So *That’s* Where They Are

One of the more curious aspects of our Age of Credulity is the complete and utter faith postmoderns put in the notion that antiquity set about a massive project of inventing twelve fictional apostles and then scattering their graves all over the Mediterranean and building shrines to them. There’s no need to even check to see if this far-fetched thesis is might be problematic. It’s. Just. True. And Christians are gullible fools if they think, even for a second, that the reason the shrine grew up is because somebody that mattered a lot to the early Christian community in that area is buried there.

Nobody does this with mummies buried in the Valley of the Kings. When the shrine inscriptions tell you Imhotep is buried there, people pretty much say, “Hey! Look! Imhotep’s mummy!” But for some weird reason, when you open a tomb beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s (inscribed “Peter is Within”) and find the bones of a crucified man, postmoderns say, “That could be *anybody*” and assume that it is, in fact, anybody but Peter, who many are not even sure existed. And, of course, from that amazingly credulous skepticism come the even more amazingly credulous skepticism that 12 fictional people invented the even more ficional Jesus of Nazareth.

We truly live in an age that will believe anything, except the obvious. Point out the tombs of the apostles, attested by a whole civilization and it’s all rubbish. Put a bone box in James Cameron’s hands and let him babble something about the Jesus Dynasty and the deeply rational postmodern mind will believe every word.

In case you are interested, James was actually the son (with Joses, Jude, and Simon (his successor to the See of Jerusalem) of Cleopas (the Emmaus disciple) and “Mary, the wife of Clopas). Not a sibling of Jesus.