41. The Judah son of Jesus ossuary with its ornamentation and inscription.
The two major new discoveries in the Patio tomb—the epitaph and the Jonah image—provide for the first time in history tangible archaeological evidence related to the resurrection faith of Jesus’ first followers. As we have explained earlier, the “Jonah ossuary” that until 1980 was located right in the front of the first niche on the right as one entered the tomb most likely belonged to the father of the family. Since it was filled to the top with bones it probably held the remains of his wife and children as well. Also in that niche were two additional ossuaries, filling it to capacity, as if later family members wanted to be as close as possible to whoever was in the Jonah ossuary. The Jonah ossuary, in our view, is by far the most unusual ossuary ever found. It has no parallels in all of Jerusalem.
Although this ossuary has no names inscribed on it and no standard ornamentation, it offers something infinitely more valuable and interesting. The drawing of Jonah and the big fish might be considered crude, even amateurish, with its awkward stick figure with a circular head emerging from the fish’s mouth. It might even seem unbecoming to the tomb of the wealthy man who owned the estate upon which this and two other tombs are closely clustered.
In contrast, the tomb itself is simple but elegant. Its symmetrically carved gables boast lovely ornamented painted ossuaries, as elaborately carved as any in the Israel state collection. This family could afford to have any kind of ossuary it might have desired, which makes the Jonah ossuary stand out all the more. It tells a story, expressing a faith in resurrection that might have been inspired by direct and personal contact with Jesus of Nazareth. On one end we find just the tail of a big fish, the rest of the fish cut off at the bottom edge of the ossuary as if it were diving into the deep. At the other end some kind of doorway, with double crossed panels or bars. We cannot be sure of the intended narration but it surely has something to do with “entering” the watery deep, perhaps the gates of death, being taken under, but then miraculously being spit out of the jaws of death onto dry land—alive and rescued.
Cave burial in this period represents at the same time a kind of dreadfulness as well as love. When we bury our dead deep in the ground, there is a sense in which we have a symbolic token of the deceased, the grave site. We have removed them from the living. They are truly gone from our presence. In a family burial cave, generation after generation enters the tomb for rites of burial and mourning. The bones are visible, whether gathered in a central pit or placed in ossuaries. The living family is quite literally in the physical presence of the dead. The stark reality of death and decay cannot be ignored or forgotten. When the patriarch Jacob knew he was dying he called his twelve sons together—the sons who became the twelve tribes of Israel—and told them: “I am to be gathered to my people; bury me with my father in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah . . . which Abraham bought . . . to possess as a burying place” (Genesis 49:30). This notion of being gathered to the fathers is the central expression about death in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. Abraham, Moses, all the prophets die and are buried, joining those who went before them—quite literally “gathered” together.
We have described the emotions we felt when we first entered the Jesus tomb. For over thirty years it has been empty of the remains of those once buried there, filled only with discarded holy books and cemented over with a heavy cover. The Patio tomb was a quite different experience. Even though some of the ossuaries had been moved to different niches in the brief 1981 examination by the IAA archaeologists, the tomb is largely intact. The bones in the five niches without ossuaries are undisturbed and still in place, just as they must have been left when the bodies were laid to rest. Since our entry into this tomb was accomplished remotely, it was as if we were somehow there but not there, observing but not disturbing, catching a tiny glimpse of the expressions of faith and life the tomb represents, but still separated in time and space.
We have entered dozens of excavated tombs in Jerusalem in the course of our five-year investigation to learn what we could about Jewish burial in this time. This was different. We were visiting this tomb while leaving it intact. It is hard to describe the emotions involved. The experience transcended the academic, the cerebral, and even the technical challenges before us. Everyone on our team felt this. We were privileged to discover a link, if not a bridge, between this thoroughly Jewish tomb and an emerging Christian faith that had barely begun to express itself. Like time travel or some high-tech spectral presence, we were witnessing the birth of Christianity and the once strong, familial link between Judaism and Christianity that existed among Jesus’ earliest followers.
