22. Jonah vomited out of the sea monster, as depicted in the San Sebastiano catacombs.
According to our earliest gospel sources, Jesus often spoke in code. Everyone has heard of the “parables” of Jesus but the word parabole in Greek literally means to “lay alongside.” The idea is that one uses a symbolic term or story, laying alongside the real meaning—both obscuring it and revealing it at the same time. In other words, the “sign” is not the thing itself, but a kind of code or riddle for the concealed or secret meaning.
Our earliest New Testament gospel is Mark. Although it follows Matthew in the New Testament we use today, scholars are convinced it was our first written gospel, dated before Matthew, Luke, or John.1 It represents our earliest version of the “story” of Jesus, a narrative account of his preaching and healing that culminates in his execution by crucifixion. Early in Mark’s narrative Jesus explains his use of parables, shocking his listeners with his forthright declaration that he is purposely obscuring his meaning so that people would not understand:
And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.” (Mark 4:10–12)2
This is surely a contrast to the normal Sunday school approach to the parables of Jesus, which asserts that Jesus told his parables in order to help people understand. Here Jesus says just the opposite. The parables are riddles that only those whom God chooses can understand. To the rest, called “outsiders,” the parable, sign, or symbol is intended to obscure, not reveal, the true meaning.
Often when Jesus would offer one of his riddles he would end with the admonition, “Let the one who has ears to hear, hear!”3 The idea is that some who hear will understand the secret meaning, while others will “hear” the words but not comprehend their message.
Over one hundred and fifty years ago scholars in Germany identified a lost gospel.4 Its discovery results from an amazing bit of textual sleuthing. In terms of biblical studies it is one of the greatest discoveries of modern times, but few outside academic circles have heard of it. Scholars refer to this “gospel” as Q, short for the German word Quelle, meaning “source.” It was not found in a cave or buried in a clay jar, as were the Dead Sea Scrolls and the lost Gospel of Thomas. It is embedded in the New Testament gospels of Matthew and Luke. In other words it had been there all along, hidden away for centuries, but no one had noticed it.
Mark wrote first and Matthew and Luke drew upon Mark as their basic narrative source. In other words, Mark provides the storyline and structure for both these subsequent works. Some scholars even call Matthew and Luke “rewritten Mark,” much the way one might publish a subsequent edition of a work with revisions, changes, and additions. Besides using Mark, Matthew and Luke had access to this older source we call Q. By extracting from Matthew and Luke the material that they have in common, that is not in Mark, we are able to reconstruct this lost gospel source with a reasonable degree of certainty.5 Q turns out to be an early collection of the sayings and deeds of Jesus that predates even Mark. It is not a narrative or story but primarily a collection of Jesus’ teachings and deeds. Many scholars consider it to be a lost gospel of Jewish Christianity, uninfluenced by later Gentile Christian developments.6 It is usually thought to date to about 50 CE—just twenty years after Jesus’ death.
Recovering Q has allowed us to go behind the gospels as they now stand and see an earlier time when the Jesus movement was young and first developing in Galilee and Jerusalem. Q predates Paul and all the theological changes that developed as a result of his mission work to non-Jews in Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome. Q is about 350 lines and contains approximately fifty separate “teachings” of Jesus. It would have fit on a roll of papyri or parchment much like some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that come from the same period. For our recent discovery in the Talpiot Patio tomb the lost gospel source of Q turns out to be critical, for it is in Q that we learn one of the earliest interpretations of the mysterious “sign of Jonah,” attributed directly to Jesus.
In both Mark and Q we have accounts of the enemies of Jesus asking him to give them a “sign” in order to test him—was he the “son of David” or not (Matthew 12:23)? The phrase “son of David” is code for the expected king or Messiah, who was to be a descendant of the ancient king David and would appear in the last days to establish the kingdom of God.7 These enemies had seen Jesus’ healings and exorcisms but were not convinced, charging that he performed these wondrous deeds through magical powers from Beelzebul—the prince of demons (Mark 3:22; Matthew 12:23–24; Luke 11:15).
In Mark’s gospel, when these enemies demand a sign, Jesus’ reply is stark and abrupt: “Truly I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation” (Mark 8:12). As outsiders they are simply dismissed. Matthew knows this tradition about no sign and repeats it when he is following Mark as his narrative source (Matthew 16:4). However, he, like Luke, has the second source—Q. It is in this older source that we can glimpse the traditions that circulated among Jesus’ earliest followers who still lived in the land of Israel, some of whom would have heard him preach and teach.
The Q source records a similar scene in which Jesus’ enemies taunt him for a sign, but his response is quite different from Mark’s tradition. Rather than say “no sign will be given,” as he does in Mark, Jesus in Q speaks in a riddle. It is clear that Mark, writing many decades later, probably from Rome, has no access to this tradition. In Q Jesus tells the crowds that were flocking around him: “This generation is an evil generation: it seeks a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29). This is our earliest reference to the mysterious “sign of Jonah.” The Greek word for “sign” used here is semeion. It is related to our English term semantics, which refers to the ways in which words signify (“sign”) meaning. Here in Luke’s version of Q the “sign” is not explained, but in Matthew’s parallel version we read its interpretation: “ . . . but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah, for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40).
