Have the Burial Boxes of Jesus and Mary Magdelene been Found? Míceál Ledwith. On 4 March 2007, the Oscar winning movie director, James Cameron of "Titanic" fame, unveiled a controversial documentary on the Discovery Channel. A companion book appeared around the same time. They claimed that two ancient stone burial boxes which they had displayed during a press conference in New York on February 26thmay have contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth and his wife Mary Magdalene, and they suggested a third ossuary in the tomb might have contained the remains of their child. ---------------------------------------- 1. The Lost Tomb of Jesus. 2. Jacobovici, Simcha: The Jesus Family Tomb: the Discovery, the Investigation and the Evidence that could change History. February 2007.
Normally the discovery of an ancient artifact tied to one of the pivotal figures in human history would be greeted with acclaim. Not so this one. If the bones of Jesus were in that box it would pose problems of a catastrophic nature for almost all branches of Christianity. I don’t think they have made their case, but I am delighted that James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici made this documentary and did it so skillfully. Jacobovici had previously directed a documentary in 2003 about another ossuary, which has had a very chequered past, and was claimed to belong to James, who was one of the brothers of Jesus. Most of the reaction to that documentary at the time was "I never knew Jesus had a brother," even though the New Testament names four of them in addition to two (appropriately unnamed!) sisters. As well as providing fuel for the scholars this new documentary on the so-called Jesus Tomb has also provided a vocabulary for many people who do not have the background or education in this field to freely discuss these ancient matters that bear so much on how we understand ourselves in relation to God today. "The Passion of the Christ" and "The Da Vinci Code" did the same thing, each in its own way. Let us look at the implications of the find and the likelihood of its veracity. Since the time of the Apostles the Christian Church has based its faith squarely on the fact that Jesus rose from the dead before dawn on the first Easter Day, and ascended later. If this did not happen then, as St. Paul put it, … "our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.’ (1 Corinthians 15: 13-14).
A senior cleric of the Catholic Church, The President of the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, was interviewed by Ted Coppel on the same night that the documentary was aired. Under some pressure he gamely proffered that even if the bones of Jesus were found in some grave today it would not shake his faith in him. Other churchmen made similar comments over the following weeks. While that may very well be their personal belief, I am not so sure they fully realize that making such statements qualifies them as heretics of the first class in the eyes of mainstream Christianity. THE DISCOVERY: THE SIXTH TOMB OF JESUS It is now almost twenty seven years since these two bones boxes or "ossuaries" were discovered during an excavation at East Talpiot, about three miles south of the old city of Jerusalem. Shimon Gibson3 who worked on the find as a junior archeologist of the Israeli Department of Antiquities (now the Israel Antiquities Authority) states the tomb, appropriately enough I suppose, was discovered on a Friday in April 1980 and that three days were given to accomplish the excavation.
Shimon Gibson at the "John the Baptist Cave." ----------------------------------------3. Now a Senior Fellow with the W.F. Albright Institute in Jerusalem He excavated what was claimed to be the Cave of John the Baptist at Kibbutz Tzuba, 15 miles west of Jerusalem, which was revealed in August 2004 and further excavated in 2006 under the main sponsorship of UNC Charlotte, to whom this picture belongs. Up to about the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD it had been customary that, after a corpse had decayed for about a year, the bones would be transferred to relatively small bone boxes for permanent burial. The bones of more than one person were often placed in the same ossuary. Six of the ossuaries discovered at Talpiot had inscriptions on them and carvings on the wall of the tomb had several chevron symbols, which also featured over the entrance to the tomb, and beneath which more bones were buried. Nobody is sure of their significance.4 ----------------------------------------4.Triangle and circle icons are found in Sumerian iconography in association with the goodness Inanna.
The Entry to the Tomb Construction workers clearing a site to lay the foundations of an apartment complex accidentally discovered the entrance to this tomb. Work was halted and archeologists were given three days to excavate and document the tomb. They found ten ossuaries, or bone boxes carved from limestone.
