The Jesus Discovery

by James D. Tabor

  Simcha and his team went to work on three fronts at once—commissioning the creation of a special robotic arm, getting the permission of the ultra-Orthodox, and convincing the condo owners’ association to allow drilling in the narrow corridor of their basement storage area. Everything had to happen together or the whole operation could not take place. But prior to any of these efforts the IAA had to give some kind of permission: if not an excavation license, then perhaps permission to survey the site of the tomb in a noninvasive way. Simcha, who had moved to Israel from Canada in 2008, had already made some initial inquiries of Shuka Dorfman, head of the IAA, as to what would be required.19 James would need the sponsorship of his university, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and since he is a historian and not an archaeologist, he would have to invite a qualified archaeologist to join him as well as have the endorsement of the anthropology department at his university. UNC Charlotte would also have to certify that proper funding was in place and that timely academic publication of the results would follow.

  James invited Rami Arav, an Israeli archaeologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has years of experience excavating at the ancient city of Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee as well as experience with ancient tombs of this period. Rami enthusiastically agreed. James and Rami put together all their documentation for the license and submitted it to the IAA in July 2009. They asked for permission to “survey” both the Patio and the Garden tombs. To our surprise we were told that any license given would be an “excavation” license, even though we planned only to enter the Patio tomb via remote camera. Apparently it was the position of the IAA that both tombs had been exposed by construction work in the 1980s, so technically they had been previously authorized for excavation. Even though the excavation of the Patio tomb had not been completed, it was technically not a new or intact tomb—so its proper excavation could theoretically be completed. The license would also allow us to excavate further in the Jesus tomb if we saw the need, since it had been investigated in 1980 rather hastily, as a “rescue” dig. One additional caveat that the IAA stressed: any dealings with the ultra-Orthodox were our problem not the IAA’s. We were of course elated that so far as the IAA was concerned, the extent of our exploration of either tomb was open to whatever circumstances we could work out.

  In early August we heard that the internal IAA license committee had forwarded our license application to the Archaeological Council because of its unusual nature. The Archaeological Council is the highest advisory board to the director of the IAA. Its decision could make or break any request to excavate in Israel. Unfortunately, the council was not meeting until November. Time was ticking away.

  The Archaeological Council approved the license on November 15, 2009. There was one catch. IAA licenses are issued annually, no matter what time of year one applies. Ours would expire on December 31, 2009—just six weeks from the date it was issued. It would of course be impossible to have everything ready by the end of the year; on top of that, James and Rami would not be free to come over to Israel until after December 15, when their university semesters ended. That would leave us only two weeks to work. We decided to go ahead with some preliminary work regardless and reapply for a renewal of the license for the entire year 2010.

  In the meantime, Simcha had received permission from the condo association allowing us access to the property to do our measurements, and most important, to bring in a company that could run ground penetrating radar (GPR) along the corridor of the basement where we planned to drill the probe holes to access the tomb with the robotic arm and cameras. This amazing technology can produce images “underground” and detect voids. The GPR indicated there was a void just at the point we had identified by our measurements as our only option for drilling. It was an area less than three feet long and a foot wide. If we were correct the drill would drop into the tomb just inside its outer wall—but we would be inside!

  14. Israel Antiquities Authority license to excavate both tombs.

  The drilling itself would have to wait until 2010 and a renewal of our IAA license. In the meantime Simcha was working hard to come to an agreement with the ultra-Orthodox and the condo owners to allow for the actual penetration of the basement floor. Even though we had every expectation of receiving a renewal license for 2010, until we had it in hand we had no assurance that our project could move forward. Rami and James turned in a report to the IAA on our activities at the end of 2009 and on February 23, 2010, we had our new license in hand. This meant we had the rest of 2010 to complete our work.