The four-line inscription just a few feet away on the elaborately decorated face of the ossuary next to the Jonah ossuary was equally revealing to us. This time we were decoding words, not drawings, but the message appears to be related. In 1980 this ossuary was in the second niche on the right, maybe indicating it came from a slightly later time. It is hard to know when the tomb was dug but we are fairly sure that like other Jerusalem burial caves, it went out of use around 70 CE, when the Romans brutally crushed the Jewish revolt and killed or exiled the inhabitants of the city. The normal life cycles of death and burial were shattered and disrupted. It is possible that any family members who survived the war never return to their ancestral homes. The exposed bones in the niches offer silent testimony to this devastation, which likely prevented family members from completing the Jewish burial rites for their relatives.
We can estimate that two or three generations of the family might have buried their dead in this tomb. If the Patio tomb was the family tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, as we propose, the person who scratched these four lines in Greek wanted to give mute testimony to that same faith in Jesus’ resurrection that the Jonah ossuary represents. This epitaph is not a professionally executed inscription in formal script. It is legible but shows individual intent—the Divine [or Wondrous] Jehovah raises up . . . We do not think the inscription is a testimony to a generic faith that God will “lift up” the dead, even though many Jews in this time did believe that God would raise the dead at the end of the age. We are convinced that each discovery must interpret the other and both must be seen in the context that the other provides. The sign of Jonah is clear and unambiguous. The connection to Jesus is direct and explicit. That Jonah became the preeminent symbol of the resurrection of Jesus for 3rd and 4th century Christians testifies to its simple power. The inscription affirming that God either has lifted up or will lift up bones from the dead is most likely connected as well to a resurrection faith grounded in the family’s encounters with Jesus—not the Jesus of texts and oral tradition, but the human Jesus whose physical remains we believe were reverently treasured and remembered by this family that had had the privilege of attending to his burial. The ossuaries, the bones, the inscriptions, and the tombs themselves became for us silent testimonies to lives once lived. They sparked our imagination.
James and Mariamene are written about in our surviving texts, but we know next to nothing about the son, Judah, and precious little about the mother, Mary—if the Mary ossuary is indeed that of Jesus’ mother. The gospel of John does not even name her. Matthew, Mark, and Luke mention her only at Jesus’ birth and his death. There are some legendary traditions about Jesus’ mother going to Asia Minor with the apostle John, but they make no sense historically. They are built on the mistaken idea, in our view, that John the fisherman, one of the twelve apostles, is the mysterious unnamed “beloved disciple” mentioned five times in the gospel of John, to whom Jesus gave charge of his mother as he was dying on the cross.1 This seems highly unlikely, as if his brother James would have abandoned his responsibilities as the older brother, or for that matter, his wife, Mariamene, who apparently was very close to Mary, based on the evidence in the gospels.2 The last we hear of Jesus’ mother in the New Testament is that she was mentioned with the rest of the group, along with his brothers, living in Jerusalem (Acts 1:14). She is not even named. She is apparently a widow. Joseph is never mentioned in the gospels after the birth of Jesus. Jesus is called “the son of Joseph” twice and the “son of the carpenter [tekton],” translated “builder,” in Matthew 13:55. We should not expect Joseph to be buried in this tomb. If Mary died before 70 CE she would be gathered with her sons. Depending on how Joses died, perhaps all three were martyred for what was called “the hope of Israel.”
Judah’s parents gave their son a proud Maccabean surname—after Judas Maccabee, the brave hero who led a revolt against the forces of the brutal Greek occupier Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 BCE and set up an independent Jewish state that lasted until the Romans arrived in 63 BCE. His was a common male name (6.5 percent), popular in this period for those who wanted to show solidarity for the freedom of Israel. Two of the twelve apostles are named Judas—one infamous, the other virtually forgotten (Mark 3:13–19). Judas the Galilean was the most famous “Judah” of that generation. He led a revolt in the year 6 CE, in Galilee, when Jesus would have been about ten years old. Josephus relates his story, calling him the founder of the “4th philosophy,” after the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes—the Zealots.3 He is also mentioned in the book of Acts (5:37). Like Mary, he had sons named James and Simon, and like Mary, his sons were slain by the agents of Rome. We will likely never know what Judah son of Jesus’s life was like, or how he died. His ossuary is not undersized (55 x 23 x 27 centimeters), so he was not a child when he died. It is nicely ornamented and the inscription of his name, “Judah son of Jesus,” is the only one that is formally carved.
