is the talpiot tomb really the family tomb of Jesus.pdf

the tomb, because it was so badly disturbed according to Kloner,

allow for a dating from the late-first century B C E to 70 C E , which

is certainly a much broader time frame than proponents of the

identification would assume. With the crucifixion in about

30 C E , the family of Jesus would have used the tomb until

70 C E , a rather brief span by any calculation for so decent a

family-tomb complex. There were numerous sherds recovered

in the cave, which suggests a longer life to the tomb, one that

would have begun in the pre-Christian era. This fact only

exacerbates the awkwardness of positing that the family of

Jesus would have had a family-tomb in Jerusalem when they

were living in Galilee, and that it was in their family at least a

generation or so before Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem

at the end of his life.

In light of the sensitivity of the subject, which perforce

raises the issue of whether there was a physical resurrection,

and in light of the questions it raises about the veracity of the

New Testament accounts of the death and burial of Jesus, I

submit that this was not the appropriate way to present such

a hypothesis to the public as well as to the scientific and

archaeological communities. As far as I am concerned, the

story of the tomb of Jesus remains merely a hypothesis that has

raised many important issues, but that remains unsubstantiated,

doubtful, and completely suppositious.

Notes

1. Kloner (1996: 15–22). In press interviews, Kloner has denied that the

tenth ossuary had gone missing and has insisted all along that it was plain,

as he states quite clearly in the report on page 21.

2. Rahmani (1994: 222–23), and see also Rollston in this issue.

3. Kloner (1993: 105; 1996: 22, n. 2). In Rahmani’s comment to the

Mariamne ossuary, no. 701 in Rahmani (1994), he notes that only nine

ossuaries were returned to the IAA.

4. See Rahmani (1994) and Rolleston in this issue.

5. For a fuller discussion of this complicated matter see, Meyers (1971:

85–92). Rahmani has been the scholar who more than any other has

identified the Jerusalem practice of reburial in ossuaries with the Pharisees.

See his four-part article in Biblical Archaeologist (1981, 1982).

Is the Talpiot tomb really the family tomb of Jesus?

the attendants took away the black cloth covering

two stone boxes (ossuaries), which bore inscriptions,

so the assembled journalists were told, of none other than Jesus

son of Joseph and Mary Magdalene. You could have cut the

air with a knife when the announcement was made. The press

conference took place on February 27, 2007, at the New York

Public Library and was organized by Discovery Channel, and

by Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron, the makers of the

documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.” It was indeed a dramatic

moment, with a panel of experts ready to answer questions on

the stage, and with the endless flashing of cameras recording

the moment for posterity. The two main questions that hung on

every journalist’s tongue, in the stunned silence following the

announcement, was whether there was sufficient scientific proof

that the family tomb of Jesus had indeed been discovered, and,

if so, how would this ultimately affect Christianity?

I too attended the press conference, even though I had

considerable doubts regarding their controversial interpretation

of the Talpiot tomb as the family tomb of Jesus. But I did think

it important for me to be present, first because I happened

to be one of the team members who excavated the tomb

twenty-seven years ago, and second so that I might register my

skepticism on the spot and tell journalists a different side of the

story. I must commend the film makers for inviting me to be

present at this press conference, knowing quite well that I had

serious misgivings on the subject.

The Discovery

The tomb was excavated twenty-seven years ago on

a westward-facing slope of a hill, within the area of East

Talpiot, a new residential suburb that was constructed

about two kilometers due south of ancient Jerusalem. The

area had the appearance of an enormous quarry site, with

bulldozers churning up the sides of hills, large trucks trundling

around the place, piles of rubble, and clouds of yellow dust

billowing in different directions. The general layout of the

streets had already been roughly demarcated and these

were sufficiently flat to allow vehicles access to most areas

under construction. The buildings were only partly built, or

not at all. There was already a petrol station on the corner.