  THE DRILLING BEGINS

  Our plan was to begin the drilling in early May. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Simcha and Felix had approached Walter Klassen, one of the best engineers in the business of constructing complex props and mechanical devices for movies.20 When he heard what we needed, he was clearly intrigued but also recognized the incredibly difficult challenges inherent in the task. He was willing to try. He would have to custom-build a robotic probe that could drop down through an eight-inch drill hole into the tomb, then expand with a controllable arm that had enough leverage to mount a high-resolution camera on the end. It would have to reach anywhere inside the 11.5 by 11.5 foot tomb that was just under four feet deep from ceiling to floor. The real challenge, assuming that could be done, was to construct a secondary extension arm that could reach at least six more feet into the niches with a snake camera in order to examine all sides of the ossuaries. Walter was fairly certain he could have at least a prototype of the robotic arm done by May to test its main capabilities in the tomb itself, as well as obtain further measurements from inside.

  15. Map of the Patio tomb with ossuaries, drill holes, and robotic arm trajectories.

  As May arrived things were coming together. Simcha had worked out a formal legal agreement with the condo owners. He had met with Rabbi David Schmidl, whose permission we would need to enter the tomb without objection from the Orthodox. Then we met a snag.

  Rabbi Schmidl was willing to agree to the camera probe so long as it did not touch or move anything, but he was adamant that nothing be taken out or disturbed. Klassen was planning to equip his robotic arm not only to hook and grab any small artifacts, coins, or other items we might discover and want to remove, but to give it the ability, using an inflatable bladder, to slightly move the ossuaries that were jammed up against one another. This might be the only way they could be examined for inscriptions. Rabbi Schmidl was unbending. Unless we agreed, the whole thing was off. He also insisted that his representatives be on site at all times observing our actions. We decided to go along with his restrictions even though our license allowed us much more, including physical entry into the tomb if need be. We intended to play by the rules. This was a first step, to explore and take a look—if we could even get in—and that was still a big if. Based on Kloner’s original report we knew there were at least two Greek inscriptions in the tomb. If we could shed further light on the Jesus family tomb nearby then any effort we made was more than justified.

  The drilling began the first week of May 2010. The drill crew used specially constructed diamond drill bits that Felix had had made for our specific purposes. Bill Tarant, who worked for General Electric, joined the expedition, bringing a much better camera than we had had in 2005. The drilling went on for a few days with stops and starts. On Thursday, May 6, Simcha called James to report the exciting news—they had gotten into the tomb and dropped a small camera inside. The view was spectacular, with much more clarity and maneuverability than in 2005. All the measurements and calculations had proven accurate. James booked a flight that evening and was on his way to Israel the next morning.

  16. The initial drilling of the probe holes in the corridor basement floor.

  The team spent the week surveying and measuring the tomb with a preliminary look at the seven ossuaries inside. All but two were elaborately decorated and painted with lovely carved rosette designs and borders. The nine niches were skillfully carved with gabled tops and the sto
nes that once blocked them were still intact. The seven ossuaries were distributed in four of the niches; the other five held human bones that were never gathered for secondary burial. Those bones suggested that the tomb had been used up to the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 68 CE. Most likely the family that owned the tomb never returned to gather the bones of their dead and put them in ossuaries before the Romans destroyed the city and killed or exiled them with the rest of the population.

  17. First view of a previously unseen ossuary in niche one, blocking stone at the side.

  As we peered through our monitors, watching the camera on the end of the prototype robotic arm sweep flawlessly around the tomb, our excitement mounted. The laser feature of the camera had gathered the precise data that Walter needed in order to complete the full version of the robotic probe. As we packed up that day we felt a sense of awe about where we were and what we were now poised to do. We were unseen visitors of the present remotely entering the past—to 68 CE when the tomb had been left sealed and the generation who knew Jesus had scattered. We agreed that the last week in June we would return to the tomb with Walter and his fully constructed robotic arm. Then the real search for ossuary inscriptions could begin.

