Dem Bones

The Academy Awards have come and gone with no terrorist attacks or personal traffic traumas, and Eventful February (Superbowl+Oscars) draws to a close with a Stock Market correction and the sounds of bats and balls colliding in baseball training camps. I'm glad to be able to turn my attentions to my favorite pastime, but I'm not done with my observations on our cultural flatulence.

I was incorrect in a few of my Oscar predictions, though accurate in speculating that I'd get four out of six correct. Alan Arkin was a good upset choice, and "The Departed" as reasonable a pick as any of the others for Best Picture. The Oscar telecast was somewhat more tasteful than in the past, with some creativity going into the presentations of art design and costume awards. Ellen Degeneres was an unexciting but congenial hostess, and she elicitted one solid laugh from me with her crack about how the Oscars wouldn't exist without Jews, Gays or Blacks--and neither would children named Oscar. To be politically incorrect, I couldn't help thinking of the phrase "Dikes at mikes" when she shared the podium with Queen Latifah and Melissa Etheridge. I imagine so did Oscar writer Bruce Vilanch, though he was savvy enough to restrain himself.

But it was another crack, totally straigtforward, that elicitted a much larger snort of "Hah!" from my cynical soul the next day, and had nothing to do with the Oscars (though it did, tangentially, to one big 2006 epic missing from Oscar contention, the critically savaged "Da Vinci Code.") It turns out that an upcoming Discovery special, produced partly by King of the World James Cameron, purports to display the actual burial site of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. Seems that some ossuaries recovered from a construction site near Jerusalem twenty years ago are inscribed with names that all belong to the Jesus family. Ossuaries are like safety-deposit boxes for the bones of relatives that have decomposed, and often contain the remains of several family members. This one mentioned Jesus (actually Joshua, or Yeshua, or whatever it was in Aramaic), along with Joseph, Mary (actually Miriam) and Judah, apparently Jesus's son. Now there were a lot of Joshuas and Josephs and Miriams in ancient Judea, but this was considered more than a coincidence because of an additional name, Mariame, which is a derivative of Miriam that supposedly was Mary Magdalene's real name. And DNA tracings suggested that she did not share ancestry with the others, meaning she was probably a wife.

Whew! Not exactly proof positive but they're a lot closer to pinning Judah on Jesus than they are of finding Daniellynne Smiths' real papa. Of course this archaeological speculation is appalling apostasy to anyone of two billion people who believe Jesus's body went floating up to Heaven. Cameron is lucky he is living in this century (though this century looks like it's going to suck big time regardless), since stake burning would be his expected reward for this production.

Of course it is in the nature of the current Naturalist vs. Supernaturalist debate that so many people would deried archaeological and fortensic evidence and put all stake into a fanciful mythology. But what got me was the reaction of one Biblical scholar (a phrase that is something of a tautology) who said that Cameron's speculation was, to paraphrase, a "great scam to hoodwink the population."

That's when I let out my derisive "Hah!" loud enough to awaken my snoozing dog. Whose scam are we talking about? How about your fucking made-up fantasy about angels and heaven and resurrections that have led to persecution and wars and inquisitions and probably now to the end of humankind? What is so terrible about learning that Jesus was just a very smart and humane man with a lot of good ideas on how we should treat each other? Why does he have to have been supernatural?

Whatever happened to "the truth shall set you free?" Not in our lifetime.