Why Jesus’ Tomb?

The possibility of Jesus’ tomb is a difficult issue, if not impossible one, for most Christians who toe the line with various offshoots of Pauline and Johannine theological interpretations of the nature of Jesus that had won out over other competing theological interpretations several hundred years after Jesus’ crucifixion. After all, once a believer accepts the resurrection of Jesus from the dead as fact, then everything else concerning the matter is non-fact even if the evidence to the contrary is staring at one’s face.

Worse, once a believer accepts Jesus as the God, not just the Son of God (Pauline view, which is as far as St. Paul was willing to go) but the very God Himself (the Johannine view, developed in the Gospel of John), then the idea of the remains of God in an ossuary becomes, well, outrageous blasphemy. Indeed, many a Christian reacts to this type of talk as violently as any Moslem who would have no qualms about killing anyone who blasphemes against the Prophet Mohammad.

So how should those of us who are not encumbered by the traditional Christian theological interpretations of Jesus, but still have tremendous respect and love for Jesus, in this acrimonious and often emotionally charged, irrational milieu, approach the possibility that Jesus was a human being, with blood relations, who died as human being?

From the perspective of Christian orthodoxy, which essentially hinges everything on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, as Paul did, the humanizing of Jesus would kill his divinity, thus depriving him of his power to grant grace to his believers. But this is an erroneous view; after all, Christian theological development could have followed a different pass from the winning view, which was extracted at the cost of the lives of millions upon millions of so-called heretics, while still preserving Jesus’ divine nature and, more importantly, his power to grant God’s grace.

Take Buddhism, for example. No mainstream Buddhists believe that Gautama Buddha is the God; in fact, they cheerfully accept the fact that he was once a human being, who had a wife and a son, and who departed from this world thorough the decay of his material body. At the same time, most Buddhists have no qualms about praying to the Buddha to intercede on their behalf, because the Buddha, once freed from the earthly bound and its karma, had become a fully divine being, capable and willing to respond to the need of those who call upon him.

To such view, Christians are taught to retort that Jesus is God whereas the Buddha is not, thus the Buddha is incapable of helping and saving people, but that’s like saying that the only doctor that can save your life in a medical emergency is the CEO of the hospital. It’s a ridiculous view but that is essentially what the preachers of Christian orthodoxy want their followers to believe.

In truth, there are many ways to slice a pie, while still getting the same taste. Much of Christian (and Moslem) inflexibility and intransigence in regard to religious dogmas comes from the Christian insistence that there is only one way to slice a pie, and theirs is the only cut that gives a taste.

To make the matter worse, there are many New Testament scholars and biblical archaeology researchers whose unspoken motive for being in their professions is to defend the Christian faith and denounce and discredit any and all studies and discoveries that do not agree with their Christian dogmas and literal truth of the New Testament.

Can we really do scientific research and scholarly investigations under such inflexible presumption and dogmatic adherence to the researchers’ vested interest? No, and that is why doing clear-headed studies and impartial investigations of New Testament times is like driving a car on a road where all the bystanders are tossing nails and digging potholes in front of your car.

There is no question that some of the claims made by the directors of The Lost Tomb of Jesus seem intended to pander to the hidden history and conspiracy theory aficionados with their overarching attempt to connect the discovery of the tomb to Freemasonry, Knights Templar, and the main thesis of Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code. This is truly unfortunate since those unwarranted claims exposed the entire theses advanced by the film to widespread ridicules and condemnation.

Nevertheless, the film did achieve one thing that was necessary; that is, reviving the interest in this tomb which, in spite of a concerted effort by many biblical archaeologists and New Testament Scholars to dismiss it as an insignificant find, is actually a rather unusual tomb with many remarkable aspects that make it far from an insignificant, run-of-the-mill first century Jewish family tomb.

There is also a troubling report from the Jerusalem Post that seems to indicate that this concerted effort by Israeli archaeologists and other biblical experts to debunk the idea of Jesus’ tomb was motivated not by sound science but by political considerations. In the future postings, I hope to construct a plausible scenario of what might had actually happened in those few fateful years prior and after the death of a man called Jesus, once the son of man, then the Messiah and the Son of God, and finally the God Himself.

Jesus' Tomb Found?

The Jerusalem Post and time magazine report that the widow of the Israeli archaeologist Yosef Gat, who discovered a controversial first century family tomb in Jerusalem's Talpiot neighborhood in 1980, is now telling the world that her husband believed the tomb was indeed Jesus’ tomb, but he chose not to make his view known for fear of a widespread anti-Semitic backlash that the discovery might trigger.

