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Acabei de ver agora nas listas ANE-2 e Biblical Studies que Joe Zias preparou um guia para os telespectadores do documentário do Discovery Channel The Lost Tomb of Jesus: Deconstructing the Second and Hopefully Last Coming of Simcha and the BAR Crowd

Aliás, Joe Zias em e-mail para a lista de discussão ANE-2, cita Byron McCane, que diz, entre outras coisas:

The publicity for the Discovery Channel documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” has a disturbingly familiar ring. First came the James Ossuary; then The DaVinci Code, next the John the Baptist cave, and now the lost tomb of Jesus. The two archaeologists involved in “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” for example, already have a well-known track record for sensationalism. These programs go for the quick buck. Everything is crafted to generate interest, to make sales. The disturbing trend in recent documentaries toward profit-driven sensationalism, however, is an insult to all concerned, and especially to those of us who are scholars of these subjects. And that is why it is scholars who should bring this train of sensationalism to a stop.

Explico o começo: Toda esta publicidade em torno do documentário “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” do Discovery Channel tem um aspecto muito familiar: primeiro foi o Ossuário de Tiago, depois o Código Da Vinci, em seguida, a Gruta de João Batista e agora a Tumba Perdida de Jesus. Os dois arqueólogos envolvidos na estória, por exemplo, são conhecidos por uma visível postura sensacionalista em suas atuações… Tudo é direcionado para o comércio… É um insulto a todos, especialmente aos especialistas da área, que devem dar um basta nisso…

Como o documentário será apresentado hoje, dia 4, nos EUA, seria prudente os brasileiros irem se prevenindo, pois vem aí um tsunami de propaganda. Por isso recomendo mais leituras. Dia 18 de março a TV apresenta a coisa aqui.

Ben Witherington e outros especialistas apresentaram dez razões que mostram o absurdo da estória de uma tumba da família de Jesus em Talpiot.

Veja Ten Reasons Why The Jesus Tomb Claim is Bogus, que são:

1. There is no DNA evidence that this is the historical Jesus of Nazareth
2. The statistical analysis is untrustworthy
3. The name “Jesus” was a popular name in the first century, appearing in 98 other tombs and on 21 other ossuaries
4. There is no historical evidence that Jesus was ever married or had a child
5. The earliest followers of Jesus never called him “Jesus, son of Joseph”
6. It is highly unlikely that Joseph, who died earlier in Galilee, was buried in Jerusalem, since the historical record connects him only to Nazareth or Bethlehem
7. The Talpiot tomb and ossuaries are such that they would have belonged to a rich family, which does not match the historical record for Jesus
8. Fourth-century church historian Eusebius makes quite clear that the body of James, the brother of Jesus, was buried alone near the temple mount and that his tomb was visited in the early centuries, making very unlikely that the Talpiot tomb was Jesus’ “family tomb”
9. The two Mary ossuaries do not mention anyone from Migdal, but simply has the name Mary, one of the most common of all ancient Jewish female names
10. By all ancient accounts, the tomb of Jesus was empty, making it highly unlikely that it was moved to another tomb, decayed for one year’s time, and then the bones put in an ossuary

Traduzindo para o português:

1. Não há evidência de DNA de que este seja o Jesus de Nazaré histórico
2. A análise estatística que foi efeituada não é confiável
3. O nome “Jesus” era comum no século primeiro, aparecendo em 98 outras tumbas e em 21 outros ossuários
4. Não há evidência histórica de que Jesus tenha se casado ou tido um filho
5. Os primeiros seguidores de Jesus nunca o chamaram de “Jesus, filho de José”
6. É improvável que José, que morreu mais cedo na Galiléia, tenha sido enterrado em Jerusalém, já que dados históricos o ligam apenas a Nazaré ou Belém
7. A tumba e os ossuários encontrados em Talpiot teriam pertencido a uma família rica, contrariando o que é historicamente aceito sobre Jesus
8. O historiador da Igreja Eusébio, do século IV, deixa claro que o corpo de Tiago, o irmão de Jesus, foi enterrado sozinho perto do monte do Templo e que sua tumba era visitada nos primeiros séculos, tornando bastante improvável que a tumba de Talpiot seja a “tumba da família” de Jesus
9. Os dois ossuários das duas Marias não mencionam ninguém de Migdal, mas simplesmente trazem o nome Maria, um dos mais comuns entre todos os nomes de mulheres judias da época
10. Segundo todos os relatos da antiguidade, a tumba de Jesus estava vazia, sendo improvável que ele tenha sido removido para outra tumba, ficado em decomposição durante um ano e depois seus ossos tenham sido colocados em um ossuário.

Termino a leitura, mas observo: para ser justo, os argumentos acima pedem o benefício da dúvida: nem todos são tão históricos assim. Alguns têm um forte sabor teológico!

Special Report: Has James Cameron Found Jesus’s Tomb or Is It Just a Statistical Error?

Should You Accept the 600-to-One Odds That the Talpiot Tomb Belonged to Jesus?

When Associated Producers, the production company behind the new documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, contacted Andrey Feuerverger, he was, to put it mildly, surprised. “This is not in the usual run of things one gets to do,” says the University of Toronto statistician, alluding to Associated Producers’ somewhat unusual request that he calculate the odds that a particular tomb in Israel is the last resting place of Jesus Christ.

Despite his previous lack of interest in biblical archaeology, Feuerverger spent two years crunching numbers for what turned out to be a labor of love. At the end of all of his figuring, he told the documentarians, including director James Cameron of Titanic fame and award-winning investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici, that there was a one in 600 chance that the names—Jesus, Matthew, two versions of Mary, and Joseph—scribbled on five of the 10 ossuaries (or caskets for bones) found in the Talpiot tomb could have belonged to a different family than the one described in the New Testament.

When Cameron and Simcha announced Feuerverger’s calculations along with a package of other evidence (including forensics, DNA and archaeology) earlier this week, it sparked a media firestorm.

Some news outlets reported that Feuerverger’s odds had really been as high as one in a million, which the statistician denies. That “is not a number I would want to ever think originates with me,” he says.

Meanwhile biblical historian James Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the primary historical advisor on the production team, reported on his blog that he calculated the odds were one in 250,000 that another family of that period would have the same names as those scrawled on the bone boxes.

Even the Discovery Channel, which is set to air the controversial documentary on Sunday, March 4, seemed confused by Feuerverger’s calculations, declaring on its Web site that that the odds are “600 to one in favor of this being the JESUS FAMILY TOMB.”

What Are We Calculating Here, Anyway?

