The Talpiot Tomb Theory--Just in Time for Easter!

Well, guess what time of the year it is? Yes, we're coming up on Easter again. And what always happens around Easter time? Well, the media finds some way, some mechanism of attacking Jesus Christ, and especially attacking the resurrection, the crucifixion.

Remember what happened last year? Last year we had the Talpiot tomb. Remember Mr. Yakubovich and Mr. Cameron and the Discovery Channel? Remember the 16 days that I spent to write this book right here, From Toronto to Emmaus, dealing with the entire Talpiot tomb theory and refuting it on each of the levels it was presented?

Yeah. Well, people said, ah, you overreacted, wasted all that time and effort. Well, it was only 16 days, but I wasted all that time and effort, and I kept saying, folks, this is just the first go-around.

This is going to keep coming up. They're going to retool. They're going to spin things, and they're just going to keep representing this idea over and over again until people just start taking it for granted.

Well, obviously, they found the bones of Jesus. But there are a lot of folks who promoted the stick-your-head-in-the-sand routine, and, ah, don't worry about it. Well, guess what's going on? Here's a clip from CNN, and I'm not saying I told you so, but, um, I did tell you so.

The widow of a soft-spoken archaeologist shares an explosive revelation. Her husband died believing he had discovered the tomb of Jesus Christ in the Jerusalem suburb of East Talpiot. Ruth Gott said her husband, Yosef, a Holocaust survivor, never spoke out for a simple reason.

He had great fears, she recalls, of a wave of anti-Semitism that would break out because of his discovery. The same tomb was the subject of last year's controversial documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

She made her stunning announcement at a conference in Jerusalem organized by the Princeton Theological Seminary. The documentary's producer, Simcha Jacobovici, was in the audience. I literally fell off my chair.

I got, it was very moving.

His documentary claimed, among other things, that the ossuaries, or stone boxes for bones, found in the tomb bear the names Mary and Jesus, son of Joseph, and suggests that Jesus did not die on the cross, was not resurrected, but rather married Mary Magdalene and fathered a child.

The lost tomb of Jesus was bitterly attacked by Christian leaders and some archaeologists, but Jacobovici has stood by his work.

I am a reporter, I'm a journalist, I'm a filmmaker. My job is to report, not to try to suppress the news because of what I think some people out there might react to it. I reported as best as I could, as honestly as I could, archaeology, DNA, patina, statistics.

That was my job.

At the Princeton conference, some scholars dismissed the documentary.

My personal conclusion is that in no way can we say, with the conclusion postulated by the film, that the lost tomb of Jesus is one and the same with the tomb in East Talpiot.

But others said it simply couldn't be brushed aside.

In my view, the issue is possible, very much possible, but we don't have yet a compelling evidence. What we have to do, I think, is to try to get more evidence.

For Jacobovici, it's time to stop attacking the documentary and start doing archaeology.

Go look at the evidence. Don't hide from the evidence and sit and talk about me. I'm not the story. That tomb that's just over here, that's the story.

The seminar concluded with a vote by participants to reinvestigate the tomb buried somewhere underneath all this rock and concrete. It seems that the controversy set off by the documentary is about to be resurrected.

Ben Wiedemann, CNN, Jerusalem.

The irony is that not a lot has changed since last year and the furor that developed over the Talpiot tomb theory. The very same refutations are still there and they haven't been answered by people like Simcha Jacobovici or by Cameron or any of the apologists for this particular perspective.

If anything, more information has come out, especially about the inscriptions and regards to the ossuaries and things like that. But you see, this is how things work in our society. It comes out, sounds too crazy at first, and so people, well, you know, some scholars say no, who really knows.

And then it comes back the next year, and then it comes back the next year. And then people start making reference to it and you have passing references in books. And it's sort of like a snowball effect until people start going, well, yeah, you know, there seems to be good evidence because, well, have they actually examined the evidence?

No, but you see, they've heard it over a period of time. And unfortunately, for a lot of people in our society, they don't do a lot of critical thinking. And so it's the repetition. It's coming up. It's seeing it in different forms and different forms.

And I hear this person over here, and I especially hear the philosophy professor at the local community college saying, oh, yes, this is good stuff. And here it comes. And what do we as believers have to do?

Well, we have to be prepared. We have to know what the theory is and respond to it. Last year, I took a lot of time on the blog. If you go back to March of last year, March of April of 2007 on the blog, you'll see all sorts of information about all the background issues.

We dug into resources that didn't even exist in the state of Arizona anyways. We had to bring books in and things like that in a very short period of time to put this response out. It's all in here. But that's the problem is that people look at this.

They go, well, you know, what are the chances am I ever running into someone who believes this? Well, really, the point there is if you prepare yourself now to respond to these kinds of attacks, you'll be even better prepared when the next mutation of this theory comes along, the next version of a similar theory comes along.

And, folks, look at the past history. Look at what happens before Christmas and Easter every single year. There are people who want to just flood the minds of especially Western thinkers with all sorts of possible theories to create the idea that, well, it could be this, could be this, could be this, and no one can really therefore know.

That's all they need to do is make it so that people go, eh, too much to dig through. I guess we really can't know. And, you see, the Gospel proclamation is not that Jesus might have risen from the dead but that he did and that he will return and he will judge the living and the dead.

So all you've got to do to turn people off the Gospel, all you've got to do to thwart that proclamation is to convince people, well, no one really knows. And so that's why we have to be prepared. And so there you go.

It's back again. It's not any better than it was before. The same facts we presented last year refuted again this year. But we need more Christians to be aware of these sayings so they can provide that kind of response.

So the Talpiot tomb is back, but it's back and it's still refuted just like it was before. Thanks for watching.