The following day we called in Professor James Charlesworth, an expert in Greek and early Christianity, who was in Jerusalem doing research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. After reinserting the robotic arm and swinging the camera once again over to the third niche, we showed him what we had discovered: first the inscription, then the image. He immediately and independently offered the same interpretation we had come to the day before. He excitedly sight-read the inscription. “The Divine Jehovah raises up from [the dead].” He also offered without hesitation the same interpretation of the fish. What we are looking at, he said, appears to be the earliest representation from Jesus’ followers of their faith in his resurrection of the dead. A quiet shudder went through the room as the implications of his conclusion sunk in. It was not only what we were seeing, but where we were seeing it—peering into a sealed 1st century tomb not two hundred feet from one that could arguably be that of Jesus and his family.
In the next chapter we will explore what the gospels call the mysterious “sign of Jonah” and its implications alongside an inscription affirming one being raised from the grave. As we packed up that evening, it was hard to fully absorb what we had seen. Was it possible that these tombs in East Talpiot offered us the first archaeological evidence of Jesus, his family, and the faith of his followers in his resurrection?
On April 11, 2012, after the publication of the hardcover edition of this book, Prof. James H. Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary announced a rather startling discovery regarding the “Jonah and the Fish” image in an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail.
According to Prof. Charlesworth, the tiny little “stick figure” that we have interpreted as a “Jonah” image, appears to be ingeniously formed so that its lines spell out the name Yonah in Hebrew—Yod, Vav, Nun, Hey. Since the publication of the photographs of the Jonah and the fish image, some scholars have suggested alternative interpretations of the image, arguing it had nothing to do with the Jonah story but was rather an image of a funerary monument or a vase of some type.
Since the name Jonah appears to be quite clearly written in Hebrew letters in a style common on ossuaries from this period, this new observation by Prof. Charlesworth adds significant support to our interpretation of the image. Although it might be possible that the engraver would write the name Jonah on a funerary monument or vase, it seems much more likely that the intent was to represent the idea of resurrection through an image of Jonah and the fish, as we have argued.
CHAPTER THREE
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DECODING THE MYSTERIOUS SIGN OF JONAH
According to our earliest gospel sources, Jesus often spoke in code. Everyone has heard of the “parables” of Jesus but the word parabole in Greek literally means to “lay alongside.” The idea is that one uses a symbolic term or story, laying alongside the real meaning—both obscuring it and revealing it at the same time. In other words, the “sign” is not the thing itself, but a kind of code or riddle for the concealed or secret meaning.
Our earliest New Testament gospel is Mark. Although it follows Matthew in the New Testament we use today, scholars are convinced it was our first written gospel, dated before Matthew, Luke, or John.1 It represents our earliest version of the “story” of Jesus, a narrative account of his preaching and healing that culminates in his execution by crucifixion. Early in Mark’s narrative Jesus explains his use of parables, shocking his listeners with his forthright declaration that he is purposely obscuring his meaning so that people would not understand:
And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.” (Mark 4:10–12)2
This is surely a contrast to the normal Sunday school approach to the parables of Jesus, which asserts that Jesus told his parables in order to help people understand. Here Jesus says just the opposite. The parables are riddles that only those whom God chooses can understand. To the rest, called “outsiders,” the parable, sign, or symbol is intended to obscure, not reveal, the true meaning.
Often when Jesus would offer one of his riddles he would end with the admonition, “Let the one who has ears to hear, hear!”3 The idea is that some who hear will understand the secret meaning, while others will “hear” the words but not comprehend their message.
Over one hundred and fifty years ago scholars in Germany identified a lost gospel.4 Its discovery results from an amazing bit of textual sleuthing. In terms of biblical studies it is one of the greatest discoveries of modern times, but few outside academic circles have heard of it. Scholars refer to this “gospel” as Q, short for the German word Quelle, meaning “source.” It was not found in a cave or buried in a clay jar, as were the Dead Sea Scrolls and the lost Gospel of Thomas. It is embedded in the New Testament gospels of Matthew and Luke. In other words it had been there all along, hidden away for centuries, but no one had noticed it.
Mark wrote first and Matthew and Luke drew upon Mark as their basic narrative source. In other words, Mark provides the storyline and structure for both these subsequent works. Some scholars even call Matthew and Luke “rewritten Mark,” much the way one might publish a subsequent edition of a work with revisions, changes, and additions. Besides using Mark, Matthew and Luke had access to this older source we call Q. By extracting from Matthew and Luke the material that they have in common, that is not in Mark, we are able to reconstruct this lost gospel source with a reasonable degree of certainty.5 Q turns out to be an early collection of the sayings and deeds of Jesus that predates even Mark. It is not a narrative or story but primarily a collection of Jesus’ teachings and deeds. Many scholars consider it to be a lost gospel of Jewish Christianity, uninfluenced by later Gentile Christian developments.6 It is usually thought to date to about 50 CE—just twenty years after Jesus’ death.