This is quite extraordinary, since it is the only sign Jesus says he will give to his generation, preserved for us in this earliest gospel source Q. Matthew is, of course, writing long after Jesus had died, been buried, and—according to the faith of his followers—been raised from the dead. What he offers his readers here is a clear interpretation of the sign of Jonah—namely that Jesus would be three days and three nights in the tomb. The sign of Jonah has to do with faith in Jesus’ resurrection and this is how it has been interpreted throughout Christian tradition.
It is rare to find contemporary archaeological evidence related to a saying of any ancient figure, much less Jesus. Most of what we know of the teachings of Socrates or Plato or the ancient rabbis comes to us from copies of manuscripts dating as late as the Middle Ages. Even in the case of Jesus, our first complete copies of the New Testament gospels date to the time of Constantine in the 4th century CE. Our discovery in the Patio tomb is unprecedented in that it reflects one of the earliest sayings of Jesus, preserved in Q, contemporary to the generation that saw him and heard him teach.
The biblical story of Jonah and the great fish, often a favorite in children’s Bible storybooks, is preserved in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in the book of Jonah—one of the Hebrew prophets. God tells Jonah to go to the great city of Nineveh, the capital of ancient Assyria, and call upon the people to repent of their sins or face destruction. Jonah refuses to obey God. He flees on a ship from Israel’s Mediterranean coastline, headed for Tarshish, a coastal city in Spain—as far west as one could go. A mighty storm erupts, threatening to break up the ship and take it under. Everyone is praying to their gods and Jonah finally confesses his sin to the crew. He tells them that he is a Hebrew, fleeing from Jehovah his God, refusing to do his bidding. At his request they throw him overboard as a scapegoat, hoping the Hebrew God would turn his wrath away. Immediately the sea becomes calm. Then we read: “And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17).
Jonah prays fervently from the belly of the fish that threatens to become his living tomb. God hears his prayer and causes the fish to vomit Jonah out onto dry land. The words of Jonah’s prayer of thanksgiving show that the belly of the fish represents entering Sheol, the underworld of death in Hebrew:
I called to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol. I cried, and thou didst hear my voice . . . The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me, weeds were wrapped about my head . . . I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet thou didst bring up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God (Jonah 2:2, 5–6).
Jonah’s language here about going down through the gates of death and then being lifted back to life becomes a perfect model for the notion of resurrection from the dead. The story is all the more fitting as appropriated by the Q source since Jesus, according to this tradition, spent three days and three nights in the tomb and then was raised from the dead.8
One might assume that Jews in the time of Jesus would have seized upon the Jonah story to illustrate the more general notion of resurrection of the dead, but such is not the case. In Jewish writings of this period Jonah is not a major, or even much of a positive, figure at all.9 There is not a single reference to him in the entire collection of Dead Sea Scrolls and the book of Jonah is never mentioned. In other Jewish texts, such as the collection known as the Pseudepigrapha—Jewish writings that are later than the Hebrew Bible and were written between 200 BCE and 200 CE—he is only mentioned twice, once in passing as an example of one who repents of sinning against God’s command, the other as an illustration of how God hears the prayers of those sinners who cry out to him.10
There is an obscure Armenian translation of a Greek text of unknown date and origin called De Jona that recounts the Jonah story in full. Although some scholars date the original text to the 2nd or 3rd century CE, this is uncertain since the original Greek text is lost and the Armenian translation comes from the 6th century CE or later. It does seem to be Jewish and, significantly, it describes the rescue of Jonah from the belly of the fish as a “sign of rebirth,” as if he is being delivered from the “womb” of the fish. Jonah declares, in this text: “You have to regard me; I was taken out of the sleep to be a sign of rebirth, and I shall be a warrant to everyone of his own life” (De Jona 95).11 Although this is not properly an image of resurrection of the dead, it does seem to form our closest Jewish parallel to the kind of interpretation of Jonah’s rescue that became so widespread in early Christianity. One question that must be asked is whether this text, coming so late, might have been influenced by Christian traditions or beliefs about Jonah.
