Talpiot Tomb

1980, and the Sixteen Years Before Anyone Noticed

In March 1980, construction work for an apartment block on Dov Gruner Street in the East Talpiot neighbourhood of Jerusalem, about five kilometres south of the Old City, broke into a rock-cut tomb. It was reported, and a salvage excavation ran from 28 March to 14 April under permit number 938: Y. Gath of the Department of Antiquities directed it, with A. Kloner and E. Braun, and S. Gibson drew the plans. Ten ossuaries were recovered. Six carried inscriptions. This was routine work: hundreds of such tombs surround Jerusalem, and they are the ordinary burial furniture of the century in which the New Testament is set. The excavation report was published in 1996, sixteen years later, without causing any stir at all.

Five of the six inscriptions are in Hebrew or Aramaic and are usually rendered Jesus son of Joseph, Maria, Mattia, Joseh, and Judah son of Jesus. The sixth is written in Greek letters and reads Mariamne Mara. Every one of those names is common. In the standard lexicon of Jewish names of the period the Hebrew and Aramaic names behind them are among the most frequently attested there are, which is why nobody in 1980 or in 1996 thought anything had been found beyond a well-preserved family tomb.

In late February 2007 the filmmakers J. Cameron and S. Jacobovici held a press conference announcing that this was the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family — that Mariamne Mara was Mary Magdalene, that the Judah named as a son on one of the boxes was their child, and so that Jesus had married, fathered a son, and been buried in a family plot. The Lost Tomb of Jesus aired on the Discovery Channel days later, and a book followed.

The Arithmetic, and What It Can and Cannot Do

The claim rested on a statistical argument: this particular cluster of names, in one tomb, is too unlikely to be a coincidence. That is a real question and it got a real answer. In 2008 the Annals of Applied Statistics devoted most of an issue to it — a paper by A. Feuerverger of the University of Toronto, more than a dozen published discussions by other statisticians, and Feuerverger's rejoinder. It is one of the most thoroughly worked-over calculations in the history of biblical archaeology, and it is freely readable.

What it establishes is narrower than the coverage suggested, and the author said so himself in print. Feuerverger wrote that his paper does not claim the tomb is most likely that of the New Testament family; what it tries to do is develop tools to help subject-matter experts weigh such claims. The reason is that every number in a calculation like this depends on assumptions supplied from outside statistics — which names count as a match, whether Mariamne Mara can be read as Mary Magdalene at all, whether Joseh and Yehosef name one man or two, how many families in Jerusalem the tomb should be compared against. Change any of those and the answer moves by orders of magnitude. Several discussants said flatly that the assumptions could not bear the weight; Feuerverger agreed with a number of the criticisms in his reply.

There is also a chain of separate claims underneath the arithmetic, and each link has to hold. C. Evans and S. Feldman set the objections out plainly in Biblical Archaeology Review: the family was not wealthy and a rock-cut tomb of this type belonged to those who were; a Galilean family would be expected to bury in Galilee; a man from outside Judea is normally identified by his town, as Jesus of Nazareth is throughout the Gospels, rather than by his father; there is no title on the ossuary of the kind his followers might have added; and there is no tradition of veneration at the site, where the tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was being pointed out as his burial place by the second century. None of those objections is fatal on its own. All of them have to be wrong together for the identification to stand.

Being Specific Instead of Being Loud

The temptation with this one runs in both directions and both should be resisted. The tomb is not a hoax; it was excavated by the state, catalogued, published and stored, and nine of the ossuaries were catalogued into the state collection and are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The tenth has generated an argument of its own, and it is settled by numbers rather than by suspicion. It is IAA 80.509; the excavation report records it as plain and gives its dimensions as 60 by 26 by 30 cm; the 1994 published catalogue of the state collection left it out, describing it as a plain, broken specimen. The makers of The Lost Tomb of Jesus proposed that it was the James Ossuary, which had surfaced separately on the market — but that box was published at 50.5 cm along its base and 25 cm wide, which is a different object, and A. Feuerverger, who did the statistical work on this tomb, wrote in 2008 that "in my opinion there is at present no credible evidence to tie that ossuary to the Talpiyot tomb." J. Tabor has continued to argue the other way since, and his own collected writing on the tomb is linked below. Nothing about the case requires anyone to have hidden anything.

