The Jesus Discovery
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In the same way Paul’s clear interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead as leaving behind the physical body, and being re-clothed in a spiritual incorruptible body, has to be given priority over the views of Luke and John, who stress a resuscitated physical corpse.
According to Paul, the new resurrection body will not be “flesh and blood,” but rather a transformed immortal spirit—clothed in a new spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:35–50). In the gospels, Jesus says much the same thing. He condemns the literal-minded Sadducees who rejected the idea of resurrection of the dead as an absurdity because they took it to mean that God must reassemble bodies long perished. Jesus responded clearly—in the “resurrection of the dead” there is no longer male or female, no marriage or birth or death. Resurrection is a completely transformed state, though an embodied one (Luke 20:27–36).
The evidence of the Talpiot tombs correlates Paul’s view of resurrection of the dead as well as that of Jesus with the archaeology of his first followers.
As the Christian theological tradition developed, the early Christian fathers took the accounts of Luke and John even further and formulated an idea not found anywhere in the New Testament, which they called the “resurrection of the flesh.”4 They argued that Jesus’ physical body was revived and he walked out of his tomb in a transformed state that was still flesh and bones, but somehow that body was not physical, even though it looked and functioned as if it were. They claimed that Jesus’ body was ethereal and immortal. Some of the church fathers, such as the 3rd century theologian Tertullian, went so far as to argue that God, who created the world, would gather the very flesh of those long dead, including those who had turned to dust, ashes, or been lost in the sea. He went on to say that those in the resurrection would have the capacity to eat and have sex but would have no desire for such things.
This flatly contradicts Paul, Jesus, and our new archaeological evidence from these two tombs. Jesus’ first followers believed that Jesus had been “raised up from the dead,” but as we see in the Greek inscription in the Patio tomb, they believed in his exaltation in heaven. Anthropomorphic language is common throughout the Bible. These early Christians believed Jesus “sat at the right hand of God,” but they were not so naïve or literal as to believe in thrones or seats upon which an embodied God the Father and Jesus Christ his son sat side by side. Affirming the resurrection of the dead, before the theologians elaborated the notion, meant that one affirmed that Jesus was “raised up” or “lifted up” into the holy realms. It was an affirmation of triumph and glory, not a statement about the revival of a physical corpse.
For centuries Christians have looked to the past to inform the present. They have been convinced that by exploring the origins of Christian faith they could transcend many of the theological accretions that have accumulated over the centuries. This was the spirit of the radical Protestant reformers, but over the past hundred years, Catholics have taken up the same challenge—to draw as close to the beginnings as one can, given our sources. It is not a matter of imitating the past. We know that Christianity today, with its history, traditions, and modern cultural contexts, cannot replicate the faith of the first Christians but it cannot help but be enriched by drawing closer to its authentic history.
The Jesus Discovery documents a long journey that we hope will be a beginning, not an end. We want to promote the kind of fruitful historical inquiry and discussions that advance our understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other faith, or no faith, we have all been affected deeply and significantly by the life and death of this man. For billions of people he continues to be the focus of faith and adoration, the hope of both life and death. Whatever one’s view of Jesus, we should always remember the lessons of the Enlightenment and the very foundation of our academic and scientific culture—good history is never the enemy of informed faith. As has ever been the case through the ages it is dogma, ignorance, and bias that should ever remain our common enemy. Our hope is that our decade-long investigation of the Talpiot tombs will serve to dispel those ancient stumbling blocks so that responsible history and informed faith can dwell together in peace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost we thank our families for coping with the challenges of everyday living these past ten years when we were so often away from home, on the phone, buried deeply into our research, or secluded away writing or filming. We particularly thank Rami Arav who teamed up with us on the Talpiot tombs investigation and generously allowed us to draw from his thirty years of archaeological experience. Likewise, our colleague James H. Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary has been an invaluable academic adviser and confidant. The team pulled together by Associated Producers, both in Canada and Israel, too many to mention, were an indispensible part of making our impossible venture a dream come true, but particular thanks to: Yosi Abadi, Simon Andreae, Revital Antman-Rav, Asher Ben Artzi, Nicole Austin, Uri Basson, Meyer Shimony Bensimon, Steve Burns, Shuka Dorfman, Felix Golubev, Joan Jenkinson, Walter Klassen, Noam Kuzar, Raam Shaul, Bill Tarant, Eli Zamir, and Moses Znaimer. Their hard work and dedication in meeting any challenges along the way inspired us all.
We also want to thank colleagues James Cameron, Andrey Feuerverger, Shimon Gibson, Israel Hershkovitz, Eldad Keynan, Jerry Lutgen, Robin Mirsky, Charles Pellegrino, and Aryeh Shimron, who have so generously offered us their expertise in a diverse range of areas relative to our inquiry. We thank our dedicated and hardworking agents Douglas Abrams and Elaine Markson who made this project their passion as well as our editor at Simon & Schuster, Bob Bender, his assistant, Johanna Li, and the whole marvelous Simon & Schuster team.