The Mishnah (circa 200 CE), the first major collection of rabbinic materials that later became the core of the Talmud, has one passing reference: “He who answered Jonah in the belly of the fish will answer you and hear the sound of your cry this day. Blessed are you, O Lord, who answers prayer in a time of trouble.” (m. Taan 2:4).12 Apparently, the reason for the dearth of Jonah traditions in rabbinic literature is that during the 4th and 5th centuries CE, when much of that material was being edited, the rabbis had little interest in praising or emphasizing Jonah because the Christians had claimed and co-opted him as foreshadowing the resurrection of Christ.13
In ancient Jewish art there are no attested representations of Jonah and the fish. That fact alone puts our Patio tomb discovery in a new light. By the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, when Jews did begin to create iconographic art, depictions such as Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Noah and the ark, Moses and the burning bush, the Exodus, Elijah and the widow’s son, Daniel in the lion’s den, the Ark of the Covenant, and Menorahs abound. Jonah never appears.14 These images are preserved on mosaic floors of synagogues, in murals and frescos, and in funerary art.15
In sharp contrast, Jonah and the fish is the most common motif in early Christian art from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Graydon Snyder tabulates a total of 108 examples of the “Jonah cycle” (Jonah cast into the sea, Jonah spat out of the fish, and Jonah at rest) on murals, frescos, and sculptures in catacombs, churches, and other Christian sites.16 This compares with eight representations of Noah and the ark, six of Daniel in the lion’s den, six of Jesus’ baptism, five of the sacrifice of Isaac, and five of the resurrection of Lazarus—all in Christian contexts. The difference in these numbers is truly remarkable. The explanation seems to lie in the dominant influence of Jesus’ saying about the “sign of Jonah.”17 Christians saw the Jonah story not only as a powerful image of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, but also as a way of affirming their own faith in the resurrection of the faithful at the end of days. The Jonah image was both a proclamation and an affirmation of personal faith. That is why the Jonah cycle is predominantly found in tombs—particularly in the catacombs of Rome. Jonah and the fish is the quintessential early Christian biblical image—more so even than the baptism of Jesus, the cross, or any other depiction of Jesus.
After discovering the image of Jonah and the great fish on the ossuary in the Patio tomb we decided to visit two of these Christian catacombs in Rome—San Sebastiano and Priscilla—to see firsthand what we had been reading in dozens of books on early Christian art. We were astounded at the number of Jonah representations we saw in these two locations. We arranged to visit after hours and the guides showed us several burial chambers with Jonah images that are not open to tourists. The motif was unmistakable.
One particular chamber, clearly of an extended family, had a complete set of murals depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the sailors throwing Jonah into the sea, Jonah being spat out of the fish’s mouth, and Noah in the ark. Noah, second only to Jonah, had also become a symbol of salvation based on a passage in the New Testament book 1 Peter about Christian baptism putting one into an “ark” of safety, protecting and saving from sins: “Baptism, which corresponds to this [i.e., Noah in the ark] now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:21). What the early Christians did, beginning with Jesus’ appropriation of Jonah, was to draw upon a series of images from the Hebrew Bible—Adam and Eve in paradise, Noah and the ark, Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac, and Jonah and the fish—to illustrate their new understanding of salvation in Jesus through his resurrection. Baptism itself, according to Paul, was like a new “Exodus” from Egypt, a crossing of the Red Sea, into the Promised Land (1 Corinthians 10:2). Baptism also pictured the death and burial of the old self—in a watery grave—and the resurrection or rebirth of the new person free from sins (Romans 6:4).
Jonah functioned in a similar way, being cast into the sea and swallowed by the fish or sea monster, which represented death. The belly of the fish was likened to the grave, or alternatively, the womb. Being spat out onto dry ground represented resurrection from the dead or rebirth. It is common for Jonah to emerge from the mouth of the fish with his hands raised, reflecting what is called the orant pose, indicating prayer and spiritual devotion, as shown in these murals.
This iconographic use of Jonah to represent the resurrection of Jesus is echoed in early Christian writings of the 2nd and 3rd centuries as well.18 Justin Martyr, who wrote around 150 CE, argues with pagan opponents that Jesus fulfilled the one sign he gave—the “sign of Jonah,” since he rose from the dead after three days.19 The Acts of Paul, written in the late 3rd century CE, condemns those who doubt the resurrection of the body, citing the example of Jonah and applying it to Jesus and his resurrection.20
To understand the significance of the Jonah image to the early Christians, we turn to the sign of Jonah found in the Patio Tomb. The ossuary with the image of Jonah and the fish is in the third niche, ossuary 6 on our map. It is turned perpendicularly in the niche and ossuary 5 is jammed up against it so closely we were unable to see its full decorated façade. Fortunately the Jonah image is on the left side of the ossuary’s decorated front panel if you are looking into the niche from outside, which allowed us to see it with our camera probe.
The fish is clear, with fins and scales, an eye, and a huge etched-in tail with a human stick figure being expelled from its mouth. All the other decorated ossuaries in the tomb have formally executed façades with typical rosettes and border designs similar to hundreds of other examples from the period. Families could have ordered them from a shop that specialized in ossuary manufacture. Certain patterned styles and motifs were common and probably carried meanings now lost to us.
The Jonah ossuary is completely different. Its patterns and markings look much more crude and homemade, which indicates that the family took a plain ossuary and created a unique design to express something that was no doubt deeply meaningful. In other words, the Jonah ossuary carries a specific message. Nothing like it has ever been seen on any of the two thousand ossuaries that have been documented.
