The Jesus Fraud

Simca and John

NBC NEWS When this guy Simca Popolopowiotz (what I've called him)  popped up as the director of The Lost Tomb of Jesus, merry-go-round music played in my head.  This guy has been a regular on Discovery Channel for the past few months, and I've watched most every episode as he trudges through the ancient world looking for truth, or something. At some point - I wasn't looking for anything - at some point a pattern emerged. The underlying theme seemed to be discrediting stories and documents surrounding Jesus Christ. That's not unusual, but this guy was slick enough that I took him at face value ... some Jewish guy interested in history, until ... . The Jewish historian Josephus is THE historical source for that period of time.  His published work Antiquities of the Jews contains a passage know as Testimonium Flavianum. That passage is one of about two references to the historical Jesus anywhere, and Josephus describes him as the 'Christ.' When Simca got around to Josephus, and this particular passage, his tone and tenor took a turn to the hyper. He went to an even more hyper Jewish scholar to call the passage a forgery, perpetrated by Christians (The passage first came came under attack around the 18th century). I'm not pronouncing one way or another on the legitimacy of  Testimonium Flavianum, but Simca's reaction to it was such that I began to doubt his motives. I think my instincts were right. At any rate, the NBC news story pretty much spells out where this story is headed. Simca's credibility as an archaeologist is kaput. He reacted to this story like a democratundergrounder to the Downing Street memo, and James Cameron (''I'm not trying to undermine Christianity, just the opposite'') is just another Hollywood dickweed in a jungle full of dickweeds By the by - here's some relevant statistics. Out of a total number of 2625 males, these are the figures for the ten most popular male names among Palestinian 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. MEN WOMEN 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 Mary/Mariamne 70 42 Salome 58 41 Shelamzion 24 19 Martha 20 17 (Source - THE JESUS TOMB? ‘TITANIC’ TALPIOT TOMB THEORY SUNK FROM THE START)