Denver Seminary

Pre-Docudrama Viewing

What will they think of next? Dan Brown writes a novel (The DaVinci Code) that fictitiously garbles Christian history and millions of people believe it is based on fact. The end-of-the-second-century Gospel of Judas is unearthed and the normally scholarly National Geographic Society produces a documentary so biased than even skeptics like Bart Ehrman have to debunk it.

Now various news sources and websites, accompanying a Discovery Channel documentary, tout the possibility of scholars having discovered Jesus’ family tomb. Ossuaries (small bone boxes into which people were re-buried after their corpses had rotted and their skeletal remains were exhumed) in a Jerusalem tomb allegedly contain the Hebrew names for Joseph, Mary, Matthew, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Judah son of Jesus, with space for perhaps one more mini-coffin. DNA tests now demonstrate that the second Mary does not share any DNA with the remains found in the Jesus ossuary. Given the frequency of burying extended families together, it makes sense to think of this person as a wife of one of the other men, and given the location of her ossuary next to the one of Jesus, perhaps she was his wife.

One writer declares, “We’ve disproved the resurrection.” Another boasts, “At last, the first indisputable evidence that Jesus of Nazareth actually lived.” A third announces, “See, Jesus was married to Mary and they had a son named Judah.” Mighty wishful thinking on all three counts! Consider the following observations that also emerge as one reads the stories carefully.

(1) There is doubt about what some of the letters in the names’ inscriptions really say, particularly the name supposedly corresponding to Jesus. (2) The tomb (in the Talpiot neighborhood) is nowhere near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a highly likely candidate for the original site of Jesus’ death. Given ancient Jewish burial practices, the likelihood of Jesus having been buried anywhere other than close to where he was crucified is small. (3) Dan Brown’s fiction notwithstanding, there is not a shred of historical evidence to suggest that Jesus was married and much that says he was single. (4) The second Mary’s name isn’t Magdalene; it is actually three Greek (!) words that could be translated Mary the Master. But that is not a known title or form of address for the Magdalene anywhere else in antiquity.

(5) Normally when the information from tombs doesn’t match existing literary information about ancient people, the assumption is made that we haven’t found their tombs. For the sake of argument, let’s say that this tomb does contain the remains of a Joshua (the actual Hebrew) and a Miriam who had a son named Judah. That information alone virtually disproves that this tomb had anything to do with the “Holy Family,” since the Bible and serious Christian tradition unanimously agrees Jesus was unmarried and celibate.

(6) Speaking of reading carefully, most of the reports acknowledge that this tomb and all these ossuaries and their inscriptions were first discovered in 1980. And the information was made public then; there was no cover-up. So if there was any likelihood that these ossuaries had anything to do with Jesus of Nazareth, one would expect to find all kinds of hoopla in the scholarly literature and popular news releases from that day. In fact there was none. People in 1980 realized that the evidence didn’t add up.

Ah, but now we have two new pieces of scientific data, we are told. Besides the “Jesus” and “Mary” DNA being tested and found unrelated, some patina (a fancy word for the encrustation of junk built up on the surface of an object made of wood or metal over the centuries) from the ossuaries appears to match that found on the famous James ossuary that came to light just a few years ago and that was at first highly touted as belonging to “James, son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus.” That is, until it was pointed out that the inscription adding “brother of Jesus” appeared to be in a different form of handwriting and to have come from a later date. So if the James ossuary did come from this “Jesus family tomb,” that would probably be one more reason (7) for not believing it had anything to do with the famous characters by those names.

For the coup de grace, however, the sensationalizers trot out statisticians who compute some astronomically miniscule likelihood of all these names being found together in one place and having them all correspond to the biblical names associated with Jesus’ family. Of course, nothing is said about (8) the missing brothers and sisters of Jesus from this tomb. Nor does (9) any plausible explanation emerge for why one (and only one) disciple, Matthew, unrelated to this family, would show up in their tomb. Be all that as it may, unless you know something about (10) the frequency of ancient Hebrew names in Israel during the centuries surrounding the birth of Christianity, to have Joseph, Mary, Jesus, another Mary, Matthew and maybe James all crop up in one place seems just too unlikely to be coincidental.

It’s time to do some real historical research. In 2002, the Israeli scholar Tal Ilan wrote the book that will never be a bestseller (at $220 even through Best Buy) but becomes an invaluable resource in debates like this: Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, Part I: Palestine 330 BCE—200 CE (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Richard Bauckham’s outstanding 2006 volume, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)—which is affordable and which I have reviewed in the Denver Journal, accessible from the seminary’s homepage—provides the excerpts most relevant for New Testament studies.