Feuerverger says he was neither asked nor did he attempt to calculate the odds that the Talpiot tomb was the final resting place of Christ, the Messiah. As Aleks Jakulin, a statistician at Columbia University, points out, “I doubt Professor Feuerverger really estimated ‘the odds that these ossuaries were not Jesus’s family’s final resting place.’ Instead & one should say that one in 600 families (on the conservative side) would have that particular combination of names purely by chance, based on the distribution of individual names in the population.”

Such a calculation assumes all kinds of things, and is highly dependent on one’s starting assumptions. For instance, “A Christian would use [the probability that Jesus is in a coffin] equals zero, because of ascension, so the discussion stops right there,” Jakulin says. “Someone else would instead assume that there was a single Jesus, one out of five million.”

A Statistical Analysis Is Only as Good as Its Starting Assumptions

“I have to tell you that a statistician working with a subject matter expert, in this case biblical historical scholars, essentially is obliged to rely on assumptions that come from them,” explains Feuerverger. “It’s not a secret that the assumptions are contestable. I tried to stay with things that vaguely seemed reasonable to me, but I’m not a biblical scholar. At the end of the day, I went with specific assumptions and I try to make clear what those assumptions were.”
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Among the assumptions that Feuerverger made to yield his odds: that the scholarly text he used as a source of names (to determine the frequency and distribution of Jewish monikers in the era of Jesus) was a representative sample of the five million Jews who lived during that era. He assumed this even though the text, called the Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity was published in 2002 and only includes 2,509 names.

Scan The Lexicon of Jewish Names, which includes names from ossuaries, ancient texts and every other source available, and you will learn that the names unearthed in the so-called Jesus Family Tomb were among the most common of that era. One in every three women listed in the Lexicon was named Mary, for instance, and, at that time, one in every 20 Jewish men was called Yeshua, or Jesus.

Tal Ilan, who compiled the Lexicon of Jewish Names and who vehemently disagrees with the assertion that this could be Jeus’s tomb, says that the names found in the tomb “are in every tomb in Jerusalem. You can get all kinds of clever people who know statistics who will tell you that the combination is the unique thing about [these names], and probably they’re right – if you want just exactly this combination it’s more difficult to find. But my research proves exactly the opposite – these are the most common names that you could expect to find anywhere.”

It was only when Feuerverger assumed that some of the names were exceptional, and fit with scholars’ beliefs about the historical family of Jesus, that his calculation became worthy of advertising. According to Feuerverger, the most important assumption by far was the one that dealt with the inscription that appears on the ossuary that the documentarians assert belonged to Mary Magdalene.

“The extraordinariness of the Mariemene e Mara inscription gets factored into the calculation as a very rare name,” says Feuerverger. By the logic of the historians and archaeologists enlisted by the production team, this inscription is so rare that Feuerverger could safely assume that this was the only woman who possessed this name out of all of those listed in the Lexicon. This changed the odds that this tomb belonged to just any Mary Magdalene from roughly one in three to one in 80.

A Debate Rages Over the Archaeology Behind the Statistics

Other scholars think the assertion that the inscription Mariemene e Mara, written in Greek, refers specifically to Mary Magdalene is ridiculous. Jodi Magness, an archaeologist with an interest in early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that any Jews buried in Jerusalem who were not natives would have had their home towns appended to their names when they were inscribed on ossuaries. (Despite scholars’ beliefs that Jesus’s entire family hailed from outside Jerusalem, none of the inscriptions on the ossuaries in the contested burial cave include other birthplaces.) Magness also believes that if Jesus’s family were wealthy enough to own a burial cave, it would have been in his home town of Nazareth and not in Jerusalem.

U.N.C. Charlotte historian Tabor, a consultant on the documentary, pooh-poohs the naysayers. “Mariemene e Mara means ‘of Mariemenu, the Master,'” he says. “This is a title. It means ‘This is the ossuary of Mariemene, known as the Mara.'” His opinion—which is consistent with Feuerverger’s assumptions but clashes with those of many of his peers—is that this is a completely unique name, supporting his hypothesis that this is the grave of the Mary Magdalene.

Tabor also disagrees with critics who dismiss the fundamental premise of his and Feuerverger’s calculations—that the family of Jesus would have been buried in caves typical of wealthier Jews and not in the shallow dirt graves that were common in that era. To some extent, this is a debate over the nature of evidence. Many biblical scholars and archaeologists, including Magness, accept that the gospels of the New Testament have some historicity to them, because they are the only direct historical accounts of the death of Jesus. But Tabor, on his blog, quotes scholars who argue that there is no reason these texts should be given more weight than any other piece of evidence.

Tabor responds to the charges that it is improbable that Jesus and his family had a burial cave in Jerusalem by noting that “if you know anything about messianic movements, the followers provide for their leader—they don’t just throw him in a ditch when he dies. & Think of any Jewish sect—they take care of their rabbi. There’s no evidence this family ever went back to Galilee. James [Jesus’s brother] dies in Jerusalem, Mary and his brothers are there—there’s no indication that anybody went back to Nazareth.”

In other words, Tabor argues that it is not only likely that the family of the Jesus could have afforded a burial cave, but that it most likely would have opted for one in Jerusalem.

Both sides of this debate are extraordinarily difficult to prove given the paucity of historical evidence, something this controversy has in common with nearly all archaeological and historical disputes. “As archaeologists we are always reconstructing a picture based on incomplete evidence,” notes Magness.

As a result, the calculations made by Feuerverger and others rest on premises that must be decided by historians and archaeologists, who are still far from agreement on even the basics of the Talpiot tomb. “I did permit the number one in 600 to be used in the film—I’m prepared to stand behind that but on the understanding that these numbers were calculated based on assumptions that I was asked to use,” says Feuerverger. “These assumptions don’t seem unreasonable to me, but I have to remember that I’m not a biblical scholar.”

Fonte: Christopher Mims – Scientific American: March 2, 2007

Chris Tilling publicou em seu blog Chrisendom, em 01/03/2007, um post de Richard Bauckham sobre a Tumba Perdida de Jesus.

Richard Bauckham é Professor de Novo Testamento na Universidade St Andrews, Escócia.

The alleged ‘Jesus family tomb’

As I understand it (I have not yet seen the film itself) the Discovery Channel programme “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” claims that a tomb discovered in the Talpiot area of Jerusalem in 1980, containing ten ossuaries, is the tomb of Jesus’ family and contains some of the remains of Jesus himself. If my memory serves me correctly the same claim was made in a British television programme, fronted by Joan Bakewell, just a few years ago. However the Discovery Channel programme claims to have new evidence and arguments.

