Most Documentary TV Shows On Ancient Topics (Biblical Studies And Early Christianty, Mostly) Really, Really Suck

A recent program about the fragments of the True Cross did a fairly good job of presenting the viewer with a story about the activities of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great and a devout Christian, who according to that story pretty much invented what we now know as Christian veneration of relics. The program tells us that Helena went to Jerusalem, found a piece of wood and declared that it was the Cross on which Jesus was put to death, cut it up into little pieces and distributed these pieces to churches all across the Roman Empire. This is the traditional story about how Helena began the belief that all of those pieces of wood in churches are pieces of True Cross. There are very good reasons to doubt whether Helena ever interested herself in relics at all. If these reasons were presented during this program, I must have blinked or zoned out at the time.

The same program did a particularly bad job of presenting the information it had on some recent scientific evaluation on the authenticity of the True Cross: a piece of wood considered since the 11th century to be piece of the True Cross was carbon-14 dated, and found to have come from a tree which lived in the 11th century. Not even close to the supposed time of Jesus, not even close to Helena's discovery in the 4th century of what she called the True Cross.

The carbon-14 dating was presented to the viewer in the very last several minutes of the 1-hour show. Why not at the very beginning of the show? Why not inform the viewer right at the start that any preoccupation with the Cross or any other relics on Helena's part is not solidly demonstrated by any historical evidence?

Perhaps the show's producers were afraid that if they did that sort of thing -- made sense -- it would be hard to keep viewers' attention for the rest of the hour. Perhaps they were exactly right about that. In any case, their handling of the material was pretty typical of such shows purporting to present the latest scholarly knowledge about ancient religious things: present a mix of comments by serious scholars with obfuscating narration, as if what the producers actually want is mainly to keep the viewer confused. The scholars will discuss "the tradition," that is, what the most conservative of believers regard as history, although almost no-one else who's studied the subject matter still does. The shows do not make plain what is meant by "tradition," they don't make plain that the experts are not relating what they consider to be fact. To make things worse, often crackpots who DO regard the traditional fables as factual are interviewed along with the experts.

Is there any rational reason at all to believe that Helena would have had any means at all of determining that what she had discovered was the True Cross? (IF, for the sake of argument, she actually looked for the Cross at all?) I doubt it very much, but my point is that the question was not discussed on air. The people most well-qualified in the world to discuss such matters, and quite willing to share their expertise, were interviewed, and we got a recitation of a bunch of fairy tales and precious little evaluation of what history, if any, is contained in them.

I have to wonder just exactly how much edifying information is routinely edited out of such interviews. I wonder whether one can hold out some hope that the raw footage of the entire interviews tends to be preserved, and will someday be edited into something much better than most of what goes on the air these days.

Thank goodness, these scholars write books, books with which the producers for half-assed "Secrets Revealed" shows on the so-called "History Channels" and NatGeo and the Smithsonian Channel, etc, have nothing to do. If you watch some of these shows and are intrigued by what is said by people like Professors Ehrman, Pagels and Chilton, you might find it quite interesting to read their books and see how badly the TV shows present what they have to say.

And then you'll walk around angrily muttering to yourself all the time about how TV jerks us around, just like I do. Just like me, you'll shout, "Why don't the experts insist on better shows being made? Is it just money, simple as that? Are the experts afraid that if they rock the boat they'll kill the golden goose? Et tu, Bart?!" Yes, you'll be angry, but I'll be a little bit less alone.

Just What Could You Build With All The Fragments Of The True Cross?

Archaeologists excavating a 7th-century church in Turkey have found a reliquary with a piece of the True Cross in it.

John Calvin, the loveable, cuddly 16th-century founder of Calvinism, is quoted as saying that the pieces of the True Cross added up to a large ship-load of wood, while Charles Rohault de Fleury, a 19th century archaeologist, said that they added up to about 1/3 of a cross the size of one Jesus might have been crucified on. Was Calvin really in a position to judge how much wood was in all the fragments of the True Cross? I really doubt it. Was he fervently opposed to Catholic practices such as the veneration of relics? Oh yes. (To this day Calvinist churches are notable for Minimalist decor.) Was Charles Rohault de Fleury an expert archaeologist who wouldn't make a statement like that about True Cross fragments without basing it on reliable data? I don't know. Was he a fervent defender of the Catholic Church? I don't know that either.

Was Fleury counting differently than Calvin, excluding many pieces of True Cross which Calvin included? Again, I don't know. Do many people today repeat Calvin's line, or something similar ("If you put all the pieces of the True Cross together you could build an Ark," for example), not based on any clear idea at all about the number and size of Cross relics, but because they are grinding an anti-Catholic ax? (Or an anti-Orthodox ax. Let's not forget that although in the 7th century the split between Catholic and Orthodox still far from complete, "Orthodox" is a far more accurate term to describe a 7th-century church in Turkey than "Catholic.") I have absolutely no doubt about that, nor do I doubt that many Catholic apologists would gladly quote Fleury's remark without having any more idea about Fleury's competence and possible bias than I do -- that is to say, no idea whatsoever.

Once again, I feel I am on the sidelines, on neither of the two sides bickering over the theological significance of some archaeological find. The theological debate doesn't particularly interest me, and the historical significance of the find, which interests me, doesn't seem to interest very many others.

Do I think that any of the relics venerated as pieces of the True Cross really once were pieces of the cross on which Jesus was crucified? Well, I'm not convinced that Jesus existed. If He did, and if He was crucified, wearing a crown of thorns, and stabbed in the side with a lance by a Roman soldier while He was on the Cross, then it seems to me that it is possible that the wood and thorns and iron venerated by some Christians as pieces of the True Cross and of the Crown of Thorn and of the Holy Lance are actually objects which touched Jesus -- possible, but extremely unlikely, because I know of no reports of anyone preserving relics thought to have been associated with Jesus earlier than Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. And also because it would have been unusual for the Romans to have allowed Jesus' followers to have preserved the Cross or a part of it. (But it would have been unusual for them to have allowed Jesus' followers to remove his body from the Cross. Leaving the body there to rot away was a significant part of the horror and insult of that form of punishment. "Golgotha" means "place of skulls" because the remains of the victims of crucifixion were left there. And that is one of the many reasons why I have trouble believing the New Testament stories of Jesus.)

Nevertheless, a 7th-century artifact is interesting to me purely by virtue of its being as old as the 7th century. In this case, I would most likely find the reliquary much more interesting than the piece of wood within. Unless, that is, they date the piece of wood and it actually turns out to have come from a tree felled in the 1st century or earlier. (Did the Romans reuse one cross over and over?)

If they do actually date the wood, then as far as I know, that in itself would be newsworthy. As far as I know, Orthodox and Catholic authorities have allowed very few relics to be scientifically tested. The most famous exception has been the Shroud of Turin. That was subjected to carbon-14 dating and found to have been made in the 13th or 14th century. And ever since, the Catholic Church along with various crackpots and huckster authors and makers of silly documentaries and the so-called "History Channel" have being doing all they can to distract people from those carbon-14 test results and to discredit the scientists who performed those tests.

If traces of human blood are found on this wood, this 7th-century-or-older artifact found in Turkey, that in itself would not be significant in the search for the historical Jesus, because, sadly, crucifixions were still quite common in the 7th century.