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.
Satan tries to put down the Resurrection Insurrection again. It won't work this time, either.
Jesus is basically a form of Joshua, so it was sort of like naming him Tom.
The keys to the kingdom were not given to the Church Fathers, they were given to Peter. What the magisterium declares as fact, is fact. What the Fathers thought does not fall under the power to bind and loose on earth/in heaven. The only uniform consensus that matters is between Peter and God.
Since there's no such thing as the "ascension" of Mary, then the answer would be "no".
Fine, just point to where in scripture it refers to Mary not dying..
I watch all those unsolved mystery shows about the bible, and the scholars they interview are always coming up with information they claim is in the bible that I have never seen.
We have to remember the bible has been translated over and over. No telling what it really said in its pure form. Perhaps these scholars have access to old texts that were once part of the early bible.
John
It doesn't say she died, either. What's your point?
I read once that half the women in Judea at that time were named either Mariam or Salome.
It's like finding a set of 19th c. gravestones for John, Abigail his wife, and Thomas son of John and concluding that there was a 9,999,999 out of 10,000,000 chance that this was the grave of the second president of the U.S.
Dumb.
Mrs VS
My point is that far too much Mary veneration happens in the catholic church this co-redemptrix stuff is over the top.
He also failed to speak clearly on the issue of what day to worship the Lord. Yet no mainline Protestant will deny that it's God's will that we worship Him on Sunday instead of Saturday.
There are two things to remember:
1) God chose to bring us salvation a) as a human, b) constrained to human time, and c)vulnerable to human suffering.
2) Christ chose fallible, time-constrained human beings to spread His Gospel far and wide, instead of leaving His disciples a book with "all" the answers and "all" topics covered. If all the answers were apparent and obvious, the Church Fathers were wasting their time having an opinion on anything. The belief in Christ's divinity wasn't decided overnight, nor was the hypostatic union. In God's good time, these beliefs were defined. The same goes for the Blessed Mother's Immmaculate Conception and Assumption. There's no way to point to spot on the timeline and say, "This is where the Church should have defined all it needed to define." That would be ludicrous.
For example, there was a space of time where the Church, was in conflict over continuing to heed the requirement of circumcision. Since Jesus did not (according to the Gospels) define the need (or lack thereof) for circumcision, we must then decide if Paul was simply innovating (since there was no apparent admonition from Christ) or if he was properly applying the explicit teachings of Christ to human reason, thereby coming to the conclusion that since the Old Covenant no longer applied (but was fulfilled), thus circumcision was no longer necessary, nor were the dietary laws of Moses. (It should be noted that he who defined it to the entire Church was not Paul, but Peter, who was advised on the matter by Paul, and verified directly by the Holy Spirit.)
Thus, going back to the very first years of Christianity, the Church was formulating doctrine not just on the words of Christ, but as logical extensions of His teachings, thereof. Because it took many many centuries to formally define the dogmatic nature of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, that has no bearing on whether the Church has the right or the authority to formulate doctrine which may not be explicitly stated in the Bible. If the Christian Church can accept that because Christ was Resurrected on Sunday, that should be the Lord's Day, then why can't the Christian Church accept that because Christ was sinless, He could not have been begotten through sinful flesh?
I think it's very sweet that they found evidence that the one Miriam went by "Mara". We always think of people in ancient times as being very stiff and formal. We don't usually think of them as having nicknames, but why wouldn't they have? "Iosi" sounds nice too.
Catholic Moms command a vast, vast army.
I was just watching something last night that gave me the impression that the Latin "Deus" is something of a contraction more or less meaning "Of Zeus."
Nice of God to leave his DNA like that.
As far as I know, the day of the week we choose to worship God is merely tradition, and is not actually in the bible.
The only time it is mentioned (as far as I know) is in the OT when He says we should work for 6 days, and rest on the seventh. The seventh day is Saturday.
However, because Jesus rose on the third day, Protestants traditionally worship on that day--which is a Sunday.
As a protestant, I consider myself rather conservative. However, I don't believe it makes a difference as to which day we choose, just as long as we do rest at least one day/week, and we worship and fellowship with Him.
Latin has no 'j's either. They used 'io'. And they would have pronounced it as if it had a 'y'.
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