1. Camera shot of the interior of the Patio tomb showing an ossuary in place.
It was a bright summer day in Jerusalem. We were crowded together with our film crew in a narrow corridor around a group of camera monitors in the basement of the condominium building in East Talpiot. The building had been built over the tomb shortly after its discovery in 1981. The tomb itself had been left sealed and the archaeologists who briefly examined it at the time had apparently missed its precious contents. We never set foot in the tomb. We were able to get an archaeological license to explore it remotely using a set of state-of-the-art cameras at the end of a sophisticated robotic arm that we had lowered into its dark interior through holes drilled into the floor of the basement.
We had been filming inside the tomb for two days, painstakingly moving our camera probe from one area to another. We had stuffed our equipment, cables, and high-resolution monitors into a small corridor leading to a storage area in the basement. What we had observed so far was fascinating enough. Just the experience of being able to “enter” this ancient tomb and see its contents kept us on the edge of our seats with our eyes focused on the camera monitors for hour after hour. The robotic arm slowly made its way around the tomb. Suddenly something unusual came into focus. Carved into the side of a limestone ossuary, or “bone box,” was a startling image that we recognized, one never before seen on an ossuary or on any other ancient artifact from the 1st century CE. Right next to this ossuary was a second one with a four-line Greek inscription. We stared at the monitor as the image and the Greek letters came into sharper focus, and adjusted the light to get a better look. A shout went up in the cramped corridor when we read the inscription. What we saw was clear evidence of faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead from this sealed tomb securely dated to the time of Jesus. The implications struck us immediately. We were gazing at the carved imagery and writing of some of Jesus’ earliest followers. It was very likely that some of those people buried in this tomb had actually seen and known Jesus, maybe even witnessed his death, and were hereby proclaiming their faith in his resurrection as well.
Reeling from this discovery, we flew to Rome to investigate similar, but much later, images in the catacombs in Rome. The catacombs consist of hundreds of miles of many-leveled tunnels and passageways filled with burial chambers deep beneath the ancient city of Rome. It was here that the ancient Romans, and later the Jews and early Christians, buried their dead. The catacombs belonging to the Christians date to the late 3rd and early 4th centuries CE. On the walls of these family burial chambers one finds what was until now the earliest examples of Christian art—painted frescos, carvings, and inscriptions, many having to do with faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead as offering hope of eternal life to his followers. In order to provide a wider context for what we had discovered in the Jerusalem Patio tomb we invited Professor Robin Jensen of Vanderbilt University to join us as a guide in the catacombs. She is one of the most distinguished historians of early Christian art in the world.1 We spent hours walking in the deep underground passageways where the pungent odor of damp earth fills the stale air. Jensen took us from chamber to chamber, through the tangled maze of tunnels and levels, offering us a tour of some of the main images and inscriptions in the catacombs of Priscilla and San Sebastiano.
In the evening at our hotel after our first long day of exploration we showed Robin a photograph of the image carved on the ossuary that we had discovered in Jerusalem. She was completely taken back by what she saw. She instantly recognized the image. She kept saying, you mean this was found in a 1st century tomb in Jerusalem? How is that possible? Nothing like this has ever been found dating earlier than the 3rd century CE—and only in Rome, never in Jerusalem. The date and the location connected this discovery to Jesus’ earliest followers. This discovery left us all a bit stunned. It seemed impossible, but a photograph of the evidence was lying on the table before our eyes.
It is against Israeli law to willfully excavate, violate, disturb, or destroy a tomb, whether ancient or modern. Nonetheless, 18th and 19th century explorers, modern tomb robbers, and construction crews have all taken their toll—particularly on ancient Jewish cave burials in Jerusalem. Yet there has been an unexpected positive benefit to these disturbances. Jewish cave tombs in this period contain little of obvious value. Typically Jews did not bury their dead with jewelry, coins, or other items of value. A tomb might contain clay oil lamps and ceramic vessels used for ritual purposes, such as perfume vials and even cooking pots, but little more—except for ossuaries. It is these ossuaries that the thieves want. Carved from soft limestone, these “bone boxes” became the repositories for the bones of loved ones. When a Jew died the corpse was washed and prepared for burial and then laid out in a niche or, in some tombs, on a shelf carved into the walls of the tomb, until the flesh decayed. These burial niches are called kokhim in Hebrew and they served for the initial placement of bodies as well as for the storage of ossuaries. The shelves within the niches are called arcosolia. This initial laying out of the body is referred to as a “primary burial” and was usually followed by a “secondary burial” a year or more later when the flesh had decayed and the bones of the deceased were gathered and placed in an ossuary.
