The Jesus Discovery

by James D. Tabor

  It is the other three names—Jesus son of Joseph, Joses, and Mariamene Mara—that make the cluster of six names far from common.

  “Jesus son of Joseph” is precisely the ossuary inscription we would expect for Jesus. Individuals are usually identified by their names alone, but sometimes one’s parents or, in the case of a wife, the name of one’s husband, is included, or more rarely, one’s brother.4 Jesus is legally known as the “son of Joseph” in our New Testament gospels (Luke 3:23; 4:22; Matthew 13:55; John 1:46; 6:42). Based on the Jewish tradition, ancient and modern, of designating the father to identify an individual, this is the name we would expect to see for him.5

  Some have argued that for this to be the New Testament Jesus we would more likely have an ossuary inscription reading “Jesus of Nazareth,” or perhaps “Jesus the Messiah” or at least “Jesus our Lord.” This is not the case. Names on ossuaries are not intended as public proclamations, but rather as private, intimate identification “tags” to help the family who is burying their dead over several generations keep straight which loved one’s bones were put in which ossuary. This point is further reinforced by the informal cursive style of this inscription. It was not formally carved by a stonemason but instead was scratched on the end of the ossuary by a family member. This custom is well illustrated by the inscription on the ossuary of Caiaphas, the high priest in the time of Jesus who delivered him to Pontius Pilate to be crucified. As we noted in chapter 1, Caiaphas’s name is written in a similar informal cursive script without any title indicating that he was the high priest of the nation.

  34. The “Jesus son of Joseph” ossuary with inscription.

  In the New Testament gospels Jesus is referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth” only ten times, out of six hundred references. He is called Jesus Christ (that is, Messiah) just four times, and only in Matthew and John, who want to make a theological, not a historical statement. So far as expecting the town Nazareth to be named, a survey of ossuary inscriptions indicates that towns of origin are rarely given at all unless one is from outside the land of Israel, and titles or other such designations are exceptionally rare.6 So “Jesus son of Joseph” is just what we would expect to find if an ossuary had been prepared for Jesus of Nazareth.

  35. The “Jesus son of Joseph” inscription with a transcription in English.

  We can confidently say that 3.9 percent of males had the name Yeshua (Jesus) and that it occurs, as we saw in the last chapter, on 18 other inscribed ossuaries out of approximately 600 that have been discovered. So far as males named Jesus with a father named Joseph, however, we have evidence of only two—the one in the Talpiot tomb and another on the ossuary that Sukenik discovered in 1931.7 We have already seen in chapter 3 that even if we consider all nineteen of the “Jesus” inscriptions ever found on ossuaries, excluding the two in the Talpiot tomb, up to half a dozen might, ironically, refer to Jesus of Nazareth—rather than to some other male named Jesus. As we pointed out in the previous chapter, these factors have to be considered when one evaluates the assertion that Jesus is a common name that could be expected in many tombs.

  What about the remaining two inscriptions, Yoseh and Mariamene Mara? Understanding these special names requires a bit of homework, and the evidence can get a bit technical, but the results are essential for a proper evaluation of these ossuary inscriptions.

  Yoseh is a shortened form, or nickname, of the more popular name Joseph (Yehosef in Hebrew). While the name Joseph is the second most common male name in the period, after Simon, this nickname Yoseh is rare.8 The common name Joseph accounts for 8.6 percent of male names while Yoseh occurs only seven times on ossuary inscriptions and only once in Aramaic—here in the Talpiot Jesus tomb.9 The remaining six ossuaries have the name in Greek, written as Ioses or Iose—translated in English Joses or Jose. That means Yoseh represents only .003 percent of male names, making it exceedingly rare. As we will see, this name alone drives the statistics on the probabilities of the cluster of these names occurring together in a single tomb off the charts.

  The obvious question in considering whether this Talpiot tomb might be that of Jesus and his family is to ask whether there is anything in the New Testament gospels about someone with this rare nickname Yoseh.

