Posted on 02/24/2007 9:14:06 AM PST by aculeus
In a scene worthy of a Dan Brown novel, archaeologists a quarter of a century ago unearthed a burial chamber near Jerusalem.
Inside they found ossuaries, or boxes of bones, marked with the names of Jesus, Joseph and Mary.
Then one of the ossuaries went missing. The human remains inside were destroyed before any DNA testing could be carried out.
While Middle East academics doubt that the relics belong to the Holy Family, the issue is about to be exposed to a blaze of publicity with the publication next week of a book.
Entitled The Jesus Tomb and co-written by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, the book promises the inside story of "what may very well be the greatest archaeological find of all time".
Some of the ossuaries will be at the book launch in New York, released by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The story began in March 1980 when Yosef Gat, an archaeologist employed by the IAA, surveyed a burial chamber on the south-eastern approaches of Jerusalem.
The area was being developed into the latest suburb of the city, East Talpiot, and bulldozers had uncovered an archaeological site.
Mr Gat found a standard-looking Jewish tomb dating from the era of King Herod, the Jewish king known for his ambitious building works and for his murder of infants at the time of the birth of Jesus.
After crawling into the necropolis Mr Gat found the main chamber had been silted up with soil and debris, with six "kokhim", coffin shaped spaces leading off the main chamber where human remains were housed.
According to Jewish rites, bodies would be left for a year or so to decompose in the "kokhim" before relatives came back to gather the bones and store them in ossuaries.
Mr Gat found 10 ossuaries bearing inscriptions. Some were in ancient Greek and some were in Hebrew.
One inscription said "Jesus, son of Joseph", another said "Mara", a common form of Mary, and another said "Yose", a common form of Joseph.
The authors were unavailable for comment yesterday but it is understood they base their claim that the burial chamber contained the remains of the Holy Family on their own study carried out inside the structure.
The chamber has been closed for years because a building was constructed on top of it but the authors got permission to break through an apartment block floor.
They claim to have found human material on which they performed DNA testing in a New York laboratory.
"Tests prove the names are genetically of the same family and statistically, there is a one in 10 million chance this is a family other than the Holy Family," the pre-publication publicity for the book said.
However, according to strict Christian teaching, Jesus ascended to heaven, so there would be no bones left behind.
Mr Gat died several years ago. His boss, Prof Amos Kloner said that while the names together had "a certain power" they are standard.
"At least three other ossuaries have been found inscribed with the name Jesus and countless others with Joseph and Mary," he said.
The 10 ossuaries were taken initially to the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Nine were catalogued and stored but the tenth was left outside in a courtyard.
That ossuary has subsequently gone missing.
The story went cold until two accounts of the discovery were published by Israeli academics in the mid 1990s. Prof Kloner wrote the second one in the IAA's in-house magazine Atiquot in 1996.
It sparked publicity, most notably a BBC programme shown that Easter produced by Ray Bruce called The Body In Question. However, Prof Kloner said there was no way the tomb housed the Holy Family.
"It is just not possible that a family who came from Galilee, as the New Testament tells us of Joseph and Mary, would be buried over several generations in Jerusalem."
However, in this Dan Brown era, we can't help wondering.
Immaculate Conception:
Luke 1:34-35
Mary asked the angel, "But how can I have a baby? I am a virgin? The angel replied, "THe Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby born to you will be holy and he will be called the Son of God.
Source- The Bible
I am a great partisan of John Paul II but, to the extent that he may have ever said anything that reasonably led you to believe otherwise, he certainly defined no doctrine or dogma to that effect. There are some "ultras" among Catholics who want to believe that Mary is co-Redemptorix. They have been quite disappointed to date and are quite likely to remain so.
Also, papal infallibility was formally proclaimed by the First Vatican Council during the 1850s in the pontificate of Pope Pius IX. Papal infallibility had long been an undefined tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, the original Christian Church. There was no Calvinist anything before God created Calvin, nor any reformation before God created Luther, nor any Baptist Church before it was created in reformation times. Non-Catholic Christians existed from early times to our own. Donatists, Nestorians, Pelagians, Arians, Albigensians, and many more such groups existed within Christianity but outside of Roman Catholicism long before there was a reformation, long before there were Baptists, Anabaptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans, and what not.
A great thing about America is that I may hold my Roman Catholic beliefs alongside of you holding your Calvinist Baptist beliefs alongside others who are Lutheran or Methodist or Jehovah's Witnesses or Jews or Mormons or agnostics or atheists. We all live here and we are all protected by First Amendment freedom of worship and freedom from establishment.
Like all Catholics who believe as Catholics must believe, I believe that Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone is my personal Lord and Savior. I suspect that you share that belief. Someday, I dare to hope to meet you personally in heaven.
I totally agree. Sometimes I wonder if God gets a kick out of our bickering and our human boundaries we place on our faith. It will be a shock to us all when we get to heaven and find out it didn't matter if we wore make-up or danced or played cards or ate pork or worshipped on Saturday vs. Sunday. If we all put more empahsis on just sharing the love of Jesus instead of trying to prove our way is right the world would be so much better. I think that God didn't intend for loving him and following him to be as hard as we make it out to be.
