The Jesus Discovery

by James D. Tabor

  James then revealed his surprise to Simcha. He had been doing extensive research on the brothers of Jesus for his book The Jesus Dynasty. He had noticed that Mark had used a rare nickname Joses for the second brother, Joseph (compare Mark 6:3 with Matthew 13:55). That form of the name in Greek is the equivalent to the nickname Yoseh in Hebrew. James had noticed that this precise nickname was on one of the six inscribed ossuaries in the Jesus tomb. As far as James had determined, this particular form of the common name Joseph was so rare that of the dozens of ossuaries inscribed with the various forms of the name Joseph, either in Hebrew or in Greek, this was the only one with the Hebrew form Yoseh. Of course the fact that Mark uses this form of the name does not prove that the Yoseh in the tomb was Jesus’ brother, but along with Mariamene Mara, such rare forms of these otherwise common names (Mary and Joseph) affect the odds of their occurring in a cluster with the name Jesus son of Joseph.

  FINDING THE JESUS TOMB—ALMOST

  Later in 2005, when Simcha was able to meet the family that lived over the tomb and to have his team survey the physical situation, it seemed clear that a first step would be to drop a camera down one of the ritual vent pipes that run up from the tomb to the patio above—assuming the pipes would be clear and accommodate such an operation. That would allow them to film inside the tomb without the need to tunnel in from the basement below, a possibility that was fraught with difficulties—not the least of which would be the physical stability of the foundation of the building. Even such a simple plan was not so easily done. The owners of the condo unit had to agree but there was a further problem. Apparently the patio with the vent pipes off the condo unit was considered common property, so the condo association for the whole building might have to get involved. Also, the Jewish family that owned the condo was Orthodox and they insisted that once the initial camera probe was done, should anything further be attempted Simcha must get official rabbinic approval from the ultra-Orthodox authorities that claimed the right to safeguard the sanctity of any Jewish tomb. Simcha agreed and the plan for the remote camera was set in motion.

  Getting the hundred-thousand-dollar camera down a six-inch pipe turned out to be quite a challenge. One pipe led nowhere, stopping far short of the tomb. The second pipe looked more promising but had some blockage about thirteen feet down. Simcha’s team had to call a plumber, who was able to clear it after much effort.

  On Friday, September 16, 2005, the camera was dropped down the pipe and into the tomb eighteen feet below. Simcha remembers it as a surreal experience, as if one were passing from one reality to another, separated by two thousand years. Suddenly Simcha and his team received a shock. Peering at the small camera monitors they realized they were not inside an excavated empty tomb but quite the opposite. They could hardly believe their eyes. The tomb was intact—with ossuaries still inside the lovely carved gabled burial niches on three sides! This tomb did not match the map of the Jesus tomb that Gibson had made in 1980. What’s more, the entrance to the tomb was completely sealed, whereas the Jesus tomb had been left open. They could clearly see the tightly fitted stone blocking the ancient entrance from inside the tomb. Since they knew that the Jesus tomb had been excavated and left empty and open in 1980 by the archaeologists, the conclusion was obvious: The tomb under the patio could not be the Jesus tomb, even though it seemed to be the right location in East Talpiot.

  When it comes to discoveries and investigations there seems to be a mysterious truism at work. What one most expects to find seldom turns up and what is least expected or even overlooked often turns out to be highly significant. Even before the Patio tomb camera probe, Felix Golubev, Simcha’s associate, had noted in the IAA files a reference to two tombs in the Dov Gruner Street area: the Jesus tomb that we thought we had located and a second tomb about two hundred feet to the north. We were so certain that we had located the Jesus tomb below the patio marked by the ritual vent pipes that we had not focused on the second tomb. We subsequently learned that the Patio tomb had been exposed in 1981 and briefly examined, but left unexcavated—so we knew this was the tomb we were looking at. Now we knew that there were two Talpiot tombs. Our investigation had widened considerably.

  Amos Kloner, who had supervised the discovery of both tombs for the IAA, had noted that two of the ossuaries in the Patio tomb had Greek names inscribed.12 As Simcha reviewed the film footage from inside the Patio tomb he began to realize the awesome implications of our mistake. We were filming inside a sealed 1st century tomb from the time of Jesus—something that had never been done before. Moreover, it was not just any tomb but one located yards away from the so-called Jesus tomb. What if the two tombs were related and this second tomb could eventually be explored? Imagine the possibilities of reading the two inscriptions and perhaps finding others, not to mention anything else that might still be sealed inside. But for now the business at hand was to find the Jesus tomb and determine if it was still intact and accessible after twenty-five years.

  Simcha located the engineer who had supervised the construction of the condominium in the 1980s, Ephraim Shohat, and brought him to the site. He clearly remembered both tombs. Shohat confirmed that the first tomb, the one that had the Jesus family inscriptions, was free and clear of buildings and was left intact in one of the terraces constructed between the buildings, while the other, the Patio tomb, was indeed under one of the condo buildings with ritual vent pipes running down to the tomb below. As Shohat and Simcha’s team wandered the areas between the buildings, curious neighbors began to gather offering various opinions as to the location of the tomb. After getting his bearings, Simcha pointed to a five-by-five-foot cement slab covering a raised rectangular area alongside the sidewalk in one of the terraced gardens. At that moment a local resident, a blind woman, walked by, asked what they were looking for, and put her hand on that very cement slab, declaring, “The tomb is here.” She had lived there since the 1980s and remembered that the tomb had been initially left open but was later covered by residents to prevent kids from climbing in and out and possibly getting hurt.

