I was looking at an article a Texas newspaper called the Victoria Advocate this morning about a claim by director James Cameron that the bones of Jesus have been found along with the bones of Mary Magdelene in a family crypt, suggesting the two were married, or at least in-laws of some sort. Cameron has made a documentary, entitled The Lost Tomb of Christ, based upon what he says is evidence proving that the bones are almost certainly that of the religious leader whose life story became the foundation of Christianity.
Most of the content was rather tedious, with unreflective arguments from Christian believers saying that the bones of Jesus could not possibly have been found because, after all their religion teaches that Jesus was lifted up into the air after being resurrected. That’s what they believe happened, these believers said, so any claim to the contrary must be false.
Well, one of these quotes caught my attention, but not because of what the person being quoted was saying. Rather, it was the name of the person being quoted:
Pastor Brick Wall of Victory Christian Life Center said he doesn’t hold stock in the film’s premise. “For me, personally, as a believer, I have complete faith that Jesus’ body doesn’t exist on Earth because he went to Heaven.”
Pastor Brick Wall? That name caused me to suspect that what I was reading might not be the straight article it appeared to be, but some kind of satire instead. After all, what kind of person would be walking around with the name Brick Wall?
Well, the Brick Wall kind of person, apparently. It took a bit of research, because Brick Wall isn’t the sort of pastor to gain a lot of attention on the Internet, but I did find several articles and resources referring to a man named Brick Wall who lives in Victoria, Texas.
It seems that Brick Wall really is a pastor. He regards his calling as teaching people how to gain victory in life, as he believes God wants them to do.
It’s kind of ironic, then, that when Brick Wall ran for City Council in Victoria last year, he lost, with just 32.2 percent of the vote, to his competitor, consultant Paul Polasek.
Perhaps Brick Wall needs to change his ministry to reflect the teaching of Jesus that it’s the people who are defeated in life that are the most blessed. Maybe it’s time for him to accept that he’s just another brick in the… oh, you get it.
I certainly don’t mean to stir up contrversy (yuk,yuk!), but could it be that the teachings of Islam might be correct in their view that Jesus was “the most blameless of the Prophets”? Hmmmm…
It’s about as likely as finding a tomb with the names of Abraham and Mary and deciding you had found the tomb of the Lincolns. I’m not going to get excited until the findings are presented in a scholarly journal with peer review.
Heh. This time, I agree with their conclusion, if not their reasoning: the bones of Jesus could not possibly have been found because he never existed. The idea that Christ had been a historical figure was invented sometime in the second century CE.
What about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? At least some of these would have been contemporaries of Jesus, and others would have been able to talk to people who had been his contemporaries. Paul would have talked to the disciples in Jerusalem, who had known Jesus personally–what about these records of the early church?
These gospels by these characters were not written until well after the death of the Jesus character.
You treat them like they were researchers, or journalists. They weren’t. They were propagandists.
According to the Epistles, Paul did visit the Christians in Jerusalem—for two weeks. If they had been the Apostles Who Knew Christ, he’d have stayed longer, and made a bigger deal of it.See, Christianity actually dates back to the second century BCE; it started out as a form of Jewish mysticism. The idea was that Yahweh worked his will in the world by sending down a spirit called the Christ, so you could work magic by appealing to the Christ. Later on, the Coptic Christians in Egypt conflated the Christ with Horus, son of Ra, and started telling existing myths with Christ instead of Horus. This memeplex was stronger (everybody likes a good story), so it spread; eventually the stories were written down as the Gospels.
I doubt there has ever existed a writer without a bias. The “father of history”, Herodotus himself was a propagandist for his own failed military campaigns, but differentiated between events he had been an eyewitness to, things told him by credible eye witnesses, and stories whose origins have been lost in the mists of time, many of which have later been proven by archeological and other evidence. The importance is not to find an author without bias–you can’t do it–but to understand the bias of any given author.
Beside being linked to Horus, the Jesus tradition shares even stonger elements with the Tammuz cult observed in Jerusalem at the time. Dying and cannabalized saviors go back into prehistory.
Why reject the NT then use it as a authority for the length of Jesus stay in Jerusalem?
