Several of the ossuaries in the tomb contained the bones of more than one body. One ornately decorated limestone ossuary held the remains of six different individuals. Five of the bone sets contained within it were from an adult woman, a teenage boy, a young child, and two infants, but one set was from a man thought to have been about sixty years old when he died. It is this set of bones that has been tentatively identified as those of Caiaphas of the New Testament. An inscription incised two times on the outside of the stone box, “Yehosef bar Qafa” and “Yehosef bar Qayafa,” can be translated as Aramaic variations on the Greek words “Joseph, son of Caiaphas” or perhaps even “Joseph, of the family Caiaphas.”
The Roman historian Josephus says that Caiaphas’ full name was Joseph Caiaphas, but that he was commonly referred to simply as Caiaphas—“Joseph, who was also called Caiaphas, of the high priesthood” (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.2.2,18.4.3). Thus, the Joseph named in the ossuary inscription may be Caiaphas of the New Testament. However, this identification is by no means conclusive, for bodies could frequently be switched around in antiquity and even placed into ossuaries not originally meant for them.
Still, if this is the body of Caiaphas, he would be one of the few individuals described in the New Testament whose physical remains have been identified by archaeologists. Such individuals are surprisingly rare, so this discovery is more significant than it would be if the ossuary were uninscribed and the individual inside were unidentified. At the very least, if it is Caiaphas, the discovery would confirm that the people who play a role in the stories of the New Testament were real and not fictitious.
Even some of the most important people from the New Testament, such as John the Baptist, have left behind few traces of their existence. Thus, there was tremendous public interest when Shimon Gibson, a British archaeologist based in Jerusalem, announced that he had found a cave associated with John the Baptist. Gibson set out his evidence in a book titled The Cave of John the Baptist: The Stunning Archaeological Discovery that has Redefined Christian History (2004).
Gibson had found pictures of a man with a staff, a dog, and a head incised onto the walls of a cave located near the village of Ain Kerem, the traditional birthplace of John the Baptist. He interpreted these as depictions of the story of the life of John the Baptist. In addition, he found an oval stone with a foot-shaped indentation, which he identified as having been used for ritual foot-washing. However, after spending five years excavating the cave, Gibson, and his colleague James Tabor, a Bible scholar from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, admit that the cave drawings were not carved until at least the Byzantine period (fourth to seventh centuries CE) or later and that there is no direct link to John the Baptist. Gibson suggests that the cave may have been used by Christian monks or other religious advocates who believed that it was associated with John the Baptist, thus explaining the graphic depictions.
Although Gibson’s interpretations are interesting, few scholars agree with them. In 2008, Joe Zias, formerly of the Israel Antiquities Authority, suggested instead that most of the images date to the Crusader period and that they are related not to John the Baptist but rather to Lazarus, the patron saint of leprosy. The treatment of leprosy included the washing of diseased feet.
Other interesting but unproven suggestions made in recent years concerning John the Baptist revolve around the emphasis that he placed on baptism and the fact that there are a large number of pools—probably Jewish ritual bathing pools used for purification (miqva’ot)—at the site of Qumran. The combination of the existence of these probable miqva’ot at Qumran, the idea that there may have been Essenes living at the site, and the suggestion that the idea of Christian baptism may have been derived from the Jewish practice of ritual immersion in miqva’ot has led a few scholars to suggest a three-part theory: that John may have lived at Qumran at one point in his life; that he may have been an Essene (even though he is never identified as such either in the New Testament or by the historian Josephus); and that he may have gotten the idea of baptism from his use of the ritual pools at Qumran. Obviously there is much speculation involved in these suggestions, but little archaeology.
As for the actual ministry established by Jesus and his followers, some of the most interesting archaeological evidence was uncovered in November 2005 within a maximum-security prison located a few hundred yards away from the famous site of Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in the Jezreel Valley. During construction work to expand the prison, workers uncovered an intriguing mosaic. It is in a building apparently used by Roman soldiers and currently thought to date to the third century CE.
The mosaic was placed into the floor in four separate sections, to the north, south, east, and west of what was probably once a table in the middle of the room that was used for the Eucharist. The eastern and western panels have only geometric patterns, but the northern and southern panels contain inlaid inscriptions in Greek. The northern panel records the name of the Roman soldier—Gaianus, a centurion—who paid for the mosaics, and the name Brutius, the craftsman who laid the mosaic. It features two fish, an early Christian image perhaps reflecting the miracle of loaves and fishes, which was used as a reference to Jesus for several centuries before the cross was adopted as a universal symbol for the religion. In translation, the inscription reads as follows: “Gaianus, also called Porphyrius, centurion, our brother, has made the pavement at his own expense as an act of liberality. Brutius carried out the work.”
