Joan Bakewell: Why archaeology is an ideological battleground
When science casts doubts on stories in which believers vest their hopes of salvation, expect trouble
Friday, 2 March 2007
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It has all happened before. The story of what might be Jesus's family tomb was first told on British television on Easter Sunday 1996. I know, because I was the reporter who told it. And a lot of trouble it got me into. Now the American director James Cameron is taking up the story. Ten years on, we can expect the world's reactions to be different. But just how different?
In March 1996, I had been taken by The Heart of the Matter's two producers, Chris Mann and Ray Bruce, to a dusty warehouse in the suburbs of Jerusalem where they had uncovered six ossuaries - ancient clay boxes that once held bones of the dead. Back in 1980, a blast of TNT had broken into a typical cave tomb of the first century AD when new apartments were being built in East Talpiot, a suburb of south Jerusalem. The ossuaries found in a tomb bore the names of Jesus, son of Joseph, Mary (in Greek), a second Mary, Matthew and Juda, son of Jesus.
So much is fact. Neither then nor at any point later did we make specific religious claims for these ossuaries. We merely asked the question, "what if ... the body of Jesus were to be discovered?" It was an idea appropriate for Easter Sunday. We called the programme The Body in Question.
I wrote the story of our discovery in a long article for The Sunday Times. Then all hell broke loose. A Telegraph leader denounced our programme as "the latest and one of the silliest questionings" of the truth of the resurrection. The broadsheets ran full-page follow-ups. But we were also ridiculed and denounced across the broader press. The BBC's Religious Department came under pressure from within and without, and had to make mumbling sounds of regret.
Numerous distinguished clerics were asked what would happen if the body of Jesus were actually found. Keith Ward, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, actually declared that "if it [the body] were found and validated in some way, I would cease to be a Christian." Others said much the same. Only David Jenkins, the maverick former Bishop of Durham, said it wouldn't damage his Christian faith. So there were and are big issues at stake. Eventually, news reached the Vatican, which declared us to be deluded and dangerous. Yet all we had done was to speculate on the significance of boxes with names current at that time and authenticated by Jewish scholars.
Since 1996, several things have happened that take interest in the story forward. First, The Da Vinci Code has popularised the idea, hinted at by the tomb inscriptions, that Jesus married Mary Magdalen and fathered a son, creating a bloodline down the centuries. Next, developments in DNA techniques have allowed shreds of remains from the two relevant ossuaries to be examined. They show that the two individuals, Jesus and Mary, were not related, and therefore, it being a family tomb, could have been a married couple. Further, the surge in religious fundamentalism since the mid-1990s means that Cameron's update - produced by the Discovery Channel and Channel 4 - may run into even heavier flack than we did.
The truth is that it is highly unlikely this is the actual tomb of Jesus and his family. There is certainly no positive proof of anything. The names were all common in the Palestine of that era; Jesus belonged to a poor family in Nazareth which would be unlikely to own a rich tomb in Jerusalem; another tomb, actually near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has a greater claim to be the space offered by Joseph of Arimethea. But even speculation is dangerous.
Archaeology has both religious and political significance in today's world. Palestinians believe that Israel is systematically destroying their archaeology to support its claims to have early rights in the territory. There were riots recently when the Israelis constructed a walkway that impinged on the Temple Mount, angering Muslims who saw it as one more inroad into what is sacred to them. It is not the first time this has happened, and it will not be the last. The country is one huge archaeological treasurehouse, and also the point where three great religions collide.
But such spade wars exist across the world. Australia stands accused by its aboriginal peoples of having damaged their sacred sites. Muslim mosques built on Hindu sites risk being torched. It remains to be seen whether the building works soon to disturb the environs of Stonehenge bring protests from druids. Every religion has rights these days, and to claim actual space and artefacts as your own is to reinforce your faith.
When people feel threatened, as religions today feel threatened by the advance of the secular world, they defend themselves vigorously. When science and archaeology make factual assertions that cast doubt on the historical truth of stories in which centuries of believers have vested their hopes of salvation, we can expect trouble.
Nor is it enough to say that science and religion address life in different ways. In some ways they do: religions offer hope of life after death and consolation for suffering before it. But religions also offer an account of how the world came into existence, at whose behest we are all here. Science doesn't have the answers to those questions, but it is certainly exploring explanations outside the Book of Genesis. The confrontation between science and religion has grown more intense since the mid-1990s. And it can only get more so.
