Would You Buy the Buddha’s
Tooth?
Candida Moss12.20.15 The
Daily Beast
News organizations were a bit embarrassed this week when a viral
selfie of Pope Francis turned out to be fake. But there is a
history of dubious items—including footprints of the Prophet
Mohammed and Buddha’s tooth.
At this stage
of his papacy, a Francis photo going viral is almost banal. But
there was something different about the “Holy Selfie” of Francis
that commandeered our Instagram feeds this past week. In the image,
posted on an unofficial Vatican account, Francis smiles broadly as
he captures his “first selfie” for the masses. It seemed, for a
media minute, as if Francis had embraced the technological world’s
most narcissistic pleasure. The image
made New York
Daily News, Yahoo, and CNN. But, as
we quickly discovered, the picture is
a fake. And in this respect it’s
just one in a long line of religious forgeries designed to bring
fame and fortune to their creators.
Every religious
group is susceptible to forgers. Whenever you have something of
value—be it designer purses or actual currency—you have those who
will dedicate time and effort to forging it. And artifacts relating
to religious leaders—Jesus, saints, the Prophet Mohammed, or the
Buddha—are in particularly high demand.
The technology
used to create these forgeries varies from the kind of thing your
six year old could do on the living room floor (any piece of old
looking wood could come from the true cross) to cutting edge
science (the Turin Shroud still defies efforts to explain how, if
it is a forgery, it was made).
Many are housed
in museums. A thumb-sized artifact dubbed the “Ivory Pomegranate”
(even though it is made of hippopotamus bone) and bearing a
paleo-Hebrew inscription was bought by the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem in 1988. At the time, it was believed to have adorned the
High Priest’s scepter in Solomon’s Temple and was, thus, the most
important artifact in the museum’s collection.
Then, on
Christmas Eve, 2004, the Israel Museum announced that the
pomegranate was a modern forgery. Those who were believed to be
responsible were, in fact, indicted by the police and the Israel
Antiquities Authority, though there are some who continue to
advocate for the authenticity of the artifact.
The truth is
that forgery is an ancient phenomenon and that doubts hang over the
authenticity of everything from bones of John the Baptist to
stone-encased footprints of Mohammed. The reasons for producing
religious forgeries are simple: power, money, attention, influence,
and entertainment. There are some who believe that Columbia scholar
Morton Smith forged the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark (so secret
that no one but Morton Smith has ever seen it) as a joke on the
academy.
So far as the
Francis selfie goes, the cost to the consumer is relatively low.
It’s somewhat embarrassing to share a fake news item, but you’re
hardly alone. In other cases, however, fake relics cost the
believer a great deal more.
In 2005, more
than 60,000 donors poured $45 million and 270kg of gold into the
construction of a Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Chinatown in
Singapore. A relic as precious as a tooth of the Buddha himself
demanded lavish accommodations, and people were eager to
contribute. According to the official website,
the tooth was found by a Buddhist monk in 1980 when he was
repairing the remains of a collapsed shrine in Myanmar.
But almost
immediately after the temple complex opened in 2007, people began
to ask questions. In a series of articles, Lianhe Zaobao pointed
out that historical records suggest that there were only two extant
teeth of the Buddha and both of those are already accounted for.
Moreover, why had no one heard of this discovery?
More worrying, however, was the appearance of the
tooth. Dr. Pamela Craig, a senior lecturer at the School of Dental
Science at the University of Melbourne who was interviewed
by The Straits
Times, remarked that “there’s
absolutely no possibility that it is a human tooth.” Every single
dental expert who was consulted by newspapers and media outlets
agreed that the tooth belongs to a herbivorous animal, likely of
the bos species. Write
your own joke about vegetarians turning bovine.
In response to
the accusations and letters from angry donors, the temple took out
advertisements in major news outlets in Singapore telling people,
“We should stand firm on our own faith towards the sacred
relics.”
Defenders of
ambiguous relics often point out is that what is important is
belief, not authenticity. Some of the Catholic Church’s language
about controversial religious artifacts like the Shroud of Turin
underscores this point. If people believe in relics, and if those
relics are focal points for religious devotion, then perhaps we can
leave it there. But tell that to the thousands who donated to the
temple in Singapore.