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 the biblical James, in a feature docu-drama airing Easter Sunday (April 20) on the Discovery Channel.

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.

“James: Brother of Jesus” is the first documentary that seeks to piece together the complex story of the stone casket, explaining the background and meaning of the stunning find.

Critics and skeptics 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 kosher chicken during a break from filming a re-creation scene of an ancient Jewish burial 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 grave site. 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.”

The patina over the now famous Aramaic inscription, “Ya’acov bar Yosef Ahui D Yeshu” (James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus), is the key to the artifact’s authenticity, adds Jacobovici. An examination at the Israel Geological Survey determined that the crust that had developed over the inscription during 2,000 years had remained intact. Such a patina would be broken or missing entirely in a more modern forgery.

“And if you accept that the inscription is authentic, then the genealogy of names, `James, Joseph and Jesus,”’ is another powerful piece of evidence, adds Jacobovici. “You had to have had a certain wealth or status to have an ossuary with an inscription on it, and to have an inscription where the brother was mentioned meant that the brother was probably a very prominent person.”

Untangling the story of the ossuary’s journey from its original grave site to a museum exhibition chamber 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 in fact describes that first part of the two-stage process, which according to Christian tradition was interrupted by the Resurrection.

Sometime 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, 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, 48, a lifelong antiquities collector, 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. It was not until recently, says Golan, that he realized the significance of the inscription. The reclusive collector makes a rare appearance in “James: Brother of Jesus.”

Side by side with the archaeological questions surrounding the ossuary are the religious questions that have been raised involving the life and work of James, who apparently died a martyr’s death around A.D. 62.

“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 since Mary was a perpetual virgin, James was a cousin. The Orthodox hold he was a son of Joseph from a previous marriage, and Protestants widely regard James as the biological younger brother of Jesus, born to Mary and Joseph.

Despite differing views of his parentage, 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 film credits 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.”

(“James: Brother of Jesus” airs at 9 p.m. EDT Sunday, April 20, on the Discovery Channel; check local listings.)

CAD END FLETCHER