Jesus Bones--Fact or Faith?

When I grew up in Abilene, Texas, my mother was a bridge fanatic. She played duplicate bridge in tournaments. She was a Life Master and played with people like Omar Sharif. She was crazy for it.

One of her bridge partners was a man named Jack Grimm. They called him Diamond Jack in Abilene because he was a larger than life fellow who had made a considerable amount of money in the oil business and liked to wear a diamond pinky ring. Being an adventurous sort of man who had explored for oil and found it, he chose to use some of his treasure for further explorations. In the 1970's he funded unsuccessful expeditions to find Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. He searched Mt. Ararat for Noah's Ark. Then in 1980 he funded the first major scientific search for the wreck of the Titanic. This was his territory. He was used to searching for treasures far under the surface. He was a geologist.

Diamond Jack never found any of these relics, but he sure had a good time trying. There is something about a quest that puts fire in a man's belly. It's not the kill that matters, but the hunt. Life is not about finding, it's about searching.

Which brings us to the welded subjects of Faith and Fact and to James Cameron. As we all know, when Diamond Jack Grimm's dream of finding the Titanic was realized after his death, James Cameron was the one who capitalized on the discovery by making a blockbuster movie.

Now Cameron is playing the Mel Gibson card. He knows that anything with 'Jesus' in the title is going to be dynamite at the box office, so he has resurrected a twenty-five year old 'discovery' and claims to have found the lost tomb of Jesus. It's a marriage made in heaven, religion and show business. Diamond Jack would have been proud.

Men of good conscience and sound intellect have been trying forever to reconcile the difference between fact and faith. Where do they intersect? Every philosopher since Aristotle has been wrestling with this dilemma. How much evidence do you need to believe what you want to believe?