Crucified Man of Giv'at ha-Mivtar

A Salvage Dig Ahead of the Bulldozers

In June 1968, construction work in the Giv'at ha-Mivtar neighbourhood north of Jerusalem — the area also called Ras el-Masaref — broke into ancient tombs, and the Israel Department of Antiquities sent Vassilios Tzaferis, a former Greek Orthodox monk turned archaeologist, to excavate them before they were lost. In Tomb I was an ossuary inscribed with the name Yehohanan son of Hagqol; the transliterations of the father's name vary between publications. The bones inside were of a man of roughly twenty-four to twenty-eight, about five foot six, and through his right heel bone was an iron nail, bent over so that it could not be pulled out, still carrying with it a fragment of the wooden upright it had been driven into.

That bent nail is the reason this find exists at all. The Romans crucified people by the thousand across four centuries, and this is the only skeleton ever recovered that shows it. Iron was worth money and nails were routinely pulled out and reused; this one had hit a knot in the wood, curled, and stayed. The ossuary and a replica of the heel bone with its nail are displayed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The remains themselves were reburied, as Israeli practice requires — and the haste of that requirement matters for what follows, because the anatomist who examined them was working against a clock set by the religious authorities.

What the Bone Establishes

It establishes that a man was crucified in Judea in the first century, and that at least in his case a nail was driven through the heel. It also, quietly, establishes something about burial. Under Roman practice the crucified were commonly left to rot or thrown into a common pit; the shocking thing about Yehohanan is not the nail but the ossuary. Somebody claimed the body, and it went into a family tomb and eventually into an inscribed limestone box like anyone else's.

That is because of Deuteronomy 21:22-23, which requires that a man hanged on a tree be buried the same day and not left overnight, on the ground that a hanged man is under God's curse and defiles the land. John 19:31 has the Judean leadership asking Pilate to break the legs of the crucified so the bodies would not remain over the Sabbath. Yehohanan is physical evidence that this concession was made and this custom kept, which is the background against which the Gospels' account of Jesus's burial in a tomb belonging to a member of the council should be read. Paul reaches for the same verse from Deuteronomy in Galatians 3:13 and turns it inside out: the curse is the point.

The Version Almost Everyone Still Repeats Was Retracted in 1985

This is the most important thing on this page. The reconstruction published by the anatomist Nicu Haas in 1970 said that the man's heels had been nailed together sideways with a single nail, that his forearms had been pierced, and that his legs had been deliberately broken. That reconstruction is in a great many books, in a great many sermon illustrations, and on the overwhelming majority of websites that discuss this find. It was overturned forty years ago.

J. Zias and E. Sekeles published "The Crucified Man from Giv'at ha-Mivtar: A Reappraisal" in the Israel Exploration Journal in 1985, and it dismantled the earlier account point by point. The nail is about 11.5 centimetres long — earlier reports of seventeen or eighteen centimetres were simply wrong — which is far too short to have passed through two heel bones and a plaque. So the feet were not nailed together: each foot was nailed separately, one to either side of the upright, with the man straddling the post. The mark on the forearm bone is non-traumatic and is not evidence of nailing; the arms were most likely tied. The break in the leg bones is post-mortem, and the evidence for deliberate leg-breaking is inconclusive. A talus bone in the assemblage probably belongs to a third individual entirely. Haas suffered a stroke in 1975 and never replied to any of it.

Two things follow, and both are worth being blunt about. The first is that if you have read a description of this find anywhere else, it is more likely than not to be the retracted version, and it is not a matter of scholarly taste — it is a measurement. The second is a limit on what the corrected version proves. This is one skeleton. It shows that heel-nailing happened; it does not show that heel-nailing was standard, or that every crucifixion looked like this one, and it cannot settle the question of where the nails went in Jesus's own case. Thomas asks to see the print of the nails in Jesus's hands, and this bone has nothing to say about that either way. An article that used Yehohanan to reconstruct Good Friday in detail would be doing exactly what Haas did — building more on one body than one body can carry.

Scripture references

• John 19:31-33 — The request that the legs be broken so the bodies would not remain on the Sabbath
• Deuteronomy 21:22-23 — Same-day burial for a man hanged on a tree — why a crucified man got a tomb at all
• Galatians 3:13 — Paul turns the curse of Deuteronomy 21 inside out
• John 20:25 — "The print of the nails" — a detail this bone cannot speak to

Sources

• ScholarshipJ. Zias and E. Sekeles, "The Crucified Man from Giv'at ha-Mivtar: A Reappraisal" — Joseph Zias and Eliezer Sekeles, Israel Antiquities Authority / Hebrew University · Israel Exploration Journal 35 (1985), 22-27. The reappraisal that overturned the 1970 reconstruction. Print onlySupports: The 11.5 cm nail, the separate nailing of each foot, the non-traumatic forearm mark, and the post-mortem leg break
• ScholarshipN. Haas, "Anthropological Observations on the Skeletal Remains from Giv'at ha-Mivtar" — Nicu Haas, Hebrew University · Israel Exploration Journal 20 (1970), 38-59. The original reconstruction, superseded in 1985 and cited here as the source of the version still in general circulation. Print onlySupports: The retracted reconstruction, and its provenance
• ReferenceAssociates for Biblical Research: "Rethinking the Crucified Man from Giv'at ha-Mivtar" — Associates for Biblical ResearchSupports: A point-by-point comparison of the 1970 and 1985 readings
• Holding institutionIsrael Museum, Jerusalem — the Yehohanan ossuary and heel-bone replica — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem · The museum's online collection is served as a JavaScript application and could not be fetched and confirmed for this article, so no object URL is given rather than an unverified oneSupports: Current location of the ossuary and the displayed replica
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Jehohanan

Further reading

• Associates for Biblical Research: Rethinking the Crucified Man from Giv'at ha-Mivtar
• Wikipedia: Jehohanan

Reflect

A wrong account of this man's death has been repeated for fifty years because it was vivid and nobody checked. What have you passed on because it moved you rather than because you knew it was true?