How to Piss People Off

Well, give James Cameron credit for one thing - he knows how to make a whole bunch of people really angry. Via this post on the New York Times The Lede blog comes word that Cameron has produced a:

90-minute documentary in which Mr. Cameron, along with journalist Simcha Jacobovici, say they have uncovered the burial cave of Jesus and his family — along with enough DNA evidence to establish, they say, that Jesus wasn’t resurrected and that Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.

Quite the stunner, no? It's not quite that clear cut, as this article in the Toronto Globe and Mail points out:

Although the evidence contained in the film and book is hardly definitive, it is compelling.

Inscribed in Hebrew, Latin or Greek, six boxes -- taken from a 2,000-year-old cave discovered in 1980 during excavation for a housing project in Talpiyot, south of Jerusalem -- bear the names: Yeshua [Jesus] bar Yosef [son of Joseph]; Maria [the Latin version of Miriam, which is the English Mary]; Matia [the Hebrew equivalent of Matthew, a name common in the lineage of both Mary and Joseph]; Yose [the Gospel of Mark refers to Yose as a brother of Jesus]; Yehuda bar Yeshua, or Judah, son of Jesus; and in Greek, Mariamne e mara, meaning 'Mariamne, known as the master.' According to Harvard professor François Bovon, interviewed in the film, Mariamne was Mary Magdalene's real name.

So, in other words, the evidence appears to show that a clutch of people sharing names with Jesus and his family were buried together in this tomb. The odds on that group not being Jesus of Nazareth are fairly low (either 1 in 600 or 1 in 42 million, depending on who does the calculations), but it's not as if there's a test sample of Jesus's DNA against which to compare.

Nonetheless, the prospect of disproving the resurrection or buttressing the mythology behind The Da Vinci Code is not sitting well with the faithful. If the comments to this post on Time's blog are any indication (2500 comments - Holy Shit!), lots of folks are pissed off. There's lots of believers taking solace in the idea of Cammeron and his partners in crime (i.e., non-Christians) being sent to hell for their blasphemy (really, the holy schadenfreude is amazing). The cream of the crop is this enlightened discourse:

FUCK JAMES CAMERON HE LICKS HIS MOTHERS PROLAPSED ANUS
FUCK JAMES CAMERON HE LICKS HIS MOTHERS PROLAPSED ANUS

That repeats ad nauseum.

The whole situation reminds me of "Crucifixion Variations" by Lawrence Person, in which scientists have discovered some sort of subatomic particles that, properly studied, allow them to "see" history unfold. The story involves a project to attempt to "see" the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. The project administrator is an atheist who hires an old friend who is a born again Christian to run the experiments. When the first experiment shows Christ's burial followed by an empty tomb, the atheist is intrigued and the believer is ecstatic. When the second experiment shows just the opposite, the atheist is still intrigued, while the believer is shattered.