Typically these ossuaries were wide enough to hold the skull of the deceased and long enough for the femur bone, the largest bone in the human body, to fit diagonally. For an adult that would be an average of 25 inches in length, 12 inches high, and 10 inches wide. In some cases the bones of more than one family member were put in a single ossuary—whether a husband and wife, two sisters, or even children with their parents. Other times wives and children had their own separate ossuaries, depending on the wishes and custom of a given Jewish family. We have an ancient rabbinic text that describes the process quite poignantly:
Rabbi Eleazar bar Zadok said, “Thus spoke my father at the time of his death, ‘My son, bury me first in a niche [Hebrew kokh]. In the course of time collect my bones and put them in an ossuary; but do not gather them with your own hands.’ And thus I did attend him: Jonathan entered, collected the bones, and spread a sheet over them. I then came in, rent my clothes for them, and sprinkled dried herbs over them. Just as he attended his father so I attended him.” (Semahot 12.9)2
Jesus once told a would-be follower “Let the dead bury the dead,” when the man protested that he needed to wait until he had buried his father to join Jesus. The cryptic reference most likely reflects this practice of secondary burial—not that the man was waiting for his father to die, but that his father had recently died and he needed to pass the obligatory first year following his father’s death, when the family would gather his bones and put them in an ossuary. Only then could he leave his family and follow Jesus (Luke 9:59).3
Tomb robbers usually dump the bones and take the ossuaries, oil lamps, and other pottery vessels. The ossuaries can be sold through the illegal antiquities market for a few hundred dollars—but they are worth much more if they are inscribed with the names of the deceased. Think of these tombs, with their inscribed ossuaries, as time capsules, preserving a tiny slice of history. Rather than a pile of bones of an unnamed and forgotten family, we have the names and relationships of the family that used a particular tomb—and in rare cases, as we will see, much more. These tombs provide a way for us to peer back into the past and recapture a moment in antiquity.
Jerusalem has experienced a huge building boom since 1967, when the Israelis unified the city and took down the dividing barriers between east and west. The population, both Jewish and Arab, has skyrocketed. But whenever you dig below a half meter or so in this ancient city or its environs you are more than likely to uncover archaeological antiquities, whether mosaics, ruins of ancient walls and buildings, or, often as not, ancient Jewish tombs. Antiquities are defined as any human-made material remains that can be dated earlier than the year 1700 CE and any zoological or biological remains older than 1300 CE.4 As a result, with the construction of practically every road, highway, bridge, park, housing unit, or building, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA), responsible for excavating, preserving, and safeguarding historic ancient sites, is called in. This work is called “rescue” or “salvage” archaeology, and it is usually done as quickly as possible so as not to unduly delay the construction project that has been halted.5 It is against Israeli law for anyone to willfully ignore or destroy a site that contains antiquities. One simply never knows what might turn up with the next construction blast or sweep of the bulldozer.
Jerusalem is ringed with ancient tombs. These burial caves are carved into the limestone bedrock and hidden from modern eyes. The city was destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans and nineteen centuries of subsequent building and periodic destruction have obscured the landscape. Most of these tombs date back to the 1st century BCE through the 1st century CE, when the Roman destruction brought a halt to normal Jewish life. Scholars label this time period the Late Second Temple period, and often refer in particular to Herodian Jerusalem, named after Herod the Great, the Roman client king who ruled the country from 37 to 4 BCE. Christians loosely refer to this period as “Jerusalem in the time of Jesus.”6
The use of ossuaries is a practice that is almost exclusive to Jerusalem and its environs in this period. Only a handful of ossuaries have been found in other parts of the country from this time. Scholars debate the reasons for this custom but the archaeological evidence is clear—this localized use of ossuaries flourished from the end of the 1st century BCE to the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman armies in 70 CE and then largely ceased.7
Approximately 1,000 cave tombs have been opened in the Jerusalem area in the past 150 years with over 2,000 documented ossuaries.8 Thousands more have been lost or sold and scattered into private hands. The latest catalogue of inscriptions from Jerusalem lists nearly 600 inscribed ossuaries, or approximately 30 percent of the total.9 Typically these ossuary inscriptions, written mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic or Greek, preserve the names of the dead.10 For historians and archaeologists these ossuaries represent a different kind of treasure, much more valuable than jewelry or coins. In a very few cases these inscriptions include warnings against opening or violating the tomb, or even more rarely, something about the deceased—perhaps where one was from if outside the land of Israel, how one might have been related to others in the tomb, or what one’s occupation might have been. Many ossuaries are plain, but others are decorated, most often with rosettes, various geometric patterns, architectural façades, and occasionally images of plants such as vines or palms. Images of humans and animals were forbidden as violations of the biblical commandment not to make “graven images”—so when there are exceptions, as is the case with our Patio tomb find, they stand out. Epigrams, in which something is said about the beliefs of the deceased about death and the afterlife, so common on Greek tombs in this period, are virtually nonexistent on Jewish ossuaries. As a result, the newly discovered Greek inscription on a Jewish 1st century CE ossuary is unprecedented in the archaeological record from this period.11
Construction blasts and bulldozers build the future but sometimes also unearth the past. These Old City tombs represent a valuable cross section of Jewish life—and death—in this period. The inscribed ossuaries, with names of individuals who lived and died before, during, and after the time of Jesus, lie at the crux of our investigation and indeed are what led us to the new discoveries that this book documents. We have spent many hours working side by side, studying and photographing scores of ossuaries all over Jerusalem—in the basement of the Rockefeller Museum, at the Israel Antiquities Authority warehouse in Beth Shemesh, in the storerooms of the Israel Museum, and elsewhere. The experience of walking through row after row of tall shelves of ossuaries, literally surrounded by these silent witnesses to the people who lived and died in Jerusalem in the 1st century CE, is for us a moving one. Most of the names are of long-forgotten individuals who lived and died without leaving behind any other record. But from time to time a tomb or ossuary can be identified with an individual we know from history—in a few cases even someone mentioned in the New Testament gospels. When that happens this hazardous process of tomb violation, whether by explorers, robbers, or modern construction, offers an amazing connection to the past—and the possibility of learning something entirely new, and connecting in a more tangible way with a person whom we had known only from a written text. It is as if the two-dimensional text suddenly becomes a three-dimensional life.
