The Bones of Jesus

The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” which the Discovery Channel will run on March 4, argues that 10 ancient ossuaries — small caskets used to store bones — discovered in a suburb of Jerusalem in 1980 may have contained the bones of Jesus and his family, according to a press release issued by the Discovery Channel. Not that I buy into it, but it is alarming that so many people are up in arms about this. Don’t get me wrong; that fundamentalists hate this kind of thing is WELL documented. The question you should be asking is “why.”

From ideologies concerning justice to teaching our children not to lie, we have always been told (and continue to pass down) that, no matter what, the truth will present itself. In that line of reasoning, why would someone get so upset about claims that go against the grain of their religion? What will people find if they truly search for the answers?

In this case, a great deal of knowledge that goes against the current belief structure of today’s Christian. For example, were you aware that a vast majority of the early Christians were, in fact, Gnostics? That majority never accepted the idea of a bodily resurrected Jesus. The Jesus myth was just one of many Mystery Schools around at the time. Dig even further into the history of the Church and you may find some things that will disturb you. How about the fact that before the Council of Nicaea, there were well over 200 gospels concerning Jesus. Most of them are lost forever (thanks to book burnings and the sacking of the Great Library of Alexandria), some of the are still in existance (such as the Gospel of Q and the Gospel of Thomas) and some have only recently been discovered (like the Gospel of Judas). What about the four gospels commonly accepted? Earliest versions of these were were written well after the death of Jesus. They contained no claim of authorship, no chapters or verses and have been altered several times. When it comes to the translations of the early Gospels, even the Catholic Encyclopedia conceeds that, “In all departments forgery and interpolation as well as ignorance had wrought mischief on a grand scale.” Despite Church prohibitions against any further research into the origins of the Gospels, scholars have shown that all four canonized Gospels have been doctored and revised. While the Church claimed that truth was static in natureand had been revealed only once, it continually found cause for changing that “truth.” Roman philosopher Celsus said the same of the revisionits, “Some of them, as it were in a drunken state producing self-induced visions, remodel their Gospel from its first written form, and reform it so that they may be able to refute the objections brought against it.”

And what about the bloody history of the early Church? Believe me, the horrors in all 3 Saw movies combined cannot compare to the contraptions that the Church devised for those that refused to believe their “truth.”

That in mind, why would I trust ANY information coming out of the very same establishment that forged, lied and killed their way to power in the first place? Fundamentalism is a handicap for those that wish to continue learning.