Recovering Q has allowed us to go behind the gospels as they now stand and see an earlier time when the Jesus movement was young and first developing in Galilee and Jerusalem. Q predates Paul and all the theological changes that developed as a result of his mission work to non-Jews in Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome. Q is about 350 lines and contains approximately fifty separate “teachings” of Jesus. It would have fit on a roll of papyri or parchment much like some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that come from the same period. For our recent discovery in the Talpiot Patio tomb the lost gospel source of Q turns out to be critical, for it is in Q that we learn one of the earliest interpretations of the mysterious “sign of Jonah,” attributed directly to Jesus.
In both Mark and Q we have accounts of the enemies of Jesus asking him to give them a “sign” in order to test him—was he the “son of David” or not (Matthew 12:23)? The phrase “son of David” is code for the expected king or Messiah, who was to be a descendant of the ancient king David and would appear in the last days to establish the kingdom of God.7 These enemies had seen Jesus’ healings and exorcisms but were not convinced, charging that he performed these wondrous deeds through magical powers from Beelzebul—the prince of demons (Mark 3:22; Matthew 12:23–24; Luke 11:15).
In Mark’s gospel, when these enemies demand a sign, Jesus’ reply is stark and abrupt: “Truly I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation” (Mark 8:12). As outsiders they are simply dismissed. Matthew knows this tradition about no sign and repeats it when he is following Mark as his narrative source (Matthew 16:4). However, he, like Luke, has the second source—Q. It is in this older source that we can glimpse the traditions that circulated among Jesus’ earliest followers who still lived in the land of Israel, some of whom would have heard him preach and teach.
The Q source records a similar scene in which Jesus’ enemies taunt him for a sign, but his response is quite different from Mark’s tradition. Rather than say “no sign will be given,” as he does in Mark,
Jesus in Q speaks in a riddle. It is clear that Mark, writing many decades later, probably from Rome, has no access to this tradition. In Q Jesus tells the crowds that were flocking around him: “This generation is an evil generation: it seeks a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29). This is our earliest reference to the mysterious “sign of Jonah.” The Greek word for “sign” used here is semeion. It is related to our English term semantics, which refers to the ways in which words signify (“sign”) meaning. Here in Luke’s version of Q the “sign” is not explained, but in Matthew’s parallel version we read its interpretation: “ . . . but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah, for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40).
This is quite extraordinary, since it is the only sign Jesus says he will give to his generation, preserved for us in this earliest gospel source Q. Matthew is, of course, writing long after Jesus had died, been buried, and—according to the faith of his followers—been raised from the dead. What he offers his readers here is a clear interpretation of the sign of Jonah—namely that Jesus would be three days and three nights in the tomb. The sign of Jonah has to do with faith in Jesus’ resurrection and this is how it has been interpreted throughout Christian tradition.
It is rare to find contemporary archaeological evidence related to a saying of any ancient figure, much less Jesus. Most of what we know of the teachings of Socrates or Plato or the ancient rabbis comes to us from copies of manuscripts dating as late as the Middle Ages. Even in the case of Jesus, our first complete copies of the New Testament gospels date to the time of Constantine in the 4th century CE. Our discovery in the Patio tomb is unprecedented in that it reflects one of the earliest sayings of Jesus, preserved in Q, contemporary to the generation that saw him and heard him teach.
WHY JONAH AS A SIGN?
The biblical story of Jonah and the great fish, often a favorite in children’s Bible storybooks, is preserved in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in the book of Jonah—one of the Hebrew prophets. God tells Jonah to go to the great city of Nineveh, the capital of ancient Assyria, and call upon the people to repent of their sins or face destruction. Jonah refuses to obey God. He flees on a ship from Israel’s Mediterranean coastline, headed for Tarshish, a coastal city in Spain—as far west as one could go. A mighty storm erupts, threatening to break up the ship and take it under. Everyone is praying to their gods and Jonah finally confesses his sin to the crew. He tells them that he is a Hebrew, fleeing from Jehovah his God, refusing to do his bidding. At his request they throw him overboard as a scapegoat, hoping the Hebrew God would turn his wrath away. Immediately the sea becomes calm. Then we read: “And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17).
Jonah prays fervently from the belly of the fish that threatens to become his living tomb. God hears his prayer and causes the fish to vomit Jonah out onto dry land. The words of Jonah’s prayer of thanksgiving show that the belly of the fish represents entering Sheol, the underworld of death in Hebrew:
I called to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol. I cried, and thou didst hear my voice . . . The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me, weeds were wrapped about my head . . . I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet thou didst bring up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God (Jonah 2:2, 5–6).
