Not to get all Indiana Jonesy about it, but 12 skeletons? From right around year 0? And they even show a picture of a weathered, ceramic cup?
The article plays it straight, but I'm pretty sure this = Holy Grail confirmed.
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The article plays it straight, but I'm pretty sure this = Holy Grail confirmed.
If the 12 apostles existed, it seems unlikely that they'd all be buried in the same place, in what may have been a "prestigious" tomb. Jesus isn't exactly described as a particularly popular figure in his time when it came to the authorities, and I would expect the 12 apostles would have died at different times, in different places, and wouldn't have been buried together.
The time range is pushing it, too: between 400 BCE and 106 CE, though that's just the roughest of estimates based on when the city was founded and when it was annexed by the Romans, not based on any inspection of the remains. It feels more likely that this tomb was built, used, and sealed up well before Jesus and the disciples/apostles supposedly lived.
Even if we assume the religious fairy tales are true, this doesn't pass the smell test: it's vanishingly unlikely that these are the remains of those men, or that any of this is related to the Holy Grail mythology.
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/where-are-the-12-apostles-no...
Christianity is India's third-largest religion with about 26 million adherents, making up 2.3 percent of the population as of the 2011 census.[1] The written records of St Thomas Christians mention that Christianity was introduced to the Indian subcontinent by Thomas the Apostle, who sailed to the Malabar region (present-day Kerala) in 52 AD.
It was always a point made from very early times that Rome was the church of Peter. As opposed to places like Alexandria for example whose status came from it being the see of a disciple of Peter.
Something else I seem to recall is that one of the leg bones was different -- what would be expected from a Galilean fisherman always putting one leg on the side of a boat to haul in a fishing net.
The final resting place of a number of Apostles is more or less known -- Ss Simon and Jude are in Saint Peter's, Saint Paul is buried in Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, Saint James the Greater is at Compostella in Spain, Saint Bartholomew is in a church on an island in the Tiber in Rome, Saints Philip and James the Lesser have their own church in Rome I think.
Other Christian circles, and a large swathe of historians, disagree on this front. However, it is one of the founding points of the Petrine Primacy, or the reason that Saint Peter is seen as the First Pope of the Catholic Church.
Doubting the existence of the twelve apostles is about the height of obstinate prejudice and special pleading. No serious historian does.
> it seems unlikely that they'd all be buried in the same place [...] I would expect the 12 apostles would have died at different times, in different places, and wouldn't have been buried together.
It is common knowledge that they weren't buried in the same place. They were on an evangelical mission and traveled to different places[0]. All of them were martyred, except for John.
> Even if we assume the religious fairy tales are true
Sad and unnecessary snark.
[0] https://aleteia.org/2017/07/21/whatever-happened-to-the-twel...
So much of supposed 'Christian history' is myth making based on incredibly unreliable evidence just extrapolated from other unreliable evidence.
And things like 'Peter is here' is also far from conclusive. As figures like Peter were venerated by the later church. Just as 'Jesus is here' wouldn't mean its the grave of Jesus.
> what would be expected from a Galilean fisherman
The evidence that that the apostles even were fisherman isn't actually very good. Acting like its confirmed that we know Peter was a Galilean fisherman is ridiculous.
Also a fact like that can have 100s of explanations.
> final resting place of a number of Apostles is more or less known
Mostly based on church internal story (known to be completely incorrect in many cases) and association combined with later finds. Almost none of them have solid historical bases even by standards of the first century.
The problem is that Christian scholarship for 2000 years was utterly dominated by Christians and Christian institutions with a huge amount of believe in Church history. Independent study outside of those institution is 1:100 less resourced and for every issue they have to first fight this Christian status quo. Many 'scholars' of these topics have 'faith requirements' meaning they are not actually allowed to publish anything that would go against core doctrines. How much these are enforced depends on the institution but there are known cases where people got fired. This is still bad now but it was way, way worse 30-40 years ago.
People get their careers ruined over things like this, one professor was harassed at being gay (before that was accepted) and claimed that his research was 'gay propaganda' because it vaguely talks about Jesus sleeping with another dude.
So any claims about this soft of stuff, specially if not done in the last couple decades are highly questionable at best. So I take all of these claims with a huge grain of salt.
Any christian community needs to boost is credibility, and hype up their own history.
And there are plenty of historians that disagree that there is any solid bases for the claim that there were exactly 12 apostles. Even assuming that term had a specific meaning in the first century.
There is plenty of evidence that the very term apostles no is different then historically. Paul himself, literally the oldest source on Christianity we have, disagrees with the classic 12 apostles theory, as Paul claims he is an apostle.
So pretty much every serious historian disagrees that there is a clear cut '12 apostle' that were consistent and named since the time of Jesus. In the oldest document we have of the time period no '12 apostles' are mentioned.
There are so many serious issue with the whole idea of '12 apostles'.
> [0]
That's not a source. The majority of that 'history' is church internal history that has very, very thin bases that actual historians would accept.
The fact is we almost nothing first century sources that talk about this (and even what we have is heavily bias and unreliable). Pretty much all of this history is 2nd century at best (most of it later). And we have plenty of evidence that this is by far a long enough within religions to evolve a mythology.