New Controversy Surrounds Alleged 'Jesus Family Tomb'

[TRANSPONDER]

I am keeping an open mind -as I am about the James casket. Though the state of my information makes me think 'No'.

As to the idea of Jesus as a wandering teacher with a few tricks (1), it is a view we get in this 'interpretation' of the gospel story to fit Jesus as failed messiah, Hasmonean general, Nazorean zealot, social-reformer-rabbi. I rather see that as getting a theory and then selecting gospel material (sometimes with a lot of reading between the lines) to support the theory. I have a Pet Theory of my own, and it would admit the Talpiot family, but Talpiot does seem an odd location for it. The family tomb should either be in Galilee, or on the mount of Olives (since, if you must see one of the sepulchres as Joseph's tomb, it couldn't stay there as Bezetha was becoming a suburb and burials were being moved to Olivet).

(1) I was struck in the early days of my study that four major 'healings' looked very much like fakes.
(a) the healing at a distance - Jesus waves his hand and the report comes back that the patient was cured.
(b) Jairus' daughter. We hear that she is dead and a couple of trusted cronies only are allowed in the girls' room with Jesus, where she is 'woken up'.
(c) bar -Timaeus is posted waiting for Jesus to appear and begins hollering. Jesus stops and restores his sight. Easy to fake that one.
(d) Raising of Lazarus. After arrival in Peraea, a message arrives - from Martha and mary in Bethany, who apparently knew where to send the note - "Jesus, John's baptizing place, Peraea" not to Galilee. Jesus waits two days before setting out and finds Lazarus already in the tomb waiting for him to arrive. After some chat Jesus calls Lazarus and he comes hopping or walking out, if his legs were separately wrapped by Mary and Martha last night before they shut the tomb, to make sure he could walk easily.

Looked at that way, they look like show -miracles to convince the onlookers. And when you have the Lazarus trick working so well, what a wheeze for getting Jesus off the cross alive, too.

[travric]

^
You know looking back on history is a combination of memory and being in the present, the 21st century to be exact where things in perspective look so so clear. Yet most analytical formulations are based on suppositions and other markers of the times. It's all we can do.
It would be fascinating to go back and walk among those whom we talk and expound about.
I'd think we probably would have some arguments vindicated.

For others well I'd think we'd have to say that we are all caught in our own intellectual constructions of the past as we sit here assessing events and personages. Thing is it's always evident that we ourselves in our cognition surely 'get in the way'. It's the nature of doing research on the past especially those of highly conflicted associations.

[TRANSPONDER]

That's why, rather than try to get myself into the mindset of how the people who wrote the gospels thought, I look at the hard evidence. What they wrote, how they wrote it and thus why they wrote it.

That tells us what it is that they wrote and what it is not. And that is half -way to knowing who Jesus was and who he was not.
It's for me to prove my case, and I hope one day I will start putting it on my blog.