RELIGION WATCH : Memories Matter

Did Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, really wash his hands of the death of Jesus? Did Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, really say, “It is expedient for us that one man should die lest the whole nation perish”? We have only the testimony of the Gospels to go on, and the Gospels are imperfect history. And yet it is distinctive of Western religion--of Judaism and Christianity alike--that such historical questions, however unanswerable, should matter. If Western religion were confined to history, it would not be religion. If it were indifferent to history, it would not be Western.

Israeli archeologists, as reported in an upcoming issue of Biblical Archeology Review, recently discovered an ossuary (a casket-like box) inscribed with the name of Caiaphas. They infer on the basis of inscriptions and other evidence at the site that the bones in the ossuary may very well be those of the man who was high priest from AD 18 to 36. The discovery--made by chance, as so often in the history of archeology--is simply astonishing.

Jesus and Caiaphas were both Jews who lived their lives under Roman rule. Caiaphas had made his peace with the conqueror. As for Jesus, scholars debate whether he was a political rebel, as Liberation Theology has claimed and as his execution suggests, or a teacher in the Jewish wisdom tradition: unorthodox but no forerunner of those Jews who would later rise against Rome. Jesus versus Caiaphas remains one of the paradigmatic confrontations in history as remembered. The bones matter because the memory mattered first.