JAMES D. TABOR is chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of several books, among them Paul and Jesus and The Jesus Dynasty. Visit him at www.jamestabor.com. SIMCHA JACOBOVICI is a filmmaker (The Lost Tomb of Jesus), author (The Jesus Family Tomb), and adjunct professor in the Department of Religion at Huntington University. He is the host of the television series The Naked Archaeologist and winner of three Emmy Awards. Visit him at www.apltd.ca, and www.simchajtv.com.
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ALSO BY JAMES D. TABOR
Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity
The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus,
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Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious
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A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom
Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (with Arthur J. Droge)
Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise
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NOTES
PREFACE
1. We use the designations BCE (before the Common Era) and CE (the Common Era) rather than the conventional designations of BC and AD. The dates remain the same in either system.
2. See http://www.rushprnews.com/2007/02/25/holy-film-see-the-lost-tomb-of-jesus-on-the-discovery-channel, as well as Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, The Jesus Family Tomb: The Evidence Behind the Discovery No One Wanted to Find, rev. pbk. ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2007).
3. See Jack Finegan, The Archaeology of the New Te
stament, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 359–74, for a summary of the positive case. Not all scholars agree. James Strange offers an assessment of the evidence for and against; see “Archaeological Evidence of Jewish Believers,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, ed. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), pp. 710–41. For other dissenting views see Joan Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), as well as Gideon Avni and Shimon Gibson, “The ‘Jewish-Christian’ Tomb From the Mount of Offense (Batn Al-Hawa’) in Jerusalem Reconsidered,” Revue Biblique 115 (1998), 161–75.
CHAPTER ONE: THE DISCOVERY
1. Robin Margaret Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
2. See Byron R. McCane, Roll Back the Stone: Death and Burial in the Time of Jesus (New York: Trinity Press International, 2003), pp. 39–47. On the practice of Jewish burial in Jerusalem more generally in this period, see Eric M. Meyers, Jewish Ossuaries: Reburial and Rebirth, Biblica et orientalia 24 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute Press, 1971); Pau Figueras, Decorated Jewish Ossuaries, Documenta Et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui 20 (Leiden: Brill, 1983); and especially the comprehensive work of Rachel Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs, Practices and Rites in The Second Temple Period, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 94 (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
3. See Byron R. McCane, “ ‘Let the Dead Bury Their Own Dead’: Secondary Burial and Matt 8:21–22,” Harvard Theological Review 83 (1990): 31–42.
4. See http://www.antiquities.org.il/article_Item_eng.asp?sec_id=42&subj_id=228&autotitle=true&Module_id=6.
5. See the Israel Antiquities Authority website for its policy on “salvage” archaeology: http://www.antiquities.org.il/article_Item_eng.asp?sec_id=41&subj_id=227&id=205&module_id=#as.
6. See Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), for a survey of major sites and their periods.
7. See the comments of L. Y. Rahmani, A Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), p. 23. Rahmani’s catalogue is abbreviated herein as CJO with specific ossuaries designated by a number.
8. The reason these numbers are imprecise is that many of these tombs have been destroyed or were never recorded and hundreds of the estimated ossuaries have disappeared or been lost over time. See Hannah M. Cotton et al., eds., Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae, vol. 1.1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 8–9, and Amos Kloner and Boaz Zissu, The Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period, Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion, vol. 8 (Leuven, Belgium; and Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2007), pp. 30–31. Zissu was able to locate 793 cave-tombs within two miles of the Old City of Jerusalem. Cotton’s Corpus is abbreviated CIIP herein with specific ossuaries designated by number.
9. Cotton, CIIP, pp. 65–609. Most of these inscribed ossuaries are in the Israeli State Collection though various ecclesiastic institutions and even private individuals in and around the Old City of Jerusalem have their own collections. Rahmani’s older catalogue of ossuaries in the Israel State Collection up through 1989 lists 227 inscribed ossuaries of a total of 897, or 25 percent; see CJO, p. 11.
10. Typically 60 percent are Hebrew/Aramaic, 30 percent are Greek, and 10 percent are mixed Greek and Hebrew.
11. See Rahmani, CJO, pp. 25–28. For typical examples of Greek funerary epitaphs see http://religiousstudies.uncc.edu/people/jtabor/dualism.html.
12. Cotton, CIIP 324, pp. 344–46. The names are inscribed in three different places on the ossuary, on the front and back sides and on the lid, as: Alexandros Simon; Simon Ale[xandros]; Alexandros of Simon, and of Alexandros. The possessive can refer to the ossuary of the person named, meaning it belongs to them, in which case this ossuary could have well held the bones of both son Alexander and father Simon.
