The Search for John the Baptist

John the Baptist...or meaningless grafitti? 

So the picture above is of this archaeologist who believes that he has found the cave that John the Baptist lived in in the wilderness outside of Jerusalem. The reason I know this is because Claudia and I watched 'Snatched' last night, and then afterwards got sucked into the History Channel. We watched the end of some documentary on the Shroud of Turin (it's Easter weekend, so there was a lot of Christian programming), then an hour of 'The Last Days of World War II' (basic premise: the show is new every week and covers this week sixty years ago; it's like 'Best Week Ever', only about the war. This week was the fall of Iwo Jima, and Eisenhower's decision to let Stalin take Berlin). After that, this show came on called 'The Search for John the Baptist.' I intended to go to bed immediately, until it became clear that the archaeologist believed that he had found John the Baptist's cave based primarily on the drawing shown above.

Now, any child with a stick could make that drawing; in fact, that's what most of my drawings look like even when I'm trying my best. To me, it looks like any ol' stick figure...but to the archaeologist, it is incontrovertible proof of the cave's provenance. He says that the upraised hands were symbolic of baptism, and that the figure's robes resemble John the Baptist's traditional outfit. I don't really see any distinctive outfit other than that normally worn by stick figures, but okay. The only other stuff on the walls were a bunch of indentations that the camera kept focusing on, although I could never tell what they were supposed to signify, and three very rough cross-shaped things that the archaeologist said was a clear representation of Jesus' crucifixion.

In his defense, he did get a bunch of slave labor from some archaeology students over a spring break, and they dug to the bottom of the cave and found lots of pottery remnants from several periods in history, including 1st century AD. That does signify that the cave was in use by a variety of people. However, the archaeologist believed that the cave was used for religious services related to John the Baptist, and a helpful computer simulation was provided of some priest standing in the middle of the cave using the 'illustrations' on the wall to illuminate John the Baptist's role in Christ's life. If this were true, couldn't they have, at some point in the millennium between the crucifixion and when the cave was abandoned during the onslaught of the Crusaders, found a freaking artist who could do better than one stick figure and three crosses? There is no writing on the walls and no other illustrations. In fact, I would not be surprised to learn someday that the stick figure was actually made possible by a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts.

Okay, I've said enough. I should go to bed!