Opinion: A Titanic blow to Christian faith?

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When I first heard (out of one ear cocked to the TV news) that “Titanic” director James Cameron had had produced a documentary about a purported “lost tomb of Jesus,” I visualized Leo DiCaprio standing on a mausoleum shouting, “I am the king of the Jews.” An Associated Press story about the documentary doesn’t incline me to take this ”bombshell” any more seriously, though I suppose I’ll watch the program.

1) Although you never would have known it from the nuns who taught me at Sacred Heart School in Pittsburgh, Yeshua (an Aramaic variation ofr Joshua) was a common name. Don’t take my word for it. In his classic study of Jesus, “A Marginal Jew,” the Catholic scripture scholar Father John Meier writes: “It is hard for Christians today to appreciate that Jesus of Nazareth did not stand out in his contemporaries’ minds because of his name.”

2) The notion that Jesus might have been married is not the conversation-stopper (or scandal to Christian faith) that it might seem. Meier concludes that “we cannot be absolutely sure whether or not Jesus was married,” but thinks the more probably hypothesis is that he was not and remained celibate for religious reasons.

As with “The Da Vinci Code,” it may be that public interest in Cameron’s documentary will steer viewers toward serious books about Jesus – or even a novel like “Gospel” by Wilton Barnhardt, an erudite and entertaining thriller that does double duty as a primer on the Bible, Christian doctrine and the history of heresy. James Cameron should consider adapting it as a film.