It’s amazing. When I talk to people that don’t know Christ, some of them don’t even believe He lived. Or they except tripe like Da Vinci Code as truth of a coverup.
But let some big shot director shoot a movie about 27 year news, they immediately believe that.
Why are the falsehoods so easy to believe, but the truth is so hard?
This week we’re going to see a lot in the news about the tomb of Jesus. It’s part of a secular marketing program to drum up viewers for the Sunday night special. And as marketing efforts go, it’ll be successful.
But the news was dismissed 27 years ago; it’s just repackaged garbage.
But the Israeli archeologist responsible for the 1980 excavation, Prof. Amos Kloner, on Monday night intensified his criticism of this assertion, lambasting the documentary as “brain confusion.”
Serious scholars dismissed this claim years ago.
Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem who was interviewed in the documentary, said the film’s hypothesis holds little weight.
“I don’t think that Christians are going to buy into this,” Pfann said. “But skeptics, in general, would like to see something that pokes holes into the story that so many people hold dear.”
“How possible is it?” Pfann said. “On a scale of one through 10 _ 10 being completely possible _ it’s probably a one, maybe a one and a half.”
Pfann is even unsure that the name “Jesus” on the caskets was read correctly. He thinks it’s more likely the name “Hanun.” Ancient Semitic script is notoriously difficult to decipher.
Kloner also said the filmmakers’ assertions are false.
“It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave,” Kloner said. “The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.”
Archaeologists also balk at the filmmaker’s claim that the James Ossuary _ the center of a famous antiquities fraud in Israel _ might have originated from the same cave. In 2005, Israel charged five suspects with forgery in connection with the infamous bone box.
But hey, skeptics believe what they want to believe. The truth of Jesus can be blinding to those that have spent too much time in the dark.
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