The Family Tomb Of Jesus

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Well, good morning. In a brief period of time that we have this morning, I would like to try to help to prepare you for what
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I'm calling the Monday morning deluge. And that will be taking place tomorrow morning, because in just now less than 12 hours from now, the
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Discovery Channel will begin airing a film on the family tomb of Jesus, put together by Simcha Jakubowicz and James Cameron.
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James Cameron, of course, the fellow from the Titanic. He didn't go down with the ship.
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And you are going to, if you have been a vocal Christian in your school, in your workplace, in your family, and you have unbelievers who have heard you proclaim your faith in the risen
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Christ, you are going to be asked. And in fact, I've already had some brothers here mentioned that last week, they were being asked, just on the first interviews from the
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Today Show and things like that, what do you think about their finding Jesus? You're going to hear all sorts of wild claims.
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The Discovery Channel's made all sorts of wild claims that even the book and the film don't make.
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But you know how our society is. They're going to hear only a part of the story. And that's why we need to know the rest of the story.
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I have not seen the film. I read the book on the flight out here. I had actually gotten a little bit of a head start on this one when there was only one announcement that had been made.
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Somehow, out of the blue, I was informed of that. So I had about two days ahead start over everybody else in doing the research on this subject.
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This presentation was put together last night after dinner. It's not completely finished.
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The last few slides, I'm going to have to just sort of explain things. But hopefully, it will be useful to you.
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Some people are asking, should we watch the film tonight? I would suggest that you do, if you can.
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I only got cable for the first time about six months ago. So I would have to be running over to somebody else's house to do it.
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But the fact of the matter is, this is a very, very serious attack upon our faith. I know that it's very easy to laugh these things off and ha, ha, ha.
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But honestly, if someone comes along and says, I have scientific evidence, I have statisticians,
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I have DNA, I have the archaeologists who found this tomb. And this is actually the tomb that they're talking about, the tomb at Talpiot, Jerusalem, that was first discovered in 1980.
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That's a picture from March of 1980 when it was discovered. During the film, they will rediscover it because it was sealed up.
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And apartment complexes were built all around it. And part of the excitement of the film, and I'm sure it's going to be a well -made film,
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James Cameron is not a bad filmmaker. I'm sure it's going to be well -made. The excitement is finding it again using robotic cameras and actually getting down into the grave site itself, which, interestingly enough, has been turned into a
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Geniza. The Orthodox Jews buried phylacteries and prayer books in there.
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And so they've almost filled it up with those things that are slowly decaying down there. So I'm sure it'll be quite an interesting thing to watch.
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But woven into the fabric of that will be this assertion that there is an ossuary that exists that contained the bones of Jesus.
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And if you have the bones of Jesus, Christianity is false. Period. End of discussion.
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They are saying, oh, no, no, we're not attacking Christianity because most Christians believe in a spiritual resurrection anyway. It's not a bodily one.
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Well, they've been hanging around with John Dominic Cross and John Shelby Spong for too long. The historic
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Christian faith has always proclaimed the physical resurrection of Christ. And so if there are physical bones in an ossuary someplace, then
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Christianity needs to fold up shop and move on, because that is an attack upon the very heart of the faith.
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That's all there is to it. And so we need to take it seriously. There's going to be a big deluge this week. And then slowly, you'll see things quieting down.
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But that doesn't really mean a whole lot, because we still want to be speaking the truth. And that means people will have heard this.
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And we're going to be having to correct this information for a very long time. Some of you who were here for the class know that I have announced that over the next 2 and 1 half weeks, about 12 hours a day,
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I am going to be writing a book on this subject. We want it out by Easter. So pray for me, because just sitting for that long is bad enough.
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Keeping your mind from not turning into mush while typing that long and staring at a computer screen likewise is a bit of a challenge.
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So the book came out Wednesday. There's the cover of the book right there.
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The film airs tonight, 9 PM Eastern Standard Time. On Monday, you will face a choice. Do I speak, or do
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I simply shrug my shoulders? Here is a shot from the film here. This is Simcha Jakubowicz examining one of the ossuaries and the inscriptions found on the ossuaries.
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And we'll see some pictures of that. There is an ossuary. That's actually the ossuary of Caiaphas, Joseph Caiaphas, I think the son of the high priest we know of in the
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New Testament. For those who have been living in a cave, a brief outline of the story. Simcha Jakubowicz and James Cameron of the
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Titanic and Terminator movies have produced a documentary claiming to have found the family tomb of Jesus.
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What's more, they claim Jesus' bones were once there up to 1980, in fact.
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And in fact, what happened was, when the ossuaries were removed from the tomb.
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See, what would happen is, there's lots of this type of stuff in Israel. And as Israel as a nation state has grown, and as they do construction, they're constantly uncovering things like this.
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In fact, in the film you'll see that when they were looking for this one again, they found another one 50 yards up the hill that has never been entered.
