40. The Talpiot Jesus tomb before excavation, the ossuaries covered with soil.
If the James ossuary inscription is authentic and if it has probably come from the Talpiot Jesus tomb, what about the report by Hegesippus that the tomb of James was visible in the Kidron Valley? We suggest that there well might have been some kind of monument to James in that area. We also must observe that Hegesippus spent his career in Rome. We can’t assume that he is reporting an eyewitness account. Today there are several monumental tombs in the Kidron Valley dating to the late Hellenistic period (200–100 BCE) that are variously identified as the “Tomb of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” the “Tomb of Zechariah,” the “Pillar of Absalom,” and a tomb inscribed as that of a priestly family, which is sometimes identified as the “Tomb of James.” These sites have no historical connection to these figures. They are part of hagiographic traditions that Christians developed in the late Byzantine period down through the Crusades.
Even though we had initially suggested the possibility of the missing tenth ossuary being that of James, based on the similar dimensions and the patina fingerprints that seemed to place it in the Talpiot tomb, we must always adapt our views to new evidence.38 Shimon Gibson had suggested this theory of a missing eleventh ossuary to us back in 2006, when he recalled that the ten ossuaries inside the niches and removed to the Rockefeller Museum had been covered with soil. When the IAA archaeologists arrived on Friday morning, March 28, 1980, the first day of the excavation, they took photos and there is no evidence of any ossuaries having been dug out of the niches. But it is entirely possible, since patina tests show the James ossuary spent much of its history over the past two millennia in the Talpiot tomb environment, that this ossuary was near the door, less covered with soil, and thus easy to carry off. By whom or when we will likely never know. What we do know is that the mystery of the James ossuary is closer to being solved than ever before, and that whether it is the tenth or eleventh ossuary, it likely supports the Talpiot tomb’s links to Jesus, his family, and the early Christians who believed in his resurrection.
CHAPTER SEVEN
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RESURRECTION, LOST BONES, AND JESUS’ DNA
The two major new discoveries in the Patio tomb—the epitaph and the Jonah image—provide for the first time in history tangible archaeological evidence related to the resurrection faith of Jesus’ first followers. As we have explained earlier, the “Jonah ossuary” that until 1980 was located right in the front of the first niche on the right as one entered the tomb most likely belonged to the father of the family. Since it was filled to the top with bones it probably held the remains of his wife and children as well. Also in that niche were two additional ossuaries, filling it to capacity, as if later family members wanted to be as close as possible to whoever was in the Jonah ossuary. The Jonah ossuary, in our view, is by far the most unusual ossuary ever found. It has no parallels in all of Jerusalem.
Although this ossuary has no names inscribed on it and no standard ornamentation, it offers something infinitely more valuable and interesting. The drawing of Jonah and the big fish might be considered crude, even amateurish, with its awkward stick figure with a circular head emerging from the fish’s mouth. It might even seem unbecoming to the tomb of the wealthy man who owned the estate upon which this and two other tombs are closely clustered.
In contrast, the tomb itself is simple but elegant. Its symmetrically carved gables boast lovely ornamented painted ossuaries, as elaborately carved as any in the Israel state collection. This family could afford to have any kind of ossuary it might have desired, which makes the Jonah ossuary stand out all the more. It tells a story, expressing a faith in resurrection that might have been inspired by direct and personal contact with Jesus of Nazareth. On one end we find just the tail of a big fish, the rest of the fish cut off at the bottom edge of the ossuary as if it were diving into the deep. At the other end some kind of doorway, with double crossed panels or bars. We cannot be sure of the intended narration but it surely has something to do with “entering” the watery deep, perhaps the gates of death, being taken under, but then miraculously being spit out of the jaws of death onto dry land—alive and rescued.
Cave burial in this period represents at the same time a kind of dreadfulness as well as love. When we bury our dead deep in the ground, there is a sense in which we have a symbolic token of the deceased, the grave site. We have removed them from the living. They are truly gone from our presence. In a family burial cave, generation after generation enters the tomb for rites of burial and mourning. The bones are visible, whether gathered in a central pit or placed in ossuaries. The living family is quite literally in the physical presence of the dead. The stark reality of death and decay cannot be ignored or forgotten. When the patriarch Jacob knew he was dying he called his twelve sons together—the sons who became the twelve tribes of Israel—and told them: “I am to be gathered to my people; bury me with my father in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah . . . which Abraham bought . . . to possess as a burying place” (Genesis 49:30). This notion of being gathered to the fathers is the central expression about death in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. Abraham, Moses, all the prophets die and are buried, joining those who went before them—quite literally “gathered” together.
