The Jesus Tomb? ‘Titanic’ Talpiot Tomb Theory Sunk from the Start
by Ben Witherington
Remember the tale of the Titanic? How it was supposed to be impregnable, and nothing could poke holes in it? How it would never be sunk? Well all I can say is that human hubris knows no bounds, and that hasn’t changed in the last century.
On April 15th 1912 the supposedly leak proof Titanic rammed into an iceberg and sank—sank like a giant stone. Sank quickly, with great loss of life.
Why do I bring this up? Because in one of the interesting ironies in recent memory, James Cameron the movie director who made the enormously successful film “Titanic”, on the night after the Oscars, will give an Oscar winning performance at a news conference along with Simcha Jacobovici who have now produced a Discovery Channel special on the discovery of Jesus’ tomb, ossuary, bones, and that of his mother, brothers, wife, and his child Jude as well! Who knew! The show will air on March 4, 2007.
In addition we are now regaled with a book by Simcha and Charles Pellegrino entitled The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History
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First of all, I have worked with Simcha. He is a practicing Jew, indeed he is an orthodox Jew so far as I can tell. He was the producer of the Discovery Channel special on the James ossuary which I was involved with. He is a good film maker, and he knows a good sensational story when he sees one. This is such a story. Unfortunately it is a story full of holes, conjectures, and problems. It will make good TV and involves a bad critical reading of history. Basically this is old news with a new interpretation. We have known about this tomb since it was discovered in 1980. There are all sorts of reasons to see this as much ado about nothing much:
1) The statistical analysis is of course only as good as the numbers that were provided to the statistician. He couldn’t run numbers he did not have. And when you try to run numbers on a combination name such as ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ you decrease the statistical sample dramatically. In fact, in the case of ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ you decrease it to a statistically insignificant number!
Furthermore, so far as we can tell, the earliest followers of Jesus never called Jesus ‘son of Joseph’. It was outsiders who mistakenly called him that! Would the family members such as James who remained in Jerusalem really put that name on Jesus’ tomb when they knew otherwise? This is highly improbable. My friend Richard Bauckham provides me with the following statistics:
Out of a total number of 2625 males, these are the figures for the ten most popular male names among Palestinioan Jews. The first figure is the total number of occurrences (from this number with 2625 as the total for all names, you could calculated percentages), while the second is the number of occurrences specifically on ossuraies.
1. Simon/Simeon 243 59
2. Joseph 218 45
3. Eleazar 166 29
4. Judah 164 44
5. John/Yohanan 122 25
6. Jesus 99 22
7. Hananiah 82 18
8. Jonathan 71 14
9. Matthew 62 17
10. Manaen/Menahem 42 4
For women, we have a total of 328 occurrences (women’s names are much less often recorded than men’s), and figures for the 4 most popular names are thus:
Mary/Mariamne 70 42
Salome 58 41
Shelamzion 24 19
Martha 20 17
You can see at once that all the names you’re interested were extremely popular. 21% of Jewish women were called Mariamne (Mary). The chances of the people in the ossuaries being the Jesus and Mary Magdalene of the New Testament must be small indeed.
By the way, ‘Mara’ in this context does not mean Master. It is an abbreviated form of Martha. Probably tehe ossuary contained two women called Mary and Martha (Mariamne and Mara).
There are so many flaws in the analysis of the statistics themselves, that one must assume the statistician did not have the right or sufficient data to work with.
2) There is no independent DNA control sample to compare to what was garnered from the bones in this tomb. By this I mean that the most the DNA evidence can show is that several of these folks are inter-related. Big deal. We would need an independent control sample from some member of Jesus’ family to confirm that these were members of Jesus’ family. We do not have that at all.
In addition mitacondrial DNA does not reveal genetic coding or XY chromosome make up anyway. They would need nuclear DNA for that in any case. So the DNA stuff is probably thrown in to make this look more like a real scientific fact. Not so much.
3) Several of these ossuaries have very popular and familiar early Jewish names. As the statistics above show, the names Joseph and Joshua (Jesus) were two of the most common names in all of early Judaism. So was Mary. Indeed both Jesus’ mother and her sister were named Mary. This is the ancient equivalent of finding adjacent tombs with the names Smith and Jones. No big deal.
4) The historical problems with all this are too numerous to list here:
- The ancestral home of Joseph was Bethlehem, and his adult home was Nazareth. The family was still in Nazareth after he was apparently dead and gone. Why in the world would be be buried (alone at this point) in Jerusalem ? It’s unlikely.
- One of the ossuaries has the name Jude son of Jesus. We have no historical evidence of such a son of Jesus, indeed we have no historical evidence he was ever married;
- the Mary ossuaries (there are two) do not mention anyone from Migdal. It simply has the name Mary– and that’s about the most common of all ancient Jewish female names.
- We have names like Matthew on another ossuary, which don’t match up with the list of brothers’ names.
- By all ancient accounts, the tomb of Jesus was empty– even the Jewish and Roman authorities acknowledged this. Now it takes a year for the flesh to desiccate, and then you put the man’s bones in an ossuary. But Jesus’ body was long gone from Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb well before then. Are we really to believe it was moved to another tomb, decayed, and then was put in an ossuary? Its not likely.
- Implicitly you must accuse James, Peter and John (mentioned in Gal. 1-2– in our earliest NT document from 49 A.D.) of fraud and coverup. Are we really to believe that they knew Jesus didn’t rise bodily from the dead but perpetrated a fraudulent religion, for which they and others were prepared to die? Did they really hide the body of Jesus in another tomb?
We need to remember that the James in question is Jesus’ brother, who certainly would have known about a family tomb. This frankly is impossible for me to believe.
Continue reading The Jesus Tomb 1.2.
Dr. Ben Witherington III is currently a professor at the Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky since 1995. He completed his Ph.D at the University of Durham, England in 1981. During his career, he has written more than 30 books and six commentaries including: The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci (2004) and The Brother of Jesus. The Dramatic Story and Meaning of the First Archaeological Link to Jesus & His Family (2003) with Hershel Shanks. Learn more about Dr. Witherington’s credentials and work.
