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

Finding True Religion in the James Ossuary: The Conundrum of Relics in Faith Narratives

59| bernadette mcnary-zak Finding True Religion in the James Ossuary The Conundrum of Relics in Faith Narratives The memory of the righteous is for a blessing. —Proverbs 10:7 An ossuary is a religious relic due to its function in a religious ritual involving the domestic care of the remains of a dead loved one by Jews and Jewish Christians in Jerusalem in the first century. Performed on the first anniversary of death, the ritual was a form of secondary burial in which the bones of the deceased were gathered from a temporary grave and deposited into an ossuary that was then placed for permanent interment in the family burial cave. For its practitioners, the ritual was intimately tied to the construction of memory. As early Christian historian John Corbett has observed, this was a social fact, for ‘‘to gather up bones was to claim kinship with the righteous dead, patriarch or Maccabean hero, saint or martyr, and paradoxically by this act to establish the one so commemorated as a friend of God.’’∞ A material connection to the past, a tangible reminder of a prior religious practice, and evidence of an earlier mode of religiosity, the James Ossuary a√orded its viewers a way to imagine this construction of memory as a religious act nearly 2,000 years later. As denominational claims were weighed with those of the museum, the media, and the academy, Christians generally agreed that the James Ossuary was an object of importance. They disagreed, however, about its value for the present. bernadette mcnary-zak 60 encountering an ancient object In the midst of the controversies and debates surrounding the authenticity of the James Ossuary during and after its display in the fall of 2002, the majority of observers voiced a consistent message: the ossuary was not an object of faith. Cautionary claims and reminders of the accepted limits of the role of objects appeared widely in newsprint alongside the reports of the Israeli Antiquities Authority and others regarding the ossuary’s authenticity . As one religious leader explained, ‘‘Religious artifacts can evoke feelings and memories the same way a childhood photo might evoke the connection with your family. . . . But an object doesn’t create faith any more than a picture can create a family.’’≤ Reporter Marianne Meed Ward, author of a regular Sunday column titled ‘‘In Your Faith’’ for the Toronto Sun, o√ered this assessment in an interview that appeared on November 15, 2002: ‘‘Faith is not about science or history or needing proof. It’s making a decision about how to live your life. Whether a box sitting in a museum actually held the bones of the brother of Jesus has very little relevance to faith.’’≥ A month later she wrote that ‘‘the box neither proves nor disproves the story of Jesus. But the interest it generates tells us that religion is relevant. Faith matters.’’∂ One observer gave this reason for his di≈culty in interpreting the James Ossuary as an object of faith, explaining that there was something fundamentally absent from the ossuary that had been present with other objects encountered during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem: When we were in the Garden of Gethsemane the olive trees are 2,000 years old and you can visualize them actually kneeling there and being there. Essentially this did make us feel closer to Jesus because we had a communion service there and they gave us real olive wood cups as mementos. . . . At the Via Dolorosa we saw the supposed upper room where the Last Supper took place and in each of these places we had the scripture read. In Caesarea Philippi where Christ asked, ‘‘Who do you say that I am?,’’ we read that right at the spot. We took a trip on the Sea of Galilee which was quite meaningful, too. All of this does not compare with seeing a box.∑ Categorically, this observer’s experiences in these places made sense because they enabled him to encounter the biblical narratives ‘‘at the site.’’ The Conundrum of Relics in Faith Narratives 61 Through his experiences, the truthfulness of these narratives was recognizable and so confirmed and contributed to his religious worldview in an intellectual and emotional way; in contrast, as an object unfamiliar and categorically other, the ossuary was incapable of providing him similar meaning. He determined, therefore, that the ossuary ‘‘should be situated in the broader context of other archaeological finds...