What about the resurrection faith of these families? Why were they, of all the Jews buried in this time, the only ones to inscribe on their ossuaries testimonies to God raising the dead? In our minds there is no doubt why. Theirs was not a generic faith in “life after death” but faith in the resurrection of their Teacher.
When one thinks about our concepts of death and the afterlife in the Western world the questions most people have are questions of individual survival—whether there is “life” after death. The nature of that life or survival can be thought of in a variety of ways, but the fundamental question is, What happens to me when I die? Is there something or is there nothing? Those who believe in “life after death” are affirming, in some manner, the idea that some essence of the individual self, the person we sense ourselves to be, survives the death of the body. It is the survival of the “I,” the ego self that is in question. It is assumed that the biological self or body returns to dust or ashes, but the inner self lives on in some way. These questions come to us intuitively on the level of personal experience anytime someone we love dies. The heart stops, respiration ceases, and the person is pronounced dead. The person becomes a “corpse” and it is easy to think of the now-decaying body as merely a “house” or vehicle for the inner self or soul—but not the person we knew in life. We dispose of the body according to our cultural customs and personal choices, respectfully but also realistically, knowing that this body is irretrievable.
This view of the human person as both a mortal physical body and an immortal soul or spirit is deeply rooted in our Western religious and philosophical past. For most, without belief in some sort of life after death, there could be no viable spiritual faith. The alternative is seen as materialism—that we are just a functioning biological organism made wholly of matter.
In the writings of Plato Socrates summed it up best as he drank the fatal hemlock, having been condemned to death by the Athenian elders. He told his disciples to weep not for him but for themselves, for he was returning “home” while they would remain for a time in the house or prison of the body, until their time of release came.4 The Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero, who lived in the 1st century BCE, explained this view more fully: “Strive on indeed, and be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure that can be pointed out by the finger” (6:24).5 This Platonic body/soul dualism became the standard belief in Greco-Roman antiquity, even among some Hellenized 1st century Jews, such as Philo and Josephus.6 Celebrated early Christian theologians such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine considered Plato a kind of honorary “pre-Christian” and reshaped their exposition of the Christian faith almost wholly in Platonic categories.
Because of this Platonic influence it is extremely difficult for people today, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other spiritual tradition, to conceive of life after death other than through the lens of Plato—the body perishes and the immortal soul passes on to an unseen realm of the spirit.
Given this perspective we must ask, what could bones possibly have to do with any idea of life after death? Although the term resurrection has become rooted in our Jewish-Christian-Islamic cultures, most are confused about how two ideas—immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body—relate to one another. If one attends a funeral and the rabbi, priest, minister, or imam stands before the corpse, right before lowering it into the grave, or in front of an urn of ashes, while reading words of scripture declaring that the “dead shall rise,” people are often confused about what is being affirmed. Are they to believe that the body, destined to the dust or turned to ashes, is somehow to be revived or re-created? Is “resurrection” to be taken literally, or is it just a metaphorical or symbolic way of saying, “We believe the essential human person survives death.” Is there such a thing as “spiritual” resurrection?
Resurrection of the dead is affirmed in our Western religious creeds. Jews recite the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides, the last of which says, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead.” Christians affirm the “resurrection of the body” in the Apostles’ Creed, the oldest confession of its type. Muslims affirm that God will raise the dead for judgment on the Last Day—also called the “Day of Standing Up” (Surah 2:79).
The original core idea of “resurrection of the dead,” at least for Christians and Jews, whose understanding is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, is best illustrated by Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. The prophet Ezekiel sees a valley full of dry bones and God asks him, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel answers, “O LORD God you know.” Then God tells him to address the bones: “Thus says the Lord GOD to the bones: Behold I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.” (Ezekiel 37:5–6) Resurrection of the dead in this passage is a reconstitution of the physical body, a miraculous revival of the entire person, living and breathing again in this world. Here the concept of resurrection of the dead involves a bodily return to this world, contrasted to the concept of the immortal soul that undergoes a transition from the body to a higher state in another realm.
