Word: sarcophaguses
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...crypt of Christ had been found. Their task was complicated by the fact that since the tomb was opened in 1980, the bones of the various ossuaries had gone missing through a mishap of Israeli bureaucracy. Also gone were diagrams made by excavators that showed where each stone sarcophagus lay inside the tomb, and what the family relationships might have been, say, between Jesus and Mary Magdelene, who some speculate may have been his wife...
...child and determines to carve out his revenge, has never seemed so human or so bleak. It's no longer just a Guignol songfest, staring at its creatures, with fascination but not pity, from an Olympian distance above the cage in which they claw at one another. Inside this sarcophagus of a play, beneath Sondheim's cold-steel lyrics, Burton finds a pulsing, mournful heart...
...Neither fact rules out the possibility that the sarcophagus might be Paul's; his bones could have been recovered and reburied in the earlier church, which was built in about AD 390. But not even church representatives, who say that there is "incontrovertible evidence" that Paul was buried at the site, are willing to guarantee that this sarcophagus will contain him. X-ray tests on it have already failed because of a layering of concrete and plaster that still surrounds most of it. And the more than 300-year gap between Paul's reported death by order...
...Church has said that it may try to open the sarcophagus, but hasn't set a date, which is consistent with the preferred speed of both the Vatican and careful archaelogists. If they do, and they discover the bones of a single man whose skull appears to have been forcefully separated from his body (Paul was beheaded) then the scholars will be much more receptive. Carbon dating might at least attest to a first-century provenance...
...Until then, the sarcophagus is a little like your great-great-great-grandmother's precious pearls, which the family knew were somewhere in the attic, and finally turned up when someone went digging. You knew they were there; you found them again. The family is free to believe that they are worth millions; but an objective gem assessor might apply a tougher set of criteria...