Mysterious bones of Jesus, Joseph and Mary

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.

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."

Baldrick: Moving on to relics, we've got shrouds, from Turin; er, wine from the wedding at Cana; splinters from the cross [gets a sliver in his finger from one of the splinters]; er, and, of course, there's stuff made by Jesus in his days in the carpentry shoppe: got pipe racks, coffee tables, coatstands, bookends, crucifixes, a nice cheeseboard, fruit bowls, waterpoof sandals... (picks up a piece of wood that's partly carved) Oh, I haven't finished that one yet.

Ah, but the enterprising Baldrick missed out on the Holy Diapers, a lucrative little item of infinite supply. But the real treasure was the Holy Prepuce.

According to the apocryphal Infancy Gospels, after Jesus' circumcision in a cave, Mary's midwife placed the foreskin in an alabaster jar filled with spikenard, a preservative, which she gave to her son, admonishing him "Guard well this jar of aromatic nard and do not sell it, even when they offer you 300 denarii". [1]...

"Depending on what you read, there were eight, twelve, fourteen, or even 18 different holy foreskins in various European towns during the Middle Ages". [3] The relic was originally said to have been given to Pope Leo III on December 25, 800 by Charlemagne on the occasion of his coronation; he in turn is said to have claimed that it had been brought to him by an angel while he prayed at the Holy Sepulcher (although another version of the story says it was a wedding gift from the Byzantine Empress Irene). The Pope placed it into the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran basilica in Rome with other relics. [4]

In addition to the Holy Foreskin claimed by Rome, other claimants in history have included the Cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay, Santiago de Compostela, the city of Antwerp, Coulombs in the diocese of Chartres, France as well as Chartres itself, and churches in Besançon, Metz, Hildesheim, Charroux, Conques, Langres, Anvers, Fécamp, Puy-en-Velay, Calcata, Santiago de Compostela, and two in Auvergne. [3]...

The abbey of Charroux claimed the Holy Foreskin was presented to the monks by Charlemagne. In the early 12th century, it was taken in procession to Rome where it was presented before Pope Innocent III, who was asked to rule on its authenticity. The Pope declined the opportunity. At some point, however, the relic went missing, and remained lost until 1856 when a workman repairing the abbey claimed to have found a reliquary hidden inside a wall, containing the missing foreskin. The rediscovery, however, led to a theological clash with the established Holy Prepuce of Calcata, which had been officially venerated by the Church for hundreds of years; in 1900, the Church solved the dilemma by ruling that anyone thenceforward writing or speaking of the Holy Prepuce would be excommunicated. In 1954, after much debate, the punishment was changed to the harsher degree of excommunication, vitandi (shunned); and the Second Vatican Council later removed the Day of the Holy Circumcision from the church calendar.[5]...

Apart from its physical importance as a relic, the Holy Foreskin is sometimes claimed to have appeared in a famous vision of Saint Catherine of Siena. In the vision, Jesus mystically marries her, and his amputated foreskin is given to her as a wedding ring...

Saint Bridget was said to have received the Holy Prepuce from an angel, and would experience "orgasm-like sensations" when she would place bits of it on her tongue.

Personally, I favor the claims for the Prepuce Of Calcata.

At any rate, we can see that Rome had officially promulgated the Prepuce for hundreds of years, insisting people believe in it. Then they repudiated it in 1900 and told people they couldn't believe in it, then became even more firm about it in the Fifties and then removed the feast altogether. And yet, the Calcatans were still parading it around and worshipping it in the Eighties. But then it was "stolen" by "thieves". And so now all these different Holy Prepuces can no longer be found. Mysterious indeed. Good thing the pope has threatened to excommunicate anyone writing or speaking about it.

The Council of Trent was the Counter-Reformation Council. It was convened in the mid-sixteenth century, a little less than 25 years after Luther posted his 95 theses at Wittenberg.

No one says that belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is NECESSARY to your salvation. Whether Scripture contains all that is necessary as to doctrine or not, Jesus Christ gave the keys to Peter and by the Council of Jerusalem of about 54 AD, that decision as to the circumcision of uncircumcised Gentile male converts (mostly adults) to Christianity being unnecessary was made upon Paul's petition to Peter. (Acts).

Certainly, there were those among the early Church Fathers who were in error. The brilliant Tertullian comes to mind. He died holding the errors of UltraMontanism, despite having defined orthodoxy as "antiquity, universality and consensus." I am aware of only one Egyptian pope, Pope St. Miltiades (311-314) and, like most popes, he did not seem to have initiated much in the way of doctrine. He was the pope when the Emperor Constantine decided to accept Catholicism as the religion of the Roman Empire only a few years after the abdication of Diocletian and the end of Diocletian's persecution of Christians and the then pagan Constantine's success in the civil war of succession after seeing a vision of the cross in the sky with the legend beneath "In Hoc Signo Vinces" or In This Sign, You will Conquer.