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The ossuaries are still in it. So there's lots of fascinating stuff over there in Israel. There's no two ways about that.
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But what happened is a bulldozer is clearing land for an apartment complex and breaks through and finds this tomb.
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And so the law is, if it's been broken into already, then the archeologists have to come, all construction has to stop, the archeologists have to come, the ossuaries, bones, whatever, have to be removed.
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And then they have a deal in essence with the Orthodox Jewish leaders that the bones are removed from the ossuaries and given a proper
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Jewish burial. So we do not have any bones to be testing. The bones were removed 27 years ago from each one of these ossuaries and were given a good
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Jewish burial and no one has a clue where they are. So they do not have the bones of Jesus.
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You're saying, well, I've heard about DNA. Those were small. If you can imagine, bones become very brittle over time.
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And so there would be little fragments left actually embedded in the very bottoms of these limestone ossuaries.
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That's what they were testing, not the full bones themselves, okay? So just to keep that in mind.
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Ossuaries were only used for about 70 to 100 years. No one is actually even sure why
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Jews started using ossuaries. They only used them in a fairly limited area. There were some up in Galilee, but mainly
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Jerusalem and down in Jericho. The practice came to lay a body in on a flat slab in a tomb for about a year.
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And then once the natural processes have taken place during that course of time, you re -enter the tomb, sometimes on the one -year anniversary, and you gather the bones and you would place them into an ossuary.
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Now, some people say, well, that was so, you know, they're running out of room or stuff, but that doesn't really make any sense because most of these graves and sepulchers are just as large as any others.
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So no one's really sure who started it or did it reflect a growing recognition of the battle between the
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Pharisees and Sadducees in regards to the afterlife. It's like, we just don't know. But there's only a brief period of time, once Jerusalem is destroyed in AD 70, you don't have any more ossuaries.
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Ossuaries are very common in Israel that if you've got a little bit of money, you can buy one as a planter for about 2 ,000 bucks.
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And there are places all through Jerusalem where you will look up on someone's balcony and there they've got roses growing out of an ossuary.
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So there were a lot of them around and only a small percentage of them, however, about 20 % have inscriptions on them.
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Six out of the 10 in this tomb had inscriptions on them. And it's the nature of those inscriptions that are central to the plot that you will see this evening.
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That in fact, right here is the Jesus ossuary. And in fact, you will see down here below, you will actually see the inscription that is found on it.
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And believe it or not, the book spends, I don't know how much time arguing that this is a cross.
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When in fact, if you look at that and then you look at the top of the ossuary itself, the lid, which is separate, the same thing appears on the top.
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It's an arrow, this side forward. We see that on cardboard boxes all the time, but they wanna spend a tremendous amount of time saying, well, this is actually a cross and so on and so forth.
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But anyways, this is Yeshua ben Yosef. You can see it along the side here.
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And that's another picture of it from 1980 when it was first found. You'll notice it is exceptionally plain.
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There is no decoration on it. You notice that the Joseph ben Caiaphas one that I showed you earlier, much more material on it, much more decoratively made.
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There's another picture. They claim that they have DNA evidence linking the ossuary, similar to the one in the picture above, to the bones of Jesus.
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This means if the theory is true, then there was no physical resurrection of Jesus. The film's conclusions can only be seen as a well -funded attack upon the
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Christian faith itself. Now, what is more, they theorize, based upon Gnostic writings written hundreds of years after Jesus, that he was married to Mariamne, identified in those
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Gnostic writings, well, by speculative interpretation, as Mary Magdalene, that they had a son named
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Judah. And here is a picture from one of the ossuaries in the Taupiat tomb, and it says
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Yehuda bar Yeshua, which means Judah, son of Jesus. And so, again, they're saying, see, we can prove by DNA, and this is very important, and I'll explain this a little bit more later on.
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They are not saying we can prove that this is the DNA of Jesus. Anybody who knows anything about DNA, I don't care how many episodes of CSI you've seen, anybody who knows anything about DNA knows that you need a full nuclear
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DNA profile and some sort of reference source to be able to identify someone from their
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DNA, and there would be no reference source available to be able to identify people in antiquity. That's not what they're claiming to have done.
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Just make sure that you're aware of that. We'll get to that a little bit later on. So the theory is, what's being proposed is that the
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Meriamne Ossuary, which, if you really wanna get into this, is numbered 8500, 80 -500, and the
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Yeshua ben Joseph Ossuary, 80 -503, their official designations, according to the
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Israeli antiquities folks, that by testing the mitochondrial
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DNA in those ossuaries, they are able to determine that they were not related maternally.
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There's a little controversy beyond that, but I'll get into that a little bit later on. Here is the
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Meriamne Ossuary and the inscription that is found there, and there is controversy about what it actually says.
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What you're seeing up above is what the Discovery Channel claims, Meriamne a Mara, they say,
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English translation, Mary known as Master. That's actually not an accurate translation.
