Christians rejoice: the doubts about the faith thrown up by the discovery of Jesus's alleged ossuary do not hold up to analysis, writes Seán Freyne
The recent announcement in the news and television media of "startling new evidence about Jesus" - evidence that at first sight would appear to put a serious question mark over Christian belief in the Resurrection - has for the most part been greeted with a big yawn.
"Not again," was the reaction of many, sated with these "revelations" about Jesus, which have become almost an annual occurrence.
Yet the internet is buzzing with comments and suggestions, and CNN 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, when the worldwide Christian family celebrates the event on which its faith 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 deceased people were laid after bodily decomposition had taken place) that, it is claimed, contained the remains of Jesus himself and other members of his family. This claim was made in a recent press conference in New York, followed by a programme on the Discovery Channel and an accompanying book, The Lost Tomb of Jesus.
The suggestion is based on the names that are carved, or sometimes merely scratched, on the outside of the ossuaries. While there is some debate about the decipherment of the names, the following 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 and Martha, or Mary Magdalen).
The director of the programme, James Cameron (he of Titanic fame), and its producer, Canadian film-maker Simcha Jakobovici, argue that there is a very high degree of statistical probability supporting the identification of this group of names with Jesus of Nazareth and his family.
They argue that the convergence of such a number of names associated with Jesus in the Gospels virtually rules out the possibility of their referring to some other family, even though some of the principal names - Yeshua and Mariamenou in particular - are quite common in the inscriptional evidence from Jerusalem in the same period.
The fact that there is a Mariamenou as well as a Marya included in the group - especially when it is taken in conjunction with Yehuda, son of Yeshua - raises once more, in the fashion of The Da Vinci Code, the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were married and had a child.
Now, however, this offspring did not end up in the south of France as the medieval legend of the Holy Grail - on which Dan Brown's book is based - had claimed, but was actually buried in the family tomb in Jerusalem.
Even more damaging to Christian claims, however, would be the suggestion that Jesus himself was actually buried with his family, thus throwing serious doubt on the gospel stories of his burial in a tomb owned by a wealthy follower, Joseph of Arimathea, close to Golgotha where he was crucified and the visit of the women to the tomb on the first Easter morning (Mark 15:42-16:8).
It should be noted at the outset that there are serious difficulties with the statistical argument identifying the group with Jesus's family, not to speak of the decipherment of the names. While the Gospels were all written 30 years or more after the events of Jesus's death and burial, they are faithful to Jewish burial customs of the period, especially in Jerusalem. These demanded that the dead person should be buried within 24 hours of death.
In Jesus's case, this had to be done hurriedly because the Passover Sabbath was about to begin at sundown, and the presence nearby of a rock-cut tomb was convenient.
The visit of the women to the tomb once the Sabbath was over was in order to anoint the body, which would normally then be left to decompose in the antechamber of the tomb, a process that normally took more than a year.
Subsequently, the deceased person's bones would be placed in an ossuary, which would then be stored in one of the several shafts cut out of the rock face within the burial chamber for secondary burial.
THE TRADITION IN Jerusalem, going back to the first century, was that Golgotha and the adjoining tomb were located outside the northern wall of the Herodian city, quite a distance from Talpioth, the neighbourhood where the alleged family tomb was found in the southwest of the city.
Today, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre covers that original spot, even though it is well within the walls of the later, extended city. The likelihood that this was indeed the place of crucifixion and burial of Jesus has been increased by the recent archaeological survey of the area underneath the present basilica, which indicates evidence of a disused quarry with a tomb cut into its face as well as a protruding rock that had not been removed.
There is clear evidence that the builders of the first basilica there in the early fourth century went to great trouble to ensure the correct location of the most sacred site in Christendom.
Even though the pagan emperor, Hadrian, had sought to wipe out all memory of the place's association with Jesus in the early second century by building a pagan temple over the spot, the tradition of the Jerusalem Christians that this was indeed the place prevailed, and, to the emperor Constantine's great surprise, traces of the rock and tomb were discovered when the pagan temple had been removed in AD 325.
It has been suggested that perhaps the body of Jesus was later taken by members of his family for secondary burial in the family tomb at Talpioth. One of the problems with that suggestion is the fact that rock-cut tombs were expensive and only people of means could afford them.
It is unlikely that the family of Jesus were sufficiently affluent on the basis of what the historian Eusebius relates about his close kinsmen later. If perchance they did own such a tomb, then it 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 Jesus who is connected with Jerusalem later, James, "the brother of the Lord", is not among those named in the Talpioth tomb, even though he was, we know, murdered in Jerusalem in AD 64.
Furthermore, when people from outside Jerusalem were buried in the city they were invariably identified by their place of origin or by some other indicator, something that is missing in the case of the Yeshua of the Talpioth tomb.
Despite the improbability of the arguments being put forward at present, the suggestion, however unlikely, that an ossuary containing the bones of Jesus was discovered in Jerusalem will be unsettling for many people.
It should be recalled, however, that according to the Gospel of Matthew a (false) story was circulating among the Jews later in the first century to the effect that the disciples of Jesus had come and stolen the body of Jesus by night (Matthew 28:11-15).
Thus, Cameron's and Jakobovici's documentary is a modern-day attempt to discredit the Christian claim about Jesus's bodily resurrection. The fact that such rumours circulated did not deter the 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 and how it might be possible to authenticate our claims about Jesus as the Risen Lord today.
Surely, it was the conviction that Jesus's life had not ended in failure but that his utter faithfulness had been rewarded by God's creative 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 the world'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 not here?" and "Go back to Galilee, there you will see him as he told you" (Mark 16:7; Luke 24:5) - these were the ways in which the evangelists sought to describe the indescribable, namely, that Jesus was 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 the despisers who mocked the claims about Jesus.
For the true followers of Jesus, however, the best way to proclaim their beliefs was to live lives that followed the pattern of Jesus's self-giving generosity in the knowledge that in doing so they were witnessing to the new creative power of God that had been released 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 light shine out of darkness' [Genesis 1:3; Ps 18:28] has made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ."
(2 Corinthians 4:6)
Seán Freyne, emeritus professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin, is director of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at the same 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 Doctrine and Life magazine. He is president of the International Society for the Study of the New Testament for the current year, the first Irish person to hold this position