  Everyone familiar with the New Testament gospels knows of two Josephs—Joseph the husband of Mary, and Joseph of Arimathea, who took charge of Jesus’ burial. They both go by the common full name Joseph.

  Few people are aware that Jesus had four brothers. Their names are listed twice in the gospels—James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas. This gives us a third New Testament Joseph. James was the eldest and the second of the four was Joseph. We know nothing about him other than his name, whereas we have an abundance of historical sources on Jesus’ oldest brother, James, who assumed leadership of the Jesus movement following Jesus’ death.10

  Levi Rahmani was the first to publish the Garden or Jesus tomb inscriptions, in his 1994 catalogue of ossuaries. He suggested that the Yoseh in the tomb was most likely the father of the Jesus buried there since the Jesus inscription says “Jesus son of Joseph.” That is certainly possible, but then one would expect that the ossuary would have the name Joseph—not the rare nickname Yoseh. We have a different explanation for the Yoseh in the Jesus tomb.

  James ran a computer search of the Greek texts of the New Testament for the name Ioses, the Greek form of Yoseh. To his surprise it did show up, but only in the gospel of Mark. According to Mark, Joses, or as some manuscripts have it, Yoseh, was the rare nickname of Jesus’ second brother, Joseph (Mark 6:3).11 Apparently this nickname was something Mark knew since Matthew, in listing the four brothers, seems to know only the full formal name Joseph (Matthew 13:55), though a few manuscript copies of Matthew also preserve the nickname Joses.

  36. The Yoseh ossuary inscription.

  For our research this was a major milestone and so far as we know no one had noticed or pointed it out before. Thus we now have a significant linguistic link between the earliest New Testament gospel tradition about the brothers of Jesus and their names—or in this case, a nickname—and this rare form of the name Joseph on an ossuary from the Talpiot tomb. One of the things one tries to do in archaeology, when possible, is combine textual or literary evidence with the material archaeological evidence. One is always cautious that the text not be used to overinterpret the archaeological evidence or vice versa. In this case, where there appears to be a complete “fit” between text and artifact, we are in a good position to draw some reasonable conclusions. As we will see, when we explore why it is highly likely that Jesus’ second brother, Joses, would be buried in the same tomb with him, our conclusions are further supported.

  Of course it is hypothetically possible that there was another Yoseh in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, and that he was related to some other Jesus with a father named Joseph. As we will see below, when you run the statistics on that possibility, it is extremely unlikely. But these are not the only factors that influence the probability.

  The inscription Mariamene Mara is even more fascinating with regard to the mistaken assertion that the names in the Jesus tomb are common. Clearly it is some form of the common name Mary or Mariam/Mariame in Hebrew—but what about its strange ending? And what is the significance of Mara?

  Of the six inscriptions from the tomb this is the only one in Greek. In contrast to the ossuaries of Jesus, Maria, and Yoseh, which are plain, this woman was buried in a beautifully decorated ossuary. Levi Rahmani deciphered her inscription in his Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries published in 1994. For most of us Rahmani is the chief authority for the study of ossuaries and their inscriptions. His keen eye and uncanny ability to decipher some of the most obscure inscriptions are legendary.

  Rahmani read the inscription as Mariamene Mara. No one questioned his judgment for thirteen years—until the story about the Talpiot “Jesus tomb” made headlines. Suddenly everyone was scrambling, it seemed, to come up with arguments against those Simcha had put forth for the first t
ime in his 2007 Discovery Channel documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus. There he had presented evidence that Mariamene was a unique form of the name Mary that was used by Jesus’ first followers when referring to Mary Magdalene.