The putative existence of a variety of heresies among Egyptian Church Fathers no more proves the inerrancy of Scripture (which ought to be conceded in its own right) than it could possibly prove the errors of popes none of whom were Egyptian Early Church Fathers. By analogous logic, does one reject the possibility of Christian orthodoxy in doctrine because of the reformation which began nearly 1500 years after the sacrifice of the cross and then metastacized into thousand of distinct "churches" each with its own notions to distinguish it from the others. This observation does not disprove the reformation but it also does not recommend it as a source of theological truth or orthodoxy either.

Again, it was the First Vatican Council of the mid-19th century that formally declared and defined papal infallibility and not Pope Pius IX (with the incomparable nickname Pope Pio NoNo). Neither John Paul II nor any other pope (including Pius XI) has ever defined Mary as Co-Redemptorix. She cannot be Co-Redemptorix and the confusion probably results from remarks as to her acceptance of her virgin maternity of Jesus Christ.

The reason that many Protestants have trouble with this stuff is that many are ever prepared to believe the worst about Catholicism. We Catholics certainly have our disagreements with the children of the reformation. We need not go out of our respective ways to find more. If Catholics have a weak grasp of the history of the reformation, then it is at least equally true that the reformed do not grasp the history of the Catholic Church.

You may have noticed a previous post whose author I have forgotten who posted that Jesus Christ must have been the Son of God because He could not be sinless (in the sense of Original Sin) as a Son of a descendant of Adam (through whom He would have had Original Sin). Made sense to me although God is wonderful and can do anything. Is it not equally obvious that Jesus's mother would be without Original Sin also. Therefore the Catholic tradition, eventually made dogmatic by Pius IX after Mary's apparition to St. Bernadette Soubarous at Lourdes, that Mary was conceived without the taint of Original Sin by Divine Intervention and protection at her conception. You may not believe it but it is neither necessary to your salvation nor a particularly difficult act by an omnipotent God desiring a perfect vessel through whom to send His Son to us.

It would also be consistent with several other traditional Catholic beliefs as to Mary which (to the best of my knowledge) have not been formally defined as dogma. Since pain in childbirth was a wage of Original Sin and since death was also a wage of Original Sin, many believe that an immaculately conceived Mary would have suffered no tribulation in the birth of Jesus and would have, at most, fallen asleep rather than died (this is known as the Dormition of Mary).

We who are Catholics are not the only Christians who have "traditions of men" as you may call them. There are a lot of traditions of reformed men and women as to the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Not all of them are true but they are the tradition of the reform nonetheless. None of this is to make fun of you or of your beliefs. I have no doubt that you believe what you believe as sincerely as I believe what I believe and that our God, nonetheless, loves each of us at least as much as we each love Him.

In any event, what I believe and what you believe are much more consistent (90-95%) than either of us is in the habit of saying. We ought not fight one another publicly on the 5-10% for the entertainment of our mutual enemies and those of our God (enemies who produce Discovery Channel programming suggesting that He did not rise from the dead, as Scripture teaches us both; that Dan Brown and not the Gospels have the truth that Mary Magdelene was NOT married to Jesus Christ NOR that any child Judah or otherwise was born to them; that Mary, assuming, as you might, that she was buried anywhere, was buried not at Ephesus in Turkey where she lived with John the Evangelist bu at Jerusalem's suburbs much less with the body of Jesus Christ, etc.).

Please do not regard my occasional historical corrections (such as the century of Trent) as hostile. Any perceived offense from me to you is not intentional but a fault of this fallen human that I am.

We are separated brethren in Christ. I think that Scripture teaches that we will know the Christians as those who love one another. Let us prove Scripture, here and everywhere, now and ever.

God bless you and yours.

No one says that belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is NECESSARY to your salvation.

I think the pope does. At any rate, this is part of the Protestant frustration with Catholicism. It is all these different inconsequential matters, some spurious, that must be discussed endlessly. Or that assume an important role in faith and doctrine and the ceremonial life of the church. If they are not essential, they should be pared away. There is also a certain Protestant instinct against any tendency that detracts from the work and glory of our Savior, against anything that detracts from His central place in our spiritual life. I would say, however, that Catholics do not neglect the Father. When you observe many Protestant and evangelical churches, you see an overwhelming enthusiasm for the Son and rarely a mention of the Father. Knowing you over the years at FR, I know that you do understand these matters well, no less than a serious and devout Protestant would.

By analogous logic, does one reject the possibility of Christian orthodoxy in doctrine because of the reformation which began nearly 1500 years after the sacrifice of the cross and then metastacized into thousand of distinct "churches" each with its own notions to distinguish it from the others. This observation does not disprove the reformation but it also does not recommend it as a source of theological truth or orthodoxy either.

