Jesus' Bones Found! Sleep in on Sunday

Have you heard the news? Apparently the family tomb of Jesus has been found in a Jerusalem neighborhood (Talpiot), complete with the ossuaries and bones of His mother, brothers, Jesus Himself, His wife Mary, and His son! James Cameron, of Titanic fame, has been kind enough to produce a Discovery Channel documentary to fill us in on this remarkable find. What does this all mean? Well, if true, it means at least this much:

• Dan Brown (of The Da Vinci Code) was wrong in claiming that Mary Magdalene left the crucified Jesus for France and lived and died there with her child.


• John Dominic Crossan was wrong to claim that Jesus was buried in a shallow grave and eaten by dogs.


• Jesus didn't really live in India and have a tomb in Kashmir after all.


• The Jesus-never-existed types need to repent of their presumption and poor historical analysis.


• Muhammad was wrong and Muslims are following a false prophet who claimed that Jesus didn't really die on the cross but, instead, was taken up to heaven by Allah.


• The family and followers of Jesus were idiots for burying Him in Jerusalem (putting his name on the box no less), right in the heart of the conspiracy; and His Roman and Jewish enemies were incompetent fools for not finding the counter-evidence right under their own noses.


• Names like Mary, Jesus, and Joseph are not really some of the most common of that era like we once believed.


• The James ossuary, which Cameron ties in with this find, isn't a forgery after all, as some insist.


• James Cameron is a genius and all the liberal scholars and archaeologists who thought this theory unconvincing are morons for having neglected this find since it was first brought to light in 1980.


• James Tabor, who released a book about all this last year (The Jesus Dynasty), will have to surrender his view that Jesus' real father was a Roman soldier named Panthera.


• If you're buried too close to someone whose DNA does not match you maternally, then you must be married to them.


• Statistical calculations only need be done on the data that fits your theory. All contrary data may be ignored.


• The relatives and friends of Jesus' departed family liked long hikes and funeral processions, since they preferred a tomb that was miles away from their home towns of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee.


• The Acts of Phillip, which contains stories even more fantastic than the four Gospels, and which scholars have always taken to be a 4th Century work at the earliest, is actually an authoritative document from which someone like Cameron may appeal to make his case.


• As St. Paul says, we Christians "are of all men most to be pitied" for believing in a raised Christ (1 Co 15:19).


• Contrary to Cameron's insistence that we can still believe in the resurrection as a spiritual event and maintain our "faith," we must accept that the authors of Scripture were liars and the whole New Testament is tainted by their dishonesty.


• The disciples of Jesus were psychotic fools to propagate this lie, which offered only persecution and death with no personal payoff.


• If you are a Bible believing Christian, you can now sleep in on Sunday.


• If you are a liberal Christian, you are not so much affected, though you should ask yourself once again just why it is you call yourself a "Christian" and how you even know what Jesus really taught given that His biographers were such conspiracists.

For some critical reviews of Cameron's titanic folly, see the following:

Christian:
Problems Multiply for Jesus Tomb Theory (Ben Witherington)
A Skeleton in God's Closet? Paul Maier Responds (Stand To Reason and Justin Taylor)
James White's rundown on this topic
Hollywood Hype: The Oscars and Jesus’ Family Tomb, What Do They Share? (Darrell Bock)
Don’t Lose Any Sleep Over Jesus’ Lost Tomb (Pulpit Magazine)
Has the tomb of Jesus been found? (CARM)
Wailing at the Tomb (Townhall.com)

Secular:
Archaeologists, scholars dispute Jesus documentary (CNN)
Is This Jesus' Tomb? (Time)
Raiders of the Lost Tomb (Newsweek)
The Jesus Hoax (Huffington Post)
Special Report: Has James Cameron Found Jesus's Tomb or Is It Just a Statistical Error? (Scientific American)