We have described the emotions we felt when we first entered the Jesus tomb. For over thirty years it has been empty of the remains of those once buried there, filled only with discarded holy books and cemented over with a heavy cover. The Patio tomb was a quite different experience. Even though some of the ossuaries had been moved to different niches in the brief 1981 examination by the IAA archaeologists, the tomb is largely intact. The bones in the five niches without ossuaries are undisturbed and still in place, just as they must have been left when the bodies were laid to rest. Since our entry into this tomb was accomplished remotely, it was as if we were somehow there but not there, observing but not disturbing, catching a tiny glimpse of the expressions of faith and life the tomb represents, but still separated in time and space.
We have entered dozens of excavated tombs in Jerusalem in the course of our five-year investigation to learn what we could about Jewish burial in this time. This was different. We were visiting this tomb while leaving it intact. It is hard to describe the emotions involved. The experience transcended the academic, the cerebral, and even the technical challenges before us. Everyone on our team felt this. We were privileged to discover a link, if not a bridge, between this thoroughly Jewish tomb and an emerging Christian faith that had barely begun to express itself. Like time travel or some high-tech spectral presence, we were witnessing the birth of Christianity and the once strong, familial link between Judaism and Christianity that existed among Jesus’ earliest followers.
The four-line inscription just a few feet away on the elaborately decorated face of the ossuary next to the Jonah ossuary was equally revealing to us. This time we were decoding words, not drawings, but the message appears to be related. In 1980 this ossuary was in the second niche on the right, maybe indicating it came from a slightly later time. It is hard to know when the tomb was dug but we are fairly sure that like other Jerusalem burial caves, it went out of use around 70 CE, when the Romans brutally crushed the Jewish revolt and killed or exiled the inhabitants of the city. The normal life cycles of death and burial were shattered and disrupted. It is possible that any family members who survived the war never return to their ancestral homes. The exposed bones in the niches offer silent testimony to this devastation, which likely prevented family members from completing the Jewish burial rites for their relatives.
We can estimate that two or three generations of the family might have buried their dead in this tomb. If the Patio tomb was the family tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, as we propose, the person who scratched these four lines in Greek wanted to give mute testimony to that same faith in Jesus’ resurrection that the Jonah ossuary represents. This epitaph is not a professionally executed inscription in forma
l script. It is legible but shows individual intent—the Divine [or Wondrous] Jehovah raises up . . . We do not think the inscription is a testimony to a generic faith that God will “lift up” the dead, even though many Jews in this time did believe that God would raise the dead at the end of the age. We are convinced that each discovery must interpret the other and both must be seen in the context that the other provides. The sign of Jonah is clear and unambiguous. The connection to Jesus is direct and explicit. That Jonah became the preeminent symbol of the resurrection of Jesus for 3rd and 4th century Christians testifies to its simple power. The inscription affirming that God either has lifted up or will lift up bones from the dead is most likely connected as well to a resurrection faith grounded in the family’s encounters with Jesus—not the Jesus of texts and oral tradition, but the human Jesus whose physical remains we believe were reverently treasured and remembered by this family that had had the privilege of attending to his burial. The ossuaries, the bones, the inscriptions, and the tombs themselves became for us silent testimonies to lives once lived. They sparked our imagination.
James and Mariamene are written about in our surviving texts, but we know next to nothing about the son, Judah, and precious little about the mother, Mary—if the Mary ossuary is indeed that of Jesus’ mother. The gospel of John does not even name her. Matthew, Mark, and Luke mention her only at Jesus’ birth and his death. There are some legendary traditions about Jesus’ mother going to Asia Minor with the apostle John, but they make no sense historically. They are built on the mistaken idea, in our view, that John the fisherman, one of the twelve apostles, is the mysterious unnamed “beloved disciple” mentioned five times in the gospel of John, to whom Jesus gave charge of his mother as he was dying on the cross.1 This seems highly unlikely, as if his brother James would have abandoned his responsibilities as the older brother, or for that matter, his wife, Mariamene, who apparently was very close to Mary, based on the evidence in the gospels.2 The last we hear of Jesus’ mother in the New Testament is that she was mentioned with the rest of the group, along with his brothers, living in Jerusalem (Acts 1:14). She is not even named. She is apparently a widow. Joseph is never mentioned in the gospels after the birth of Jesus. Jesus is called “the son of Joseph” twice and the “son of the carpenter [tekton],” translated “builder,” in Matthew 13:55. We should not expect Joseph to be buried in this tomb. If Mary died before 70 CE she would be gathered with her sons. Depending on how Joses died, perhaps all three were martyred for what was called “the hope of Israel.”
Judah’s parents gave their son a proud Maccabean surname—after Judas Maccabee, the brave hero who led a revolt against the forces of the brutal Greek occupier Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 BCE and set up an independent Jewish state that lasted until the Romans arrived in 63 BCE. His was a common male name (6.5 percent), popular in this period for those who wanted to show solidarity for the freedom of Israel. Two of the twelve apostles are named Judas—one infamous, the other virtually forgotten (Mark 3:13–19). Judas the Galilean was the most famous “Judah” of that generation. He led a revolt in the year 6 CE, in Galilee, when Jesus would have been about ten years old. Josephus relates his story, calling him the founder of the “4th philosophy,” after the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes—the Zealots.3 He is also mentioned in the book of Acts (5:37). Like Mary, he had sons named James and Simon, and like Mary, his sons were slain by the agents of Rome. We will likely never know what Judah son of Jesus’s life was like, or how he died. His ossuary is not undersized (55 x 23 x 27 centimeters), so he was not a child when he died. It is nicely ornamented and the inscription of his name, “Judah son of Jesus,” is the only one that is formally carved.
