 Jesus' Tomb?
Marketing hype
There’s been some fuss in the papers in late February about the discovery of a Jewish tomb that, it is suggested, might be Jesus’ family tomb. This tomb, discovered during building excavations in the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiot in 1980, contained ten ossaries (limestone boxes for storing bones) inscribed with names that sound very Biblical to film-makers James (Titanic) Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici.
Nothing to it, says Dr Paul Maier, one of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’s Vice Presidents, and a noted New Testament era historian. Firstly, it’s not news: scholars have known about the ossuaries since March 1980. The general public learned about them when the BBC filmed a documentary on them in 1996. James Tabor’s book, The Jesus Dynasty, also made a big fuss over the Talpiot tombs more recently. This is only getting attention now because it’s promotion for a film Jacobovici has made that screens on the US Discovery channel on March 4. It’s marketing.
Second, all the names — Yeshua, Joseph, Maria, Mariamene, Matia, Judah, and Jose — are extremely frequent Jewish names for that time and place, and thus most scholars consider this merely coincidental, as they did from the start. One-quarter of Jewish women at that time, for example, were named Maria.
Bar-Ilan University Prof. Amos Kloner, the Jerusalem District archeologist who officially oversaw the work at the tomb in 1980 and has published detailed findings on its contents, agrees that the names were common, and says the fact that such apparently resonant names had been found together was of no significance. He added that “Jesus son of Joseph” inscriptions had been found on several other ossuaries over the years. “It makes a great story for a TV film,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “But it’s impossible. It’s nonsense.”
Kloner says, “The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the first century CE.” He agrees with another point made by Dr Maier, that Jesus’ family would never have a family tomb in Jerusalem. “They were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem,” said Kloner. Not only that, says Maier, but Jerusalem is “the very city that crucified Jesus.”
“Besides all of which, church tradition — and Eusebius [third-century historian often called the father of church history] — are unanimous in reporting that Mary died in Ephesus, where the apostle John, faithful to his commission from Jesus on the cross, had accompanied Mary.”
“Alas,” says Maier, “this whole affair is just the latest in the long-running media attack on the historical Jesus, which — we thought — had culminated in that book of lies, The Da Vinci Code. But no: the caricatures of Christ continue.”
Other links
The blog that contains the original email by Dr Paul Maier: http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2007/02/whos_writing_th.html
Other discussion of the movie and evidence: http://str.typepad.com/weblog/
Yet another response and analysis: http://www.carm.org/evidence/Jesus_tomb.htm
The promotional website from the Discovery Channel: http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/tomb/tomb.html
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Jesus' Tomb?