The Jesus Tomb Brouhaha

For those of us in archaeology-related professions, the talk of the town this past week was the film 'The Lost Tomb of Jesus,' that aired with much ado on the Discovery Channel last Tuesday. The expose was underwritten by the guy who produced 'The Titanic' and presented by a Jewish journalist in a Druze kippa hot on the trail of a good story. They set out to authenticate a late second temple period burial tomb as the final resting place of Jesus and several of his family members, including his mother Mary, his brothers, Mary Magdalene and his son (gulp). In fact, the names in the tomb correspond seamlessly with the Da Vinci Code theory which purports that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had a child.

The tomb was discovered accidentally during construction in one of Jerusalem's satellite neighborhoods in 1980. It contained ten ossuaries (bone boxes used for secondary burial), six of which were clearly inscribed with the aforementioned names. One of the stronger arguments against the film's premise is that people from the Judaea region usually inscribed tombs with their first name and their father's name, as in this tomb, whereas Galileans used the first name and the hometown. In addition, Jesus came from a family of modest means; in all likelihood they would not have been able to afford the excavation of a family burial tomb. Even if they had one, Nazareth would seem to be the natural location for it.

Amos Kloner, the head archaeologist of the Jerusalem district when the tomb was revealed, pooh-poohed the suggestion that this was the tomb of Jesus' family, claiming that the names inscribed on the ossuaries were extremely common during Jesus' time and could have been found in that combination in many families, especially in a burial cave where generations of relatives found their final resting place. He subsequently consigned the ossuaries to a shelf in an antiquities storeroom in the Jerusalem hinterlands, where they have been collecting dust until today. (Interestingly, one of the ossuaries was evidently 'lifted' and sold on the antiquites market, where it was purchased by a well-known Israeli collector named Oded Golan. A few years ago he publicized his ossuary as belonging to the brother of Jesus and was subsequently indicted for forgery. Hmmm...)

If you walked down the street in Jerusalem two thousand years ago and called out, "Hey, Jesus!" how many people would have answered? Statistical analysis of the chances of all those names appearing together was done by a Canadian professor, who based his calculations on a book called "The Lexicon of Jewish Names" by a scholar named Tal Ilan, who appeared in the movie. A world-renown expert on second temple period Jewish history who has taught at Harvard and who is a member of the faculty of a German university, I once knew her as Tali, back when she did the tour guides' course in the class parallel to mine in 1985. She was extremely self-confindent, both intellectually and physically; I have a clear memory of her taking her newborn infant along on hikes and nursing him while she walked precariously along the edge of a cliff. Oddly, they didn't mention that in the movie.

Another local celebrity who was interviewed for the film was the eleven year-old boy who actually discovered the tomb, now a 38 year-old Israeli living in Paris, who was flown back to Israel for twenty-four hours just to tell his story to the cameras. A few tidbits that probaby would up on the floor of the editing room made their way to an article on the NRG Maariv internet news site. The kid, Uriel Maoz, claims to have recognized the triangle and the circle over the entrance to the tomb immediately. "The moment I saw the sign I ran home to my mother and cried, "Mom, I found a burial cave from the second temple period!" Was this a sign of yet another great Jewish genius, or just a regular kid who picked up a little archaeology from helping his mother study for her exams to pass the tour guides' course?

Junior and his mother tried to contact an archaeologist, but being Friday afternoon no one answered the phone at the Antiquities Authority. Maoz says, "A few hours later, I saw kids on the lot opposite our house playing with some skulls and bones. I told my father that they had taken them from the cave. My father took a giant garbage bag and we went from house to house, door to door, and we collected everything they found. My Dad explained to them that this was a desecration of the sanctity of the dead and of graves. After we
collected the bones we put the bag in a storage shed under the steps in our garden....If the premise of the movie is correct - and this is really the tomb of Jesus - then Jesus' bones were in my backyard."

His mother is still evidently a bit possesive about the tomb, because Maoz related that one day recently, on her way to the supermarket, Mrs. Maoz walked by the concrete slab the contractors poured over the tomb way back when and noticed all manner of photographers and curious people peering into a hole dug into it. "That's my son's tomb!" she called out to them. "What are you talking about, lady?" they yelled back. "He found it over twenty years ago. What are you all doing here?" Uriel admitted that it would always be his cave, or as they call it in his family, "his grave."

What is the real reason this discovery never made the headlines until now? If you think it's because Christians are afraid of evidence that contradicts the New Testament, think again. In a discussion on the question held at the most recent meeting of my women guides' professional group our conclusion was unanimous: it was the contractors. When the ossuaries were dusted off and those famous names were revealed the builders no doubt began to sweat profusely. If Jesus' tomb was discovered here they could kiss their buildings and their profits goodbye. Jesus, shmesus - call in the concrete pumps and send this tomb back to kingdom come where it belongs, no matter who's buried there. Hey, what a great sales pitch: Hurry! One apartment left with garden over tomb of ancient rabbi - at a bargain price!