  A BREAKTHROUGH DISCOVERY

  On Sunday, June 27, 2010, our entire team gathered in Jerusalem—Rami Arav, our archaeologist and codirector of the “excavation”; Bill Tarant, with a set of sophisticated cameras donated by GE; Felix Goluber and Meyer Bensimon, who had worked out all the measurements; the film crew; security police; a representative from the IAA; a couple of Rabbi Schmidl’s assistants; and most important, Walter Klassen with his final version of the robotic arm. The feeling of anticipation was intense. Our team bonded together as our work progressed and Rabbi Schmidl’s representatives were genuinely drawn to our project and its fascinating scientific value.

  18. The entire team gathered outside the basement area of the condominium.

  We decided to explore the tomb systematically, niche by niche, working counterclockwise from the sealed entrance. Once inserted, the robotic arm worked beautifully. There were a few bugs to work out but Walter had the equipment with him to make necessary alterations as we went along. Several times in the days to follow he pulled his robotic arm completely out of the tomb and made adjustments. Other times he had to clean the lens of the camera when it hit the walls of the tomb or picked up soil from the floor. The whole apparatus broke down once after one of the pulley cords had gotten tangled. Our hearts sank, contemplating the possibility the entire operation would have to be given up. For a tense couple of hours Walter was not sure he could retract the robotic arm. He was finally successful and we were back in business. We breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  Walter was hoping that the extension he had installed on the end of the robotic arm with its snake camera and light would be able to reach all the ossuaries for close examination, including several that were the farthest from the drill holes and pushed deep into the niches. Every minute was filmed in real time for the record. Inscriptions can show up on any surface of a four-sided ossuary, even on the lid, so every inch had to be carefully examined. The inscriptions are easy to miss. Some are deeply chiseled and obvious but they are more often informal and sometimes faint.

  19. Walter preparing the robotic arm for insertion into the tomb.

  The first niche contained ossuary 1, one of the most beautiful and elaborately decorated ossuaries we had ever seen, but there were no inscriptions. We had a moment of passing excitement when it appeared that there might be some defaced letters on its lower front, but closer examination showed them to be random scratches. Our first surprise came in the second niche, which held three ossuaries. Ossuary 2 had a strange symbol on its front that looked at first glance like a four-legged, stick-figure animal of some sort. Since Jews in this period were forbidden to put animal or human images on their ossuaries, based on the commandment to avoid graven images, James suggested the symbol might be the name Yahweh written in stylized Hebrew—the letters Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh. That possibility would be quite significant since writing the sacred name of God—the Tetragrammaton—was forbidden. Was it possible the family that buried their dead in this tomb would dare such a heretical action? There is surely no other such example of something like this mysterious symbol, whatever it was, on any of the 600 inscribed ossuaries that are known.

  20. The mysterious symbol on the front of ossuary 2.

  21. The faint MARA inscription in Greek on ossuary no. 3, inked in for clarity.

  As we moved along to ossuary 3, a gasp went up in the cramped corridor. As we stared into the monitors, we began to see the faded Greek letters MARA etched faintly into the end facing us, just above an incomplete rosette marking. Mara is the feminine form of Mar in Aramaic, which means “Lord” or “Master,” as explained in the previous chapter. It occurs on only four other ossuaries from the period, one of them just two-hundred feet away—in the Jesus tomb—where we have Mariamene Mara. We were amazed. To find a Mara at all would be extraordinary, but that it was just a stone’s throw from the ossuary in the Jesus tomb seemed to us beyond chance or coincidence. This was our first indication that maybe the two tombs were related in content, not just in proximity.

