Jesus’ tomb documentary fails to convince
Unfortunately, I missed the documentary on Jesus’ tomb last weekend, but apparently I didn’t miss much. PZ Myers watched and wasn’t impressed:
It wasn’t very impressive. They really milked a paucity of hard data for an over-long ‘documentary’ that was mostly handwaving. The DNA data was pretty much non-existent—one pair of bone fragments were compared and found not to match. Most of the story was an assurance that the conjunction of names found in the tomb couldn’t merely coincidentally match the names found in the gospels…but they really had to reach to make excuses to turn “Miriamne Mara” into “Mary Magdalene”, and they had one name, this “Judah” kid, that didn’t match the biblical collection at all, so they just flat-out invented an unsupported tale of Jesus having a son. Flogging a link between some ossuaries stored in a warehouse (which did not look at all secure) for twenty years and a known forgery also simply obliterates any credibility the whole shebang might have.
Not very surprising, and reflects much of what I predicted last week.