118 NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 69:3–4 (2006)

Shimon Gibson

T here was a hushed air of expectancy in the hall when

The cave was in the side of a rocky scarp just above the street

(later known as Dov Gruner Street) and the gaping hole of

the entrance was visible even from a distance. Although the

rock-cut façade of the tomb was in the shade, I found it quite

striking as I approached it. It was hewn from gleaming white

limestone and there were chisel marks cut diagonally across the

entrance that were set off by the orange staining derived from

the soil fills removed by bulldozers. Above the doorway were

two simple raised carvings of a circle and a pointed triangle.

The facts of the discovery are quite straightforward. A blast

at the East Talpiot construction site brought to light the tomb

and resulted in the destruction of its large external rock-cut

courtyard and part of the roofed vestibule. The discovery of the

cave was reported separately by two individuals on Thursday,

March 27, 1980—Kerner Mandil, in charge of the supervisory

office of the Armon Hanatziv/East Talpiot Project, and the

engineer Ephraim Shohat of the construction company Solel

Boneh. An archaeologist, Eliot Braun, was dispatched on that

same day by the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums

to check on the nature of the discovery and he reported back to

Amos Kloner, the Jerusalem District Archaeologist.

Clearly the cave needed to be excavated. The blocking stone

to the cave was missing and the interior of the burial chamber

had become blocked with approximately half a meter of soil

that had been washed in from outside. The tops of the ossuaries

were, however, visible. A few fragments of ossuaries were also

noticed outside the cave entrance. It was too late to do any

digging so the work was postponed to the following day.

Shimon Gibson (left) and James Charlesworth (right) stand over the

cement shaft and lid situated above the Talpiot Tomb.

The next day, Yoseph (“Yoske”) Gath, an archaeologist

working for Kloner in the Department, began excavating,

and by noon managed to extract ten ossuaries from the cave,

which were then transported on a special truck back to the

safekeeping of the Rockefeller Museum. These ossuaries

were handed over to the curator, anthropologist Joe Zias,

and placed into temporary storage where they were later

examined by the chief curator L. Y. Rahmani. The work

had to be undertaken in a hurry, since excavations were not

permitted on the Saturday, and any ossuaries left in the cave

might be pilfered by greedy antiquity thieves. Alternatively,

members of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community

might demonstrate and create disturbances and this could

lead to a cessation of the excavations altogether. Indeed, this

is exactly what happened to another Second Temple-period

tomb. Situated only twenty meters to the northeast of the

excavated tomb, it was full of ossuaries (some inscribed).

However, because of ultra-Orthodox Jewish objections, it was

later sealed and still remains unexcavated.

Not long after the archaeologists left the site that Friday, an

eleven-year-old boy named Ouriel, as he was returning from

school, entered the building site and saw the cave entrance.

This was after he had heard additional blasting at the site. At

that time he says there was only one Arab guard and all the

construction workers had gone home. He peered into the cave,

identified it as a tomb, and then went home to tell his mother,

Rivka Maoz. The Maoz family was living in an apartment block

they had moved into in 1976 in the older part of the East Talpiot

neighborhood, about one hundred meters or so to the south of

the area of the tomb. His mother tried to contact archaeologists

at the Rockefeller Museum, but without much success since

they had already gone home.

Yoseph Gath, the excavator of the Talpiot Tomb.

NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 69:3–4 (2006)

119

There were no excavations that Saturday and the guard

at the construction site was not very diligent. As a result the

tomb was visited by local children who had heard about the

tomb and were drawn to investigate it. This resulted in some

human bones being taken out of the tomb and removed from

the site. Conscientiously, Rivka Maoz, with the help of her son,

collected the pilfered bones from the kids and placed them in

a plastic bag. When the excavations were resumed on Sunday,

Ouriel handed over the bones to the archaeologists.

My own personal involvement with the Talpiot tomb began

with a telephone call from Kloner: “Could you go tomorrow

morning to Talpiot where Yoske is digging?” he wanted to

know. At that time I was working as a part-time archaeological

assistant and surveyor in the Department of Antiquities. He

wanted me to take measurements, make a drawn plan, and

record elevations of the tomb. I contacted the excavator, Gath,

and made arrangements to meet with him the following day

on the edge of the new neighborhood. He possessed a rather

morose demeanour, quite the opposite of myself. “Anything

special about this tomb?” I asked him. “Not really,” he replied,

“anyhow you will get a good look at it tomorrow.”