The tail of the fish is oriented to the top of the ossuary and the mouth is turned to the bottom, as if the fish is spitting the figure onto land. There is a border to the side with what appears to be representations of mountains. The clear area the fish occupies within the borders of the panel represents water. The human stick figure’s head looks like it is wrapped in the style of a mummy. We suggest that the artist is trying to represent the seaweed that was wrapped around Jonah’s head when he emerged, based on the biblical text in which Jonah says “weeds were wrapped about my head” (Jonah 2:5). There are also fins and scales on this fish. Even though in popular imagination the story of Jonah and the “whale” is widespread, the text of the book of Jonah never identifies the creature as a whale—but as a “great fish.” In Jewish mythology the great fish that swallowed Jonah is associated with Leviathan, one of two great sea monsters that God created on the fifth day of creation. Leviathan, along with Behemoth, represents evil, chaos, and death. Leviathan lives in the Mediterranean Sea. He is prominent in rabbinic literature in connection with the coming of the Messiah. Leviathan is a kosher fish with fins and scales, not a mammal like a whale. The Torah forbids consumption of any kind of sea creature lacking fins and scales (Leviticus 11:9–12). According to these traditions, in the messianic age, at the time of the resurrection of the dead, Leviathan will be killed and eaten by the righteous in a great celebratory banquet. His skin will then be used to make shelters for the righteous.21 It is significant that we see evidence in our ossuary representation of the fish reflecting these details of the biblical story and Jewish tradition. When art historians interpret images, especially funerary art, they base their analysis on antecedents and precedents. A given image is then compared with other similar images, since various cultures develop and reuse certain stylistic motifs. It is common to find patterns and motifs used on furniture and frescos transferred to funerary art. That is why many of the images of Jonah and the fish in the catacombs of Rome are quite similar. A basic style of portraying the story had developed by the 3rd and 4th centuries CE among the Christians and it was then repeated hundreds of times.
In the case of this newly discovered Jonah image there is nothing to compare it to. We know of not a single example of anything similar in the entire world of early Jewish art. The person who drew this image is turning an idea into an image. He or she had a concept in mind, but no example or model to imitate or adapt. The design is most likely based on the text of the book of Jonah, but more important, the oral tradition reflected in Q that Jesus had likened his resurrection from the dead to the story of Jonah and the fish. It makes no sense to think that someone would arbitrarily decide to put a Jonah fish image on his or her ossuary, violating the biblical prohibition of making images. It is all the more unlikely since we have no other such images on ossuaries in this period and Jonah and the fish is not even developed as a motif in Jewish texts of this period. The artist is clearly trying to express a concept. It is an affirmation of faith. But it is also a daring and heretical move. That it is in a tomb on an ossuary holding the bones of the deceased is all the more telling.
26. Computer-generated image of Jonah and the fish produced from multiple photographs taken from various angles.
As we examined the rest of the ossuary this interpretation was further reinforced. On the left end of the ossuary was another design, also done in a simple lined style. There was a bell-shaped object with a crosslike design in the middle. It looked as though it might represent an entrance into the ossuary—and thus an entrance into death. Whether the cross was there to represent an entrance, or whether it might have a more symbolic meaning, is open to interpretation.
On the opposite right end of the ossuary was another fish, very similar to the Jonah image, but only one-third of it was drawn. You can see the tail and part of the body of the fish with its scales, but then the rest is drawn so close to the bottom of the ossuary that the image could not be completed. We were not able to get a clear or wide shot of this end of the ossuary due to its tight fit against the wall of the niche. All we could see was some kind of grid pattern that looked like the scales. Later, in looking at the archive photos that Amos Kloner took of the ossuaries back in 1981, the image jumped out at us—it is definitely a partial fish, drawn in the same style as the one on the front.
Next we examined the right side of the front panel of the ossuary. It had a design similar to the left side, with the mountain-like borders running along its edge and something that looked like rivers or canals with several smaller fish in them. Taken together, the images on the front and the two side panels seem to represent a kind of narrative. It is as if the ossuary itself presents death, and the various scenes on its panels portray stages of entering the grave and emerging alive again—just as Jonah does in the biblical story. Our biggest disappointment was that we could not see the middle of the front of the Jonah ossuary, where there might have been some kind of inscription. Ossuary 5, in front of the Jonah ossuary, was pushed so closely against its face, less than a half-inch, that we could not get a clear shot between the two. Walter had equipped the robotic arm so it could have easily and gently moved the ossuary in front just an inch or two, using an inflatable balloon, but we felt bound to honor our agreement with the ultra-Orthodox stipulating that nothing be moved even a fraction of an inch. The day we made our discovery one of Rabbi Schmidl’s representatives who had stuck close to us the whole time was present. Over the course of our investigation he had become a part of our team and seemed to share our excitement at each new discovery. We had formed a bond with the Orthodox and gained their respect based on keeping our word and demonstrating that our interest was to gather information about the deceased in the tomb as a way of honoring and remembering them.
