The Jesus Discovery

by James D. Tabor

  Around noon on Friday the 28th, the day after the tomb was exposed, an eleven-year-old schoolboy, Ouriel Maoz, whose Orthodox Jewish family lived near the site, passed by and saw the distinctive façade of the exposed tomb, clearly visible from the street below. He ran home excitedly to tell his mother, Rivka Maoz, who immediately called the Department of Antiquities to report the newly visible tomb; she was concerned that if it were left unguarded its contents might be plundered. She could not get through to anyone since businesses close early on Friday afternoon for the Jewish Sabbath. The mother and son then went together to the tomb as the light was fading and they remember that they could see some skulls and bones inside. They saw no signs of any archaeologists or workers on the scene.

  The next day, Saturday, was the Sabbath. Ouriel remembers running home from synagogue to tell his mother that some local kids had entered the tomb, found the skulls and other bones, and were playing soccer with them, kicking them about the area. The tomb had been left unguarded over the Sabbath. Rivka and her husband ran the children off and gathered all the bones they could locate, going door to door asking parents to be sure they made their children return all the bones. They gathered all they could collect, putting them in plastic bags for safekeeping until the next morning. On Sunday morning, when the archaeologists arrived to continue their work, she delivered the bags of bones to Gath.28

  Gibson arrived about noon on Sunday to do the map survey of the tomb. In 2003, when we first interviewed him about his arrival at the scene, he distinctly recalled seeing the ossuaries that had been removed from the tomb lined up outside, waiting for a truck from the IAA that would transport them to the Rockefeller Museum headquarters of the IAA. Gibson recalled how Gath took him inside the tomb, where the workers were removing the soil that had accumulated, and he could still see the impressions left by the ossuaries. Gath indicated to him where each had been located so he could include the original locations of all ten on his map. If Gibson’s initial memory was correct, that would mean the ossuaries were not removed until midday Sunday and had been left in the tomb Friday and Saturday. This would explain how the neighborhood kids were able to pull skulls out of the ossuaries in the tomb for their makeshift soccer game since the ossuaries were buried under a foot and a half of soil and not visible when the archaeologists first began their work.

  Getting these chronological facts straight is critical. If the tomb was indeed left open and unattended with ossuaries inside from its opening on Thursday through Sunday morning, there is a real possibility that the tomb could have been looted and ossuaries removed. The construction workers who exposed the tomb were aware of it and by Saturday those living in the neighborhood were aware as well. We are convinced that one or more ossuaries did go missing and in chapter 6 we will offer the results of our own investigation of what most likely happened.

  The matter of the scattering of the bones is also troubling. How many bones were scattered and lost? Were the rest left in the ossuaries that were then taken to the IAA for analysis by an anthropologist? This would have been the normal procedure. What did Gath do with the bag of bones that the Maoz family gave to him Sunday morning? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions. It is quite disconcerting to think the bones from this ancient Jewish family, including the skulls from inside the ossuaries, were scattered and kicked about when the tomb was left unguarded over that fateful weekend.

  Joe Zias, the anthropologist at the Rockefeller Museum who routinely received bones from tomb excavations, says he does not remember receiving bones from this particular tomb, but he notes that construction crews were uncovering many dozens of tombs in the 1980s and there was no reason for any particular set of bones to receive special treatment. Zias was the main “bone man” or anthropologist there at the time, but there is no record that he ever examined them or prepared a report. This is very unfortunate, since a full study of all the bones in all ten ossuaries might have contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of this tomb and those buried therein.

  At that time, ossuaries with the bones inside were usually transported intact to the laboratory, where the bones could be separated for analysis and study. Depending on their state of deterioration they could be typed for age, sex, and any other distinguishing forensic information. This examination would also allow any potential correlation between the ossuary contents and any ossuary inscriptions.

  Since Joseph Gath never published a full report of the contents of the Garden tomb, and the bones were never examined, our information regarding the excavation is extremely limited. The first publication in 1996 by Amos Kloner resulted from media attention to this tomb by the BBC, but by that time, fourteen years later, no bone reports could be done and much information was lost. One must assume that these and all other skeletal materials in various Israeli labs were turned over to the Orthodox religious authorities in 1994 when the Israeli government agreed to return such remains for reburial.29 These bones were presumably buried in unmarked common graves by the Orthodox authorities.

  Fortunately, when the bones of ossuaries are removed significant bone fragments often remain, sticking to the sides of these limestone coffins. The ossuaries are rarely cleaned or brushed out unless they are going on display in the Israel Museum. In the case of the Garden tomb, enough bone fragments were left, even in 2005 when we first examined the ossuaries, to allow for DNA tests of some of the remains from two of the ossuaries. It is only recently that DNA tests have been done on skeletal remains from tombs of the period in an effort to determine familial relationships in a given tomb.30 What we have managed to recover fills in a few missing pieces of the overall story. The fascinating results of those tests will be presented in the final chapter of this book.

