Every Easter there’s something. A skeptical sideshow of some sort to excite the excitable. This year it’s “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.” Discovery Channel is putting on a production by James Cameron (producer of Titanic) claiming that the Tomb of Jesus has been found, along with his remains, and the remains of His family, which includes his wife Mary Magdalene and their son.

OK, it’s a familiar type of claim, but this time it’s on Discovery Channel. Not that Discovery Channel is the place where finds like this, if they are defensible, are first aired, but the point is, for some people the fact that it’s on TV will validate it. But in case anyone is interested in an informed response to what has been released thus far, check out Ben Witherington, a scholar on the historical Jesus. He has offered some revealing replies here.

For example, the movie makers made much of the fact that the tomb contained an ossuary of “Jesus, son of Jospeph.” For those who don’t know, “Jesus” is the same as “Joshuah” in Hebrew or Aramaic. But notice the frequency of these names, according to Richard Bauckham:

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

Check out more interesting replies at Witherington’s blog.

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This caught my eye today. Apparently more Americans are killed by illegal immigrants than in Iraq.

Why is it that those who are soft on immigration are – stereotypically, the very same ones who are harsh on Iraq?

If American picketers and full time protesters are concerned about tackling the issues that protect Americans, and if Illegal immigration results in more American deaths than the war in Iraq, then surely those same people should be complaining about illegal immigration just as loudly as they are about Iraq. Unless, of course, their complaints about Iraq serve a political purpose that complaining about illegal immigration wouldn’t have…. Surely not!

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For those with an interest in Alvin Plantinga, and in particular his now notorious “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,” you’ll be interested in his new article on “Religion and Science” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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I just discovered this today. Reclaiming the Mind ministries have a regular paltalk room where prominent Christian scholars are guest speakers on a variety of subjects.

Previous guests have included such notables as Alvin Plantinga, John Frame, William Lane Craig, Dan Wallace and others. All you need is to download Paltalk. Check out the link above. This looks like a really good thing here, I’m certainly going to check it out!

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I’m working on a paper on William Hasker’s Emergent Dualism and his model of how the mind survives the death of the body. This blog entry isn’t so much about whether he’s right or not, but about an astronomical claim that he refers to.

As a parallel to his claim that the mind survives the death of the body, he appeals to his claim that in a black hole, the matter that possesses the intense gravity literally ceases to exist, and the gravity field continues to exist with literally no matter at its centre.

Every astronomy resource I can locate indicates that this is false, and that the matter at the centre of a black hole continues to exist, or that if it were to dissipate, the black hole would evaporate. I don’t suppose anyone knows of any source that suggests the contrary, do they?

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