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