The basic arguments concerning the names on the ossuaries seem to be two (1) The names, including ‘Jesus son of Joseph,’ ‘Judah son of Jesus,’ Yose, Mary and Matthew, are the names of key figures in the New Testament Gospels. Some statistical arguments are alleged to show that the odds are hugely in favour of the view that the names on the ossuaries in fact refer to the figures known from the New Testament. (2) The form of the name Mary (in Greek) is the distinctive Mariamenou. This, it is claimed, is the same form of the name as Mariamne, which is the name of the sister of the apostle Philip in the fourth-century Acts of Philip, presumed to be Mary Magdalene.

I wish to stress at the start that the issues raised by this proposal are complex and difficult. My first reactions to what I was told about it by journalists were too little considered and I had not then had time to track down all the relevant evidence and study it carefully. So I made some mistakes. (I recommend that no one pronounce on this matter without having the relevant pages of Rahmani’s catalogue of ossuaries actually in front of them. My initial lack of access to them misled led me at some points, even though I was told quite carefully what they contain. They can now be seen on the Discovery Channel website.) I am fairly confident of what I’m now saying here, but ossuaries and onomastics are technical fields, and I’m open to corrections from the experts. I’ve no doubt that refinements of the argument will result from further discussion of the issues.

I shall divide my discussion into the matter of the names on these ossuaries in general, and a longer consideration of the name alleged to be Mary Magdalene, since this requires quite careful and detailed consideration. (I have refrained from using Hebrew and Greek script, and have tried to make the argument intelligible to people who know no Greek. Unfortunately at the moment I don’t have a functioning transliteration font: hence the overly simply transliteration of the names that I’ve had to use.)

The names in general

The six persons named in the ossuary inscriptions (Rahmani 701-706) are:
(1) Mariamenou-Mara (the first name is a unique form of the name Mariam, Mary, and will be discussed separately below).
(2) Yehuda bar Yeshua (Judah son of Jesus)
(3) Matia (Matthew)
(4) Yeshua bar Yehosef (Jesus son of Joseph)
(5) Yose (a common abbreviated form of Yehosef)
(6) Maria (a form of Mariam, Mary)
All the inscriptions are in Aramaic except the first, which is Greek.

We should note that the surviving six names are only six of many more who were buried in this family tomb. There may have been as many as 35. The six people whose names we have could have belonged to as many as four different generations. This is a large family tomb, which would certainly have been used for quite some time by the same family. We should not imagine a small family group. Some members of the family of Jesus we know lived in Jerusalem for only three decades (from the death of Jesus to the execution of his brother James in 62). None of our other evidence would suggest that there were so many of them as to require a tomb of this size.

Only three of the six named persons correspond to the names of known members of the family of Jesus: Jesus son of Joseph, Maria (Jesus’ mother or his aunt, the wife of Clopas), Yose (Jesus’ brother was known by this abbreviated form of the name Joseph: Mark 6:3). In a family tomb only members of the family (members by birth or, mostly in the case of women, marriage) would be interred. The fact that one of Jesus’ close disciples was named Matthew has no significance at all for identifying the person in the ossuary labelled Matthew. We shall discuss Mariamenou-Mara below, but it cannot be stressed sufficiently that there is no evidence at all for the conjecture that Jesus married Mary Magdalene (and note that an extra-marital affair, which some postulate, though again without evidence, would not qualify Mary Magdalene to be in the tomb of Jesus’ family). Similarly, there is no evidence at all that Jesus had any children. (If he really had a son named Judah, would he not be mentioned somewhere in the ancient literary evidence? He would have been a useful figure for a Gnostic wishing to claim esoteric teaching of Jesus handed down from someone close to him, but he goes unmentioned in the Gnostic Gospels that do make such claims for other figures and unmentioned also in the church fathers who relay information about Gnostic claims.)

All of the names on these ossuaries were extremely common names among Jews in Palestine at this period. We have a great deal evidence about this (the data is collected in the enormously useful reference book: Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, part 1 [Mohr-Siebeck, 2002], and also analysed in chapter 4 of my recent book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses [Eerdmans, 2006]). We have a data base of about 3000 named persons (2625 men, 328 women, excluding fictional characters). Of the 2625 men, the name Joseph (including Yose, the abbreviated form) was borne by 218 or 8.3%. (It is the second most popular Jewish male name, after Simon/Simeon.) The name Judah was borne by 164 or 6.2%. The name Jesus was borne by 99 or 3.4%. The name Matthew (in several forms) was borne by 62 or 2.4 %. Of the 328 named women (women’s names were much less often recorded than men’s), a staggering 70 or 21.4% were called Mary (Mariam, Maria, Mariame, Mariamme). (My figures differ very slightly from Ilan’s because I differ from a few of her judgments for technical reasons, but the difference is insignificant for present purposes.)

I am not a mathematician and do not know how to get from these figures to calculations of odds. I must leave the assessment of Feuerverger’s case to others. But it seems to me incredible.

The name Mariamenou-Mara

The Hebrew name Mariam was very popular among Palestinian Jews at this period, though hardly used at all in the diaspora. It was usually rendered in Greek in one of two forms: Maria and Mariamme (or Mariame). It could, of course, be simply written as Mariam in Greek characters (and this is the practice of the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, when referring to Mariam the sister of Moses, called Miriam in English Bibles). But we know only four cases in which this was done with reference to a living person of the early Jewish period. (One of these is Luke 10:39-42, referring to Mary the sister of Martha, though there is a variant reading Maria).

Much more popular were the forms Maria (the form used everywhere in the New Testament, except Luke 10:39-40, for all the various Maries it refers to) and Mariamme/Mariame (used, for example, by Josephus). Both give the name a more Greek form than the simple transliteration Mariam. Palestinian Jewish women who themselves used a Greek form of their name as well as a Semitic form (a common practice) would be likely to have used Maria or Mariamme. This accounts for the fact that the Greek form Maria is often found on ossuaries transliterated back into Hebrew characters as Mariah. (Odd as this practice might seem, there are examples for other names too.) This is what has happened in the case of the woman called Maria (in Hebrew characters) on one of the ossuaries we are studying.

It is worth noting that this Greek form of the name Miriam has nothing to do with the Latin name Maria, which also existed. The coincidence is just a coincidence. It was, however, a coincidence that Jews living in a Latin-speaking environment could have exploited, just as Jews in Palestine exploited the coincidental near-identity of the Hebrew name Simeon and the Greek name Simon. The woman called Maria in Romans 16:6, a member of the Christian community in Rome, may have been a Jew called Mariam in Hebrew (an emigrant from Palestine), or a Gentile with the Latin name Maria, or a Jew living in Rome who had the name Maria precisely because it could be understood as both Hebrew and Latin.