The language of both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament bears out this core idea. In Hebrew one speaks of God literally “making live” the dead. The Greek word for resurrection (anastasis) mean literally “to stand up.” Thus “lifting up” or “raising up” is a way of affirming that the person represented by the bones will return to life. But what kind of life—and in what kind of body?
In the Bible, when the bones are buried, the spirit or soul descends into the “world of the dead,” called Sheol in Hebrew and Hades in Greek. Sheol is described as a land of silence and forgetfulness, a region gloomy, dark, and deep (Psalms 115:17; 6:5; 88:3–12; Isaiah 38:18). All the dead go down to Sheol, and there they make their bed together—whether good or evil, rich or poor, slave or free (Job 3:11–19). The dead in Sheol are mere shadows of their former embodied selves; lacking substance they are called “shades” (Psalms 88:10).7 There is one “séance” story in the Hebrew Bible in which the infamous medium of Endor conjured up the “shade” of the dead prophet Samuel at the insistence of King Saul, who wanted to communicate with him. When Samuel appears, rising up out of the earth, he asks Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” (1 Samuel 28:8–15). But even Samuel must then return to Sheol. Death is a one-way street; it is the land of no return: “But man dies, and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he? As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be aroused out of his sleep.” (Job 14:10–12)
There are three stories of the resuscitation of the dead in the Hebrew Bible. Elijah raises the son of a widow; his successor, Elisha, raises the child of a wealthy woman; and a dead man put in the grave of Elijah, touching his bones, “lived and was raised to his feet” (1 Kings 17:17–22; 2 Kings 2:32–37; 2 Kings 13:21). Jesus raises three people from the dead in the gospels: a twelve-year-old girl; a young man, son of a widow; and Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha (Mark 5:41–43; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:43–44). Matthew says that at the death of Jesus many of the dead came out of their graves and walked about in the city (Matthew 27:52). Peter raises a widow and Paul revives a young man who fell from a window (Acts 20:9–12).
What is important to note about all these stories of “resurrection” is that these people returned from death to live again, but they subsequently died again. This notion of a temporary return from death, basically a revival of a corpse, is not the view of resurrection of the dead that Jews in the time of Jesus believed and that followers of Jesus affirmed about him.
The Hebrew Bible says very little about resurrection of the dead in this more extended sense. The single unambiguous passage is from Daniel, one of the latest books, but it is a key to understanding the concept at its core:
And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And multitudes of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever. (Daniel 12:1–4)
The metaphor of “sleeping in the dust of the earth” and then awakening captures precisely the core idea of resurrection of the dead. The bodies of the dead have long ago decayed and turned to dust, so this is no resuscitation of a corpse, nor is it even Ezekiel’s vision of re-clothing dry bones with sinew and skin. This is an entirely new concept that has begun to develop in Jewish thought. Jews like Jesus, as well as the Pharisees, believed that on the “last day” the dead would be raised. People confuse this notion with the literal idea of resuscitation or the “standing up” of a corpse. The Jewish idea of resurrection at the end of days does not involve collecting the dust, the fragmentary decaying bones, or other remains of the body and somehow restoring their form. According to the book of Revelation, even the “sea” gives up the dead that are in it—which can hardly mean one must search for digested bodies that the fish have eaten and eliminated, as unpleasant as the thought may be (Revelation 20:11–15). Corpse revival is not resurrection of the dead.
The fully developed view of resurrection of the dead among Jews in the time of Jesus was that at the end of days the dead would come forth from Sheol or Hades—literally the “state of being dead”—and live again in an embodied form. The question was, what kind of embodied form? It was there that the debates began. The Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, poked fun at the Pharisees, who affirmed it. How could God raise the dead? What if a woman had had seven husbands in her life, each of whom died—in the resurrection whose wife would she be? Jesus was confronted with this question in the gospels (Luke 20:34–40). His answer was clear and unambiguous: when the dead come forth they will be in a transformed body, much like the angels, not the literal physical bodies that they once inhabited. There will be no “marriage or giving in marriage,” as there will be no “male or female” in terms of physical gender. There will be no birth, no death, but a new transformed life.
