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"The Lost Tomb of Jesus"
The alleged discovery of the tomb of Jesus is really just an attempt to put into question Christ's resurrection.
The documentary was broadcast on the Discovery Channel last Sunday. It claims that Jesus' burial site has been found and suggests that Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and had a son.
This is not new to Christians, in fact there is talk of ancient tombs, some from the first century, discovered in the neighborhood of Talpiot, at the beginning of the 1980s, on which are engraved some names, such as those of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Matthew. This is the factual data.. Hence, there is nothing new in this revelation.
There is so much noise surrounding the documentary's airing because the media wanted to launch a scoop. Given the success of operations such as 'The DaVinci Code,' an attempt has been made to produce a similar success, playing with the real question at stake, namely, if Jesus is really risen.
The thesis launched is that if Jesus is buried there with his family, then the resurrection would be no more than an invention of his disciples.
Leaving to one side the inconsistency of the archaeological proof, which has been utterly contested by Israeli archaeologists, the factual event of Jesus' resurrection is rigorously documented in the New Testament by the five accounts of the apparitions: four of the Gospels and St. Paul's.
All critical studies in these two centuries have shown that in the profound truth of the accounts of the apparitions there is non-debatable historicity.
There is a vacuum between Good Friday, when the disciples abandoned Jesus, and Easter Sunday, when they became witnesses of the Risen One, with a drive and courage that impelled them to proclaim the good news to the ends of the earth, even to giving their lives for him.
The profane historian cannot explain this change. The Gospels imply it: There was an encounter that changed their lives. And this encounter, recounted in the passages of the apparitions, is characterized by an essential fact: The initiative is not from the disciples, but from him who is alive, as the book of the Acts of the Apostles states.
This means that it isn't something that happens in the disciples but something that happens to them. In the course of history Christ has been proclaimed with a drive that has involved geniuses of thought, not visionaries, from Augustine of Hippo to Thomas Aquinas, down to Teresa of Calcutta, to give three examples.
We could ask ourselves why is the media so interested in keeping Jesus in its sights? Obviously because, in the depths of the West's culture Jesus is such a decisive and important point of reference, that everything that affects him affects us. What is most troubling about this recent publicity stunt of Jesus' burial place, and the alleged DNA findings of Jesus and his family, is that the media have spilled so much ink and wasted so much space on utter nonsense. This leads one to question the professionalism of the media.
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