In the Gospels Mary Magdalene’s name is always given in the Greek form Maria, which is the New Testament’s standard practice for rendering Mariam into Greek, except for Luke 10:39-42. As we have noted it is standard Greek form of Mariam. However, from probably the mid-second century onwards we find some references to Mary Magdalene (often identified with Mary of Bethany and/or other Gospel Maries) that use the alternative standard Greek form Mariamme (or Mariame). These references are all either in Gnostic works (using ‘Gnostic’ fairly loosely) or in writers referring to Gnostic usage.

We find the form Mariamme in Celsus, the second-century pagan critic of Christianity, who lists Christian sectarian groups, including some who follow Mary (apo Mariammes). These may well be the group who used the Gospel of Mary (late 2nd century?), a Greek fragment of which calls Mary Magdalene Mariamme. This form of her name also appears in the Coptic (a translation from Greek) of the Gnostic Work the Sophia of Jesus Christ (CG III,4). The usage may have been more widespread in Gnostic literature, but the fact that we have most Gnostic works only in Coptic makes it hard to tell.)

This tradition of using the form Mariamme for Mary Magdalene must have been an alternative tradition of rendering her name in Greek. It most likely goes back to a usage within the orbit of Jewish Palestine (since the name Mary in any form was very rare in the diaspora and Gentile Christians would not be familiar with the name Mariamme ordinarily). But so does the usage of Maria in the New Testament Gospels, at least one of which is at least a century earlier than any evidence we have for giving her the name Mariamme. It would be hazardous to suppose that Mariamme was the Greek form of her name use by Mary Magdalene herself or the earliest disciples of Jesus.

The Gnostic use of Mariamme is also reported by Hioppolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies (written between 228 and 233). He says that the Naassenes claimed to have a secret teaching that James the brother of Jesus had transmitted to Mary (5.7.1; 10.9.3). What is especially significant is that the manuscript evidence is divided between two forms of the name: Mariamme and Mariamne (note the ‘n’!). It is probably impossible to tell which Hippolytus himself wrote. However, it is easy to see that, in a milieu where the name Mariamme was not otherwise known, the usage could slip from Mariamme to Mariamne.

These variant readings in Hippolytus are the first known occurrences of the form Mariamne (which the Discovery Channel programme claims is the same name as that on one of the ossuaries). Since it occurs in Hippolytus as a variant of Mariamme, and since the latter is well attested in Jewish usage back to the first century CE, it seems clear that the form Mariamne is not really an independent version of the name Mariam (independent of Mariamme, that is). But a late deformation of the form Mariamme, a deformation made by Greek speakers not familiar with the name. This must also then explain the usage in the apocryphal Acts of Philip (late 4th or early 5th century), where Mariamne is consistently and frequently used for the sister of the apostle Philip, apparently identified with both Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany.

We can now turn to the inscription on the ossuary, which has, in Greek: MARIAMENOUMARA. The two words Mariamenou and Mara are written consecutively with no space between. This makes it rather unlikely that two women are named here. But Rahmani takes a small stroke between the last letter of Mariamenou and the first of Mara to be a Greek letter eta (long e). He takes this to be the relative pronoun he (eta with a rough breathing), reading: ‘Mariamnenou who [is also called] Mara.’ (Note that this is different, it seems, from what the Discovery Channel do when they read the eta with a smooth breathing, meaning ‘or’.) There are parallels (I gather from Rahmani) to this abbreviated way of indicating two names for the same person.

The form of the name on the ossuary in question is Mariamenou. This is a Greek genitive case, used to indicate that the ossuary belongs to Mary (it means ‘Mary’s’ or ‘belonging to Mary’). The nominative would be Mariamenon. Mariamenon is a diminutive form, used as a form of endearment. The neuter gender is normal in diminutives used for women. But the name Mariamenon is found only here in all our evidence for ancient Jewish names. It is, of course, a specifically Greek formation, not used in Hebrew or Aramaic.

This diminutive, Mariamenon, would seem to have been formed from the name Mariamene, a name which is attested twice elsewhere (in the Babatha archive and in the Jewish catacombs at Beth She’arim). Mariamene is an unusual Greek form of Mariam, presumably invented because it has a rather elegant hellenized form. When I first looked at this issue I was rather persuaded that the form Mariamne was a contracted form of Mariamene (which I think is what the Discovery Channel film claims), but I then found that the second and third century evidence (reviewed above) makes it much more plausible that the form Mariamne is a late deformation of Mariamme that occurred only in a context outside Palestine where the name was not known. So the Discovery Channel film’s claim that the name on the ossuary is the same as the name known to have been used for Mary Magdalene in the Acts of Philip is mistaken.

But we must also consider the rest of this inscription. The Discovery Channel film proposes to read Mara as the Aramaic word ‘the master’ (as in Maranatha). But, since we know that Mara was used as an abbreviated form of Martha, in this context of names on an ossuary it is much more plausible to read it as a name. This woman had two names: Mariamenon and Mara. It could be that the latter in this case was used as an abbreviation of Mariamenou, or it could be that the woman was known by Mariamenon, treated as a Greek name, and the Aramaic name Mara, conforming to the common practice of being known by two names, Greek and Semitic.

If the woman, for whatever reason, is given two different names on the ossuary, it is very unlikely that she would also have been known as Mariamene, even though this is the form of which Mariamenon is the diminutive. One other point can be made about Mariamenon. As a term of endearment it would be likely to have originated in the context of her family. But in that case, we probably need to envisage a family which used Greek as an ordinary language within the family. This does not mean it did not also use Aramaic, which would probably be the case if the names on the other ossuaries are those of family members closely related to Mariamenon. The family could have been bilingual even within its own orbit. Alternatively, the ossuaries in Aramaic could come from a branch of a big family or a generation of the family different from that of Mariamenon, such that their linguistic practice would be different. In any case, it is unlikely that the close family of Jesus would have spoken Greek within the family, and so it is unlikely that Mariamenon belonged to that close family circle.

The conclusion is that the name Mariamenon is unique, the diminutive of the very rare Mariamene. Neither is related to the form Maramne, except in the sense that all derive ultimately from the name Mariam. There is no reason at all to connect the woman in this ossuary with Mary Magdalene, and in fact the name usage is decisively against such a connexion.