Equally, the claim is not accepted, and the reason is not that scholars found it theologically unwelcome. It is that the inference asks a common cluster of common names to carry an identification, and the discipline's answer — argued out in a statistics journal rather than a pulpit — is that it cannot. J. Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte continues to argue the other way in print and has published further work on the site; that is a live minority position held by a credentialed scholar, and readers should know it exists rather than hear only that everyone disagrees.

For a Christian reader the theological stakes are lower than the headlines implied, and it is worth naming why. The resurrection as the New Testament presents it is bodily; an ossuary of Jesus containing his bones would contradict it directly, which is precisely why the claim was newsworthy. But the argument never reached the point where that mattered. It failed at the identification, on ordinary evidential grounds that a first-year archaeology student can follow, and it would have failed there whatever anyone believed about Easter.

Scripture references

• Matthew 27:59 — Joseph of Arimathea wraps the body in a clean linen cloth
• Matthew 27:60 — And lays it in his own new tomb, cut out of the rock — a borrowed grave, not a family plot
• Mark 6:3 — The family named in the Gospels: Mary, and the brothers James, Joses, Judah and Simon
• John 19:41 — A garden near the place of crucifixion, and in it a new tomb where no one had yet been laid

Sources

• ScholarshipA. Feuerverger, "Statistical Analysis of an Archeological Find", with published discussions and rejoinder — Andrey Feuerverger, University of Toronto, and more than a dozen discussants · The Annals of Applied Statistics 2/1 (2008); the rejoinder is at 99-112 and is open access. The link goes to the rejoinder, where the author states the limits of his own paperSupports: That the author does not claim the tomb is most likely the New Testament family's, that the result depends on assumptions supplied from outside statistics, and that in his opinion there is at present no credible evidence tying the James Ossuary to this tomb
• ReferenceC. Evans and S. Feldman, "The Tomb of Jesus? Wrong on Every Count" — Craig Evans and Steven Feldman, Biblical Archaeology Society · First published in 2007 in response to the documentary. The source for the six inscriptions as read, and for the chain of objections set out in this articleSupports: The list of inscriptions, the ten ossuaries, and the specific objections to the identification
• Holding institutionA. Kloner, "A Tomb with Inscribed Ossuaries in East Talpiyot, Jerusalem" — Amos Kloner, then district archaeologist of Jerusalem for the Israel Antiquities Authority - the excavating body's own report · 'Atiqot 29 (1996), 15-22. The formal excavation report, published sixteen years after the dig and eleven years before the documentary. Print onlySupports: The excavation record, the ossuary catalogue, and the fact that the find was published without controversy
• ReferenceG. Franz, "The So-Called Jesus Family Tomb 'Rediscovered' in Jerusalem" — Gordon Franz, Associates for Biblical Research · A fully referenced account keyed to the excavation report and to L. Y. Rahmani's 1994 catalogue of the state collection. The source for the permit number, the excavation dates, the personnel, the tenth ossuary's IAA number and dimensions, and the dimensions of the James Ossuary as first publishedSupports: The excavation record and the measurements that separate the tenth ossuary from the James Ossuary
• ReferenceJ. Tabor, in-depth reading on the Talpiot tomb — James Tabor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte - the leading academic advocate of the identification · His own collected writing on the site, linked so the minority case can be read in its author's words rather than summarised by people who reject itSupports: The existence and content of the continuing minority position

Further reading

• Biblical Archaeology Society: the case against the identification, set out point by point

Reflect

Six ordinary names in one ordinary tomb became a worldwide story in a week. What would it take to slow you down long enough to ask how common the names were?