13. See Tom Powers, “Treasures in the Storeroom: Family Tomb of Simon of Cyrene,” Biblical Archaeology Review (July–August, 2003): 46–51, 59. A version of Powers’ analysis can be read at: http://israelpalestineguide.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/alexander-son-of-simon-ossuary-illustrated-2010-edit.pdf. See the official publication by Nahman Avigad, “A Depository of Inscribed Ossuaries in the Kidron Valley,” Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962): 1–12, as well as his encyclopedia entry “Tomb South of the Village of Silwan,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 2, p. 753. Avigad doubted that this inscribed ossuary could be identified with the Alexander son of Simon mentioned in the New Testament.
14. There was no Rufus buried in this tomb but the single inscriptional example of this Latin name, rare in Jerusalem but known in Cyrene, was found in another tomb in 1954 in another area of Jerusalem, see Cotton, CIIP, no. 385, pp. 405–6.
15. Cotton, CIIP, nos. 461, 462, pp. 481–85. See Zvi Greenhut, “Burial Cave of the Caiaphas Family,” Biblical Archaeology Review 18:5 (September–October 1992): 29–36, 76 and Ronny Reich, “Caiaphas Name Inscribed on Bone Boxes,” Biblical Archaeology Review 18.5 (1992):40–44, 76.
16. See http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2064920,00.html and http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=216355. Simcha’s paper on these two missing nails is archived at http://jamestabor.com/2011/06/22/simcha-jacobovici-responds-to-critics-of-his-nails-of-the-cross-film/.
17. Passover fell on Tuesday, March 1, in 1980 with Easter the following Sunday, March 6. A year later, in 1981, Passover was on Sunday, April 19 and Easter was the same day. Given the differences in the Jewish and Gregorian calendars, Passover and Easter can fall as much as a month apart since Passover is determined by the lunar calendar, falling on the fifteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan, while Easter, in the Roman Catholic tradition, is the first Sunday following the full moon after the Vernal Equinox (March 20, 2011). This can be any Sunday between March 22 and April 25.
18. Scholars continue to debate the year of the crucifixion and have made credible arguments for each year from 30 to 36 CE. See Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998), pp. 353–68. The majority has agreed on 30 CE so we have adopted this date in this book.
19. There are three published reports on the tomb, each tantalizingly sparse in details with some differences among them: Amos Kloner, Excavations and Surveys in Israel 1982, vol. 1, nos. 78–81 (October 1982), p. 51; Amos Kloner, Survey of Jerusalem: The Southern Sector (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2000), p. 84; Kloner and Zissu, Necropolis of Jerusalem, p. 342, which contains a map by Kloner. The IAA files contain one memo dated August 2, 1981, plus some photographs. An April 17, 1981, memo that Kloner wrote right after his team finished their work is referenced in the August 2 memo but is nowhere to be found. One early Roman period cooking pot was catalogued by the IAA as from this tomb, although excavators remember other items being removed. There is no copy of the excavation license. These are unfortunate losses and perhaps these and other materials will be recovered in the future.
20. See Amos Kloner and Shimon Gibson, “The Talpiot Tomb Reconsidered: The Archaeological Facts,” in The Tomb of Jesus and His Family? Exploring Ancient Jewish Tombs Near Jerusalem’s Walls: The Fourth Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Arthur C. Boulet (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). We thank Professors Kloner and Gibson for making a prepublication copy of their paper available to us. The ossuary Kloner removed is now catalogued as IAA 81-505. See Rahmani, CJO, no. 741, p. 229, and plate 106. Curiously, the Rahmani catalogue lists this ossuary from a nearby site, the Mount of Offense, east of the Old City of Jerusalem, and calls it a “chance find,” but Kloner has identified it as the one he removed and the IAA files show it was examined and photographed at the Rockefeller Museum.
22. See Kloner and Zissu, Necropolis of Jerusalem, p. 342, and Kloner and Gibson, “The Talpiot Tomb Reconsidered.”
23. The tag reads: 1050/1981-2162, dated April 16, 1981.
24. Kloner reports this in a handwritten August 2, 1981, memo now in the IAA archives that includes a color sketch of the pillar with the vent running up through it. Oddly, Kloner puts the wrong tomb license number—1053—in this memo, which is the permit number for a tomb north of Jerusalem having nothing to do with Talpiot.
25. The following description of the discovery of the tomb and its excavation is based on eyewitness interviews with the participants who are still alive as well as original files from the Israel Antiquities Authority archives, an official report published in 1996 by Amos Kloner, “A Tomb with Inscribed Ossuaries in East Talpiot, Jerusalem,” Atiquot 29 (1996): 15–22, and Kloner and Gibson, “The Talpiot Tomb Reconsidered.”
26. In 1980 what is now known as the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) was called the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums (IDAM), founded in 1948. The department was reorganized and renamed in 1999. In this book we generally use the present designation IAA for sake of clarity.