 

Guest Post by Richard Bauckham – Addenda and Corrigenda on Marian Names

(1) To understand why and how Hebrew names acquired Greek forms, it helps to know that Greek nouns never end in consonants other than n, r and s. So ‘Mariam’ in Greek looks barbaric (hence Josephus, e.g., never uses it). Maria and Mariamme are obvious ways of adapting the name to a more Greek-looking form.

(2) I made a mistake about the NT’s use of Mariam and Maria (that’s the danger of doing this sort of work in a hurry). The NT in fact uses both quite often. It’s virtually impossible to be sure of the figures because for most occurrences of one there are variant readings giving the other. For the same reason it is difficult to discern any rationale for the choice of one rather than the other. But a couple of points are interesting. First, it is clear that Luke calls the mother of Jesus Mariam throughout chapters 1-2. This suits very well the ‘Hebraic’ atmosphere that Luke is evoking in those chapters. Second, in the UBS text Mary Magdalene is always Maria except in Matt 27:61; John 20:16, 18. The former, if correct, is just anomalous. But in John 20:16 it is Jesus who addresses Mary as ‘Mariam,’ to which she replies ‘Rabbouni’. For Jesus to use her Hebrew name here is obviously appropriate, and that usage in then continued in v 18 (whereas in vv 1, 11 she is Maria). Incidentally, my mistake about NT usage in my original post makes no difference to the rest of my argument there.

(3) I should have mentioned the inscriptions on the ossuary that Rahmani numbers 108. Across the lid of the ossuary, the name Mariame is written twice (in Greek), while on the underside of the lid is written (in Greek) first Mariamnou (but the last letter is not certain), then, under it, Mariame. Rahmani takes Mariamnou to the genitive of Mariamne, and so finds an early instance of this form of the name. However, the correct genitive would, of course, be Mariamnes. It seems easier to suppose that the nominative would be Mariamnon, which would be another instance of the diminutive that appears as Mariamenon on ossuary 701 (the alleged Mary Magdalene ossuary). Rahmani himself takes Mariamenon on that ossuary to be a diminutive of Mariamene. Mariamnon would be a contracted form.

(4) Apparently some manuscripts of the Acts of Philip (sometimes?) have Mariamme rather than Mariamne. Bovon makes this point, but I have not found it in the apparatus of his edition. If accurate, it strengthens my case.

Em Higgaion, de Christopher Heard, há um excelente post sobre o espetáculo que estão vendendo com o nome de A Tumba Perdida de Jesus.

Leia The Talpiot/Jesus tomb: point and counterpoint, item 1.

E fique atento à sequência, pois vem mais por aí. Christopher Heard é professor de Religião na Pepperdine University, em Malibu, Califórnia, USA.

A estória será transmitida pela TV nos EUA no dia 4 de março. E no Brasil no dia 18 de março. No Discovery Channel.

Variadas questões suscitadas por este caso podem ser lidas no biblioblog de Mark Goodacre, NT Gateway Weblog.

Como estava viajando, só agora pude perceber o barulhão que esta história da tumba de Jesus – perdida ou achada? – está fazendo. Havia anotado uma coisinha aqui, mas de ontem para hoje a fofoca se espalhou.

É o tipo de coisa que a gente não sabe se ri – da absurda ignorância – ou chora – lamentando a dimensão da esperteza e da persistente ganância que continuam firmemente enraizadas em alguns seres vivos deste incrível planeta…

Como gostava de dizer o amigo Juarez, mineiro que vive em Roma: A ignorância é atrevida e polifacética!

Mas, decida você mesmo: leia um pouco sobre o caso, se é que isto algum dia tenha merecido ser chamado de “caso”. Peço, exatamente por isso, consentimento aos conterrâneos mineiros para usar a palavra, pois caso em Minas é coisa séria!

 

The Jesus Tomb? ‘Titanic’ Talpiot Tomb theory sunk from the start – Ben Witherington: February 26, 2007

Remember the tale of the Titanic? How it was supposed to be impregnable, and nothing could poke holes in it? How it would never be sunk? Well all I can say is that human hubris knows no bounds, and that hasn’t changed in the last century. On April 15th 1912 the supposedly leak proof Titanic rammed into an iceberg and sank—sank like a giant stone. Sank quickly, with great loss of life.
Why do I bring this up? Because in one of the interesting ironies in recent memory, James Cameron the movie director who made the enormously successful film “Titanic”, on the night after the Oscars, will give an Oscar winning performance at a news conference along with Simcha Jacobovici who have now produced a Discovery Channel special on the discovery of Jesus’ tomb, ossuary, bones, and that of his mother, brothers, wife, and his child Jude as well! Who knew! The show will air on March 4th. In addition we are now regaled with a book by Simcha and Charles Pellegrino entitled The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History just released today by Harper-Collins timed to co-ordinate with their news conference and the Discovery Channel special. Why should we be skeptical about this entire enterprise?

First of all, I have worked with Simcha. He is a practicing Jew, indeed he is an orthodox Jew so far as I can tell. He was the producer of the Discovery Channel special on the James ossuary which I was involved with. He is a good film maker, and he knows a good sensational story when he sees one. This is such a story. Unfortunately it is a story full of holes, conjectures, and problems. It will make good TV and involves a bad critical reading of history. Basically this is old news with a new interpretation. We have known about this tomb since it was discovered in 1980. There are all sorts of reasons to see this as much ado about nothing much:

1) The statistical analysis is of course only as good as the numbers that were provided to the statistician. He couldn’t run numbers he did not have. And when you try to run numbers on a combination name such as ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ you decrease the statistical sample dramatically. In fact, in the case of ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ you decrease it to a statistically insignificant number! Furthermore, so far as we can tell, the earliest followers of Jesus never called Jesus ‘son of Joseph’. It was outsiders who mistakenly called him that! Would the family members such as James who remained in Jerusalem really put that name on Jesus’ tomb when they knew otherwise? This is highly improbable. My friend Richard Bauckham provides me with the following statistics:

Out of a total number of 2625 males, these are the figures for the ten most popular male names among Palestinioan Jews. the first figure is the total number of occurrences (from this number, with 2625 as the total for all names, you could calculate percentages), while the second is the number of occurrences specifically on ossuraies.

