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Regular Member
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Utah
Posts: 167
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I ran across this story last spring and managed to find this old message board entry summarizing a London Times article from March 31, 1996. It is as far as I can tell the same set of ossuaries.
The message board link http://orion.huji.ac.il/orion/archiv.../msg00156.html appears to still work, but I will post the entire message here as it may disappear and I have not tried to search the Times archives. There are minor formatting issues with the text, which may be missing some punctuation.
Quote:
• To: orion@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
• Subject: London Times Tomb Story
• From: Jdtabor@aol.com
• Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 18:36:28 -0500
________________________________________
I hope everyone is busy with Passover and Holy Week and does not mind being bombarded with these news reports on the Jerusalem "tomb" with the first century common names: I finally ran down the original story in the London Sunday Times--it has a lot more information than all the clips I previously sent out which I downloaded from Nexis--and which contain contradictions and apparent errors. If I need a Qumran connection here for the Orion list...let's see, what about raising the following question: Given the text James Strange recently found at the settlement, with both name of author and date, what other personal NAMES of community members can we document in the Scrolls now that all have been released? Has anyone made or published such a list yet?
James Tabor
UNC-Charlotte
Story follows:
The London Sunday Times
March 31, 1996
THE TOMB THAT DARE NOT SPEAK IT’S NAME
Easter is a Christian mystery. The story of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection is the focus of Christian belief and hope of eternal life a spiritual mystery. This Easter, however, will be different. While the glorious Easter hymns echo round the cathedrals and parish churches of the land, a remarkable group of clay caskets brought to light in Jerusalem by the BBC will electrify the centuries-old debate: did Jesus' body really rise from the dead on Easter morning?
The caskets ossuaries in which the bones of the dead were deposited in 1st-century Israel¬ have lain on a warehouse shelf in a backwater of Jerusalem for 16 years. Israeli archeologists saw no significance in them and the tomb they were found in was obliterated. Yet when they were placed in front of us, we stood dumbfounded.
How, we wondered, would Christians respond when we told them of the discovery? Would they dismiss it out of hand as not something devout believers could bring themselves to consider? Might some even find the nature of their faith shaken by our news? Or would they dismiss it as a hoax?
We are no hoaxers; we did not create this remarkable archeological evidence; we simply brought it out of obscurity after going to Israel with two questions in mind. What happened to the body of Jesus? ¬ a question you can only ask, of course, if you do not believe in His bodily resurrection and what can we now discover about the events of the time that can help explain the birth of a religion destined to transform the spiritual life of the whole world?
IT WAS Barrie Allcott, director of CTVC, an independent production company founded by J Arthur Rank to make religious programmes, who first had the idea for the programme to be broadcast on Easter Sunday. Suppose, he said to Anne Reevell, editor of Heart of the Matter, that the body of Jesus were found in Jerusalem. How would this affect Christian faith?
Ray Bruce, of CTVC, and Chris Mann, our director, flew to Jerusalem for a "recce", intent on illustrating this hypothesis with the latest archeological research on crucifixion and burial rites at the time of Jesus' death.
This was not as simple as it sounds. Archeology is a hot topic in Israel. It has often been alleged that Israeli archeologists' priority is to search out primarily Jewish history in this disputed land in order to reinforce today's political claims. Yet orthodox Jews harass the archeologists, daubing graffiti curses on their sites. Any human bones found must be handed over for immediate reburial. Were the body of Jesus to be discovered today, that would be its fate.
Israel is in a ferment of development, and wherever a tractor goes in there are likely to be interesting archeological finds. The land is eloquent with the traces of its history, but the Christian legacy is but one of many strands. What may strike Christians as resonant with meaning may be dismissed in the fervour of the country's Jewishness. That is why, perhaps, it needed outsiders to bring out from dusty archive shelves discoveries made a decade ago that compel the attention of all Christians.
WHEN I joined Ray and Chris to work as the reporter on their film, things were tense in Israel. The suicide bombers had recently struck. Friends wondered why I was in pursuit of Jesus' life rather than the future of the peace process. I told them mine was the longer-running story.
But I found that I also had an entirely personal problem. In the matter of Easter, you have either a Christian or a non-Christian viewpoint. There is no neutral ground outside the resurrection debate. Whatever you believe puts you somewhere within it. Ray and Chris are both professing Christians. I am not.
I grew up within the mainstream Church of England belief and observation, baptised, confirmed and accepting readily the Gospel story and Christianity's moral precepts.
