JERUSALEM
— Hailed by some as the most significant of all Christian relics but
dismissed by skeptics amid accusations of forgery, misinterpretation and
reckless speculation, two ancient artifacts found here have set off a
fierce archaeological and theological debate in recent decades.
At
the heart of the quarrel is an assortment of inscriptions that led some
to suggest Jesus of Nazareth was married and fathered a child, and that
the Resurrection could never have happened.
Now,
the earth may have yielded new secrets about these disputed
antiquities. A Jerusalem-based geologist believes he has established a
common bond between them that strengthens the case for their
authenticity and importance.
The first artifact
is an ossuary, or burial box for bones, bearing the Aramaic inscription
“James son of Joseph brother of Jesus,” that the Israeli collector who
owns it says he bought from an East Jerusalem antiquities dealer in the
1970s. More than a decade ago, the government Israel Antiquities
Authority declared the “brother of Jesus” part of the inscription a
forgery and pressed charges against the collector; a Jerusalem court
ruled in 2012 that the state had failed to prove its case.
The
second artifact is a tomb unearthed at a building site in the East
Talpiot neighborhood of East Jerusalem in 1980 and thrust into the
limelight by a 2007 documentary
movie, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.” The film was produced by James Cameron
(“Titanic”) and written by Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-born filmmaker
based in Toronto. It was first broadcast on the Discovery Channel in
2007.
The
burial chamber, which subsequently became known as the Talpiot Tomb,
contained 10 ossuaries, some with inscriptions that have been
interpreted as “Jesus son of Joseph,” “Mary” and other names associated
with New Testament figures. The group of names led Mr. Jacobovici and
his supporters to argue that this was probably the tomb of the family of
Jesus of Nazareth, a sensational claim rejected by most archaeologists
and experts, who said that such names were very common at that time.
Critics
like Amos Kloner, the Jerusalem district archaeologist at the time,
essentially accused Mr. Jacobovici of jumping to conclusions to promote
his movie.
Mr.
Jacobovici and his supporters say that if it could be proved that the
so-called James ossuary, whose provenance is unclear, originated in the
Talpiot Tomb, the names on it, added to the cluster of names found in
the tomb, would bolster the chances that the tomb belonged to the family
of Jesus of Nazareth.
Enter
the geologist, Aryeh Shimron. He is convinced he has made that
connection by identifying a well-defined geochemical match between
specific elements found in samples collected from the interiors of the
Talpiot Tomb ossuaries and of the James ossuary.
When
the Talpiot ossuaries were discovered, they were covered by a thick
layer of a type of soil, Rendzina, that is characteristic of the hills
of East Jerusalem and was apt to impose a unique geochemical signature
on the ossuaries buried beneath it.
“I
think I’ve got really powerful, virtually unequivocal evidence that the
James ossuary spent most of its lifetime, or death time, in the Talpiot
Tomb,” Dr. Shimron said in an interview in the lobby of the King David
Hotel here as he presented his as-yet unpublished findings to a reporter
for the first time.
An
unlikely Indiana Jones, Dr. Shimron, 79, was born in the former
Czechoslovakia and is an expert in plaster. Now retired as a senior
researcher of the Geological Survey of Israel, a government institute specializing in earth sciences, he has been involved in archaeological geology for the last 20 years.
Dr.
Shimron based his research on the theory that an earthquake that
convulsed Jerusalem in A.D. 363 flooded the Talpiot Tomb with tons of
soil and mud, dislodging its entrance stone and, unusually, covering the
chalk ossuaries entirely.
“The soil created a kind of vacuum,” he said. “The composition of the tomb was simply frozen in time.”
For
the last seven years, Dr. Shimron has been studying the chemistry of
samples from chalk crust scraped from the underside of the Talpiot
ossuaries and, more recently, from the James ossuary. He has also
studied samples of soil and rubble from inside the ossuaries. In
addition, for comparative purposes he has examined samples from
ossuaries from about 15 other tombs.
Mr. Jacobovici, who has been documenting the research for another movie, said “the production” financed the lab work.
The
Israel Antiquities Authority provided access to most of the ossuaries
and carried out the major part of the sampling under the direction of
Dr. Shimron. A spokeswoman for the authority said that it had provided
some technical assistance for Mr. Jacobovici’s movie but that it was
“not part of the loop.”
Dr.
Shimron was looking for unusual amounts of elements derived from
Rendzina soil, like silicon, aluminum, magnesium, potassium and iron, as
well as for specific trace elements, including phosphorus, chrome and
nickel — signature components of the type of clayey East Jerusalem soil
that he says filled the Talpiot Tomb during the earthquake. The
findings, he says, clearly place the James ossuary in the same
geochemical group as the Talpiot Tomb ossuaries.
“The evidence is beyond what I expected,” he said.
Today
the Talpiot Tomb is sealed underground beneath a concrete slab in a
courtyard between nondescript apartment buildings on East Talpiot’s Dov
Gruner Street, and its ossuaries are under the custodianship of the
Israel Antiquities Authority. The James ossuary is back with its owner,
Oded Golan, the collector, who lives in Tel Aviv and keeps the box in a
secret location.
Yet Dr. Shimron’s findings seem likely to reawaken the controversies of the past.
There
is the notion that burial remains, including bone matter, of Jesus of
Nazareth would suggest that there could have been no bodily
resurrection. Moreover, speculation that one of the bone boxes found in
Talpiot may have belonged to Mary Magdalene, while another bore the
inscription “Judah son of Jesus,” has only added to the general
contentiousness of the finds.
Although
10 ossuaries were unearthed in Talpiot, only nine remain. Though
archaeologists said the 10th was a plain, broken box that got thrown
away, this, too, has spurred questions and conspiracy theories,
including theories that the James ossuary was the 10th and was somehow
spirited away.
Mr.
Golan, the collector, recently gave Dr. Shimron access to his James
ossuary for testing but said he was skeptical about the results.
For
one thing, Mr. Golan said in a telephone interview, he bought the
ossuary in 1976 at the latest, whereas the Talpiot Tomb was excavated in
1980.
(Had Mr. Golan purchased the ossuary after 1978, it could have been reclaimed by the state under Israel’s antiquities law.)
Even
if the chemistry is correct, the James ossuary could have come from
another tomb in East Talpiot, Mr. Golan posited, adding that such
research required samples from a much broader test base.
“It
is very interesting but not enough to determine anything conclusively,”
Mr. Golan said of Dr. Shimron’s work. “You would need samples from at
least 200 to 300 caves.”
Shimon
Gibson was among the Antiquities Authority archaeologists who entered
the newly exposed Talpiot Tomb in 1980. He said recently that it was
clear that the underground entrance to the tomb had been open since
antiquity and that the tomb had filled with soil abruptly as a result of
a single quick event — possibly an earthquake.
Dr.
Gibson and other archaeologists concluded that tomb raiders had
probably been there during the Byzantine period. But he discounted any
possibility that the James ossuary had been spirited away when the tomb
was uncovered.
“I
myself have excavated a handful of tombs that were open and filled with
soil,” Dr. Gibson said. “Personally I don’t think the James ossuary has
anything to do with Talpiot.”
Still,
Dr. Gibson said, the scholarly community was eagerly awaiting the
publication of Dr. Shimron’s results in a scientific journal for peer
review.
Dr.
Shimron, meanwhile, said he was bracing for an inevitable storm of
criticism, including from people who find it anathema that a scientist,
as he put it, should be “playing around with Jesus and Mary’s bones.”
No comments:
Post a Comment