Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Why Jesus’ Tomb?

The possibility of Jesus’ tomb is a difficult issue, if not impossible one, for most Christians who toe the line with various offshoots of Pauline and Johannine theological interpretations of the nature of Jesus that had won out over other competing theological interpretations several hundred years after Jesus’ crucifixion. After all, once a believer accepts the resurrection of Jesus from the dead as fact, then everything else concerning the matter is non-fact even if the evidence to the contrary is staring at one’s face.

Worse, once a believer accepts Jesus as the God, not just the Son of God (Pauline view, which is as far as St. Paul was willing to go) but the very God Himself (the Johannine view, developed in the Gospel of John), then the idea of the remains of God in an ossuary becomes, well, outrageous blasphemy. Indeed, many a Christian reacts to this type of talk as violently as any Moslem who would have no qualms about killing anyone who blasphemes against the Prophet Mohammad.

So how should those of us who are not encumbered by the traditional Christian theological interpretations of Jesus, but still have tremendous respect and love for Jesus, in this acrimonious and often emotionally charged, irrational milieu, approach the possibility that Jesus was a human being, with blood relations, who died as human being?

From the perspective of Christian orthodoxy, which essentially hinges everything on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, as Paul did, the humanizing of Jesus would kill his divinity, thus depriving him of his power to grant grace to his believers. But this is an erroneous view; after all, Christian theological development could have followed a different pass from the winning view, which was extracted at the cost of the lives of millions upon millions of so-called heretics, while still preserving Jesus’ divine nature and, more importantly, his power to grant God’s grace.

Take Buddhism, for example. No mainstream Buddhists believe that Gautama Buddha is the God; in fact, they cheerfully accept the fact that he was once a human being, who had a wife and a son, and who departed from this world thorough the decay of his material body. At the same time, most Buddhists have no qualms about praying to the Buddha to intercede on their behalf, because the Buddha, once freed from the earthly bound and its karma, had become a fully divine being, capable and willing to respond to the need of those who call upon him.

To such view, Christians are taught to retort that Jesus is God whereas the Buddha is not, thus the Buddha is incapable of helping and saving people, but that’s like saying that the only doctor that can save your life in a medical emergency is the CEO of the hospital. It’s a ridiculous view but that is essentially what the preachers of Christian orthodoxy want their followers to believe.

In truth, there are many ways to slice a pie, while still getting the same taste. Much of Christian (and Moslem) inflexibility and intransigence in regard to religious dogmas comes from the Christian insistence that there is only one way to slice a pie, and theirs is the only cut that gives a taste.

To make the matter worse, there are many New Testament scholars and biblical archaeology researchers whose unspoken motive for being in their professions is to defend the Christian faith and denounce and discredit any and all studies and discoveries that do not agree with their Christian dogmas and literal truth of the New Testament.

Can we really do scientific research and scholarly investigations under such inflexible presumption and dogmatic adherence to the researchers’ vested interest? No, and that is why doing clear-headed studies and impartial investigations of New Testament times is like driving a car on a road where all the bystanders are tossing nails and digging potholes in front of your car.

There is no question that some of the claims made by the directors of The Lost Tomb of Jesus seem intended to pander to the hidden history and conspiracy theory aficionados with their overarching attempt to connect the discovery of the tomb to Freemasonry, Knights Templar, and the main thesis of Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code. This is truly unfortunate since those unwarranted claims exposed the entire theses advanced by the film to widespread ridicules and condemnation.

Nevertheless, the film did achieve one thing that was necessary; that is, reviving the interest in this tomb which, in spite of a concerted effort by many biblical archaeologists and New Testament Scholars to dismiss it as an insignificant find, is actually a rather unusual tomb with many remarkable aspects that make it far from an insignificant, run-of-the-mill first century Jewish family tomb.

There is also a troubling report from the Jerusalem Post that seems to indicate that this concerted effort by Israeli archaeologists and other biblical experts to debunk the idea of Jesus’ tomb was motivated not by sound science but by political considerations. In the future postings, I hope to construct a plausible scenario of what might had actually happened in those few fateful years prior and after the death of a man called Jesus, once the son of man, then the Messiah and the Son of God, and finally the God Himself.

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