The Jesus Discovery

by James D. Tabor

  In the time of Jesus things were of course quite different. The hills south of Jerusalem, down toward Bethlehem, were relatively sparsely populated with private lands devoted to agriculture and livestock. The neighborhood where the Garden and Patio tombs are located is called Armon Hanatziv. It is just off a high ridge, called the Promenade, that provides a spectacular view of Jerusalem to the north and Bethlehem to the south, and it still attracts busloads of tourists today. In ancient times there was a main road crisscrossing the area, running southeast, that passed the famous Mar Saba monastery and went down to the Dead Sea, near Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. To the west of the two tombs, just a few hundred yards away, was a spectacular aqueduct that transported water from Tekoa, south of Bethlehem, north to Jerusalem. The area is thick with ancient biblical history. Abraham traveled this route on his way to Mount Moriah, as recorded in Genesis 22:1–4. Rachel, wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph and Benjamin, is buried on the road running south to Bethlehem (Genesis 35:16). Just to the south and east of Bethlehem, clearly visible from the Talpiot tombs, is the magnificent Herodium, the tomb of Herod the Great, the Roman-appointed “King of the Jews.”

  In the 1980s, when the construction companies were tearing up the area to build residential dwellings, mostly apartments and condominiums, the Garden and Patio tombs were not the only tombs uncovered. Just to the north of the Garden or “Jesus” tomb, less than sixty feet away, was another tomb that had been almost entirely blasted away. All that was left was one of its inside walls, with the partial remains of the niches still visible. None of its contents could be studied or evaluated but it likely belonged to the same farm or agricultural estate. In the immediate vicinity there was also an ancient olive press, various water cisterns, and the remains of a plastered ritual bath called a mikveh. Joseph Gath, who surveyed the entire area around the tombs, concluded that these installations belonged to a large farm or wealthy estate and were most likely the family tombs of the owner, clustered closely together.41

  Ancient historians work with evidence, archaeological and textual, seeking to discern if there is any fit between what we read in our texts, in this case the gospel accounts of Jesus’ death, and what is found in excavations. They often construct working hypotheses to test whether the various types of evidence fit together and what the alternative interpretations might be.

  As we consider whether the Garden tomb might indeed be the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his immediate family a key historical question arises. According to the New Testament gospels Joseph of Arimathea, who had enough wealth and influence to go directly to Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea, to request the burial rights for Jesus’ body, was responsible for Jesus’ burial. Such a task would normally fall to the immediate family, or to the closest disciples of a teacher such as Jesus. For example, we learn in the gospel of Mark that when Herod Antipas beheaded John the Baptizer, his disciples were allowed to come and take his body and bury it in a tomb (Mark 6:29). In all four of our gospels, Joseph of Arimathea appears just after the crucifixion to remove Jesus’ corpse from the cross and carry out the Jewish burial rites for Jesus (Mark 15:43–47).42 We never hear of him again. He is said to be a member of the “council,” or Sanhedrin, the indigenous Jewish judicial body responsible for Jewish affairs, as well as a sympathizer with Jesus and his movement. If one wants to understand what happened to Jesus’ body after the crucifixion, one has to pay careful attention to Joseph of Arimathea.

  What most readers of the New Testament have missed is that Joseph of Arimathea initially placed the body of Jesus in a temporary unfinished tomb that just happened to be near the place of crucifixion. It was an emergency measure so that the corpse would not be left exposed overnight, which was forbidden by Jewish law (Deuteronomy 21:23). It was late afternoon when Jesus died and the Jewish Passover was beginning at sundown that very evening. Although Jewish tradition required that a body be buried as quickly as possible, the full rites could not be carried out before the Passover meal began. The gospel of John explains it best:

  Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:41–42)43

  Jesus was temporarily placed in this new tomb, with the entrance blocked with a stone, to protect his body from exposure and from predators. According to Mark all Joseph of Arimathea had time to do was to quickly wrap the bloodied body in a linen shroud—no washing, no anointing, no traditional Jewish rites of mourning—nothing (Mark 15:46). The women, including Jesus’ mother, his sister, his companion Mary Magdalene, and others, who followed at a distance, had every intention of completing the Jewish rites of burial, which involved washing the corpse and anointing it with oil and spices, as soon as the Sabbath was over (Mark 16:1). Joseph of Arimathea, in asking to take charge of the proper burial of Jesus, clearly had a more permanent arrangement in mind. The most likely scenario is that he planned to provide Jesus, and subsequently his family, with a cave tomb at his own expense, likely on his own estate outside Jerusalem. That he was a local resident seems likely based on his membership in the Sanhedrin, and he is the one who would have had the means to provide the family of Jesus, who were from Galilee, with a family cave tomb.

  The Patio tomb, in particular, shows evidence in both architecture and content of having belonged to a rich family. Our new evidence from the tomb further points in this direction. Once we put things into this biblical context, noting carefully what the earliest gospel traditions actually say, the faith of Jesus’ followers that he was raised from the dead can finally be understood in proper historical context. Rather than denying that Jesus was raised from the dead, the Talpiot tombs and their contents give witness to the resurrection faith of these first believers. In an uncanny way, Easter 1980 and Easter 1981 have provided us with a revolutionary new understanding of the implications of that first Easter weekend and all that transpired. In the following chapter we will relate our “rediscovery” of the two Talpiot tombs, their freshly uncovered contents, and how our understanding of Jesus and his first followers has been dramatically reshaped by what we have found.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  TWO TALPIOT TOMBS

  When we first went looking for the Talpiot “Jesus tomb” in March 2004 we were not even sure it had survived the building project in the 1980s. At that time we had no idea there was a second tomb located just a couple of hundred feet away. We knew that locating the Garden tomb after twenty-four years, somewhere within or under a complex of condominium buildings, would not be easy. We ended up consulting with the initial archaeologists, the original builders, and local residents, and checking city maps and old photographs. Surprisingly, our search began by simply knocking on doors and it ended with a blind woman leading us to the correct location.

  James had been working with Jerusalem archaeologist Shimon Gibson excavating an ancient site in Suba, west of Jerusalem, now known as the “John the Baptist” cave.1 Shimon has lived in Jerusalem since his family moved there from London when he was a young boy. He knows the history and archaeology of Jerusalem intimately. He also has a remarkable memory for details. As a beginning, James asked Gibson what he knew about a “Jesus tomb” discovered in 1980 in East Talpiot, on the off chance that he would be able to supply some information or know whom to ask about its subsequent fate. Was the tomb destroyed, covered over, or otherwise inaccessible due to the subsequent building boom in Talpiot?

  James was stunned when Shimon informed him that not only did he know about the tomb, but that he had assisted Joseph Gath and supervisor Amos Kloner in its excavation twenty-four years ago. He had served as the surveyor, had drawn the official map of the tomb and its contents, and was even listed on the excavation license. Shimon immediately gave Kloner a call to see if he remembered the precise location since Gibson had never been back to the tomb after construction in the area h
ad been completed. Kloner identified the approximate location and added that he did not think the tomb had been destroyed, that it might be preserved under a building. The next day, Shimon and James set off for East Talpiot and began walking around the various condominium complexes in the area around the gas station, talking to residents, and looking for any kind of concrete cover or vent pipes between the buildings that might indicate the presence of a tomb below ground.

  It is hard to imagine that scene today, considering how little we knew at the time and how much we have learned since. The two scholars must have appeared a bit strange to the residents on that Sunday afternoon—James, the American academic, and Shimon, the British-Israeli archaeologist, going door to door and stopping people along the walkways between the buildings asking if anyone had a tomb under their apartment or had heard of one in the areas between the building units. After about two hours of ringing doorbells and asking residents they hit pay dirt. A resident who had lived there since the building was first constructed in 1980 remembered talk of a tomb. He directed them to a nearby neighbor’s apartment. They rang the doorbell and the owner confirmed that his condominium had been built over an ancient tomb. Both James and Shimon assumed this had to be the Jesus tomb they were looking for. They had no idea at the time that there were two tombs in proximity to one another. The owner had lived there since 1980, and he and his wife were able to buy the place at a reduced price because other potential buyers did not want a condo unit built over a tomb.