  ENTERING THE JESUS TOMB

  Simcha’s team wasted no time. On Sunday, September 18, 2005, they broke the seal on the concrete cover over the Garden tomb and slid it aside, exposing a cavity about twelve feet deep directly in front of the open entrance to the tomb. There was no doubt they were at the right spot. The distinctively carved chevron façade on the face of the tomb was clearly visible. In seconds they were inside. To their amazement the tomb was not empty. There were no ossuaries but the entire tomb was filled to a depth of several feet with decaying books, pamphlets, and loose manuscript pages. The tomb had become a genizah, a depository for old and worn-out holy texts that Jewish law requires not be thrown away but be properly “buried,” in keeping with their holiness. Apparently the local rabbinic authorities had used the tomb for this purpose before it was finally sealed with the concrete slab.

  13. The Garden tomb close-up, covered with a concrete slab.

  Simcha got Shimon Gibson on the phone, explained to him that the Patio tomb was the wrong location, and invited him to come take a look. Simcha wanted to film Shimon and get his thoughts and recollections right at the scene, inside the tomb, since he had been involved in the 1980 excavation. In the meantime all hell broke loose outside the tomb above. Some tenants had called the police saying the film crew had no permission to remove the slab cover and were trespassing on private property, while others, including the blind woman and some of her fellow residents, insisted it was common property and had been left open for years after the excavation by the IAA. A shouting match ensued. The police arrived but refused to take sides and insisted on order. By the time Shimon arrived there was a semblance of a truce. Simcha had promised to donate some funds for a swing set for the kids in the garden and to seal up the tomb again once the filming was complete. Shimon was hesitant to go inside the tomb since he was not clear who had sealed it up—the IAA or the residents. He called someone at the IAA, described the situat
ion, and was told it was all right to enter a tomb that had already been excavated. There are hundreds of such ancient tombs all around Jerusalem, left open once their contents have been removed. For Shimon it was a trip back to his past. He was only twenty-one years old when the tomb was discovered and was just beginning his career in archaeology. He crawled into the tomb with Simcha and revisited on camera his memories of the tomb after twenty-five years. While they were inside filming another ruckus broke out. A local resident who happened to work for the IAA and lived across from the tomb showed up. She had heard the commotion and shouting. She made a call to the IAA and apparently got someone else who did not understand the situation. She told the official that a film crew was violating an ancient tomb without permission. He told her to tell them they were violating the law and would be arrested unless they ceased their activities immediately, exited the tomb, and resealed it. Simcha decided to comply, even though he was quite certain that an excavated tomb, left open by the IAA and subsequently covered over by the condo residents for safety reasons, could not be illegal to enter. That would be a battle for another day. The team had succeeded beyond anything they could have imagined for a weekend’s activity. Not only had they entered the Jesus tomb but also they had peered into the nearby sealed tomb through a camera. They had confirmed there were two tombs, in very close proximity to one another, the second still intact. This was by any measure a successful first step.

  THE WORLD REACTS

  Simcha’s film, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, aired on the Discovery Channel on March 4, 2007.13 It was preceded by a press conference in the New York Public Library with over 350 journalists from all over the world in attendance. The ossuaries inscribed “Jesus son of Joseph” and “Mariamene Mara” had been flown in from Israel for the occasion. Although the two-hour documentary included the brief camera probe of the Patio tomb nearby, its focus was on the Jesus tomb and its thesis was the likelihood that the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth had been discovered in 1980. The film covered all the evidence our investigation had generated at that time. This included a peer-reviewed statistical study by Dr. Andrey Feuerverger on the probabilities of the names on the ossuaries occurring in a cluster, the results of our DNA tests on the bones from the Jesus and Mariamene ossuaries, the historical evidence for Jesus and Mary Magdalene being husband and wife and bearing a child, and a scientific analysis of the patina surfaces of the ossuaries in the Jesus tomb with that of the James ossuary, which indicated that the James ossuary most likely was looted from the Jesus or Garden tomb.14

  The evangelical Christian community mobilized a protest directed at the Discovery Channel demanding that the film not be shown again. Discovery received more than one and a half million e-mails from this irate constituency within twenty-four hours. Its switchboard was jammed with protesting phone calls for several days after the film aired. An orchestrated campaign directed toward the main advertisers supporting Discovery Channel programming quickly followed. As a result of this onslaught several major advertisers threatened not to advertise on Discovery if the show were ever aired again.