A dramatic example of such a discovery occurred on November 10, 1941. A single-chamber burial cave was found in the Kidron Valley, just southeast of the Old City of Jerusalem, by archaeologists Eleazar Sukenik and Nahman Avigad. The entrance was sealed and the cave had not been looted. Of the eleven ossuaries inside nine were inscribed, one in Hebrew/Aramaic, another bilingual, and the rest in Greek. Archaeologists were able to determine this was a tomb for a family of Jews from Cyrene, in present-day Libya. It was dated to the 1st century CE. One of the eleven ossuaries had two names inscribed: Alexandros as well as Simon with “the Cyrenian” included.12 Those names will ring a bell with many readers. Simon of Cyrene is famous for helping Jesus carry his cross to the place of execution. Many Christians commemorate his act as the fifth station of the cross. But the gospel of Mark significantly adds that this Simon was the father of “Alexander and Rufus,” naming his two sons, as if ancient readers might know them (Mark 15:21).
Is it possible that archaeologists have stumbled upon the family tomb of Simon of Cyrene and his son Alexander, the very ones mentioned in the New Testament gospels? One might think this very possibility would be an occasion for excitement and celebration. Surely this ossuary would be on display in the Israel Museum, visited by millions of Christian tourists each year who come to see the Dead Sea Scrolls and other wonders of archaeology. But such is not the case.
We went looking for the ossuary in 2005 and finally located it with some difficulty, in a back storage room at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, under a table. It did not appear to be of any particular interest to the curator who brought it out for us to examine. He even seemed a bit curious as to why we would have shown up with an interest in seeing it. We brought with us biblical scholar Tom Powers, who had written several articles about this intriguing ossuary but had never seen it firsthand. He had done all his work from published photos.13 We studied the bone box in great detail, photographed it, measured it, and examined it for any possible additional markings. We all felt awe in the little storage room where we were gathered that day. We had to ask ourselves, Is it possible we are standing around the ossuary that once held the bones of Alexander, Simon of Cyrene’s son, and perhaps Simon himself as well?
Archaeology connects us to our ancient past, but there is something about a tomb and a burial that is particularly moving. It is easy to imagine Alexander the son being present that day with his father, as Jesus passed by carrying the cross. The gospels say Simon was a passerby who was coming in from the countryside for Passover. Since the festival of Passover is a family event, his sons Rufus and Alexander would have undoubtedly been with him (Mark 15:21).14 Might Alexander have been present when the Roman soldiers impressed Simon to carry the cross? Would he then have followed his father to the place of execution and have even witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus? The name Simon is fairly common among Jews of this period but the name Alexander much less so—and this Alexander, like his father, is from Cyrene. That day, standing in the storeroom at Hebrew University, we were all contemplating that spine-tingling probability and experiencing firsthand the remarkable ways ancient archaeological finds can connect us to the past.
We have the bulldozers to thank for an even more astounding accidental discovery in November 1990. Builders working on a park in the Peace Forest, just south of the Old City, uncovered a 1st century CE burial cave with twelve ossuaries, five inscribed. Unfortunately the tomb had been looted so its contents were in disarray, but two inscribed ossuaries caught the archaeologists’ special attention—one was inscribed Yehosef bar Qafa—Joseph son of Caiaphas; the other simply Qafa—the family name Caiaphas. The archaeologists were convinced that most likely they had uncovered the ossuary of the very man before whom Jesus stood condemned in the early morning hours of the last day of his life—Joseph Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest in the time of Jesus (Matthew 26:57–67).15
Although the ossuaries were elaborately decorated, it is important to note that the inscriptions themselves were scratched on the plain sides of the ossuaries in a very informal cursive script and that the tomb was quite modest for a person of such wealth and importance. Also, one of the other ossuaries, inscribed Miriam daughter of Shimon, had a coin in the skull—presumably reflecting the pagan custom of putting a coin in the mouth to pay Charon, the ferryman over the Hadean river Styx in Greek mythology. Recently Simcha has tracked down two nails likely from the Caiaphas tomb that had gone missing. One expert has identified them as crucifixion nails.16 In Greek and Jewish tradition nails used for a crucifixion carried special magical powers, so one has to wonder if two such nails, connected to the Caiaphas family, might also be connected to the execution of Jesus. Regardless of that possibility, from this tomb we learn that a person of influence and means might have a modest tomb, with very informal, even sloppily executed inscriptions on their ossuaries, and that even the family of the high priest of Israel was not immune to pagan or Greek customs.
The discovery of these two tombs, containing the remains of these individuals mentioned specifically in the gospels, is truly extraordinary—and to think that these men were directly involved with Jesus during the last day of his life, witnessing his trial and his crucifixion. Archaeology is very much a “surprise” science, as one simply never knows what will turn up next. What one most hopes to find might never come about, but we have all learned that what one least expects can appear at any time.
