Jesus

Having just announced the creation of a new religion—in my previous blog post [display]—I'm aware that it's somewhat risky to submit this new blog post about Jesus, who could well upstage me. What I have to say is so important, however, that I don't think I'm behaving foolishly. Indeed, if it were to come to pass that the two great religions of our Third Millennium were Christianity and Awestruckism (as I firmly believe), I'm completely fairplay. I want to give Jesus a chance.

I've just finished reading (rereading in the case of the first title) a pair of extraordinary books:

If ever there were required reading in the Vatican (and elsewhere), this is it! But the arguments of the distinguished authors—James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici—are often so complex (while remaining perfectly lucid) that I'm more and more convinced that Christianity, in spite of all its obvious merits, is likely to be soon engulfed, for the better or for the worse, by the limpidity of my Awestruckism. The change will evoke the way in which the terribly complicated "nested spheres" theories of Ptolemy were surpassed by the splendid simplicity of Kepler. For the moment, it's a little too early to say whether Awestruckism is likely to demolish Christianity (and Judaism and Islam, just to name a few old religions) in the same revolutionary style. But today, if Jesus were a corporation on the Chicago stock exchange, I wouldn't buy shares...

It's a tale of two tombs, which I shall refer to (jumping ahead, for simplicity) as the Jesus Tomb and the Arimathea Tomb. Basically, book #1 talks of the first tomb, whereas the existence of the second tomb, almost alongside the other one, is only revealed in book #2. But the themes of the two books and the two tombs are so intricately interwoven that you need to delve into both.

First, I should make it quite clear that we're not talking about the literary effusions of crackpots. I'll let you look up the credentials of the North Carolina professor James Tabor and the filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici. They're smart guys, not necessarily in the Judeo-Christian religious mainstream, but terribly convincing. Their competence extends from deciphering ancient Biblical texts down to the analysis of DNA. And they write in a beautifully convincing style, which leaves little doubt about the likely truth.

So, the great news is that we now know, most probably, where Jesus, his family and his companions were buried. It is becoming clearer that Jesus was indeed the sexual partner of Mary Magdalene.

Retrospectively, it's amazing that the bones of Jesus were probably accessible (able to be examined genetically) not so long ago, before being whisked away into eternal obscurity by the Ultra-Orthodox morons of the Holy City. The stupidity of the latter guys has given unwittingly an enormous boost to my new religion of Awestruckism...