I thought my readers might like to know the top five posts on TaborBlog for the month of July as judged by number of visitors. In case you missed any of these they are hyperlinked:
1. Two Assumptions About Early Christianity
3. Ebionites and Nazarenes: Tracking the Original Followers of Jesus
4. The Non-Sexual Life: A Misplaced Sense of Holiness
The braided hair of a Jewish woman was found at Masada but until recently no example of preserved hair from a Jewish male had ever been found from the late 2nd Temple period. This discovery is one of the many fascinating, but less publicized finds of the 1st century “Tomb of the Shroud,” discovered in the summer of 2000 just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. The secrets this tomb continues to yield are many, including recent correlations with the DNA test results from the Talpiot Jesus tomb.
Many of the most interesting archaeological discoveries are accidental. There seems to be an unwritten axiom, those who seek never find, and those who find were not seeking. I have participated in over 20 seasons of excavation at five different sites over the past 25 years and I can’t count the times when suddenly, “out of the blue,” one of our students, volunteers, or a staff member, suddenly finds something significant–totally unexpected! Such was the case with the 15 line ostracon at Qumran in 1996, the engraved 1st century menorah we found at Sepphoris in 1999, or the mysteriously inscribed stone vessel at Mt Zion in 2009.
I have to say that until our recent discoveries in the Talpiot “Patio” tomb, the most exciting find in which I have been involved had to be the wholly accidental late night discovery of the freshly robbed tomb in Akeldama, in the Valley of Hinnom, just south of Jerusalem. It was June 14, 2000. Shimon Gibson and I were hiking just south of the Old City with five of our students, showing them some of the abandoned 1st century tombs of that area. We had been in Israel for two weeks excavating at the Suba “John the Baptist” cave. We suddenly and unexpectedly came upon a freshly robbed entrance to one of the many 1st century tombs that are in that area–many of them still sealed. We could see broken ossuaries, scattered bones, and displaced soil where the invaders had removed the blocking stone to the tomb and tunneled inside.
The rest is now history. This amazing three-level tomb, cut into bedrock, contained in a lower niche or kokh, the partially preserved skeletal remains of a male with a badly deteriorated cloth burial shroud still visible! We could hardly believe our eyes. Joe Zias, whom we told about the discovery the next day, was so sure the cloth had to be a later reburial swore that he would heat his “hat”–a plastic cyler’s hat at that–if our cloth turned out to be ancient.
I had the cloth dated at the University of Arizona C-14 lab. Douglas Donahue, the same scholar who tested the Shroud of Turin, dated our cloth–it came out 1st century CE, and made headlines around the world, see here and here. Although 1st century cloth has been found at Masada and in caves in the Judean Desert, nothing of this sort had ever been found in Jerusalem. Apparently that niche, sealed with a blocking stone, had a geological fissure that kept water from seeping in and rotting the material.
The tomb had any number of interesting features. DNA studies were done on all the individuals represented in the tomb–the first time, so far as we know, that this had even been done in an ancient Jerusalem tomb of this period. Textile analysis was done on the cloth–it turned out to be a layered mixture of linen and wool.[1] Perhaps the most surprising find was that our shrouded individual, a male, had Hanson’s disease–leprosy–the 1st documented case from the ancient world in this region, see my post on this here. Gibson, Zissu, and I published our preliminary results later that same year[2] and in 2009 a complete scientific study appeared in the on-line journal PLoS One, available for download here.
One of the more fascinating finds in this tomb, one that has not received much attention, was the preservation of a sample of Jewish male hair. The hair was lice-free, and trimmed or cut evenly, probably indicating that the family buried in this tomb practiced good hygiene and grooming. The length of the hair was medium to short, averaging 3-4 inches. The color was reddish.