And that’s exactly what happened in the spring of 1980 and again in 1981. Two tombs—the Garden tomb and the Patio tomb—were exposed by construction blasts in East Talpiot, a neighborhood just a mile and a half south of the Old City of Jerusalem. The tombs are less than two hundred feet apart. One was blown open from the front, with its courtyard destroyed, exposing its main entrance. The roof of the other was blasted open, allowing one to drop down from the top inside the still-sealed tomb. An Israeli construction company that was building a series of condominiums in the new neighborhood exposed both tombs. Easter and Passover do not always fall together in the same week, though they did in 1980 and again in 1981, when the two tombs were uncovered.17 We believe these tombs relate directly to Jesus, his family, and to his first followers. It seems more than ironic that both were uncovered around Easter and Passover, nineteen and a half centuries after his death.18
The Garden tomb, excavated by archaeologists in 1980, is located in a garden area today, between two condominium buildings. The tomb was left open, as are many ancient tombs in Jerusalem that have been excavated, but it was later covered over by the condominium owners with a concrete slab to keep children from falling in. The second tomb was examined by archaeologists in April 1981 but never excavated. This is the tomb in which we made our discoveries in June 2010. The Patio tomb has two ritual vent pipes, required by Jewish religious custom, that run up through a patio of one of the condo units built above it. According to Jewish law, tombs convey ritual impurity, so a space is maintained between the floor of any building and the ground surface above a tomb so that technically the building is not touching the tomb itself. The vents, commonly called “soul pipes,” allow the spirits of the dead to leave the tomb. Locating these two tombs again after twenty-five years was not an easy task, especially with streets, parking lots, and buildings now covering the area, but the concrete slab and the vent pipes turned out to be key indicators.
In April 1981, the Patio tomb, the site of our recent discoveries, was first uncovered. The tomb was exposed by a dynamite blast by the Solel Boneh construction company, which was preparing the area for a condominium building on what is today Dov Gruner Street in East Talpiot.19 Amos Kloner, Jerusalem district archaeologist and a Ph.D. student, went immediately to investigate the tomb on behalf of the IAA as soon as construction workers reported its discovery. Kloner was able to enter the tomb through the break in the ceiling. The tomb was twelve feet under the modern ground surface and its original entrance was closed, blocked by an ancient sealing stone. The tomb had a single central square chamber measuring 11.5 by 11.5 feet. It contained nine nicely carved gabled burial niches, three on each of three sides, each sealed with a heavy blocking stone. Four of the niches held a total of eight ossuaries. There were skeletal remains in the others.
Kloner reports that he was only in the tomb a very short time, just a few minutes, on his initial visit when a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews arrived, determined to protect the sanctity of the tomb and especially its bones from being disturbed by the archaeologists. He only had time to quickly examine the cave before being forced to leave by their protests. He was able to carry off one smaller ossuary, decorated but not inscribed, probably that of a child, which he turned over to the authorities at the IAA’s Rockefeller Museum headquarters.20
The tomb was assigned permit 1050 and Kloner left his assistants, the late Joseph Gath and Shlomo Gudovitch, to continue the investigation since he had to leave the country on a previously scheduled trip abroad.21 They were able to remove the heavy blocking stones from the various niches, briefly examine the ossuaries, and take photographs before the Orthodox returned and forced them to leave. In a subsequent publication Kloner mentions cooking pots in three different locations in the tomb.22 Only one pot made it to the IAA warehouse, where all artifacts are required to be stored as property of the state of Israel. We recently held it in our hands. It is still in perfect condition and properly tagged with the date and license number, at the IAA storage facility in Beth Shemesh.23 No one knows what happened to the other cooking pots or whether anything else might have been removed from the tomb. We can say that there are no such pots or other artifacts, other than the seven ossuaries, in the tomb today, based on our recent reinvestigation of its contents.
Kloner further reports that all the ossuaries but one were decorated and two had Greek names inscribed. The eyewitnesses we have interviewed confirm that IAA archaeologists worked at the tomb for several days, finally removing all the ossuaries from their niches, opening their heavy stone lids, and numbering the ossuaries with chalk marks. They were preparing to hoist them up with ropes through the opening in the ceiling for transport to the Rockefeller when they were stopped at the last moment by an irate group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish protesters who had returned. The positions the ossuaries occupy today in the niches are different from what is shown in the 1981 photos and on the map Kloner subsequently published, indicating that they were put back in the niches randomly, either by the archaeologists or the Orthodox religious authorities that halted the work.
The Patio tomb was sealed on April 16 with the seven ossuaries inside, and not seen again until twenty-nine years later by our remote cameras. In mid-July 1981 the builders poured a thick concrete support pillar down into the tomb to support the condominium building they were constructing.24 The tomb was subsequently sealed off under the basement of the building, and as mentioned the construction crew installed the “ritual” vent pipes that ran up through the concrete pillar to exit on a patio on the first floor.
Apparently, in their haste, and under pressure from the Orthodox, the archaeologists failed to notice what we discovered in June 2010. We found the two Greek names the archaeologists mentioned but we also discovered a Greek inscription with four lines of text, plus a mysterious image. The image offers a key to interpreting both of the Talpiot tombs and their probable relationship to Jesus. Together the inscription and the image constitute one of the most significant finds in recent archaeological history.
Every small detail matters to an archaeologist. Getting the facts straight is critical in interpreting both these tombs. We know much less about the details of the discovery of the Patio tomb since it was never excavated and was only briefly examined when it was exposed in 1981. Even the IAA records are sparse. In the case of the Garden tomb we have a lot more information with more pieces to the puzzle, but just as many questions as we have answers. Here are the facts as we understand them.
The Garden tomb was uncovered one year earlier by the same construction company preparing the area for a series of terraced condominium units. It is less than two hundred feet from the Patio tomb. It was exposed by a dynamite blast on Thursday morning, March 27, 1980.25 Engineer Ephraim Shohat and his supervisor immediately notified the IAA, who dispatched archaeologist Eliot Braun, who happened to live in the area, to investigate.26 The outside covered courtyard of the tomb had been completely blasted away, exposing an unusual façade with a chevron and a circle, carved on the face of the small inner entrance to the tomb itself. This entrance, measuring eighteen by eighteen inches, would have normally been covered with a sealing stone but it was missing, perhaps indicating the tomb had been left open or was disturbed at some time in the past. Braun crawled inside the tomb and found that it was filled knee deep with the local terra rossa soil that had apparently washed in over the centuries, even covering the tops of the ten ossuaries, yet unseen, that were stored inside. The inside of the square tomb measured only nine by nine feet and the ceiling was about four feet above the floor, so Braun could not stand inside. It is a much more modest tomb than the Patio tomb, both in terms of size and the architecture of the niches, which are more roughly cut. The Garden tomb’s interesting façade is its most distinguishing feature.