Inside the tomb at Talpiot The original team that excavated the tomb, included the archeologist Joseph Gat, and the surveyor Shimon Gibson who drew diagrams of the interior. The Israel Antiquities Authority at the time assessed the ten ossuaries as having little importance. Given the number of ancient ossuaries that have been discovered around Jerusalem there is not room to store them all indoors unless they are remarkable in some way, so the Talpiot ossuaries were taken to an old factory site in a rundown suburb of Jerusalem, Romemma, where they were stored in the open. One of the ossuaries (provisional number 80:509) disappeared early on and the nine that remained were stored in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, north east of the Old City. More than 1,000 such ossuaries have been discovered in the vicinity of Jerusalem. THE ‘JAMES’ OSSUARY In 2002 another ancient sepulchral urn was came to light in Israel that bore the inscription in Aramaic "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." It measures 20x11x12 inches. The recent Discovery Channel documentary claims that this so-called "James" Ossuary is in fact the one that was stolen from the Talpiot Tomb group in 1980. Obviously if this ossuary were genuinely that of James, and if it really had belonged in the Talpiot Tomb group, it would greatly strengthen the claim that this was the family tomb of Jesus. But both of those are very large claims.
The "James" Ossuary While opinions remain divided, the Israeli Antiquities Authority published a report on 18 June 2003 which concluded that the "James" ossuary was authentic but the inscription was a modern forgery made to look ancient by washing with a chalk solution. Two of the original archeologists who worked on the 1980 Talpiot discovery, Joe Zias and Amos Kloner, Dr. Joe Zias, former Curator, Israel Antiquities Authority.
Prof. Amos Kloner, Bar-Ilan University are emphatic that the James Ossuary was not the tenth ossuary that went missing from their find at Talpiot. They state the missing tenth ossuary was bare of all inscription and ornamentation as was most emphatically stressed by Professor Amos Kloner, who had supervised the initial excavation of the Talpiot Tomb in 1980. It has been stated by Joe Zias, on 20 March 2007, that the dimensions of the tenth ossuary did not match those of the James Ossuary. It is equally intriguing to remember that Prof. Tabor and Dr. Gibson used to claim that the "James" Ossuary came from another find of their’s in 2000, one valley over from where the Talpiot Tomb lay! Of course I suppose the final nail in the coffin of the James Ossuary may well be that in February of this year a photograph of the "James" Ossuary was exhibited by Oded Golan, who claims to be the owner, bearing a date stamp of 1976, four years before the discovery of the Talpiot Tomb at the end of March 1980.
THE SIXTH TOMB OF JESUS
The " Jesus" Ossuary I know of five other tombs that claim, probably with greater reason than Talpiot, to be the last resting place of Jesus: in Kashmir, Pakistan, Tibet, England, and in northern Israel in Galilee. I suppose you can’t have too much of a good thing! The only person among the documentary makes who has appropriate academic credentials is Professor James Tabor.5 I was intrigued to hear his testimony on the program because last June when reading his new book "The Jesus Dynasty"6 I noted that while giving a full discussion of the Talpiot Tomb he also made a very convincing case for the tomb of Jesus being, not at Jerusalem at all, but in Galilee, outside the city of Tsfar!7 ----------------------------------------5. Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. 6. Tabor, James D., The Jesus Dynasty, 344 pp., Simon & Schuster, 2006. Let us look at the background to the Discovery Channel documentary. THE BBC DOCUMENTARY OF EASTER SUNDAY 1996 An independent film making company, CTVC, was interested in making a documentary about burial customs at the time of Jesus and traveled to Jerusalem to investigate in 1995. They were told that there were 71 ossuaries in storage in Jerusalem inscribed with the name "Jesus", and several that bore the inscription "Jesus son of Joseph." These were very common names of the period, as was the name "Mary." The film makers were directed to the East Talpiot group of ossuaries which they considered interesting since like several of the other ossuaries, they bore inscriptions that included both the names Mary and Joseph as well as Jesus.8. The documentary was made and eventually aired by the BBC on Easter Sunday, 7 April 1996. It created some sensation, most notably in a long article "The Tomb that Dare Not Speak its Name," that appeared in "The Sunday Times" News Review a week before the documentary was shown. It should be noted that no claim was made in that documentary that the ossuaries were related to Jesus and his family and the story soon ceased to attract any attention.
