If you are a blogger who deals with Christianity in any way, it has been de rigeur over the last few days to write about the so-called Jesus Tomb that was found in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem in 1980. The stir has been caused by the new documentary by James Cameron that will be on the Discovery Channel next Sunday. Of particular interest is a blog post by Ben Witherington. James Tabor, one of the scholars who worked on the film, responded to what Dr. Witherington had to say.

If you are interested in reading other blogs on the subject, Tyler Williams at Codex has pulled together an extensive list of links to posts by bloggers. I was planning to do this today, but we pleased to discover that Tyler had already done the work.

For those who are not familiar with the story, here is a brief summary: In 1980, a tomb from the 1st century CE was discovered in Jerusalem. It contained ten ossuaries, bone boxes used for secondary burial. Four were uninscribed, but six had the names Joshua son of Joseph, Maria, Mariamne, Jose, Matthew, and Judah son of Joshua on them. The tomb was excavated by specialists and the ossuaries sent to the Albright Institute. One of the uninscribed ossuaries later disappeared. In the new documentary, it is claimed that this is the burial place of Jesus (whose Hebrew / Aramaic name was Joshua), his wife Mary Magdalene, his brother Jose, and his son Judah.

I am not going to give a huge run down of the evidence. That has been done elsewhere. And I will hold off on a major post until I have seen the documentary next Sunday. But before I start with any comments, I feel I should make the following disclaimers:

  • I am not a full time archaeologist. I have spent four seasons doing field work and some time analyzing data in the lab, but this is not my area of specialization.
  • I am not a scholar of early Christianity. I teach NT sometimes, but my field of study is OT.
  • I have not examined the ossuaries. I cannot comment on their validity or their dating. I suspect they are genuine, having come from a controlled excavation.
  • I have seen the James Ossuary when it was on display in Toronto. Kyle McCarter, my professor in grad school, was one of the specialists asked to study it.

Having said that, I wanted to address a few things that seem interesting to me about this story.

First, the fact that the movie is from Simcha Jacobovici does not inspire much confidence. He is know for movies that make sensationalistic claims without having the data to back them up. See, for example, Chris Heard at Higgaion, who did an extended critique of Jacobovici’s The Exodus Decoded.

Second, the James Ossuary does not come from this tomb, despite the Discovery Channel’s assertion that it does. The idea of the documentary is that the missing ossuary from Talpiot is the James Ossuary. But excavator’s notes clearly state that the missing ossuary was not inscribed. But the James Ossuary has a clear inscription. In addition, there is some evidence to suggest that the James Ossuary was known in the 1970s, which means there is no way it could have been in a tomb until 1980. Of course, if the ossuary is a forgery as some have suggested, none of this matters anyway. The patina tests that have been cited are meaningless if the rest of the data do not match.

Addendum: after writing this post, I discovered a post by Mark Goodacre at the NT Gateway that points to more problems with the claim that the James Ossuary is from the Talpiot tomb.

The James Ossuary has bearing on the argument that the Talpiot tomb is the tomb of the family of Christ. James Tabor presents a discussion on the probability of these particular names occurring together, given what we know about name distribution in the 1st century. It is worth quoting what he has to say at length:

Imagine a football stadium filled with 50,000 people—men, women, and children. This is an average estimate of the population of ancient Jerusalem in the time of Jesus. If we ask all the males named Jesus to stand, based on the frequency of that name, we would expect 2,796 to rise. If we then ask all those with a father named Joseph to remain standing there would only be 351 left. If we further reduce this group by asking only those with a mother named Mary to remain standing we would get down to only 173. If we then ask only those of this group with a brother named Joseph only 23 are left. And finally, only of these the ones with a brother named James, there’s less than a 3/4 chance that even 1 person remains standing.1

His analysis assumes that there was an ossuary with the name James in this tomb. But when we take the James Ossuary out of the equation, we have 23 people in 1st century Palestine who would have been named Jesus/Joshua, had a father named Joseph, a mother named Mary, and a brother named Jose. That is a pretty decent number considering the population of Palestine at the time was around 50,000. In addition, Tabor assumes that the Mary on this ossuary is the mother of Jesus. But nothing on the Mary ossuary gives any indication of her relationship to Jesus.

Third, does it strike anyone else as odd that they think Jesus named his son after the man who betrayed him? Granted, according to the theory they propose Jesus would have named his son before being betrayed, but I find it hard to imagine that his son would not have gone by another version of the name instead. This is not an argument against the theory, but it does seem a bit weird.

Fourth, it strikes me as odd that there is no Christian graffiti in this tomb. If this tomb is the burial place of Jesus, we would expect there to be symbols on the wall. After all, even if (as the theory suggests) his followers moved him here so they could promulgate the idea that he had been resurrected, they still would have accepted the idea that he was the messiah. Why no graffiti — even simple signs — indicating that they thought this man was special?

I will save further thoughts until I have seen the documentary, which airs this Sunday on the Discovery Channel.


  1. James Tabor, “Some Initial Thoughts on the Talpiot Tomb,” The Jesus Dynasty Blog (2/27/2007). [back]
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