Most of the time, I do not pay attention to reports of new findings that will shake the faith of Bible believers. This seems to come up every few years, and within days or weeks there are major holes found in such theories. About this time last year, we lived though the exposé and sham of the Da Vinci Code. The Da Vinci Code was a modern day "Trojan Horse" attack on Christianity. The same can be said of the Jesus Family Tomb.
For some reason, this week I watched the documentary shown on The Discovery Channel. Though I knew it would be nothing short of misleading information, I tuned in to see how clever they would get in their attempt to discredit the Bible story. I must admit, they found novel ways to authenticate a story based solely on ifs. Not just small bits were missing from the theory, but major leaps of blind faith must be believed in order to move to the next level of this mounting plot. With each step the viewer was led through, it was met with yet another "what if."
It was my feeling that it took much more faith to believe in this man made theory, than to believe the Biblical account. Yet some will no doubt believe the so labeled "proof" from this short documentary.
If you are a believer as I am, I think you will agree that the only people these things seem to affect are those that do not believe anyway. I was asked no less than four times by non-believers what I thought about the "new findings" this past week. It shows that many people just look for ways not to believe. It is clear they do not understand the faith, or know the Bible.
Below is a short list of major problems with the documentary.
• The tomb is not in old Jerusalem. It is nowhere near the Temple Mount, and we already know that the tomb of James was near the Temple Mount.
• The earliest Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, including the members of Jesus' family and Mary Magdalene, did not speak Greek. They spoke Aramaic.
• There is absolutely no historical evidence to suggest Mary Magdalene would have been called by a Greek name before A.D. 70.
• None of the brothers of Jesus as listed in the NT are named Matthew.
• Mary Magdalene is called 'Maria' constantly in first century Christian literature, and indeed well into the second century as well. She is never called Mariamene or the like.
• The name problem. One name was written in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and one in Greek, denoting they came from many generations, and not just one.
• There is no good historical connection between the sister of Philip, and Mary Magdalene, none.
• The view of both Mary Magdalene and Philip in the NT. The two were never connected at all. They were from different cities, it seems clear.
• The second word on the Mariamene ossuary is Mara which is short for Martha another female name. It is not a reference to her being a master or teacher.
• The ornamental decoration is meant to attract attention and draw people to the tomb. It is meant to distinguish the tomb from others; this means it was not a secret tomb.
Why would one not believe the Biblical account which was written by people, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, that knew Christ and walked with Christ and came from the time He lived, and yet one believes Gnostic documents filled with wild fictional accounts, fairy tales about talking animals and the like? Acts of Philip or the Gospel of Mary, which this documentary is based on, use Bible names to enhance the validity of the documents in order to have inexperienced students of the Word believe them. Yet it is known that these Gnostic documents came from the fourth century and not the time of Christ.
When will the next attack come? It won't be long. Mark my word; we will see more and more such stories as time goes by. It seems like this is the age of the rebirth of Gnostic belief. If this is true, one should be aware of who the Gnostics were.
The Gnostics
The word Gnostic is derived from the Greek word Gnosis meaning "To Know". Gnostics believed that salvation was achieved through the attainment of knowledge. The spread of Christianity throughout the Greek and Roman worlds was also followed with Pagan thoughts and ideas falling in disfavor. Acts 19 is a small example of people turning from Pagan ways as they burned the sorcery scrolls in public and stopped buying temple goddess statues in about 54 A.D. where Paul was preaching.
Acts 19:18-20
18 And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds.
19 Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.
20 So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.
This was repeated throughout the Greek and Roman worlds. One way pagans tried to battle the growing Christian believers, was to integrate Greek pagan rites into the Judea-Christian package.
We see these warnings to the churches in the book of Revelation, especially Pergamum and Thyatira. In Thyatira, we have a so-called prophetess, who is teaching sexual immorality and idolatry practices. This is one of the many proto-Gnostic movements that would ultimately spread throughout most of the Christian world.
Revelation 2:20-21
20 Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.
21 And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.
22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.
The Gnostic took Christian names and terms and rebuilt Greek paganism. The God of the Old Testament was a God of the Jews and a low level evil angel who trapped mankind in a physical body. The Gnostics took on familiar names and terminology but with much different theology. They believed there was an unknown All-Father and Mother God. They believed all souls originally lived in a spiritual realm of light, the Pleroma, until they were imprisoned in physical bodies on the earth. Flesh and all matter were viewed as intrinsically evil.
Gnostic "Salvation" equated liberation of the soul from the body, the freeing of the inner spirit from the confines of matter. Such liberation could only be achieved through "Gnosis" which brought about the detachment from the evil world (similar to Buddhism). To achieve this enlightenment, one needed to know the truth about God (All-Father), himself and life.
Ancient Gnostics preached two gods, a good deity of light and an evil deity of darkness. The good deity (The Principle or All-Father) was seen as the epitome of love. This God was responsible for creating the other god. This evil god, the demiurge, is the one who created the physical world; He is the God of the Old Testament. This evil God of the Jews, who favored the Jews, seeks to impede human souls from returning to God and returning to the Divine. The good God is utterly removed from the world, he is unknowable. But through sexual intercourse, the bridal chamber, man can return from the Plemoria and become one with the Divine.
The Gnostics gospels are nothing new to the church. They were found to be non-Christian in the past. What is new is that some think the Gnostics gospels held a higher value than the Word of God, when in fact they were rejected as false stories.
This documentary asks us to only believe part of the Biblical story, and then to believe what they have added. If only they could change the story, then they could have a god of their own, fit to their liking. This is nothing short of playing God, picking what passages to believe and those we should not. If we remove only part of the holy Word of God, we may as well trash the whole thing.
This whole Gnostic renewal reminds me of a verse in Romans.
Romans 1
2 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
As man looks for more ways not to believe, they do become foolish. It would be much easier to just believe the Bible. I do however understand why they do not believe the Bible. To do so, would mean there is a God. If they believe in the God of the Bible, they would then need to listen to what He has to say. It is God's Word they do not like. They would rather live life as they want instead of submitting to a higher power.
The Bible has withstood attacks for over 2000 years. Not this recent revelation, or any other finding will change the Bible. Nor will it change the heart of the believer.