In a recently published book entitled, The Jesus Family Tomb, co-authors Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino make their case for having discovered a tomb in Jerusalem that contained the ossuaries of personages known to history as Jesus son of Joseph, his Mother Mary, his brothers Jose, Simon, and James, Mary Magdalene and a Judah son of Jesus hinted at by legend but unrecorded in scripture. They present a fascinating story of archaeological discovery, religious politics, ethnographic, geological, and biogenetic evidence, and a statistical analysis of the probability of finding any tomb dating to the first century in Jerusalem that would contain ossuaries with the same configuration of inscribed names traceable to figures central to the canonical or Gnostic Gospels.

Surprisingly, this book has received little popular attention or press, despite the airing of a discovery Channel documentary on the find by the same authors. It is not immediately apparent why this is so. The bibliography and scientific authorities cited include well-known and highly reputable scholars, the writing is lucid and well constructed, the logic balanced and devoid of religious rhetoric, and the possible alternative interpretations of the undisputed archaeological facts are freely acknowledged and aired.

In a world where religious posturing and politicking has become daily fair in the press, the conspicuous silence around the theme of this book seems all the more peculiar. One could easily expect the Christian right to decry the book as the work of the anti-Christ, or cast aspersions upon it alleging some supposed "Jewish agenda" of the authors, or even express outrage from the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community about the desecration of the sacred dead of Israel. Yet if such responses have been published, they have remained essentially under the radar of mainstream media coverage and opinion- shaping.

This may be taken as yet another illustration of how we humans hold to our paradigms, tailoring the data we receive from life to fit them. When the data are too much at odds with the paradigm, they are generally not received at all- they simply don't compute in our consciousness. Perhaps the notion of clear archaeological evidence that Jesus and his family really did exist as recorded in the bible is as threatening to some as is the possible proof that he did not rise bodily from the dead. It is surely not only Christians who have vested interests in these long-held claims, for even much Jewish and Muslim rhetoric plays with such assumptions- or the denial of them.

What neither Jacobovici and Pellegrino's book nor the Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialectic deals openly with is what such archaeological "proof" would do to our understanding of the Gospels and of Christian theology as a whole. Before rushing to judgment that it would prove it all a "lie", resulting in a massive and traumatic disillusionment for untold millions who have held fast to their belief in that "lie", it would behoove us to take a deeper look at both ancient and modern notions of reality and its relationship to the phenomenology of the spirit.

To be sure, if it could be proved that the biological remains of Jesus, his mother Mary, and several of his canonically recorded siblings were buried in a single family mausoleum, located outside of the Old City of Jerusalem halfway to their alleged ancestral home of Bethlehem, it would be considered a stupendous find of Indiana Jones proportions. Add to that constellation of biblical stars the ossuary of a woman identified as Mariamne (the Greek rendering of the name scripture refers to as Mary Magdalene) who did not share the same DNA as the remains in the Jesus ossuary, but whose presence in a family tomb clearly and logically suggests a relationship by marriage, plus the remains of a possible child by that coupling identified as a "son of Jesus", and the mind boggles. It would be hard not conclude that however biased the orthodox Christian interpretation of the Gospels might be, or however draconian the purge of so-called Gnostic Christianity from Church history, scripture actually got a great deal of the Jesus story right. It would be equally hard not conclude that it got what became some of its most central and binding tenets quite wrong. The question then arises, did it do so intentionally, supposing some dire political motivation? Or did it merely subject historical facts and realities to a certain mythologization through the editorial influence of the combination of deep devotion and the passage of time distancing authors from the original events recorded? And if we must attribute this to mytholigization, shouldn't we make a distinction between myth and falsehood? After all, our cultural mythologies often speak most eloquently about what we value most, about what inspires the best in us, and about humanity's innate yearning for transcendence itself.

The essence of transcendence is paradox. Mystics of many faiths, from Teresa of Avila of Spain, to Rabb'ia Basri of Iraq, to Mirabai of India, have eloquently expressed the tension between mortal existence and beatific experience. What can be proven as "historical fact" and what can be attested to as documented but subjective experience are never synonymous. Our Western model of truth and reality tends to be based upon the dual assumption that there is such a thing as complete objectivity, and that material definitions of reality are the only ones that are considered valid. Both are assumptions are flawed.

This objective materialism is a decidedly a modern bias that has little precedent. It seems based on questionable logic at best. Since human cognitive perception is inherently an internal experience of each individual, true "objectivity" is perhaps impossible. Moreover, it is demonstrable that all of our perceptions may be at least somewhat tinged by the paradigms of what our experience and culture teaches us is possible. Until the invention of the microscope, even our understanding of matter was extremely gross and limited. Yet the further science pushes us to examine the minutiae of atomic structures and quantum physics, the closer we seem to draw to the mystics' understanding of a spiritual reality permeating the physical but not limited by it.

When the Council of Nicaea wrestled with the apparent contradiction between the human and divine nature of Jesus, the collective wisdom of the Church Fathers opted to avoid an either/or conclusion. Jesus, they decided, was both fully God and fully human. A paradox. This conclusion, however cherished as a uniquely Christian interpretation, is not substantially different from the Indic definition of the Guru as both a cosmic (divine) principle and that principle made manifest in human form, or the Kabbalistic notion of the Messiah as being an inner potential state present in all but realized only by a few. It is ironic that so much religious debate and discord is dictated by such materially limited definitions of truth and reality focusing only on apparent differences rather than underlying commonality. The question in such dialogue should never be merely "Is this true", but rather, "If this is true, in what way is it true?"

For all its fascination and even entertainment value, I, for one, am in no position to decide the veracity of the claims made by the authors of The Jesus Family Tomb. But by even being willing to explore the possibility of such a find, I think they have done great service to all those who would seek beyond facile answers and comfortable conclusions. Whatever the "historical" facts surrounding the death and burial, or the debatable resurrection of the man known as Jesus of Nazareth, there is no avoiding the "fact" that, like the stories of countless saints of other traditions, the story of Jesus- whether history or myth- has been an experientially real source of immense inspiration, comfort and motivation for countless millions for the past two millennia. What is arguably more important than what may or may not have happened to Jesus' body at the time of his death and burial, is what those who knew and loved him experienced and what they did with that experience to make their lives and those of others better, richer, and more fulfilling. There is no escaping the reality that for many, at least, the experience that he did not definitively "die" has helped them face sickness, loss, torture and even death with a peace and joy they would not have otherwise had. That is significant, whether one considers him or herself a "believer" or not. And that cannot be changed even by a revisionist history correcting the "factual inaccuracies" of past generations.

Robert H. Stucky is the Executive Director of Faith In Diversity Institute.

Copyright © 2006 by Faith In Diversity Institute