Last Sunday evening Megan and I settled down to watch a two hour documentary on the Discovery Channel. This action is not unusual in our house where The History Channel, The National Geographic Channel, and the Discovery Channel are by far the most watched channels on our cable system. We love historic shows and will be guaranteed to be glued to anything about natural disasters and the weather.
This being stated, we were not watching our usual fare of tornado and civil war shows. Instead we were watching a documentary that claimed to have found the tomb of Jesus and his immediate family. The show describes a tomb unearthed in the early 1980's during construction of an apartment complex that contained ossuaries with inscriptions that at least statistically speaking, would have to have been of Jesus, the virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and some others. Much explanation and linking the names scratched into the limestone ossuaries with various Biblical texts and forgotten gospels.
So here is where I stir the pot. Say it's true. Say that this really was the final resting place of Jesus and much of his nuclear family. As a Christian/Jew/Agnostic/Hindu/Muslim what does this do? I refuse to accept that this would not realign your faith at all, but I am willing to believe that there are those who would emerge unshaken. The question is why? Why would this cause you to question your faith or not question your faith?
I'll go first. I'm not a particularly religious person although I do think of myself as a person of certain unshakable beliefs. I was raised in the church, was baptised (twice), have taken college courses on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and have read the Bible. That being said, I have a basic mistrust of organized religion that is deeply embedded in my psyche and rarely ever attend church services.
I am intrigued by this "discovery" and highly skeptical, but for argument sake we are saying it's true. My first reaction was that it would prove the Jews and Muslims right, that the body of Jesus would prove that he was, at best, a prophet of God and not the Messiah. The idea appeals to me as I've always felt that my personal beliefs are much closer to Judaism than conventional Christianity. Then I thought that perhaps instead the discovery of Jesus' tomb proves the Christians right...well, to some extent anyway. See, it's the whole ascension to Heaven thing that I had a hard time with at first but why would Jesus need his physical body in Heaven? Wouldn't he shed it as he would all other Earth-bound possessions to join his father? Perhaps what we have here instead is the key to what Christianity really is.
Of course the documentary also claimed to hold the ossuaries for Mary Magdalene and what was theorized to be the child of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The debate grows restless and quickly ugly from here, I'm afraid. The mention of it makes me feel like I'm stirring a pot of boiling oil, it could flash over any minute and ignite.
I'll have more thoughts on this...