Later in assessing our Jonah ossuary findings we made yet another important discovery. In carefully studying the original photos that Kloner had taken of the ossuaries in 1981 we realized that the Jonah ossuary had originally been the first one, in the first niche, on the right as one enters the tomb. By carefully comparing these archive photos with our camera probe footage we have been able to recover the original positions of all the ossuaries in the tomb the day it was first entered. Rather than being tucked away deep in one of the other niches, as it is today, the Jonah ossuary occupied the place of honor reserved for the patriarch of the family—first on the right.
What’s more, the photo clearly shows that this particular ossuary was filled to capacity with bones, indicating it held the remains of more than one individual. Jewish ossuary burials of this time often have the bones of several family members in a single ossuary.22 In contrast to the other elaborately carved and painted ossuaries, including the one Kloner had removed from the tomb in 1981, the Jonah ossuary seemed uncharacteristically simple, even crude, compared with the standard ornamentation found on ossuaries. We were convinced that it was an ossuary with a message and therefore its proclamation took precedence over its formal beauty. We could not help but wonder—could this be the humble ossuary of Joseph of Arimathea and his family? Was there something about his faith or piety as part of the Jesus movement that would lead him to prefer such a modest bone box?
From what little we know of him in the gospels, Joseph of Arimathea seems to have been a person who was bold and daring enough to depict his faith in Jesus’ resurrection in such a unique and even heretical manner. He was willing to use his influence to go to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and get charge of Jesus’ proper burial at a time when sympathy with Jesus or his movement was not an easy thing to choose. Even the disciples of Jesus had gone into hiding after his death. The plainness of this ossuary reminds one of the ossuaries of Jesus, Maria, Matthew, and Joses in the Jesus tomb nearby. Might Joseph of Arimathea have chosen a similarly modest ossuary for himself and his most immediate family—but one that boldly proclaimed their faith even in the midst of opposition and conflict?
The Greek inscription, right next to the Jonah ossuary, seemed to silently interpret the entire context of the tomb in a new light. Epigrams on ossuaries in this period are extremely rare. Of the 650 inscribed ossuaries on record there are only a dozen or so with any kind of message written on them. Typically these messages are emphatic protective formulae—unequivocal warnings against disturbing the bones of the deceased, such as:
Bones of our father, do not open them!
Our parents: Do not ever open!
Our father Dositheos—not to be opened!
Miriam, wife of Mathia: whoever moves these, blindness strike!23
There is one possible exception, on an ossuary found on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. It is written in Aramaic and scholars have debated its proper translation. Some say it reads, “No man can go up [from the grave],” while others translate it “his entering [the grave] nobody has abolished.”24 In either case the idea is that it is impossible to reverse death. Although such expressions are abundant in Greek culture at this time, and even on later Jewish burials from the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, such an epigrammatic statement on a 1st century Jerusalem ossuary was unique until our discovery.25
The four-line inscription, written in uncial (uppercase) Greek letters, reads as follows:
ΔІΟΣ (Divine or Wondrous)
ΙΑΙΟ (Jehovah)
ΥΨΩ (Lift up)
ΑΓΒ (Lift up)
When James returned home from Israel he began to consult with several expert epigraphers to get their evaluations of the text. All were duly impressed with the extraordinary nature of the find, realizing that an epigram of this sort was a “first” so far as Jerusalem ossuary inscriptions from this period. Based on their input James considered several alternative translations, including the possibility that this was a dedicatory inscription: “To God Jehovah [most] high holy,” but that would require the verb “to raise up” to be a contracted form of the adjective “most high.” This is problematic since the inscription seems to represent the word as a verb.26
The final line of the inscription consisting of three Greek letters—A G B—is most intriguing. This is not a standard Greek word; it seems to be some kind of coded abbreviation. Perhaps it represents the initials of the name of the deceased. Such cryptic sets of letters occur on a half-dozen other ossuaries and so far no one has been able to figure out their meaning, though it is clear they are purposeful.27 It is possible that these three Greek letters represent the Hebrew verb hagbah, which means “lift up.” If that were the case we would have a repetition of the verb—lift up, lift up—once in Greek, the other in Hebrew written in Greek. This would parallel the first two lines, which refer to God in both Greek and Hebrew.
