Here is a grab from last night’s “Jesus Family Tomb” show on the Discovery Channel, that i sort of live blogged.

Here is the context of the show in which this scene appeared. Film maker Simcha Jacobovici claims to have located the concrete sealed-over Talpiot tomb, discovered in 1980, investigated and evacuated then, and shortly afterward built over by apartment complexes. This occurs in the last half hour of the show and is, dramatically, a really big thing. The Talpiot tomb had been covered with a concrete slab by the government even though all the human remains and the ossuaries had been removed. So Simcha and crew removed the slab to get inside:

Once inside, Simcha, a crew member and the cameraman discovered, as expected, that the bone boxes were gone. But there were old copies of the Jewish Scriptures interred there. These were put there after the tomb’s discovery; the narrator explains that Orthodox belief requres that worn-out Scriptures be buried or interred. (So does Islam, btw, for worn Qurani.)

Simcha discovers that one of the texts is open to the book of Jonah. The narrator says that Jesus told his disciples that “Jonah is the key” to his ministry: “If you want to know what I am up to,” Simcha quotes Jesus, “read the book of Jonah. That’s the code.” The narrator then kicks in: “The Gospels record that Jesus constantly spoke in parables and codes, not surprising for the leader of what today would be an anti-government movement.”

There are three problems with this claim.

One: Jesus never said that Jonah was “the” key. He did mention Jonah when some people asked him for a sign of his authenticity. Jesus responded, “… no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here! ”

It is an illuminating comparison, indeed, but Simcha overstates it by saying it is “the key” to understanding Jesus’ ministry. And, worse for Simcha, even if it was the key, it cannot jibe with the third problem, below.

The second, and much more serious problem for the show’s thesis is that the Gospels do not claim that Jesus spoke in codes. In my New Testament studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I learned that what Jesus taught and preached was mostly quite transparent to his hearers. It’s true that a couple of Jesus’ parables were so opaque to the Twelve that they asked him outright what the meaning was, but in each case Jesus’s explanation was religious, not political. Example: the parable of the sower who went out to sow.

The third, and most severe problem is this: Nowhere in the NT is Jesus presented as a political pretender to the ancient throne of David. There is no basis in the NT that the Twelve or the several women who arranged for Jesus’ daily support - and must be included as part of Jesus’ inner circle - had any idea that Jesus wanted them to oppose the government. In fact, when challenged on this point by Pilate, asking him whether he was king of the Jews, Jesus bluntly answered in Luke’s telling, That’s your rumor (”You say so”). In the Gospel of John, it flows thus:

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate then dismisses the conversation with the word, “What is truth?”

The idea that Jesus was a political threat to Rome was a claim made about him, not by him in either word or deed, intended to lead Pilate to order Jesus executed. Pilate is well known to modern historians has an inept governor of Judea (one of an unfortunate series) and one who was especially willing to execute Jews on the flimsiest of evidence, or none at all. This was well known 2,000 years ago, obviously, and Jesus even used Pilate’s liberal use of the sword as a religious teaching point - but not as a political point.

Where does Jonah strike against this claim? Simcha cannot have it both ways. He can’t claim that Jesus was a political agitator, a claimant to a political throne, and then turn around and say that the key to Jesus ministry is Jesus’ claim, via Jonah’s text, that he will be resurrected from the dead after three days. You can have one, you can have the other. You can’t have both.

This is crucial because the entire edifice of the Jesus family tomb show hangs on the claim that Jesus was an anti-government agitator and not a religious reformer or something else. Why? Because that is the only reason Simcha gives for the secrecy of Jesus’ marriage and son. If Jesus was executed by Rome, Simcha says, then how much greater would be the danger that Jesus’ son, Judah, would be hunted by the authorities? So there is a presumed, vast conspiracy of silence among —

— all Jesus’ disciples, including the several women,

— the straphangers who moved in and out of his travels, the Jesus groupies, as it were,

— his hometown synagogue where he presumably would have been married and which the Gospels record was inimical to him personally; Luke even records his own congregants tried to kill him one day,

— the Jewish hierarchy itself, all the way up to the Sanhedrin, whose members would have at least been interested in the question of Jesus’ marital status if for no other reason to compile a dossier - and this interest would have been felt by friendly Sanhedrin members such as Nicodemus, not merely those opposed to Jesus.

In short, the conspiracy to keep Jesus’ presumed marriage secret would have had to encompass keeping it secret not merely from the Romans, but from Jesus’ own countrymen. It would have amounted literally to a nationwide conspiracy.