  Amos Kloner reports that he visited the tomb when it was first reported to the antiquities authorities on Thursday, March 28, took photos, applied for the permit, and by noon Friday Gath and his workers had extracted all ten ossuaries from the niches, after digging them out of the soil that filled the tomb. Kloner insists that all ten ossuaries, with their bones, were transported to the Rockefeller Museum by midday, hours before the Sabbath arrived on Friday night.31 Kloner’s photos, now part of the official IAA files, do indeed show the niches in the tomb filled with soil to a level that made the ossuaries resting on the floor invisible. The IAA records show that Gath, Braun, and some workers had begun at least to clear the soil over the ossuaries on Friday morning. Various eyewitnesses, including Gibson in his original testimony, dispute whether Gath and his workers removed all ten ossuaries by noon that Friday for transport to the Rockefeller. It seems unlikely, since several of the ossuaries were broken and extracting them all from their encasement in two feet of soil would have required considerable effort.

  The Maoz family says they never saw any archaeologists working at the tomb on Friday afternoon when they first visited. That they saw skulls and bones exposed might indicate the archaeologists had reached the tops of the ossuaries that morning before suspending their work and leaving the scene. Apparently the tomb was left unguarded, as it had been the previous Thursday afternoon and evening. An open tomb, with its striking façade, visible from a distance up on the ridge, was an invitation to local children or other intruders to enter the tomb and ransack things Friday night. The presence of skulls is particularly noteworthy, since these skulls would have come from inside the ossuaries—indicating that at least the soil covering the tops of the ossuaries had been removed on Friday morning by the archaeologists. Rivka Maoz gave us several color photos from the family album, two taken inside the tomb, showing that the ossuaries had been removed when the photos were taken. But when were these photos made by the Maoz family? Kloner and Gibson insist they were made on March 29, on the Sabbath, but the Maoz family are observant Jews and are not permitted to take photographs on the Sabbath. The photos were most likely made late on Sunday since there are no workers in the photos and the ossuaries had already been removed. Shimon Gibson is now convinced that his initial me
mory was faulty and that when he arrived Sunday morning he must not have seen the ossuaries outside after all, since they would have already been taken away by the archaeologists by noon on Friday, according to Amos Kloner. Everyone has the right to revise their recollections and change their mind, but Gibson does have a photographic memory and in his initial interviews with us he was quite explicit about seeing them all outside. The exact timing of the removal of the ossuaries, either on Friday or Sunday, is critical since one of the ossuaries, a potentially very significant one, may have gone missing.

  INSIDE THE GARDEN TOMB

  According to all the records the Garden tomb contained a total of ten ossuaries, and they were catalogued as numbers 80.500 through 80.509 in the IAA collection. The current card catalogue at the IAA warehouse in Beth Shemesh only lists nine; the tenth, numbered 80.509, is not included, nor are there any photographs or measurements of it in the IAA excavation files. In chapter 6 we discuss this tenth and missing ossuary and what might have happened to it.

  Gibson’s drawing shows all ten ossuaries in place in five of the six niches, marked with a number and a letter. Unfortunately, Kloner reports that he can find no record that would match up the ossuaries and their catalogue numbers with their original locations in the tomb on Gibson’s map. That sort of information, correlating finds with their location at an excavation site, is basic to any archaeological fieldwork. Recording precisely where things were found is perhaps the most important aspect of any excavation, as every beginning student of archaeology knows. It is impossible to imagine that Gath failed to tag the ossuaries with locus numbers. No one would send a group of ten ossuaries—or any artifact for that matter—to the Rockefeller without filling out a proper identification tag. Six of the nine ossuaries were inscribed with names and if we had their original locations we would know how the names were grouped in the tomb, giving possible hints as to the relationship of the individuals buried there to one another.

  The six inscriptions, one in Greek and the rest in Aramaic are, in English: Jesus son of Joseph, Mariam called Mara, Joses, Judah son of Jesus, Matthew, and Maria. Since we clearly have a father named Jesus and his son Judah in this tomb, one wonders if one of the named women, Mariam called Mara or Maria, might have been the mother, and if so, which one. One might expect that the ossuaries of the father, mother, and son would be grouped together in the same niche. There is one niche, just on the right as you enter the tomb, that, according to Gibson’s drawing, held three ossuaries, clustered together. It is tempting to imagine that the Jesus of this tomb, his son Judah, and the mother might have been clustered together in this place of honor—first on the right as you enter the tomb. Unfortunately, given the lack of proper records we now have no way of knowing. At the time the ossuaries were removed and taken to IAA storage the archaeologists noticed that some of the ossuaries were inscribed in Greek and Aramaic but the name “Jesus son of Joseph,” which might have at least raised an eyebrow or two, is quite difficult to read as it is written in an informal cursive style.32 In due time Israeli epigrapher Levi Rahmani, along with Joseph Naveh and Leah Di Segni, deciphered the names, but how long after the tomb’s discovery we do not know. The nine ossuaries with descriptions and photos were included in the official Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in 1994, authored by Rahmani. The publication of Rahmani’s catalogue was the first time these six names from the Garden tomb were publicly revealed—fourteen years after their discovery.

