Joe Nickell, Relics
of the Christ (The University Press of Kentucky, 2007)
Reviewed by Robert M.
Price.
What
are relics and why are they important? They are material remains of holy
people of the past, figures of any religion, though Nickell is
interested here in Christian relics, particularly those related to the
life of Jesus of Nazareth. The best, most valued relics are fragments of
the bodies of biblical and early Christian heroes and saints (or Old
Testament prophets). Slightly less holy, but still quite venerable, are
objects which have come in contact with those holy bodies, especially
clothing. Since these remain out of the reach of personal possession,
belonging to churches, there are lower-tier relics (available in the
lobby), too, namely, objects having come in contact with relics of
either of the first two types. That’s what they are.
Why are they important? To
believers, their importance lies in providing a tangible link with the
Holy as revealed in past history. Relics are like tell-tale vestiges of
a dream, proving after all, that it was no mere dream, as when Fred
Gaily and Doris Walker find what seems to be Kris Kringle’s cane in the
dream house little Suzy requested from him for Christmas (Miracle on
34th Street). Even so, a relic is supposed to be tangible
proof that divine revelation occurred in the very same historical
time-stream in which the believer lives, not some storybook realm of
fantasy. Understandably, believers hold tenaciously to such
life-preservers of faith. Moreover, these vestiges are supposed to serve
as channels for the contagious holiness of that past to travel along to
reach the present for those who own or can at least touch the relics.
This reduces the relic to a fetish or a rabbit’s foot.
Joe Nickell, intrepid
investigator of all things alleged to be paranormal, has in this
beautifully written and produced volume, gone to a good deal of trouble
to investigate great numbers of relics housed all over the Christian
world. He is thus much like the crowds of pious pilgrims among whom he
moves in shrine after shrine. Only, whereas the others come seeking the
relic as an answer, Nickell is approaching each relic as a question
which he hopes to answer. He knows that there is nothing holier than the
truth, and that is always his grail. And, like Perceval, he usually
finds it.
Many of us inhabit
worldviews in which relics exist only as a variation on Ripley’s
Believe It or Not, a side show, a curiosity shop filled with quaint
and amusing fakes. But it is a mistake to leave it at that, for relics
still possess a power that they have always possessed. They are tokens
of authority contested by rivals for power. In this respect they have
everything in common with apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Peter Brown,
in his classic The Cult of the Saints, shows how the veneration
of martyrs took the form of worship services at their gravesites or
inside their mausoleums, usually out in the countryside. These shrines
and their attendants were rivals of the metropolitan churches and their
bishops. The saints’ shrines were competing loci of sacred power and
therefore of financial and religious clout. Just as itinerant holy men
were dangerous loose canons uncontrollable by the staid bishops of
settled churches, even in death the saints’ charisma threatened to
outweigh that of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy in the cities. The
bishops’ solution was to exhume and re-inter the relics in new shrines
within the city walls and therefore within their own jurisdiction.
(Again, that remains the issue as to whether the Church will officially
recognize particular Marian apparitions today. Should they endorse and
thus co-opt the borderline-sectarian devotion rendered to the local
Mary-avatars? Or would that be to risk the institution’s credibility
depending on what happens there?)
For churches to house
saints’ relics is to claim their clout. It is a poor man’s version of
being able to claim that this or that apostle founded one’s church.
While such claims mean less and less in the modern church world, the
relics that continue to claim the headlines still function as religious
authority anchors. The most obvious is the Shroud of Turin, long ago
debunked but still defended by Quixotic “sindonologists” who will brook
no interference from pesky laws of physics. In The Relics of the
Christ Joe Nickell reenters the lists, staking the vampire Shroud
image yet again, refuting the latest, even more ludicrous
pseudo-scientific claims made on its behalf by the desperate, who do not
seem to realize that what they thought was a weapon for the defense of
the resurrection is now itself in need of at least as much defense. The
even more recent Ossuary of James, which some hawked as proof at least
of an historical Jesus, is more than a (supposed) historical artifact.
It would actually function as a relic anchoring more conservative views
of Christian Origins. It, too, has been debunked, as one may read in
these pages, but it still has its unbowed defenders engaged in acrobatic
maneuvers of cognitive dissonance reduction.
As a New Testament critic,
I recognize that what Joe Nickell is doing in this book is closely
parallel to the work we are doing in the Jesus Project and the Jesus
Seminar. For you see, the many sayings attributed to Jesus in the
gospels were ascribed to him precisely to provide more authority than
that carried by their real and anonymous authors. In short, the gospel
“Jesus” sayings are already relics vying with one another (and with the
sayings of lesser mortals) for authority, to be listened to and obeyed
by more Christians. As Bultmann and his successors exploded bogus claims
of dominical authority for the sake of which millions of clergy had
always quoted these sayings, so does Joe Nickell debunk the claims of
those who would wield solid, three-dimensional relics for the same
purpose.