The Tomb of Jesus and His Family

On Sunday March 4 at 9:00 p.m., the Discovery Channel showed a film about the archeological finding of a tomb in Jerusalem which, according to the producers, contained the remains of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, Matthew the brother of Jesus, and Judah, the son of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. My advice is to treat the whole thing with profound skepticism. The newspapers heralded the story as a major revolution in religious thought. Surely, if the remains in the tomb turned-out to be the bones of Jesus, and if Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a son by her, the core of Christian belief would be undercut. But there is good reason to doubt that the boxes (“ossuaries”) found in the tomb really contained the bones of the Holy Family.

In the first place, this is not a new discovery. The tomb and the ossuaries were discovered in 1980. If they really were the remains of Jesus and his family, why haven’t we heard about them before now? If these archeological finds were authentic, it would have rocked the world of religion in 1980. Instead, nothing has been heard for 27 years.

Secondly, there is no basic agreement as to the inscriptions on the ossuaries. The people producing the film claim that they are the names of Jesus’ family, but others say that the inscriptions are not at all clear. Moreover, the names Jesus (Jeshua), Mary (Maria), Joseph (Yosef), and Matthew (Matia) were common names in first century Israel. The film’s producers claim that the odds of a convergence of so many names from the holy family in one tomb is over 600 to 1, but that is no argument for the authenticity of the ossuaries. Moreover, why would the tomb of Jesus’ “family” be in Jerusalem rather than Nazareth?

A large part of my skepticism is based on the claim that there is a missing ossuary from the tomb and that it is probably the “James Ossuary” that surfaced some years ago. Proponents of that ossuary claimed that it had contained the bones of James the brother of Jesus. Careful examination by experts revealed, however, that it was a fake. The fake had been created by a skilled Israeli dealer of antiquities. He was selling such forgeries for large amounts of money.

At one time it was widely believed that the Shroud of Turin was Jesus’ burial cloth which had miraculously retained his negative image. People believed this despite the fact that there was great conflict between the Gospels and the facts about the shroud. For example, the Gospel of John says that the body of Jesus was wrapped in “strips of linen,” not a single cloth. The Shroud is one large piece of cloth showing a whole body and head. Anyway, this was all made moot when carbon dating of the Shroud proved that it was created in the thirteenth century, not the first.

If such a spectacular find of Jesus’ tomb was authentic, one would expect the leading biblical scholars in the world to have written something about it. Yet I have spent a lifetime reading their works, and there is nothing. You can bet that if there were some validity to the archeological finds, scholars like Raymond E. Brown, John P. Meier, E.P. Sanders, Reginald H. Fuller, Bart D. Ehrman, James D.G. Dunn, Paula Fredriksen, and many others would have written about it. They obviously did not consider it worthy of comment. It is doubtful that these scholars would have wanted to cover up the truth. They have not hesitated to put the accuracy of the New Testament in question.

These and other scholars have pointed out the conflict in the different Gospel stories about the resurrection. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, on Easter Sunday Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” went to the tomb. However, the Gospel of Mark says that the two Marys and Salome went. Luke writes that Mary Magdalene went with Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and other women. Matthew says that the stone was removed by an angel when the women arrived, but Mark and Luke say it had already been removed. Matthew says that when the women arrived, an angel was outside the tomb, but Mark says the angel was inside the tomb. Luke says there were two men inside the tomb. In Matthew and Luke the two women rush from the tomb to tell the disciples, but Mark says that they said nothing to anyone. Other post-resurrection stories are also in conflict.

The account of the resurrection by the first Gospel writer, Mark, originally ended in Mark 16:8 with the story of the women going to the tomb. There was nothing about Jesus appearances after that. Scholars agree that the parts of Mark about Jesus’ appearances after that (Mark 16:9-21) were inserted into the Gospel by Christian scribes long after the original Gospel was written. They are not contained in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospels. The portions in Matthew and Luke about the resurrection are based on the gospel of Mark and are therefore very suspect.

While a claim about Jesus’ tomb may be exciting to some, it should, like all such stories, be taken with a grain of salt. To me, the best position to take is skepticism about everything, especially archeological claims to authentic biblical finds.