Presuppositions, Methods, and Assumptions: The Tomb
Assessing the Assessments: The Jesus Family Tomb
I have had a good vantage point the past two weeks for assessing the responses to the Discovery television documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” through media interviews, private messages from academic colleagues, and about 3000 e-mail messages. Here are a few reflections from that experience.
It seems to me there are three basic approaches to the Talpiot tomb subject, each of which reflects its own presuppositions, assumptions, and methods in evaluating the evidence.
1. First, there are those who are quite sure the Talpiot tomb is that of Jesus of Nazareth and his family because they want to believe it in order to “bash” Christianity. It took them about five minutes to decide this just had to be right, and that it was too good to be true. Even though the evangelical Christian response has largely drowned out these folk, I have seen this attitude in quite a few Blogs and opinion pieces on the Web, and I have heard it from a few media people. This response includes the proverbial “recovering Catholic” type who might find comfort in this story as a way of supporting his/her own disengagement and disenfranchisement from the Church. Or, it might be from self-declared “atheists and secularists,” who for both personal and political reasons are prepared to rejoice at anything that might poke a good stick at the hornet’s nest of evangelical or conservative Christianity. As far as I can tell most of these folk are watching more than participating actively in the debate and discussion. Although they apparently “hope” that good evidence emerges to support the idea that the ossuary that held the bones of Jesus and his family have been found, if it turns out to not be the case, they are not overly invested in the outcome.
2. Second, there are those who come from orthodox or evangelical Christian perspectives who have prejudged the evidence, no matter what its nature might be, simply because by definition their faith precludes the possibility that this could be the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. Simply put, this tomb can not be what some claim because Jesus rose from the dead and went to heaven, literally, up through the clouds (flesh, bones, organs, and all), so obviously his body could not be on earth–case closed. This position, though understandable from the standpoint of faith, is the weakest of the four in that it declares the “end” or conclusion, no matter what might be the evidence. The whole enterprise becomes one of “debunking,” not of open and honest consideration of possibilities.
Many years ago, when I was a professor at the University of North Dame, the brilliant philosopher and theologian Philip Devenish, presented a rather provocative paper titled “Can a Christian be an Historian?” in our faculty forum. His essential argument was a simple one: historians ideally, by definition, investigate evidence and follow it wherever it leads; while orthodox Christians are committed to dogmas, many of which rest upon literal interpretations of “events” that are taken to be historical in nature, so that results are predetermined. Of course Devenish was not so naive as to think that all historians somehow stand outside of time and culture and thus reflect some sort of perfect objectivity; nor was he unaware of Christian historians who do not take such literalistic approaches to the core Christian story. But I think he did put his finger on something very much at work in this Talpiot tomb story and how it has played out in the more conservative Christian circles.
3. Finally, there are those with or without academic training in the field of Christian origins and the other specialty areas related to the topic who would like to see an open and honest investigation of the evidence. No historian can be absolutely objective and all of us need a “place to stand” from which we ask our questions. However, in the academic enterprise there is really no place, even on a topic as sensitive as this one, for prejudging the evidence. And ideally, one should not particularly “care” how it all comes out. In other words any kind of cultural or theological considerations should not come into play in evaluating evidence. In other words, there may be enough evidence to connect this tomb to that of Jesus and his family and there may not be, but the task is clear and singular–an open and undetermined examination of the evidence and a testing of hypotheses.
In my view the first approach is as deficient as the second. But what has surprised me most this week are the ways in which a few academic colleagues, who clearly do not share the theological presuppositions of the second approach, nonetheless, either explicitly or implicitly, support that agenda. One archaeologist, not a Christian, was quoted as saying, “this could not be Jesus of Nazareth because God has no DNA.” Another has argued that this could not be the tomb of Jesus because his followers believed he was raised from the dead, yet this scholar clearly does believe that Jesus, as any human being, died and his body decomposed. It is this complex mix of emotions, sensitivities, and confused avenues of inquiry that has, in my view, let to lots of heat and very little light this past week. I remain convinced that the evidence regarding the Talpiot tomb, presented so far in a TV documentary, deserves a fair and honest evaluation. One thing that I find encouraging in all this is that most of my academic colleagues who have contacted me privately, and by far the majority of the 3000 e-mails I have received, largely share the perspectives of the third option. I do indeed think that over the next few weeks and months this topic will be explored properly and the results will become clear to honest observers.