TheERK said:
The funny thing is when Christians got excited that this was evidence of the historical Jesus. The fact that it's a big deal at all says a lot about the quality of previous evidence for Jesus.
Compare it to the evidence for evolution. If scientists found a new fossil, or series of fossils, that showed very bluntly that evolution happened, would there be great revelry? No, it would just be another thing to pile up. It might be cool, but nobody would be terribly excited, because when something has already been that well established, it's not that big a deal anymore. Kind of like proving that gravity works.
Is anyone really surprised that the James Ossuary caused such a stir, given the poor existing evidence for Jesus?
I think that if a new type of conclusive, unambiguous fossil evidence of evolution were discovered (to the extent it hasn't already been discovered; I'm no specialist), it would cause excitement among experts because of its novelty, but it would not strike a real chord with laypeople because, psychologically, most people don't feel (or have a deep desire to feel) a profound personal link to prehistoric fauna. This is why animal fossils (while sometimes very interesting) don't ordinarily inspire us the way paleoanthropological or archeological finds do. Something in our own humanity resonates within us when we regard the Pyramids of Egypt or read about the Tyrolean Iceman. The same basic effect prevails in a slightly different way when we contemplate the physical artifacts (gifts, clothes, letters etc.) associated with loved ones who are absent.
I can entirely understand why the James Ossuary provoked the kind of excitement it did. It's more like a sign saying "George Washington slept here" than it is like a trilobite fossil. In our imaginations, that kind of human artifact briefly collapses the time and distance that separate us from the person or persons with whom it is associated. This is something naturally fascinating to us, particularly in the case of a person like Jesus, who casts a very long and unique shadow across the Western cultural imagination.
That's why I think the James Ossuary caused a stir. After all, even when it was thought genuine, it wasn't remarkable for its evidentiary value
per se. Just like evolution, the historicity of Jesus is something most people, experts and laymen alike, have accepted. It was remarkable because it was a new
kind of evidence, of a sort that the human psyche finds particularly fascinating. (As the
CNN.com article noted, "While most scholars agree that Jesus existed, no physical evidence from the first century has ever been conclusively tied with his life.")
