QUOTE(Consummate Deist @ Nov 17 2004, 05:11 PM)
My point was that if Jesus never existed he couldn't very well be the Messiah, now could he. [right][snapback]360234[/snapback][/right]
QUOTE(Consummate Deist @ Nov 17 2004, 08:20 PM)
You pulled James "bone box"
Sorry that was proven to be a hoax two years ago!
[right][snapback]360512[/snapback][/right]
Could you please present a site that gives proof that that is a hoax? You refuse to believe without proof. I do too.
Thank you. If you have been offended, my apologies but you have offended me by dragging my thread down.
I began this insisting I wanted opinions and beliefs. Not facts. I wanted this to stay civil because threads like this always break down into flaming. I don't want that. I want to understand why AND why not Jesus is BELIEVED to be the Messiah.
Have I made myself clear? Please, if you are still confused, let me know, I really do want to clear this misunderstanding up.
Here is the definition of faith. Please note number two, ie, "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."
Thank you.
Potholer
[right][snapback]361202[/snapback][/right]
The main reason why this box is a hoax, and is not proof of the existence of Jesus?
The first inscription, which is in Aramaic, "Jacob son of Joseph," is authentic. The second inscription of "brother of Jesus," is a poorly executed fake and a later addition.
Report on the "James" ossuary inscription
I carefully checked many photos and writings on ossuaries and covenants before sending you my report. I make no claim to be an expert on ossuaries, but inscriptions and scripts are another story. It might be in order to warn you that I have a great deal of experience at spotting ancient frauds and forgeries.
There are a few things we have to bear in mind about ossuary inscriptions.
First, according to Rahmani (1981, 1982) on Jerusalem burial practices, most ossuaries are from the period between 30/20 BCE-70 CE -- but by no means all.
Second, human remains are not dug up and displaced without very good reasons. Ossuaries show up in quantity when burial space is at a premium.
Solutions to the burial space problem are quite varied. In Classical Greece, for example, low status people were buried in space-saving one-person shaft graves (with a tiny round marker on the spot with the necessary data). The Keramikon in Athens is full of these. In Italy, from the Renaissance until the late 19th-century, after 3 years, unless a family could afford an ossuary or pay another three years rent, the bones were dumped in a mass grave site -- usually a convenient quarry or crevice or what have you, filled with dirt layer by layer. In Athens, ossuaries are still used (metal boxes nowadays); again, that three-year rent period runs. Even in modern Louisiana, along the Mississippi water seepage makes it impossible to dig graves of a reasonable depth; burials are in family mausoleums and bones are pushed down to make way for the latest arrival.
As ossuaries, after all, contravene the normal rules for Jewish burial, the appearance of so many ossuaries in the period before the destruction of the Temple is strong evidence that the cemeteries around Jerusalem were in a space-crunch. (The post-70 reduction in ossuaries follows naturally enough from the removal of enough people from the area to reduce the need for bone- boxes.)
It is not a question of "popularity" at all (which when one thinks about it, is a most peculiar way to think about the subject), but a lack of burial space... which also gives us information about population density of a given area. (Oddly enough, there does not seem to be very much in the literature that addresses this point for the relevant period; yet the correlation between the space constraints indicated by the rise in ossuaries and the density of the population of a given area is rather obvious.)
Third, while today, grave markers are carved by pros, this was not the case in these Jewish ossuary inscriptions. The apparently wide variations in ossuary inscriptions come from a simple fact: these ossuary inscriptions are covenants, vows to affirm continuing respect for the deceased in spite of having disinterred his/her remains. As with any other vow, the text must be in the hand of the one making the vow. Thus (as is noted in the literature), a surviving member of the family painted on, or scratched into, the (usually) limestone box the memorial data. In some cases a professional would carve over the handwriting exactly as written. (BTW, this is the standard practice for all professionally carved covenants.)
In other words, all those ossuary inscriptions are holographs. Needless to say, in such a mass of individual writing, literacy varied tremendously from semi-literates who wrote only upon occasion to school-boys to scholars. [What is relevant to sorting out the apparent lack of relation between status and ossuary is not the wealth or social status of the individual(s) (up to three sets of same-family bones can show up in an ossuary), but the level of literacy and status of the survivors. Thus, there is a relationship between status and inscription... but we would need information on the "survivors" in each case to know who, what, when, how, and why.]
From the writing on the ossuary inscriptions, some are clearly written by youngsters and semi-literates who did not have complete control of graph sizes and could not hold a straight line. Others are clearly the holographs of literate people.
James inscription was written by two different people
The inscription on the "James" ossuary is a bit more complicated. First it has been gone over by a professional carver; the words are excised (not incised). Second, it was written by two different people.
Translated, with the amendments to the original spelling as given in the article, the inscription reads:
Jacob son of Joseph brother of Joshua.
Source!...And there you have it.
I have to remember that the next time someone asks me if I have found Jesus. " No, but did you look behind the couch?"
