Has the Family Tomb of Jesus Been Found?
By Mike Licona
Director, Apologetics and Interfaith
Evangelism
Titanic movie director James Cameron, film documentarian Simcha
Jacobovici and a few others announced that they had identified a tomb in East
Talpiot (just south of the old city of Jerusalem) in which were discovered the
skeletal remains of Jesus—son of Joseph and members of his family including,
Mary (his mother), Mary (his wife from Magdalene), Jude (his son), Joseph (his
brother), and another family member named Matthew. (The remains were
contained in burial bone boxes called "ossuaries.") The group also claims there
is a strong probability that the James' ossuary revealed in 2002 once sat in
this tomb. The tomb under discussion was actually discovered in 1980 but
little was thought of it until 1996 when the BBC aired a report suggesting that
it may be the burial tomb of Jesus' family, a claim that was dismissed by
archaeologists and scholars. The recent news is that additional evidence
has come to light through DNA testing. The book (you had to guess there
would be one!) has just been released (The Jesus Family Tomb by
Jacobovici and Pellegrino) and the television documentary The Lost
Tomb aired on The Discovery Channel on March 6.
The ramifications of such a find—if true—would be devastating to the truth
of Christianity. The apostle Paul wrote, "And if Christ has not been
raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians
15:17). In the original Greek, Paul literally writes, "worthless
your faith is," placing the word "worthless" first in the clause for
emphasis. If the bones of Jesus have been discovered, it is time for
Christians to hang up their faith and go find something else in which to
believe because we have been duped.
While I look forward to getting the entire story, there are 5 glaring
problems that immediately surface with the suggestion that the tomb of Jesus'
family has been identified in Jerusalem:
1. The ossuaries are from the wrong location. 1st-century tradition
places Jesus' burial in Jerusalem by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb that was
discovered empty shortly thereafter. Even if one rejects the historicity
of the resurrection of Jesus and posit that the body was instead moved by
Jesus' disciples, after one year his remains would have been placed in an
ossuary and transported to their final burial location. In those days,
family members were normally buried in their hometown. In Jesus' case,
this would have been Galilee, not Jerusalem. So, if Jesus was not
resurrected, we should be looking for his ossuary in Galilee. Moreover,
the Talpiot Tomb does not square with other reports of where members of Jesus'
family were buried. Eusebius (4th-century, Ecc Hist. 2.23.18) reported that a
stone marked the burial spot of James, Jesus' brother, by the Temple Sanctuary
in Jerusalem. The Talpiot tomb now being postulated is some distance away from
where that spot would have been. According to tradition that goes back to
the 6th-century, there are two traditional sites of Mary's burial spot in
Jerusalem-the Talpiot tomb isn't one of them. It is also interesting to
note that the traditional burial spots of James and Mary were all in different
locations.
2. The collection of very popular names presented is
unimpressive. Mary was the most common female name in Jesus'
day. It is estimated that one in every five women in Jerusalem at that
time had the name "Mary." In fact, there are at least six Mary's in the
New Testament.1 Joseph was the second most common male
name in Jesus' day. Jude was the fourth most popular name, Jesus was the
sixth, and Matthew the ninth. Of more than 1,000 ossuaries that have been
discovered in Jerusalem—I don't know how many have inscriptions—22 have the
name "Jesus" inscribed on them and two have "Jesus, son of Joseph." Thus, to
find six ossuaries with the names Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Mary, Jude, and Matthew
has limited value. Moreover, one cannot ignore the fact that Matthew is
among the bunch. If he wasn't a son of Jesus, who was he? He was not
listed as one of Jesus' brothers. This terribly odd factor cannot be ignored by
the sober historian. The documentary proposes that he may have been one of
Mary's ancestors, since there were 6 who could have been referred to as
"Matthew" listed in Luke's genealogy between Mary and King David (Luke
3:23-31). However, the closest may have been Mary's great-grandfather and
we should ask why his remains are in the Talpiot Tomb while others
weren't. The documentary simply glosses over this ossuary that is grossly
out of place.