There were six burial niches, or kokhim, measuring six feet deep, twenty-one inches wide, and thirty-four inches high, carved into the east, north, and west sides of the tomb, two per side, with ossuaries stored in five of them.27 The tomb had two arched shelves, or arcosolia, six feet in length, carved into the north and west sides of its walls. It was on these shelves, as we have said, that corpses would be initially laid out for decomposition before the bones were collected into ossuaries a year or so following death. Archaeologists later noted that there were bone fragments on the shelves and when the two feet of terra rossa soil fill was removed, exposing the ancient floor of the tomb, they found skeletal remains, including skulls, just below the two shelves.
District archaeologist Amos Kloner supervised the operation and he assigned IAA archaeologist Joseph Gath to carry out the excavation. Gath invited Shimon Gibson, a young archaeology student with a talent for drawing, to prepare a survey or map of the tomb. Kloner applied for the necessary license to excavate on Friday, March 28, with Gath as the license holder. The “Permit for a Salvage Dig 938” was issued on Monday, March 31, the day before Passover, but apparently, according to IAA files, Gath had begun his work with the aid of Braun and three or four construction workers on the 28th, the Friday morning after the discovery. The excavation continued, with short breaks for the Passover holiday, until Friday, April 11, two weeks later.
Around noon on Friday the 28th, the day after the tomb was exposed, an eleven-year-old schoolboy, Ouriel Maoz, whose Orthodox Jewish family lived near the site, passed by and saw the distinctive façade of the exposed tomb, clearly visible from the street below. He ran home excitedly to tell his mother, Rivka Maoz, who immediately called the Department of Antiquities to report the newly visible tomb; she was concerned that if it were left unguarded its contents might be plundered. She could not get through to anyone since businesses close early on Friday afternoon for the Jewish Sabbath. The mother and son then went together to the tomb as the light was fading and they remember that they could see some skulls and bones inside. They saw no signs of any archaeologists or workers on the scene.
The next day, Saturday, was the Sabbath. Ouriel remembers running home from synagogue to tell his mother that some local kids had entered the tomb, found the skulls and other bones, and were playing soccer with them, kicking them about the area. The tomb had been left unguarded over the Sabbath. Rivka and her husband ran the children off and gathered all the bones they could locate, going door to door asking parents to be sure they made their children return all the bones. They gathered all they could collect, putting them in plastic bags for safekeeping until the next morning. On Sunday morning, when the archaeologists arrived to continue their work, she delivered the bags of bones to Gath.28
Gibson arrived about noon on Sunday to do the map survey of the tomb. In 2003, when we first interviewed him about his arrival at the scene, he distinctly recalled seeing the ossuaries that had been removed from the tomb lined up outside, waiting for a truck from the IAA that would transport them to the Rockefeller Museum headquarters of the IAA. Gibson recalled how Gath took him inside the tomb, where the workers were removing the soil that had accumulated, and he could still see the impressions left by the ossuaries. Gath indicated to him where each had been located so he could include the original locations of all ten on his map. If Gibson’s initial memory was correct, that would mean the ossuaries were not removed until midday Sunday and had been left in the tomb Friday and Saturday. This would explain how the neighborhood kids were able to pull skulls out of the ossuaries in the tomb for their makeshift soccer game since the ossuaries were buried under a foot and a half of soil and not visible when the archaeologists first began their work.
Getting these chronological facts straight is critical. If the tomb was indeed left open and unattended with ossuaries inside from its opening on Thursday through Sunday morning, there is a real possibility that the tomb could have been looted and ossuaries removed. The construction workers who exposed the tomb were aware of it and by Saturday those living in the neighborhood were aware as well. We are convinced that one or more ossuaries did go missing and in chapter 6 we will offer the results of our own investigation of what most likely happened.
The matter of the scattering of the bones is also troubling. How many bones were scattered and lost? Were the rest left in the ossuaries that were then taken to the IAA for analysis by an anthropologist? This would have been the normal procedure. What did Gath do with the bag of bones that the Maoz family gave to him Sunday morning? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions. It is quite disconcerting to think the bones from this ancient Jewish family, including the skulls from inside the ossuaries, were scattered and kicked about when the tomb was left unguarded over that fateful weekend.
Joe Zias, the anthropologist at the Rockefeller Museum who routinely received bones from tomb excavations, says he does not remember receiving bones from this particular tomb, but he notes that construction crews were uncovering many dozens of tombs in the 1980s and there was no reason for any particular set of bones to receive special treatment. Zias was the main “bone man” or anthropologist there at the time, but there is no record that he ever examined them or prepared a report. This is very unfortunate, since a full study of all the bones in all ten ossuaries might have contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of this tomb and those buried therein.
At that time, ossuaries with the bones inside were usually transported intact to the laboratory, where the bones could be separated for analysis and study. Depending on their state of deterioration they could be typed for age, sex, and any other distinguishing forensic information. This examination would also allow any potential correlation between the ossuary contents and any ossuary inscriptions.
