.JPG){kind=small}
Posts
This article is subject to change as I do further research! There are several aspects about the inscriptions that I need look into yet.
In 1980 a tomb was discovered in east Talpiot, a section in Jerusalem. This tomb is underneath an apartment building, this occurs in the Middle East. While building they came across it. In 1996 the BBC asked the question, “is this the burial tomb of Jesus?” and nobody gave it the time of day. However, in 2007, the Discovery Channel aired the documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” where it was claimed that two bone boxes, found in the tomb contained the bones of Jesus Christ, his wife, Mary Magdalene, and their son, Judas. What does this mean? If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, as Paul said, our faith is in vain and we of all people should be the most pitied. Therefore, this documentary requires a thorough investigation and response.
In our media saturated culture, people took this documentary seriously. Why? With 50% of college age adults, being illiterate from one degree to another, only 25% can read and understand technical writings, leaving the other 25% between the two extremes. Thus the average Christian today, when hearing about this are extremely shaken to their core. They have no clue what to do. Unfortunately, our culture, being a microwave culture doesn't have the patience to wait for a thorough scholarly response. Scholarship takes years. Since this documentary has been out, massive amounts of research has been done.
In Israel, in the 1st Century, there were two forms of tombs. One around the Jerusalem area, and you had to be pretty wealthy to have this kind of a tomb. They would use a cave, likely they would cut the tomb out of bedrock, hence its expensive nature. Inside this kind of tomb it would be 5 or 6 feet tall, when you go down the steps and walk in. Around the edges there would be shafts called “loculi” and these would be a couple feet wide and five to six feet deep. The Jews had 24 hours to bury a person, they would take a deceased body, wash it, clothe it in linen, and then slide into one of the loculi. The dead body would be laid for roughly a year. Once the body had fully decomposed, they would go back in and all that would be left would be bones. They would then gather them up and placed inside a limestone bone box called an “ossuary”. These ossuaries are generally large enough to fit the longest bone, the femur. Sometimes they would place more than one person inside one of these boxes. 25% of the time, they would inscribe the name of the person on the side. So a name would be inscribed on the side of the ossuary a name or various names, depending on how many individuals there were in the box. They would then be placed inside a smaller chambers that would be carved into the walls of the tomb. One thing that must be remembered, these tombs are not only for an immediate family. These would be for even extended family, grandparents, uncles, cousins, etc. In this society a lot of people would die very young, you might marry up to three times. Then these people would be buried when they died in the family tomb, their children and family members too. But not only this, you would also have your servants if they didn't have anywhere to be buried. One tomb was found with 14 ossuaries and 88 skeletons, this is a serious extended family. This practice roughly existed for about one hundred years, it stopped around 66-70 A.D. During the Jewish/Roman war. There are examples of some ossuaries that go beyond by roughly 50 years.
So when they say that they found the Jesus Family Tomb, this information needs to come to mind.
In the Talpiot tomb there were a total of ten ossuaries. One ended up missing, now there are nine and out of these nine, six have names on them. This is in itself odd. But anyways, Dr. Shimon Gibson, who was one of the original excavators, says about this tomb “I would say this is a common Jewish tomb from the 1st Century A.D. And with ossuaries that belong to the family members, and they scrolled on the sides of them family member names, and that's about it.”
: Dr. Amos Kloner, who was in Charge of the excavation of the Talpiot Tomb (Archeologist). “Generally speaking, the tomb at the time looked like a common one, an ossuary burial place. In this case, ten ossuaries, with six inscriptions.”
This is considered to be a common tomb because the names in it, were common names. Here are the names: Matthew, Maria/Mary, Mariamne/Mary, Yose/Joseph, then two of the ossuaries have the controversial inscriptions, Judah/Judas son of Jesus, and “Yeshua bar Yosef”.
The documentary sensationalizes the importance of this inscription, “...and on one of the ossuaries that was discovered in the Talpiot tomb written in Aramaic, was an astonishing name, “Yeshua bar Yosef”.
Many Christians were bothered by this, but the fact is, is that the name Joseph is the second most popular male name at that time. The only more common name is Simon/Simeon. There are a total of 45 ossuaries that have the name Joseph on them, 22 ossuaries have the name Jesus. What about the fact that this ossuary has “Jesus son of Joseph”. How about some statistics? Over the length of the period of ossuaries, about a hundred years, it is estimated that there were roughly 80,000 males in Jerusalem during that period of a hundred years. If one in ten of these have the name “Jesus” how many of them would have Josephs for a Father? There were roughly over 1,000 men named Jesus whose father was named Joseph. So before we even start, there is a thousand to one chance that this is Jesus' tomb. That's only if you concede several things.
15% of males were named Jesus. Mary is the most common name and there are two in the Talpiot Tomb. 1 in 4 women had the name Mary. And if you include derivatives 1 in 2 would have the name Mary.
Epigrapher, Dr. Stephen Pfann, studies the inscriptions on the hundreds of ossuaries that are held at an Israeli warehouse stated, “They've [Documentary] evaluated this from the standpoint of the common person on the street rather than according to what the common person on the street, lets say, 2,000 years ago would understand if you saw that there was a “Jesus son of Joseph”. These were very very common names and its kind of making the mountain out of a mole hill type of thing.”
In Jerusalem, at the time of Jesus, there was a very small variety of names in common use. Scholars have accounted for only 16 names that made up roughly 80% of the total population of the time. All of the names found in the Talpiot tomb are on the list of the most common 16 names of the period. Maria/Mary at number 3, Yosef/Joseph at number 4, Yudah, Judah at number 5, Martha at number 9, Yeshua/Jesus at number 10, and Mattai/Matthew at number 13.