3. There is strong historical evidence that Jesus was single: (a)
In 1 Corinthians 9:5, Paul states that he and Barnabas have the same right to
be married as others in their positions who are married; he then names Peter,
the other apostles, and the Lord's brothers. If Jesus had been married,
Paul would only have to mention it and there would have been no need to mention
the others; (b) In Acts 8:30-34, Phillip is talking to an officer in the
Ethiopian Army—a eunuch—who was reading the writings of Isaiah while resting on
his chariot. The passage he was reading said of the Messiah, "Who can
speak of his descendants?"2 —a question that would be
especially interesting to a eunuch; (c) Although there were two Mary's at
Jesus' cross (Jesus' mother and Mary Magdalene), Jesus made provisions for his
mother but none for the woman who was purportedly his wife? (d) There is
no mention in the New Testament that Jesus was married. Thus, the burden
of proof falls to anyone who proposes that Jesus was married. This brings
us to an important observation: There is not a shred of good evidence that
Jesus was married or had children. The passage in the Gospel of
Phillip, written 100-200 years after Jesus and to which Dan Brown referred
in The Da Vinci Code, is preserved only in a single manuscript which
contains holes that Brown conveniently supplied words for, making it appear
that Jesus and Mary had a romantic relationship. n February 2005, I had a
collegial television dialogue with Princeton professor Elaine Pagels on
the Gospel of Thomas. During the break, moderator Lee Strobel
asked us what we thought of Dan Brown's assertion that Jesus was married to
Mary Magdalene. Pagels, who is not at all sympathetic to evangelical
Christianity, rejected the notion and replied that Dan Brown is perhaps the
only person in the world who believes that Jesus and Mary were
married. With this new Talpiot Tomb proposal, Professor Pagels may now add
a few more names to her list. Here's the bottom line: If Jesus of Nazareth was
single and had no descendants, the remains of those in the Talpiot tomb do not
belong to him and his family.
4. Most importantly, the theory that the Talpiot tomb once contained the
bones of Jesus and his family cannot explain other known historical
facts. It is fairly certain that James became a Christian after the
death of his brother Jesus (AD 30 or 33) and was serving as the primary leader
of the Jerusalem Church when Paul wrote Galatians between AD 49-55. The
earliest proclamations of Paul, James, Peter, John, and the other Jerusalem
apostles is that Jesus had been resurrected. In light of this, why would
James, who was a pious Jew and who appears not to have been a follower of Jesus
through the time of his crucifixion, help perpetrate the fraud that Jesus had
resurrected when he knew where he was buried? Moreover, that shortly
after his death by crucifixion Jesus' disciples sincerely believed that he had
resurrected and appeared to them belongs to the historical bedrock that
even nearly all skeptical scholars regard as indisputable. The Talpiot
tomb theory cannot explain this fact if these same disciples knew where the
corpse of Jesus lay.
5. The DNA evidence establishes little. At best, it only links
possible familial relationships between those in the Talpiot tomb. It
cannot even suggest that the remains are those of the family of Jesus of
Nazareth.
This new book and television documentary will be fascinating and appears at
first look to be of a sensationalist genre. However, when this new
Talpiot Tomb hypothesis is weighed in the historian's scale, a few
beans may be placed on the side in its favor while a brick of historical
evidence is placed gently on the side against it. The tip of the scale
that follows is not a gentle one.
1Mary, the mother of Jesus (Matthew 1:16); Mary Magdalene
(Matthew 27:56); Mary, the mother of James and Joseph (Matthew 27:56); Mary,
the sister of Martha and Lazarus (Luke 10:39); Mary, the mother of John Mark
(Acts 12:12); Mary, a member of the church in Rome (Romans 16:6).
2Luke uses the same Greek word translated "descendants" in a similar
manner just a few chapters later in Acts 17:28.