News: James Cameron and the Jesus Family Tomb

It is all over in the news.

But the buzz seems to have settled rapidly compared to the Da Vinci Code.

I heard a brief report on it on my iTunes of a ABC Nightline podcast. The story didn't even merit a full show and the tone was somewhat skeptical of the claims made in the documentary. So even the secular news media isn't going crazy for it.

As you would imagine, the Christian scholarship community has been responding.

Be sure to check out the many posts from Mark Goodacre, an Associate Professor of New Testament in the Religion Department at Duke University. He rounds up a lot of posts from other scholars.

Ben Witherington has also posted extensively but unfortunately, he hasn't learned how to use the label feature in Blogger so I link to one of his earlier ones. Witherington is a professor of New Testament at Asbury Seminary.

One more place I'd recommend people check out is Stand To Reason's (by Melinda Penner) breakdown of the controversy.

Bottom line is that the tomb theory has a lot of assumptions and some of them not very good ones.

UPDATE: Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason has written a piece you should check out if you really want a very quick overview of the controversy. In particular, he calls to task some of the head-in-the-sand, knee-jerk (am I using contradictory mixed-metaphors here?) responses from some in Christian circles. He then uses his usual "Dragnet" "nothing but the facts" approach.