The Lost Tomb of Jesus

A compilation of an earlier five-part series to which there may, or may not, be future additions.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus Did James Cameron really find the tomb of Jesus?

Or, more accurately, did Simcha Jacobovici find it?

Now, I rather like Jacobovici. He’s an entertaining television presenter, although I wonder what his academic qualifications are (I’ve googled, and can’t find them).

I looked forward to watching the television special (on VisionTV in Canada - I believe it was on the Discovery Channel in the US).

I have to say I was disappointed.

No, not disappointed…repulsed.

This was not archaeology.

What we got was a Holy Blood/Holy Grail/DaVinci Code mishmash of factoids, misapplication of statistics, garbage DNA analysis, suspect chemical analysis and something very close to looting of an archaeological site.

To summarize briefly:

In 1980 a tomb was found in the suburbs of Jerusalem at an apartment building construction site (Talpiot Apartments). In this tomb were ten ossuaries of various sizes, some decorated and some plain, some with inscriptions and some without. They were catalogued and stored by the Israeli Antiquities Authority and quickly forgotten. In 1996 Amos Kloner, the archaeologist who excavated the site, published his research. That same year the BBC produced a documentary linking the Talpiot tomb with Jesus. Why?

One of the ossuaries - one of the smallest and plainest - bore an extremely crude inscription - Yeshua bar Yusoheph - Jesus, son of Joseph. Another bore the name of Mary, Yose (the name of one of Jesus’s brothers, but also a nickname for Joseph), a Matthew, another Mary and, sensationally, a Judah son of Jesus - these inscriptions were much less crude than the Jesus inscription. The other four had no inscriptions.

All of these names were exceedingly common in 1st century Judea and have been found on other ossuaries from the same period (roughly 1,000 ossuaries have been catalogued). For example, it is estimated that nearly 25% of the women of the time were named Mary (that’s right, folks - in his day, Jesus was equivalent to Bob the Messiah).

The second Mary inscription was in Greek (Miriamne e Mara). Jacobovici’s entire hypothesis depends on this inscription really meaning Mary Magdalene. Migdal was a Greek-speaking town. Mara could be interpreted as Master. In the Acts of Philip (a non-canonical scripture most likely written in the 4th century), Philip has a sister called Miriamne, who Jacobovici asserts was Mary Magdalene. On this foundation is his house of cards built. Because if the name on the ossuary were Mary Magdalene, then Jacobovici would almost certainly have identified the tomb of Jesus. Unfortunately for Jacobovici, it is not.

I won’t go into all of the sordid details. Suffice to say that the DNA evidence was completely worthless and misleading to the point of mendacity. The chemical evidence, oddly, was examined by an American police laboratory. The categorically faked James ossuary was asserted to have come from the same tomb, without mentioning photographic evidence that proves it to have been known before 1980.

To me, the worst thing about the “documentary” was that it encourages unauthorized entry to archaeological sites and has publicized to the world the location of an unexcavated tomb. Given the difficulty worldwide of keeping sites from being looted this is almost criminally irresponsible.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Part 2
None of the criticisms of Jacobovici’s work actually demonstrate that his hypothesis is wrong. There is a real chance that he is right, and right for the right reasons.

Let me be clear. The probability used by Jacobovici was 599 in 600 chances that this was the tomb of the New Testament Jesus of Nazareth. This is clearly wrong, because it is based on assumptions that themselves only have a small probability of being right. For example the probability is based on the assumption that Miriamne e Mara is Mary Magdalene. If that assumption is false, then the probabilities calculated would be about 1 in 160, roughly 0.6%.

However, let’s revisit the statistical analysis.

First, the name Jesus, or Yeshua. This name was shared by roughly 4% of the population. The local population was about 50,000 in the first century, and the period that this style of burial was common spanned about four generations, giving a population of about 8,000 Yeshuas, meaning that the name Yeshua alone means that there was a 1 in 8,000 chance that this was Jesus of Nazareth. About 10% of the men were named Joseph, leaving about 800 men named Yeshua who had a father named Joseph. So far, so good.

