Tomb: Major discovery or scientific oddity?

Imagine: You are minding your own business, which just happens to be archaeology, when in the midst of a routine salvage job cataloguing the contents of a burial ground that turned up on a construction site, you make an unexpected discovery.

Six of the 10 sets of remains you have found are labeled, and you can recognize most of them instantly as the names of some of the most famous people in the world. And of course, it's not like these famous names are arbitrary - not Napoleon Bonaparte and Mae West and King Tut and Emperor Hirohito. All of the names come from the same time period and were intimately associated with each other.

"Weird," you think. "If these are really the remains of the people that I and millions of people around the world know by these names, then this is probably the biggest archaeological discovery in the history of the world."

Then you shake your head, laugh at yourself, and say, "Nah! Nothing that interesting ever happens to me," as you finish signing the order to move the 10 ossuaries holding the bones to a local museum, where they will be inventoried, emptied and shelved. The bones will get a proper burial, and you won't have to be the person hated by millions of people for digging up Jesus, his mother Mary, and Mary Magdalene.

Sounds far-fetched to a generation raised to think of archaeologists as bull-whip-wielding Indiana Joneses, but to anyone who has ever spent any time studying archaeology, it makes perfect sense. The fact of the matter is that archaeologists and anthropologists are some of the most boring people in the world.

Remember, they are teachers nine months of the year - grading papers, scouring the library for obscure reference materials, and droning on and on about "Demographic anthropology in the study of matrimonial exchanges in a Dogon isolate" (a real title picked at random from the Internet). And then for two or three months of the year, they are sent into exile to do something monumental like use a toothbrush to meticulously unbury a chicken bone out of an old fire pit in order to verify the eating habits of the pre-Columbian Choctaw or Cherokee.

The reason I know about all this, in some small degree, is because as an undergraduate anthropology student, I tried to interest my professors in considering the possibility that real life might be more interesting than a textbook - something which led to me developing a considerable reputation as a troublemaker.

I was less interested in what "everyone knew to be true" and more interested in the arcane and wonderful world of "what everyone assumed to be false." That propensity for controversy led me into every dark cranny of archaeology that existed.

Instead of writing a paper on the significance of the lizard motif in some obscure tribe in South America, for instance, I would write about apparent cross-cultural influences between ancient Chinese dragon symbols and pottery glyphs found in Chile. Instead of toeing the politically correct line about man's arrival in the New World occurring sometime at the end of the last ice age, around 12,500 years ago, I would write term papers about Louis Leakey's controversial claim for human habitation of the New World more than 100,000 years ago.

If I were really in an ornery mood, I would write about cryptozoology and the possibility that hominid cousins of homo sapiens had survived into the last millenium to inspire such folklore as Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman.

There was no theory I wasn't willing to explore, which I suppose made me something like an aspiring Indiana Jones, except there was no Indiana Jones yet, and if there was, he would have flunked out of anthropology.

The fact of the matter is, my professors considered me kind of a nuisance because I kept asking questions they didn't have answers for. And, by the same token, I considered my professors something of a nuisance, since they had apparently taken a professional vow sometime in graduate school to wear blinders that prevented them from looking too far from the accepted truth.

Needless to say, I opted out of the field of archaeology before I had made the grad school choice that would have committed me to donning an intellectual straitjacket, but before that I did get to spend part of one very enjoyable summer in Guatemala working on the excavation and restoration of an early Mayan pyramid. Afterwards, I went into writing and then journalism, but I always retained an interest in enigmatic discoveries and archaeological evidence which challenges the accepted wisdom of history and prehistory.

Thus I was fascinated and more-than-a-little curious when I heard that James Cameron, the director of "Titanic," had filmed a documentary about the discovery of what was alleged to be the tomb of Jesus Christ.

And I was not at all surprised when one archaeologist after another - and one Bible historian after another - denounced the film as a hoax or a fraud. The fact of the matter is that people don't like to be challenged on their core beliefs, and there is no more basic belief than the one that says "Jesus' tomb was empty."

But using my top-dollar anthropological training from Tulane University, I was able to ascertain that the main argument against the film's claims was that it was just plain impossible - and if not impossible, then at least very inconvenient.

The fact that most of these arguments were made before anyone had even seen the film or read the accompanying book by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino ought to be disturbing to lovers of truth. Having seen the film now, I for one am highly intrigued by the numerous coincidences which converge to suggest this is the real tomb of Jesus.

Cameron and Jacobovici have invited further study and further analysis of the evidence. They have, in essence, rolled away the stone in front of the tomb and asked the world to look around and see for themselves what is there.

What is most interesting about the discovery is not that it is controversial, but that it has made almost no impact on the general public. It certainly got much less media attention than the death of Anna Nicole Smith, and appears destined to fade into obscurity as an archaeological oddity like the Baghdad battery from 2,000 years ago or the giant stone balls of Costa Rica.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it will just take a while to weigh the evidence and absorb its implications. I for one don't think it changes anything about my understanding of Jesus the Messiah, or my faith in him. Indeed, anything which encourages me to look more closely at the Gospel record and to study the meaning of the miraculous words of Jesus, I consider a good thing.

So I will continue to read the Bible and will continue to study the evidence about the tomb where a man named Jesus was found, and will continue to try to remember that God is God and I am not.

Paul said, "we know that all things work together for good to them that love God." Sometimes we just have to get out of the way and let that truth be proven.