It so happens I was born on Easter Sunday. Samuel Beckett did nothing to deny the widely held belief that he was born on Good Friday, the 13th, taking, I suspect, a wry pleasure in such a doom-laden start for a writer whose work was so depressing. In similar but opposite vein, I have always regarded my Easter birth as a personal blessing. The benison of a religion I was to love and to forsake.
Throughout this assignment I was to find my journalist's objectivity and my historian's scepticism ¬ warring with a deep current of ancient faith and a love that once held a central place in my life.
I was working with tenacious individuals. Ray is a man of restless energy, with contacts across the Middle East. He hails friends at every turn. He knows how to open doors. Chris, after 17 years on Songs of Praise and similar programmes, recently embarked on a series ¬ Ancient Voices¬ involving the search for historic truths. In Israel, he had the air of somebody living on the edge of volcanic excitement, only restrained by an almost military discipline and impeccable manners.
Chris had made the programme's crucial discovery before my arrival. He and Ray first had examined the Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries, published in 1994, listing all the ossuaries discovered in Jewish tombs bearing any kind of mark or inscription. They were looking for ossuaries listed as bearing the name Jesus, son of Joseph. Their purpose was not to make any religious claim. They needed an ossuary simply as an example of what might have happened to the body of the historic Jesus.
Chris had learnt that two "Jesus, son of Joseph" ossuaries from the 1st century AD ¬ what Israeli archeologists call the 2nd Temple Period ¬ were stored in the warehouse of the Israel Archeological Authority, an old factory on a side street in Romemma, a rundown suburb of Jerusalem.
Baruk Brendel, one of the curators, had let him in, saying: "If you have the catalogue number, I'll get the yellow card out." All good archeological institutes are obsessed with accuracy and cataloguing, and only slowly could Chris fire Baruk with enthusiasm for his search.
The first Jesus ossuary was little more than a broken shard, with a mark supposedly of a fish and an inscription. Chris knew a 6in diameter piece of pottery makes an uninspiring picture. He persisted in seeking out the second ossuary.
More faded library numbers drawing-pinned to wooden shelves; up and down; more stacked shelves. Finally, he had exactly what he needed for filming: a clay box, 65cm by 25cm by 30cm, inscribed in ragged Hebrew lettering with the words "Jesus, son of Joseph".
Chris might well have been satisfied to find the single box and leave. Something made him pause. "Do the ossuaries on adjacent shelves," he inquired, "have any relationship to this one?" "Oh yes, they were all found in the same tomb."
Slowly, matching catalogue numbers to library cards, the name of each ossuary found alongside "Jesus, son of Joseph" in the tomb was revealed to Chris. First Joseph, written in Hebrew. Beside it, in lettering of the same period, Mary. Then there was a second Mary, this time in Greek. Another bore the name Matthew. And of a different date, on an ossuary bearing a traditional decorative motif Juda, son of Jesus. Six ossuaries in all.
"It felt like the balls of the national lottery coming up one by one and approaching the jackpot," said Chris. The second Mary was not a problem. There is, as Chris was well aware, a reference in the Gnostic gospel of Philip, a text from the beginning of the Christian era found in Egypt in 1945. It reads: "The companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth."
The speculation that flooded Chris's mind remains just that speculation. Yet the tug of familiar names ¬ Mary, Joseph and their son, Jesus is hard to resist. Sunday school days have imprinted them on young minds. The canon of European art, the focus of worship in a million churches, have reinforced their impact. The names are icons of our culture. How could we not respond when Chris told us what he had found? We wanted to film the ossuaries.
We remained well aware that the names may indeed be no more than a chance alignment. Indeed, Tal Ham, one of Israel's foremost experts on Jewish and early Christian history, left no doubt. She has collected all the names that appear on ossuaries, on inscriptions on papyri and other written sources, from about the 2nd century BC to about the 2nd century AD.
Her compilation has been nicknamed the telephone directory of the period. She told us: "Mary is the most common name for women. Joseph is the second most common name for men, after Simon. Jesus is also one of those very typical names. So I would say the chance that this is the cave tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family is not very likely."
We heard her. We believed her. But what if Jesus had died, there had been no resurrection and he had been buried with his parents? Their ossuaries would certainly read: Mary and Joseph and Jesus, son of Joseph. Wouldn't they?
