Faith Well Grounded

Boy, am I hestitant to put this entry in the "Science" category. It just proves that I need to create some more categories. But, since it loosely falls under Biblical Archaeology, I'll let this one slide.

I never really got that worked up about the "Lost Tomb of Jesus" during its media campagne, and more especially after its debut on The Discovery Channel. The reasons for not getting too excited were many-fold. First, I have absolute trust in the validity of my faith, and it's times like this that I am thankful I have studied and reasoned to ground my faith in more than vapor and blind trust. I have absolute trust that God can stand some scrutiny.

Secondly, they still found an empty tomb.

I kept wondering what the big deal was. They found a bunch of ossuaries in a lost tomb, and the one bearing the name of Jesus was empty. No bones. No hair. Not even a fingernail. Just a little crust they could scrape and test. "THE" Jesus' or not, I found that somewhat appropriate.

Then I actually watched the program, saw the leaps and bounds of logic being used to make the case, and figured "case dismissed" in my own mind. Since the airing of the show, quite a bit has come out to shoot holes in the methodology and assertions made. I think it safe to say that the entire thing is debunked, and that's fine on all sides I would imagine. The producers made their money. Christians got to talk about our Lord and Savior to throngs of newly interested people. And Jesus' tomb remains more than lost.

It remains empty.

Edit:
You may notice that this blog entry went missing for a while. I took it down as I double-and-triple-checked my facts concerning the emptiness of the "Jesus" ossuary. I have finally tracked down a quote by CHARLES PELLEGRINO , an advisor to the film and coauthor of the book. He states:

I have not personally had a chance to examine the fragments studied by Carney Matheson at the Thunder Bay lab. They may in fact be small fragments of bone. I can only speak for the material I have personally examined. Not only have I (so far) encountered a complete absence of bone material - but a complete absence of the usual biological signatures of bone deteriorating in an ossuary (nematode traces, etc). Additionally, the fibers in the concretion samples are inconsistent with what normally happens to fibers during the year long period of primary burial (half of its mass is usually bundles of black mold stems; whereas the Jesus fibers, though ancient and enclosed by minerals, are pristine). If there were bones in the Jesus ossuary, then the greater mass of bones that should have been there was removed by someone, many centuries ago. We're still trying to explain this; but there is a significant anomaly in the Jesus ossuary."

http://www.ibdof.com/viewtopic.php?t=115197 (emphesis mine...)

I can now rest assured that I did, in fact, see/hear that the ossuary was empty. It of course was not the empty ossuary of the Biblical Jesus, our Savior. But it is somehow ironic, none-the-less.

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