  9. Shimon Gibson’s original map of the Garden tomb from 1980.

  Remarkably no one in any official capacity noticed or considered this unusual cluster of six names as having any special interest—not even the Jesus son of Joseph inscription. Only one other ossuary inscribed “Jesus son of Joseph” has ever been found, out of approximately two thousand ossuaries that have been uncovered over the past two hundred years. The famous Israeli Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Eleazar Sukenik brought it to light in 1931. He had stumbled across it in the basement warehouse of the Rockefeller Museum. It seems no one had ever noticed it before, and no one knows where it came from. As one might expect, the news of its existence caused a minor stir in the world press. Could this ossuary have possibly been that of Jesus of Nazareth?33 The scholars who commented on the discovery when Sukenik made his announcement emphasized that these names were sufficiently common to make any such identification irresponsibly speculative. Besides, no one knew where this ossuary had been found, when it was discovered, or who had found it. No such attention was given to the Jesus son of Joseph ossuary from the Garden tomb, even with these five other names all associated with Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

  Joseph Gath died in June 1993, a year before the Rahmani catalogue was published. Gath never published a full report on the tomb, but we know he must have talked with Rahmani once the names were deciphered since Rahmani thanks him, as the excavator of the tomb, for giving permission for the ossuaries to be published.34 His widow, Ruth Gath, has told us that when her husband learned of the names of the inscriptions, he told her privately that he believed that the traditional burial site of Jesus, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was the “wrong tomb.” He explained that as a Jew he planned to remain silent about this opinion since any claim that the Garden tomb was that of Jesus of Nazareth and his family might result in an anti-Semitic backlash from the Christian church.35

  10. The Garden tomb entrance between the apartments—it is covered by the cement slab at bottom center.

  In 1995 a British film crew working on an Easter special on the resurrection of Jesus had noticed the two “Jesus son of Joseph” ossuaries listed in Rahmani’s catalogue and asked to film one or both of them. When the director discovered that the 1980 Garden tomb had contained ossuaries with a clustered set of names like Joseph, Mary, Jesus, Judah, and Matthew, all names associated with Jesus and his family in the New Testament, the film crew’s interest was considerably piqued. The subsequent 1996 BBC Easter television special, coupled with a front-page story in the London Sunday Times titled “The Tomb That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” sparked a worldwide flurry of news coverage.36 Archaeologists, officials from the IAA, and biblical scholars quickly weighed in, assuring the public that “the names were common” and the tomb could have belonged to any man named Jesus, not necessarily the one we know as Jesus of Nazareth. There were even calls from the Vatican to the IAA seeking clarification about the veracity of the stories that were circulating in the media. The story lasted about a week and then was largely dropped. Most academics chalked the whole subject up to an unfortunate case of media frenzy. One positive result of the news coverage was that the late Amir Drori, director of the IAA, embarrassed that he had never heard of this “Jesus” tomb, demanded that a full report of the tomb and its contents be assigned at once. The task fell to Amos Kloner to write up an official report on the tomb so as to dispel irresponsible media speculation. Kloner’s article appeared a few months later that same year, surely record time for an academic publication.37 Had the 1996 publicity bubble never occurred it seems unlikely that anything about the tomb would have ever been published, and the tomb with its contents would have been forgotten.

  Both Kloner and Gibson have expressed their view that the Garden tomb merits no further scholarly attention and that it has become undeservedly famous due to media sensationalism.38 In their view the names in the tomb are common and have no connection to Jesus of Nazareth. The other major objection to identifying this tomb as the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth is the assertion that there is no historical evidence that Jesus had a son at all, much less one named Judah. When James was writing his book The Jesus Dynasty in 2005, he reacted to the post–Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code sensationalism and stated bluntly that the idea that Jesus was married and had children made good fiction but was “long on speculation and short on evidence.”39 However, based on all the evidence as well as the new discoveries in the Patio tomb, James has had reason to change his mind.

  The media hysteria to which Kloner and Gibson refe
r is not so much the 1996 BBC story, which was quickly forgotten, but the aftermath of the investigation that we began in 2004. The preliminary results were made public in March 2007 through a Discovery Channel television documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, the bestselling book The Jesus Family Tomb, and a number of scholarly articles.40 We will chronicle that investigation and its results in the following chapter.

  THE STRATEGIC LOCATION OF TALPIOT

  Few outside of Jerusalem had ever heard of the district of East Talpiot, just south of the Old City of Jerusalem, until the news stories regarding the “Jesus” tomb made headline news around the world in March 2007. According to the gospel of John, the tomb in which Jesus was initially placed in haste, until full burial rites could be performed after Passover, happened to be near the place of his crucifixion (John 19:41). Millions of Christians visit Jerusalem each year and are invariably taken either to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian quarter of the Old City, or an alternative site, just north of the city, more popular with evangelical Protestants, called “Gordon’s Calvary.” They come to either spot to view the place where they believe Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead on that first Easter morning. The crowded rows of condos and apartments that make up the various neighborhoods of East Talpiot are understandably not on the Christian tour agenda.