For example, Bauckham reproduces the 99 most popular male names among Jews in Israel throughout this period from every known inscriptional and documentary source preserved or recovered. Here’s the list of the top eleven, in order, beginning with the most frequent: Simon, Joseph, Eleazar (Lazarus), Judah, Yohanan (John), Joshua (Jesus), Hananiah (Ananias), Jonathan, Mattathias/Matthias (Matthew), Menahem (Manaen), and Jacob (James). The names in parentheses are the English equivalents of the Greek versions of the Hebrew names that precede them. Notice anything interesting? Indeed, every male ossuary name from the Talpiot tomb is on the list, in positions 2, 4, 6 and 9, respectively, and, if James belonged there, too, he is number 11. Or, to use raw numerical data, we know of 218 Josephs from this period, 164 Judahs, 99 Joshuas, 62 Matthews and 40 Jacobs. And, of course, only the tiniest fraction of ancient evidence has survived the centuries.

What about the women you ask? Mary is number one! Then come Salome, Shelamzion, Martha, Joanna, Shiphra (Sapphira), Berenice, Imma and Mara. So two Marys in an extended family calls for about as many raised eyebrows as a modern Hispanic family with two Marías. For that matter, would anyone bat an eye if that same family had a José (Joseph) and a Jesús as well? Would this prove that such a family included the long lost descendants of Jesus himself?

Or take a more chronologically relevant example. Scholars have long known about (and tourists can still visit) the tomb in Bethany where inscriptions were discovered referring to Mary, Martha and Lazarus (and others). But every scholar worth his or her salt, no matter how conservative, acknowledges that those names were just so common that even to find them together in one tomb in the very town that the Bible says the three New Testament characters by those names lived proves statistically insignificant. It’s entirely possible that it happened completely by chance. There may easily have been a whole bunch families in Bethany with lots of children, including three with those names, in an age when parents had as many children as they could in hopes that a few might survive to care for them, if necessary, in their old age,

The same approach must be taken with the cluster of names in the Talpiot tomb. In fact, Bauckham’s tables extracted from Ilan’s monumental reference work add one very interesting footnote. The Hebrew woman’s name listed as ninth most common (actually tied for eighth with Imma) was Mara, like the form announced to have been found with the second Mary in the Talpiot tomb. Not only does Mara not mean Magdalene but, although it could be the Grecized feminine equivalent to the Aramaic masculine mar or “master,” it actually appears on one ossuary, discovered elsewhere in Israel much longer ago, as an alternate form of the name Martha. And the feminine form of “master,” in a highly patriarchal culture, was not used nearly as often as the masculine form. So the “Mary” that may have been a spouse to this Joshua/Jesus more likely was named Mary Martha, not Mary Magdalene, and not Mary the Master.

One of the best kept secrets in the last quarter of a century from those who try to learn history exclusively from the popular media is the massive amount of evidence that has come to light or been more accessibly compiled supporting the accuracy of the New Testament documents. For details just on the Gospels themselves, see the first book I ever wrote, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP, 1987), which will be appearing this year in substantially revised form for a twentieth-anniversary edition. Recent works by Darrell Bock, Craig Evans, Ben Witherington, Tom Wright, and a host of others all rely on solid, sober scholarship of a kind Dan Brown, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel will apparently never care to publicize. Bolstering conventional belief about anything has never made much money and that’s all it’s really about in these endeavors. (Lest you think I’m being too cynical, Darrell Bock has shared stories with me of what representatives of the major networks told him face to face he’d have to raise in millions of dollars before they’d ever consider doing it.). In a postmodern world, post-Communist world truth gives way to fiction to fuel capitalism. It is tragically reminiscent of the comment Russians used to make during their Communist era when their two major news organs were Pravda (meaning “Truth”) and Izvestia (meaning “News”): “there is no pravda in izvestia and there is no izvestia in pravda!” My, how far things have deteriorated in this country in the seventeen years since the fall of the Soviet regime!

Craig L. Blomberg
Distinguished Professor of New Testament
Denver Seminary
Littleton, CO
March 1, 2007

Post-Docudrama Viewing

Now I can comment firsthand on what was said and shown, rather than just secondhand from the pre-telecast publicity.

