The bones of contention did not belong to Jesus

Christians rejoice: the doubts about the faith thrown up by thediscovery of Jesus's alleged ossuary do not hold up to analysis,writes Sean Freyne

The recent announcement in the news and television media of"startling new evidence about Jesus" - evidence that at first sightwould appear to put a serious question mark over Christian belief inthe Resurrection - has for the most part been greeted with a bigyawn.

"Not again," was the reaction of many, sated with these"revelations" about Jesus, which have become almost an annualoccurrence.

Yet the internet is buzzing with comments and suggestions, andCNN was prepared to cover the special news conference announcing the"discovery" with a blaze of publicity.

So what is the "new and startling" evidence, and what, if any,questions does it raise for Christians preparing for Easter, whenthe worldwide Christian family celebrates the event on which itsfaith is based?

Briefly, it is the discovery in Jerusalem, as long ago as 1980,of six ossuaries (carved stone boxes in which the bones of deceasedpeople were laid after bodily decomposition had taken place) that,it is claimed, contained the remains of Jesus himself and othermembers of his family. This claim was made in a recent pressconference in New York, followed by a programme on the DiscoveryChannel and an accompanying book, The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

The suggestion is based on the names that are carved, orsometimes merely scratched, on the outside of the ossuaries. Whilethere is some debate about the decipherment of the names, thefollowing are the generally accepted readings: Yeshua, bar Yehose(Jesus son of Joseph); Marya (Mary); Mathyh (Martha); Yoseh (Jose);Yehuda bar Yeshua (Judah son of Jesus); Mariamenou Mara (Mary andMartha, or Mary Magdalen).

The director of the programme, James Cameron (he of Titanicfame), and its producer, Canadian film-maker Simcha Jakobovici,argue that there is a very high degree of statistical probabilitysupporting the identification of this group of names with Jesus ofNazareth and his family.

They argue that the convergence of such a number of namesassociated with Jesus in the Gospels virtually rules out thepossibility of their referring to some other family, even thoughsome of the principal names - Yeshua and Mariamenou in particular -are quite common in the inscriptional evidence from Jerusalem in thesame period.

The fact that there is a Mariamenou as well as a Marya includedin the group - especially when it is taken in conjunction withYehuda, son of Yeshua - raises once more, in the fashion of The DaVinci Code, the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalen weremarried and had a child.

Now, however, this offspring did not end up in the south ofFrance as the medieval legend of the Holy Grail - on which DanBrown's book is based - had claimed, but was actually buried in thefamily tomb in Jerusalem.

Even more damaging to Christian claims, however, would be thesuggestion that Jesus himself was actually buried with his family,thus throwing serious doubt on the gospel stories of his burial in atomb owned by a wealthy follower, Joseph of Arimathea, close toGolgotha where he was crucified and the visit of the women to thetomb on the first Easter morning (Mark 15:42-16:8).

It should be noted at the outset that there are seriousdifficulties with the statistical argument identifying the groupwith Jesus's family, not to speak of the decipherment of the names.While the Gospels were all written 30 years or more after the eventsof Jesus's death and burial, they are faithful to Jewish burialcustoms of the period, especially in Jerusalem. These demanded thatthe dead person should be buried within 24 hours of death.

In Jesus's case, this had to be done hurriedly because thePassover Sabbath was about to begin at sundown, and the presencenearby of a rock-cut tomb was convenient.

The visit of the women to the tomb once the Sabbath was over wasin order to anoint the body, which would normally then be left todecompose in the antechamber of the tomb, a process that normallytook more than a year.

Subsequently, the deceased person's bones would be placed in anossuary, which would then be stored in one of the several shafts cutout of the rock face within the burial chamber for secondary burial.

THE TRADITION IN Jerusalem, going back to the first century, wasthat Golgotha and the adjoining tomb were located outside thenorthern wall of the Herodian city, quite a distance from Talpioth,the neighbourhood where the alleged family tomb was found in thesouthwest of the city.