The southern panel contains two inscriptions. On the right (or eastern) side of the panel is an inscription with four women’s names. It asks the viewer to remember “Primilla and Cyriaca and Dorothea, and moreover also Chreste.” On the left (or western) side of the panel is the most interesting inscription. It says that the Eucharistic table in the middle of the room was paid for by a woman named Akeptous: “The God-loving Akeptous has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.” This is the earliest inscription ever found in Israel—and perhaps anywhere in the world—that mentions Jesus Christ.
The people named in the inscriptions have not been identified, but they probably belonged to a Christian community thriving among the soldiers of the Roman Sixth Legion, who were based in the area during those centuries. Scholars have debated whether the building in which the mosaic was found was a church. It was unlikely to have been the type of church structure with which we are now familiar, since Christian churches as we know them did not exist during the third century CE. They did not appear until the fourth century CE, after Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 CE, which declared that Christianity was a tolerated religion and could be practiced without fear of punishment. It was at this later time that buildings such as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem were first built.
Some scholars argue that the building housing the mosaic may have been a so-called house church. These were apparently in use during the second and the third centuries CE, when Christianity was a forbidden religion; at that time, it was prudent to make places of Christian worship as inconspicuous as possible. In that era, places of worship were known by various names, including ecclesi and domus Dei (House of God).
At the time the mosaics were apparently laid, Christianity was considered to be an illegal religion in the Roman Empire, and its practitioners could be punished. However, the Roman authorities frequently turned a blind eye to the activities of adherents of a variety of outlawed religions—including the so-called mystery religions such as the worship of Eastern gods Mithras, Osiris, or Orpheus—so long as the adherents of these religions revered the official Roman pantheon of gods and goddesses as well. Nevertheless, the province of Syria Palestine, as it was called at the time, including the region around Megiddo, was within the domain of the Roman Empire in the third century CE, and those named in the mosaic inscriptions may have been putting their lives in jeopardy by revealing their identity. That their names were so prominently inscribed perhaps speaks to th
e depth of their personal faith. On the other hand, if the dating of the building is off by a century, then it would have existed when it was allowable to practice Christianity without fear of punishment, and the story would not be quite as dramatic.
By this point, however, we are beyond the events depicted in the New Testament and have moved past the furthest boundaries of biblical archaeology and into the archaeology of the Byzantine and Late Antique period, which is another topic altogether.
Chapter 12
Fabulous finds or fantastic forgeries?
Some of the most interesting recent debates in biblical archaeology concern three objects that have come to the fore since the 1990s and the turn of the new millennium. These objects are either among the most important ever announced in the field of biblical archaeology or among the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated upon a gullible public. They include an inscribed ivory pomegranate possibly from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem; the James Ossuary, which has an inscription proclaiming it to be the burial box of James, the brother of Jesus; and the Jehoash Tablet, upon which is written an inscription purportedly documenting repairs made to Solomon’s Temple by King Jehoash, who ruled in Jerusalem from ca. 836 to 798 BCE.
All three objects have captured the public’s imagination and have been featured in Biblical Archaeology Review, a popularizing magazine edited and published by Hershel Shanks—a lawyer who founded the Biblical Archaeology Society in Washington, DC, and who has been called the world’s most influential amateur biblical archaeologist. While all three artifacts have been pronounced by various scholars as possible forgeries, based upon examination of the objects involving high-powered microscopes, petrographic analysis of the materials involved, and analysis of the inscriptions themselves, they are vigorously defended as genuine by Shanks and a few scholars.
The story begins in 1979, when André Lemaire, an esteemed epigrapher and professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, walked into the shop of an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem. He asked if the dealer had any objects with ancient Semitic inscriptions. This is not considered to be good practice by biblical archaeologists today, since it encourages a black market in antiquities, but standards and practices were different then. Lemaire was shown a small ivory pomegranate less than two inches tall, which was said to belong to an anonymous collector. The pomegranate was made from the canine tooth of a hippopotamus. Part of the main body was broken off, as were two of the six original petals rising from the stem. Running in a ring at the top of the body, just below where it meets the neck, were letters incised into the ivory. It was an inscription written in paleo-Hebrew, the letter-writing system that was used in Judah up until the return of those exiled to Babylon from 586 to 539 BCE.
After taking photographs and studying the inscription under a microscope, Lemaire went home to Paris. Eventually he published a scholarly article in Revue Biblique in 1981, followed by a popular article in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1984. He identified the pomegranate as part of a wand or scepter, the shaft of which would have been attached to a small hole that can still be seen in the base of the pomegranate. He dated it to the eighth century BCE and suggested that it probably belonged to the priests serving in the Temple in Jerusalem. Lemaire reached this startling conclusion based upon the partially broken inscription, which he reconstructed as reading lby[t yhw]h qdsû khnm (“Belonging to the Tem[ple of the Lor]d [Yahweh], holy to the priests”). If his analysis were correct, the pomegranate would be the first sacred object ever identified as coming from Solomon’s Temple.