Mary, however, creates a bit of a problem. About 25% of the women were named Mary, so we would expect almost every tomb with multiple burials to have at least one Mary, or even several. So, even two Mary’s in the tomb really brings us no closer to Jesus - probably every man of the time had several Mary’s in his life. Jacobovici’s analysis centres around the specific form of the name used in one book of the New Testament, which matches the form on one of the ossuaries in the Talpiot tomb (please note, I am accepting some of his claims here, although I have not verified them - this is somewhat risky given his lack of enthusiasm for exactitude). Jacobovici claims that this ossuary is unique, and that no other ossuary has an inscription in exactly that form. If this is true, then we might be able to assign some probability level to this inscription. For the sake of discussion, I’m going to arbitrarily assign it a probability of 50% - there’s a 50% chance that this is significant in identifying Jesus’s mother out of all the other Mary’s in 1st century Judea. We are now down to a 1 in 400 chance that this is Jesus of Nazareth.

Next, we have the name Yose. This is a nickname for Joseph, so this may very well be the Joseph who is the father of the person in the Yeshua ossuary. Therefore, he has already been counted. But, again, this is a unique occurrence of an inscription that matches the form found in one of the Gospels. So, again, I am going to assign it an arbitrary probability of 50%. We now have a 1 in 200 chance that this is the right Jesus.

Matthew is a nullity. The presence of this inscription doesn’t change the odds one way or the other. There is no mention of a Matthew as part of Jesus’s family in the New Testament. There is also no argument that the New Testament is not meant to be taken as a complete and closed list of all of Jesus’s relations. So, we’re still at 1 in 200.

Judah, son of Jesus is also a nullity. The New Testament, as I see it, sets out to chronicle what was unusual about Jesus and not what was ordinary. An adult male was expected to be married and to have children. There was no particular reason for the New Testament writers to mention this status, as it was not unusual. There would have been reason for them to specifically mention his celibacy, if that was a significant part of his life or of his teaching. They do not. So, we’re stalled at 1 in 200.

Last, we come to Miriamne e mara. And that, we will discuss in Part 3.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Part 3

Before we come back to Miriamne e mara, let’s talk about some of the arguments against Jacobovici’s conclusion, other than the ones that I have already raised, and that I think are valid.

Some of these are:

  1. Jesus was a poor man, and this is clearly the tomb of a wealthy middle class family. Therefore, this could not be the tomb of Jesus.
  2. Jesus was a Nazarene, and his family tomb would be in Nazareth, not Jerusalem. Therefore, this could not be the tomb of Jesus.
  3. Jesus had no son, and this tomb contains a Judah, son of Jesus. Therefore, this could not be the tomb of Jesus.
  4. There is no mention in the Gospels of a Matthew related to Jesus, and this family tomb contains a Matthew. Therefore, this could not be the tomb of Jesus.
  5. Jesus was God’s son, not Joseph’s. Jewish critics of Christianity referred to him as Jesus, son of Joseph, but he would not have been buried under that name. Therefore, this could not be the tomb of Jesus.

In my opinion, all of these arguments are specious, but let’s take them one at a time:

  1. Jesus was a poor carpenter. The Greek word translated into English as carpenter, is tekton, or artisan. This could include a whole host of occupations, of which carpenter is just one. The family could, indeed, be a wealthy one, as the family of a builder or developer might be today. In addition, Jesus was the founder of a religious sect. There is certainly evidence in the Book of Acts that finances were of some importance to the group’s leaders after the death of Jesus, and it is no stretch to think that Jesus’s family would have had access to donations from wealthy believers.
  2. Jesus was a Nazarene. True. But, from what evidence we have (including the Bible), several members of his family were in Jerusalem at the time of his death, and remained there afterwards. They could very well have purchased or commissioned a family tomb.
  3. Jesus had no son. I touched on this in the earlier post. There is no way of deciding this one way or the other. My opinion is that the Gospel writers were attempting to explain what was different about Jesus and that there was no particular reason for them to mention a family. Nor do they ever make explicit that he had no family, which would have been notable. In fact, they ignore most of his life.
  4. The Bible mentions nobody named Matthew as a relative. Again, the New Testament makes no claim to providing an exhaustive list of Jesus’s friends and relations.
  5. Jesus was God’s son. Well, if you have a child-like faith in the immaculate conception, the virgin birth, the corporal resurrection and the bodily ascension into heaven, you will never believe that Jesus’s body could be found. But, in the real world, we have to assume that none of those supernatural events actually occurred.