Paul is clear on this point. Some of his converts in the city of Corinth were denying the resurrection of the dead. They were most likely thinking along the lines of Plato—if the immortal soul is freed from the prison of the body at death, why would it ever return to the body? And yet that is precisely what Paul defended—a return to a body. But as he makes clear, it is not a natural or “physical body”—the one he calls the body of “dust”—but a spiritual body, literally “wind body” (pneumatikos), that is transformed and not subject to death (1 Corinthians 15:42–50).
Resurrection of the dead, according to both Paul and Jesus, has nothing to do with one’s former physical body. Paul’s objectors taunted him—“How are the dead raised? In what kind of a body will they come forth?” He called them fools because they had no idea about the concept of resurrection, mistaking it for corpse revival (1 Corinthians 15:34). Paul says that Jesus had become what he calls a life-giving spirit. The difference between this idea and that of the Greek notion of the immortal soul is difficult to understand, but in the Hebraic view of things the distinction was important. Simply put, in Greek thought death was a friend that released one from the bonds of the lower, mortal, decaying, material world. In Hebrew thought the created world is good—even very good—and death is an enemy, but one that can be conquered. Paul writes that the “last enemy to be destroyed is death,” and then the creation, which is good, will be “released from its bondage to decay” (1 Corinthians 15:26; Romans 8:21).
The whole concept turns on the notion of how the created world is viewed—as something to abandon and escape (the Greek view) or something to be transformed and changed (the Hebrew view). That is why the Bible speaks of “new heavens and a new earth,” rather than leaving this earth to go to heaven (Isaiah 65:17; Revelation 21:1). The kingdom of God arrives when the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven. In both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament the ideal future arrives when God comes down to the renewed creation, not when we leave a hopeless world to join God in heaven (Revelation 21:3).
Paul makes clear that in Christian resurrection the body is left behind like a change of clothing, to turn to dust, and the spirit is “reclothed” with a new spiritual body. He compares the physical body to a temporary tent, but the new body is a permanent house (2 Corinthians 5:1–5). He even throws in a polemic against the Greek Platonic view of the “unclothed” or disembodied immortal soul. He says our desire is not to be naked, which is the state of death before resurrection, but to be clothed again!
Paul reflects the earliest Christian view of Jesus’ resurrection, the resurrection hope his followers had, and that our Talpiot tombs affirm. That is why the presence of bones—even if they are the bones of Jesus—do not contradict the faith in resurrection of Jesus’ followers.
What we have found in the Talpiot tombs is primary evidence of what the first Christians believed about resurrection faith. It is not theology, but it is firm archaeological testimony that helps us to reconstruct what early Christians believed. The tomb evidence agrees with the teachings of both Jesus and Paul about the new spiritual body. The confusion in the gospels has come because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the empty tomb. There was an empty tomb, but it was the first tomb, the temporary one in which Joseph of Arimathea placed the corpse of Jesus until the Passover and Sabbath were past. The Talpiot Jesus tomb was not empty—the “Jesus son of Joseph” ossuary held his bones, and we have even been able to do DNA tests on those remains.
Discovering remains of the body of Jesus is no threat to the original resurrection faith of Jesus’ followers; it is actually an affirmation of that faith. Paul knows nothing of that first empty tomb. He knows that Jesus died and was buried and on the third day he was raised up. He then appeared to his followers not as a resuscitated corpse, but in Paul’s words, as a “life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). These words of Paul are our earliest testimony to faith in Jesus’ resurrection—until now. We now have testimony by Jesus’ original followers that possibly predates Paul, and predates the gospels by many decades. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were written between 70 and 100 CE. The names on the books are traditional. They are not included in the text but were added to the manuscripts later as “titles.” In other words, Mark does not begin, “I Mark, having witnessed these things, do hereby write . . .” Nor does Matthew, Luke, or John. In that sense all four gospels are pseudonymous—we don’t know their real authors.
