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POPSJesus Family Tomb--James Ossuary Why should anyone believe this from Ben Witherington? On December 29, 2004, Golan was indicted in an Israeli court along with three other men - Robert Deutsch, an inscriptions expert who teaches at Haifa University; collector Shlomo Cohen; and antiquities dealer Faiz al-Amaleh. They are accused of being part of a forgery ring that had been operating for more than 20 years. Golan denies the charges against him, but the forgery factory was in a hidden part of his own luxury flat in Jerusalem. Golan is sufficiently dhady for anyone sensible not to believe a word he says.
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POPSJesus Family Tomb What we know about the Essenes is that “they related to each other as family, even when they were not physically related”. They called each other brother and siter, and very likely called senior members father and mother, just as Christians came to do. The Essenes did BC what the Christians did AD except that Essenes were Jews and Christians quickly became mainly gentiles. There is a continuity between the culture of the Essenes and that of the Christians that modern Christians simply will not recognize because they insist on supernatural explnations not natural ones.
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POPSJesus Family Tomb The rosette was a sign of Judah come down from Persian times when the Persians colonized the country and set up the Temple State of Yehud (417—BC). That rosette is still a symbol of both ancient nations. Who then would use the rosette other than fervent Jewish nationalists? And who were the fervent Jewish natinalists other than the Essenes. This could have been an Essene tomb and not a Jewish family tomb at all. The original archaeological reports by Amos Klonos need to be scrutinized for evidence of this, if it has not been erased by clumsy archaeology. The Essenes were not identical with the Nazarenes, and so the Nazarenes need not have known where the Essenes had buried their brother. The Nazarenes were converts to the idea of the kingdom coming soon, and need not have known much about the basic affiliations of their leader, but simply his immediately pressing principle which was an Essene principle—the world was about to end and Jews had to repent to get into it.
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POPSJesus Illigitimate and taken in by the Essenes
What this boils down to is that the early evidence of Jesus’s birth is that he was illigitimate. It is special pleading to say this conclusion is uncharitable because Mary claimed it was a miracle. It ought not to need saying that no Christian father would accept the same excuse for his daughter’s pregnancy, so there is nothing uncharitable about it. In those days, Greeks thought it possible for human women to be impregnated by gods, and it was used as an excuse in that culture, but no traditional Jewish culture was likely to accept it. The Christians who wrote the gospels were not traditional Jews. If they were Jews at all, they were writing for people in the Hellenized world outside Palestine where divine births were acceptable. The two birth narratives were quite plainly stuck on to the bios of Christ, and no scholar considers them to be anything other than myth. It leaves the notion of illigitimacy as the only explanation for Jesus being called the son of Mary. The question then is
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POPSMary Magdalene Ben Witherington makes these statements in his blog about the Jesus Family Tomb book. He is a professional Christian and is complaining about the facts offered by the authors, Charles Pellegrino and Simcha Jacobivici, a pair of ancient history sensationalists out to make money. Yet this tiny part of the professional Christian response is just as mendacious. How does he know all the early Christians in Jerusalem spoke only Aramaic, and had no Greek? Since this country had been in the Greek sphere of influence for over three centuries, it seems most unlikely. If they did speak only Aramaic, it was a deliberate choice, not because they had no Greek. As for Mary Magdalene growing up in a Jewish fishing village called Migdal, this is pure invention. No one knows what “Magdalene” means, and so it is pure conjecture that it refers to any town. If it refers to Migdal at all, it could be translated as “Mary the Tower”, implying her fortitude, or even her towering stature.
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POPSThe Lost Tomb of Jesus Christians will persist in complaining that others misrepresent them, yet they will not examine the facts of their own belief honestly.
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