The Tomb of the Shroud continues to offer more surprises. We recently noticed that the mitDNA tests of two of the individuals in this tomb match the polymorphisms of two individuals in the Jesus family tomb–namely skeletal materials taken from both the Yeshua and the Mariamene ossuaries. What the implications of this might be, and whether there is any possible relationship between these two families, remains to be explored. For one particularly tantalizing possibility, see Shimon Gibson’s speculations regarding the James ossuary being stolen from the Akeldama “tomb of the Shroud.”[3]
Millions of Christians don’t really think of Jesus as a Jew and most do not know that his earliest followers continued to live according to their Jewish faith. These Judaeo-Christians, as they are sometimes called, upheld many facets of the Jewish faith, including observing the Sabbath, the Jewish festivals, the dietary laws. They believed Jesus was the Messiah, but they denied he was a God or born without a father. They were various called Nazarenes or Ebionites, but most often heretics by the later, largely Gentile church, see my post “Tracking the Original Followers of Jesus” here.
In this video Simcha Jacobovici, filmmaker of The Lost Tomb of Jesus, talks about the first followers of Jesus: how this early Christian sect was persecuted and when they moved underground.
I will be giving a lecture on this topic at the upcoming Biblical Archaeology Society “Bible Fest,” in Chicago, November 16-18. Simcha is also planning to be there and he and I are both giving presentations at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, which meets in Chicago on that same weekend. I hope to see or meet many of you there. See here for details.
Yesterday I received the following note from Andrew Sills, Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Georgia Southern University.[1] Prof. Sills has a very important contribution “The Apostles as Brothers of Jesus” in the forthcoming volume, The Tomb of Jesus and His Family? Exploring Ancient Jewish Tombs Near Jerusalem’s Walls, edited by James H. Charlesworth and Arthur Boulet.
Ossuary inscribed Mariah in the basement storage of the Israel Museum
I thought his was an astute observation, and one I had not thought of before:
In our various tabulations of ancient names from the time of Jesus based on ossuary and other inscriptions the male names far outnumber the female names as many as 8-1. One can obviously point to a heavily patriarchal society that would include a cultural disregard for the value of women. Therefore, when a woman’s name is found on an ossuary, she must have been an important women indeed. In other words, the standards for achieving an ossuary inscription must have been much more rigorous for women than for their male counterparts.
In the Talpiot tomb, we find not one female inscription, but two. Thus, two very prominent women in this family. Since we expect eight males for each female, a “typical” two-woman tomb should have sixteen males. Talpiot has many less male inscriptions, thus we might infer that the women of Talpiot were particularly important. And both Talpiot women were named Mary. Yes, of course, Mary was a common name. 21% of all Jewish women of the period were named Mary. But only 4.4% of *pairs* of women (21% times 21%) were named Mary. What percentage of pairs of Marys in the same family were important enough to rate an ossuary inscription? Impossible to say, but it sounds like a very rare event.
In the case of the family of Jesus of Nazareth, we know he was associated with two very important Marys, namely his mother and Mary Magdalene, so this seems to be very strong evidence linking Talpiot to Jesus of Nazareth, stronger than just the name frequencies alone would imply, although I do not know a way to quantify this.
A bit of background here for those not up on the names and the numbers–what we call the “onomastics”–that is, the science of analyzing the proper names of Jewish men and women in the time of Jesus as to both their etymology and frequency.
First, as Tal Ilan’s work has shown, “women are greatly underrepresented” in our ancient records, constituting only 11.2% of all named persons in our sources, which give us 2509 named men against only 317 named women.[2]
Second, not all ossuaries of this period are inscribed. In fact, inscriptions are more the exception than the rule. For example, of the 897 ossuaries included in the Rahmani catalogue only about 227, or approximately 25% are inscribed. That means that 75% of ossuaries have no inscriptions at all.[3]
This means that the Talpiot Jesus tomb is notable on two counts. First, it has an extraordinary high percentage of inscribed ossuaries–six out of a total of ten. And second, two of those six names are names of women. Just to take one parallel example, the “Tomb of the Shroud,” in Akeldama, that Boaz Zissu, Shimon Gibson, and I investigated in 2000.[4] This tomb had a total of eight ossuaries with only two inscribed–one Maria, the other Salome. That two women were noted seems to speak for their prominence.
All the more so in the Talpiot tomb. I have written extensively of the “Marys” in Jesus’ life here. If you missed that post take a look, and think about it in terms of Prof. Sills’s observation.
