The “Tomb of the Shroud” which was discovered and investigated in 2000 by Shimon Gibson, Boaz Zissu, and me, with a team of our UNC Charlotte students  in the summer of 2000, continues to yield up many scientific secrets about life and death in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus. I related the basic story of the exciting discovery of this freshly robbed tomb in the Introduction to my book The Jesus Dynasty in 2006 and Shimon Gibson has recently provided a more thorough analysis in his new book, The Final Days of Jesus: The Archaeological Evidence (HarperOne, 2009). We published a preliminary report in the journal Hadashot Arkheologiyot (vol. 111: 2000, pp. 70-72, figs. 138-139) but a major monograph is planned for 2011 and various aspects of the research are beginning to appear in scientific journals. Although the burial shroud itself continues to receive great public interest (see the latest in today’s The Daily Mail), other aspects of research on this tomb are quite notable. DNA profiles were done on all the bones in the tomb, so far as we know for the first time in an ancient tomb in Jerusalem from the Herodian period. We also have the only substantial example of male hair from the period (lice free, cut reasonably short, and well groomed), and most important, the earliest case of leprosy ever found–in the Holy Land or elsewhere. The significance of the latter discovery is a major contribution to our understanding of ancient disease and has recently been published in the current issue of the Public Library of Science Journal. Yesterday’s Jerusalem Post had a nice feature update on the tomb and its secrets, highlighting the leprosy finding:

Remains in tomb near Old City show first known case of leprosy
Dec. 15, 2009

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich , THE JERUSALEM POST
DNA taken from the shrouded remains of a man discovered in a tomb next to the Old City of Jerusalem shows him to be the first human proven to have suffered from leprosy, according to Hebrew University researchers and North American and British collaborators. They published their findings in the December 16 issue of the PLoS One – the US Public Library of Science journal.

Prof. Mark Spigelman and Prof. Charles Greenblatt of the Sanford F. Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at HU in Jerusalem, along with Prof. Carney Matheson and Kim Vernon of Lakehead University in Canada, Prof. Azriel Gorski of New Haven University and Dr. Helen Donoghue of University College London performed the molecular investigation. The archeological excavation was led by Prof. Shimon Gibson, Dr. Boaz Zissu and Prof. James Tabor on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The burial cave, known as the Tomb of the Shroud, is located in the lower Hinnom Valley near the Jaffa Gate and part of a first century CE cemetery known as Akeldama, or “Field of Blood” (mentioned in the Book of Matthew 27:3-8, and Acts 1:19 in the Christian Bible). It is located adjacent to the spot where Judas is said to have committed suicide.

The tomb of the shrouded man is also located next to the tomb of Annas, the high priest (6 CE to 15 CE), who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest who betrayed Jesus to the Romans. It is thus believed that this shrouded man was either a priest or a member of the aristocracy. Gibson suggests that the view from the tomb would have looked directly toward the Second Temple.

The tomb is very unusual because it is clear that this man, whose remains are dated by radiocarbon methods to 1 CE to 50 CE, did not receive a subsequent burial. Secondary burials were common practice at the time, when the bones were removed after a year and placed in an ossuary (a bone box made of stone). In this case, however, the entrance to this part of the tomb was completely sealed with plaster. Spigelman believes this is because the man had suffered from leprosy and died of tuberculosis, as DNA of both diseases was found in his bones.

Historically, disfiguring diseases such as leprosy led to the sufferer being ostracized from their community. However, a number of indications – the location and size of the tomb, the type of textiles used as shroud wrappings, and the clean state of the hair – suggest that the shrouded individual was a fairly affluent member of Jerusalem society, and that tuberculosis and leprosy may have crossed social boundaries at that time.

This is also the first time fragments of a burial shroud have been found from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shroud is very different to that of the Turin Shroud, until now assumed to be the one that was used to wrap the body of Jesus after his crucifixion. Unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud, this is made up of a simple two-way weave, as textile historian Dr. Orit Shamir was able to demonstrate.

Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

The excavation also found a clump of the shrouded man’s hair, which had been ritually cut before he was buried. These are both unique discoveries because organic remains are only rarely preserved in the Jerusalem area owing to the soil’s high humidity levels.

Spigelman and Greenblatt state that the origins and development of leprosy are largely obscure. Leprosy in the Jewish Bible may well refer to skin diseases such as psoriasis. The leprosy known to us today was thought to have originated in India and brought over via bacteria to the Near East and Mediterranean countries during the Hellenistic period. The results from the First Century Tomb of the Shroud fill a vital gap in our knowledge of this disease, they said.