The Reformation is best understood as a mostly successful attempt to return to those doctrines, based on scripture, known throughout the ancient churches. It relied heavily upon that titan of theology, Augustine. It explicitly rejected much of the corruption that had grown up around the Roman hierarchy. The Reformation had no problem with simple believers of Christ, they reserved their condemnation for those who had abandoned the humble role of shepherd for more worldly ways. In that sense, the Reformation was a back-to-basics movement. Naturally, given the bloodshed and the passions involved, it regrettably acquired a life of its own on both sides, a bad influence on both for centuries.

As for a 'revival' of ancient practices, one might point to the establishment in the American colonies of the practice of the ancient Greek democratic republics as a form of government and somehow suggest that the span of time involved casts some doubts upon its legitimacy. But that would also not be true. I'm not expressing it well but I'm sure you take my meaning.

Neither John Paul II nor any other pope (including Pius XI) has ever defined Mary as Co-Redemptorix.

But they gave her that title publicly.

Therefore the Catholic tradition, eventually made dogmatic by Pius IX after Mary's apparition to St. Bernadette Soubarous at Lourdes, that Mary was conceived without the taint of Original Sin by Divine Intervention and protection at her conception. You may not believe it but it is neither necessary to your salvation nor a particularly difficult act by an omnipotent God desiring a perfect vessel through whom to send His Son to us.

If it is not necessary to salvation, why contend for the doctrine? As for the necessity that Mary be immaculate, it would mean that Jesus' mother was not fully human, as human as any other woman. Therefore, you have robbed Him of His full humanity. As you know, He did glory in the title Son of Man as much as Son of God. As the disputes over ancient heresy show so clearly, nothing can be allowed to rob Him of either His full humanity or His full divinity. To ascribe to His mother any particular merit over any other woman does, in fact, diminish Him as a man and leads toward the varieties of heresy in which He is considered to be a god who merely appeared to wear human flesh. I'm sure you know about these ancient heresies and the terrible controversies they led to.

It would also be consistent with several other traditional Catholic beliefs as to Mary which (to the best of my knowledge) have not been formally defined as dogma. Since pain in childbirth was a wage of Original Sin and since death was also a wage of Original Sin, many believe that an immaculately conceived Mary would have suffered no tribulation in the birth of Jesus and would have, at most, fallen asleep rather than died (this is known as the Dormition of Mary).

Scripture does not mention she had a painless childbirth or that she merely fell asleep and disappeared into thin air (not that that is consistent with the account of Juvenal posted earlier). Moreover, if she did not experience pain in childbirth, then she was not truly a woman, again her own supernatural nature would detract from Jesus' own divinity and humanity. I would note that the Gospel accounts uniformly describe the miraculous events of her life consistently and in detail and yet they omit a painless birth. Beyond that, if you did prefer to believe her childbirth was painless, it would be as simple to posit that God Himself granted that to her instead of somehow suggesting that His creation of her as a unique and sinless creature was required to achieve the outcome of painless childbirth. Probably what makes a non-Catholic so resistant to these ideas is that the New Testament speaks consistently of Mary and Joseph and Jesus but never in the terms of Mary or Joseph being other than an ordinary young married couple who experienced a few very startling miracles surrounding the birth of their first child, who was the Son of God.

We who are Catholics are not the only Christians who have "traditions of men" as you may call them. There are a lot of traditions of reformed men and women as to the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

Tell me about it. Even in the Baptist tradition, with our emphasis on very simple and largely non-ornamental buildings, there is a creeping tendency to constantly embellish and distract with frivolities from the worship of Christ and Him alone. Our history is to hold these things in check but you notice the creeping tendency. It is not difficult for us to understand why the church of Rome ended up with so many problems after so many centuries, so many different challenges in so many different places.

In any event, what I believe and what you believe are much more consistent (90-95%) than either of us is in the habit of saying. We ought not fight one another publicly on the 5-10% for the entertainment of our mutual enemies and those of our God.

Actually, I believe it does no harm and can do a lot of good. It is more likely that dispute can cause people to question what they believe and lead them to look for more answers and substance. The greatest problems faced in modern churches are people who attend and call themselves Christians but really have no idea of what they actually believe or why they believe it. Nor do they look at the available history to confirm what they believe. So I think debate, kept reasonably polite, may be good for the faith. Naturally, being polite doesn't mean that theology isn't a bloodsport so the audience should be cautious. So theology has a danger that it may become too careless or disruptive but it is probably more dangerous, especially in the modern era, to sit back in your pew complacently, not knowing or caring what you believe or upon what basis you believe in particular doctrine.

Please do not regard my occasional historical corrections (such as the century of Trent) as hostile.

Not at all.

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