Since Joseph Gath never published a full report of the contents of the Garden tomb, and the bones were never examined, our information regarding the excavation is extremely limited. The first publication in 1996 by Amos Kloner resulted from media attention to this tomb by the BBC, but by that time, fourteen years later, no bone reports could be done and much information was lost. One must assume that these and all other skeletal materials in various Israeli labs were turned over to the Orthodox religious authorities in 1994 when the Israeli government agreed to return such remains for reburial.29 These bones were presumably buried in unmarked common graves by the Orthodox authorities.
Fortunately, when the bones of ossuaries are removed significant bone fragments often remain, sticking to the sides of these limestone coffins. The ossuaries are rarely cleaned or brushed out unless they are going on display in the Israel Museum. In the case of the Garden tomb, enough bone fragments were left, even in 2005 when we first examined the ossuaries, to allow for DNA tests of some of the remains from two of the ossuaries. It is only recently that DNA tests have been done on skeletal remains from tombs of the period in an effort to determine familial relationships in a given tomb.30 What we have managed to recover fills in a few missing pieces of the overall story. The fascinating results of those tests will be presented in the final chapter of this book.
Amos Kloner reports that he visited the tomb when it was first reported to the antiquities authorities on Thursday, March 28, took photos, applied for the permit, and by noon Friday Gath and his workers had extracted all ten ossuaries from the niches, after digging them out of the soil that filled the tomb. Kloner insists that all ten ossuaries, with their bones, were transported to the Rockefeller Museum by midday, hours before the Sabbath arrived on Friday night.31 Kloner’s photos, now part of the official IAA files, do indeed show the niches in the tomb filled with soil to a level that made the ossuaries resting on the floor invisible. The IAA records show that Gath, Braun, and some workers had begun at least to clear the soil over the ossuaries on Friday morning. Various eyewitnesses, including Gibson in his original testimony, dispute whether Gath and his workers removed all ten ossuaries by noon that Friday for transport to the Rockefeller. It seems unlikely, since several of the ossuaries were broken and extracting them all from their encasement in two feet of soil would have required considerable effort.
The Maoz family says they never saw any archaeologists working at the tomb on Friday afternoon when they first visited. That they saw skulls and bones exposed might indicate the archaeologists had reached the tops of the ossuaries that morning before suspending their work and leaving the scene. Apparently the tomb was left unguarded, as it had been the previous Thursday afternoon and evening. An open tomb, with its striking façade, visible from a distance up on the ridge, was an invitation to local children or other intruders to enter the tomb and ransack things Friday night. The presence of skulls is particularly noteworthy, since these skulls would have come from inside the ossuaries—indicating that at least the soil covering the tops of the ossuaries had been removed on Friday morning by the archaeologists. Rivka Maoz gave us several color photos from the family album, two taken inside the tomb, showing that the ossuaries had been removed when the photos were taken. But when were these photos made by the Maoz family? Kloner and Gibson insist they were made on March 29, on the Sabbath, but the Maoz family are observant Jews and are not permitted to take photographs on the Sabbath. The photos were most likely made late on Sunday since there are no workers in the photos and the ossuaries had already been removed. Shimon Gibson is now convinced that his initial memory was faulty and that when he arrived Sunday morning he must not have seen the ossuaries outside after all, since they would have already been taken away by the archaeologists by noon on Friday, according to Amos Kloner. Everyone has the right to revise their recollections and change their mind, but Gibson does have a photographic memory and in his initial interviews with us he was quite explicit about seeing them all outside. The exact timing of the removal of the ossuaries, either on Friday or Sunday, is critical since one of the ossuaries, a potentially very significant one, may have gone missing.
According to all the records the Garden tomb contained a total of ten ossuaries, and they were catalogued as numbers 80.500 through 80.509 in the IAA collection. The current card catalogue at the IAA warehouse in Beth Shemesh only lists nine; the tenth, numbered 80.509, is not included, nor are there any photographs or measurements of it in the IAA excavation files. In chapter 6 we discuss this tenth and missing ossuary and what might have happened to it.
Gibson’s drawing shows all ten ossuaries in place in five of the six niches, marked with a number and a letter. Unfortunately, Kloner reports that he can find no record that would match up the ossuaries and their catalogue numbers with their original locations in the tomb on Gibson’s map. That sort of information, correlating finds with their location at an excavation site, is basic to any archaeological fieldwork. Recording precisely where things were found is perhaps the most important aspect of any excavation, as every beginning student of archaeology knows. It is impossible to imagine that Gath failed to tag the ossuaries with locus numbers. No one would send a group of ten ossuaries—or any artifact for that matter—to the Rockefeller without filling out a proper identification tag. Six of the nine ossuaries were inscribed with names and if we had their original locations we would know how the names were grouped in the tomb, giving possible hints as to the relationship of the individuals buried there to one another.