Furthermore, the new research has shown that molecular pathology clearly adds a new dimension to the archeological exploration of disease in ancient times and a better understanding of the evolution, geographic distribution and epidemiology of disease and social health in antiquity.

The co-infection of both leprosy and tuberculosis here and in 30 percent of DNA remains in Israel and Europe from the ancient and modern period provided evidence for the postulate that the medieval plague of leprosy was eliminated by an increased level of tuberculosis in Europe as the area urbanized.

A few months ago I published a blog post about an anonymous evangelical Christian author who went by the pseudonym “Servetus the Evangelist” who had self-published a new and challenging biblical study on the Trinity titled: The Restitution of Jesus Christ. The original plan was that the author, a well known evangelical, would reveal his identity on the 500th anniversary of Michael Servetus’s birth, but in the meantime, as a kind of playful contest, would release weekly clues as to his identity and invite readers to make guesses.

Recently “Servetus” has announced a change of mind. He promises to reveal his identity this coming Thursday, on November 19th. The following announcement has appeared on his Website:

ANNOUNCEMENT!!! October 18, 2009
I have decided to end this contest and reveal my identity as the author of The Restitution of Jesus Christ on November 19, 2009, almost two years earlier than planned. I will tell on this webpage who I am. And I will tell about the interesting development that has caused me to change these plans. It is something totally unexpected and that I could not have foreseen. Yet I am very excited about it.

Stay tuned, we don’t have long to wait…

I have a new “Op-Ed” piece just posted at the Web site Bible & Interpretation. If you don’t know the site you might spend some profitable time exploring its many features and thick archives, drawing in a “Who’s Who” from the world of Biblical Studies and Archaeology.

My essay deals with the thorny question of whether or not the description of the “Last Days of Jesus” (scholars call this the “Passion Narrative) in the Gospel of John is dependent or independent of Mark, our earliest Gospel. And further, if John is independent, as I argue, does it rest upon sources that might in fact be more primitive, and potentially more reliable, for getting at the “historical Jesus.” You can read the entire essay here:

“The Gospel of Mark: Priority Does not Mean Primacy“

It has been my observation that so much that has been written about the tomb found in 1980 in East Talpiot south of the Old City of Jerusalem, the so-called “Jesus tomb,” has been heavy laden with emotion, presuppositions, and agendas both hidden and more obvious. Accordingly, it was refreshing to read the enlightening essay by Jerry Lutgen, “The Talpiot Tomb: What are the Odds?”  recently posted on the Web site “Bible Interpretation.” You can read it in full here:

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/tomb357926.shtml

Mr. Lutgen’s point might be taken to be an obvious one, mainly that presuppositions heavily influence the work of even the most sober and scientifically oriented statisticians but I found his treatment clear and helpful in sorting through the complex maze of mathematics related to the cluster of names on the ossuaries from the Talpiot tomb. He takes for his comparisons the papers of three statistical studies by Andrey Feuerverger, Randall Ingermanson, and Kevin Kilty & Mark Elliot, and tries to get at the heart of the matter of what drives the numbers, and thus affects the outcomes or conclusions on probability.

Lutgen’s work supports a position I have advocated for quite some time regarding the application of statistical methods to the Talpiot tomb.

I do not think it is possible to construct any meaningful statistical model that will tell us whether this tomb, or any other, might be the hypothetical Jesus of Nazareth family tomb. There are simply too many variables and no one could account for them all, or even anticipate them. Who would be in such a tomb? Where would it be located? How large would it be (inner family only or wider circles)? Would ossuaries likely be plain or decorated? Would inscriptions be Aramaic or Greek or both? And so on and on it goes. The point is we can neither know nor accurately imagine any of these things? The list of potentially factored variables could be infinite.

The function of statistics with regard to onomastics is to establish simple probabilities. That is, what is the likelihood that this particular cluster of names (taken either in generic form, e.g. Yehoshua/Mariam/Yehosef or nickname form Yeshua/Maria/Mariamene/Yose) might occur more than once? That is it. In my own work I have preferred to be conservative and use generic forms of the names in the Talpiot tomb, forms that are then much less rare than those we actually have. But the calculations are firm and the method is sound.