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The argument is that the name cluster, the other names were Maria in Latin, which would be
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Mary. Mary, by the way, was the most common name in antiquity amongst the
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Jews. A full 25 % of women had the name Mary or a variant thereof.
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So it didn't help much in the marketplace. Mary! Yes! You know, and a quarter of everybody turns around.
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So you've got Maria, you've got Meriamne, you've got Yeshua ben Joseph, Yudah ben
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Bar Yeshua. You've got Yose and Mattia, which would be a diminutive or nickname form of Matthew.
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So the argument is, there they are on the screen, that this name cluster, that having only these names in one place, that there is at least a 600 to one at lowest end, 600 to one chance that this, not 600 to one against it, 600 to one for the chance that this is the
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Jesus family tomb. To find those names in one place, 599 times out of 600, that means it's gonna be
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Jesus's tomb. And that's the low end. The high end was in the millions. And they are gonna have statisticians on, and they're gonna go through the names and so on and so forth.
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We'll talk about that in just a moment as well. This image, by the way, is the actual original drawing from the archeologist from 1980 of what the inside of the tomb looked like, where the ossuaries were, things like that, that was done by Dr.
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Kloner. And he's in the film as well, although he does not even begin to buy the theory that they are promoting.
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The argument is that at the very least, there is a 600 to one chance that this must be the Jesus family tomb. At the high end, the argument is that is at least a million to one that this is not the
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Jesus family tomb. That at least is what the movie will be telling people tonight, that the DNA evidence, the archeological evidence, the name evidence, and the connection to what they call original
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Christian tradition, which is their way of saying Gnostic religion 400 years removed, identifies one of these names as Mary Magdalene, and this therefore is the foundation of their presentation.
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Beyond these claims, the book goes into some truly esoteric theorizing, including asserting that Judah ben
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Yeshua is the author of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which the Jesus Seminar has in essence canonized and made the fifth gospel, which was actually written around AD 165.
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Now that guy is an old dude. I'm not sure how he got buried before AD 70 in this tomb, and he's still got 95 years to go before he writes his gospel, but hey, you know, who am
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I? And it even speculates that the Knights Templar, popular from the Da Vinci Code, if you saw the film or read the book, discovered the
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Talpiot tomb and may have held it secret as leverage over the Roman church. There's these conspiracy theories that how did the
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Knights Templar have so much power and authority? What did they have on the church? Well, the theory is, well, they actually found this tomb and they discovered who was in it, and so now they held that as leverage over the
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Roman Catholic Church. If you don't give us money and power, then we're gonna tell the whole world that Jesus is buried in Jerusalem and we'll take everybody there and show them his bones and blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And so it purposely tries to tie into the Da Vinci Code money -making machine in this particular context.
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Now, there's the outline of the argumentation. Obviously, it's going to be presented in a very smooth fashion.
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It's going to be very interesting to watch. It's gonna be fast -paced. I'm looking forward,
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I'm not gonna see it because I'm gonna be on an airplane tonight at nine o 'clock, but I'll see it first thing in the morning and I'm looking forward to seeing the discovery of it because reading that section of the book was by far the most interesting part of the book and finding the other tomb and what it looked like.
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That's gonna be very, very interesting. And in the middle of all that, you're gonna have real scholars being interviewed.
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Now, some of those scholars are starting to speak out going, oh, wait a minute, I didn't know what you were gonna be saying about this stuff and you're going a little bit beyond what
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I tried to tell you. But still, you're gonna have these folks on there and I'm gonna tell you, no matter how skeptical you are going in, if you don't have some factual ground underneath you, you're gonna sit back and go, whoa.
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And if you would do that, then I'm gonna tell you, obviously, people who are looking for a reason not to believe are gonna go, yeah.
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And that's why we are taking the time to sort of prepare you before it even happens.
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Now, the heart of the entire theory, and this is where people, for some reason,
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I'm not sure why it is in our society. I think it's possibly partly because of our educational system and partly because we have become very visually oriented people with a very, very short span of attention.
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People struggle to identify threads of argument and see what the foundational parts of the argument are and to evaluate them in a critical fashion.
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People struggle with that kind of a thing in our society. And so when you start weaving together all these different threads, for many people, the very fact that you're weaving it together, the very fact that there are multiple threads is enough to prove the argument.
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They don't get to the point of asking, are any of these threads actually on their own convincing or compelling?
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Are there other explanations to be offered, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's difficult in our society to deal with this kind of a presentation that has media savvy and money behind it and things like that.
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It takes time, and that's why most of the discussions on Larry King or the Today Show or whatever, even if they had somebody on to respond to it, are so short and so soundbite -ish that it's next to impossible to actually accomplish anything.
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What's worse is, my phone hasn't been ringing off the hook, I can guarantee you that, and if you
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Google this story, my website's there, but the media's not looking for that. Instead of Fox News, they had
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Brent Bozell on to oppose these folks, and he's a census taker, a poll taker, a media watcher.
