By Siamang
Unless you’ve been parked on the planet Mungo for a week, you know that the King of the World claims to have found a box that previously contained the bones of somebody named Jesus.
There are various claims of DNA evidence and other evidence, including the names of others found with this ossuary that line up with some of the biblical names of Jesus’ family and/or friends. And then there are some extra folks that the Bible doesn’t talk about, and James Cameron draws the dotted lines to ask… “did Jesus have two sons?”
Ben Witherington has a skeptical look at the claims.
I am hopeful, however, about this. I have hope that this incident will provoke people in general and Christians specifically to practice looking at claims skeptically. I note that Christians reject this claim because it flatly contradicts Christian tradition about Jesus’ resurrection. I have read the reactions of atheists like PZ Meyers who reject it for being poor scholarship amazingly unsupported by the find.
But I do have hope that people will use something like this to think about skepticism and the reasons why this claim is not credible.
Myself as a person who does not believe in Biblical inerrency STILL has a strong skepticism about the claims of James Cameron. I think there’s an interesting lesson there, that there are some things that Christians and non-Christians can come to a consensus about based on the facts on the ground. We can agree that the King of the World is more PT Barnum than Howard Carter.
-Siamang
And I do get an ironic chuckle from that Discovery Channel link above. The page features an ad for another Discovery Channel show, the skeptical “Mythbusters.”
02-27-2007 |
9 Comments »