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Newspapers, newsweeklies and television shows all choose the Lent/Easter or Advent/Christmas seasons to run stories that take an oh-so-modern look at Jesus, Mary, angels or God himself. You can practically time your fasting by their appearance.
This year's buzz is "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," the Discovery Channel's sloppy pastiche of bad archaeology, bad statistics and bad Gnosticism. Archaeologists and historians, even non-Christian ones, pooh-pooh this story as old news - the tomb was first discovered 27 years ago - and bad history. The assumptions are laughable: Jesus, wife Mary and son Judah all end up in the same tomb, undiscovered for centuries until producer James Cameron decided to make a buck off them.
So, if the history is so bad, why is everybody talking about it?
There is, of course, a particular kind of secular humanist who simply wishes to disprove the Christian message. A mix of scientific skepticism and ideological antipathy fuels the desire, and the fantasy of all fantasies that Jesus didn't rise from the dead, in fact, did not die any sort of heroic death, but simply lived the first-century Palestine equivalent of a middle-class life.
St. Paul says that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then we are the most pitiable of men, and the secular humanist fervently wishes it is so. This may explain the intentions of the filmmakers. But what about the audience?
There remains in our popular culture a fascination with Jesus as a wise man, shaman, guru. There is no desire, however, for a Son of God, someone who speaks with authority about matters of heaven and earth, someone who is loosed from the bonds of death but has not written a book about his half-hour in heaven. We aren't all that crazy about a redeemer, either, since we are not convinced we need redeeming.
The Jesus we like is the Jesus who urges us to get along, the Jesus who assures us that God loves us like he loves the sparrows.
This Jesus doesn't make rules. He doesn't condemn. He doesn't make us uncomfortable. He is a kindly spirit, helping us to do our best.
If this Jesus had a wife and kid, then so much the better. If he died, was buried, but left a really cool teaching for the rest of us, that's good, too.
But if he did die for our sins, was buried and then rose from the dead -- if he is the son of God, and if there is nothing more important in this life than hearing his word, believing in him and following him - then what are we to make of the lives we are living now?
Some people say that if they find the bones of Jesus, it wouldn't affect their faith one bit. Perhaps. If it is no big deal, we wonder why the early tradition and the scriptures chose to emphasize the empty tomb and the reality of the Resurrection so strongly, since it only made the Christian message harder to swallow. In any case, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" is not about the bones. It is about the deconstruction of Christianity itself.
And this desire to strip Christianity of its most powerful claims will not die with this television show. In fact, odds are that you'll hear another version of the same old story sometime around next Christmas.
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