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It's amazing. We should not expect that we're gonna get fair treatment and fair time from the media to respond to these things.
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But be that as it may, we need to go through and identify what holds this argument together and ask the question, does it have any validity to it at all?
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The heart of the entire theory is found in the identification of this inscription with Mary Magdalene. Mariamne, and it's actually not
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Mariamne. On the side here, it's difficult to see, obviously. If you have a really good picture of it, you can see it, but you will see that it is actually
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Mariammenu, it's the genitive form, and then Mara. Now, Mara is the diminutive form of Martha.
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If you had a daughter named Martha and she was a little kid like Susan, you'd call her Susie, or something along those lines,
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Mara is to Martha what Susie is to Susan. And so one of the possibilities actually is is that ossuary had more than one person's bones in it.
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In fact, it was very common, the man who actually excavated this tomb, rather briefly, of course, because they had a whole bunch of heavy equipment laying around waiting to build an apartment complex, they only had a few days to do it.
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But Dr. Kloner himself estimated that at average, if you were to look at ossuaries at average, there'd be about 1 .7
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people per ossuary. So having two people in an ossuary was more common than it was uncommon.
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And so others have said, no, this just simply means that you have a Mary person and a
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Martha person, possibly a mother and daughter, because the Martha is in the diminutive here, that are buried in this, their bones are in this ossuary.
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And without the bones, there's no way of knowing, since they were removed in 1980 and buried, there's no way of going beyond that and finding out one way or the other.
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But the whole heart of everything, if you look at this, and in fact, if you read the book, if you read the book, if you listen to the very first interview that was done on the
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Today Show on Monday morning with Simcha Jakubowicz and James Cameron on camera,
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I have the sound on this computer, in fact. If you listen to what they say, they say the way that they connected the dots, what tied all of this together, was when
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Simcha Jakubowicz discovered that in what's called the Acts of Philip, let me see if this is the, yes, here we go.
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Well, Mariamne is one of the many forms of the most popular name known to Jewish women of the first century,
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Mary. Never in contemporary documents is Mary Magdalene identified as Mariamne. The entire connection drawn by Jakubowicz and his team is based upon the
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Acts of Philip, a mythical, ahistorical Gnostic text known from a 14th century manuscript.
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Francois Bovan, who found the text, theorizes the Mariamne found in the book, who's the sister of Philip, is actually
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Mary Magdalene. What does that mean? Francois Bovan found a 14th century manuscript that he theorizes came from a book written around the fourth century
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AD. It is another one of the Gnostic writings. It goes back to the rise of the
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Gnostic religion in Egypt, which was one of the primary competitors with Christianity.
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Even the Apostle Paul writes against Proto -Gnosticism, the Book of Colossians. John writes against it in 1
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John, and it flourishes in Egypt. And so there is a writing, and no one can actually date it overly clearly, but has to be during a period of time when
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Gnosticism was still flourishing. So let's say fourth, fifth century, somewhere around there, you have the
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Acts of Philip. Now, these are stories about what Philip did as he went preaching, and he was accompanied by his sister,
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Mariamne. Now, Philip doesn't do too well in this story because, as you're probably aware, if you remember the
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Da Vinci Code stuff, there is a strong element of the feminine deity in Gnostic writings.
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And so just as in, for example, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Mary Magdalene knows more about the secret things of Jesus than Peter does, a response against the male -dominated church.
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In the same way, Philip's a little bit of a wimp, okay? He's not overly brave in what he's doing, and it's
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Mariamne, his sister, who comes along and strengthens him and helps him and so on and so forth.
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Now, this same Mariamne, and they didn't really mention this in the book or the film, but this same
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Mariamne, when she's threatened while preaching, can turn into a glass box or a pillar of smoke. It's wonderful to be able to do these things.
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And interestingly enough, the Jesus of the Acts of Philip, likewise prophesies that she will die in the
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River Jordan, not in Jerusalem, but in the River Jordan. And so this
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Mariamne is in the Acts of Philip, and Francois Bovan goes, you know what, that's such a powerful woman, that must be
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Mary Magdalene. Never does the Acts of Philip say that. Mary Magdalene appears nowhere in the Acts of Philip at all.
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It is pure speculation. It has no basis in fact or reality. It's purely speculative based upon a 14th century text, but that is the heart of this entire argument.
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It is taken as an established fact that the experts of Christendom recognize that Mary Magdalene is
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Mariamne. And that's it. I mean, there is the heart of the entire thing.
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And as yet, I have not heard anyone responding to this, certainly not in the media, but bringing it up and saying, wait a minute, the number of speculative steps you have to take here is massive.
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And it also illustrates what's really going on in this situation. I mean, if you really are doing real archeology and real science, do you leap 400 years into the future to a different geographical area to come up with the context for identifying names on ossuaries in Jerusalem?
