“Death creates an economy that makes life precious. One of the ways of naming that preciousness is friendship.”
Stanley Hauerwas

All over red rover: Christianity and the bones of Jesus  

Andrew Cameron

Australians have a saying: “it’s all over, red rover.” We use this saying when something is finished, gone, kaput, dead-as-a-doornail. The rhyme emphasises the finality of the demise, although no one quite knows why the red dog gets a mention.

Christians have another saying. It is not a set form of words, but something like it is said in conversations, literature and pulpits. “I’ll stop believing if they find the bones of Jesus.” It is a view something like that first expressed by the apostle Paul: “if Christ has not been raised, [our] faith is worthless … If we have placed our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.” [1 Corinthians 15:17,19]

So if claims made in the U.S. documentary The Tomb of Christ are correct, then it is definitely all-over-red-rover for Christianity.

The Discovery Channel does not agree, asserting that The Tomb of Christ does not challenge a belief in the resurrection. Jesus’ body may have been laid out in a temporary tomb and moved later to the site where his bones were finally stored—a procedure that “does not mean that he could not have been resurrected from the second tomb. Belief in the resurrection is based not on which tomb he was buried in, but on alleged sightings of Jesus that occurred after his burial and documented in the Gospels.” With this suggestion, the documentary’s defenders imply that a resurrection of Jesus would not have been a ‘bodily’ resurrection. 
  Christians are not interested in following a dead saviour, because dead people cannot save us from much   
 

Bodily Resurrection - why it matters

From time to time, various lines of argument are deployed to diminish the need for Jesus’ resurrection to be historical and bodily. “Religious belief is spiritual, personal and internal. It is not related to matters of science and archaeology.” “Jesus is such a good moral teacher that his ideas remain. We can have faith in and follow them.” “Since Jesus rose from death and ascended ‘spiritually’, his ‘spirit’ lives on.” On these views, it is a bit rigid or literal or unimaginative to believe that a tomb of Jesus renders Christianity ‘all over red rover’.
 
Yet like Paul, many millions of Christians are not interested in following a dead saviour, because dead people cannot save us from much. Various dead people can help us avoid ignorance or stupidity. But you are very much looking for a live and effective Saviour if you want to be saved from something more. There are enemies too great for us to handle. Our obsessions to master, use and consume people or animals or the environment; the calamitous consequences of our expulsion of God from our lives; our coming death … whoever needs saving from these enemies discovers that the form of the resurrected Jesus matters very much.
 
It matters that he appeared in a way that he could eat, be touched, and was not a ghost [e.g. Luke 24:37-43, John 20:27]. It also matters that there was a strange new ‘spiritual’ dimension to his body [e.g. John 20:19]. This Jesus has what Paul calls a ‘spiritual body’ [1 Corinthians 15:44], retaining the best of the old and the promise of something new. It is a jewel that signals the totality of Jesus’ victory over humanity’s enemies. A ‘spiritual body’ like his is said to be on offer to all who look to him for rescue from sin, wrath and death.
 
Hence Christians are genuinely interested in the claims of documentaries such as The Tomb of Christ. They do not want to waste any more time believing in ‘spiritual bodies’ if Jesus’ never had one, and they should not be offended when asked to consider new evidence. To the contrary—if Jesus of Nazareth took his bones nowhere and offers no hope for our long-term future, believers will be thankful to be told, even if somewhat grief-stricken.
 
The Tomb of Christ

Aired again in Australia on Channel 10, and somewhat provocatively in the lead up to Christmas (on December 20, 2008) the Tomb of Christ documentary makes some startling claims. In brief they are as follows:

1. The documentary focuses upon a group of ‘ossuaries’ (boxes of bones) that was unearthed in 1980 at a building site in Talpiot, Jerusalem.

2. Six of these have hard-to-read names scratched upon them in either Hebrew, Greek or Aramiac.
 
3. The documentary asserts that these names are ‘Jesua, son of Joseph’, ‘Mary’, ‘Mariamene e Mara’, ‘Mathew’, ‘Jofa’, and ‘Judah, son of Jesua’.

4. It is asserted that these names refer to Jesus Christ, his mother, Mary Magdalene his ‘wife’, two of his brothers, and his ‘son’.

5. DNA analyses of the Jesus and the Mariamene remains are used to claim that these people could possibly have been married. 

6. A statistical analysis is used to claim that there is only a one-in-600 chance that this particular grouping of names would not be the family of Jesus. 

7. A technique invented for the documentary attempts to show that deposits upon the surface of the ossuaries match those upon the surface of the so-called ‘James brother of Jesus’ ossuary (which was in the news in 2005). If this seventh ossuary also came from Talpiot, then the likelihood that the group is not the family of Jesus rises, we are told, to one in 30,000.

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