The greatest story ever told is still being discovered. This book describes the earliest example of Christian art ever discovered, pushing back the date of any pictorial image related to Jesus by at least 150 years. Adjacent to the Jonah image, just inches away, we have also documented the earliest inscription related to faith in resurrection of the dead. Both discoveries date to the lifetimes of the generation of Jews who heard Jesus preach and witnessed his death. These finds constitute what historians call primary evidence, unfiltered by the complexity of traditions that developed around Jesus during the first hundred years after his death. This first archaeological evidence of a teaching of Jesus—the cryptic saying, attributed to him by Matthew, regarding the “sign of Jonah,”—is revolutionary. These discoveries offer us a glimpse into the very birth of Christianity.
These extraordinary finds in the Patio tomb, near a tomb that is likely the family burial chamber of Jesus and his family, provide us a glimpse of earliest Christianity. These discourses can inform Christian faith by bringing us closer to understanding Jesus and his first followers than we have ever been before. These discoveries allow us to bypass the accumulated traditions that have obscured Jesus and the earliest beliefs about him for so long. They allow us to see him with new eyes, as he truly was in his time and place. The collective evidence found in the two Talpiot tombs should be good news for all who can look beyond theological dogma and interpretation and recognize the value in recovering this significant glimpse into the faith of Jesus’ first followers. It is rare for any archaeological discovery, short of a written text, to tell so much. Prior to our discoveries the only direct archaeological link to Jesus was the “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus” ossuary. That artifact, which we believe also came from one of the Talpiot tombs, has advanced our evidence by light years. We can now reconsider all the other ossuaries that scholars have dismissed as having anything to do with the Jewish followers of Jesus. We can say with assurance that followers of Jesus were expressing evidence of their faith in the various ways they inscribed their ossuaries. This is a major advance in the field of biblical archaeology.
We truly live in a privileged time as witnesses to these archaeological discoveries from Jerusalem, the place of Christianity’s birth. These are not collective communal interpretations, but singular testimonies of specific individuals who lived and died in Jesus’ own time. This gives them a special value beyond even a formally written text. Historians covet evidence of this sort—whether epitaphs, personal letters written on papyri, even receipts or graffiti. They represent the forgotten voices of individuals who left testimony of their thoughts, activities, practices, or beliefs. In the case of the Jonah ossuary a picture is worth much more than a thousand words. Taken in its wider context it requires us to reread the gospels, in light of these finds, and not the other way around.
For the past 175 years scholars have been trying to learn more about Jesus based on the accepted methods of historical critical inquiry.1 Prior to the 19th century few had distinguished between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. The theology of the Christian church, as defined in the major Christian creeds, had treated faith in Christ as the preexistent divine Son of God who had died and been resurrected from the dead to bring salvation to the world as if it were historical fact. The quest for the historical Jesus represented a new approach to the gospels that involved reading them critically and trying to separate theological belief in Christ from the story of Jesus the human being—a 1st century Jew in his own culture and time.2 What those pioneers of the 19th century quest for the historical Jesus lacked was the textual and archaeological discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is hard to imagine writing about the historical Jesus without the Dead Sea Scrolls, the many “lost” gospels that have been found, and most important, the emerging archaeological record of Galilee and Judea that continually informs our own historical quests.
Scholars have long recognized that the four New Testament gospels are theological portrayals of Jesus rather than historical accounts. This is not to say that they contain no history. It is rather recognition that each of the gospel writers portrays a theological interpretation of Jesus with specific agendas and points of view relative to the times in which he wrote—fifty to a hundred years after Jesus’ death. Even the names associated with the gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are attributions that were added later. The original texts do not name their authors. They are anonymous works written to promote diverse theological visions of Jesus, his teachings, and the significance of his death and resurrection.
As we have seen, Mark, our earliest gospel, mentions no appearances of Jesus after his death. The oldest copies of Mark end at chapter 16, verse 8: the women flee from the empty tomb and say nothing to anyone. The implications are enormous. Mark could write a gospel in the 70s CE, more than forty years after Jesus’ death, and it could circulate without anyone saying, “Wait, I thought Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, or to the women at the tomb, or to a gathering of disciples in Jerusalem that same day, or to the disciples who had returned home to Galilee.” Mark believed that his story was the gospel—as he say clearly in his opening line: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” (Mark 1:1). At least according to Mark, the story of Jesus did not involve resurrection appearances of the type found in Matthew, and especially in Luke and John, who move closer toward the idea of the resuscitation of a corpse—misunderstanding the “empty tomb” and why it was found empty that Sunday morning.
