The evidence required
Here’s what Darrell Bock had to say when asked a question similar to the one I tried to pose on his blog:
COLLINS: So what would you need to see to tell you without a shadow of a doubt that these are the remains of Jesus?
BOCK: Well it would need to be in a location that fits the location of Jesus’ family. Jesus’ family comes from Galilee. What we have to believe here is that pilgrims came down to celebrate a feast in Jerusalem. One of their members was executed, controversially. They secretly bought a tomb and then put the rest of his family in it. And that’s very unlikely. If there were a family tomb tied to Jesus it would be far more likely be in Galilee than in Jerusalem.
It appears that the kicker is the location of the ossuary. Beyond that is the question of how to explain the founding of Christianity if Jesus was buried, knowingly:
COLLINS: All right, so the location already debunks this theory in your eyes?
BOCK: That’s correct. The location is a problem. The nature of the Ossuary itself is a problem. We have to believe that these people stole the body, secretly purchased this location, had a year to prepare the Ossuary, did it with graffiti-like script on the Ossuary to honor this one who they thought was great and then they turn around knowing that they’ve buried him and go out and preach that the tomb was empty and that his body disappeared along with him.
Still, I am curious about what would happen if we found an ossuary in Galilee which bore the name “Jesus” and fit the time period. Would the statistical probability of the name and its frequency continue to be the barrier to believing we’d found Jesus? In my mind, the statistical probability of a human being having been raised from the dead is a greater barrier…
It will always be, to many, a conundrum as to how a band of fishermen and peasants could create a religion based on a vision, delusion, or fanciful wish (the bodily resurrection). However, human beings have strong default beliefs in the supernatural. That, with their background assumptions regarding the promise of a physical resurrection (grounded in Judaism), is to me, a sufficiently plausible explanation for the way Christianity caught like wildfire in the early first century. The choice is not between a bodily resurrection and a religion founded on lies. No one is accusing the early church of knowingly propagating a falsehood, merely that they propagated what humans had for centuries before them–a miraculous story about god’s intervention in the natural world.