Today, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre covers that originalspot, even though it is well within the walls of the later, extendedcity. The likelihood that this was indeed the place of crucifixionand burial of Jesus has been increased by the recent archaeologicalsurvey of the area underneath the present basilica, which indicatesevidence of a disused quarry with a tomb cut into its face as wellas a protruding rock that had not been removed.

There is clear evidence that the builders of the first basilicathere in the early fourth century went to great trouble to ensurethe correct location of the most sacred site in Christendom.

Even though the pagan emperor, Hadrian, had sought to wipe outall memory of the place's association with Jesus in the early secondcentury by building a pagan temple over the spot, the tradition ofthe Jerusalem Christians that this was indeed the place prevailed,and, to the emperor Constantine's great surprise, traces of the rockand tomb were discovered when the pagan temple had been removed inAD 325.

It has been suggested that perhaps the body of Jesus was latertaken by members of his family for secondary burial in the familytomb at Talpioth. One of the problems with that suggestion is thefact that rock-cut tombs were expensive and only people of meanscould afford them.

It is unlikely that the family of Jesus were sufficientlyaffluent on the basis of what the historian Eusebius relates abouthis close kinsmen later. If perchance they did own such a tomb, thenit would be much more likely that this would have been in Nazareth,not Jerusalem.

It is interesting to note that the only close relation of Jesuswho is connected with Jerusalem later, James, "the brother of theLord", is not among those named in the Talpioth tomb, even though hewas, we know, murdered in Jerusalem in AD 64.

Furthermore, when people from outside Jerusalem were buried inthe city they were invariably identified by their place of origin orby some other indicator, something that is missing in the case ofthe Yeshua of the Talpioth tomb.

Despite the improbability of the arguments being put forward atpresent, the suggestion, however unlikely, that an ossuarycontaining the bones of Jesus was discovered in Jerusalem will beunsettling for many people.

It should be recalled, however, that according to the Gospel ofMatthew a (false) story was circulating among the Jews later in thefirst century to the effect that the disciples of Jesus had come andstolen the body of Jesus by night (Matthew 28:11-15).

Thus, Cameron's and Jakobovici's documentary is a modern-dayattempt to discredit the Christian claim about Jesus's bodilyresurrection. The fact that such rumours circulated did not deterthe Matthean Christians from proclaiming Jesus as the Risen Lord,and nor should it deter us either.

THE DISCUSSION SHOULD, however, challenge all Christians to re-examine their understanding of the meaning of the Resurrection andhow it might be possible to authenticate our claims about Jesus asthe Risen Lord today.

Surely, it was the conviction that Jesus's life had not ended infailure but that his utter faithfulness had been rewarded by God'screative goodness that transformed the lives of the first disciples.Earthly traces were not to be sought among the remains of the dead,but in the lives of those who had been emboldened to challenge theworld's values because of their belief in God's acceptance of Jesus.

"Why seek ye the living among the dead; he is risen, he is nothere?" and "Go back to Galilee, there you will see him as he toldyou" (Mark 16:7; Luke 24:5) - these were the ways in which theevangelists sought to describe the indescribable, namely, that Jesuswas now living his life with God.

The empty tomb stories were intended not to confirm such an other-worldly event for believers but to respond to the doubters and thedespisers who mocked the claims about Jesus.

For the true followers of Jesus, however, the best way toproclaim their beliefs was to live lives that followed the patternof Jesus's self-giving generosity in the knowledge that in doing sothey were witnessing to the new creative power of God that had beenreleased into the world with Jesus's life and death.

As Paul, recalling the creative generosity of the God of Jesus,reminds his Corinthian converts: "For the God who said 'Let lightshine out of darkness' [Genesis 1:3; Ps 18:28] has made his light toshine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of theglory of God in the face of Christ."

(2 Corinthians 4:6)

Sean Freyne, emeritus professor of theology at Trinity CollegeDublin, is director of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at thesame university. His books include Galilee and the Gospels (2000)and Jesus, a Jewish Galilean: a New Reading of the Jesus Story(2004). This article also appears in the April edition of Doctrineand Life magazine. He is president of the International Society forthe Study of the New Testament for the current year, the first Irishperson to hold this position