I have wondered why Paul doesn’t hang out more with Peter and those guys in Jerusalem, but first of all he does admit he came there at the behest of the Roman government to persecute (kill?) them. Maybe not a lot of trust there about whether a leopard can change its spots. Would you turn your back on this guy? (with or without a vision on the road to Damascus) Secondly he doesn’t seem to be the follower type but runs around starting a lot of churches, not sticking around and not settling down in one place. Still he seems to be in constant contact with the disciples in Jerusalem when it comes to policy questions like whether converts can eat different animals forbidden by Jewish law or whether they have to be circumcized. Paul is a Pharisee, a reader of the Jewish law, a lawyer, if you will, and his interest is not in chronicling the life and teachings of Jesus but in the legalese surrounding the establishment of the new religion and the organizational issues of the new churches.
I don’t think you can say the writers of the gospels “should have” done some certain thing in order to prove they wasn’t inventing a story. What is an “uninvented” religious story supposed to look like? People like to repeat the “not a historical person” thing without really thinking about it or presenting proof. If the four gospels were invented rather than based on eyewitness accounts, they should show more similarity–be more “airtight”. They were’t researchers or journalists, there was no such thing in those days. If you had been part of the birth of a new religion, how would you record it?
“Why reject the New Testament then use it as a [sic] authority for the length of Jesus [sic] stay in Jerusalem?
- The point was to show that even the New Testament isn’t consistent with Biblical literalists’ arguments. They’re just faith-based, making stuff up whenever they need to defend their religion.
Paul’s stay (not Jesus) in Jerusalem, right.
But if the argument is Jesus didn’t exist at all or Jesus was made up after the 2nd c., what about Paul visiting the apostles after Jesus death, and starting all these churches while being in contact with people who had known Jesus and were eyewitnesses? It is just too convoluted an argument to say Jesus never existed. Occam’s razor. That the New Testament isn’t completely consistent is just more evidence for me of multiple sources, multiple interpretations, and different recollections of the same basic events.
Cameron’s stuff seems to be based on gospels of Mary Magdelene and/or Philip that are later and don’t have the same scholarly weight.
Yeah, just like it’s too convoluted an argument to say that the Zoroastrians are all wrong, and that the Wiccans just made up their rites in the 20th century, and that Lao Tzu never existed.
After all, there are lots of people go around making extraordinary supernatural claims in these traditions, just like people do about Jesus. So, therefore it must be right!
Not.
Keep in mind the Ram Bomjon example they write about here at Irregular Times. Plenty of people are willing to buy any inspirational humbug that comes along, and then tell others they just know for sure that it’s right.
Remember the example of the Iraqi military officer who people suspected did not exist – it took 2 weeks of intense search to discover that he was in fact real, in the 21st century, and people had his name, place and position to work with!
Ever heard of identity theft? Or con men pretending to be someone they’re not? Or the 20-something man who passed for a high schooler?
People make up this kind of stuff all the time, and get away with it – even with the Internet, even with libraries, and international police networks, etc.
Imagine how easy it would have been to pull off the conversion of a mythological figure two thousand years ago.
After all, billions of people today say that they’re sure that GOD exists – and no one has ever seen him!
Excuse me, but who said that ANY gospels have ANY scholarly weight?
They don’t.
They weren’t written by scholars.
They’re just stories.
Wiccans say their rituals are from the 20th century therefore Jesus did not exist. Whatever.
Rome is just a story.
Socrates is just a story.
Sumer is just a story.
9/11 is just a story.
Some philosophers do suggest that Socrates did not really exist as a person, but rather as a fictional exemplar, kind of like Jesus.
Sumer, Rome and the attacks of September 11, 2001 are backed up by massive amounts of direct evidence of their existence.
There is no direct evidence for the existence of Jesus. None whatsoever.
“9/11″ is a story. It’s a story about the events of September 11, 2001.
Direct evidence of Rome, Sumer, 9/11, Marco Polo, the Cat in the Hat, Tacitus, Alexander, Machiavelli, Nancy Drew, the Holocaust, Batman? No, none of it written by scholars. Too easy to fake. Besides, I didn’t personally see any of those things.
I did see Hillary Rodham Clinton once. You’ll just have to trust me on that one.
The Truth Shall Set you Free…
Do your research before you attempt to make claims like that.