Simcha’s entire hypothesis stands on this conspiracy because his whole explanation of the tomb depends on his unproven and unprovable claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were secretly married and finally, secretly entombed in the same place along with their secret son.

Can anyone say, “conspiracy theory?” Yep.

Now, back to that skull. One of the reasons that NT scholar Jonathan Reed called the show “archeo-porn” in the following “Critical Look” segment was for scenes such as that one. It is simply sensationalistic, dramatized hype. It is deceptive. The scene does not take place in the Talpiot tomb, but there is nothing in the show telling you that. You see Simcha entering the Talpiot tomb, examining the book of Jonah, then some other sequences are shown, and then we’re back in the tomb - apparently, as far as we know, because there is Simcha rustling on the tomb’s floor in faded light and he picks up this skull and shakes the dirt out of it. Then he puts it back down. There is not a syllable of narration nor a crawl on the screen to indicate that this is anything other than the Talpiot tomb. Then Simcha exits the tomb with this shot.

But this is a shot of the entrance to the Talpiot tomb, not the skull tomb, looking from the inside out. It is a near-exact match of an earlier shot of Simcha entering the tomb. It immediately follows the skull-handling sequence. What are viewers supposed to believe about what they have just seen? At worst, that there are still human remains in the presumed Jesus tomb, at best that Simcha goes tomb hopping and casually handles human remains. And neither give confidence that he plays straight with his audience. He simply does not tell the whole truth.

Update: More on Jesus’ presumed political pretensions. It’s worth noting that John 19:19-30 relates:

19 Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” 20 Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. 21 Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, “The King of the Jews,’ but, “This man said, I am King of the Jews.’ ” 22 Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.”

Here Pilate specifically rejects the idea that Jesus himself claimed the throne of David.

Britain’s Channel 4 was the key player in the broadcast there of “The Jesus Family Tomb.” Not content with stirring up trouble for the Christian religion, it’s now turned its guns against the global warming religion (oh, did I say that?) Its new show is called, “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

The programme, to be screened on Channel 4 on Thursday March 8, will see a series of respected scientists attack the “propaganda” that they claim is killing the world’s poor.

Even the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, is shown, claiming African countries should be encouraged to burn more CO2.

Nobody in the documentary defends the greenhouse effect theory, as it claims that climate change is natural, has been occurring for years, and ice falling from glaciers is just the spring break-up and as normal as leaves falling in autumn.

A source at Channel 4 said: “It is essentially a polemic and we are expecting it to cause trouble, but this is the controversial programming that Channel 4 is renowned for.”

Controversial director Martin Durkin said: “You can see the problems with the science of global warming, but people just don’t believe you – it’s taken ten years to get this commissioned.

“I think it will go down in history as the first chapter in a new era of the relationship between scientists and society. Legitimate scientists – people with qualifications – are the bad guys.

“It is a big story that is going to cause controversy.

“It’s very rare that a film changes history, but I think this is a turning point and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bollocks.

“Al Gore might have won an Oscar for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, but the film is very misleading and he has got the relationship between CO2 and climate change the wrong way round.”

One major piece of evidence of CO2 causing global warming are ice core samples from Antarctica, which show that for hundreds of years, global warming has been accompanied by higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ Al Gore is shown claiming this proves the theory, but palaeontologist Professor Ian Clark claims in the documentary that it actually shows the opposite.

He has evidence showing that warmer spells in the Earth’s history actually came an average of 800 years before the rise in CO2 levels.

Prof Clark believes increased levels of CO2 are because the Earth is heating up and not the cause. He says most CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans, which dissolve the gas.

When the temperature increases, more gas is released into the atmosphere and when global temperatures cool, more CO2 is taken in. Because of the immense size of the oceans, he said they take time to catch up with climate trends, and this ‘memory effect’ is responsible for the lag.

Scientists in the programme also raise another discrepancy with the official line, showing that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, when global temperatures then fell for four decades.

It was only in the late 1970s that the current trend of rising temperatures began.

This, claim the sceptics, is a flaw in the CO2 theory, because the post-war economic boom produced more CO2 and should, according to the consensus, have meant a rise in global temperatures.

The programme claims there appears to be a consensus across science that CO2 is responsible for global warming, but Professor Paul Reiter is shown to disagree.

He said the influential United Nations report on Climate change, that claimed humans were responsible, was a sham.

It claimed to be the opinion of 2,500 leading scientists, but Prof Reiter said it included names of scientists who disagreed with the findings and resigned from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and said the report was finalised by government appointees.

Much more at the link, RTWT. Another look at the documentary here.