The first word, DIOS, can be taken as an adjective, modifying the divine name of God—Yahweh or Jehovah—transliterated into Greek as IAO or here IAIO—thus the “divine” or “wondrous” Jehovah. We know this form in various literary sources, especially on magical papyri and amulets.28
The core of the inscription is the contract verb hupsoo—“to lift, to raise up.” As is common in inscriptions it is written in an abbreviated form. It could be translated “he raised up” or even “he will raise up”—one can’t tell from this contracted form of the verb.29 In nonbiblical Greek this verb is rare and comes only in later sources.30 In contrast it occurs 260 times in the Greek Old Testament. It is used for exaltation in general, and understood as deliverance and redemption from danger and enemies. More specifically, in several passages it is used to express a developing view in resurrection of the dead: “Be gracious to me, O LORD! Behold what I suffer from those who hate me, O thou who lifts me up [hupson] from the gates of death” (Greek text of Psalm 9:14). In the Apocalypse of Abraham this verb is used for Abraham, who like Enoch and Elijah, is taken up to heaven by angels, so it comes to mean heavenly exaltation as well as being brought up from the grave (10:1). In the Dead Sea Scrolls it is used specifically for “raising up” from death as well as awakening or resurrection.31
There are three passages in the New Testament that use this precise Greek verb—hupsoo—to refer to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus from the dead as well as his exaltation to heaven:
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself. (John 12:32)
This Jesus God raised up . . . being therefore lifted up to the right hand of God. (Acts 2:32–33)
The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God lifted him up at his right hand as Leader and Savior . . . (Acts 5:31)
The verb comes to do double duty, referring both to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead as well as to his being lifted up to heaven. Paul uses a compound form of the verb that intensifies it: “Therefore God has lifted him to the highest . . .” (Philippians 2:9).
We can’t say with certainty whether this four-line inscription refers to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead or the hope of the deceased in the ossuary who believed he or she would be “lifted up.”
Given the context provided by the image of the “sign of Jonah,” it seems more likely to us that it refers both to Jesus as a celebratory declaration of faith in his resurrection as well as to the resurrection of those in the tomb who have faith in him. This would clearly be the intention of putting Jonah and the fish images on one’s tomb in the catacombs at Rome. We must take into account that both the Jonah image and the inscription are on ossuaries—in a tomb—not on a wall, a pillar, an amulet, or other artifact. It is that funerary context that seems to most strongly point to Jesus. It could be a more general expression of faith in resurrection, but since we have no such general expressions on any of 650 inscribed ossuaries, it seems more likely that its connection is to faith in Jesus’ resurrection. It further seems that this family, buried not two hundred feet from the Jesus family tomb, is calling upon God to raise their messiah or proclaiming and celebrating that he has already been exalted to heaven.
These discoveries in the Patio tomb provide a new context for our discoveries in the Jesus tomb, but they also open the way for a reevaluation of ossuaries and their inscriptions and ornamentations in general. There has been a sharp debate among scholars as to whether we have any evidence that the Jewish followers of Jesus in 1st century Jerusalem left any distinctive evidence of their faith by the way in which they inscribed and marked the ossuaries in which they were buried.
In the 1970s Pau Figueras came across a small fragment of an ossuary in the IAA warehouse of unknown provenance that had the name Yeshua—Hebrew for Jesus—inside a circle that he identified as a fish. He was convinced that he had discovered the first archaeological evidence that could be tied to Jewish followers of Jesus.32 Most scholars disagreed, taking the so-called fish as a carelessly drawn circle simply calling attention to the name of the person buried in the ossuary. Levi Rahmani wrote, “The similarity of the circle to a fish is coincidental and the inferences drawn by Figueras excessive.”33 Jonathan Price recently concurred, labeling Figueras’s suggestion “an over-interpretation.”34 These editors of the two most prestigious catalogues of ossuary inscriptions from this period represent a general consensus. They maintain that not only is there no distinctive archaeological evidence left behind by Jesus’ first followers, but also that ossuary ornamentations in general are nonsymbolic and have nothing to do with expressions of hope for resurrection or the afterlife.35 However, images that fall out of the ordinary pattern and seem to have some individual stamp of expression such as the Jonah image in our Patio tomb challenge this standard opinion. We are convinced that a new examination of the evidence might reveal much that has previously been overlooked.
We recently examined the Figueras ossuary fragment in the warehouse of the Israel Museum and discussed it with the collections curator David Mevorach. Although he supported the minimalist position that the artifact was simply a crudely drawn circle, he admitted that with further evidence—perhaps more examples of fish with a clearly symbolic meaning—he might change his mind. We suggest here, in light of our recent discoveries, that the Figueras fragment is a representation of the “sign of Jonah”—Jesus inside a fish. It appears to be a fairly well-drawn fish, not a careless circle, and the inscription inside the fish—the name of Jesus—might not refer to a person named Jesus who was buried in the ossuary, but rather to that deceased person’s faith in Jesus and his resurrection. In other words it would be a symbol of faith, not a careless marking.
Price mentions that there are only two other examples of names within “circles” on ossuaries, and one of them is from the Jesus tomb: the name Mariamene Mara—the name associated with Mary Magdalene. We had never paid attention to it before but from the photo one can clearly see the sweeping flourish of a bulging circular shape enclosing her name. We recently examined the inscription in the IAA warehouse at Beth Shemesh. The “circle” is in the shape of a fish—maybe even a great fish. Was this just a thoughtless flourish or was it purposely and carefully executed to convey some kind of symbolic meaning? If the custom of drawing circles around names occurs only three times out of 650 ossuary inscriptions, and two of them are connected to a “Jesus” name, we think these inscriptions might be quite important.
