While some sources are referring to "The Lost Tomb
of Jesus" as the work of director James Cameron, it is actually the work a
man named Simcha Jacobovici. 
Cameron co-produced the piece and as he has a more well-known name, the
news knows it will draw in more readers. 

However, when I first found out about the program that
aired this past Sunday, it was not the first time I had heard of Mr.
Jacobovici.  Just this past August, I had
heard him on a Catholic radio station promoting another documentary he made called
"The Exodus Decoded." The program was being promoted on the show
because it held a favorable position toward the Exodus, mainly that it is
plausable that it occurred and that, according to Jacobovici, there was
evidence of it.

I watched the program and enjoyed it.   And while it was criticized by scholars, a
lot of us who watched it went away pretty convinced that Jacobovici’s
hypothesis was compelling enough for us to take seriously.  Then
this past Monday came and Jacobovici informed the press of his new discovery.  He and his crew had found what he touted to
be the lost tomb of Jesus.  If it were,
it defied the belief in Jesus’ physical ascension into Heaven, as it contained
an ossuary (or bone box) labeled "Jesus son of Joseph." 

 And, as I had placed
some faith in his authority in his previous program, I was torn.  I was caught up in reanalyzing how I had gone
into watching the previous program and how I was going into this one.  As non believers on the Discovery Channel’s
forum touted that Christians were ready to embrace anything that affirmed their
beliefs and bury their heads in the sand at the things that opposed them, I
felt a certain element of truth. 
Granted, I also found myself aware of the same thing occuring among the
non-believers.  I had known that the most
critical audience of "The Exodus Decoded" had been the non-believers,
and now even before the show had aired, the forum was filled with non believers
spouting about how science had proven Christians wrong. 

Watching the program
on Sunday didn’t shake my faith.  But it
did overwhelm me.

I went into the
program with the intention of writing a blog counter-arguing its claims, and I
didn’t know where to start.  I spent a
good part of Monday, writing a paragraph or two and deleting it.  Do I start with the names of Jesus’ family vs
the names on the ossuaries?  Do I address
the authority of the Gnostic texts being used to support their claims?  Do I address the blind statement made that
the Church used to ordain women?  How
about the fact that the Church’s teachings are addressed with an attitude of
"Well yea my crazy uncle says this, but everyone knows…?" And boy,
you know, when they purported that John the beloved and our Blessed mother were
actually "Judah the son of Jesus" with his mother Mary Magdalene at
the foot of the Cross, I literally paused the program and growled.  Then began slapping my head and saying
"no no no no" as a bunch of actors dramatized Jesus’ saying
"Woman, behold your son", etc to the wrong people.

I kept asking myself
"Just who is my audience?  What
subject would fit them?"  to try to
narrow it.    I don’t know what knowledge other people have
and what knowledge they don’t have. 

What I do know is
this.  Considering what the producers of
the program expected their average viewer to know, a person with that limited
of knowledge would potentially find it convincing. 

Burying our heads in
the sand is not an option.  While God, of
course doesn’t call us to all become scholars and to scrutinized every piece of
information that comes our way, we do need to think about where we get our
education.  Do we wait for information to
be set on a plate before us, laced with lots of entertaining frosting to allure
us to digest it?  Do we only study like a
child set before a plate of food at dinner that we really don’t want to eat,
that as soon as our superiors leave, we quickly feed to the dog?   

 Watching programs
like these isn’t a bad thing.  They can
be a great motivator to us to learn more about what our Church teaches and why
she teaches it.  Debating my faith online
has definitely one of the prime reasons I know as much as I do about it.  Those answers have strengthened my faith and
lead me toward a deeper relationship with Christ.   While I do open my bible now for more
reasons than to just argue points with people, I can definitely say that I had
the bible sitting on my shelf a good year after I was confirmed and didn’t
really begin opening it till people presented me with challenges. 

But we do need still
to be careful.   We don’t want to overwhelm
ourselves with so many questions at once.

For actual arguments
against the ones given in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus", check out:

Examining the ‘Jesus Tomb’ Evidence

Jimmy Akin’s "Tomb of Jesus Nonsense"

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