The excavation within the cave (IAA Permit No. 938) was

conducted in stages with breaks between March 30 to April

11, 1980, and it was supervised by Gath, with the help of three

to four workers provided by the Solel Boneh construction

company. Having completed the excavation, Gath returned to

his office (April 15) and wrote up a preliminary report on the

excavations and prepared a File Card for the site, both of which

he deposited in the Department’s archives. Tragically, Gath

died before he was able to publish the results of his excavations,

and it was left to Kloner to publish a final report on the tomb in

the pages of the journal ‘Atiqot in 1996.

Kloner faced a challenge in writing this report owing to

the fact that Gath left behind only sparse and incomplete

notes about the results of his excavation. My examination

of Gath’s notes in the archives at the Rockefeller Museum

(IAA administrative archives/peh/J-M/bet/8/X), confirms

that his notes are minimalist in content and that a lot of vital

information about the tomb has been lost.

The second problem Kloner faced was that the human bones

from the cave had not been written up; anthropologists Joe Zias

and Patricia Smith, who studied material from tombs at that

time, both confirm that neither of them examined the human

bones from this specific cave. Moreover, the bones were no longer

available to Kloner for study since they had been transferred to

the religious authorities for reburial, in accordance with an

agreement that was made between the Israeli government

and the religious authorities who objected to the storage of

human bones within the Antiquities Authority’s storerooms.

The Results

The original courtyard in front of the tomb entrance had

been badly destroyed by the blasting operations. Enough of the

vestibule was preserved, however, for me to ascertain its size at

the time I was preparing the plan of the tomb.

Above the doorway are raised decorative carvings. Gath

suggested that these represented an attempt to depict a rosette

with a gable above, and that it was left unfinished, perhaps

because the local chalky rock ( nari ) was too soft to make

carvings in any greater detail. Notwithstanding the claims

made by the filmmakers, I should point out that these carvings

are not at all mysterious, but are known from the rock-cut

facades and interior doorways of a number of tombs around

Jerusalem. Representations of gabled doors with acroteria are

known from several tombs within the Akeldama (“Field of

Blood”) cemetery south of Mount Zion. The circle, however,

most likely represents a wreath, and examples are known from

the decoration of tombs around Jerusalem, notably from the

ceiling of the inner chamber of the so-called “Tomb of Absalom”

in the Kidron Valley, and from the lintel of the “Tomb of the

Apostles” in Akeldama.

Clambering into the cave, I could see that its interior chamber

was intact. Toolmarks left by the hewer’s chisels were evident

The original plan of the tomb made by Shimon Gibson.

120 NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 69:3–4 (2006)

on the walls and ceiling. A step led down into the square

(2.9 « 2.9 m) chamber whose ceiling was sufficiently high (2 m)

to allow for standing room, so that family members could arrange

with ease the burial of their kin on the two shelves positioned

within arched burial spaces ( arcosolia ) in the upper northern

and eastern walls of the cave. This was where the shrouded

bodies were placed as primary burials and left to decompose

(a process that took about one year), with the bones later

gathered and placed within ossuaries. Cut into the lower walls

of the chamber were tunnel-like burial recesses (averaging 1.8

meters in depth and half a meter in width), known as kokhim ,

and there were two in each of the three walls. Except for one,

they were all used as storage spaces for ten soft limestone boxes

(ossuaries) containing human bones in secondary burial.

The cave had evidently been forced open, entered, and

ransacked at some point before the modern era by tomb

robbers. At the time of the excavation, it was clear to Gath

that intruders had disturbed the tomb because the blocking

stone for the door was missing and quantities of soil had later

accumulated within the cave having been washed in from

outside. The intruders were probably also responsible for the

removal of the stones blocking the kokhim (if indeed they

originally had them), for the sweeping of the intact primary

inhumations from the arcosolia shelves, and for the smashing of

some of the ossuaries (seven were broken and six of these were

eventually restored), and with the chucking of two ossuary lids

onto the floor of the main chamber.