In Matthew Jesus does not appear to the eleven male disciples in Jerusalem at all, but only much later in Galilee, and even then some of them doubted (Matthew 28:16–20). The latest gospels, Luke and John, further expand the traditions, with Jesus appearing in physical form—eating fish and showing his wounds in his hands, feet, and side. He invites the disciples to touch him, saying that he is not a ghost, but flesh and bones (Luke 24:39–43; John 20:26–29). These appearances take place both in Jerusalem and Galilee. This is a vastly expanded tradition over that of Mark, who better represents the original faith of Jesus’ followers. These writers have lost the original view of resurrection, defended by Paul much earlier, in the 50s CE, in which the flesh and bones were left behind, but the spirit was “lifted up” to God. It was only decades later that people found Mark’s abrupt ending unacceptable and attempted to amend it to conform to these later accounts (Mark 16:9–20).
In contrast, the 2nd century CE gospel of Peter, discovered in Egypt in the 1890s, supports Mark’s earlier tradition. Unfortunately we only have fragments but the text ends abruptly with the disciples weeping and mourning for seven days, being grieved at Jesus’ death and the discovery of the empty tomb. They return to their homes in Galilee and resume their normal lives. Peter and his brother Andrew go back to their fishing (Gospel of Peter 15:58–60). It is possible the text ended with them seeing Jesus; we don’t know, since it breaks off, but either way, this tradition that they wept and mourned the whole week of Passover and then returned home, contrasts sharply with the accounts in Luke and John. There is no way to reconcile these views from a historical point of view. They show a theological development away from the evidence in the Talpiot tomb, in which the flesh and bones of “Jesus son of Joseph” are put in the cave, and subsequently in the ossuary, but his followers maintained faith in his resurrection—his being lifted up to the “holy place.”
Mary Magdalene is another example of the necessity of separating theology, myth, and tradition from history. Mark mysteriously mentions Mary Magdalene, like a character who appears out of nowhere, at the cross and then at Jesus’ tomb, but she plays no role in terms of witnessing to Jesus’ resurrection. The Gospel of Peter does the same. Mary visits the tomb, finds it empty, but then flees in fear, saying nothing to anyone. Luke seems reluctant even to mention her name, although she is clearly identified in Mark, who is his main source. Luke says only that “the women who had followed him from Galilee” saw his death and his temporary burial—leaving them unnamed (Luke 24:49, 55). When he finally does name them, it is to dismiss them as witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection in favor of Peter and the male disciples (Luke 24:10–11). In contrast, John names Mary Magdalene as the intimate “first witness” of Jesus’ resurrection (John 20:1–18). In half a dozen later gospels, as we have seen, Mary Magdalene is the most prominent of the disciples of Jesus, even ahead of the twelve, causing Peter to be jealous of her intimacy with Jesus. The archaeological findings of the Talpiot tombs put in perspective the theology and tradition that began to marginalize her and, in the gospel of Luke, even damn her as a fallen woman. The Jesus tomb speaks volumes, even through its six simple inscriptions. Here we find Mariamene Mara buried side-by-side next to Jesus and what we believe to be their child Judah—together in death as in life. These archaeological facts are quite touching and moving in terms of their implications once one can clear away the theological dogma and mythological notions of bodies—bones, flesh, and all—being taken up to heaven. To find oneself in the presence of the historical Jesus and the tomb of his family takes one beyond issues of faith or religious orientation. For us it was experiencing history, the history of the man who was one of the most influential human beings who ever lived.
It is the same with the brothers of Jesus. Mark names all four brothers, including Joses, the nickname of Jesus’ second brother, whereas Luke, recording the same scene, omits the brothers as well as Jesus’ mother (compare Mark 6:1–3 and Luke 4:22–23). John presents the brothers of Jesus as hostile to him (John 7:3–5). Not one of the four gospels records the fact that James the brother of Jesus assumed leadership of the twelve after Jesus’ death, yet, as we have seen, multiple sources confirm that this was the case.
The case of Joses is particularly fascinating to consider. He is the second brother of Jesus, born after James, but other than his name listed in Mark’s gospel, and nowhere else, his very existence has been muted—until now. We don’t know how he died but that he is interred in an ossuary before 70 CE means that his life was likely somehow cut short. Perhaps he too, like Jesus and James to follow, went up against the corrupt religious establishment and was killed. We will never know his story but his ossuary is an amazing testimony to his life. Had he lived he would likely have succeeded James in leading the Jesus movement. Instead the third brother, Simon, took over.3
These differences, and there are many more, are not a matter of minor details. Although some scholars have tried to reconcile these diverse traditions, it is impossible. The gospel writers are not recording history but a series of competing traditions and emphases that developed fifty to a hundred years after Jesus’ death.
