Thursday, March 08, 2007

Bitterness--- a Meditation
[via Ben Witherington]

Speaking of bitterness...
The Prayer of Jael
[via tallskinnykiwi, HT: From My Heart, Out of My Mind]

Posted by Jadon at 3:00 AM

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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous9:50 PM

    I found Witherington’s latest dispatch on "Bitterness" it to be disturbing but at the same time quite revelatory, particularly the story about his friend.

    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 unique (copyrighted?) takes on 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 nested 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.”

    Most people agree that his J-o was not one of the ten, but he only dragged his credibility farther down a black hole 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 assault against the Faith. Remeber the James Ossuary special shown on EASTER SUNDAY in 2003 on the Discovery Channel? That’s Witherington’s work.

    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 out the Lord Jesus Christ for money.

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