The six inscriptions, one in Greek and the rest in Aramaic are, in English: Jesus son of Joseph, Mariam called Mara, Joses, Judah son of Jesus, Matthew, and Maria. Since we clearly have a father named Jesus and his son Judah in this tomb, one wonders if one of the named women, Mariam called Mara or Maria, might have been the mother, and if so, which one. One might expect that the ossuaries of the father, mother, and son would be grouped together in the same niche. There is one niche, just on the right as you enter the tomb, that, according to Gibson’s drawing, held three ossuaries, clustered together. It is tempting to imagine that the Jesus of this tomb, his son Judah, and the mother might have been clustered together in this place of honor—first on the right as you enter the tomb. Unfortunately, given the lack of proper records we now have no way of knowing. At the time the ossuaries were removed and taken to IAA storage the archaeologists noticed that some of the ossuaries were inscribed in Greek and Aramaic but the name “Jesus son of Joseph,” which might have at least raised an eyebrow or two, is quite difficult to read as it is written in an informal cursive style.32 In due time Israeli epigrapher Levi Rahmani, along with Joseph Naveh and Leah Di Segni, deciphered the names, but how long after the tomb’s discovery we do not know. The nine ossuaries with descriptions and photos were included in the official Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in 1994, authored by Rahmani. The publication of Rahmani’s catalogue was the first time these six names from the Garden tomb were publicly revealed—fourteen years after their discovery.
Remarkably no one in any official capacity noticed or considered this unusual cluster of six names as having any special interest—not even the Jesus son of Joseph inscription. Only one other ossuary inscribed “Jesus son of Joseph” has ever been found, out of approximately two thousand ossuaries that have been uncovered over the past two hundred years. The famous Israeli Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Eleazar Sukenik brought it to light in 1931. He had stumbled across it in the basement warehouse of the Rockefeller Museum. It seems no one had ever noticed it before, and no one knows where it came from. As one might expect, the news of its existence caused a minor stir in the world press. Could this ossuary have possibly been that of Jesus of Nazareth?33 The scholars who commented on the discovery when Sukenik made his announcement emphasized that these names were sufficiently common to make any such identification irresponsibly speculative. Besides, no one knew where this ossuary had been found, when it was discovered, or who had found it. No such attention was given to the Jesus son of Joseph ossuary from the Garden tomb, even with these five other names all associated with Jesus of Nazareth and his family.
Joseph Gath died in June 1993, a year before the Rahmani catalogue was published. Gath never published a full report on the tomb, but we know he must have talked with Rahmani once the names were deciphered since Rahmani thanks him, as the excavator of the tomb, for giving permission for the ossuaries to be published.34 His widow, Ruth Gath, has told us that when her husband learned of the names of the inscriptions, he told her privately that he believed that the traditional burial site of Jesus, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was the “wrong tomb.” He explained that as a Jew he planned to remain silent about this opinion since any claim that the Garden tomb was that of Jesus of Nazareth and his family might result in an anti-Semitic backlash from the Christian church.35
10. The Garden tomb entrance between the apartments—it is covered by the cement slab at bottom center.
In 1995 a British film crew working on an Easter special on the resurrection of Jesus had noticed the two “Jesus son of Joseph” ossuaries listed in Rahmani’s catalogue and asked to film one or both of them. When the director discovered that the 1980 Garden tomb had contained ossuaries with a clustered set of names like Joseph, Mary, Jesus, Judah, and Matthew, all names associated with Jesus and his family in the New Testament, the film crew’s interest was considerably piqued. The subsequent 1996 BBC Easter television special, coupled with a front-page story in the London Sunday Times titled “The Tomb That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” sparked a worldwide flurry of news coverage.36 Archaeologists, officials from the IAA, and biblical scholars quickly weighed in, assuring the public that “the names were common” and the tomb could have belonged to any man named Jesus, not necessarily the one we know as Jesus of Nazareth. There were even calls from the Vatican to the IAA seeking clarification about the veracity of the stories that were circulating in the media. The story lasted about a week and then was largely dropped. Most academics chalked the whole subject up to an unfortunate case of media frenzy. One positive result of the news coverage was that the late Amir Drori, director of the IAA, embarrassed that he had never heard of this “Jesus” tomb, demanded that a full report of the tomb and its contents be assigned at once. The task fell to Amos Kloner to write up an official report on the tomb so as to dispel irresponsible media speculation. Kloner’s article appeared a few months later that same year, surely record time for an academic publication.37 Had the 1996 publicity bubble never occurred it seems unlikely that anything about the tomb would have ever been published, and the tomb with its contents would have been forgotten.
Both Kloner and Gibson have expressed their view that the Garden tomb merits no further scholarly attention and that it has become undeservedly famous due to media sensationalism.38 In their view the names in the tomb are common and have no connection to Jesus of Nazareth. The other major objection to identifying this tomb as the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth is the assertion that there is no historical evidence that Jesus had a son at all, much less one named Judah. When James was writing his book The Jesus Dynasty in 2005, he reacted to the post–Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code sensationalism and stated bluntly that the idea that Jesus was married and had children made good fiction but was “long on speculation and short on evidence.”39 However, based on all the evidence as well as the new discoveries in the Patio tomb, James has had reason to change his mind.
The media hysteria to which Kloner and Gibson refer is not so much the 1996 BBC story, which was quickly forgotten, but the aftermath of the investigation that we began in 2004. The preliminary results were made public in March 2007 through a Discovery Channel television documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, the bestselling book The Jesus Family Tomb, and a number of scholarly articles.40 We will chronicle that investigation and its results in the following chapter.
Few outside of Jerusalem had ever heard of the district of East Talpiot, just south of the Old City of Jerusalem, until the news stories regarding the “Jesus” tomb made headline news around the world in March 2007. According to the gospel of John, the tomb in which Jesus was initially placed in haste, until full burial rites could be performed after Passover, happened to be near the place of his crucifixion (John 19:41). Millions of Christians visit Jerusalem each year and are invariably taken either to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian quarter of the Old City, or an alternative site, just north of the city, more popular with evangelical Protestants, called “Gordon’s Calvary.” They come to either spot to view the place where they believe Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead on that first Easter morning. The crowded rows of condos and apartments that make up the various neighborhoods of East Talpiot are understandably not on the Christian tour agenda.