1 Simon/Simeon 243 59
2 Joseph 218 45
3 Eleazar 166 29
4 Judah 164 44
5 John/Yohanan 122 25
6 Jesus 99 22
7 Hananiah 82 18
8 Jonathan 71 14
9 Matthew 62 17
10 Manaen/Menahem 42 4

For women, we have a total of 328 occurrences (women’s names are much less often recorded than men’s), and figures for the 4 most popular names are thus:

Mary/Mariamne 70 42
Salome 58 41
Shelamzion 24 19
Martha 20 17

You can see at once that all the names you’re interested were extremely popular. 21% of Jewish women were called Mariamne (Mary). The chances of the people in the ossuaries being the Jesus and Mary Magdalene of the New Testament must be very small indeed.

By the way, ‘Mara’ in this context does not mean Master. It is an abbreviated form of Martha. probably the ossuary contained two women called Mary and Martha (Mariamne and Mara).

There are so many flaws in the analysis of the statistics themselves, that one must assume the statistician did not have the right or sufficient data to work with.

2) there is no independent DNA control sample to compare to what was garnered from the bones in this tomb. By this I mean that the most the DNA evidence can show is that several of these folks are inter-related. Big deal. We would need an independent control sample from some member of Jesus’ family to confirm that these were members of Jesus’ family. We do not have that at all. In addition mitacondrial DNA does not reveal genetic coding or XY chromosome make up anyway. They would need nuclear DNA for that in any case. So the DNA stuff is probably thrown in to make this look more like a real scientific fact. Not so much.

3) Several of these ossuaries have very popular and familiar early Jewish names. As the statistics above show, the names Joseph and Joshua (Jesus) were two of the most common names in all of early Judaism. So was Mary. Indeed both Jesus’ mother and her sister were named Mary. This is the ancient equivalent of finding adjacent tombs with the names Smith and Jones. No big deal.

4) The historical problems with all this are too numerous to list here: A) the ancestral home of Joseph was Bethlehem, and his adult home was Nazareth. The family was still in Nazareth after he was apparently dead and gone. Why in the world would be be buried (alone at this point) in Jerusalem? It’s unlikely. B) One of the ossuaries has the name Jude son of Jesus. We have no historical evidence of such a son of Jesus, indeed we have no historical evidence he was ever married; C) the Mary ossuaries (there are two) do not mention anyone from Migdal. It simply has the name Mary– and that’s about the most common of all ancient Jewish female names. D) we have names like Matthew on another ossuary, which don’t match up with the list of brothers’ names.
E) By all ancient accounts, the tomb of Jesus was empty– even the Jewish and Roman authorities acknowledged this. Now it takes a year for the flesh to desiccate, and then you put the man’s bones in an ossuary. But Jesus’ body was long gone from Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb well before then. Are we really to believe it was moved to another tomb, decayed, and then was put in an ossuary? Its not likely. F) Implicitly you must accuse James, Peter and John (mentioned in Gal. 1-2– in our earliest NT document from 49 A.D.) of fraud and coverup. Are we really to believe that they knew Jesus didn’t rise bodily from the dead but perpetrated a fraudulent religion, for which they and others were prepared to die? Did they really hide the body of Jesus in another tomb? We need to remember that the James in question is Jesus’ brother, who certainly would have known about a family tomb. This frankly is impossible for me to believe.

5) One more thing of importance. The James ossuary, according to the report of the antiquities dealer that Oded Golan got the ossuary from, said that the ossuary came from Silwan, not Talpiot, and had dirt in it that matched up with the soil in that particular spot in Jerusalem. In fact Oded confirmed this to me personally when I spoke with him at an SBL meeting. Why is this important? Well because the ossuaries that came out of Talpiot came out of a rock cave from a different place, and without such soil in it. To theorize that there was a Jesus family tomb, and yet the one member of Jesus’ family who we know was buried in Jerusalem for a long time did not come out of the ground from that locale contradicts this theory. Furthermore, Eusebius reports that the tomb marker for James’ burial was close to where James was martyred near the temple mount, indeed near the famous tombs in the Kidron valley such as the so-called tomb of Absalom. Talpiot is nowhere near this locale.

6)What should we make of James Tabor’s being co-opted into this project? You will remember his book which came out last year The Jesus Dynasty. In that book he had quite a good deal to say about the Talpiot Tomb, and about Panthera being the father of Jesus, and about Jesus being buried in Galilee, and of course nothing about a ossuary which claims that Joseph is the father of Jesus. Why such a quick reversal of his earlier opinions? This makes him appear very quixotic, not a very reliable witness who sticks by his guns when he draws a conclusion, for he has now reversed himself not just on one or two minor points, but on several major ones. My advise to James, whom I respect and who has not only done some fine archaeological work but is a nice guy, is to disassociate himself from this speculative and flawed theory just as quick as possible if he cares for his reputation as a scholar.

In the Toronto Star article from Sunday’s paper, we find that the unraveling has begun before they even hold the news conference today— here is a brief quote from the article written by Stuart Laidlaw—

“But there is one wrinkle that is not examined in the documentary, one that emerged in a Jerusalem courtroom just weeks ago at the fraud trial of James ossuary owner Oded Golan, charged with forging part of the inscription on the box.

Former FBI agent Gerald Richard testified that a photo of the James ossuary, showing it in Golan’s home, was taken in the 1970s, based on tests done by the FBI photo lab. The trial resumes tomorrow.

Jacobovici conceded in an interview that if the ossuary was photographed in the 1970s, it could not then have been found in a tomb in 1980.

But while he does not address the conundrum in the documentary, he said in an interview that it’s possible Golan’s photo was printed on old paper in the 1980s.”

Here is the link to the Toronto Star article.

https://www.thestar.com/News/article/185708

In fact the same article reports that Professor Amos Kloner from bar Ilan University has already told the German press “It’s a beautiful story but without any proof whatsoever.” He is important since he did extensive work and research on this very tomb and its ossuaries and came to negative conclusions published in a journal in 1996. In short, this is old news, to which has been added only the recent DNA testing and statistical analysis neither of which makes the case the film makers want to make.

I feel sorry for Simcha, but I know how these things happen. One’s enthusiasm for a subject propels one into over-reaching when it comes to drawing conclusions. The problem with keeping these ideas secret for the sake of making a big splash of publicity, and lots of money, is that peer review by a panel of scholars could have saved these folks a lot of embarrassment down the road. ‘C’est la vie.’

So my response to this is clear— James Cameron, the producer of the movie Titantic, has now jumped on board another sinking ship full of holes, presumably in order to make a lot of money before the theory sinks into an early watery grave. Man the lifeboats and get out now.
For those wanting much more on the historical Jesus and James and Mary see now my WHAT HAVE THEY DONE WITH JESUS? (Harper-Collins, 2006).