Jonah’s language here about going down through the gates of death and then being lifted back to life becomes a perfect model for the notion of resurrection from the dead. The story is all the more fitting as appropriated by the Q source since Jesus, according to this tradition, spent three days and three nights in the tomb and then was raised from the dead.8
One might assume that Jews in the time of Jesus would have seized upon the Jonah story to illustrate the more general notion of resurrection of the dead, but such is not the case. In Jewish writings of this period Jonah is not a major, or even much of a positive, figure at all.9 There is not a single reference to him in the entire collection of Dead Sea Scrolls and the book of Jonah is never mentioned. In other Jewish texts, such as the collection known as the Pseudepigrapha—Jewish writings that are later than the Hebrew Bible and were written between 200 BCE and 200 CE—he is only mentioned twice, once in passing as an example of one who repents of sinning against God’s command, the other as an illustration of how God hears the prayers of those sinners who cry out to him.10
There is an obscure Armenian translation of a Greek text of unknown date and origin called De Jona that recounts the Jonah story in full. Although some scholars date the original text to the 2nd or 3rd century CE, this is uncertain since the original Greek text is lost and the Armenian translation comes from the 6th century CE or later. It does seem to be Jewish and, significantly, it describes the rescue of Jonah from the belly of the fish as a “sign of rebirth,” as if he is being delivered from the “womb” of the fish. Jonah declares, in this text: “You have to regard me; I was taken out of the sleep to be a sign of rebirth, and I shall be a warrant to everyone of his own life” (De Jona 95).11 Although this is not properly an image of resurrection of the dead, it does seem to form our closest Jewish parallel to the kind of interpretation of Jonah’s rescue that became so widespread in early Christianity. One question that must be asked is whether this text, coming so late, might have been influenced by Christian traditions or beliefs about Jonah.
The Mishnah (circa 200 CE), the first major collection of rabbinic materials that later became the core of the Talmud, has one passing reference: “He who answered Jonah in the belly of the fish will answer you and hear the sound of your cry this day. Blessed are you, O Lord, who answers prayer in a time of trouble.” (m. Taan 2:4).12 Apparently, the reason for the dearth of Jonah traditions in rabbinic literature is that during the 4th and 5th centuries CE, when much of that material was being edited, the rabbis had little interest in praising or emphasizing Jonah because the Christians had claimed and co-opted him as foreshadowing the resurrection of Christ.13
JONAH IN EARLY CHRISTIAN TRADITION
In ancient Jewish art there are no attested representations of Jonah and the fish. That fact alone puts our Patio tomb discovery in a new light. By the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, when Jews did begin to create iconographic art, depictions such as Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Noah and the ark, Moses and the burning bush, the Exodus, Elijah and the widow’s son, Daniel in the lion’s den, the Ark of the Covenant, and Menorahs abound. Jonah never appears.14 These images are preserved on mosaic floors of synagogues, in murals and frescos, and in funerary art.15
In sharp contrast, Jonah and the fish is the most common motif in early Christian art from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Graydon Snyder tabulates a total of 108 examples of the “Jonah cycle” (Jonah cast into the sea, Jonah spat out of the fish, and Jonah at rest) on murals, frescos, and sculptures in catacombs, churches, and other Christian sites.16 This compares with eight representations of Noah and the ark, six of Daniel in the lion’s den, six of Jesus’ baptism, five of the sacrifice of Isaac, and five of the resurrection of Lazarus—all in Christian contexts. The difference in these numbers is truly remarkable. The explanation seems to lie in the dominant influence of Jesus’ saying about the “sign of Jonah.”17 Christians saw the Jonah story not only as a powerful image of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, but also as a way of affirming their own faith in the resurrection of the faithful at the end of days. The Jonah image was both a proclamation and an affirmation of personal faith. That is why the Jonah cycle is predominantly found in tombs—particularly in the catacombs of Rome. Jonah and the fish is the quintessential early Christian biblical image—more so even than the baptism of Jesus, the cross, or any other depiction of Jesus.
After discovering the image of Jonah and the great fish on th
e ossuary in the Patio tomb we decided to visit two of these Christian catacombs in Rome—San Sebastiano and Priscilla—to see firsthand what we had been reading in dozens of books on early Christian art. We were astounded at the number of Jonah representations we saw in these two locations. We arranged to visit after hours and the guides showed us several burial chambers with Jonah images that are not open to tourists. The motif was unmistakable.
One particular chamber, clearly of an extended family, had a complete set of murals depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the sailors throwing Jonah into the sea, Jonah being spat out of the fish’s mouth, and Noah in the ark. Noah, second only to Jonah, had also become a symbol of salvation based on a passage in the New Testament book 1 Peter about Christian baptism putting one into an “ark” of safety, protecting and saving from sins: “Baptism, which corresponds to this [i.e., Noah in the ark] now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:21). What the early Christians did, beginning with Jesus’ appropriation of Jonah, was to draw upon a series of images from the Hebrew Bible—Adam and Eve in paradise, Noah and the ark, Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac, and Jonah and the fish—to illustrate their new understanding of salvation in Jesus through his resurrection. Baptism itself, according to Paul, was like a new “Exodus” from Egypt, a crossing of the Red Sea, into the Promised Land (1 Corinthians 10:2). Baptism also pictured the death and burial of the old self—in a watery grave—and the resurrection or rebirth of the new person free from sins (Romans 6:4).
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