  11. James standing over one of the ritual vent pipes running down into the Patio tomb.

  That evening James called Simcha, who lived in Toronto at that time. He excitedly reported the news: “We have found the Jesus tomb and we think it is intact.” James gave Simcha the name and address of the family they had met. That telephone call set everything in motion. We agreed that a first step in any reinvestigation of the Jesus tomb would be to examine the tomb itself firsthand. Empty or not, it might still hold some important clues about the 1st century Jewish family that was buried there. Given the hasty “rescue” excavation in April 1980, perhaps something had been overlooked.

  THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS

  At that time, in March 2004, we had never met face-to-face. In an initial phone conversation in October 2003 we discovered that we had a lot of common interests—especially involving ancient tombs and ossuaries from the time of Jesus. James was doing research for his book on the historical Jesus called The Jesus Dynasty, which involved his own work on the Jesus family and the four brothers of Jesus—James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon, listed two places in the New Testament (Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3). James had heard of the Talpiot Jesus tomb when it received a brief bit of publicity in 1996 in the BBC Easter documentary but he had not paid it much attention. He had gotten interested in ancient Jerusalem tombs and their ossuaries in 2000 when he and Shimon had accidentally stumbled upon a freshly robbed burial cave in the Hinnom Valley, just south of the Old City, now known as the “tomb of the Shroud.”2

  Simcha had produced a documentary for Discovery television in 2003 titled James Brother of Jesus, which focused on an ossuary that had surfaced in 2001 in the hands of an Israeli antiquities collector. Inscribed “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus,” it had caused a sensation. For Simcha, who had won Emmy Awards for a variety of documentaries on diverse subjects, this represented a foray into new territory—biblical archaeology. Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, had published the news of the find in November 2002.3 The ossuary was put on display in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum, where tens of thousands of visitors had viewed it and scholars caught their first glimpse of the actual artifact. Academic experts were divided over whether it might have been the burial box of James, the brother of Jesus of Nazareth. Some were quite excited about the discovery, while others suspected that the owner, in order to connect it to Jesus and make it more valuable, might have forged the portion of the inscription reading “brother of Jesus.”4 If authentically linked to Jesus of Nazareth the ossuary inscription would represent the first archaeological evidence ever found that mentions Jesus and his brother by name. As such it would be priceless. When Simcha began work on that project, invited by Shanks to produce a documentary on the find, Simcha did not even know what an ossuary was, or, like so many others, that Jesus even had a brother named James.

  12. The James ossuary on display in Toronto with the academic experts gathered.

  In the course of his work on the James ossuary film, Simcha learned about the existence of the 1980 “Jesus tomb” from the excavator Amos Kloner himself. He was interviewing Kloner at the IAA warehouse when Kloner asked him facetiously, “Why are you so interested in an ossuary that might belong to Jesus’ brother when there is one inscribed ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ found in a tomb in 1980 along with five other names associated with Jesus and his family? Wouldn’t you be more interested in the real thing?” Simcha could hardly believe his ears. Kloner quickly assured him he was only teasing him a bit and that these names, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, are so common in tombs of this period that it would be foolish for anyone to conclude this particular one had any association with Jesus of Nazareth. Simcha was intrigued and wanted to know more. He was not so sure that the tomb’s contents should have been so easily dismissed.

  Simcha arranged to examine and film the ossuaries from the Jesus tomb, along with their tantalizing set of inscribed names. Of the six ossuaries from the Jesus tomb, all but two had been cleaned and put on display at one time or another. Fortunately, two of them, the ones inscribed “Jesus son of Joseph” and “Miriam Mara,” had never undergone any cleaning. Simcha and his team were amazed to see fragmentary bone samples left inside both of them—more than enough for DNA testing.

