For the first time in history a man of faith and a man of science are teaming up to search for Jesus’ DNA. A pastor and a geneticist will consequently search for Jesus’ descendants, that is Jesus’ living relatives.
Using the latest advances in DNA technology Oxford University geneticist George Busby and biblical scholar Pastor Joe Basile are investigating the world’s most famous holy relics including the Shroud of Turin, The Sudarium of Oviedo and the newly discovered bones of Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist*.
Their journey takes them to holy sites around the world from Spain and Italy to Israel and the shores of the Black Sea. By extracting and analyzing samples of each of these holy relics they hope to retrieve a sample of DNA that possibly belongs to Jesus or a member of his family. They believe that if they can find a strand of Jesus’ DNA it could help identify who among us today are descendants of Jesus and provide us with new insight into the man many consider to be the most important person in history, Jesus.
Joel Basile, lead pastor of Encounter Road Church in California, and Oxford University geneticist George Busby used DNA evidence to examine the Shroud of Turin, The Sudarium of Oviedo and the newly discovered bones of Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist.
“By extracting and analyzing samples of each of these holy relics, they hope to retrieve a sample of DNA that possibly belongs to Jesus or a member of his family. They believe that if they can find a strand of Jesus’ DNA it could help identify who among us today are descendants of Jesus and provide us with new insight into the man many consider to be the most important person in history, Jesus,” according to the History Channel.
Their results were revealed in a History Channel documentary, The Jesus Strand: A Search for DNA, which debuted Easter Sunday.
“The History channel really wanted accuracy,” Basile said. “We used the Bible as a map combined with science. My role was to make sure we didn’t get out of bounds.”
Basile and Busby traveled through the Middle East and Europe to study these artifacts held sacred by the church.
“We were able to go to places no one else gets to and look at artifacts that are pretty incredible,” Basile said. “It was a life-changing moment for me.”
The project’s goal was to find a strand of Jesus’ DNA to find any living relatives. Since Jesus and John the Baptist were cousins, it would stand to reason they shared similar biological markers.
So what did the duo find?
“While DNA analysis can’t prove that these are the artifacts some believe them to be, the hope is that these and other items could one day provide insight into the relationships between them and their modern descendants. Let’s assume for a moment that contamination could be completely ruled out and that DNA analysis demonstrated that DNA from the Shroud was a familial match to DNA from the James Ossuary—and that they are both related to the Bulgarian bones. Could this then have been the DNA of Jesus and his family? To answer that, all you need is a little belief,” Busby says.
Shroud of Turin and Jesus face reconstruction
*In 2010, bones were discovered in the ruins of a Bulgarian church in the St. John the Forerunner Monastery (4th–17th centuries) on the Black Sea island of St. Ivan. Two years later, after DNA and radio carbon testing proved the bones belonged to a Middle Eastern man who lived in the 1st century AD, scientists said that the remains could conceivably have belonged to John the Baptist.
I was not aware that Christ had any children. If he did not, then he does not have any descendants. That would be a good explanation of why there are no genuine Christians in the world — just lying hypocrites who make a living out of it.
So Xenos is pro-migrant and anti-Christian, why am I not surprised. A real EU-ropean.
KTG: please remove that comment about me. It is factually incorrect and also ad hominem. Why did you allow this shit to appear?
was this post paid for by the history channel?
it is a nothing premise with no substance that repeats itself constantly…the blog is better off without!
You forgot pro Islam and anti Greek