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Is that how you do serious science? I would suggest to you that it is not in any way, shape, or form.
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This, the Acts of Philip, together with the fact that in one instance, the early church writer,
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Origen, the single man most responsible for establishing allegorical interpretation, used a similar form.
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It's not the identical form. It's an M instead of an N. The mu instead of the nu, Mariamne.
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Though even there, I have not found evidence that Origen was referring to Mary Magdalene. It looks like he was referring to Mary, the sister of Martha.
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I have on this computer the Thesaurus Lingua Graecae, the ancient Greek writings in Greek, fully searchable.
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I pulled it up for myself. Most folks don't have access to that kind of information. I used it in my first doctoral studies.
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And in looking at the context in Origen, even that doesn't seem to connect in any way, shape, or form either.
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The fact is this connection shows how bogus this entire argument is. Mariamne was the name of a well -known wife of Herod at this particular time in history.
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If you do a search on Mariamne, I have the Libronics library here, a very full version of it.
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And I did a search on Mariamne, and every single reference that came up was to the fact that Mariamne was
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Herod's favorite wife, which wasn't a good thing to be because he was very jealous of her, and so jealous that he eventually had her killed so that nobody else could have her.
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So Herod was, that first Herod was not a nice guy. But there was even a huge tower that Herod had built that he had named
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Mariamne. So here you have the historical context, the Hasmonean dynasty, which is when ossuaries were used, and you have someone very high up.
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Let me ask you a question. How many little girls in the early 1960s were named
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Jackie? Some of, now some of you younger people are going, huh?
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Jackie, who? And again, I'm identifying my age, but some of you who are a little bit more toward my generation are going, uh -huh, uh -huh, uh -huh.
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Well, if you have a very popular wife of the king, does it not make much more sense to be looking to that as the source of your name than to a
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Gnostic text written in Egypt 400 years later? Seems so to me. Seems rather logical, but that wouldn't sell any books.
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Trust me, that book sold more copies on Wednesday for 25 bucks than all the books
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I've ever written combined and collected together, because I won't do that kind of stuff, and they will, so they win.
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So that's what's going on in that type of a situation. Now, here is one of the resources.
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I am certain that this poor lady never, ever, ever expected her book to be nearly as popular as it is today.
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But there is a woman by the last name of Ilan in Jerusalem, in Israel, who has compiled all the reference data, the inscription data from ossuaries that have been found and cataloged by the
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Israeli authorities. Now, that was a big seller. Let me tell you something. I am pretty certain that that was,
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I bet you you all passed that at Barnes & Noble on your way out, right up front. And, but it has become the source of so much of this discussion, because here you have the number of names of men found on these ossuaries.
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So you'll notice that Simon Thimian, 9 .3 % of the inscriptions found on ossuaries, and remember, the ossuaries, only about 20 % of them have inscriptions on them.
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So it's a minority that have them on them. But 9 .3%, Simon Thimian. Joseph is second with 8 .3.
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Judah, 6 .2, Eleazar, I'm sorry, 6 .3. Judah, 6 .2. John, Yohanan, 4 .6.
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There's Yeshua, Jesus, at 3 .8. It's the sixth most popular. And you go on down from there. You notice
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Matthew's there. Do you notice something? Except for Jose, which is actually a diminutive of Joseph, which might probably make it in the second category, all the names in this tomb are exceptionally common.
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They're in the top 10 as to popularity. And that's one of the reasons why the original archeologists sort of looked at it and said, yep, another
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Jewish tomb. Catalog them away, let's go. And didn't come up with any of this connection that has been made by Simchavovich, by Yechavovich and Cameron, and that because of a
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Gnostic gospel. And here's the first four names for the women. Mary, Maryomne.
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Notice the form that's even found there. The most common one, 21 .3%. Salome, 17 .7.
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Shalamzion. Yeah, I would name my kids Shalamzion. 7 .3. And Martha is down at 6 .1.
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But the first two are just huge. And there are obviously many permutations of those names, diminutive forms and so on and so forth that were used, especially for Mary.
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You had to. I mean, if you had 10 kids, I guess you've named three of the girls Mary. I mean, that'd be really confusing, but that's what you'd have.
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Now, keep something in mind. The statistics that have been created are based upon some assumptions that are highly questionable.
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Poor people didn't get buried in ossuaries because poor people couldn't have the tomb where you would have to have it for so long that the body had to be able to decay and then you had to go back into the tomb and then you had to have the ossuaries put in there.
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This was upper middle to the rich had the opportunity of having tombs in Jerusalem.
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And the vast majority of those who would have done so, these were in fact family tombs and were used for generations.
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Now, what does that immediately make you think of in this context? Jesus isn't from Jerusalem, folks.
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I mean, I know that a lot of people go, Jesus, Jerusalem, cross, yeah. But if we know any of the historical information, we know that he's from Galilee.