Miriamne e mara is now going to have to wait for Part 4.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Part 4

Just to give you some idea of what we’re dealing with, here is a picture of the actual “Jesus” inscription:

As a result of the crudeness of the inscription, there has been more than one reading of it. In my opinion, the following is the most reasonable interpretation:

To my eye, the area where the question mark is can only reasonably be interpreted as “bar” - “son of”, giving “[cross] Jesus, son of Joseph”.

The cross is intriguing. Jacobovici argues that it represents the last letter of the Aramaic alphabet and links it to the Gospel of John (correction: Revelation, but, since it was probably written by the same person as John, the argument stands), suggesting that Jesus didn’t speak Greek, and so would not have said alpha and omega, but alaph and tau. Tau, in the 1st century AD, was written as a skewed cross. I am uncomfortable with that link, as John is a later gospel, non-synoptic, and has whiffs of Gnosticism. Nonetheless, what we are seeing is quite possibly an early Christian symbol. To be fair, it may also be a stonecutter’s mark, indicating how to put the lid on the ossuary.

So, there we have yet another reason why Jacobovici’s contention that there is a 599 in 600 chance that this is the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth is bunk. While I think that Jesus, son of Joseph is the most reasonable interpretation of the inscription, I have to say that there is a several percent possibility that the inscription doesn’t say Jesus at all.

Addendum: (better photo)

I should also credit Steve Caruso for his terrific series of posts on this inscription.

2nd Addendum: I should note that it is Jacobovici who contends that the initial cross is a tau and that this is how it was written in the 1st century. Personally, I would agree with Steve Caruso that it looks an awful lot like an alaph.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Part 5

Finally, we return to Miriamne e Mara, as Jacobovici characterized it. It’s astonishing how much misinformation has spread around the internet about these inscriptions. You really have to look at the original:

This one is in Greek, more carefilly inscribed, and reads left to right, so it’s a lot easier to make out to our Western eyes.

Again, several interpretations have been offered for this inscription. Here’s a few:

  1. Mary (who is) the Master
  2. Mary (who is) Martha
  3. Mary/Martha
  4. Mary and Martha

To me, this is much easier than the Jesus inscription. If you look at the two M’s in the first part of the inscription, you will see that they are very different than the M in the last part of the inscription. The first two M’s are constructed entirely with straight lines, while the last one has rather attractive curves. I think that this shows they were carved by two different people, indicating that two different sets of bones were deposited in the ossuary at different times. So, the the inscription would read Mariamni kai Mara - Mary and Martha. I really don’t see where Jacobovici got his interpretation.

For one thing, this is a Greek inscription. Mara means master, but not in Greek. Mara means master in Aramaic. So, it’s a stretch (but certainly not impossible) to read a Greek text with an Aramaic transliteration.

Mary, the Master would indeed be a very unusual inscription to find in a 1st century Jewish tomb. Mary and Martha…not so much. It was very common to use the ossuaries to house several sets of bones.

Again, the contention that the inscription of this ossuary said Mary the Master and referred specifically to Mary Magdalene was the linchpin of Jacobovici’s argument that this was the tomb of Jesus Christ. It is not impossible that he was correct, but it’s a long, long way from being proven. Under the most likely interpretation the inscription says Mary and Martha, and again, these are two very common women’s names of the period.

If I may be permitted a curmudgeonly aside, it would have been useful if even one person in the New Testament had any imagination at all when it came to naming their children - where is Frank Zappa when you really need him? I mean, really, if future archaeologists find a tomb inscribed, Dweezil, son of Frank, will anybody doubt that they know who they have found?

Again, credit has to go to real scholars.