This is an interesting encapsulation of the controversies surrounding the Talpiot Tomb near Jerusalem, which may have contained the ossuary of Jesus. It’s sort of dated but there’s been little progress since, especially since they reburied the tomb.
http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=651
I think this is particularly interesting since we are talking about the people dealing with the body of a man who they considered to be the (a?) Messiah. Wouldn’t they have wanted to have completed the burial properly as soon as possible? And if the 10th ossuary that went missing doesn’t turn out to be the James ossuary, I’ll eat my hat. (An easy bet I’ll grant you, since I’ll probably be long gone at that point.)
At this point we enter what John Dominic Crossan has called the “dark age” of early Christian origins. Jesus died in 30 C.E. but we have no records until Paul, in the 50s C.E., of what the early Jerusalem followers of Jesus, now led by his brother James, might have preached or taught regarding the death of Jesus. For centuries everyone has “filled in” those twenty years based on the narratives of Luke-Acts, and the sharply polemical account of Paul in his letter to the Galatians, but many of us have become convinced that Luke’s creation of a “myth of origins,” and Paul’s claim that his “gospel” was accepted by the Jerusalem “pillars,” (James, Cephas, and John) should be radically questioned (see SBL symposium papers, Redescribing Christian Origins, eds. Cameron and Miller).
My purpose in this piece is not to argue these complex issues but to make the simple point that from a critical reading of our earliest sources on the emergency burial of Jesus’ corpse we would expect that first tomb to be empty within twenty-four hours. And I think we can safely assume that it was.
There is also this very satisfying explanation for the symbol on the tomb.
http://www.ebionite.org/jesus_tomb.htm
Forgive this rough, rough reconstruction below. But try to picture an abstract version of the holy spirit like a dove enveloping the head or symbolic person of Yeshua. The light blue represents a "step" back in the relief and some indentations which do remind me more of a dove.
[img]http://www.ebionite.org/tombrecondove.jpg[/img]
Those responsible for this tomb, assuming that it is the tomb of Yeshua’s family, were not likely to represent a resurrection, even if they believed his spirit entered the Presence of God. Would they use a cross to show that Yeshua was executed by Roman crucifixion like thousands of other Jews? Zias says that X’s on ossuaries were alignment marks, which is very sensible to me. What if every crucified, interred Jew had an X marked on their ossuary? That would certainly make a cross ubiquitous and no longer noteworthy.
To the Ebionites it is (and was) his “adoption” by God and empowerment of holy spirit. Like David, Yeshua was adopted by God to become king in Israel. If it is a stylized depiction featured on this tomb of God’s anointing and empowerment of Yeshua and his dynasty, some present with him in this tomb, then my interpretation is not at all unreasonable. Should it be unreasonable for an Ebionite to understand what the Ebionites responsible for this tomb intended? But to look for symbolism in Christian mythology and the Gentile milieu to decrypt the symbol’s meaning is a mistake. Yeshua had little to do Gentiles, and his mission was in every way Jewish.
Was this the original symbol for “Jesusism” before the much later fish and cross?
That was nearly a month ago!
You must be bored, Churro…