Gath noticed skulls and large limb bones at two points on the

floor, and it is feasible that these came from the primary burials,

which were swept off the arcosolia shelves by the intruders.

The original sections of the tomb made by Shimon Gibson.

Carved doorways from tombs in the area of Akeldama south of

Mount Zion with decoration similar to that on the facade of the

Talpiot tomb.

NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 69:3–4 (2006)

121

At the time of the excavation, only a thin compacted fill (five

centimeters thick) of crushed bones was found on the shelves.

A third skull was found in the corner of the main chamber,

and it may have been taken out of one of the ossuaries in the

adjacent kokh . In addition to this, fragmentary human bones

and a few first-century C E potsherds were found scattered

throughout the main chamber. The number of interments in

the cave is unknown, but, basing himself on data obtained from

other tombs that have been studied, Kloner believes that it

might have been about thirty-five individuals. Unfortunately,

this is mere guesswork since the anthropological remains from

the Talpiot tomb were never examined or quantified.

Ten ossuaries were discovered in the Talpiot tomb. In making

a measured plan of the cave, I recorded the position of the

ossuaries according to information provided by Gath. Since

Gath did not match up the Rockefeller IDAM accession

numbers given to the ossuaries with the attribution numbers

as they appear on my plan of the cave, we will never know

for certain which ossuary came from which kokh , and this is

unfortunate as it represents a major loss of information. In

addition, we have no information about the ossuary fragments

Gath picked up outside the tomb entrance. In total, only three

of the ossuaries were found intact; the rest were broken and had

to be restored. Six or seven lids were discovered, one gabled

and the rest flat in appearance. Five of the ossuaries were plain

and five were decorated with double-rosette motifs in panels,

surrounded by bands with chip-carved zig-zag designs, except

for one, which also has a decoration of vertical rows of small

circular disks. Maker’s marks were detected scratched on three

of the ossuaries.

Only nine of the ten ossuaries from the tomb are at present

in the Israel Antiquities Authority storerooms in Beth Shemesh

(Nos. 501–508/1980). Where is the tenth missing ossuary?

Rahmani in his 1994 catalogue described it as “a plain, broken

specimen.” The filmmakers, Jacobovici and Cameron, got a

lot of mileage out of this missing ossuary, suggesting that it

might be the same as the “James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”

ossuary, implying that the ossuary was stolen and eventually

ended up in the hands of the collector Oded Golan. This is

highly unlikely since we know that the tenth ossuary was plain,

undecorated, and uninscribed, and, on top of everything else,

it was broken. This description does not fit the “James” ossuary,

which is complete and decorated on one side with rosettes

and on the other with a deeply carved inscription. Rahmani,

however, recently provided me with an explanation as to how

the tenth ossuary might have become mislaid. All decorated or

inscribed ossuaries, when received at the Rockefeller Museum

in the 1980s, he tells me, were placed on shelves, whereas

broken plain ossuaries, of which there were large quantities,

were stored in the external courtyard of the museum. When

the ossuaries were transferred to Beth Shemesh, the tenth

broken example was most likely thrown away, owing to a lack

of storage space.

Six of the ossuaries were inscribed (five in Hebrew script and

one in Greek). The inscriptions were scratched in different

hands with a nail or stylus. The location of the inscriptions vary:

three were on the front of the ossuary and another on the back,

with two on the short end of the ossuary and one on the inside.

The inscriptions were originally read by Rahmani (assisted by L.

Di Segni) and published in his Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in

1994 (nos. 701–706), and similar readings appeared in Kloner’s

‘Atiqot report on the tomb (nos. 1–6).

The carved lintel above the so-called “Tomb of the Apostles” in the

area of Akeldama. Wreaths like the ones on this lintel are probably

what the carver of the facade of the Talpiot tomb intended to depict.

This drawing reconstructs what was probably in the mind of the

person who carved the facade of the Talpiot Tomb.

122 NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 69:3–4 (2006)

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: