The great circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum famously quipped, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  Or did he?

Actually, it was David Hannum, one of Barnum’s rivals. The story begins with Mr. George Hull, a student of archeology and paleontology who contrived a famous hoax to make money. Hull had a “giant” carved out of stone, and buried on his cousin’s farm in Cardiff, New York. Why? Because evangelists of the time were preaching about lost giants that roamed the earth, and Hull knew he could make a mint if the buried giant was “suddenly” unearthed and put on display. And he did. Things went so well that he was able to sell two-thirds interest in the giant for $30,000 to a group of men, one of them being banker David Hannum (who believed the giant real). P. T. Barnum tried to buy the giant, but Hull and Hannum wouldn’t sell. So, ol’ P. T. had one carved of his own, and claimed Hull and Hannum’s was a fake! Seeing the streams of visitors flowing in to see P. T.'s “giant,” Hannum, still believing his own giant to be real, declared “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

A circus atmosphere. Hucksters and Hoaxers. Public credulity. Greed. Archeology. Carvings in stone. Elaborate duplicity. And lots and lots of money.

Some things never change.  Our newest Hull & Barnum is the Discovery Channel, which has stepped in as the latest vendor of unearthed wonders with The Lost Tomb of Jesus.  Given the monetary success of elaborate hoaxes like The DaVinci Code, it was inevitable that television producers would be unable to resist the nearly unfathomable depths of gullibility.

The Discovery film claims that ten ossuaries (small caskets used to store bones) that were discovered in a Jerusalem suburb in 1980 contain the bones of Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Joseph, and indeed Jesus’s hitherto unknown son, Judas, as well as other members of the “clan.” The Discovery docu-drama is a slicked over version of an earlier BBC attempt to cash in that was filmed in 1996. Like P. T. Barnum, Discovery realized the heap of money to be made, and carved their own “giant” with the help of James Cameron, producer of the Titanic.

But as with both Barnum’s and Hull’s giants (that were later on admitted to be fakes) when you call in the experts, from scriptural scholars to archeologists not on the Discovery payroll, the story starts to crumble.

One such scriptural scholar to speak out is Ben Witherington III.  Ben Witherington’s academic credentials are impeccable.  A graduate of  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Witherington received his Ph.D. in Theology (with a concentration in New Testament) from the University of Durham in England. Among his many awards, he was named General Editor of the prestigious New Cambridge Bible Commentary Series in 2001. He has written over thirty books, and has appeared on the History Channel, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN,  A&E, the PAX Network, and, yes, The Discovery Channel.

Witherington is not pleased with the combination of hucksterism and shoddy scholarship that mark both Discovery’s The Lost Tomb of Jesus and the companion book, The Jesus Family Tomb.

To begin with the obvious, the names that appear on the ossuaries are quite common.  Quoting fellow scholar Richard Bauckham, Witherington notes that of women’s names recorded at the time, including those found on similar ossuaries, Mary is the most popular. In fact, 21% of total names recorded, with 42 occurring on ossuaries.  Jesus is also quite common as well, with 99 occurrences, 22 of them being found on ossuaries.  “The names Joseph and Joshua (Jesus) were two of the most common names in all of early Judaism. So was Mary,” Witherington points out, “This is the ancient equivalent of finding adjacent tombs with the names Smith and Jones. No big deal.”

Another “major problem with the analysis of the names on these ossuaries,” adds Witherington, is that “one is in Hebrew, several are in Aramaic, but the supposed Mary Magdalene ossuary is in Greek.” What difference does that make? The language spoken by Jesus, Mary, and Mary Magdalene was Aramaic. And why would Jesus—whom Discovery wants to sensationalize (a la The DaVinci Code) as Mary Magdalene’s husband—have his inscription in Aramaic? “It makes no sense that her ossuary would have a Greek inscription and that of her alleged husband an Aramaic inscription.”

On top of that, the inscription taken to be of Mary Magdalene, Mariamene, does not actually connect to her. Mary Magdalene “is called ‘Maria’ constantly in the first century Christian literature, and indeed well into the second century as well.” The tenuous connection of Mary Magdalene to the name Mariamene comes from a 14th century Gnostic manuscript “which is theorized to go back to the fourth century A.D.” Even worse, “It does not identify Mariamene as Mary Magdalen, rather it identifies her as the sister of Philip the apostle.”

But hey, what do facts matter when there’s so much money to be made.

Elaborate and financially profitable hoaxes like The Jesus Tomb are nothing new, and Witherington spends a good deal of time patiently defusing sensationalism with sound scholarship.  Unfortunately, much of the sensationalism has its roots in the “latest” attempts by scholars themselves to cash in on the craze. So Witherington finds himself battling on both fronts, against both popular and scholarly distortions.

It is quite clear from his resume that Witherington is both deeply involved in the latest scholarship in regard to the New Testament, and deeply critical of the direction much of the scholarship has taken.  In his newest book, What Have They Done with Jesus?Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History—Why We Can Trust the Bible, Witherington takes aim at the recent attempts (both academic and popular) to undermine the credibility of the New Testament.

One of the main “strategies” of such attempts is to claim that a new gospel has suddenly been discovered, and that new gospel shows that the earliest Christians believed something quite different from the Christianity found in the New Testament. Hence the new gospel is the Gospel, the long-lost Gospel, the suppressed Gospel that is the true book of the Lost Christianity, and the New Testament is consequently the Gospel of the Oppressors Who Conspired to Cover Up the True Gospel.

Lost tombs and lost gospels.  For Witherington, this is all historical bunk; that is, it doesn’t stand up to historical scrutiny.

It is pointless to talk about ‘lost Christianities’ if we are talking about the apostolic age, because there were no forms of Christianity like later Gnosticism already extant in the first century. Indeed, as far as we know there were no forms of earliest Christianity that did not worship Jesus as crucified and risen Lord,…All of the later variants such as Gnosticism, which were deemed heresies in their own time as well as afterward, were offshoots and aberrations of the second- through fourth-century Christian churches. There is not a shred of solid historical evidence that such movements and sectarian split-offs existed in the apostolic age.

In short, the notion that there are “lost Christianities”—the very title of one of Bart Ehrman’s books, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew—is illusory.  Those who are trying to revive these lost Christianities as if they actually existed in the first century are guilty of anachronism, of reading back later heretical aberrations into the first century AD.

Why are we so easily duped into believing in such fantasies? There are several reasons. First, argues Witherington, “In America we live in a Jesus-haunted culture that is biblically illiterate….In our soap opera culture, perhaps it was inevitable that someone would turn the story of Jesus into a soap opera. The problem is, that some people are naïve enough to believe it.” Alas, the suckers lining up for The DaVinci Code and now The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

But there are also a number of people who, for one reason or another, are just plain skeptical about traditional claims of truth. Oddly enough, “they will gladly listen to new theories, even when there is little or no solid evidence to support them.”

“Another characteristic of our culture is that we have bought into the essential sales pitch which drives our economy,” and hence believe that “new is true.” While new is better than old may apply to dish soap and cell phones, it is a poor way to judge the authenticity of New Testament documents.

Yet another factor is found in academia, what Witherington calls the “justification by doubt” factor.  “Some scholars think they must prove (to themselves and/or others) that they are good critical scholars by showing how much of the Jesus tradition of the New Testament in general they can discount, explain away, or discredit. This supposedly demonstrates that they are objective….Oddly, these same scholars often fail to apply the same critical rigor and skepticism to their own pet extracanonical texts or pet theories.”

We are happy to call attention to a top New Testament scholar who does not subscribe to a doctrine of “justification by doubt,” and who applies “critical rigor and skepticism” to the “pet theories” now jostling for attention, both in academia and the popular market. And we can be quite thankful for folks like Witherington, whose calm and critical voice rises above the hawking of The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

Ted Koppel and expert panel critique The Lost Tomb of Jesus

Following the program The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Ted Koppel hosted a panel of experts offering a critical look at the documentary. On one side of the panel was the filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici with James Tabor, a professor of Religious Studies who was one of the film's featured "experts". Tabor's recent book, The Jesus Dynasty, has been assailed by critics because it purports that Jesus was not Joseph's son, or God's son but was instead the illegitimate baby of a Roman soldier named Panthera. This assertion contradicts the "expert opinion" Tabor offers in The Lost Tomb.

"Bible scholar Ben Witherington cites other contradictions, 'In that book ['The Jesus Dynasty,'] he (Tabor) had quite a good deal to say about the Talpiot Tomb, and about Panthera being the father of Jesus, and about Jesus being buried in Galilee, and of course nothing about a ossuary which claims that Joseph is the father of Jesus. Why such a quick reversal of his earlier opinions? This makes him appear very quixotic, not a very reliable witness who sticks by his guns when he draws a conclusion, for he has now reversed himself not just on one or two minor points, but on several major ones.'"

Viewers Guide to Understanding the Discovery Channel's Talpiot Tomb ‘documentary’

Seasoned anthropologist Joe Zias offers substantive evidence for challenging most of the assertions put forth in the Discovery Channel’s Lost Tomb of Jesus. As former Senior Curator of Archaeology/ Anthropology for the Israel Antiquities Authority he’s more than qualified to separate hype from reality in his Viewers Guide to Understanding Talpiot Tomb documentary from which we excerpt the segments below.

STATISTICS

Whereas their attempt as probability looks impressive, a 600 to 1 chance this it is the ‘Family’ it falls flat when one realizes that the info. given to the statistician was that of a nuclear family of ca 10 people whereas the truth of the matter is that the family of 10 is an extended family of maybe 50 or more comprising 4-5 generations, as a result it simply cannot be computed. They knew this and I have the feeling that this info. was not divulged to the mathematician. In fact, I published in 1992 a tomb with 15 ossuaries, 88 people and one name. The one person, one ossuary scenario is how the film makers present their findings whereas in an article I published in ‘Atiqot XXII, three of the ossuaries had the remains of a minimum of 6 people. There has been an enormous amount of discussion on the web dealing with the probabilities of this being the family, which I suggest the viewer read, all of which totally dismiss the statistics as of no value whatsoever.

For a more detailed explanation on how they rigged the statistics see the following:

The correct interpretation of Dr. Andrey Feuerverger's 1:600 odds calculation

The Statistical Case for the Identity of the "Jesus Family Tomb"

THE “EXPERTS” A QUESTION OF CREDIBILITY

DNA. The DNA expert from Canada spent a few months in Israel before leaving for Canada a few years ago He in fact, worked with our Science and Archaeology Group @ the Hebrew University. According to Dr. Mark Spigelman, our DNA specialist in the group he received a message from the Canadian expert concerning the question of extracting DNA from the James Ossuary apparently at the behest of SJ. Dr. Spigelman personally told him at that time that it was foolish for him to get involved for several reasons, not to mention that the object he wished to run a test on was believed to be a forgery. Secondly, the export of all biological material which is sampled and taken abroad must according to IL law have an export license which we knew quite well would never be given. Thirdly, the film which I viewed showed several ‘experts’ scraping material from the ossuary, under the worst possible conditions. Lastly, and here is where the main problem occurs, when human remains are placed in the ossuary, they have been decomposed and are just skeletal material. The film tries to give the false impression that they were sampling human tissue which had decomposed in the ossuary whereas it had been long gone before the skeletal material was ever placed there. Final analysis- high probability that the DNA is of anybody who came into contact with the ossuary the past 30 off years, including mine. To say that as one test showed male and one showed female and then jumping to the conclusion that they were married is totally absurd as most of the adult woman in the tomb would have married in, but married to whom? While preparing this report I found the following statement from their DNA expert which is revealing in that Simcha and the BAR Crowd constantly make a ‘big deal’ out of their so called hard scientific evidence. Seems that their ‘expert’ may in retrospect have been used in a manner not to his liking. According to their DNA expert in yesterdays on line SciAmer, he states the following :

“The only conclusions we made was that these two sets were not maternally related. To me it sounds like absolutely nothing.” ScientificAmerican.com March 2, 07.

