Caiaphas Ossuary

A Bulldozer Opened It

In November 1990 a bulldozer cutting a road for a recreation park in the Peace Forest, on the southern edge of Jerusalem near North Talpiot, broke through the roof of a rock-cut burial cave. The construction superintendent stopped work and reported it, and the Israel Antiquities Authority sent Z. Greenhut to excavate what was left. What was left was already disturbed: twelve limestone ossuaries lay in four burial niches, six of them displaced, some by robbers in antiquity and some by the machine. A good deal of the archaeology of Jerusalem happens exactly this way, because the living city is built on top of its own cemeteries and the archaeologist arrives after the digger.

Greenhut published the tomb in the journal 'Atiqot in 1992, and R. Reich published its inscriptions in the same volume. The most elaborate of the boxes was carved with rosettes and carried a name scratched into the stone twice, once on a plain long side and once on the decorated narrow end. Inside were the remains of six people: two infants, a young child, a teenage boy, an adult woman, and a man of about sixty. The ossuary is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem today. The bones were reburied on the Mount of Olives, as Israeli practice requires.

The Name Cut Twice

The two inscriptions do not spell the name the same way. One reads Yehosef bar Qafa; the other gives a fuller form of the family name, Qayafa. Both are Aramaic forms of the name that reaches the New Testament in Greek as Kaiaphas; Josephus, writing in Greek, calls the high priest of those years Ioseph, also known as Kaiaphas. Before 1990 the family was known only from texts. It is now known from a tomb as well, and the tomb is in the right city, in the right century, in the burial style the priestly families of Jerusalem used — a body left in a niche for a year, then the bones gathered into a limestone box and the niche reused.

A second object has since filled in the family picture without settling anything about this box. In 2011 the Israel Antiquities Authority authenticated an ossuary seized from antiquities robbers in the Elah Valley, inscribed for a woman named as the daughter of a son of Qayafa, and describing the family as priests of the course of Maaziah from Beth Imri. That is a priestly course, one of the twenty-four rotations that served in the temple, and it attaches the family to the temple establishment independently of the Gospels. It is also unprovenanced — taken from thieves, not from a floor — which limits what can be built on it.

Whose Bones?

This is where the popular retelling stops and the scholarship starts. Nothing on the box says high priest. The phrase Yehosef bar Qafa need not even mean that Qafa was his father: R. Reich has pointed out that it reads just as naturally as Yehosef of the Qafa family, a family nickname rather than a patronymic. And the high priest of the Gospels was one man in a priestly dynasty in which that first name recurs. A grandfather and a grandson would each have been a Yehosef of the Qafa family too.

E. Puech has argued against the identification on two grounds: the Aramaic word for the priest is missing from an inscription where a high priest's family might be expected to use it, and the tomb as a whole is plainer than a high-priestly family tomb ought to be. Others have questioned the reading itself, since the letters are lightly and informally cut — probably by relatives rather than by the workshop — and in a name this rare it is genuinely hard to tell a yod from a waw. On the other side, C. A. Evans, who thinks the identification likely, still writes that it could be the ossuary of the high priest, and the word carrying that sentence is could. H. K. Bond's book-length study of Caiaphas is where the whole question is set out at length rather than asserted in a line.

Here is the app's own position, and the two halves of it are not the same size. The family identification is strong and should be stated plainly: this is a burial cave of the Qafa family, and that family is the one the Gospels and Josephus name. Whether the sixty-year-old man in the decorated box is the high priest who questioned Jesus is a further step, and it is a step the evidence permits rather than compels. It is worth noticing how much the careful version still gives a reader. The Gospels put a named, datable, locatable human being at the head of the temple establishment in Jerusalem, and the ground under a public park in the same city gave up his family's bone boxes. That does not establish that anything the Gospels narrate took place. It is the ordinary texture of a real place in a real century — which is what a document telling the truth about the world it describes tends to leave lying around.

Scripture references

• Luke 3:2 — Dating the start of John's ministry by the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas
• Matthew 26:3 — The chief priests gather in the court of the high priest
• Matthew 26:57 — Jesus taken to Caiaphas
• John 11:49-50 — Better that one man die for the people
• John 18:13-14 — Annas as father-in-law of Caiaphas — the family, not just the man
• Acts 4:6 — The high-priestly family named together after the resurrection

Sources

• Holding institutionIsrael Museum, Jerusalem — Ossuary of Caiaphas the High Priest — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem · The holding institution's own page, describing the object as coming from a family burial cave in southern Jerusalem bearing the name Joseph bar CaiaphasSupports: Current location and the museum's own description of the object
• ScholarshipZ. Greenhut, "The 'Caiaphas' Tomb in North Talpiyot, Jerusalem" — Zvi Greenhut, Israel Antiquities Authority · 'Atiqot 21 (1992), 63-71 — the excavation report. The IAA's free online 'Atiqot archive begins at much later volumes, so no URL is given rather than a guessed oneSupports: Discovery circumstances, the tomb plan, the twelve ossuaries and their contents
• ScholarshipR. Reich, "Ossuary Inscriptions from the 'Caiaphas' Tomb" — Ronny Reich · 'Atiqot 21 (1992), 72-77 — the epigraphic publication, including the reading of the name as a family name rather than necessarily a patronymicSupports: The two spellings of the name and how the phrase should be construed
• ScholarshipH. K. Bond, Caiaphas: Friend of Rome and Judge of Jesus? — Helen K. Bond · Westminster John Knox Press, 2004 — the standard book-length treatment, where the objections to the identification are laid out in fullSupports: That the identification is treated as an open question in the scholarship, not a settled one
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Caiaphas ossuary

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Caiaphas ossuary
• Israel Museum, Jerusalem: Ossuary of Caiaphas

Reflect

The man who said it was better for one man to die for the people was more right than he knew. Where has God used a decision made for entirely the wrong reasons?