Them bones, hear the word of the Lord.

Some nice pithy riposte to the whole Jesus family tomb thing from Scot McKnight on God's Politics.

they have failed to report the fullness of the facts. Poor people didn’t have ossuaries and tombs in Jerusalem, because they couldn’t afford such extravagances. Galileans, when their bones were stored in ossuaries in Jerusalem, almost always wrote on the bone box their “address”: e.g., Yeshua from Nazareth. The names found on these ossuaries are so common that they are non-identifiable markers; the authors of this news story can only claim some statistical odds by necessitating that the "Mariamene" of one of the ossuaries be the Mary Magdalene of a 4th century non-Jewish, semi-Christian, apocryphal gospel. These aren’t facts the authors of this new story are willing to explore, and it undermines my confidence in their objectivity. (And some of the scholars they use to support their case are now denying the claims attributed to them.)

A succint, to the point rejoinder on the best of the case. And of course there is the credibility of the matter in principle, too.

We are being asked to believe that a Christian movement – shaped from beginning to end by the claim of both resurrection and ascension (no bones, therefore no ossuary) – was started by a family dynasty of the same faith (Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Judah), and carried on the secret of actually having the bones of Jesus buried in an extravagant and public place while they encouraged early Christians to go to death because of their faith in Jesus’ resurrection and ascension.

Quite so.

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