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He's from up, Nazareth. In fact, the amazing thing is to keep seeing these folks making their argumentation going, and this proves that this was
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Jesus of Nazareth. And they don't even realize they're repeating the term Nazareth. That city's way up north someplace, man.
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You got the wrong place here. And so the whole idea that a poor itinerant preacher would have a family tomb in Jerusalem, even after his crucifixion, and that the
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Jewish leaders would allow this, that the Romans would allow this. And in fact, there's a real big problem to all of this that probably some of you have been sitting there thinking of the whole time.
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They're going, if you're going, all right, that was a big tomb you showed a picture of. Hard to hide. It's not like this was hidden in some place.
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This had decorations on it. It was big. It was well seen. People knew where it was. That would mean the
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Jewish leaders knew where it was. And what would be the single most effective apologetic against Christianity in those first decades of the first century?
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Let's have a guided tour of the Jesus family tomb. You think he was resurrected.
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Here we go. It never happens. There's no reference whatsoever to this being the case.
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So the whole idea that there is a multi -generational rich tomb in Jerusalem for people who didn't live there is absolutely amazing.
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It truly is amazing that someone would come up with this, but hey, it makes for good movies.
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But what they've done, before I go to this, because I'm going to forget this if I don't do this.
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There is, this is not the only tomb that's ever been found in Jerusalem. The book talks about the work of a
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Roman Catholic, Italian Roman Catholic in Jerusalem by the name of Bagatti.
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And Bagatti back in the 50s was refurbishing his church in Jerusalem.
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And as he dug down, he found what's called a necropolis. It's a huge burial area.
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And it's never been fully excavated. First of all, the Jews do not like when you do stuff like that.
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And especially if you're not Jewish in the first place. But he ran into some stuff that basically caused him to stop doing it.
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It's just been sealed up and left there. Everybody knows it's there. Bagatti, for example, found an ossuary with the inscription on it,
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Simon, son of who? Jonah.
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Simon, son of Jonah, as in Peter. Now, if you're a Roman Catholic, think about this one for just a little moment here.
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Where is Peter supposed to be? He's supposed to be buried under the high altar of the
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Vatican, isn't he? I mean, I've been there. And you can walk by and look way back.
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You can sort of through these super thick windows and there's candles back there. And allegedly the bones of Peter are back there buried.
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So to find an ossuary with bones in it of the exact name of Peter, his given name, didn't exactly encourage folks to continue the work down there.
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And this is mentioned in the new book. And they tie this into the conspiracy that, you know, see archeologists have their givens and that's why they didn't pursue this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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But what they don't mention are some of the other names that Bagatti found in his necropolis before he stopped examining it.
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Including all the names in the Talpiot tomb, including Jesus, son of Joseph.
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Now also keep something in mind. The Christians never called Jesus, Jesus son of Joseph.
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That was always his enemies. So can you imagine if there was a name that you've been called your entire life only by your enemies, that your family would then inscribe it on your ossuary?
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Excuse me, don't think so. But that's what's on this ossuary. And in fact, back when, about five years ago, when
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Biblical Archeology Review was dealing with the James brother of Jesus ossuary, which
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I'll talk about in a moment, they went through the calculations of how many people that historians believe lived in Jerusalem at this time, what the population would have been, et cetera, et cetera.
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And they came up with the conclusion that there would have been at least 20 people living in Jerusalem during that time period that would have been
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James son of Joseph and brother of Jesus, at least 20 people.
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And guess what? They all died. And guess what happens when they died? They were all buried.
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And that means they gotta be someplace. And not all 20 of them were the
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James of the New Testament. In fact, 19 out of 20 of them weren't. Now you wanna figure the odds on that one?
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You can use that as a counter argument. We'll get to that in a moment. Now, as soon as I heard all the
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DNA stuff, I was department fellow in anatomy and physiology at Grand Canyon College when
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I was a undergraduate student there. And my senior year, I did a tremendous amount of study of genetics and things like that.
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And so I know a little something about DNA and RNA and the transcription sequences and things like that.
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So as soon as I heard DNA experts have established this, that, and the other thing,
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I'm like, mm -hmm, yeah, right. All right, what are they talking about? They obviously do not have a standardized sample to which they can make reference.
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So what are they talking about? And thankfully, I have a chat room. I have a chat channel, actually, a worldwide chat channel.
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We have folks from Australia and South Sea Islands and Europe and so on and so forth that gather in our little chat channel and have a little family type there.
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And there's some pretty smart people in there. And one of them is a former member of my church who is a
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CSI that works with DNA, a real CSI. There actually are real CSIs.
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They're not just on TV. And so I immediately went to her, just a brilliant, brilliant lady, and I said, could you really pull nuclear
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DNA from shards of bone in an ossuary from 2 ,000 years ago?
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I mean, what are you really gonna be able to tell from that? And she said, well, you know, the chances of that are extremely unlikely.