What about the resurrection faith of these families? Why were they, of all the Jews buried in this time, the only ones to inscribe on their ossuaries testimonies to God raising the dead? In our minds there is no doubt why. Theirs was not a generic faith in “life after death” but faith in the resurrection of their Teacher.
41. The Judah son of Jesus ossuary with its ornamentation and inscription.
CAN THESE BONES LIVE?
When one thinks about our concepts of death and the afterlife in the Western world the questions most people have are questions of individual survival—whether there is “life” after death. The nature of that life or survival can be thought of in a variety of ways, but the fundamental question is, What happens to me when I die? Is there something or is there nothing? Those who believe in “life after death” are affirming, in some manner, the idea that some essence of the individual self, the person we sense ourselves to be, survives the death of the body. It is the survival of the “I,” the ego self that is in question. It is assumed that the biological self or body returns to dust or ashes, but the inner self lives on in some way. These questions come to us intuitively on the level of personal experience anytime someone we love dies. The heart stops, respiration ceases, and the person is pronounced dead. The person becomes a “corpse” and it is easy to think of the now-decaying body as merely a “house” or vehicle for the inner self or soul—but not the person we knew in life. We dispose of the body according to our cultural customs and personal choices, respectfully but also realistically, knowing that this body is irretrievable.
This view of the human person as both a mortal physical body and an immortal soul or spirit is deeply rooted in our Western religious and philosophical past. For most, without belief in some sort of life after death, there could be no viable spiritual faith. The alternative is seen as materialism—that we are just a functioning biological organism made wholly of matter.
In the writings of Plato Socrates summed it up best as he drank the fatal hemlock, having been condemned to death by the Athenian elders. He told his disciples to weep not for him but for themselves, for he was returning “home” while they would remain for a time in the house or prison of the body, until their time of release came.4 The Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero, who lived in the 1st century BCE, explained this view more fully: “Strive on indeed, and be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure that can be pointed out by the finger” (6:24).5 This Platonic body/soul dualism became the standard belief in Greco-Roman antiquity, even among some Hellenized 1st century Jews, such as Philo and Josephus.6 Celebrated early Christian theologians such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine considered Plato a kind of honorary “pre-Christian” and reshaped their exposition of the Christian faith almost wholly in Platonic categories.
Because of this Platonic influence it is extremely difficult for people today, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other spiritual tradition, to conceive of life after death other than through the lens of Plato—the body perishes and the immortal soul passes on to an unseen realm of the spirit.
Given this perspective we must ask, what could bones possibly have to do with any idea of life after death? Although the term resurrection has become rooted in our Jewish-Christian-Islamic cultures, most are confused about how two ideas—immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body—relate to one another. If one attends a funeral and the rabbi, priest, minister, or imam stands before the corpse, right before lowering it into the grave, or in front of an urn of ashes, while reading words of scripture declaring that the “dead shall rise,” people are often confused about what is being affirmed. Are they to believe that the body, destined to the dust or turned to ashes, is somehow to be revived or re-created? Is “resurrection” to be taken literally, or is it just a metaphorical or symbolic way of saying, “We believe the essential human person survives death.” Is there such a thing as “spiritual” resurrection?
Resurrection of the dead is affirmed in our Western religious creeds. Jews recite the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides, the last of which says, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead.” Christians affirm the “resurrection of the body” in the Apostl
es’ Creed, the oldest confession of its type. Muslims affirm that God will raise the dead for judgment on the Last Day—also called the “Day of Standing Up” (Surah 2:79).
The original core idea of “resurrection of the dead,” at least for Christians and Jews, whose understanding is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, is best illustrated by Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. The prophet Ezekiel sees a valley full of dry bones and God asks him, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel answers, “O LORD God you know.” Then God tells him to address the bones: “Thus says the Lord GOD to the bones: Behold I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.” (Ezekiel 37:5–6) Resurrection of the dead in this passage is a reconstitution of the physical body, a miraculous revival of the entire person, living and breathing again in this world. Here the concept of resurrection of the dead involves a bodily return to this world, contrasted to the concept of the immortal soul that undergoes a transition from the body to a higher state in another realm.
The language of both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament bears out this core idea. In Hebrew one speaks of God literally “making live” the dead. The Greek word for resurrection (anastasis) mean literally “to stand up.” Thus “lifting up” or “raising up” is a way of affirming that the person represented by the bones will return to life. But what kind of life—and in what kind of body?
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