We made further inquiries and found that a blast of TNT had apparently led to the discovery of the Jesus family tomb. Clearing the ground for the building of new apartments in East Talpiot, a suburb of south Jerusalem, workmen had broken through into a cave tomb of the 1st century AD. Whenever this happens, archeologists are summoned instantly and the finds removed and recorded with speed. In this case, an archeologist called Joseph Gath had been called in. He had identified the find as a Jewish family tomb of the 2nd Temple Period and catalogued the six ossuaries.
There was a snag. The ossuaries were empty when they were found. The bones of Joseph, Mary, Jesus son of Joseph, the other Mary and the rest of the family had already been vandalised, probably in antiquity. Dating the layers of debris lying above them, Gath had placed the damage well in the past.
There was another snag. Gath had made his findings in 1980 and had since died of a heart attack. An apartment block now stood above the site of the tomb.
DESPITE the snags, the ossuaries seemed sensational to us. What did others think? We sought the advice of Amos Kloner, a distinguished Israeli archeologist. One morning, he took us bowling along in the fresh spring air outside Jerusalem and suddenly called a halt. On either side of the road were fields of grass speckled with flowers, rising on our right to a low ridge with trees. He explained: "I stop not for your filming, but because I want you to know this is the Vale of Elah where, according to the First Book of Samuel, chapter 17, David slew Goliath. Goliath and the Philistines came from the west over there."
He stood there smiling in the shimmering morning and I knew he felt for his scripture as I feel for mine. But the Old Testament of battles and dynasties, of exile and captivity, leaves a historical trace. The Christian story is harder to pin down or uncover.
Kloner is a leading expert on 1st-century burial sites and he was taking us to a site called Kirbet Midras, one of the grandest a two-chamber tomb with a large round stone rolled away in just the way we imagine from the traditional Easter story.
He explained that Jewish burial in the time of Christ usually went in two stages. Immediately after death the body washed, cleansed with oil, perfumed with ointment and wrapped would be laid full-length on a stone slab within the inner family tomb.
It would be left there its primary burial sealed for a year, by which time it would be not much more than bones. For the secondary burial, these bones would be collected together, placed in a stone ossuary and stored in a niche, a kokh (plural kokhim) within the tomb.
However, according to Kloner who cited chapter 8 of The Tractate Mahot, a Jewish commentary, as evidence ¬ families regularly returned three days after the first burial to check whether the person might still be alive. He told of a case, mentioned in 3rd-century Jewish writing, of a man restored from such a tomb to his family who went on to father more children. First-century Jewish customs allowed for the possibility that apparent death might not always be the real thing and provided for checks to be made on the third day. Thus, nothing in the Gospel account of Jesus' burial surprised Amos. "It is exactly as we would expect for a Jew in the 1st century AD," he said.
He poured cold water, however, on our suggestion that the six ossuaries in the warehouse at Romemma could be those of the Christian holy family. First, the names were just too common. "It is just a chance . . . I think the possibility of it being Jesus' family very close to zero." Second, "The family of Jesus coming from Nazareth is a family of limited generations. The cave we are talking about was used by a family, even a wealthy family, for several generations." Third, our attention had been drawn to the fact that after the name Jesus there appeared to be a cross scratched in the stone. This he dismissed as nothing more than a mason's mark. In any case, he insisted, the cross did not come into use as a Christian symbol until the early part of the 4th century.
His fourth point was not so persuasive. Amos believes Jesus was not buried in a Jewish family tomb in what is now East Talpiot, some three miles from Jerusalem itself.
He thinks as Christians do, and other Israeli archeologists agree that Jesus was buried in a new tomb given by Joseph of Arimathea at a site where the Holy Sepulchre now is, near the Calvary hill. The area had been a soft limestone quarry and was used as a necropolis.
We pointed out, however, that if Jesus' bones had indeed rested there in the first place, they would have been moved, as early as the 1st century, to another location. For although the burial site was originally outside Jerusalem's walls to conform with Jewish purity laws that burials were never allowed within the city in the mid-1st century, at the time of Agrippa the Just, the city was extended and a third wall built. All tombs newly enclosed within the city walls were emptied and the bones moved elsewhere. The Jesus family tomb in East Talpiot dates from this period.
Amos did not raise the challenge that others might: were the inscriptions on the Jesus family ossuaries simply a hoax? We had no way of authenticating them scientifically and we knew that the discovery in 1945 of a cave tomb of ossuaries bearing Hebrew-Greek inscriptions, which were initially believed to be lamentations by Jewish disciples for the death of Christ, were less convincing once the translations were subjected to scrutiny.