If you take the gospels in order, beginning with Mark, there are no appearances of Jesus after his death, just the statement that he will “go before them to Galilee.”8 Several scholars understand this as a reference to his second coming. In Matthew the women at the tomb see Jesus and later the eleven apostles encounter him on a misty mountaintop—but some doubted. Jesus gives them their commission to take the gospel to the world (Matthew 28:18–19). Here we have clearly left the world of history and entered the world of theology. The “Great Commission” is Matthew’s view of the Christian mission until the end of the age. Scholars do not regard these words as spoken by the historical Jesus. Luke first introduces the idea that Jesus came back in a physical body—wounds and all, asking for food to eat. He tells a story of Jesus appearing to two men on the road to Emmaus, and then appearing to the eleven apostles and other disciples. They mistake him for a ghost, but he lets them know that he has “flesh and bones” and is not a spirit. He then eats fish in front of them (Luke 24:39). John, like Luke, affirms this same view—that Jesus shows his wounds to Thomas and later meets a group of the apostles on the Sea of Galilee and cooks fish on the shore on a charcoal fire (John 20:24–25; 21:9–14).
What Luke and John introduce, namely that Jesus appeared in the same body that had been placed in the tomb, represents a major departure from early Christian resurrection faith. This later understanding of Jesus’ resurrection has led to endless confusion on the part of sincere Christians. These stories are secondary and legendary. Mark, who wrote decades earlier, does not know them, and Paul, who writes even earlier, says plainly that the new resurrected body is not “flesh and blood” (1 Corinthians 15:50).
These accounts of Luke and John were written for apologetic purposes against pagan critics like Celsus who charged that the “appearances” of Jesus to his followers were merely hysteria and delusion. By the time Luke and John wrote, at the turn of the 1st century or even later, Christians were disputing with pagans and Jews who did not accept a Jesus born of a virgin or raised from the dead. The pagans charged that the resurrection appearances were delusional but within Jewish tradition it was reported that the body was moved. Matthew’s polemic against this view, protesting that it was a Jewish lie, actually testifies to its partial truth (Matthew 28:11–15). Matthew, in his typical anti-Semitic fashion, charges that the Jews were easily bribed for money and willing to spread a lie, saying, “The disciples came and stole him away.” Part was true—they did come by night and take the body away, but they hardly stole it. Joseph of Arimathea had been given permission to take care of the burial by the Roman governor himself—Pontius Pilate. When Matthew says the “story is spread among the Jews to this day,” that is likely also partially true. Jews who lived in Jerusalem knew that Jesus’ body had been moved, and reverently buried by his family and his followers. One has to remember that the gospel writers, removed five or six decades from the events, know nothing of the Christianity that thrived and grew in Jerusalem even before Paul came along. Jesus died around 30 CE, Paul writes in the 50s CE, and the gospels, again, were written between 70 and 100 CE, or even later. The gospel writers are far removed from the original followers of Jesus, most of whom were dead, including Paul, Peter, and James.
The Q document that was a source for Matthew and Luke, and the letter of James wholly concentrate on the ethical teachings of Jesus. They contain no Christian theology at all. James mentions his brother Jesus only twice, both times in passing. Paul, on the other hand, begins the development of what we come to know as classic Christian teachings—Jesus as the incarnate divine Son of God, his death and resurrection for sins, forgiveness through his blood, baptism as a mystical rite of union, and the Eucharist as eating the body and blood of Christ. Paul, though, still has the notion of resurrection of the dead straight and he says he received what he passes on in this regard—presumably from the first witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:1–8). Although we believe that Paul’s theology is far removed from that of Jesus’ first followers, his view of Jesus’ resurrection comes directly from them—and it did not involve bones or corpses being revived. Paul is our best link to the Talpiot tombs.
We realize it is hard to imagine, given the confusion the later gospel accounts have introduced, that early followers of Jesus would have visited the Jesus family tomb, honoring and remembering their revered Teacher, the one they believed was the messiah, and declaring their resurrection faith. But when one understands the Jewish culture and context of the time, that is precisely what one would expect. Within Judaism the tombs of the zadikim—the righteous ones—are honored, remembered, and considered holy.