  Several scholars have suggested that Rahmani misread the Greek, and that it should read Mariame kai Mara—Mary and Martha, referring to two individuals, perhaps even two sisters buried together in this one ossuary.12 Since Mariame (without the final stem ending “n,” or nu in Greek) is the most common form of the name Mary in Greek, any argument about uniqueness would thus evaporate. The Mary in the tomb might have been any Mary of the time and she would be almost impossible to identify further. And her sister Martha would be equally unknown.13

  We find this new reading unconvincing and remain impressed with Rahmani’s original transcription. The inscription itself appears to be from a single hand, written in a smooth-flowing style, with a decorative flourish around both names—pointing to a single individual who died and was placed in this inscribed ossuary. According to Rahmani, Mariamene is a diminutive or endearing variant of the common name Mariame or Mary.14 Mariamene, spelled with the letter “n” or nu in Greek, is quite rare: only one other example is found on an ossuary—the one with the three fish on the front mentioned previously.15 There are no other examples from this period—or as we were soon to discover, only two, in the entirety of Greek literature down through the late Middle Ages.

  James ran an exhaustive computer search of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive digital database of Greek literature from Homer through 1453 CE. To his surprise he only found two ancient works that use Mariamn—with this rare “n” stem ending. Both texts specifically referred to Mary Magdalene!

  The first text is a quotation from Hippolytus, a 3rd century Christian writer who records that James, the brother of Jesus, passed on secret teachings of Jesus to “Mariamene,” that is Mary Magdalene.16 There it was, in plain Greek—this unusual spelling of the name Miriame or Mary, precisely like the spelling on the ossuary. According to tradition Hippolytus was a disciple of Irenaeus, who was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of the apostle John—who of course knew both Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Perhaps it is this link of oral teaching, through three generations, that somehow had preserved this special name for Mary Magdalene. Its diminutive ending makes it a term of endearment—like calling someone named James “Jimmy,” or an Elizabeth “Betty.”

  The second text that had the name Mariamene was a rare 4th century CE Greek manuscript of the Acts of Philip, dated to the 3rd or 4th century CE. Throughout the text Mary Magdalene is called Mariamene—again the precise form of the name found on the Talpiot tomb ossuary.

  Some critics have questioned why one has to jump to the 3rd or 4th century to find a parallel to a 1st century name on an ossuary in order to argue that this name belongs to Mary Magdalene. Quite the opposite is the case. What the ossuary preserves is a rare endearing form of the common name Mariame. What should surprise us is that it shows up, out of the blue, in Hippolytus and the Acts of Philip—two centuries later, when referring to Mary Magdalene. They could not know anything about the ossuary or these inscriptions—so where did they get this tradition of the rare form of the name? That this rare form appears in these later sources strengthens rather than diminishes the argument in favor of associating this name with Mary Magdalene. If Mariamene is a late form of the name, found only in these 3rd and 4th century texts, as some have asserted, what is it doing on the Talpiot tomb ossuary?

  It strains credibility to imagine that Rahmani, who was unaware of any association between his transcription of this ossuary inscription and identifications with Mary Magdalene in these later texts, would have mistakenly and accidentally come up with this exceedingly rare form of the common name Mary. Nor does it make any sense to think a misreading of the name in this inscription would end up producing two other instances for Mary Magdalene. The force of this evidence is so strong that a few scholars have even suggested that the text in Hippolytus somehow became corrupted. Again, it strains all credulity to maintain that mistakes, misreadings, and scribal errors would just happen to produce a match for an ossuary inscription in a 1st century Jerusalem tomb. What are the odds?

  What about the second word in the inscription—Mara? Rahmani understood this as an alternative form of the more common name Martha and many scholars apparently agree.17 He translated the full inscription: “[the ossuary] of Mariamene also known as Mara.” His understanding was that this Mariamene was also called Mara—a kind of nickname equivalent to the more popular form Martha.

