Even the Brooklyn Bridge has its History...

Try to imagine the most startling news story you could think of, say, something like "Elvis discovered alive, and in bed with Jackie O, also still alive, while clutching stunning evidence of Loch Ness Monster and the Kennedy Assassination!" That's pretty good, actually. I wonder if the National Enquirer is hiring? I can do better than "Bat Boy". Anyway, it seems I have some competition in this department as news services the world over hummed with this amazing story this week: "Filmmaker claims to have found nails that hung Jesus". Notice they didn't even have to supply the "!"; you did that all by yourself as you read that.

So the story goes that a very controversial film maker and amateur archaeologist, Simcha Jacobovici, claims he's found, well, the nails used to crucify Jesus. Now, there's an entire story behind this and I'm not going to get into it. If you're going to pursue it, I would strongly suggest reading the opinions of some real archaeologists such as Bibleplaces.blog or A Hot Cup of Joe to see what the real experts have to say. However, there is a secondary, underlying story about this, one that transcends shysters and snake oil salesmen trying to gain riches and fame from the gullible, and that is the world of relics in Christianity, particularly Catholicism. The first thing that usually comes to mind are the many infamous medieval forgeries that produced enough pieces of the original crucifixion cross to fill a forest, and enough thorns from the crown of thorns to fill many gardens' worth of rose bushes, but these are really just the outer peripheral edges of an entire world of physical relics which Christians once -- and some still today -- use as totem-like bridges to important people and events from the history of Christianity. In this sense, Jacobovici's claim is less important to a historian as far as whether he's right -- whether they really are the nails that tormented Jesus Christ -- than that someone would take notice of his claims and try to verify them. In other words, these nails, whether they are what Jacobovici claims or not, represent a much larger Christian history and that makes these nails interesting to historians, that some today -- whether they believe Jacobovici or not -- take the topic seriously.