The question we have most been asked since the Talpiot Jesus tomb was first brought to the attention of the public is, “What happened to the bones in the ossuaries?” A second related question we are asked is, “Why don’t you run DNA tests on all the bones in all the ossuaries?” The answer to the first question is, We don’t know. Our assumption, as we have explained, is that the bones were taken to the Rockefeller Museum, still in the ossuaries, where the custom at that time was to have them examined by an anthropologist. We know that was the case a year later with the one ossuary that Amos Kloner removed from the Patio tomb. The official IAA photo, taken before it was cleaned, shows the skeletal materials inside.
It would truly be a boon to our knowledge if we had a proper bone report on the remains inside all the ossuaries. One would think there would at least be written records confirming their receipt. Such materials are registered and signed for if normal procedure is followed. After all, if the Jesus son of Joseph ossuary contained the remains of Jesus of Nazareth, assuming the bones were not too deteriorated, a skillful anthropologist might have been able to identify marks from crucifixion or other evidence of trauma. We would have known the sex and age of the various individuals if more than one person’s bones were in a given ossuary, and a wealth of additional forensic information might have become available. Regrettably, this information appears to be missing.
Because burial is such a central ritual to the Jewish faith, there has been mounting tension over the past few decades between archaeologists and segments of the Orthodox Jewish community over the fate of human remains uncovered in archaeological digs. This controversy stems from the fact that some Orthodox groups believe that archaeological excavations of human tombs and ossuaries are a defilement of ancient Jewish graves. Conversely, archaeologists argue that excavation is an essential tool in the understanding of ancient cultures and religions, and in the advancement of archaeology as a science.
The 1978 Antiquities Law, sometimes referred to as the “dry-bones law,” distinguished human remains from the category of antiquities in an attempt to resolve this conflict. Established by the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Antiquities Law made it illegal to excavate known burial sites, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. Therefore, if archaeologists accidentally uncover human bones, the bones are to be turned over promptly to the Religious Affairs Ministry. In 1994, legislation was passed so that archaeologists had to discern on site whether bones found during excavations were humans or not. Remains could be moved to the lab for analysis only if it was impossible to distinguish on site whether bones were human or nonhuman. Due to this legislation all human materials were ordered removed from the Rockefeller labs and turned over to the Orthodox authorities. How this law might have affected the bones from the Talpiot Jesus tomb we have no way of knowing.
One has to remember that the archaeologists involved in the tomb at that time, Amos Kloner and Shimon Gibson, as well as Joe Zias, the anthropologist at the Rockefeller, have stated repeatedly that the Talpiot Jesus tomb is of no particular scientific or historical interest. In other words, there is nothing more to be said about it beyond Amos Kloner’s 1996 published report. In their judgment we have spent six years of our time, not to mention huge sums of money, investigating something unimportant. The statistical studies, paleographic analysis, patina and soil analysis, and DNA tests are unwarranted. The constant refrain, now repeated endlessly from every quarter, has been that the names are common; they mean nothing. As we have seen, this is simply false, and a growing number of historians and archaeologists realize this fact.9
Until recently, DNA tests were not done on skeletal materials from tombs, so far as we know. The tensions with the Orthodox authorities have also had some bearing on DNA analysis, as some of the rabbis understand the value of such tests for identifying the dead while others are opposed to any handling of human bones.
What is called paleo-DNA or ancient DNA (abbreviated aDNA) is a relatively new and developing science that has only recently been able to meet the challenge of extracting DNA from degraded materials. What can be done today is quite amazing and the techniques are improving continually.10
We were able to order DNA tests on bone materials from the Jesus and the Mariamene ossuaries. In these ossuaries we found only tiny bone chips. As we have explained, the other ossuaries had been cleaned. We would have gladly had tests run on any remains we could have obtained. The DNA samples we had tested were collected in a proper manner and the risk of modern contamination, as with all aDNA tests, is a part of the procedure. DNA control samples are taken of anyone who had any contact with the materials, outside or inside the lab, even if the containers remained closed, to ensure that no modern DNA is sequenced with the ancient DNA.
