Resurrecting the Brother of Jesus: The James Ossuary Controversy and the Quest for Religious Relics

Epilogue: Objects, Faith, and Archaeoporn

207| ryan byrne & bernadette mcnary-zak Epilogue Objects, Faith, and Archaeoporn Six years after its display in Toronto, the James Ossuary phenomenon remains a unique case study for scholars of religion, a cautionary tale for archaeologists, and a point of contention among some faith communities. What makes ossuaries resonant as artifacts with potential religious power or insight is not merely the fact that many bear biblical names from the biblical period. It is the possibility, however remote, that these are tangible , accessible objects with the prospects of housing the literal human remains of biblical characters. It is the body, or what the body once touched, that tantalizes the imagination of the faithful. And so on one hand, we see in the sensational merchandising of these artifacts a new kind of titillating exploitation of the body, which Byron McCane has dubbed ‘‘archaeoporn.’’∞ On the other hand, we see resistance from some religious sectors to construct a relationship between faith and physical evidence by embracing the body or its repository as a substitute or even catalyst for spiritual enrichment. This recurring intersection with the material body perhaps reached its crescendo with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code precisely because it centered on the secreted tale of a Jesus whose body was neither crucified nor resurrected, a Jesus whose body went on to procreate a human line of descent that stripped that body of all the trappings of divinity so intertwined with Christian tradition.≤ Although a work of fiction, this novel also pushed certain buttons among communities of byrne & mcnary-zak 208 faith, who took umbrage at the liberties an author would take with the necessary narrative of the body through whose biblically reported fate laid the foundation for traditions of human salvation. In spite of its controversial premise, or perhaps because of it, The Da Vinci Code dominated the New York Times best-seller list for more than two years.≥ Brown had clearly tapped into popular cultural curiosities bubbling beneath the surface. In a multimedia circus, which one might consider a sequel of sorts to the Da Vinci phenomenon, a carefully orchestrated commercial blitz filled the airwaves and Internet with news of the discovery of a tomb in the neighborhood of Talpiot in Jerusalem.∂ Funded by Hollywood producer James Cameron, the documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, who had created the 2003 film James: Brother of Jesus, Holy Relic or Hoax? for the Discovery Channel, presented a new investigative film claiming that the sensational artifacts inside the Talpiot tomb allegedly included the ossuaries of none other than Jesus of Nazareth, his wife, and children. A Jesus encased in an ossuary meant no resurrection of the body. A nuclear family interment meant a pedestrian human life ending with a conventional human burial and secondary burial. It was The Da Vinci Code all over again, except this time the argument did not rest upon the fictional speculations of a former high school teacher but upon the material results of an archaeological excavation conducted with scientific controls in the early 1980s. To accompany the documentary, on February 27, 2007, Jacobovici and coauthor Charles Pellegrino released a popular book, The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History, detailing the results of their research.∑ This reawakened interest in another book, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity, by James Tabor, a biblical archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.∏ Tabor focused his interests on the ten ossuaries discovered in the Talpiot tomb. The inscriptions and placement of the ossuaries, as well as the location of the tomb, led Tabor to argue that this was the family tomb of Jesus and the original site of the James Ossuary, which had mysteriously disappeared only to make its way into Oded Golan’s hands, presumptively via the black market. When the Discovery Channel aired Jacobovici’s sixty-minute docudrama , The Lost Tomb of Jesus, on March 4, 2007, viewers were treated to portions of the investigation, selective (and sometimes misleading) representations of scholarly commentary, historical reenactments, and the insinuation that although the Talpiot tomb had been excavated more than a Epilogue 209 quarter-century earlier (complicating media headlines of Cameron or Jacobovici having ‘‘discovered’’ much of anything) and published more than a decade earlier, there was still something fishy about its relative obscurity in the public...