NEW ADDENDUM

And one more thing to add—Eusebius the father of church history (4th century) tells us that there had been since NT times a tomb of James the Just, the brother of Jesus, which was near the Temple mount and had an honoric stele next to it, and that it was a pilgrimage spot for many Christians. It was apparently a single tomb, with no other Holy family members mentioned nor any other ossuaries in that place. The locality and singularity of this tradition rules out a family tomb in Talpiot. Christians would not have been making pilgrimage to the tomb if they believed Jesus’ bones were in it– that would have contradicted and violated their faith, but the bones of holy James were another matter. They were consider sacred relics.

Here is part of the passage from Eusebius on Jesus’ brother— James “was buried on the spot, by the Sanctuary, and his inscribed stone (stele) is still there by the sanctuary.” (Hist. Eccles. 2.23.18). This is clearly not in Talpiot, and remember to claim there is a Talpiot family tomb means that Jesus would have been buried there long before James was martyred in A.D. 62. In other words, the James tradition contradicts the Talpiot tomb both in locale and in substance. James is buried alone, in another place.

 

Filmmakers Find Jesus’ Tomb and Body – Todd Bolen: February 24, 2007

I hate these kind of stories, because everyone with any training in archaeology related to the Bible can see it’s a fraud from a mile away, but everyone else takes it so seriously.

The first thing to note in this “discovery” is that it was made by a filmmaker and a Hollywood director. That should make you suspicious. Why archaeologists and other scholars didn’t have any inkling of this until it was revealed by movie-makers should smell more like Indiana Jones than serious scholarship. Of course, it is altogether possible that these amateurs did make the greatest discovery ever in biblical archaeology. If so, it will be recognized as authentic by those who are experts in the field. If not, the filmmakers can pour millions of dollars into creating a “documentary” that ignores the scholars and appeals directly to the (largely ignorant) public.

The previous work of these two filmmakers is not irrelevant to this story; this is not their first foray into biblical archaeology. Their recent “The Exodus Decoded” reveals their methodology: partial presentation of evidence combined with twisted interpretation and a complete lack of scholarly support. Add $3 million for amazing special effects and eye candy. Simply put, no one with any knowledge of the field (secular, religious, liberal, conservative) buys what they were selling. For a 14-part review, see Chris Heard’s blog.

The filmmakers don’t want to reveal specifics of their discovery of Jesus’ tomb, but they have leaked enough details to get excitement up for their Monday press conference. So detailed analysis will have to wait (and if anyone else is doing it, I’m going to save time and simply link to them), but for now, here’s some that you won’t hear at the press conference or in the multi-million-dollar made-for-TV movie, from the the Jerusalem Post.

But Bar-Ilan University Prof. Amos Kloner, the Jerusalem District archeologist who officially oversaw the work at the tomb in 1980 and has published detailed findings on its contents, on Saturday night dismissed the claims. “It makes a great story for a TV film,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “But it’s impossible. It’s nonsense.”

Kloner, who said he was interviewed for the new film but has not seen it, said the names found on the ossuaries were common, and the fact that such apparently resonant names had been found together was of no significance. He added that “Jesus son of Joseph” inscriptions had been found on several other ossuaries over the years.

“There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb,” Kloner said. “They were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE.”

This scholar is not a Christian and is not motivated to protect religous beliefs of Christians. He is an expert on burials from the time of Christ.

In short, this “discovery” has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with financial gain. You can make a lot of money and gain a lot of notoriety by creating the most sensational of discoveries. It would all be so much better if journalists would call up a few experts, determine that the story is rubbish, and then publish nothing about it. Unfortunately, journalists are complicit in perpetuating the fraud, because sensational stories like this are good for their ratings.

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Diretor de ‘Titanic’ diz ter achado túmulo de Jesus

Os realizadores de um documentário produzido pelo diretor de “Titanic”, James Cameron, disseram nesta segunda-feira ter encontrado a tumba de Jesus ao lado da de Maria Madalena, com quem teria tido um filho.

Segundo “A tumba perdida de Jesus”, documentário dirigido pelo israelense Simcha Jacobovici, as sepulturas da família de Jesus foram descobertas em 1980 em Talpiot, um bairro de Jerusalém. Os túmulos têm inscrições com os nomes de seus ocupantes em aramaico e hebreu: Yeshua bar Yosef (“Jesus, filho de José”), Maria, Matia (Mateus), Yose (José, um irmão de Jesus, e não o pai), Yehuda bar Yeshua (“Judas, fiho de Jesus”) e “Mariamene e Mara” (“Maria, a do mestre”).

As inscrições e uma combinação de análise genética e cálculo de probabilidades permitiu aos autores concluírem que o lugar abrigou os restos de Jesus, Maria Madalena, um filho de ambos chamado Judas, Maria, a mãe do profeta, e um Mateus, que estaria relacionado com a família.

Em entrevista coletiva feita na sede central da biblioteca pública de Nova York, os autores e produtores do documentário, rodeados de um grupo de especialistas, mostraram os ossários de “Jesus, filho de José” e “Mariamene e Mara”, ou “Maria, a do mestre”, em referência a Madalena.

Ambos não têm mais de um metro de comprimento e uns 50 cm de altura e largura. A que supostamente pertence a Jesus é mais simples que a de Maria Madalena, que apresenta um par de ornamentos.

Cameron disse que o achado põe fim à ausência de provas físicas da existência de Jesus com “evidências tangíveis, físicas e inclusive forenses, em alguns casos”.

As evidências podem ser interpretadas como argumentos contra alguns dos pilares do cristianismo, como a ressurreição de Cristo e seu celibato. “Dirão que desejamos minar o cristianismo. Nada mais longe da verdade, esta investigação saúda a existência real dessas pessoas”.

Acusado de ter se metido em um terreno controverso demais para um cineasta, Cameron se pronunciou a favor de encontrar a verdade. “Como autor de documentários, não devo temer a buscar pela verdade”, declarou.

O documentário será transmitido no dia 4 de março pela rede Discovery Channel, e a mais espetacular de suas conclusões é de que o DNA encontrado no sarcófago de “Maria, a do mestre” não coincide com o de Jesus, o que descarta relação sangüínea e potencializa a ideia de uma relação matrimonial.

O documentário afirma que, apesar de se tratar de nomes recorrentes na época, a possibilidade estatística de mais de uma família com todos estes nomes é remota. A possibilidade é de 600 contra 1, segundo Andrey Feuerverger, professor de matemática na Universidade de Toronto que assistiu à coletiva.

