Thursday, January 17, 2008

Jesus' Tomb Found?

The Jerusalem Post and time magazine report that the widow of the Israeli archaeologist Yosef Gat, who discovered a controversial first century family tomb in Jerusalem's Talpiot neighborhood in 1980, is now telling the world that her husband believed the tomb was indeed Jesus’ tomb, but he chose not to make his view known for fear of a widespread anti-Semitic backlash that the discovery might trigger.

Mr. Gat’s reluctance and fear is quite understandable, for when the Discovery Channel aired a documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, based on the discovery last year, calling attention to the possibility of the tomb being the family tomb of Jesus, there was a huge outcry against the documentary by the Christian community fearful that the ancient Christian belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection was being seriously challenged with archaeological evidence. In fact, if the discovery turns out to be credible, the impact of the discovery might be as damaging to the traditional Christian theology as Darwin’s theory of evolution. As a consequence, the film was only shown once by the Discovery Channel, and Great Britain’s Channel 4 cancelled the airing of the film.

According to the film, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, produced by James Cameron and Canadian journalist Simcha Jacobovici, it appears that there were 10 funeral ossuaries, 5 of which bore inscriptions relating to the familiar New Testament Jesus clan names, such as “Jesus son of Joseph,” “Joseph,” “Mary,” “Jose” (name of a brother of Jesus), and “Mariamne” (inscribed as “known as the master”). The names such as Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were quite common in the time of Jesus, but having all those names in a family tomb together, along with the name of one of Jesus’ brothers, Jose, is quite remarkable, if not incredibly so. It should also be noted that Mariamne “know as the master” matches the description of another Mary (Mary Magdalena?) in the Gospel of Mary, a short account found on a fifth-century papyrus codex, who taught Jesus’ disciples the teachings of Jesus that were not revealed to them while he was alive.

The tomb might just be the real thing, and here is how it could have been.

It is significant to note that an ossuary of James, the brother of Jesus who became the head of “Jerusalem Church” (Jesus Movement) sometime after the death of Jesus, was not found with the other ossuaries. This actually makes sense since James was murdered by the High Priest Ananus about 4 years before the Jewish revolt of 66 A.D.

Immediately after the execution of James, it is highly likely that Ananus initiated persecutions against the followers of James, which probably prevented the followers, including James’ remaining brothers, Jude and Simon, from giving James the appropriate burial in the family tomb. After they had been driven out of Jerusalem, the survivors of the persecution probably never had the opportunity to return to the tomb of Jesus clan, as Jerusalem and its surrounding areas were completely destroyed by the Romans in the revolt of 66 A.D. Those followers who managed to stay in Jerusalem probably perished with the rest of the population of Jerusalem when the Roman general Titus sacked the city and destroyed the Herod’s Temple in 70 A.D.

One question that needs to be answered is, why in Jerusalem, not in Galilee? Jesus clan appears to be from Galilee, not from Jerusalem, and it is generally assumed that Joseph was already dead at the time of Jesus’ ministry. So why didn’t Jesus clan have the family tomb in Galilee, rather than in Jerusalem? My guess is that the clan did have a family burial place and Joseph and Jesus were initially buried in Galilee.

One New Testament Scholar, James Charlesworth, professor of New Testament language and literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, dismisses that the tomb is the final resting place of Jesus by claiming that the ossuary could not have been used by the followers of Jesus because they would not have dared putting the remains of their messiah “in such a horrible ossuary.” I believe, on the contrary, that is exactly what would have happened if Jesus were buried in his family burial place in Galilee by his poor carpenter family, not by his followers.

When James moved to Jerusalem to take over the nascent Jesus Movement (the Primitive Church) by the request of Peter, then its leader, it is possible that the remaining clan members also moved with him. From the elaborate appearance of the tomb, whoever owned the tomb must have been fairly well-off. A carpenter clan probably could not have been able to afford this type of tomb, but James could have, due to his position in the Jesus Movement.

James, some years after becoming the leader of the Jesus Movement, probably moved the ossuaries of Jesus and Joseph to the new family tomb in Jerusalem from Galilee. And as his clan members, such as Mary and Jose, died in Jerusalem, they were buried in the tomb. The presence of Mariamne’s remains in the clan tomb is a mystery. She might have been an unmarried sister of Jesus (sisters were mentioned in the New Testament but not by name), or possibly a wife of one of the Jesus clan members, even of Jesus (Mary Magdalene?).

Why didn’t Jesus’ family tomb become a focal point of Jesus Movement then? My guess is that James never told his followers that Jesus was buried there--in other words, a family secret. Why? Because it was James and his brothers who took the body of Jesus back to his family tomb in Galilee after Jesus’ crucifixion.

If you were James, would you tell? Well, I shall leave that as one of the answers to the mystery of the tomb for now, but it might just be that it is James’ silence that made the Pauline and Johannine theology of Christianity, to which most Christians today still subscribe, possible.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Your conclusions are persuasive. I've been thinking along the same lines...Jesus' family was clearly held in high regard by the new movement, and would have been well cared for. A move to Jerusalem would have made sense for them. Jesus' earthly remains could well have become a secret which the family, or the family leader, was careful to preserve. We will probably never be able to account for the initial confusion at the tomb on Easter morning...but Talpiot offers a lot of fascinating possibilities as to what happened later on.

Dr. Serendipitous said...

There really wasn’t any confusion at the tomb on the day that had later come to be known as Easter morning, only bewilderment. Or, more precisely, the confusion was in the minds of the gospel writers.

That someone had broken into the tomb would not have been a total surprise, since tomb robbery wasn’t uncommon, but who would want the body of a dead man? The three women, who were with Jesus nearly from the beginning of his ministry, were struck with grief and despair, and two of them ran to tell Peter and other disciples of what had happened, but one remained in the tomb.

Then something happened, something marvelous, to the woman, Mary Magdalene, who loved Jesus deeply. As she lay on the floor sobbing, she felt someone touch her and immediately she found herself in a vision, or, rather, in a world more real than she had ever known, and in that radiant lucidity, she saw him and held his hand.

That is all that had happened and that was all that was needed.