First, one retraction: Because the websites I visited claimed that the Discovery Channel docudrama argued that the Matthia inscription was Jesus’ disciple Matthew, my comments reflected that alleged claim. In fact, the documentary argued that this may have been Joseph’s grandfather, Matthat (as recorded in Luke 3:24), or, if this genealogy be understood as Mary’s, then her grandfather. That at least gives one possible reason for the appearance of this name in a “family tomb.”

Second, one revision: The point was well made in the show that even if the famous James ossuary, which it is suggested is the missing ossuary from this family tomb, originally read only “James son of Joseph” (without the suspect words “brother of Jesus” arguably added later), it could still belong with the other ossuaries. After all, none of the other ossuaries in this tomb (or typically elsewhere) have more than just x son of y. By the same logic, whether or not the James ossuary comes from this particular tomb, we may not have to jettison the case for its authenticity quite so quickly.

Happily, all of my other initial responses appear to remain intact, even after viewing the actual program. Perhaps I may be permitted to add even a few more.

(1) The ornate decorations on the outside of the tomb, the size of the tomb overall, and the quality of the ossuaries inside it all suggest a family of some means. Nothing is as elaborate as the Caiaphas ossuary, discovered at the beginning of the 1990s in Jerusalem, and rightly highlighted in the show as probably authentic, but everything about this “family tomb” looks well beyond what one would expect from the average lower “blue-collar” family (which is the highest socio-economic level anyone is willing to attribute to Joseph and sons) from Galilee.

(2) Not a word was said about the role of Joseph of Arimathea. Why would this New Testament character, almost universally acknowledged to be historical because his presence in the narratives is in no way theologically motivated, even need to be involved if there was such a family tomb already in existence? If such was available for reburials within a year of a person’s death, then presumably Jesus’ family had equally ample provisions available for an initial burial and scarcely needed the help of this well-meaning member of the Sanhedrin.

(3) It is true that a majority of Greek texts of Mark 6:3 read Iōsē (which yielded the KJV Joses instead of Joseph) for one of the (half-) brothers of Jesus. But the most likely original reading by the standard principles of textual criticism is neither the “Josey” nickname the film used to Anglicize this term nor the conventional Joseph, but Iōsētos (Josetos). This complicates matters further regarding issues of dating the tomb’s inscriptions, what Hebrew or Aramaic equivalent would have been most natural to use, and so on. While this may be the first ossuary to come to light with the “nickname” Josey, anyone familiar with the rabbinic literature will know that even rabbis named Jose (as it usually gets rendered in English) are common, so the mere presence of this variant of Joseph is not nearly as unusual as the film makes it sound.

(4) The ossuary purportedly of Mary Magdalene was touted as being so unusual because it was the first ossuary ever discovered with the Greek form (Mariamene) of the longer of two Hebrew versions of the name Mary (i.e., Mariamne, not Miriam). It wasn’t clear if the show was also claiming that this Hebrew form has never been found on an ossuary or not. If the point was only that the Greek form hadn’t been found before, then that is comparatively meaningless since it’s rare to find any Jewish ossuaries with Greek rather than Hebrew inscriptions. And that find alone should cast further doubt on this being a completely Jewish family’s tomb. The show argues that Mary from Magdala, being from Galilee, would have had much more interaction with the more Hellenized north of Israel (compared to Judea). But so would every other person of Jesus’ family, coming from Nazareth! And not one of the other ossuaries is in Greek. So the unique Greek inscription must have some other explanation.

If it is in fact the case that no Hebrew inscription of Mariamne has ever appeared either, then this is simply a tribute to how tiny a sample space of data the ossuaries still in existence provide, because Mariamne was in fact a very common Hebrew version of Mary during this period, as a thorough reading of Josephus discloses. King Herod (the Great) in fact had at least two Jewish wives with this name! And while the New Testament uses both Maria and Mariam to translate and transliterate, respectively, the Hebrew names for Mary, out of 54 total uses of the two names together, not once is Mariamene (Mariamne) used. If one were to apply the identical statistical approach the show did (though based on an even more inadequate sample space!), one would have to conclude that the chances of this Mary in the tomb being the Magdalene to be 0%!