The small bone chips we found contained no marrow. We shipped them to the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, on March 26, 2004. The lab had great difficulty getting any kind of useful results. The samples went through several extractions, as attempts were made to “amplify” the DNA sequences, then further clone the results. The lab attempted to gather everything it could, including mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) as well as genomic DNA (gDNA), also known as nuclear DNA. The mtDNA is found in every cell of the body. Humans with the same mother share the same mtDNA, so it can be very useful for determining sibling relationships. Nuclear or gDNA is much more difficult to work with unless one can extract undamaged material that has not been desiccated. It is the gDNA that can determine paternity.
We received our first results in July 2006. The tests, though exceedingly difficult, were successful beyond our expectations. Even though there was no possibility of nuclear or gDNA with these samples due to their degradation, there were readable DNA results for both samples—the bone fragments in the Yeshua ossuary and those in the Mariamene one. The DNA tests map out the mutations in the mitDNA strands that differ from the norm, thus allowing one to match up a mother and any of her children since those specific mutations are shared between them. Two children from the same mother would accordingly carry these identical mutations from their mother.
Our Lakehead University tests gave us three clear mutations from each sample, and the differences established that the Mariamene in the tomb was neither the mother nor the sister of Yeshua—they had no blood relationship. This would not, of course, prove that she was a wife of Yeshua and the mother of his child Judah, but it would leave open that possibility. Had she been either his mother or his sister, our interpretation of her identification based on the unique name Mariamene and the designation Mara as Mary Magdalene would have been disproven.
More recently, in May 2011, we decided to retest the bone samples that we had saved for future analysis at the ancient DNA laboratory at the University of California at Davis. Their results, using an even more sophisticated battery of tests, confirmed our previous results but also added several new mutations to the three we already had. Not only does that give us a more complete DNA profile for both Yeshua and Mariamene, it establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that they have no family blood link to one another. Here for the first time we are publishing the mutations that offer the unique DNA identification of both the Yeshua and the Mariamene found in the Jesus family tomb:
mitDNA Base position |
16051 |
16172 |
16223 |
16255 |
16278 |
16292 |
16519 |
Standard sequences |
A |
T |
C |
G |
C |
C |
T |
80.503/Jesus |
No result |
C |
T |
A |
T |
T |
No result |
80.500/Mariamene |
G |
T |
T |
G |
C |
T |
C |
The top line gives the base position number with the standard sequences of A C T G that most human beings share.11 The rows labeled “Jesus” and “Mariamene” then give the distinctive mutations that each of them share. Note the differences between them. If Mariamene was either the mother or sister of Yeshua, these mutations or variations from the standard sequence would match, which they do not.
It is unfortunate that we were not able to conduct full DNA tests of all the bones found in all the ossuaries from the Jesus tomb. Ideally that would have allowed one to construct a kind of provisional “family tree,” at least in terms of the familial genetic relationships between those individuals buried therein. Since the bones themselves were never examined scientifically and no one is even sure what happened to them, that opportunity is forever lost. There is much more we would like to know from such tests, but even to be able to say that the Jesus son of Joseph in the tomb was not a brother or son of the woman called Mariamene Mara does nonetheless contribute to our understanding. It also correlates with the evidence that we have presented in this book that she is very possibly Mary Magdalene, the mother of Judah, the son of Jesus.
Finally, if this tomb is indeed that of Jesus of Nazareth and his family then to have even a limited DNA sequence from the skeletal remains of Jesus himself is an amazing historical discovery. It is not that the DNA information tells us much we can make much use of in terms of scientific information, but the literal connection those bone fragments make between us and the historical figure of Jesus is profoundly moving, however one might understand the earliest faith in his resurrection. What we have presented in this chapter is what we are convinced was the earliest resurrection faith of his first followers, now witnessed to so clearly in the discoveries of both tombs. Taken with all the other evidence, those tiny bone fragments serve as a silent witness to the faith of those who buried their Teacher and continued to live their lives in hope of the kingdom of God.