We began to investigate further and made a rather startling discovery. The only other example of the name Mariamene, which in the Jesus tomb we have interpreted as the ossuary of Mary Magdalene, is now stored in the basement storage area of the Rockefeller Museum.36 This unusual spelling of the name, written with the n rather than the more common name Mariame, is engraved under the lid of the ossuary—which is not visible from the outside. It is extremely faint and difficult to see. When we examined the ossuary itself we were quite surprised to see that it had three little fish, very similar in style to the Figueras find, carved along the front of its façade. The distinguishing mark seemed to be the little crossed tails and a mouth. One of them had what looked like a Greek letter scrawled inside but it was too crudely drawn to decipher.
The name Jesus itself is a case in point. One of the most frequent observations made by theologians and academics alike regarding the Talpiot Garden or Jesus tomb was that the name Jesus was very common in 1st century Jerusalem. As a result, the discovery of a tomb with the name “Jesus son of Joseph” says nothing—or so the argument goes—since there were many males named Jesus with a father named Joseph in 1st century Jerusalem.
The name Jesus is known but hardly common. The definitive Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity includes all named references to Jewish males in Hebrew or Greek from 330 BCE to 200 CE in the land of Israel.37 Based on that hard data we can say that approximately 3.9 percent were named Jesus. This is a valid statistical sampling that compares the name Jesus with other known male names and their frequencies in all our sources—literary as well as epigraphic. In a sampling of one hundred Jewish males of the time only four would have the name Jesus. One would hardly call this common.
If we take all known inscribed ossuaries there are only 21 out of approximately 600 that have any form of the name Jesus, whether Yeshua in Hebrew or Iesous in Greek. Two of these are in the Talpiot Jesus tomb—“Jesus son of Joseph” and “Jude son of Jesus,” and a third, the controversial “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus,” we argue might well be from the Jesus tomb as well. If that were the case, we are left with eighteen others to consider. We recently examined all of these Jesus inscriptions that are available firsthand. Four of the twenty-one have disappeared and are known only through drawings or reports. We have spent countless hours in basement storage areas, warehouses, and museums, filming and closely studying each ossuary using special cameras and lights. We have visited the Rockefeller Museum, the IAA collection at Beth Shemesh, the Israel Museum, the Franciscan Museum, and a half-dozen other scattered locations where we have diligently tabulated all the evidence.
We have a working hypothesis that a number of the eighteen Jesus inscriptions on ossuaries refer not to the skeletal remains of a person in the ossuary named Jesus, but to Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, we think there are cases where families wrote “Jesus” on their ossuaries as a devotional tribute to their faith in him.
The ossuary fragment with the Yeshua inscription inside the fish discussed above is our first case in point. Since we don’t have the entire ossuary we cannot be sure, but if the “circle” is not a careless circle but a fish, we think it is most likely an example of someone with faith in Jesus representing the “sign of Jonah” on his ossuary.
In 1945, Eleazar Sukenik, who was the first to identify the Dead Sea Scrolls as being authentically from the Second Temple period, discovered a tomb off Hebron Road in southern Jerusalem. The tomb contained fourteen ossuaries; five were inscribed. Sukenik was convinced that this tomb contained the earliest records of Jewish followers of Jesus ever discovered.38
One of the ossuaries in this tomb had the inscription “Jesus Woe” (Iesous Iou), written faintly in charcoal, which Sukenik took to be a plaintive cry, either to Jesus or in memory of Jesus, perhaps referring to his suffering on the cross. A majority of scholars today dispute Sukenik’s reading and have argued that the word Iou is an abbreviated form of the name Ioudas or Jude/Judas—so the ossuary would read “Jesus [son of] Jude.” Many other interpretations have been suggested, some of them agreeing with Sukenik that this is some kind of a cry of woe.39 The ossuary is now stored in the basement of the Rockefeller Museum. We looked at it closely, using special lights and cameras that can enhance invisible or faded letters, and are satisfied there are no letters after the word Iou, faint or otherwise. There is a faint slanting diagonal stroke far to the right of the inscription, but it is certainly not a letter. It seems to us highly unlikely that anyone wanting to write the name Judas would have written it Iou leaving off the last letters.
The argument that the inscription represents the two names of son and father—Jesus (son of) Judas—is based upon an assumption that we think should be questioned, namely, that ossuaries invariably have the names of the dead inscribed rather than epigrams or iconographic expressions of faith.
But there was more in the Sukenik tomb. In addition to this first ossuary was another, this time with the strange formula Iesous Aloth. The first word is the name “Jesus” in Greek but what is the meaning of Aloth? Is it just another name, or perhaps a nickname, for the deceased person named Jesus? Or is it, as Sukenik argued, another cry of faith? He translated it as “Jesus Alas!” parallel to “Jesus Woe!” He connected it to the Hebrew word ’alah, “to lament.” Others have since argued that it might come from a similar Hebrew word, ‘alah, which means “to rise,” that looks almost the same in English but in Hebrew is spelled one letter differently. In that case it would read “Let Jesus arise” or “Jesus has gone up.” There is an amazing parallel in the Dead Sea Scrolls that says, “You brought me up out of the grave,” using this same Hebrew verb, aloth (4Q437.2.11). In the light of our new inscription, in which there is either hope for, or celebration of, Jehovah “raising up” someone from the dead, we think it is time to revisit Sukenik’s interpretation. But the story of the Sukenik tomb doesn’t end there.