Shortly thereafter, the ivory pomegranate was illegally smuggled out of Israel and went on display at an exhibition in Paris in 1985. Three years later, after an additional private authentication by Nahman Avigad of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, it was sold to the Israel Museum for $550,000. The huge price is generally agreed to be the result of the authentications of the pomegranate and its inscription by Lemaire and Avigad. To highlight its importance, the ivory pomegranate was put on exhibit sitting alone in splendid isolation within a glass case in an otherwise-empty room in the Israel Museum.
In 2004, however, the pomegranate was suddenly removed from display, and the museum issued a press release stating that the inscribed piece had been declared a forgery. In fact, a panel of experts, who first met in September 2004, had concluded that the pomegranate itself was authentic, but that the inscription was a recent addition. Their report stated: “In contrast to the antiquity of the pomegranate itself, the inscription and the patina-like material on the inscription and around it are a recent forgery. . . . The inscription was inscribed on the pomegranate after it had already been broken in ancient times, causing some new breaks to occur due to the pressure forced by the engraving tool on the edge of the old break and causing the incompletion of the [Hebrew letters] taw, he and yod in relation to the break in the pomegranate.”
This was not the first time that the authenticity of the pomegranate and its inscription had been called into question, but now it seemed to fit a pattern that had emerged, in which a group of dealers and collectors allegedly conspired to add forged inscriptions to otherwise-authentic pieces in an effort to increase their value. The pomegranate has since been examined several times by additional experts who used microscopic examination designed to determine whether the inscription was carved before or after the large piece of the body broke off. Their reasoning was simple—if the inscription were authentic, the letters should continue straight into the ancient break without pause. If it were inscribed in recent times, the letters would probably end a few millimeters before the break, because the forger would have been afraid of breaking off more of the original ivory if he continued his cuts. In the end, all the experts agreed that the pomegranate itself is an authentic relic, probably originally dating to the Late Bronze Age, that is, to the thirteenth or twelfth centuries BCE. However, they could not definitively answer the question of whether the inscription carved upon it dates to the eighth century BCE, i.e., the time of Solomon’s Temple, or to the late twentieth century CE. The question remains unanswered despite all the scientific testing. Everything rests upon three small Hebrew letters.
Better known to the general public than the ivory pomegranate is the so-called James Ossuary, which was announced with great fanfare at a press conference held in October 2002 by Shanks on behalf of the Biblical Archaeology Review, which broke the story and ran it as the cover story for the November/December 2002 issue. Ossuaries are fairly common discoveries in the Holy Land; they are stone boxes that contained bones from a body (or bodies) that had decomposed and subsequently been collected and placed into the box as a secondary burial (see chap. 11). What makes this ossuary unusual is the inscription carved into one of the sides in Aramaic: Yaakov bar Yoseph, Achui de Yeshua (“James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”).
When the world media reported the existence of the James Ossuary the morning after the press conference, excitement ran high. It was hailed as a major discovery—the first possible physical evidence for the existence of Jesus ever to be found. Nightly TV newscasts led with the story, which was also carried by most of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States and around the world.
The James Ossuary was owned by Oded Golan, a Tel Aviv antiquities collector who says that he purchased it in the mid-1970s and that it was stored on the balcony of his parents’ apartment for a number of years until he moved it to his own apartment. Golan’s interest in antiquity began while he was still quite young: a ten-year-old Golan is said to have discovered a now-famous small cuneiform tablet while walking around the site of Hazor as a tourist.
Golan claims that he had seen and known of the inscription on the ossuary since he first purchased it from an East Jerusalem antiquities dealer in the Old City of Jerusalem, but that he did not initially realize its significance. He says he thought “that the inscription referred to three generations because the only thing that [he] could read with certainty was the three names, Yaakov, Yosef and Yeshua.” He also said
that he did not know that Jesus had any siblings.
According to Golan, in 2002 he invited Andre Lemaire, the Semitic epigrapher at the Sorbonne, to look at another one of the forty ossuaries in his collection, in order to decipher a four-line inscription in Aramaic. While doing so, Lemaire asked Golan if he owned any other inscribed objects. Golan showed Lemaire various photographs, including a picture of the James Ossuary that was in storage at that time. At Lemaire’s request, Golan retrieved the ossuary and allowed Lemaire to study it and its inscription firsthand during a subsequent visit. Lemaire then prepared an article for publication in Hershel Shanks’ Biblical Archaeology Review, which was in itself a bit strange, since the initial publication should have been in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal rather than a popular magazine.
Before he published the article, Shanks asked Ada Yardeni, a leading Israeli epigrapher, to examine the authenticity of the inscription. In addition, he asked members of the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI) to examine and confirm the authenticity of the ossuary itself. Having received a confirmation of authenticity from all parties, Shanks scheduled the international press conference for October 2002, to be held in conjunction with the publication of the ossuary as the cover story in the November/ December issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, as mentioned earlier. The entire event was recorded for a future broadcast on the Discovery Channel by Simcha Jacobovici, the same Toronto filmmaker who would later be responsible for the Lost Tomb of Jesus fiasco.
Biblical Archaeology_A Very Short Introduction Page 11