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I have a feeling that what they were, what they're actually talking about here is mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear
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DNA. And there's real limitations as to what mitochondrial DNA can tell you. Mitochondrial DNA, the mitochondria in your cells, which are the powerhouse of your cells, that DNA is passed down only through the mother.
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And so it can only speak to maternal relationships. It cannot speak to paternal relationships.
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And right about the same time, we dug up the name of the man who did the work. This was actually before I even got hold of the book, and the book confirmed this.
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Dr. Carney Matheson, and that is Dr. Matheson there, pulled from his page, up in Canada.
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And so she wrote to him. And she said, you know, it's my understanding these would be the limitations of what could be found, et cetera, et cetera.
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And he very kindly wrote back to her and said, you're exactly right. The DNA analysis, what we told the filmmakers was that whatever their relationship between these two people, the male and the female, it was not a relationship.
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She was not his mother, and they were not brother or sister.
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They were not maternally related. And then he finished his email to her by saying, don't be deceived by the media.
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Okay, that's their DNA expert. Well, once I got the book, one of the first tests
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I had in my mind was will the book openly, plainly, honestly discuss the limitations of the type of DNA analysis they did, and will it tell you that that DNA analysis cannot rule out the possibility that Yeshua Ben Yosef was the father of Mary Amne, that there was a paternal relationship rather than a maternal relationship.
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Will they tell you that? Anyone wanna take a wild guess as to the results of my reading the book?
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You are exactly right. It is never brought out at all. They do use the term maternal, but they don't explain what they're talking about.
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They don't explain that. They just simply say, the DNA experts said they were not related.
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That's not what they did. And so I wrote to Dr. Matheson. I wrote to Dr. Matheson the morning
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I got here. I got here in the evening. Thursday morning, I wrote to Dr. Matheson since I had his email address that had been forged to me by my friend from the chat channel.
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And I wrote to him, and I basically asked him. It's on my blog if you've all been following the blog. If you go there, you'll find,
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I think, currently more information than anyone else is currently offering on this because I got the few days headstart.
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And I asked him, I said, did you inform Simcha Yakubovich and the team that came and filmed your lab and things like that, did you inform them of the limitations of what your
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DNA analysis found? And did you inform them of the possibility of the father -daughter relationship that you cannot address given the only kind of DNA you're able to extract from this 2 ,000 -year -old artifact?
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And he wrote back and said, this is what I told them, and I gave them all the possibilities, including that, which never makes it into the book.
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Now, that kind of cavalier handling of this information clearly indicates to me that we've got some major problems in the integrity.
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And some of you are going, excuse me, this is on Discovery Channel. They're the same folks who do the search for Bigfoot, so you shouldn't really be overly surprised here.
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Loch Ness is still being combed by these folks, so you shouldn't be shocked here.
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But that's not how it's presented, of course, and that's not how it's going to be presented. They present this as the sober result of scholarly analysis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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Now, I would have liked to have put much more up there, but like I said, I put this together last night.
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So I'll put that up there so you can see the thing there. What does all this mean to us?
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Anybody in here know of a friend, family member, acquaintance who you just know is gonna jump on this thing like a duck on a
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June bug and be going, ha ha ha, I told you, I told you, I told you. Anybody? Anybody? Yeah, a couple of you do.
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I think we're gonna be seeing this for a long, long time. There's only one thing that could,
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I think, totally take the air out of this balloon. There is another ossuary called the
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James Ossuary. Some of you may have heard about this just a few years ago when this news broke. There is an ossuary that has inscribed upon it,
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James, the brother of Jesus. Now, we know there is a James, brother of Jesus who is martyred there in Jerusalem, the leader of the
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Jerusalem church. And that one came out first.
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And the book makes the strong assertion that there were 10 ossuaries found in the tomb in 1980.
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The all but one of the archeologists that worked on it are still alive. And so they can be interviewed and so on and so forth.
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10 found, there's only nine in the possession of the Israeli authorities.
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There's one missing. And so the argument of the book is, James is the one that's missing.
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And you can see why they'd wanna make the connection. If James, brother of Jesus is also in that tomb, then the statistics go through the roof, is their argument.
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And so that's where you're gonna hear about a crime lab, the Suffolk County Crime Lab, testing the accretions that build up over time on limestone to identify the
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James Ossuary as coming from the same tomb as the
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Talpiot one, to try to put it in there. Now, the archeologists that work on it, the archeologist who took number 10 out says, number 10 had nothing on it.
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That's why no one knows where it went because it did not have a single marking. It was plain
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Jane. And that's why it probably didn't even end up getting stored anywhere, is because it had nothing of any significance on it whatsoever of any archeological meaning.
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And so that's their argument, but they're saying, oh, no, no, there's a conspiracy here. They're trying to hide stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah.
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So that particular ossuary is the center of a ongoing trial in Jerusalem at this very moment.