Martin Luter's Devotion to Mary
In his sermon of August 15, 1522, the last time he preached on the Feast of the Assumption, he stated:
There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know. And since the Holy Spirit has told us nothing about it, we can make of it no article of faith…It is enough to know that she lives in Christ.
Luther held to the idea and devotional practice of the veneration of Mary and expressed this on innumerable occasions with the most effusive language:
The veneration of Mary is inscribed in the very depths of the human heart. (Sermon, September 1, 1522).
[She is the] highest woman and the noblest gem in Christianity after Christ…She is nobility, wisdom, and holiness personified. We can never honor her enough. Still honor and praise must be given to her in such a way as to injure neither Christ nor the Scriptures. (Sermon, Christmas, 1531).
No woman is like you. You are more than Eve or Sarah, blessed above all nobility, wisdom, and sanctity. (Sermon, Feast of the Visitation, 1537).
One should honor Mary as she herself wished and as she expressed it in the Magnificat. She praised God for his deeds. How then can we praise her? The true honor of Mary is the honor of God, the praise of God’s grace…Mary is nothing for the sake of herself, but for the sake of Christ…Mary does not wish that we come to her, but through her to God. (Explanation of the Magnificat, 1521).
Luther goes even further, and gives the Blessed Virgin the exalted position of "Spiritual Mother" for Christians, much the same as in Catholic piety:
It is the consolation and the superabundant goodness of God, that man is able to exult in such a treasure. Mary is his true Mother, Christ is his brother, God is his father. (Sermon, Christmas, 1522) Mary is the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of all of us even though it was Christ alone who reposed on her knees…If he is ours, we ought to be in his situation; there where he is, we ought also to be and all that he has ought to be ours, and his mother is also our mother. (Sermon, Christmas, 1529).
Christian tradition says that Joseph died sometime between Jesus's 12th birthday and his public ministry. That would likely have been in Nazareth. So, why should we believe he would have been buried in Jerusalem?
Also, Jesus ascended into heaven, so he left no bones behind, nor would God's son have left a body to be corrupted. Catholic and Orthodox belief further is that after her death, the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed body and soul into paradise so as to not have her body become corrupted. You might say she experienced the rapture already because God chose her to be the vessel through which God's Son, Jesus Christ, came into the world.
Now, since the second paragraph requires faith, I can understand that it may be controversial, but never-the-less is Catholic/Orthodox belief.
Immaculate Conception - is not included in the gospels; it does not refer to the Incarnation of Jesus through the overshadowing of the BVM by the Holy Spirit.
I keep hearing this mistake over and over. In the past weeks I hear the term "Immaculate Conception" used in a comical way to refer to the strange confusion and ridiculousness of the paternity of Dannielynn Smith, and "we all know Dannielynn was not an immaculate conception". The reporters are trying to be funny, but they are being ignorant. They are confusing their terms.
I know it will not be the last time, but once again with feeling - here it is: Immaculate Conception has to do with whether or not Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was preserved from Original Sin at the time of her conception in the womb of her mother, Anna. Sacred tradition says it was so, as to render her a fit Mother for the Son of God, i.e to be the new Ark of the Covenant. Now, whether a person chooses to believe this or not, does not alter the fact of what the doctrine is. It's not about sex or biology; it's about original sin!!!! And, it's not about Jesus's conception and birth.
The thing that made her fit to be the mother of our Savior and God, JESUS was that she was a virgin and that GOD chose her. To add to that risks adding to the good news things that are not even hinted to.
This is just speculation and causes division in the body (church). These traditions(sacred or not) were added to the faith until the truth was obscured and the church departed from the faith handed down to her by holding the traditions to be equil to or superceding the WORD. These traditions started seeping into the church in the 4th century and have not stopped. This is what is destroying the faith handed to us by the Apostles. They were eye witnesses to what JESUS said and did, they wrote down what the HOLY SPIRIT guided them to write and that is what we have today. ANYONE found to have a copy of the bible or any part of it was in danger of being killed by the church(RCC) during the dark ages. We came out of the dark ages after the BIBLE was printed and given to the common folk to read for themselves. This is what also started the Reformation and the greatest persecution of believers outside the established authority of the RCC.
The persecution of bible believing christians by the RCC is well documented. The RCC continues to hold that to believe anything outside the traditions of the RCC is anathema to them to this day.(anathema[Gr. thing devoted to evil] 1. a thing or person accursed or damned. 2. a thing or person greatly detested.)If it were possible they would continue to persecute anyone who does not agree with their traditions today. Read it in their own documents, it is there.
However, there are believers in the RCC today. They are searching the scriptures and following the only authority on what the church is, through the WORD, JESUS and allowing the guide of the church, the HOLY SPIRIT, to teach them what is in the WORD. May GOD and JESUS bless them and guide them into the truth.
Did the find the skull of John the Baptist as a boy?
Did they find the skull of John the Baptist as a boy?
ok
Actually, the Immaculate Conception is Mary's conception, not the conception of Jesus. The Immaculate Conception is, I believe, celebrated on August 15th. The conception of Christ is celebrated on March 25th. Interesting note, March 25th used to be New Years and it is also the day that Frodo Baggins saved Middle Earth by destroying the ring of power.
Now that's a post that I can appreciate -- taking this whole debate and tying it in to Lord of the Rings!
8-)
Carry on.
TS
I pay attention to these things. It also happens to be my birthday.
A fraud on it's face!
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