7.Tabor, James: The Jesus Dynasty, 2006. 8. The names on the six inscribed ossuaries fromn East Talpiot as given in the 1994 "Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries" (ed. LY Ramani) and in Amos Kloner's "A Tomb with inscribed Ossuaries in East Talpiyot, Jerusalem," Atiquot, Vol. 19, 1996, are: # 701 Mariamne e Mara (in Greek) meaning "Miriam or Martha" Note Professor Pfann's dissent. # 702: Yehuda bar Yehashua (in Hebrew), meaning "Judas son of Joshua" # 703: Matya (in Hebrew) meaning "Matityahu" or 'Matthew." # 704: Yehoshua bar Yehosef (in Aramaic) meaning "Joshua son of Joseph." # 705: Yose (in Hebrew) meaning "Joses." # 706 Marya (in Hebrew) meaning "Maryam." The name "Jesus" is the Greek form of the Jewish name "Joshua" and the name "Mary" is a Greco-Egyptian form of the Jewish name 'Miriam." Little further was heard of the matter until 2002 when the ‘discovery’ of the "James" Ossuary was announced in the Biblical Archeological Review in the November-December issue. Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archeological Review encouraged the Emmy Award winning producer, Simcha Jacobovici, to make a documentary that would be broadcast on the Discovery Channel on Easter Sunday 2003. The owner of the ‘James" ossuary was Obed Golan, who claimed to have purchased it in 1986 for $500. Golan was arrested in July 2004 on suspicion of forging antiquities, but despite the murky climate surrounding the ossuary that led, among other things, to Golan’s eventual indictment, Jacobovici’s documentary "James the Brother of Jesus" was broadcast on the Discovery Channel on Easter Sunday 2003. The Talpiot Tomb was raised for discussion again in April 2006 when James Tabor published his book "The Jesus Dynasty." It was this book that gave Jacobovici sufficient information and inspiration for a further documentary which he embarked on with James Cameron of "Titanic" fame. A budget of $3.5m was raised to produce "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" which was broadcast on the Discovery Channel on 4 March 2007. A companion book by Jacobovici in association with Charles Pellegrino was published a few days before the documentary. THREE NEW TOOLS Leaving aside this rather murky history, and the similarity of circumstances surrounding the 1996 and the 2007 documentaries, if we examine the techniques used by the Cameron documentary to determine the authenticity of the Jesus ossuaries, several problems arise. The makers of the documentary used three new tools in their investigation: examination of patina, statistical analysis of names, and DNA analysis. 1. Chemical ResidueThe first new tool used was a comparison of the chemical residue or "patina" on the James Ossuary and on the other nine ossuaries from Talpiot. The ‘terra rosa’ soil type of Talpiot is fairly common around Jerusalem so until patinas are tested from all locations where terra rose soils are found, and compared with the James Ossuary patina, it must be concluded that the patina test has failed to prove that the James ossuary came from the Talpiot Tomb. Most damning of all is that the Suffolk Crime Lab Director who compared the patinas denied he had ever said the patina of the Jesus Ossuary and the James Ossuary matched, and that much more testing from other tomb sites would have to be done before any conclusions could be drawn. 2. Statistical Analysis of Names.The documentary makers did a statistical analysis of the names found in the Talpiot Tomb and tried to show only the family of Jesus could have that precise combination of names such as was found on the six ossuaries: Joseph, Jeshua, Mariamne, Maria, Matthew and Jude. They concluded in an verdict oddly worded in a negative form that the odds that this was not the tomb of Jesus would be 600:1. Nowadays we think the name "Yeshua" (Jesus) is unique, but it was not so then. It has been calculated that at the time of Jesus the population of Jerusalem would have been about 50,000 people. It is likely that between 2,500 to 3,000 individuals in the city would have been named "Jesus." In 1994 a catalogue was published of the inscriptions on the thousand or more ossuaries stored in various Israelis collections. One group of six of the ossuaries bore the name "Jesus," and two of the six bore the