There is none like You

There is none like You
No one else can touch my heart like You do
I could search for all eternity long
And find, there is none like You

Your mercy flows from a river wide
Healing comes from Your hands
Suffering children are safe in Your arms
There is none like You

As part of a church congregation, I always enjoy singing the above worship song. It has never failed to lift up my mood, which has been sinking like a 'titanic' for the past week or so.

A one and a half year old child named Merilynn Lim (not her real name) was admitted to the ICU after contracting high fever due to viral infection. It has led to a cascade of system failure. The virus is so virulent that it tipped her into total heart failure (global cardiomyopathy). Since birth, Merilynn has this muscular weakness known as hypotonia, which was detected when she was unable to sit without support by age 8 months. Since then, the parents have brought her to HUKM for weekly physiotherapy as part of early intervention program. Merilynn had been making slow but good progress. However, it was also detected that she had a borderline enlarged heart but nothing much was made out of it. She easily succumbed to episodes of fever which may sometimes take a few weeks to clear. She has also been in and out of hospital, whether it is for her high persistent fever or for investigations into her problem. A metabolic screening was finally done and mitochondrial disease was suspected. As her condition deteriorated, her parents refused to let her undergo a muscle biopsy which would be the definative test. I could emphatise with them. You wouldn't want to let your child undergo further trauma and be put under general anaesthesia in case her body could not take it.

For the past eighteen months, Merilynn's life was a long suffering one. The cardiac monitor in the paediatric ICU room was displaying ventricular irregularities. I was holding her hand, which had turned clammy and her pulse was barely palpable. I noticed too that her urine output was very low. The poor child has been intubated and sedated......

In the meantime, another event is taking place, which has sparked off a debate as to the history and the very foundation of Christianity. Somewhere in the outskirts of old Jerusalem, below an apartment in a place called Talpiot, the Discovery Channel crew has rediscovered the significance of a first century family tomb, excavated in 1980, which they believed, belongs to Jesus' family. In this tomb, there are inscriptions on the ossuaries which, the team revealed, after consulting an interdisciplinary team of experts, seemingly resemble a cluster of names belonging to the family, as noted in the Bible. Those names, if the epigraphers have got it right as as follows,

Jesus, son of Joseph

Maria (in simple form, Mary)

Yose

Mariamme e Mara

Judah, son of Jesus

Matthew

Six out of ten of the ossuary boxes have the inscriptions, which is higher than usual because most ossuaries discovered in the first century tombs have only 20% of identifying inscriptions. The names themselves have sparked controversy. Mariamme has been identified as Mary Magdelene, a follower of Jesus, and her name was the only one inscribed in Greek, as she was known to have preached in that language (others were in Hebrew or Aramaic). Yose is the nickname found in the Gospels, who was Jesus' brother, named Joseph. Though the name Joseph is common in that population, Yose is an extremely rare name to discover. There has only been one other ossuary discovered with the words 'Jesus, son of Joseph', and that too was not well documented. Therefore, even though, the names Joseph and Jesus were common among early Jews, 'Jesus, son of Joseph' is another rare finding. Jesus never had a son. He is divine and there is absolutely no historical record. This discovery of 'Judah, son of Jesus' is the most amazing of them all!

The team has gone one step ahead of the academia by publishing their findings to the general viewers, estimated to be over a billion. Since the release of the documentary which has yet to be shown here, more than a million websites have been generated on this lively topic. Of course, the scholars and experts have long known about the cluster of names (since 1980) but no one has made anything out of it. This is an account of just one of the experts.

In the beginning, the public and most of the experts have accused the filmmaking 'fat cats' of making money out of this expedition. The team of decoders, headed by James Cameron, director of Titanic and True Lies and Simcha Jacobovici (producer of the award winning documentary The Exodus Decoded) have consulted the relevant experts in epigraphy, statistics, DNA forensics etc. They are aided by a Dr James Tabor, a biblical scholar and author of The Jesus Dynasty.

The big question of this Indiana Jones style expedition, is - Is this turning out to be a perfect storm, a storm in a teacup or a piece of news that will soon be ignored and forgotten? What most of the people around the world have been reading, including myself, are stories or evidence as produced directly from the team.

I wonder if the church leaders have been following the latest developments. What is their reaction and have they revealed their thoughts to the congregation? These are testing times for the people of the faith.

(To be continued)