3 Ways Relics And Artifacts Can Help Us ‘Find Jesus’

relics, as some call them — associated with Jesus?

Even the most suspect claim of a “lost” gospel or an “explosive” archaeological find that purports to shed light on the man from Galilee can generate a media frenzy, and gives believers — or skeptics — fresh evidence to try to finally win their argument while leaving their foes on the defensive.

Think of the recent “gospel” that seemed to show Jesus had a wife — and she was, of all people, the scandalous Mary Magdalene. Or the discovery a few years ago of an ancient papyrus that depicted Judas as the hero of the gospel story, not the great betrayer. Or, a few years before that, the revelation of a bone box with “brother of Jesus” inscribed on the top.

The argument in these purported blockbuster discoveries is that everything we’ve ever known about Christianity is probably false and that there has been a massive, millennia-long cover-up to hide the real truth. Remember “The Da Vinci Code”? There’s a reason that fiction sounded like fact to a lot of people.

In recent decades, Jesus has been held up as everything from a proto-Marxist to an anti-tax Tea Partier. For others, he is the model of a simple-living, slow-food-loving peasant, or he is a model salesman who can teach you to be successful in business. Still others depict Jesus as a freedom-loving zealot or a detached Greek philosopher, or gay, or happily married — with kids, of course.

But these distortions actually make the quest to recover the Jesus of history — and of faith — more urgent.

Artifacts and archaeology can be a way to take us out of ourselves, to transport us to a time and place not our own, in hopes of discovering something about Jesus that is not filtered through the lens of our own desires.

(David Gibson, a national reporter for Religion News Service, and author and filmmaker Michael McKinley are co-authors of the new book “Finding Jesus” and creators of the CNN series).

The Huffington Post