Fascinating story, let's hope it is true. Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith, especially in these troubled times.

wow, pardon our early church ignorance, but we didn't even know jesus had a brother.

although, the box was found in a collection, not in the ground, where we would expect to find most burial boxes, increasing our skepticism.

Actually, he had 4 brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude (sometimes judas, see Matthew 13:55). He probably also had sisters, but they are not named anywhere in the Gospels.

The Catholic church in particular has had a really hard time with this. They cooked up an elaborate doctrine over the centuries that either a) says these people are really cousins (and Matthew was just, I don't know, confused), or b) Mary was miraculously... ummm... "revirginized" I guess you'd call it (I'm sure they have some sort of fancy word for it) after Jesus was born.

Personally, I think having Jesus simply be a part of a normal Jewish family in a normal region of Palestine who lived in an extraordinary time and did extraordinary things is a much more believable, and much more human, scenario than all this "prophesied" and "meant to happen" stuff you get in churches.

There's a whole world of interesting Christian stuff outside of the Roman Catholic Church's twisted pablum. Google up "gnostic" sometime.

The funny thing about gnosticism is that hardly anyone can give you a really clean explanation of what, exactly, it is. The biggest problem is that John's gospel is about this [..] close to being a gnostic track, and in fact was probably the starting point for most of those heresies. So the trick is to figure out how to define gnosticism without ending up including "legitimate" things in the cannon. Not at all easy in this very gray area of doctrine.