A teoria do documentário tem sido recebida com ceticismo e também com desprezo assumido. O arqueólogo israelense Amos Kloner, que documentou a tumba como a de uma família judia próspera, crê que não há provas que respaldem as afirmações de que ali foi enterrado Jesus. “Esta é uma sepultura judia para enterros. Quanto aos nomes que aparecem nela, se trata de uma coincidência. Não temos uma prova científica de que seja a tumba de Jesus e dos membros de sua familia”, afirmou Kloner ao jornal Yediot Aharonot.

O arqueólogo disse que das 900 covas utilizadas para enterros encontradas em um raio de 4 km da cidade velha de Jerusalém, datadas do Período do Segundo Templo, o nome Jesus ou Yeshu aparece 71 vezes.

A Autoridade de Antiguidades de Israel, que tem a custódia dos sarcófagos e restos achados no jazigo, recusou-se a fazer comentários, ainda que em 1996 um de seus porta-vozes tenha dito que a probabilidade de pertencer a Jesus e sua família era “quase certa”.

As Igrejas cristãs ortodoxa e católica afirmam que a tumba de Jesus se encontra embaixo da Igreja do Santo Sepulcro, na antiga Jerusalém, enquanto que os protestantes dizem que está mais ao norte, fora das muralhas da cidade velha.

Fonte: AFP – 26 fevereiro 2007

Folha Online: 25/08/2006 – 09h12

Filme registra dom Helder como líder progressista da Igreja

Christian Petermann – do Guia da Folha

Há documentários que se sustentam por seu objeto de estudo, já que não propõem discussões estéticas. É o caso de “Dom Helder Câmara – O Santo Rebelde”, projeto acalentado há muito pela cineasta Érika Bauer. Ela partiu da biografia escrita por padre Reginaldo, também um dos entrevistados, que atiçou sua curiosidade a respeito desta figura vital tanto na ala progressista da Igreja Católica quanto como resistência à ditadura militar. Fruto de uma pesquisa rigorosa e exaustiva, Bauer dispôs de imagens raras de arquivos nacionais e internacionais, que recuperam para espectadores mais jovens os eloqüentes discursos de dom Helder, morto em 1999. Homem do povo e para o povo, ele sempre foi muito lúcido em sua campanha contra qualquer injustiça. Forte ponto de apoio no elogio à sua figura pública, por exemplo, são os depoimentos de Leonardo Boff (cont.)

Folha Online: 19/05/2006 – 17h42

“Da Vinci” agrada na Espanha e decepciona na França

…arrasou nas bilheterias em seu primeiro dia de exibição na Espanha (…) Já os franceses, com seu ar blasé, não deram muita atenção ao longa-metragem de Ron Howard, apesar da enorme campanha de divulgação (…) As primeiras exibições de “O Código Da Vinci” nesta sexta-feira, em Nova York, aconteceu sem grandes filas e sem quaisquer manifestações…

Atualização: 20/05/2006
Estréia de “O Código Da Vinci” bate recordes no Japão
Febre “Da Vinci” invade programação da TV paga

CNBB: quarta, 17 de maio de 2006

Esclarecimentos sobre “O Código Da Vinci” – Cardeal Majella

Cardeal Geraldo Majella Agnelo – Arcebispo de São Salvador da Bahia – Presidente da CNBB

A difusão do livro “O Código Da Vinci”, de Dan Brown, e do filme baseado sobre a obra, tem suscitado em muitas pessoas perplexidades, dúvidas e confusão a respeito de algumas verdades fundamentais da fé cristã referentes a Jesus Cristo e à Igreja. A CNBB, consciente de sua responsabilidade em relação à defesa da verdadeira fé da Igreja, vem a público para prestar alguns esclarecimentos. Não devemos esquecer que a obra em questão é de ficção e não retrata a história de Jesus, nem da Igreja. Não se pode atribuir verdade às afirmações claras ou veladas do autor. O que é fantasia deve ser lido e entendido como fantasia. As únicas fontes dignas de fé sobre a vida de Jesus e o início da Igreja são os textos do Novo Testamento, da Bíblia. A história da Igreja, depois dos apóstolos, está retratada em obras de caráter histórico, cujas afirmações são respaldadas pelo rigor do método histórico. Alertamos, portanto, que a obra, no seu gênero fantasioso, apresenta uma imagem profundamente distorcida de Jesus Cristo, que está em contraste com as pesquisas e afirmações de estudiosos de diversas áreas das ciências humanas, da teologia e dos estudos bíblicos, ao longo de dois mil anos de história do cristianismo. É lamentável que a obra, com roupagem pseudocientífica, se ponha a versar de maneira leviana e desrespeitosa sobre convicções tão sagradas para os cristãos. Muitos cristãos sentem-se feridos em sua fé e nas convicções que lhes são profundamente caras. Outras pessoas são induzidas à dúvida sobre verdades da fé pregadas pela Igreja, desde sua origem, e transmitidas de geração em geração, com zelosa fidelidade à doutrina dos apóstolos. Ainda outras são levadas, inclusive, a levantar suspeitas sobre a honestidade da Igreja nas afirmações de fé sobre Jesus Cristo, seu divino fundador. Diante disso, afirmamos, com toda convicção, que a Igreja, de forma alguma, ocultou no passado, nem oculta no presente, a verdade sobre Jesus Cristo (cont.)

Cannes recebe “O Código Da Vinci” friamente

Risos nos momentos cruciais. Silêncio cortado por assobios no fim. O filme “O Código Da Vinci”, do diretor Ron Howard, recebeu uma fria acolhida pela maioria dos cerca de 2.000 jornalistas convidados para a estréia em sessão especial para a imprensa na sala Debussy, do Palácio dos Festivais, em Cannes.

No filme, o professor de semiologia Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) se une a Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), e juntos têm revelações importantes. Mas essas revelações foram recebidas por risos na sala, que estava lotada.

As reações dos críticos ouvidos ao final pela France Presse iam todas no mesmo sentido. “Não era muito compreensível. A frase básica do filme foi recebida com risos, ou zombaria, isto resume tudo”, comentou Gerson da Cunha, crítico do “Times of India”.

“É quase tão ruim quanto o livro”, afirmou Peter Brunette do jornal norte-americano “Boston Globe”. “Felizmente havia o [ator] Ian McKellen no filme.”

“O público estava perplexo, não houve aplausos, só silêncio”, declarou Margherita Ferrandino, da televisão italiana RAI 3. “Só li o livro pela metade e me cansei. É terrível!”, exclamou.

Fonte: France Press – Folha de S. Paulo: 16/05/2006