On the “Jesus Aloth” ossuary were four charcoal crosses—on the two sides and two ends. Sukenik, rightly in our view, believed these crosses could not be random markings because they were too carefully executed. He believed that they had to refer to Jesus and early Christianity. Usually such marks are dismissed as meaningless “mason’s marks,” but in this case these four crosses are so symmetrical and carefully placed, one on each surface side of the ossuary, that they can hardly be accidental. They are also written with the same charcoal style as the inscription itself—so they were definitely done by the same hand.
So far we have mentioned three possible “Jesus” inscriptions, the fish and the two in the Sukenik tomb, counted among the eighteen total but which could well refer to Jesus of Nazareth and faith in him, not to the names of the deceased. This possibility should be reconsidered. We have read all the literature pro and con and we don’t find the skeptics’ arguments convincing.
There is another inscription, discovered on the Mount of Offense, just south of the Mount of Olives, two miles north of Talpiot, which was inscribed twice in Greek: “Jesus Jesus.” It is of course possible that the bones in the ossuary belonged to a Jesus and that the family simply wrote his name twice. However, since the two names are written together on a single line, one should at least consider the possibility that someone is writing “Jesus” on their ossuary, as in the case of the Sukenik tomb, to invoke or express some kind of faith in Jesus of Nazareth. In front of the first name Jesus there is also a cross or X mark. Scholars have dismissed this as a mason’s mark that was scratched on the body of an ossuary to match a similar X on the lid, showing how the lid should be turned to fit the ossuary properly.40 Unfortunately the ossuary has disappeared and the mason’s mark argument cannot be further examined. We have examined dozens of other such X’s on ossuaries, and although some of them have a matching X on their lids, the great majority do not.41
Another name on one of the inscribed ossuaries in this same tomb was “Judah,” with a cross mark below the name almost identical in style to the four on the ossuary from the Sukenik tomb. Again, scholars have interpreted it as another mason’s mark, without symbolic value. Unfortunately the lid is missing, which might have a corresponding mark to show its orientation on the ossuary, so we cannot be sure. The style of the cross is identical to the four cross marks on the Sukenik “Jesus Aloth” ossuary, and its placement under the name seems to serve no function as a mason’s mark. As it happens the “Jesus son of Joseph” inscription in the Talpiot Garden tomb also has an X or cross marking just in front of the name Jesus. It, like the others, has been dismissed as a random scratch, or mason’s mark. This Mount of Offense tomb contained other strange markings, including one very clear Christian cross, but it is assumed that it must have been carved onto the ossuary centuries later by a Byzantine Christian visiting the tomb, since crosses simply don’t exist in the 1st century according to the standard interpretation.42
In considering our eighteen instances of the name “Jesus” on ossuaries, apart from the three we are associating with the Talpiot Garden tomb, over half a dozen might well refer not to a deceased person named Jesus whose bones are in the ossuary but to Jesus of Nazareth. In several cases there are symbols on these ossuaries that we take to be expressions of Jewish-Christian faith. We are not arguing that every “Jesus” refers to Jesus of Nazareth but that many do.
We also are convinced that the locations in which these “Jesus”-inscribed ossuaries were found might be relevant to this discussion. They are not, as one might expect, evenly distributed throughout the Jerusalem area wherever ancient burial caves have been found. Five of the total are of unknown provenance—so we have no idea where they were found. Among these is the fragment of Jesus in the fish.43 The Sukenik tomb is near Talpiot, about a mile from the Jesus Garden tomb. Eight others are within a mile and a half from Talpiot, mostly fanning out to the north, toward the Mount of Olives.44 Only three are far removed from Talpiot, north or southeast of the Old City, but each of those three ossuaries names a Jesus who is the son of someone other than a Joseph—disqualifying them as a reference to Jesus of Nazareth.45 What this means is that we have a cluster of Jesus inscriptions, some of which refer to Jesus of Nazareth, in close proximity to these two Talpiot tombs.
The entire scholarly discussion of whether the early Jewish followers of Jesus left any symbols on their ossuaries suffers, in our view, from a predisposition to dismiss any evidence that might argue to the contrary. On the face of it, this assumption that none of the Jewish followers of Jesus who lived and died in Jerusalem from 30 CE to 70 CE ever left behind any testimony to their resurrection faith is unwarranted. The recent discoveries in the Talpiot Patio tomb have put the entire discussion of the archaeological evidence for Jewish-Christianity in 1st century Jerusalem in a new light so that previous assumptions should now be questioned.