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I mean, it's ongoing right now. In fact, I imagine the film will make reference to it. The book certainly does. That the man who, the antiquities dealer who brought it forward has been accused by the
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Israeli authorities of forging the inscription on it, or at least forging a portion of the inscription on it.
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Now, obviously the book argues very strongly that he is innocent. The Israeli authorities argue very strongly that he's not.
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To me, it'll be interesting to find out, but if, since they've made the connection, since they've, and they've made a part of their argument, if that blows up, if it is, all of a sudden he, there's a
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Perry Mason moment, and the attorney, and you forged it, didn't you?
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Yes, I did, I'm sorry, you know. If something like that happens, then you got a real problem, because now they have tied this in with all the rest of theirs, and now it's been proven to be forged.
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And so now you got a problem there. Now they're gonna have to be trying to backpedal on all the stuff that they've been saying, and so on and so forth. So there could be a complete explosion along those lines,
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I suppose. But barring that happening, we're gonna be hearing about this for a long, long time.
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And I think there'll be Talpiot Tomb Two, and Talpiot Tomb Three, because they've only tested the two ossuaries.
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They said they couldn't test the Judah one, because it had been cleaned out. So there was no human remains left to even be tested for mitochondrial
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DNA. But how many people are gonna be digging through bones from 1980 right now?
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I mean, it's going to cause a huge explosion. It's a big discussion in the Mideast right now. I've heard
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Jerusalem reporters and stuff talking about how this is a huge story over there, and there's a lot of discussion about it. So it's not simply going to go away at all.
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We need to be able to provide a response, to provide a, and the only way to do that is for us to be knowledgeable about what the claims are.
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You cannot respond to an argument when you don't know what the argument is. And so that's why
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I would say I would watch it. Now you've got a little outline of stuff to be looking for.
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Hopefully you'll be able to watch it with much more discernment, because we've spent this time. The only thing
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I didn't address, by the way, very, very quickly, before 10 till or a little bit after that. Let me mention one thing.
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The argument about the names. The problem with that argument is that it's looking backwards at statistics rather than looking at the way statistics should be used.
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In other words, take your family names, take your first names, and what was the possibility that your father would choose to marry a woman by the name of your mother?
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Okay, now take that and multiply that. What was the possibility of those two particular names having a child named you?
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Now add in your brothers and sisters. Keep multiplying out the possibilities of those names based upon census rolls that we have today.
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I had a friend, just for the fun of it, go searching the internet for any place he could find a single document that had my name, my wife's name, my son's name, and my daughter's name, our first names together.
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He found out that we all attended a university in Hawaii together and were on the honor roll. We'd never been there, but then what he did is he went to the census.
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He did this in about 15 minutes. He went to the census folks. He was able to get the census records for that particular area in Hawaii, and he was able to determine the percentage appearance of those names in the census rolls, add them up together, and there is a 10 to the 13th power statistical demand that I and my family are all on the honor roll in Hawaii.
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See, that's the misuse of statistics. That's doing it backwards. The fact is that the name cluster of your family would also be highly unlikely, but it still exists because parents, men marry women with names, and they have children, and they name them, too.
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To create this kind of, wow, look at this, the same statistics would have to prove that Jesus was buried twice along with all of them because they found the same names in Bugatti's tomb, too, but it just simply doesn't work that way.
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This is what is gonna be presented. And so, yes, it does open up an opportunity for us because people are gonna be like, huh, what do you think about that?
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Well, you know, there's so many questions that this raises that actually highlight the accuracy of the
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New Testament. I mean, honestly, think about it for a moment. If this was true, why didn't the Jews know about this tomb that's right out in the middle of nowhere?
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Why didn't they put a big old sign over the top and say, Christianity's fault, look inside? They didn't do that.
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And why is it that these folks didn't tell you of the DNA possibility that their own experts told them that these two people could be related, father and daughter?
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Why didn't they tell you that? Isn't that interesting? Sounds like they're sort of playing with the facts, doesn't it? And why didn't they tell you that they actually make this identification of Mary Magdalene from a book written at least 400 years later someplace else and that the book itself doesn't even make that connection that some scholar, a
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French scholar, for crying out loud, has made the connection as well? That might be our best argument right there, you know? Boom, boom, there it goes, you know?
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There you go, you know. But these open up opportunities to say, you know, all this highlights the fact that, you know, the resurrection was a unique event, no question about it.
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And people have responded. I mean, Matthew records that the Jews early on started circulating rumor that the disciples had stolen the body, but isn't it interesting they didn't say where they had put it because they didn't know.
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The very people who controlled this plot of ground didn't know where the body went. Interesting stuff.
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So hopefully this will give you sort of a heads up, a head start, and I do hope that you'll pray for me as over the next basically 15, 16, 17 days,
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I try to avoid carpal tunnel and do everything I can to write this book, put all this information into one place so that people will have it accessible to them in a very quick period of time to provide this level of response.
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I'm sure others will be writing much longer works eventually when time allows, but something is needed now.