An epoch-dividing event recently took place in the religion that brought us B.C. and A.D. Too bad hardly anyone noticed.

For years, a dispute has boiled between the American Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion it belongs to, with many in the global south convinced that Episcopalians are following their liberalism into heresy. This month, Archbishop Peter Akinola, shepherd of 18 million fervent Nigerian Anglicans, reached the end of his patience and installed a missionary bishop to America. The installation ceremony included boisterous hymns and Africans dressed in bright robes dancing before the altar — an Anglican worship style more common in Kampala, Uganda, than in Woodbridge.

The American presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, condemned this poaching of souls on her turf as a violation of the “ancient customs of the church.” To which the archbishop replied, in essence: Since when have you American liberals given a fig about the ancient customs of the church?

“Missionaries in Northern Virginia,” by Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. RTWT.

HT: Peter Wehner, via email.

Headline: “Israel may open ‘Jesus tomb’ to public.”

Oh, wait, uh, yes it will. . . .

Film maker James Cameron says that his upcoming “documentary,” “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” will prove that Jesus of Nazareth - yes, that Jesus - was buried in a tomb in Jerusalem far from where church historians say he was, and that a stone ossuary in the tomb, discovered in 1980, once held Jesus’ bones. He also claims other ossuaries found in the tomb once held the bones of Mary, Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, assumed to be Jesus’ wife, and Judah, son of Jesus.

Reports This Is London,

His theory, which has already met with derision from experts, centres on a tomb found in the Talpiot suburb in 1980. Inside, archaeologists found ten coffins, or caskets for bones, and three skulls.

Six had names etched into them, which were translated as Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne (thought to be Mary Magdalene’s real name), Joseph and Matthew.

At the time the inscriptions provoked little interest. The Israeli Antiquities Authority said the names were common at the time.

A connection to the holy family was not made until 15 years later, when a film crew stumbled across the collection in a storeroom.

Though the bones had long since been reburied elsewhere, as was the custom, tiny traces of DNA left in the caskets were tested.

The results for the coffins labelled Jesus and Mariamne showed the two were not related by blood, leading Cameron and his team to conclude they were married.

The film’s Israeli director, Simcha Jacobovici, said: ‘Either this cluster-of names represents the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

‘Or some other family, with this very same constellation of names, existed at precisely the same time in history in Jerusalem.’

The show will be broadcast in the USA on March 4 0n the Discovery Channel. Cameron had a press conference scheduled for today but it seems not to have been broadcast on the channel. When the announcement about the conference hit the news feeds I was trying to get my site back online after a coding problem and then had to swap out the hard drive of my main computer, so this is the first I’ve been able to address this topic (or any other).

What struck me about the initial coverage was its insistence that the resurrection of Jesus was “a central tenet” of Christianity. A central tenet? It’s the foundational premise! It is the sine qua non of the Christian religion. Absent Jesus’ resurrection, there is nothing to Christianity at all. As St. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth:” If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Indeed.

Jesus’ resurrection is everything. But what about Jesus’ ethics, you may well ask. They are unoriginal to Jesus.

Scholars have already started slamming Cameron’s premise.

However, the archaeologist who oversaw the work at the tomb described the theory as ‘nonsense’.

Amos Kloner said the names found on the coffins had been found in tombs before, adding: ‘It makes a great story for a TV film, but it’s impossible.

‘Jesus and his relatives were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the first century.’

Breitbart has more:

Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said the idea fails to hold up by archaeological standards but makes for profitable television.

“They just want to get money for it,” Kloner said. …

Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem who was interviewed in the documentary, said the film’s hypothesis holds little weight.

“I don’t think that Christians are going to buy into this,” Pfann said. “But skeptics, in general, would like to see something that pokes holes into the story that so many people hold dear.”

“How possible is it?” Pfann said. “On a scale of one through 10 _ 10 being completely possible _ it’s probably a one, maybe a one and a half.”

Pfann is even unsure that the name “Jesus” on the caskets was read correctly. He thinks it’s more likely the name “Hanun.” Ancient Semitic script is notoriously difficult to decipher.

Kloner also said the filmmakers’ assertions are false.

“It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave,” Kloner said. “The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.”

Archaeologists also balk at the filmmaker’s claim that the James Ossuary _ the center of a famous antiquities fraud in Israel _ might have originated from the same cave. In 2005, Israel charged five suspects with forgery in connection with the infamous bone box.