(5) The show also makes a big deal out of the other Mary in the family tomb having the rare Hebrew form Mariah, which, they claim, was translated or transliterated back into Hebrew from the Latin Maria. But what Jewish Mary would have become so well known in Roman circles within a generation of Jesus’ death to have her name appear in a rare Hebrew form triggered by the Latin other than Mary, mother of Jesus? People who make these arguments really ought to learn how to open Bible concordances and consult them. As a matter of fact, in the Gospels and Acts, half of all of the 54 appearances of the name Mary, for a variety of individuals, appears in the Greek as Maria. Already in the 60s, thirty years and a bit after Jesus’ crucifixion in A.D. 30 (or 33), the Gospel writers (three of them Jews writing in Greek) were equally as likely to use Maria as Mariam for the Hebrew name Mary. Nothing about the prominence of this Mary, in Roman circles or elsewhere, may be deduced from the Hebrew form of the inscription on her ossuary. And if it is indeed a rare Hebrew form, all that means, again, is that we do not have anything remotely close enough to a large enough sample space of names on ossuaries to deduce the frequency of ancient Hebrew use of a name more generally.

(6) We need to press this point further and generalize it. In the docudrama, the statistical base for computing percentages of probability relied on frequency of names found in the more than 1000 ossuaries that have been discovered in Israel from antiquity. But literary texts, graffiti on walls and pottery, inscriptions on a whole host of media, in short, every known reference to a name needs to be taken into account in order to gain the largest sample size and the best possible sense of frequency of names. When that is done, the frequency of the names found in the supposed Jesus-family tomb only increases dramatically, making the odds of two or more families sharing these exceedingly common names not nearly so unlikely.

(7) But we can be more precise. The show’s chief probability and statistics expert very conservatively computed the probability of two families of the same era in ancient Israel having this particular cluster of names in common as 1 in 600. They also acknowledged that the probability becomes this unlikely only if Mariamene is Mary Magdalene, which we have shown is a very unlikely. But, for the sake of being equally cautious, let’s grant for discussion purposes the accuracy of their statistic. How many families lived in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day? How many would likely have been buried in there, whether or not they lived in Jerusalem? Because of the paucity of the data, estimates concerning Jerusalem’s sedentary population in that day vary greatly. But we would fall well in the middle of extreme suggestions if we adopted the numbers of 20,000 within the walled portion of Jerusalem, 100,000 in the whole area, and the potential of the region swelling to 1,000,000 at festival times.

Many Jews dreamed of being buried in or around Jerusalem, especially on the slopes of the Mt. of Olives facing the Eastern or Golden Gate to the city, because of the belief that they’d be among the first to join the Messiah when he came and stood on that Mountain to inaugurate end time events (cf. Zech. 14:4). So the telecast is correct in imagining that it’s not implausible to imagine a Galilean family having a Jerusalem family tomb. But for that very reason, one would expect there to be many other non-Jerusalemites making arrangements for family burials in or around Jerusalem. How many shall we imagine out of the approximately 4 million Jews in the empire overall? Would another 100,000 be fairly conservative on top of the 100,000 already in the area, since people would have to have some means or connection with people in Jerusalem to makes such dreams come to fruition? A family of ten (two parents and eight surviving children) might be a bit generous for estimating the average family size, but we do want to be cautious in our statistical analyses. So, take 200,000 people planning for a burial near Jerusalem, divide by ten, and you have 20,000 families. Allow for the odds of more than one family having the same cluster of names as found at Talpiot to be 1 in 600 (though once we exclude Mary Magdalene, our statisticians have already conceded that this probability is much too low). Divide 20,000 by 600 and, by sheer probability and statistics, we should expect 33 families to have this identical cluster of names. But if that number is too high, forget all the non-Jerusalemites (though of course that would exclude Jesus’ family in the process). Now we would expect only half as many such families—about 16 in number. And the size and quality of the tomb makes it likely that this was one of the more well-to-do, though not actually rich, of these sixteen. Still want to bet on the family of Jesus of Nazareth?

A final comment. Since I alluded to Darrell Bock’s experience with the major networks in the past, let me commend the people behind the follow-up Ted Koppel interviews for including him in their panel discussion. Indeed, let me commend them for all five of the invited responders—two well-known and well-respected biblical archaeologists with no axes to grind in favor of historic Christian faith, the scholar-president of Catholic University of America, an African-American female theologian from Virginia Seminary, and Bock, research professor of New Testament at Dallas. Every one of them in his or her own way raised important questions and doubts about the docudrama coming even close to demonstrating what they alleged and did so in a much more courteous spirit than the journalist/filmmaker of the show who continually rambled at length, interrupted every one else on the set, and came across as alternately defensive and sullen. He got good publicity for his book, but, it will be a quick-fizzling firework from a broader historical perspective.

March 5, 2007

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