Author: Joe Nickell
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Price: .95/£17.95
Isbn: 0813124255

The “Jesus family tomb” should perhaps be treated in much the same way as any other supposed relic of Jesus – and there have been enough of those over the years. We all know about the multiplicity of bits of the True Cross, and as many as 30 nails used to fasten Jesus to it. But I’m indebted to Joe Nickell’s Relics of the Christ for various other oddball relics including the tear that Jesus shed at Lazarus’s tomb, the basin in which he washed his disciples’ feet, and the tail of the ass on which he rode into Jerusalem.

We discover that the crown of thorns still appeared green in the 6th century, its freshness being “miraculously renewed each day”. The Virgin Mary wove a garment for her child, “that miraculously grew as he grew and was therefore worn by him his entire life”. A clearly fashion-conscious German cathedral has not only the swaddling cloth of the baby Jesus, but the loincloth he wore on the cross.

Nickell mentions the classic joke about a pilgrim seeing a second skull of John the Baptist, asking how this could be so, and being told, “The other one was from when he was a boy”. In passing, he dismisses Picknett & Prince’s theory about Leonardo’s photographic creation of the Shroud of Turin as “ridiculous” and “ludicrous”.

There are vials of Jesus’s blood, and of his mother’s milk. One does wonder whether the credulous believers ever thought through just how these were collected: “Our friend is dying; quick, let’s get a jarful of his blood.” Or Mary, expressing some milk into a bottle for a night feed, then forgetting to give it to her baby but deciding to hang on to it through his whole life.

Nickell only gives brief mention to my favourite relic: the foreskin of Jesus, or the Holy Prepuce. There may have been as many as 18 of these lying around Europe over the centuries, 11 of them in France and the most famous one in the Italian village of Calcata (see FT44:8, 45:3). The Vatican eventually solved the problem of competing sacred foreskins in 1900 by threatening anyone who wrote or talked about it with excommunication; in 1954, the threat was increased to excommunication with shunning.

It’s all wonderfully silly. So, one suspects, is the Jesus family tomb. Certainly, the evidence for its validity appears about as sound as for any other relic.