The Jesus family ossuary inscriptions had all been formally catalogued under numbers 701 to 706. Number 704 was described as "difficult to read, as the incisions are clumsily carved and badly scratched" but recorded as "Yeshua son of Yohosef" ¬ Jesus, son of Joseph.
The possibility of a misreading, the frequency of all the names, mean the statistical probability of its being the holy family is low. But Joe Zias, an anthropological archeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, was intrigued. "The combination of names is really impressive," he said. "Had it not been found in a tomb I would have said 100% of what we're looking at were simply forgeries. But this came from a very good, undisturbed archeological context. It was found by archeologists, read by them, interpreted by them . . . a very, very good text. It's not something which was invented."
Zias also confirmed that being subjected to public humiliation and the disgrace of crucifixion was no bar to the dignity and respect of individual burial. Excavations carried out by the Israel Antiquities Authority at Giv'at Ha-mivtar in north Jerusalem after the 1967 six-day war revealed the bones of a crucified man deposited in his own individual ossuary. His name was engraved on its surface. The evidence was conclusive because the heel bone was pierced by a 10cm nail and traces of wood are still pinned between the nail head and the bone itself.
Zias made other helpful points. "We know now it's impossible to crucify anybody through the palm of the hand. There are no bones there, simply flesh. The best place to put the nail is between the ulna and the radius ¬ high up on the wrist. When you're looking at crucifixion scenes post-14th century, the suffering Jesus, blood and tears, you're looking at theology, not history," he said. It was what he said about the process of death, however, that was most intriguing: "It was very difficult in antiquity telling when a person was dead."
I mentioned that the Gospels speak of Christ being on the cross for three hours. "If he was up there for three hours at least, then Christ died of hypovolemic shock, not because he was asphyxiated. What happens is that as the whole metabolic system gets weaker and weaker, the signs of life become much more difficult to detect. It's very risky in terms of determining death."
So it is medically possible that Jesus could have been taken down from the cross, believed to be dead and actually still been alive? "Oh, sure, sure. There's textural evidence of people being thought to be dead and being found to be in a coma."
There is a quandary in using the Gospel accounts as the starting point for an argument that Jesus lapsed into a coma mistaken for death, because it returns full circle to the reliability of the Gospels themselves. On the other hand, archeologists are turning up artefacts that clearly reinforce the stories told in the New Testament.
A few years ago Zvi Greenhut, of the Israel Museum, found 12 ossuaries in a cave tomb of the 2nd Temple Period breached by a bulldozer in south Jerusalem. The most elaborate, now on display in the museum, is an ossuary of elegant beauty, its formal decoration of spirals and circles as sharp as if newly cut. An inscription reads "Joseph, son of Caiaphas", which could also mean Joseph of the family of Caiaphas. It is the first time the name Caiaphas has appeared in archeological excavation, and Greenhut believes it could refer to Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, who handed Jesus over for trial to the Romans.
Another name involved in Christ's passion has also turned up in recent tomb excavations, that of Alexander, son of Simon of Cyrene. The Gospels tell how Simon carried Jesus' cross for part of the way along Calvary. Tal Ham refers again to her telephone directory of Jewish names and comes up with a positive identification.
"There are 250 Simons. So if it just said Simon of Cyrene, I would probably say there was a surge of immigrants called Simon from Cyrene, in north Africa, to Jerusalem. But because we have the name Alexander and that is not such a popular name with Jews ¬only 20 in the directory¬ and the biblical Simon of Cyrene is said to have sons Alexander and Rufus, then the chance that this is the ossuary of the son of Simon of Cyrene who carried Jesus' cross is very likely."
Another small piece in place in the biblical story and confirmed in the historical record. Clearly, archeology is making discoveries that show the New Testament to be accurate in matters of background, burial rites and mourning, and about certain individuals. The central figure, however, and the transcendental moment of Easter continue to elude those who come seeking proof and verification.
When I flew out of Tel Aviv, President Bill Clinton was also leaving after a visit and security was fierce. Closely questioned about my visit, I explained about the search for Jesus and the finding of the ossuaries. "Do you have any proof of this?" I was asked. After producing programme notes, I was allowed through. But the question lingered: do you have any proof of this? We have proof of nothing more than the existence of ossuaries with names central to the Christian story. What Christian believers and experts and, indeed, non-believers, make of the find will provide abundant discussion for the debate.
* Heart of the Matter: The Body in Question. Easter Sunday,
BBC1, 11pm
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02-26-2007, 10:16 AM
Skeleton in God's Closet
