After all of the hype surrounding James Cameron's "amazing" discovery of what he believed were the ossuaries (bone boxes) of Jesus and His family, I was anxiously waiting the special to air on Discovery Channel that would give us the full skinny on the truth. However when I watched it, the only thing I learned is that your personal biases can take you a long way.
Two figures from the documentary stood out to me from the beginning. The first was Simcha Jacobovichi, a documentary film maker. He hovered all over the place, looking over the ossuaries as if he were an expert and giving his opinion about everything. The only problem is, he looked really silly doing so. The guy isn't an expert in these matters, yet he made sure that his face was seen over and over again. What finally did it for me was when Mr. Jacobovichi challenged an archeological expert to a sort of "duel" when it came to what names were or weren't accurate on ancient ossuaries. His tone of voice and arrogance made him incredibly unlikable and unbelievable and many of the other experts in the show apparently had the same opinion of him (he regularly got "Who the heck do you think you are?" looks).
The next figure that stood out to me was Dr. James Tabor, the department chair of religious studies at UNC Charlotte. He was used as an expert who was supportive of these ossuaries actually belonging to Jesus. What I found revealing about his thoughts were that he dismisses the idea of the supernatural being involved in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In other words, he spent a lot of time trying to explain why this could be evidence of Jesus' bones because to him resurrection wasn't even an option.
When it comes to this topic of the possible bones of Jesus, if ones dismisses the resurrection altogether then the conversation has already stopped before it has started. I honestly don't have too much of a problem with someone who accepts the possibility of the resurrection yet wants to also study the possibility that maybe this was Jesus' ossuary. That doesn't bother me because I believe the evidence will clearly point him or her to the truth of Jesus and His resurrection. But for someone to not even consider the resurrection as a possibility, to altogether dismiss it as fable and myth, then that person will be on a quest that will carry him farther and farther away from the truth without the possibility of ever seeing it.
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