I Think I Hear Spitballs Bouncing off the Hull of the Ark

I am reviewing the news after a tasty McDonald’s breakfast coupled with an episode of Dennis Gage’s cable show, My Classic Car. What do I see before me? Yet another ridiculous attempt to discredit Jesus.

A few years back, James Cameron, who, having directed a successful movie about a sinking ship, is clearly an authority on ancient history, said he had found the tomb of Jesus. Now, we all know Jesus had a tomb. In fact, you can go to Jerusalem and visit TWO tombs of Jesus. If the line at one is too long, why, just go to the other one! But the one Cameron was pushing was different; he claimed the dead body of Jesus stayed in it permanently. If that were true, it would put a serious dent in Christianity.

Now a Jewish geologist–hello, Jewish–says he has proof Cameron’s tomb belongs to Jesus. Actually, here is what he says: “I think I’ve got really powerful, virtually unequivocal evidence that the James ossuary spent most of its lifetime, or death time, in the Talpiot Tomb.”

Not really the same as, “I proved this is the tomb of Jesus,” but that hasn’t kept the press from treating it as a conclusive debunking of Christianity.

People really need to stop falling for stories like this. Let me explain why we will never be presented with a legitimate permanent tomb of Jesus: if the Jews had known the location of his body, we would have been hearing about it for 2,000 years.

People seem to forget that religious Jews absolutely hate Jesus. They’re so angry at him, they’ll acknowledge a Satanist Jew or an atheist Jew, but they call Christian Jews “Christians of Jewish birth.” They say they are not Jewish. In reference to Jesus, they have said, “May his name be blotted out forever.” He is not popular with them.

They don’t talk about this much, because they believe persecution is strongly connected to their behavior. They don’t want to provoke anyone. In truth, they would still be persecuted even if they sewed their mouths shut and went to live in huts without electricity or telephones, because their real enemy is Satan, and he really doesn’t care what Jews do. He wants to eradicate them, period, and he will always have lots of servants handy who are willing to do the job.

Jews work very hard, to this day, to prove Jesus was a fake. The idea that they would sit around for two millennia, keeping quiet about the location of his dead body, is patently absurd. If someone proved Jesus was a fake, the parties in Israel and Brooklyn would last a month.

When Christians began to outnumber Jews, they persecuted Jews. Back when Jews outnumbered Christians, it was the other way around. They rounded us up and murdered us. Paul did this for a living; Christians were as terrified of him as European Jews were of Hitler. In the first century A.D., Jesus was already considered to be an enormous problem. If Jesus had been buried permanently in Jerusalem, Paul and his friends would have known, and they would have publicized it. We would still be hearing about it today. We are not.

There is a book called The Passover Plot. It suggests Christians paid off the Romans who guarded the tomb of Jesus. The idea is that Christians stole the body, hid it, and claimed Jesus was resurrected. Because they really wanted to dedicate their lives to a false religion, lose their jobs and property, lose all their friends, and be stoned to death.

Hal Lindsey, a Biblical scholar who makes guesses about eschatology, pointed out the obvious flaw in this theory. Aside from the fact that there is no evidence to back the story up, Roman soldiers were subject to the death penalty for relatively minor acts of disobedience. You can pay a guard to let you sneak into the movies, because very little will happen to him if you get caught. Paying a Roman soldier to face the death penalty would not be that easy. You can’t spend a bribe when you’re dead.

This “debunking” stuff has been going on for centuries. It’s asinine.

For some reason, the deniers love to claim Jesus married Mary Magdalene. It’s as if they read a bunch of Archie comic books and assumed that because the only women the books mentioned were Betty and Veronica, Archie must have married one of them. He could also have married Midge, but Moose would have beaten him to a pulp. In all likelihood, a lot of the motivation to pair Jesus with Mary Magdalene comes from the perverse pleasure of accusing him of having sex with a former prostitute.

It’s like the false stories about him, calling him “Jesus ben Pandera,” suggesting Mary was a prostitute and Pandera was the Roman soldier who fathered Jesus. Ho hum. Business as usual.

Jesus didn’t promote celibacy, but he didn’t marry, because God sent him to be the husband of the church. Also, his wife and children would have been worshiped; God didn’t want that. The Catholics already worship everyone he knew. His descendants would have been worshiped. His tomb would have become an object of idolatry. Actually, the two tombs promoted as his have already become objects of idolatry; people kiss and fondle the rock in order to absorb supernatural power.

Maybe there is a tomb belonging to a man with the common first name “Jesus,” and maybe his mother’s name was Mary and his dad’s name was Joseph. In a country where people don’t have last names, you would expect to find more than one tomb fitting that description, especially if you hated Christianity and made a point of searching. There must be two million graves like that in Mexico. “Here lies Jesus, son of Jose and Maria.” There are probably a thousand in Hialeah.

If you believe Jesus and serve him, he will eventually manifest himself to you, making all this noise irrelevant. He has manifested himself to me twice.

James Cameron hasn’t manifested himself to me even once; maybe he’s a myth, like The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Don’t pay any attention to the nonsense. If you’re relying on newspapers and Jews to teach you about Jesus, you are going to have a lot of problems. It’s like relying on Naomi Wolf to teach you about masculinity. Not that I’m thinking about anyone in particular. Certainly not a former Vice President.

But I digress.

The tomb of Jesus is a fake. The tomb of James Cameron will be very real. That about sums it up.