The letters of Paul were written earlier than the gospels (50s–60s CE) and in some ways they bring us closer to Jesus’ first followers—certainly in terms of chronology. In other ways, because Paul never met Jesus and insisted that his visions of the heavenly “Christ” were superior to the physical contact that James, Peter, and John had with Jesus before his death, they too can be much more theological than historical. Paul never mentions Mary Magdalene, and his denigrating insistence that women be silent and submissive to men shows he would not have accepted her status as Jesus’ intimate and most trusted follower. Alternatively, he is our best witness for the leadership of James over the Jesus movement, and since he directly encountered James, Peter, John, and the rest of the apostles, even if in conflict, we can take James’s prominence as an established historical fact. This correlates well with the other sources we have, outside the New Testament gospels, which give James this leadership role as “successor” to Jesus.
In the same way Paul’s clear interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead as leaving behind the physical body, and being re-clothed in a spiritual incorruptible body, has to be given priority over the views of Luke and John, who stress a resuscitated physical corpse.
According to Paul, the new resurrection body will not be “flesh and blood,” but rather a transformed immortal spirit—clothed in a new spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:35–50). In the gospels, Jesus says much the same thing. He condemns the literal-minded Sadducees who rejected the idea of resurrection of the dead as an absurdity because they took it to mean that God must reassemble bodies long perished. Jesus responded clearly—in the “resurrection of the dead” there is no longer male or female, no marriage or birth or death. Resurrection is a completely transformed state, though an embodied one (Luke 20:27–36).
The evidence of the Talpiot tombs correlates Paul’s view of resurrection of the dead as well as that of Jesus with the archaeology of his first followers.
As the Christian theological tradition developed, the early Christian fathers took the accounts of Luke and John even further and formulated an idea not found anywhere in the New Testament, which they called the “resurrection of the flesh.”4 They argued that Jesus’ physical body was revived and he walked out of his tomb in a transformed state that was still flesh and bones, but somehow that body was not physical, even though it looked and functioned as if it were. They claimed that Jesus’ body was ethereal and immortal. Some of the church fathers, such as the 3rd century theologian Tertullian, went so far as to argue that God, who created the world, would gather the very flesh of those long dead, including those who had turned to dust, ashes, or been lost in the sea. He went on to say that those in the resurrection would have the capacity to eat and have sex but would have no desire for such things.
This flatly contradicts Paul, Jesus, and our new archaeological evidence from these two tombs. Jesus’ first followers believed that Jesus had been “raised up from the dead,” but as we see in the Greek inscription in the Patio tomb, they believed in his exaltation in heaven. Anthropomorphic language is common throughout the Bible. These early Christians believed Jesus “sat at the right hand of God,” but they were not so naïve or literal as to believe in thrones or seats upon which an embodied God the Father and Jesus Christ his son sat side by side. Affirming the resurrection of the dead, before the theologians elaborated the notion, meant that one affirmed that Jesus was “raised up” or “lifted up” into the holy realms. It was an affirmation of triumph and glory, not a statement about the revival of a physical corpse.
For centuries Christians have looked to the past to inform the present. They have been convinced that by exploring the origins of Christian faith they could transcend many of the theological accretions that have accumulated over the centuries. This was the spirit of the radical Protestant reformers, but over the past hundred years, Catholics have taken up the same challenge—to draw as close to the beginnings as one can, given our sources. It is not a matter of imitating the past. We know that Christianity today, with its history, traditions, and modern cultural contexts, cannot replicate the faith of the first Christians but it cannot help but be enriched by drawing closer to its authentic history.
The Jesus Discovery documents a long journey that we hope will be a beginning, not an end. We want to promote the kind of fruitful historical inquiry and discussions that advance our understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other faith, or no faith, we have all been affected deeply and significantly by the life and death of this man. For billions of people he continues to be the focus of faith and adoration, the hope of both life and death. Whatever one’s view of Jesus, we should always remember the lessons of the Enlightenment and the very foundation of our academic and scientific culture—good history is never the enemy of informed faith. As has ever been the case through the ages it is dogma, ignorance, and bias that should ever remain our common enemy. Our hope is that our decade-long investigation of the Talpiot tombs will serve to dispel those ancient stumbling blocks so that responsible history and informed faith can dwell together in peace.