So if this freakishly does turn out to be the actual remains of John the Baptist1 then all of those Knights Templar who paid homage to John’s severed head were just kidding themselves?
Poor Templars.
I don’t buy any of it incidentally. You know as well as i that the Byzantines and Crusaders robbed graves incessantly, creating new relics. Very profitable. Sure, the bones are of Near Eastern origin
from the appropriate era. A lot of people lives and died in that time and place. Sometimes an appropriate grave was robbed through sheer circumstance.
It’ll be fun to see what mtDNA haplogroup this is though. “…a group most commonly found in the Near East.” Tell us more. The science here seems most precise.2
That National Geographic funded this raises red flags. Remember the James bones a few years ago?
This seems like a study made-for-sensationalized-TV. They should do a series on the practice of and impulse behind relic veneration tout court, informed by Feuerbach, Junger, and Augustine and covering Buddhist relic veneration, prehistoric burial practices, Kutna Hora, and african muti practices along with an examination of the medieval and modern relic forgery markets. In many ways, the facts about the bones themselves are the least interesting things here.
Imagine an interview with a modern grave-robber/goldsmith who forges filigreed armbones and releases them into the market. Link this to art forgery and Gaddis’s “The Recognitions”. Imagine a close reading of Junger’s “Aladdin’s Problem” (complete with dramatic reenactments and interviews with various talking heads about the ideas it contains). Imagine an episode on the Basilica di San Marco and the bones in its reliquaries (which are easily viewed by even the most buffoonish tourist for something like 3 euros), complete with Teshigihara-style shots of the basilica and scored by Takemitsu or Webern. Hell, Svankmajer already shot Kutna Hora. Buy the rights to it and cut it into an episode on monastic charnel houses all over the world!
People are doing TV wrong!!!
Well said. That comment deserves to be the actual post.
It’s been revealed the mtDNA is J1c2, which is relatively common throughout Europe. In no way does this place the remains as uniquely originating in Near East.
Which gets to your point in the post about the absurdity of trying to “prove” that the relic is genuine or to “prove” that it is spurious, while the real motive is sensationalist.
As you said, even if the bones were somehow pinpointed to the exact place and time, many people lived and died in those days.