Bones of contention
Alison Cotes
February 28, 2007 11:00pm
news.com.au
THE joke has been doing the rounds since I was an undergraduate: "Cancel Easter - they've found the body!"
It was funny at the time, but even the few practising Christians among us never took it seriously. After all, the raising of Jesus from death, the fundamental belief on which the Christian religion is based, has always been taken for granted.
So the latest announcement from James Cameron (the Canadian director of the film Titanic) and his colleague Simcha Jacobovici, that 10 stone coffins unearthed by archeologists in a Jerusalem suburb once held the bones of Jesus, his parents, Mary and Joseph, his wife, Mary of Magdala, and their son, Judah, has aroused near-hysteria among some Christians, but has been greeted with polite indifference by modern liberal thinkers.
One of the most vehement attacks on the theory has come from a Greek Orthodox monk at Jerusalem's Church of the Resurrection. He knows it's rubbish, he says, because for the past 15 years he's been in charge of the Holy Sepulchre where, many people believe, the body of Jesus was placed. You can't argue with that kind of logic, can you?
In any case, the resurrection has always been a matter of faith, not of proof. The resurrection accounts in the four gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, and none of the writers claims that anyone actually saw Jesus coming out of the tomb. There have been hundreds of scholarly dissertations trying to explain the nature of such an unnatural event, and the idea was first brought to popular notice in 1906 by Albert Schweitzer, in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus.
Dem bones, dem bones, did they really rise again? And if they didn't, did the coffins unearthed in Talpiyot in 1980 once contain the remains of the family from Nazareth? And should we take Cameron's documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, seriously, or dismiss it as being as fanciful as The Da Vinci Code?
And the greatest question of all: Does it matter one way or the other?
If the risen Jesus was seen first by Mary of Magdala, then later by many of his other disciples, in what form did he appear? Obviously not in his pre-crucifixion body for, according to the Luke and John gospels, the resurrected Jesus could appear and disappear at will, even morphing through locked doors, but at the same time he allowed Thomas to touch the wound in his side, and cooked and ate fish on the shores of Galilee.
Hundreds of people vowed they saw Jesus in the flesh after the crucifixion, and who are we to argue with them? People often see what they want to see, and one modern way of explaining these apparitions is that Jesus had such a powerful personality that many people felt his presence even after he was dead, just as there are people today who swear that their deceased loved ones come and talk to them. Who is to say that any of these people are wrong? We have no proof, either for or against, that would satisfy modern scientific research.
Why do 30 per cent of the old people who come to Jerusalem every year from Greece, to place their shrouds on the marble slab on which the body of Jesus was laid pre-burial, die within 12 months? What explanation can science give? Faith is a powerful thing.
There is a great difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of theology. We can be pretty sure that a man called Yeshua or Jesus was born, probably in Nazareth, about 5BC. A devout Jewish peasant, an itinerant preacher and healer, he was crucified by the Roman government about AD30. That much can be established by sources outside the four gospels as well as the gospels themselves, and this man is the Jesus of history.
On the other hand there is the Christ of faith, a figure created by the Pauline movement, the divine Son of God who was raised from death and later took his resurrected body up into the heavens, where he reigns forever as part of the Trinity. But there is no historical or scientific proof for this version of Jesus, which is purely a theological concept.
But it doesn't mean that people can't believe in his importance and that of the movement that was created in his name, or that they shouldn't try to live by the values he espoused.
And after more than 2000 years, what is more important: The bones (or lack of them), or the teachings?
Alison Cotes is a Brisbane writer |