  On Monday, June 28, we continued our camera exploration of the second niche with its three ossuaries, including number 4, jammed close up against number 3 with the Mara inscription. Our snakelike camera moved slowly all around each ossuary. On the back of ossuary 4 we thought we could barely see the outlines of some faint Greek lettering—it looked like a name, maybe the letters ION or IOM but we could not get close enough or get the right light and angle to see more. Kloner had mentioned seeing two Greek words or names in his quick 1981 foray into the tomb. We had found one—Mara. This seemed to be the second. We are still not sure what the name might be on the far end of ossuary 4—maybe IONAS (Jonah), IONES (John), or maybe even IOULIA (Julia). We later found a faint black-and-white photo in the IAA archives of this ossuary that Kloner had taken in the dim light in 1981, when he hastily photographed the seven ossuaries in their original positions. You can clearly see that there are Greek letters on the end that we were trying to reach, but they are impossible to make out—even with attempts to enhance the old photograph. We also began to realize, in comparing Kloner’s 1981 photos of the four niches that contained the ossuaries with their present placement, that they had been moved. This fits with the narrative we had reconstructed of the discovery of the tomb in April 1981. Kloner’s IAA assistants had moved all the ossuaries out of the niches, and even chalk-marked them inside in numerical order, 1 through 7. Although we were not allowed to move anything in the tomb, not even a hair’s breadth, one of the lids of Kloner’s ossuary 4 was ajar and we could actually peer inside with our cameras and see bones. A circled chalk number was still visible inside the bone box.

  Our third day, Wednesday, June 29, was devoted to niche 3, which held two ossuaries (nos. 5 and 6) perpendicular to one another but jammed very closely together. About midmorning the big surprise came. Suddenly we all shouted in unison to Walter, who was maneuvering the robotic arm, “Wait, wait, stop there!” “Back, back, back!” “Hold it, right there!” We were staring at the strangest thing we had ever seen on any ossuary. We began to examine it from every angle. It was definitely an image—but of what? At first Rami thought it might be the prow of a boat, as we did not yet have the complete image in view. He then suggested a vase or amphora with handles, examples of which are known on other decorated ossuaries.21 Rami began quickly sketching what he saw, trying to make sense of it as we all hovered close to the camera monitors. Finally Rami suggested it was some kind of tower. Jewish ossuaries sometimes have images of pillar-shaped funerary monuments carved on them, called nephesh in Hebrew.22

  As Walter brought the whole image into focus it suddenly dawned on us what we were seeing. It was not a vase, or a boat, or a tower. It was a big fish. There was no doubt about it. But it was not just a large fish. There was als
o a small, stick figure coming out of its mouth. Everyone was shouting, “It’s a fish!” and someone pointed to the two little flippers on each side. It took us about thirty seconds to process what we were seeing but it was unmistakable. “It’s Jonah and the big fish!” We were certain of it. The fish was spitting out the human figure onto the carved border at the bottom of the ossuary, which seemed to represent land. But what would an image of Jonah and the fish be doing on an ossuary? First, Jews do not normally put such pictorial representations on their ossuaries in this period—whether animals or humans. Jews of course know the story of Jonah, since a book of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament bearing his name relates his strange tale of being swallowed and vomited out alive by a large fish (not a whale) in the Mediterranean Sea. But to draw such an image was to risk breaking one of the Ten Commandments—that one make no “graven image,” including anything “that is in the water” (Exodus 20:4). Yet for one special group, this particular image took on enormous significance, so much so that they permitted its use. For the earliest followers of Jesus, who were for the most part Jewish, Jonah came to symbolize something central to their faith, based on the mysterious saying of Jesus about the “sign of Jonah.”

  We had not yet examined ossuary 5, which was blocking the Jonah ossuary, but we turned to it next. It had two highly decorated rosettes with elaborate borders, similar to several others we had already examined in the tomb. As our camera passed along its façade another shout went up. “Stop! Hold it there!” we shouted to Walter and Bill. We could see clearly a four-line Greek inscription coming into focus. Names may occur with some frequency on ossuaries, but something like this, an epigram carrying some kind of message, was extremely rare. James began to sketch the letters. For the most part they were clearly written. The inscription seemed to say something like “The Divine Jehovah raises up . . .” We could not immediately make out the final word but we knew the verb “to raise up” was often used for resurrection of the dead or exaltation to heaven. Was this some kind of ancient affirmation of resurrection of the dead? Or a reference to someone being raised up to heaven? The possibility was intriguing. Next to the Jonah image it seemed not only possible, but even likely. We kept telling ourselves none of this should exist, not in a 1st century Jewish tomb, on the side of an ossuary, where neither images nor epigrams of this type ever occur.