c. 2003 Religion News Service
EIN KEREM, Israel _ The “corpse” is shivering ever so slightly on the cold and gray winter day as green herbs are piled on his naked chest and his toes are rubbed with olive oil.
“Don’t breathe, don’t breathe,” hisses Canadian film director Simcha Jacobovici as he seeks to capture this re-creation scene of a first century Jewish burial ritual on celluloid.
Jacobovici is retracing the intricate history of the 2,000-year-old “James ossuary,” believed to have held the bones of Jesus’ brother, in an feature docu-drama due to air on the Discovery Channel just before Easter.
His quest to unravel the mystery of the origins of the box has taken him from the dusty shops of antiquities dealers in Jerusalem’s walled Old City to ancient burial caves and plundered Roman-era graves that litter both the city’s periphery and the West Bank.
The film is the first that seeks to put together the complex story of the stone box, explaining the background and meaning of the stunning find.
Critics have asked: How could such an important item remain locked away for years in a storage room of an Israeli antiquities collector, and then suddenly come to light? And how can the artifact’s authenticity be confirmed when it was discovered and identified in a place far removed from its original grave site?
“I had the same questions as everybody else,” said Jacobovici, munching a kosher vegetarian lunch during a break from filming against the background of the vineyards and olive terraces of biblical-era Ein Kerem, just outside Jerusalem.
“When somebody says, `I found a shroud,’ I’m as skeptical as the next guy. And this ossuary wasn’t found `in situ’ at the gravesite. But the amazing thing about ossuaries is that they tell their own story. Why? Because ossuaries were only manufactured during a specific 100-year period.
“And if you accept that the inscription (on the box) is authentic, then the genealogy of names, `James, Joseph and Jesus,’ is another powerful piece of evidence,” Jacobovici said.
Untangling the story of the ossuary’s journey from its original grave site to a museum exhibition has something of the flavor of an Indiana Jones adventure.
The ossuaries were part of an elaborate two-stage Jewish burial procedure popular in the first century. The body of the deceased was first anointed with herbs and oils, wrapped in a shroud, and laid to rest on a ledge in a cavelike chamber of hewn stone until the flesh had decomposed.
The New Testament story of Jesus’ death and burial describes the first part of that process, which according to Christian tradition was interrupted by the Resurrection.
Some time later, the bones would be collected and deposited in a small stone casket, which in the case of the James ossuary is 20 inches long, 10 inches wide and 12 inches high.
The ossuary is believed to have made its way from a plundered grave site to one of the many antiquities dealers operating in East Jerusalem and whose shops can be found along the winding alleys of the walled Old City. But while the Antiquities Authority licenses these dealers, the government supervisors have been largely ineffective in preventing the sale of artifacts that have been obtained illicitly by vandals in raids on archaeological sites.
Owner Oded Golan insists he purchased the ossuary in the 1970s from one of three dealers in East Jerusalem with whom he was doing business at the time.
Side by side with the archaeological questions are the religious questions that have been raised involving the life and work of James, who apparently died a martyr’s death around 62 A.D.
“The ossuary has suddenly prompted scholars to take a new look at James and the ripple effect will be felt for dozens of years,” says Jacobovici.
The ossuary’s discovery also has reignited a long-standing theological debate about James’ biological relationship to Jesus. While he is referred to as the brother of Jesus in the New Testament, Catholics believe that because Mary was a perpetual virgin, James was a cousin. The Orthodox hold he was a son of Joseph from a previous marriage. Protestants widely regard James as the biological younger brother of Jesus, born to Mary and Joseph.
But whatever your view, James was regarded as the leader of the first century Christian community in Jerusalem. The first bishop of the church in Jerusalem, he represented a more “orthodox” wing of the new religious faith than Paul and the members of the Jerusalem church sought to preserve their Jewish traditions and affiliations.
That personality has become a focus of interest for Jacobovici, an Israeli-born Canadian and Orthodox Jew whose recent films include “Quest for the Lost Tribes,” a worldwide search for peoples claiming Jewish descent, and “Struma,” a documentary about a Jewish refugee ship that sank in 1942.
“The ossuary forces one to get acquainted with James,” says Jacobovici. “And getting acquainted with James is getting acquainted with Christianity in its embryonic form, when it is essentially a Jewish sect.
“James was the leader of that early sect. And the very fact that he was buried as he was underlines the fact that not only did he live as a Jew, but he died as a Jew.”
DEA END FLETCHER
