Amazing Grace

By Robert Fischer | Published: March 8, 2007

I just had to share something. Christians are very often attacked for being judgemental, and the religion of the Christ is ridiculed being full of self-hatred. And those attacks come from a lot of people who feel personally wounded by people who call themselves “Christian”. As far as I can tell, those who call themselves Christian but unrepentently hurt others are using the Lord’s name in vain every time they self-identify as a Christian. And this happens a lot — so much so that sometime it’s even hard for me to associate with them.

But, every once in a long while, an person commits an act of Spirit-motivated grace which is really astounding. Ben Witherington III, a very prominant New Testament scholar, is now one of those people. He has become a lightning rod representing opposition to the Jesus tomb, and he took additional flak from other people (like me) who disregard the James ossuary. And things got really, really heated. And then he did this.

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  • Joe

    I’m puzzled about how Witherington’s latest dispatch (3/7/07) qualifies as “Spirit Motivated.”

    I found it to be not just weird but disturbing but at the same time quite revelatory, particularly the story about his friend that he used to build up to the standard Evangelical “sell” of a person being “bought at a price.”

    How is it that a story about his friend scheming with a Christian bookseller to sell the image of the Lord Jesus Christ to make lots of money edifying in any way? Why is it such a tragedy when the bookseller counter-schemes and defrauds his fellow panderer of the image of the Lord Jesus Christ? Why is it so touching that BW’s friend gets his picture back along with the copyright (to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ)? I found it sickening myself. I couldn’t relate to it at all.

    But I can see how it relates to BW.

    He makes HIS living by peddling his “visions” about the Lord Jesus Christ and now he finds his bread-n-butter endangered by his involvement in the recent nasty Jesus Family Tomb mess.

    Here are BW’s own words that he nestled within his weird meditation on “Bitterness”:

    “It would be easy for me to get bitter about the nonsense propagated in the Jesus tomb theory. To become bitter that the other side of the story has not adequately been told. That there is an unfairness in all of this, especially since I spent years of my life dealing with the James ossuary and the remarkable implications of that, which is still a genuine relic from the family of Jesus.”

    From his own words, it’s even more obvious now that the ONLY dog that BW had in this Jesus Tomb fight was the one that he hoped would free his James ossuary from its association with the ossuaries from the “Family Tomb.”

    He only succeeded in part. Most people agree that his J-o was not one of the ten, but he only dragged his credibility down further because he was forced to rely on the word of Oded Golan to establish a sort-of provenance for his ossuary and almost every mention of the J-o in the press was surrounded by variations on the words “fraud,” “forged” or “fake.”

    RE: “…the other side of the story has not been adequately told”

    I have to agree with him here. Even though there were archaeologists, scientists and even Biblical scholars aplenty to refute the claims of the JFT-crowd, Witherington just had to jump in bearing the ridiculous baggage of his own ossuary claims. The case against the JFT would have been more than adequate without his input. He was an unneeded distraction.

    Re: “I spent years of my life dealing with the James ossuary and the remarkable implications of that, which is still a genuine relic from the family of Jesus.”

    “Still?!”

    Still unrepentant. He’s the one who started this whole trend of bone boxes being used against the Christian Faith with his collaboration with Shanks at the BAR, then with his collaboration Jacobivici to produce the FIRST phony bone box attack against the Faith. Remeber the James Ossuary special shown on EASTER SUNDAY in 2003 on the Discovery Channel? That’s Witherington’s work.

    So, I’m not at all impressed by Witherington’s heartfelt paean to the hurt that he inflicted on himself and others by trying to sell the Lord Jesus Christ for money.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog Robert

    Two things before I get into the post.

    First of all, welcome aboard the blog. Your post was moderated, but if you’d like to stop that happening in the future, pop onto the registration page and sign up. Once you do that and get a post accepted under your signed-up name, you won’t be moderated anymore.

    Second, where’d you come from? And why is BW so interesting to you? :-D

    Now back to the post.

    BW was blogging, not preaching. So the fact that you couldn’t relate to his friend isn’t the point — the fact that it relates to him is. And I found that it helped understand the way he saw the whole mess, even though I found it similarly unrelatable.

    I don’t see BW as whoring Jesus out, and I’m kinda confused where that all comes from. In general, I’ve found BW’s work to be insightful and engaging — of course, I never saw the James ossuary special back in 2003, I mainly know him from his excellent commentary on Romans and his blog, so maybe you know something I don’t? It’s pretty clear he’s still holding onto the James ossuary as authentic, even though the case against it looks pretty damning, but I get the sense it’s because he’s enmeshed and invested in it. Assuming that the James ossuary is faked, it’s an academic mistake on his side, and I’m willing to take him with it: people have done a lot worse.

    And the “bought at a price” doesn’t phase me, because I happen to believe that’s what the Christ event is about. I’m a pretty liberal person when it comes to my theological understanding, but that salvific aspect of the crucifixion is pretty key. So, to that extent, your characterization of it as an “Evangelical sell” seems pretty off to me.

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