The “James ossuary” is an ossuary that was claimed to have belonged to James, the brother of Jesus and the chief apostle of Jerusalem; the ossuary bore the inscription, “Ya ‘a kov bar Yosef a khui Yeshua — “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” It was examined carefully in Israel and was found to have been a extremely meticulous forgery (although, IIRC, there is a small number of Israeli archeologists who say the ossuary was not forged).

I’ll withhold further judgment about the show until I have seen it. That is, if I even watch it. I tire of putting up with stuff like this. The premise of Cameron’s claims of the tomb flatly contradict the record of the gospels and the apostles themselves so much that it becomes more incredible to believe Cameron than the New Testament. Literally. If Cameron is to complete his hypothesis that the foundational claim of Christianity is false, then he also has to account for the motives of the apostles in founding a church they knew was built on a lie, what they gained from it (violent deaths, btw, with no renunciations on their part) and why the un-dead, unresurrected Jesus himself didn’t put a stop to the whole charade, and why the Roman government itself became party to the fraud by recording that it had crucified Jesus and that he was claimed to have been raised. Also, Cameron might want to explain how Jesus survived the crucifixion itself and just how the crucifixion story even got started. Other have tried this tack and failed. And so on.

However, I predict that the Christian street will not riot, no film makers will be beaten or studios burned, Christians will still rent “Titanic,” enriching Cameron even more and no bishops or prelates will demand Cameron be beheaded for insulting Christianity. So before Cameron continues to try to knock the columns from underneath such a safe target as Christianity, maybe he should consider why that’s so.

Update: Heh, Bryan at Hot Air has the same kind of thought: “Cameron’s project looks like pseudoscience dressed up to swing away at the foundation of Christianity. Let’s see him try anything similar with the religion of peace. And then we might see just how fast he sinks into hiding.”

The Weekly Standard as an article about the kerfuffle over Southern Methodist University’s bid to host the G.W. Bush library.

LATE LAST YEAR, dozens of faculty members at Southern Methodist University publicly opposed plans by President Bush to locate his presidential library on SMU’s campus in Dallas.

Now, ten bishops of the United Methodist Church, which owns the school, and of which President Bush is a member, are urging SMU to reject the library and are circulating a petition for others to sign.

A chief organizer in stopping the Bush library is a former professor at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology, who told the Dallas Morning News that he doesn’t want his school to “hitch its future star” to the war and other aspects of President Bush’s legacy.

President and Mrs. Bush are members of Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas. Its pastor, the Rev. Mark Craig, is an SMU trustee who supports the library at SMU. The whole thing is, of course, just another example of Bush Derangement Syndrome, but here’s the kicker:

For decades, United Methodist bishops have largely declined to criticize their denomination’s schools as they slipped away from their Christian moorings and became virtually secular institutions. Typical campus life at Methodist schools is not behaviorally different from most other major universities. The faculty, who often adhere to the same academic fads and ideologies of secular schools, are rarely expected to sign faith statements, belong to churches, or even be reverent towards religion. Even United Methodist seminary professors sometimes reject Christian orthodoxy. Some even reject theism itself.

Bishops have almost always defended their schools’ academic independence, even as they often served on the schools’ boards and helped channel church funding to them. But hosting the presidential library of President Bush, a fellow church member, is apparently a bridge too far for some of the church’s bishops and the 4,000 other signatories to the anti-Bush library petition.

They’ve finally found a heresy which they cannot accept.

As long-time readers here know, I am an ordained pastor on the UMC and while I am utterly unsurprised at the knee-jerkiness of the 10 bishops, I am also heartened to see that at last, at last, dear heaven, they have actually decided to stand firmly for something. Okay, against something, but still . . .

I didn’t know there was a “Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup,” but there is, and this week’s is number 94.

Remember the “God Hates Fags” hatemongers of the so-called Westboro Baptist Church?

Google Video has a segment, produced by United Methodist televsion, on what a United Methodist pastor is doing about it.

Members of a Kansas church keep showing up at military funerals with anti-gay protests, even as several lawmakers try to find ways to stop … all » them and a family is suing. But one group has managed to “drown out” their message, and make a strong statement of support for soldiers and their grieving families.

I tried embedding the video in this post, but for some reason it knocked out my sidebars, so I’ve substituted a link to the Google Video page instead.

The chief executive of one of the UMC’s main general boards has denounced the nuclear test by North Korea.

“It is a deplorable act of aggression against the prospects of a more peaceful world,” said the Rev. R. Randy Day in a statement issued on the opening day of the annual meeting of directors of the Church’s General Board of Global Ministries.

More here.