For example, if we had a tomb with the four most common male and female names: Joseph, Judah, Mary, and Salome, with no patrynomic tags, we might have hundreds of tombs with such a cluster based on standard name frequency data for 2nd Temple Palestinian Judaism. These data hold up quite well for ossuaries as well as other onomastic data (literary, inscripitions) taken as a whole (Rahmani compared with say Tal Ilan, or Hachlili).

In the case of the Talpiot names, the data show that this cluster, in these relationships, would not occur more than once, even in a high estimate of Jerusalem population over several decades/ generations. Such a conclusions does not establish mathematically the probability that this is the Jesus of Nazareth family tomb. It has to do with the rarity of the cluster. In other words, it is a response to the oft repeated claim–”oh, the names are common,” with the implications that any number of tombs of the period might contain this same configuration of names. This is the approach that Fuchs used in accessing how common it would have been to have a “James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The probabilities can be worked out with precision and the data on frequency of name distributions is sound and reliable. Essentially, this is what Feuerverger’s work on probability involves, though he did factor in various caveats in order to be as conservative as possible in his calculations. This is the Ockham’s razor of probability theory.

Randy Ingermanson and others have suggested that a more Bayesian model be used on the Talpiot inscriptions but I think the task is exceedingly problematic in that it rests upon an infinitely variable prediction of possibilities and expectations, many of which are historically disputable, that are impossible to gauge in a quantifiable way. I surely do not want to discount these efforts and I have welcomed all of these studies, but in terms of method and task, the two approaches are “apples” and “oranges.” I wonder if we will be any nearer to saying anything mathematically about the names in this tomb fitting, or not fitting, an imagined tomb of Jesus of Nazareth than we are at present. As I see it, the identification task has not to do with mathematics or probability, but with proposopography, the kind of thing that Rollston and Bauckham have begun to explore. If one can show that these names either fit, or do not fit, what we as historians might posit as a hypothetical “Jesus family tomb,” then we have something to discuss. Thus our tasks when it comes to the names are: epigraphy, statistics, and finally, history or prosopography. I have published my own attempt at that task in the periodical Near Eastern Archaeology 69:3-4 (2006):132-136, which can be downloaded in PDF format here: TalpiotNEA-Tabor

I want to commend Biblical Archaeology Review and editor Hershel Shanks for the sequence of articles on Morton Smith and “Secret Mark” in the current issue of BAR (November/December, 2009) which I just received this week. In my view the treatment was factual, fair, and quite comprehensive and I agree wholly and without equivocation with Koester and Shanks that Morton Smith did not forge the letter of Clement of Alexandria that contains the quotations to so-called “Secret” version of Mark. What one then makes of these passages is another subject but they surely go back authentically to Clement in the 3rd century CE, not to Morton Smith in the 20th. Here I have to respectfully disagree with my colleagues Bart Ehrman and Birger Pearson.

I knew Prof. Smith quite well as he so graciously helped me with my Ph.D. dissertation on Paul (Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise 1989) at Chicago back in the 1970s, just when all the controversies broke over first his Harvard volume, and the popular Harper volume Jesus the Magician to follow.  His devotion to my project gained him nothing, and he was at Columbia, and had nothing officially to do with Chicago or my committee (I wrote under Jonathan Z. Smith), but he loved ideas and recognized in my fledgling attempts to enter the field of “Jewish magic,” a beginning scholar who wanted to produce something of quality. He spent hours heavily annotating my dissertation chapters and wrote me these wonderful handwritten notes with citations and suggestions that I treasure to this day.  I will never forget when a photo-copy of the manuscript of Sefer HaRazim arrived in the mail, prior to it being available in print, compliments of Prof. Smith. He would not even let me pay him for the copy costs or postage. Over the next twenty years we often spent time together at the annual meetings and on other occasions and he came to visit us when I was teaching at William and Mary.  He was a regular participant and contributor to our SBL seminar over the years dealing with Greco-Roman idea of the “Divine and the Human.” I think I can say I knew him fairly well, both professionally and personally. Those of us who did know him find these charges of mendacious duplicity and forgery inconceivable and insulting to the kind of scholar and human being that Smith was.

In terms of the arguments themselves, the BAR articles cover things well but the Scholem correspondence, in my view, settles things once for all for anyone who takes the time to read it. I covered this recent turn in the story and controversy in a previous post on this blog: http://jamestabor.com/2009/02/02/latest-on-the-secret-gospel-of-mark/