Since the ossuaries that were found in the Talpiot tomb have the most common names it is next to impossible to identify them with any one family. Because the nam
es could easily represent practically any family living at the time. To isolate the Talpiot tomb from the rest of the other 1000 tombs in and around Jerusalem, you would have to argue that the names within the Talpiot tomb were somehow unique. This is exactly what the certain film makers and authors have attempted to do, the narrator says,
“then on a fifth ossuary, they uncovered another inscription, the inscription has two parts, the second part reads, Mara. The first part is a diminutive of Mariamne”
the film then goes to the director of the film, Simcha Jacobovici talking with another gentleman, who asks,
“Let's say in this very tomb of Talpiot, the second Mary was clearly identifiable as Mary Magdalene, lets say, what would be your reaction inside this class?” the man the responds, “it would be fascinating and certainly draw much more attention and raise many more questions.”
“MAPIAMEKAIMAPA” Mary Magdalene's Ossuary Inscription
There might be two ways to read this inscription as it isn't written well.
Mary Ossuary Inscription
But is there any reason to connect this inscription with Mary Magdalene? I need to inform you, that this is my hypothesis. I am not a paleographer or an epigrapher. I emailed a gentleman that I know, who made a documentary in refutation of Discovery's documentary, from which I am getting information for some of this lecture, about my hypothesis. So I am waiting for a response on this. But I am going to present my hypothesis, which by my own estimations is probably not new since the Discovery's Documentary came out almost three years ago already.
The first part of the inscription which is “MAPIAMH”, this is only Mariamne. Dr. Stephen Pfann notes concerning this portion of the inscription, “It is no unique name, its the most common name used for the formal name for Mariam or Mary...” Dr. Amos Kloner, notes, “The connection between Mariame and Maria Magdalena is insufficient.” The word for Magdalene isn't too different in Greek, “Μαγδαληνὴ”. What about the rest, “KAIMARA” can only mean, “and Mary/Maria”. So the inscription better reads, “Mariam and Mary”. Last of all, the inscription is written in minuscule. Miniscule Greek didn't come around until centuries later.
Also, another important aspect, this Mary could be a wife of an uncle from fifty years earlier. It doesn't have to be immediate family. The Jesus in the family tomb may not have even known the two Marys.
“Yeshua Bar Yosef” Jesus son of Joseph
In “The Lost Tomb of Jesus”, Simcha Jacobovici, saying,
“There are a whole bunch of unique things. Yosa, which you find in this tomb, and that specific variation of the name, you only find in the Gospel of Mark, as a brother of Jesus. Only in this tomb!”
Dr. Amos Kloner, in response to this noted, “There were...at least two other ossuaries, on which the name “Yeshua bar Yosef” were found...during the 20th Century. One of them was found in 1945, the headlines of the newspapers were half of the page, “got the remains of the family of Jesus were found by a Jewish archeologist in Jerusalem etc. But I am not surprised at all because these are the most common names.”
Dr. Stephen Pfann, “The name Yose, being the informal form of Joseph, is not unique to this tomb. The name Yose is found on many other ossuaries.”
Two other ossuaries that were found in the Talpiot tomb bear the name Jesus, first, “Jesus son of Joseph” and “Judah son of Jesus”. Which probably means that there is a lineage here. But this disqualifies it from being the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. There is no evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was ever married or had children. This is mere conjecture on the part of the Documentary.
Dr. Stephan Pfann at this point remarks, “the inscriptions that are on these ossuaries, of course are not at all what they [Documentary] pro-ported them to be...those misinterpretations were used by the film makers to try to support a theory that is untenable, that this is the family tomb of Jesus.”
Dr. Amos Kloner, “I believe that this burial chamber has nothing to do with the family from Nazareth.”
Dr. Shimon Gibson, “During the making of this television documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, the director asked me very openly, do I think this is the tomb of Jesus, is the Talpiot tomb, the family tomb of Jesus, and my answer was, no.”
Jesus
There are issues even with the name “Jesus” that appear on the boxes. There are only three possibilities for immediate family relationships, Judah, Jesus, and Joseph. That's only if we can read the name “Jesus”. There is a lot of dispute over this since the name is scribbled and people think that they're other names. But if there's no Jesus, then there's no story. Also, there could be more than one Jesus in the tomb.
DNA
As I mentioned at the outset of this lecture, I mentioned the BBC broadcast. When the producers of “The Tomb of Jesus” were asked why they were doing this, they said basically, yeah this was done but no one paid attention to it, but now we have DNA! And in our culture science is god. Again, there were 10 ossuaries, 6 with names. But whenever Jews discover ossuaries, they believe in the resurrection of the body, they immediately remove the bones and rebury them. So eight of the ten ossuaries had been emptied. Two of the ossuaries had debris that could be tested. Those two, “Jesus son of Joseph” and “Mariamne” one of the Marys. What was the result? They could only do mitochondrial DNA, they can't do Nuclear DNA, so they can't do a DNA finger print, they can only tell if there are common mothers. Conclusion: No Match. So what do the producers say, “HA! They must have been married.” But in reality it shows nothing. Whenever two people aren't related, it always means that they're married.
Presuppositions and Consistency
The Talpiot tomb cannot be Jesus of Nazareth, for one essential reason... The Bible is true. This may sound irrational but I would expound on this point by stating that, without God's revelation of Himself, we could not reason about anything. For example, if we did not have a ruler, would it make sense for people to be talking about measurements? One must have a standard by which he can appeal to, in order to make sound judgments. Therefore man's reason is founded in his faith, a faith that says that there is a point of reference by which I can appeal to. Faith, however is only as good as that which it is placed in. Men, therefore must borrow from the Christian worldview in order to place their faith in an idol. The triune God by necessity exists, thus the death, burial, and resurrection by necessity occurred.
interesting blog
ReplyDeleteGod bless you
Thanks.
ReplyDelete