Mr. Gat’s reluctance and fear is quite understandable, for when the Discovery Channel aired a documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, based on the discovery last year, calling attention to the possibility of the tomb being the family tomb of Jesus, there was a huge outcry against the documentary by the Christian community fearful that the ancient Christian belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection was being seriously challenged with archaeological evidence. In fact, if the discovery turns out to be credible, the impact of the discovery might be as damaging to the traditional Christian theology as Darwin’s theory of evolution. As a consequence, the film was only shown once by the Discovery Channel, and Great Britain’s Channel 4 cancelled the airing of the film.

According to the film, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, produced by James Cameron and Canadian journalist Simcha Jacobovici, it appears that there were 10 funeral ossuaries, 5 of which bore inscriptions relating to the familiar New Testament Jesus clan names, such as “Jesus son of Joseph,” “Joseph,” “Mary,” “Jose” (name of a brother of Jesus), and “Mariamne” (inscribed as “known as the master”). The names such as Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were quite common in the time of Jesus, but having all those names in a family tomb together, along with the name of one of Jesus’ brothers, Jose, is quite remarkable, if not incredibly so. It should also be noted that Mariamne “know as the master” matches the description of another Mary (Mary Magdalena?) in the Gospel of Mary, a short account found on a fifth-century papyrus codex, who taught Jesus’ disciples the teachings of Jesus that were not revealed to them while he was alive.

The tomb might just be the real thing, and here is how it could have been.

It is significant to note that an ossuary of James, the brother of Jesus who became the head of “Jerusalem Church” (Jesus Movement) sometime after the death of Jesus, was not found with the other ossuaries. This actually makes sense since James was murdered by the High Priest Ananus about 4 years before the Jewish revolt of 66 A.D.

Immediately after the execution of James, it is highly likely that Ananus initiated persecutions against the followers of James, which probably prevented the followers, including James’ remaining brothers, Jude and Simon, from giving James the appropriate burial in the family tomb. After they had been driven out of Jerusalem, the survivors of the persecution probably never had the opportunity to return to the tomb of Jesus clan, as Jerusalem and its surrounding areas were completely destroyed by the Romans in the revolt of 66 A.D. Those followers who managed to stay in Jerusalem probably perished with the rest of the population of Jerusalem when the Roman general Titus sacked the city and destroyed the Herod’s Temple in 70 A.D.

One question that needs to be answered is, why in Jerusalem, not in Galilee? Jesus clan appears to be from Galilee, not from Jerusalem, and it is generally assumed that Joseph was already dead at the time of Jesus’ ministry. So why didn’t Jesus clan have the family tomb in Galilee, rather than in Jerusalem? My guess is that the clan did have a family burial place and Joseph and Jesus were initially buried in Galilee.

One New Testament Scholar, James Charlesworth, professor of New Testament language and literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, dismisses that the tomb is the final resting place of Jesus by claiming that the ossuary could not have been used by the followers of Jesus because they would not have dared putting the remains of their messiah “in such a horrible ossuary.” I believe, on the contrary, that is exactly what would have happened if Jesus were buried in his family burial place in Galilee by his poor carpenter family, not by his followers.

When James moved to Jerusalem to take over the nascent Jesus Movement (the Primitive Church) by the request of Peter, then its leader, it is possible that the remaining clan members also moved with him. From the elaborate appearance of the tomb, whoever owned the tomb must have been fairly well-off. A carpenter clan probably could not have been able to afford this type of tomb, but James could have, due to his position in the Jesus Movement.

James, some years after becoming the leader of the Jesus Movement, probably moved the ossuaries of Jesus and Joseph to the new family tomb in Jerusalem from Galilee. And as his clan members, such as Mary and Jose, died in Jerusalem, they were buried in the tomb. The presence of Mariamne’s remains in the clan tomb is a mystery. She might have been an unmarried sister of Jesus (sisters were mentioned in the New Testament but not by name), or possibly a wife of one of the Jesus clan members, even of Jesus (Mary Magdalene?).

Why didn’t Jesus’ family tomb become a focal point of Jesus Movement then? My guess is that James never told his followers that Jesus was buried there--in other words, a family secret. Why? Because it was James and his brothers who took the body of Jesus back to his family tomb in Galilee after Jesus’ crucifixion.

If you were James, would you tell? Well, I shall leave that as one of the answers to the mystery of the tomb for now, but it might just be that it is James’ silence that made the Pauline and Johannine theology of Christianity, to which most Christians today still subscribe, possible.