inscription "Jesus son of Joseph." The point is that all of the names found in the tomb were as common as water. Besides if this was the Jesus family tomb we would have expected to find there the names of his brothers and sisters whom we know. The statistical analysis of the names found in the Talpiot tomb was based on Tal Ilan’s "Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity" published in September 2002. Tal Ilan is outraged at what she sees as a misuse of her work by the documentary. The third new tool used by the documentary makers was an analysis of the DNA traces found in the boxes bearing the names which the film makers say refer to Jesus and of Mary Magdalene. These inscriptions are notoriously difficult to decipher. Dr. Stephen Pfann says the names "Jesus" could be "Hanun," and that the "Magdalene" inscription "Mariame kai Mara" in first century Greek, does not mean "Mary the Master," which was used as a major argument by the film-makers, but refers to two separate individuals, Mary and Mara, both of whose bones were buried in this single ossuary.9 It is not surprising that it proved impossible to recover nuclear DNA from the ossuaries, but mitochondrial DNA was recovered and cloned. The conclusion of the test was that the DNA from these two individuals proved they were not related through their mother. Of course it is a very large leap indeed to jump from that fact alone to say they were husband and wife, which is what the documentary makers assert as very probable. They could, among many other possibilities, have been related through their father and have been of different generations. The forensic archeologist who conducted the DNA tests has denied that he ever said that because the DNA did not match, the two individuals must be husband and wife. "You cannot genetically test for marriage." Many people have asked why DNA from the other seven ossuaries was not tested. Unfortunately the other ossuaries were cleaned before exhibiting and certainly do not now contain any traces of human residue. The bones the ossuaries contained when they were discovered in 1980 were re-buried in an unmarked grave in accordance with Orthodox Jewish custom, so no further DNA confirmation can be done. ----------------------------------------9. Pfann, Stephen J, Ph.D: "Mary Magdalen is now Missing: A Corrected Reading of Rahmani Ossuary 701." University of the Holy Land. So, do I accept that the documentary has shown that the Talpiot find is the tomb of Jesus? The film makers used three main techniques to establish their case. The chemical residue expert at the Suffolk Crime Laboratory denies he ever said as a result of his tests that the so called James Ossuary and the Jesus Ossuary matched, the expert on first century Jewish names on whose work in the main the collection of names argument was based claims her work was misused, and the forensic archeologist who did the DNA tests is far from happy at the suggestion that his tests could in any way be used to suggest the two individuals could be man and wife. So the chances of this being the Jesus family tomb, even going no further than the main arguments presented so skillfully by the documentary makers themselves, is marginally above zero. If the documentary makers were looking for radical insight about Jesus then it’s interesting to note that the true reality of Jesus in fact is far more radical in confronting conventional belief than even finding his bones rotting in a tomb beside his wife could ever be. Anyone who has viewed my DVD "How Jesus Became a Christ" will recognize that that is where I would much prefer to have seen the time and energy placed that was spent on this documentary. If we can pay more attention to what he really taught and what he really did we stand a far greater chance of knowing how to imitate and become what he was. That is the reason why he ever came here in the first place. That is the most sensationalist news about Jesus today, it is very much at variance with the way in which he is viewed by many religions today, and it is an entirely separate issue from whether his bones were or might be in a grave somewhere. It is also why Jesus deservedly remains today a really pivotal figure of human history.
Copyright © 2007 Míceál F. Ledwith All rights reserved |
