Crypt Held Bodies of Jesus and Family, Film Says


A documentary by the Discovery Channel claims to provide evidence that a crypt unearthed 27 years ago in Jerusalem contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth.

Moreover, it asserts that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that the couple had a son, named Judah, and that all three were buried together.

The claims were met with skepticism by several archaeologists and New Testament scholars, as well as outrage by some Christian leaders. The contention that Jesus was married, had a child and left behind his bones -- suggesting he was not bodily resurrected -- contradicts core Christian doctrine.

Two limestone boxes said to contain residue from the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were unveiled yesterday at a news conference at the New York Public Library by the documentary's producer, James Cameron, who made "Titanic" and "The Terminator." His collaborators onstage included a journalist, a self-taught antiquities investigator, New Testament scholars, a statistician and an archaeologist. Several of them said they were excited by the findings but uncertain.


"I would like more information. I remain skeptical," said the archaeologist, Shimon Gibson, a senior fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, in an interview after the news conference.

In recent years, audiences have demonstrated a voracious appetite for books, movies and magazines that reassess the life and times of Jesus, and there is already a book timed to coincide with this documentary, which will be on the air next Sunday.

"This is exploiting the whole trend that caught on with 'The Da Vinci Code,' " said Lawrence E. Stager, the Dorot professor of archaeology of Israel at Harvard, in a telephone interview. "One of the problems is there are so many biblically illiterate people around the world that they don't know what is real judicious assessment and what is what some of us in the field call 'fantastic archaeology.' "

Professor Stager said he had not seen the film but was skeptical.

Mr. Cameron said he had been "trepidatious" about becoming involved in the project but got engaged out of "great passion for a good detective story," not to offend and not to cash in.

"I think this is the biggest archaeological story of the century," he said. "It's absolutely not a publicity stunt. It's part of a very well-considered plan to reveal this information to the world in a way that makes sense, with proper documentation."

Let's Start a War, One We Can Win

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 20, 2007

AFETA, Ethiopia -- They were two old men, one arriving by motorcade with bodyguards and the other groping blindly as he shuffled on a footpath with a stick, but for a moment the orbits of Jimmy Carter and Mekonnen Leka intersected on this remote battlefield in southern Ethiopia.

Mr. Mekonnen, who thinks he may be 78, is a patient in Mr. Carter's war on river blindness. He is so blind that he rarely leaves the house any more, but on this occasion he staggered to the village clinic to get a treatment for the worms inside him.

His skin is mottled because the worms cause ferocious itching, especially when they become more active at night. He and other victims scratch until they are bloodied and their skin is partly worn away. Ultimately the worms travel to the eye, where they often destroy the victim's sight.

Ethiopia has the largest proportion of blind people in the world, 1.2 percent, because of the combined effects of river blindness and trachoma. As in many African countries, the wrenching emblem of poverty is a tiny child leading a blind beggar by a stick.

As Mr. Mekonnen waited on a bench by the clinic, there was a flurry of activity, and an Ethiopian announced in the Amharic language that "a great elder" had arrived. Then Mr. Mekonnen heard voices speaking a foreign language and a clicking of cameras, and finally the whirlwind around Mr. Carter moved on.

"Do you know who that was?" I asked Mr. Mekonnen.

"I couldn't see," he replied.

"Have you ever heard of Jimmy Carter?"

"No."

Yet in remote places like this, former President Carter, at 82, is leading a private war on disease that should inspire and shame President Bush and other world leaders into joining. It's not just that Mr. Carter's wars have been more successful than Mr. Bush's; Mr. Carter is also rehabilitating the image of the U.S. abroad and transforming the lives of the world's most wretched peoples. (For a video of Mr. Carter's trip, please go to www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

On the previous night, Mr. Mekonnen had slept under a mosquito net for the first time in his life, as part of a Carter initiative to wipe out malaria and elephantiasis in this region. And Mr. Mekonnen now uses an outhouse as a result of a Carter Center initiative to build 350,000 outhouses in rural Ethiopia to defeat blindness from trachoma.

Mr. Carter has almost managed to wipe out one horrific ailment -- Guinea worm -- and is making great strides against others, including river blindness and elephantiasis. In this area, people are taking an annual dose of a medicine called Mectizan -- donated by Merck, which deserves huge credit -- that prevents itching and blindness.

Mectizan also gets rid of intestinal worms, leaving Ethiopian villagers stronger and more able to work or attend school. Among adults, the deworming revives sex drive, so some people have named their children Mectizan.

Mr. Carter's private campaign against the diseases of poverty, put together with pennies and duct tape, is a model of what our government could do. Imagine if the U.S. resolved that it would wipe out malaria and elephantiasis (both are spread by mosquitoes, so a combined campaign makes sense). What if we celebrated science not by trying to go to Mars but by extinguishing malaria? What if we tried to burnish America's image abroad not only with press releases and propaganda broadcasts, but also with a bold campaign against disease?

So I wish that President Bush could visit villages like this and see what Mr. Carter has accomplished as a private individual. Mr. Bush, to his great credit, has financed a major campaign against AIDS that will save nine million lives, and he is also increasing spending against malaria -- but not nearly as energetically as he is increasing the number of troops in Iraq. So I asked Mr. Carter whether President Bush should be pushing not for a possible war with Iran, but for a war on malaria.

"That would certainly be my preference," he said. "I thought the war in Iraq was one of the worst mistakes our country ever made, and we're possibly about to make an even worse mistake by precipitating a war with Iran. But I would like to see us shift away from war being a high priority, to diplomacy and benevolent causes."

So, President Bush, how about if we as a nation join Mr. Carter's war on diseases that afflict the world's poorest peoples -- and are one reason they are so poor. That's a war that would unite Americans, not divide them. Come on, Mr. Bush, sound the trumpets!

