TEMPLE ARTIFACTS IN THE VATICAN?

That's what the following story, which is all over the news sites, suggests:

Pope Meets With Israel's Chief Rabbis (The Guardian)

Friday January 16, 2004 7:46 PM

By VICTOR L. SIMPSON

Associated Press Writer

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pursuing his goal of reconciliation among religions, Pope John Paul II received Israel's chief rabbis Friday and assured them of his commitment to Catholic-Jewish cooperation.

[...]

For their part, rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar said they asked the pope to keep speaking out against anti-Semitism, to intercede in favor of Israeli prisoners taken by the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, and to dedicate a day on the Catholic calendar to study and reflect on the Jewish faith.

[...]

Before leaving Israel, the rabbis said they would ask to search Vatican storerooms for artifacts, such as the huge golden menorah that stood in the temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. But Metzger said Friday they didn't mention the menorah.

``We left it to his discretion to find an object that would be important to us,'' Metzger said. ``We don't know if it (the menorah) exists, but if it does and they decide to give it to us, there will be no greater joy for us.''

They were shown manuscripts written by the 12th-century Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides and asked that they be lent to Israel.

When the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D., they took huge amounts of booty home. Legend has it that religious articles from the Temple, including the menorah, were among them.

[...]

The notion that the Vatican has artifacts from the Jerusalem Temple strikes me as pretty unlikely, though perhaps not entirely impossible. One would have to assume that the Roman government managed to hold on to them through all its upheavals in the early centuries C.E. and then somehow they got transferred to the Church after Constantine. Given that the idea of the Vatican hiding all sorts of ancient relics is a major theme of fiction and rumor, I'd have to see some pretty striking evidence (say, the actual menorah) to believe this one.