Joe Zias

Darrell Bock sheds light on how "experts" were used to shape Lost Tomb of Jesus

Darrell Bock was one of the Christian scholars featured on the Ted Koppel special. Yesterday he posted a message on his blog describing how experts were used in creating the Lost Tomb of Jesus television special.

"I am involved in an internal blog for scholars and one of the questions that came up was how certain experts were involved. Here is the answer I posted for them: "François Bovon of Harvard was brought in to make the critical link between the name Mariamne and Mary Magdalene. This link is made possible by the Acts of Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, as this is a variant Greek name for Mary. Now, in fact things are more complicated. The inscription actually reads Mariaamnou, a diminutive of Mariamnon. It is the only inscription in Greek out of the six found in the cave. All he did was to verify that such a link exists between the fourth century text and Mary Magdalene. The way the special used experts was to ask them to verify points of fact to lay the ground work for the speculation but did not follow up to ask them what they thought of the actual hypothesis.

Benjamin Wiker goes to the source to interview biblical scholar Ben Witherington

tothesource: You've just published a book with a rather stunning title, What Have They Done with Jesus?: Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History--Why We Can Trust the Bible. An interesting title! Can you give us an overview?

Ben Witherington III: My critique of currently trendy views of Jesus takes place in the first chapter as a follow up to my book The Gospel Code. The subsequent chapters however paint portraits of the inner circle of Jesus of 7-8 people who were close to Jesus, or at least close to those who were intimate with him-- Mary, James and Jude from Jesus' own family, Peter and the Beloved Disciple from the male disciples, and Mary Magdalene and Joanna from the female disciples, and finally Paul, the odd man out, who became the most influential of them all.

One of the important conclusions of this study is that all the New Testament documents can be traced back directly or indirectly to these eight persons---all of them. This in turn means that the witness of these documents has not passed through many hands and lots of revisions, but is rather directly in contact with the original eyewitnesses and preachers of the word, as Luke claims of his own account in Luke 1:1-4.

tts: You take aim in particular at the current fascination with Gnostic texts, pushed by people who want to argue that Gnostic variations of Christianity are actually the “true, lost” Christianity. Could you just give us a brief description of Gnosticism, and why it is at odds with Christianity?

BWIII: Gnosticism is a syncretistic philosophy that involves some Christian ideas combined with some non-Christian dualistic ideas. Most forms of Gnosticism insist that matter is evil and spirit good, so we have a cosmological dualism. This leads to a belief that there must be two deities, the Demiurge who was responsible for creating tainted matter, and the God who is Spirit and above all that materiality. Salvation in this system is based on what you know, not who you know, and it is only for the elite or elect-- its a sort of salvation for eggheads because it requires knowing some very esoteric things.

tts: But I take it that part of your concern is the number of recent books that have championed Gnostic “gospels” as somehow more pure than those chosen for the biblical canon? Elaine Pagels comes to mind. Why do you think there is a sudden interest in Gnosticism?

BWIII: There are a variety of reasons Gnosticism plays so well in our cultural situation but clearly one of them is that it is a human self-help religion. It’s about knowing and saving yourself basically, and this plays very well in our narcissistic culture. It’s also about the unveiling of secrets, and certainly in our post-modern situation there is a fascination with mysteries and secrets.

tts: Hence, all the hubbub about The DaVinci Code. Your response to that was a previous book, The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci. Obviously, you are concerned about the many books on the market now that attempt to undermine the credibility of the Bible. What did you think of the bestseller by Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus?

BWIII: I think Bart does an adequate job of explaining text criticism. I think what he wants to conclude from dealing with textual variants is way over the top. You simply cannot argue that any major doctrine of Christianity is hanging on later textual variants. It's simply untrue, despite Bart's protests to the contrary. For example, we have plenty of NT texts which reflect a nascent form of Trinitarian thinking. The Trinity is not a notion dreamed up by church councils in the 4th century.

tts: What books besides your newest one would you recommend by top New Testament Scholars for those whose faith has been undermined by certain trends in bible scholarship?

BWIII: I would also recommend the book of mine you just mentioned The Jesus Quest, as well as Craig Evans recent Fabricating Jesus, and Darrell Bock's The Missing Gospels.

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