[Askel5]

I don't discount for a moment the notion members of the hierarchy or Vatican officials themselves could be disingenous.

But it's virtually impossible to do so in a public statement (save where some radical's doing their best to twist words as he sees feit). And it's particularly unlikely on this issue, that's all.

It's hard to believe the early Church would have inherited (with no fanfare or mention by historians) a relic like that from the Romans who'd persecuted them for centuries.

And it's true that the curators of the Vatican are probably the world's most impeccably precise librarians on the planet.

[Verginius Rufus]

Yes, it is unlikely the object was still around centuries after the sack of Jerusalem, when the Roman government began to favor the Catholic Church. Besides that, Rome was sacked by the Goths in 410 and by the Vandals in 455, so anything valuable may have been carted off on one of those occasions.

[Antoninus]

It's hard to believe the early Church would have inherited (with no fanfare or mention by historians) a relic like that from the Romans who'd persecuted them for centuries.

Spoils of war were traditionally stored in pagan temples such as the Temple of Vesta, Mars Ultor, or Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the various Roman fora. The Church began appropriating temples and cleansing them of their idols after the reign of Constantine in the 4th century, but I don't recall ever reading that the Church took control of any of the big temples in the Forum before Alaric arrived in 410.

My guess is that the Menorah was spirited away either by Alaric and hidden somewhere (still to be found??), or by Gaiseric and his Vandals in AD 455. If the latter, it probably exists in the form of Byzantine coinage from the 6th century.