In the time of Jesus things were of course quite different. The hills south of Jerusalem, down toward Bethlehem, were relatively sparsely populated with private lands devoted to agriculture and livestock. The neighborhood where the Garden and Patio tombs are located is called Armon Hanatziv. It is just off a high ridge, called the Promenade, that provides a spectacular view of Jerusalem to the north and Bethlehem to the south, and it still attracts busloads of tourists today. In ancient times there was a main road crisscrossing the area, running southeast, that passed the famous Mar Saba monastery and went down to the Dead Sea, near Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. To the west of the two tombs, just a few hundred yards away, was a spectacular aqueduct that transported water from Tekoa, south of Bethlehem, north to Jerusalem. The area is thick with ancient biblical history. Abraham traveled this route on his way to Mount Moriah, as recorded in Genesis 22:1–4. Rachel, wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph and Benjamin, is buried on the road running south to Bethlehem (Genesis 35:16). Just to the south and east of Bethlehem, clearly visible from the Talpiot tombs, is the magnificent Herodium, the tomb of Herod the Great, the Roman-appointed “King of the Jews.”
In the 1980s, when the construction companies were tearing up the area to build residential dwellings, mostly apartments and condominiums, the Garden and Patio tombs were not the only tombs uncovered. Just to the north of the Garden or “Jesus” tomb, less than sixty feet away, was another tomb that had been almost entirely blasted away. All that was left was one of its inside walls, with the partial remains of the niches still visible. None of its contents could be studied or evaluated but it likely belonged to the same farm or agricultural estate. In the immediate vicinity there was also an ancient olive press, various water cisterns, and the remains of a plastered ritual bath called a mikveh. Joseph Gath, who surveyed the entire area around the tombs, concluded that these installations belonged to a large farm or wealthy estate and were most likely the family tombs of the owner, clustered closely together.41
Ancient historians work with evidence, archaeological and textual, seeking to discern if there is any fit between what we read in our texts, in this case the gospel accounts of Jesus’ death, and what is found in excavations. They often construct working hypotheses to test whether the various types of evidence fit together and what the alternative interpretations might be.
As we consider whether the Garden tomb might indeed be the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his immediate family a key historical question arises. According to the New Testament gospels Joseph of Arimathea, who had enough wealth and influence to go directly to Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea, to request the burial rights for Jesus’ body, was responsible for Jesus’ burial. Such a task would normally fall to the immediate family, or to the closest disciples of a teacher such as Jesus. For example, we learn in the gospel of Mark that when Herod Antipas beheaded John the Baptizer, his disciples were allowed to come and take his body and bury it in a tomb (Mark 6:29). In all four of our gospels, Joseph of Arimathea appears just after the crucifixion to remove Jesus’ corpse from the cross and carry out the Jewish burial rites for Jesus (Mark 15:43–47).42 We never hear of him again. He is said to be a member of the “council,” or Sanhedrin, the indigenous Jewish judicial body responsible for Jewish affairs, as well as a sympathizer with Jesus and his movement. If one wants to understand what happened to Jesus’ body after the crucifixion, one has to pay careful attention to Joseph of Arimathea.
What most readers of the New Testament have missed is that Joseph of Arimathea initially placed the body of Jesus in a temporary unfinished tomb that just happened to be near the place of crucifixion. It was an emergency measure so that the corpse would not be left exposed overnight, which was forbidden by Jewish law (Deuteronomy 21:23). It was late afternoon when Jesus died and the Jewish Passover was beginning at sundown that very evening. Although Jewish tradition required that a body be buried as quickly as possible, the full rites could not be carried out before the Passover meal began. The gospel of John explains it best:
Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:41–42)43
Jesus was temporarily placed in this new tomb, with the entrance blocked with a stone, to protect his body from exposure and from predators. According to Mark all Joseph of Arimathea had time to do was to quickly wrap the bloodied body in a linen shroud—no washing, no anointing, no traditional Jewish rites of mourning—nothing (Mark 15:46). The women, including Jesus’ mother, his sister, his companion Mary Magdalene, and others, who followed at a distance, had every intention of completing the Jewish rites of burial, which involved washing the corpse and anointing it with oil and spices, as soon as the Sabbath was over (Mark 16:1). Joseph of Arimathea, in asking to take charge of the proper burial of Jesus, clearly had a more permanent arrangement in mind. The most likely scenario is that he planned to provide Jesus, and subsequently his family, with a cave tomb at his own expense, likely on his own estate outside Jerusalem. That he was a local resident seems likely based on his membership in the Sanhedrin, and he is the one who would have had the means to provide the family of Jesus, who were from Galilee, with a family cave tomb.
The Patio tomb, in particular, shows evidence in both architecture and content of having belonged to a rich family. Our new evidence from the tomb further points in this direction. Once we put things into this biblical context, noting carefully what the earliest gospel traditions actually say, the faith of Jesus’ followers that he was raised from the dead can finally be understood in proper historical context. Rather than denying that Jesus was raised from the dead, the Talpiot tombs and their contents give witness to the resurrection faith of these first believers. In an uncanny way, Easter 1980 and Easter 1981 have provided us with a revolutionary new understanding of the implications of that first Easter weekend and all that transpired. In the following chapter we will relate our “rediscovery” of the two Talpiot tombs, their freshly uncovered contents, and how our understanding of Jesus and his first followers has been dramatically reshaped by what we have found.