When opium can be benign

China's Communist Party, reconsidering Marx's words, is starting to wonder whether there might not be a use for religion after all


"DEVELOP the dragon spirit; establish a dragon culture," urge large green characters at the high school in Hongliutan, a poor village at the foot of a range of bleak loess hills. Though dragon can be a synonym for China, it is a god known as the Black Dragon that is being invoked here. Without funds from the Black Dragon's hillside temple, in a gully behind the village, the school would not exist. Nor, most likely, would the adjacent primary school and the irrigation system that brings water from the nearby Wuding River to the village's maize and cabbage fields.

Many local governments in rural China are mired in debt. Recent central government efforts to keep peasants happy by abolishing centuries-old taxes have not made life any easier for these bureaucracies. With their revenues cut, rural authorities have found it ever more difficult to scrape together money for health care and education. So they are only too happy to allow others to share the burden of providing these services--even the Black Dragon, whose 500-year-old temple was demolished by Maoist radicals during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Now officials in Yulin, the prefecture to which Hongliutan belongs, give the temple their blessing.

The revival of the Black Dragon Temple's fortunes is part of a resurgence of religious or quasi-religious activity across China that--notwithstanding occasional crackdowns--is transforming the social and political landscape of many parts of the countryside. Religion is also attracting many people in the cities, where the party's atheist ideology has traditionally held stronger sway.

The resurgence encompasses ancient folk religions and ancestor worship, along with the organised religions of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam (among ethnic minorities) and, most strikingly, given its foreign origins and relatively short history in China, Christianity. In the face of this onslaught, the party is beginning to rethink its approach to religion. It now acknowledges that it may even have its uses.

In Hongliutan the party appears in retreat. It is not the party secretary Zhang Tieniu who holds sway. Mr Zhang was the youngest party chief in the prefecture when he was appointed last year at the age of 32. But in a culture that reveres age, some villagers refer to him dismissively as a "lad". The man in charge in Hongliutan is 64-year-old Wang Kehua. Mr Wang happens to belong to the village's main clan. He is also the village's elected chief (a post which in most villages is subordinate to that of party secretary). More to the point, he controls the temple and its money.

Torture by Worms



By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 18, 2007

JIMMA, Ethiopia -- Presidents are supposed to be strong, and on his latest visit to Africa Jimmy Carter proved himself strong enough to weep.

The first stop of Mr. Carter's four-nation African trip was Ghana, where he visited his projects to wipe out the Guinea worm, a horrendous two-foot-long parasite that lives inside the body and finally pops out, causing excruciating pain.

Mr. Carter was shaken by the victims he met, including a 57-year-old woman with a Guinea worm coming out of her nipple.

"She and her medical attendants said she had another coming out her genitals between her legs, and one each coming out of both feet," Mr. Carter added. "And so she had four Guinea worms emerging simultaneously."

"Little 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were screaming uncontrollably with pain" because of the worms emerging from their flesh, Mr. Carter said. "I cried, along with the children."

We tend to think of human rights in terms of a right to vote, a right to free speech, a right to assembly. But a child should also have a right not to suffer agony because of a worm that is easily preventable, as well as a right not to go blind because of a lack of medication that costs a dollar or two, even a right not to die for lack of a $5 mosquito net.

As president, Mr. Carter put the issue of human rights squarely on the national agenda. Now Mr. Carter argues -- and he’s dead right -- that we conceive of human rights too narrowly as political and civil rights, and that we also need to fight for the human right of children to live healthy lives.

He has led the way in waging that battle. Because of Mr. Carter's two-decade battle against Guinea worm disease, it is expected to be eradicated worldwide within the next five years. It will be the first ailment to be eliminated since smallpox in 1977, and it has become a race between the worm and the ex-president to see who outlasts the other.

"I'm determined to live long enough to see no cases of Guinea worm anywhere in the world," Mr. Carter said as he walked in blue jeans through a couple of villages in a remote corner of southwestern Ethiopia, the third country of his African tour.

After leaving the White House, Mr. Carter ended up "adopting" diseases like Guinea worm disease, river blindness, elephantiasis, trachoma and schistosomiasis that afflict the world's most voiceless people. These are horrific diseases that cause unimaginable suffering, yet they rarely get attention, treatment or research funding because their victims are impoverished and invisible.

When Mr. Carter met with Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, then Pakistan's president, President Zia had never heard of Guinea worm and didn't know it existed in Pakistan. Nor did his health minister. But after Mr. Carter put the issue on the agenda, Pakistan worked energetically with the Carter Center to eliminate the parasite in that country.

The villages here in Ethiopia that Mr. Carter visited cradle a fast-moving creek, making a lovely image of thatch huts and bubbling water. But the creek is home to the black flies whose bites spread the parasite that causes river blindness, leading to unbearable itching and often eventually to blindness.

"It's almost impossible to imagine the suffering of people with river blindness," Mr. Carter said as he traipsed through the village beside his wife, Rosalynn.

Already, Mr. Carter's campaign is making huge progress against the disease.

Kemeru Befita, a woman washing her clothes in the creek near Mr. Carter, told me that two of her children had caught river blindness in the last couple of months. After a visit to the witch doctor didn't help, she took them to a clinic where -- thanks to Mr. Carter's program -- they received medicine that killed the baby worms. They are two of the nearly 10 million people to whom the Carter Center gave medication last year alone, who won't go blind.

At the end of the day, this one-term president who left office a pariah in his own party will transform the lives of more people in more places over a longer period of time than any other recent president. And I hope that he can also transform our conception of human rights, so that we show an interest not only in the human rights of people suffering from the oppression of dictators, but also from the even more brutal tyranny of blindness, malaria and worms.