  In that initial telephone conversation in October 2003, Simcha told James about the bone samples. James stopped him in mid-sentence. Even the possibility that skeletal remains of this particular “Jesus” could be DNA tested, whether he could be identified decisively with Jesus of Nazareth or not, was an amazing turn of events since it was assumed that all the bones from that tomb had long ago been lost or reburied by the Orthodox religious authorities. James and Shimon Gibson had already done DNA samples on the bones found in their “Shroud tomb” so James was familiar with the procedures. He offered to send these two samples from the Jesus tomb to Professor Carney Matheson at the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Ontario. Matheson was the same researcher that James and Shimon had used back in 2000.5 Simcha shipped the bone samples to James, who had them tested. The results of those DNA tests are revealed in our final chapter.

  By late 2004 Simcha had begun to assemble his team for an investigative documentary on the “Jesus tomb” that would thoroughly reevaluate the tomb and its contents. How common were the names—particularly as a six-name cluster from a single tomb? Was there a solid statistical answer to the probability these particular names would be found in a single tomb? Could the DNA tests tell us anything? What historical evidence was there for Jesus being married with a child? What about the provenance of the James ossuary—might it have been looted from the Jesus tomb? The owner of the James ossuary, Oded Golan, had claimed that he had acquired it sometime around 1980—the same time the Talpiot “Jesus tomb” had been discovered.6 Finally, could the tomb be reentered—if not physically then perhaps through some kind of remote camera probe inserted through the ritual vent pipes? These avenues of investigation had never been pursued by anyone.

  Simcha’s initial “tomb team” consisted of Felix Golubev, Simcha’s right-hand man on many of his film projects, and Charles Pellegrino, an author and scientist with a fascination with ancient archaeology who was coauthoring a book with Simcha on the Jesus tomb investigation.7 Pellegrino subsequently interested his friend James Cameron, the filmmaker of Titanic and Avatar fame, in joining the group as executive producer on the film.8

  James and Simcha met face-to-face for the first time in April 2005 in Toronto. On that visit Simc
ha invited James to officially join the “tomb team” as an academic consultant. After hearing Simcha explain his plans to carry out a thorough scientific investigation of the tomb, James could not resist.9

  At that initial Toronto meeting Simcha dropped what he called his “bombshell” on James, and James in turn let Simcha in on his most recent investigation involving the rareness of the names on the six ossuaries in the Jesus tomb.

  One of Simcha’s researchers had discovered that according to Harvard professor François Bovon, the unusual form of the name Mariam, which in Greek is written Mariamene is the precise form of the name used to refer to Mary Magdalene in a 4th century CE Greek copy of the Acts of Philip, where she is also called an apostle.10 The more common form of this name in Greek is Mariam or Mariame, or even Maria—whereas the form Mariamene, spelled with the letter “n” or nu in Greek, is rare. This was indeed new information to James and its stunning implications began to dawn on him. If it could be shown that the “Jesus son of Joseph” buried in this tomb was Jesus of Nazareth, it would follow that buried with him was his child named Judah and most likely the child’s mother—Mariamene. The second part of her inscription—Mara—seemed to support this possibility since it is the feminine form of Mar, which in Aramaic means “Lord” or “Master.”11 This would mean that the Mariamene in this tomb was being given an honorific title as Jesus’ consort, just as Jesus himself was called Mar, “Lord,” the masculine form of the title. Mara is impossible to translate into English since we don’t commonly use the term “Lordess.” Perhaps the English title “Lady” is a rough equivalent.

  James’s instinct was to resist the sensational. After all, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, published the year before, postulated that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child. Like most scholars in his field James held the view that there was no historical evidence to support this idea and he was cautious about participating in any kind of sensationalism of this sort. Surely if Jesus had been married or had children, James had thought, some evidence would have survived in our early sources. The gospels and the rest of the New Testament are silent on this subject—or at least that was James’s assumption at the time. As we will see, that particular silence is ironically quite deafening. Sometimes new evidence causes one to see things that were there all the time but were unnoticed.