  These Christians believed that it was impossible that Jesus’ tomb could have been found, certainly not with his bones intact in an ossuary, since he had been raised physically from the dead and ascended to heaven. This is the standard interpretation among the evangelical Christian community: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead means his physical remains, flesh and bones, were taken to heaven. As we will see, Jesus’ earliest followers had a different view. They understood Jesus’ resurrection as a spiritual not a physical phenomenon. Since the airing of the controversial documentary there have been a half-dozen or more books and DVDs published by evangelical Christians seeking to refute the thesis of the film.15

  At the same time, but for entirely different reasons, a cadre of historians and archaeologists weighed in through interviews, e-mails, and blog posts on the Internet, largely critical of the film and its thesis. They offered two main responses. First, that the names in the Garden tomb were so common in Jerusalem at that time that it was baseless speculation to identify this particular “Jesus son of Joseph” with Jesus of Nazareth. Second, that there was no reliable historical evidence supporting the thesis that Jesus had been married and had a child—so this particular Jesus could not be the one in the gospels.16

  A CONFERENCE IN JERUSALEM

  In January 2008, James Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary convened a conference in Jerusalem attended by over fifty academics from around the world. The theme was “Jewish Views of the Afterlife and Burial Practices in Second Temple Judaism: Evaluating the Talpiot Tomb in Context.” The gathering drew a who’s who of experts from all relevant fields—archaeologists, historians, epigraphers, paleographers, DNA specialists, statisticians, and theologians. For four days the scholars listened to papers, participated in panels, and discussed, argued, and debated between sessions and after hours. Charlesworth’s intent was to provide a proper academic forum for a thorough discussion of all the relevant issues that had been raised about the Garden tomb in Talpiot and its possible connection to Jesus of Nazareth and to publish an edited volume of papers based on the conference.17 A final concluding panel summed things up. There was no consensus on many of the major issues but most participants were unconvinced a persuasive case for identity had yet been made.18 Everyone did agree that there was a need for more evidence. At the end of the conference there was a unanimous vote calling for further investigation of the Garden tomb itself, and most important, if possible, an examination of the contents of the nearby Patio tomb. Simcha had shown the film footage from the Patio tomb that he had taken with the camera probe through the vent pipe. The audience was fascinated.

  ACHIEVING THE NEAR IMPOSSIBLE

  It might be possible to get permission to reexamine the Jesus tomb in the garden area since it had been cleared and left open in 1980 but the Patio tomb was a different matter. The IAA does not issue permits to excavate intact ancient tombs. Amos Kloner had tried to excavate the Patio tomb in 1981 with a valid permit, but the ultra-Orthodox showed up in protest and halted his efforts. Since 1981 Israeli laws had, if anything, become more stringent. The Israeli government had made agreements with the Orthodox that no intact tomb would be disturbed, out of reverence for the dead. Although Simcha had been able to drop a small camera into the tomb through the patio vent pipe and do some limited filming, he had no ability to maneuver the camera and get close to the ossuaries that were stored in the niches to examine them for inscriptions. The patio was located eighteen feet above the tomb and the condo building was covering the tomb itself. The tomb was thirty feet below the street level outside the building. The idea of tunneling under the building and breaking into a tomb carved out of bedrock was not only impractical but it would never be allowed by the municipal building authorities even in the unlikely event that the IAA gave permission. Besides, the ultra-Orthodox would muster thousands of protesters to stop any such effort and the condo association would surely step in and refuse to give permission for such a risky endeavor. The costs of such an effort would be enormous and there was no guarantee that the inscriptions or any other evidence inside the Patio tomb would have any relevance to the Jesus tomb nearby or have any significance themselves to justify such herculean efforts. It appeared that any further examination of the Patio tomb was a fool’s dream.

  Felix Golubev, Simcha’s associate producer, thought otherwise. He had been mulling over the situation since 2005, when the first camera probe had been inserted in the vent pipe. He and his local Israeli associate, Meyer Bensimon, had gotten hold of the building plans for the condo and spent hours measuring floors and walls trying to determine just where the parameters of the tomb were in reference to the building and what would be the closest way to get in. Their only reference point was the vent pipe, which ran into the tomb. The camera footage showed approximately where in the tomb the vent entered. Felix and Meyer reported their results to Simcha. They came up with a brilliant bu
t risky plan. They had figured out that the end of a narrow corridor in the basement storage area of the building was possibly just over the inside bedrock wall of the tomb. According to their calculations the tiled basement floor was just seven feet above the roof of the tomb itself. Felix’s idea was to drill a series of eight-inch-diameter probe holes through the basement floor, down through the bedrock, and into the tomb. That would allow some kind of robotic arm to be inserted into the tomb, equipped with a camera on the end that could then perhaps be maneuvered around to reach all the ossuaries and examine them remotely.

  It was a long shot. If their measurements were off by even a few inches, the drill might miss the tomb and hit the bedrock. But assuming they could get in, could anyone build a robotic arm that was sophisticated enough to be maneuvered remotely from above into a tomb barely four feet high and with the leverage to reach deep into the niches and film all around the ossuaries? They knew from the vent camera footage that several of the niches had two or more ossuaries pushed tightly together. There was no guarantee any kind of camera could get close enough and maneuver accurately enough to film all sides of the ossuaries, any of which might contain inscriptions.