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Re: Jesus Family Tombs?? (fwd)
Dear Ed,
Rahmani's corpus of Jewish Ossuaries, I think more recent than Fitzmeyer,
lists to ossuraies with the debated inscription. The one discovered by
Sukenik is very legible and is not the one from East Talpiot. The one
from East Talpiot is the one underdiscussion for it is that one which was
in the same cave as the other names. rAhmani also provides a convenient
name index so that one can easily check the name distribution. It is
very impressive to see at a glance how common the names actually were.
Victor Avigdor Hurowitz
Dept. of Bible and ANE
Ben Gurion University
Beer Sheva, ISRAEL
On Mon, 8 Apr 1996 Edmcook@aol.com wrote:
> Apparently the ossuary was "discovered" in the museum basement by E.L.
> Sukenik in 1926. It has long been known to archaeologists and has been
> anthologized several times, most recently in Fitzmyer & Harrington's _Manual
> of Palestinian Aramaic Texts_. Sukenik himself was the first to assert that
> any connection to the family of Jesus of Nazareth was misconceived in view of
> the commonness of the names involved. I don't think Sukenik can be accused of
> having been a Christian apologist.
>
> Further to the question of the chances of a random co-occurrence of these
> names: I'm not aware of any other "Yeshua bar Yehosef"'s among the Aramaic
> ossuaries, but there are at least 2 separate "Yehuda bar Yehohanan"'s among
> the small (30-40) corpus of Aramaic ossuaries. I imagine that the more famous
> name would not be any less common.
>
> Finally: It does not appear that the "Jesus ossuary" was found with any other
> inscribed material. Early reports of other ossuaries bearing the names of
> Mary, etc., were apparently mistaken.
>
> Ed Cook
> Aramaic Lexicon Project
> Hebrew Union College
> Cincinnati
>