The so-called Talpiyot tomb is a modest, single-chamber loculus tomb that was discovered in 1980 during construction work in Jerusalem's East Talpiyot neighborhood. The tomb was excavated on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities by Joseph Gat, and a final (scientific) report was published in 1996 by Amos Kloner. Ten ossuaries were found in the tomb, four of which are plain and the other six inscribed (five in Hebrew and one in Greek). The tomb has attracted attention because some of the names on the inscribed ossuaries correspond with figures mentioned in the New Testament in association with Jesus, specifically Yeshua (Jesus), Mariamene (Mary), and Yose (Joseph). It is mainly on this basis that the claim has been made that this is the [lost] tomb of Jesus and his family — a claim that was the subject of a Discovery
Channel program that was broadcast in March 2007. If the Talpiyot tomb is the tomb of Jesus and his family, it would mean that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher does not enshrine the site of Jesus' crucifixion and burial, a tradition that goes back at least to the time of Constantine (early fourth century C. E.; see Chapter 15). Furthermore, if true, this claim would mean that Jesus was married and had an otherwise unknown son named Judah (as one ossuary is inscribed “Yehudah son of Yeshua"), and that Jesus was not resurrected (as his remains were gathered in an ossuary).
The identification of the Talpiyot tomb as belonging to Jesus' family flies in the face of all available evidence and contradicts the Gospel accounts, which are our earliest sources of information about Jesus' death and burial. This claim is also inconsistent with evidence from these sources indicating that Jesus was a lower-class Jew. Even if we accept the unlikely possibility that Jesus' family had the means to purchase a rock-cut tomb, it would have been located in their hometown of Nazareth, not in Jerusalem. For example, when Simon, the last of the Maccabean brothers and one of the Hasmonean rulers, built a large tomb or mausoleum for his family, he constructed it in their hometown of Modiin, not in Jerusalem. In fact, the Gospel accounts indicate that Jesus' family did not own a rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem — for if they had, there would have been no need for Joseph of Arimathea to take Jesus' body and place it in his own family's rock-cut tomb! If Jesus' family did not own a rock-cut tomb, it means they also had no ossuaries.
A number of scholars, including Kloner, have pointed out that the names on the ossuaries in the Talpiyot tomb were very common among the Jewish population of Jerusalem in the first century. Furthermore, the ossuary inscriptions provide no indication that those interred in this tomb were Galilean (not Judean) in origin. On ossuaries in rock-cut tombs belonging to Judean families it was customary to indicate the ancestry or lineage of the deceased by naming the father, as, for example, Judah son of John (Yohanan); Shimon son of Alexa; and Martha daughter of Hananya. But in rock-cut tombs owned by non-Judean families (or which contained the remains of family members from outside Judea), it was customary to indicate the deceased's place of origin, as, for example, Simon of Ptolemais (Akko/Acre); Papias the Bethshanite (of Beth Shean); and Gaios son of Artemon from Berenike. If the Talpiyot tomb indeed belonged to Jesus' family, we would expect at least some of the ossuary inscriptions to reflect their Galilean origin, by reading, for example, Jesus [son of Joseph] of Nazareth (or Jesus the Nazarene), Mary of Magdala, and so on. However, the inscriptions provide no indication that this is the tomb of a Galilean family and instead point to a Judean family.
The claim that the Talpiyot tomb belongs to Jesus' family is based on a string of problematic and unsubstantiated claims, including adding an otherwise unattested Matthew (Matya) to the family of Jesus (as one ossuary is inscribed with this name); identifying an otherwise unknown son of Jesus named Judah (and assuming that Jesus was married); and identifying the Mariamene named on one of the ossuaries in the tomb as Mary Magdalene by interpreting the word Mara (which follows the name Mariamene) as the Aramaic term for “master" (arguing that Mariamene was a teacher and leader). To account for the fact that Mary/Mariamene's name is written in Greek, the filmmakers who produced the Discovery Channel documentary transform the small Jewish town of Migdal/Magdala/Tarichaea on the Sea of Galilee (Mary's hometown) into an important trading center where Greek was spoken. Instead, as in other Jewish towns of this period, generally only the upper classes knew Greek, whereas lower class Jews spoke Aramaic as their everyday language. Individually, each of these points weakens the case for the identification of the Talpiyot tomb as the tomb of Jesus' family, but collectively they are devastating.
To conclude, the identification of the Talpiyot tomb as the tomb of Jesus and his family contradicts the canonical Gospel accounts of the death and burial of Jesus and the earliest Christian traditions about Jesus. This claim is also inconsistent with all available information — historical and archaeological — about how Jews in the time of Jesus buried their dead, and specifically the evidence we have about lower-class, non-Judean families such as that of Jesus. Finally, the fact that not a single ancient source preserves any reference to or tradition about any tomb associated with Jesus aside from Joseph of Arimathea's is a loud silence indeed, especially as Paul's writings and some sources of the synoptic Gospel accounts antedate 70 C. E. Had Jesus' family owned a rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem, presumably some of his followers would have preserved the memory of its existence (if not its location), and venerated the site. In fact, our earliest sources contradict the identification of the Talpiyot tomb as the tomb of Jesus and his family. For example, Hegesippus refers to James' grave in the second century C. E. — but he seems to describe a pit grave or trench grave marked by a headstone (as discussed earlier), and makes no reference to James having been interred with his brother Jesus in a rock-cut family tomb.
World History
