Story of the Week - Feb 26- March 2

Have You Found Jesus Yet?

The man who brought you Titanic is now at the helm of a documentary called The Lost Tomb of Jesus. Cameron, along with director Simcha Jacobovici, has gathered suspect evidence from an archaeological site in Jerusalem and sculpted it to his liking just in time for a Lent-oriented hyped up release.

"There are six names in that tomb. One of them is Jesus, son of Joseph. There's two Marys. There's a Matthew. There's a Judah, son of Jesus." says Jacobovici. The whole gang appeared on Larry King Live for a session of slo-pitch softball.

Real archaeologists are, of course, highly skeptical. And if you think about it, you should be too, whether or not you believe in the gospel according to Dan Brown. And if you are like me, and most of your background on Mary Magdalene comes from the Da Vinci Code, you know that while based in truth, Brown's book is still a work of fiction, and is probably based on the same semi-logical probabilities on which Cameron is basing The Lost Tomb.

For one thing, Jesus, Mary and Joseph weren't exactly (still aren't) unpopular names. I'm searching for a "that's the same as." This is why they need analogies on the SAT.

Ok, that's the same as when I was in high school. There was a guy, David Siegel, two grades ahead of me, and on the first day of class, every year, some idiot teacher who had David Siegel would come to my name on the attendance sheet and say: "Oh, David Spiegel, are you related to David Siegel?"

"Oh, look, there's a family, and it's Mary and Joseph and Mariamene and Judas son of Jesus, it MUST be the same as THE Jesus! And it PROVES that Jesus had a son!"

As Jon Stewart said: the grandson of God? Talk about the most spoiled kid ever.

This is from The Lost Tomb of Jesus:
"According to statistics, if we were on a crowded street in ancient Jerusalem and called out the name Jesus, there would be approximately a 4 percent chance that a Jesus would be there. If we were to call out the name Mary, we would have a 25 percent chance of finding a Mary. Not bad odds. But what Feuerverger explains is that if we were to call out for Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Matthew and Yosef all at the same time, the chances of all those individuals being on the same street together are quite low."

There are clearly logic holes you can drive a truck through. I mean if you were in a Waffle House on a Sunday morning in South Carolina and called out the names Jim-Bob, Betty Sue and Ellie May, the chances of them all being there and being related are pretty low, too. But then again, maybe they're not.

But this is a TV special we're talking about, so the claim is more important than the evidence, and no silly logic hole will stop the quest for TV ratings. Nor will it stop Christian leaders from taking up arms against James Cameron, the Discovery Channel, and all of Hollywood.

"...every single Lenten season there's somebody, some author or someone of these TV magazine shows which puts out some doubts about the resurrection or Jesus' divinity," said William Donohue, the President of The Catholic League. And he's right. Lent is like the sweeps week of Jesus programming, most of which claims new evidence that either supports or refutes the Jesus' resurrection or his crucifixion or... his skin color. And it's irritating really, to think that someone like James Cameron has the chutzpah to think he can reverse 2,000 years of faith in a one-hour special.

It's more irritating to think James Cameron is forcing me to agree with someone like William Donohue. This is the same guy who said in 2004 that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular...I like families, I like children, they like abortions..." which is really just one step above saying Jews drink the blood of Christian babies. And let's not get into why and how the hell this guy still has his job and gets away with saying things like that. Replace secular Jews with "brown people" or "gays" and we probably have a new president of the Catholic league. And if a rabbi said the same thing?

But I digress. The sad fact that Donohue and his church of bigotry and inaccuracy have a valid point is cause for alarm, because the guy shouldn't have a job. The thing is that belief in Jesus, from my humble outside perspective, and belief in the resurrection, requires an act of faith. And that act of faith states that Jesus' bones ascended to Heaven and so there is no tomb. And if you truly believe that, a one-hour special isn't going to change your mind. So don't watch it.

And if you don't believe that Jesus was resurrected and ascended to Heaven, that's fine, but you're never going to be able to convince someone who believes it happened that it didn't. Not even if you're armed with James Cameron's inscrutable proof. So don't watch these specials.

And if you don't watch these specials, James Cameron and "Hollywood" will stop making them. And then I won't have to agree with William Donohue the open anti-Semite gay-bashing schmuck. Because it's only a matter of time before they blame the Jews.