  Readers will recall that one of the inscriptions we found on one of the ossuaries in the nearby Patio tomb also read “Mara.” Is it just another form of the name Martha? In looking through all 600 ossuary inscriptions that are extant we discover that Mara is also quite rare, with only five examples other than the two in the Talpiot tombs.18

  As explained before, we are convinced that Mara is an honorific title, not a proper name.19 Mara and Martha are related; they both come from the Aramaic masculine word Mar, which means “Master” or “Lord” in English.20 This is true still in modern Hebrew today. One can address a man formally as “Mar,” meaning “Sir” or “Mister.” It is a title not a name. If you add the feminine ending to Mar you get Mara. But English simply has no good translation for the feminine, while we use the masculine constantly. The followers of Jesus called him “Lord” or “Master,” but how would we translate that title for a woman in English—perhaps one they also honored as his companion, partner, and wife? Probably our best equivalent in English is “Lady,” the formal feminine form of the masculine Lord. When Catholics speak of “Our Lady,” referring to Mary the mother of Jesus, they are preserving and echoing this very honorific title but they don’t use it for Mary Magdalene. As we shall see she was vilified as a whore, as mentally unstable, or as both, and was written out of the dominant version of the rise and development of Christianity.

  There are two other ossuary inscriptions discovered in Jerusalem that are relevant to a proper understanding of the Mariamene Mara inscription. The first refers to two males, a Matthew and a Simon, who are called “masters” of their tomb—meaning they own it. The word there for master is the plural of Mar. It is obvious that when it comes to males there is no hesitation to read Mar as a title. As mentioned, Jesus was referred to as Mar in the New Testament, in the early Christian Aramaic prayer “Mar-na-tha,” meaning “our Lord come” (1 Corinthians 16:22).21 The second inscription names a woman named Alexa, who is called Mara—just as in the Mariamene inscription. Rather than a second name, we take it as a title, so the inscription would read: “this is the ossuary of Alexa, [the] Lady.” It is a title of honor.

  The assertion that the names in the Jesus tomb are common simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Two of the inscriptions turn out to be quite rare (Yoseh) and unique (Mariamene Mara), and they both appear to have linguistic links with the names of individuals close to Jesus, his brother Joseph and Mary Magdalene.

  RUNNING THE NUMBERS

  We have looked at the names individually, but what about this particular cluster of names taken together? There have been some sophisticated attempts to do statistical analysis on the cluster of names, asking the question of the likelihood, given the frequencies of occurrence of each of these names, that they would appear in a tomb together. It is one thing to ask what are the odds of finding a “Jesus” in a tomb of this period, but quite another to ask, what about a “Jesus son of Joseph”? Each time we add a name, or a relationship, the odds change, based on how rare or common a particular name might be. Even fairly common names, as in our example above of the Beatles, carry a different statistical weight in a cluster.

  The most formidable study is the peer-reviewed paper by Professor Andrey Feuerverger of the University of Toronto with a set of six responses. Since that paper there has been a series of further papers and responses with wildly differing results.22 It has become clear that statistical r
esults will differ according to the assumptions one uses in running the numbers. We have the data regarding the name frequencies of both males and females during the time of Jesus. What is impressive about this database is that a wider sample by Professor Tal Ilan, which includes all references, literary and inscriptional, from 200 BCE to 200 CE in the land of Israel, compares favorably with the name frequencies we find on the much smaller random sample of 600 inscribed ossuaries from tombs around Jerusalem in this period. In other words the tomb names are an accurate sampling of the larger society of the time. Based on this data, we can say with confidence that 3.9 percent of males had the name Jesus, 21.9 percent were called Mary, 6.5 percent were named Judah, and so forth. These numbers include all the forms of the names lumped together. For example, the count for Mary would include all Greek and Hebrew variants such as Mariame, Maria, Mariam, Marias, and so forth. The count for Jesus would include Yeshua, Yehoshua, Yeshu, Iesous, and other minor variants.

  Some have questioned the statistical calculations of Feuerverger but his basic data and methods have been validated by subsequent studies.23 The most impressive summary of the various studies, their variables, and the main issues at stake is the work of statistician Jerry Lutgen. His two papers, “The Talpiot Tomb: What Are the Odds?” and “Did the Set of Names from the Talpiot Tomb Arise by Chance?” set all the statistical studies in their proper context.24