The Ancients - Jewish Burial at the Time of Jesus

Episode Date: April 4, 2021

According to the Gospels, Jesus died and was removed from the cross on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath (Friday afternoon), before his body was placed in the family tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. For 'three days and three nights', Jesus’s body was entombed. But do the accounts of his burial correlate with the archaeology? Do they accurately reflect the manner in which the Jews of ancient Jerusalem buried their dead?To talk through this extraordinary topic, from what we know about ancient Jewish burial customs to the Talpiot Tomb controversy, I was delighted to be re-joined by Professor Jodi Magness. Jodi has appeared on the Ancients once before, the star of our highly-popular two part podcast on Masada.You can view Jodi's library of books here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Jodi-Magness/s?rh=n%3A266239%2Cp_27%3AJodi+Magness

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast I've got another real treat for you because I am rejoined by Professor Jodie Magnus. Jodie has been on the Ancients podcast once before to talk about Masada, the Roman siege of Masada and the many myths that still survive to this day. Now Jodie is back this time to talk about something pretty different because we're

looking at Jewish tombs and Jewish burial in the first century AD and the first century BC. What's the archaeology is telling us. Now you might be able to guess where we're going to be going with this because we're going to be looking at the archaeology that survives and seeing whether it correlates with the gospel accounts for Jesus's burial following his crucifixion. This was an incredible chat, a really really interesting chat. Jodie is an enthralling speaker as I'm sure many of you already know. So without further ado, here's Jodie. Jodie, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast. Well, thank you. I'm so happy to be back.

Well, we had to get you back after the success of your Masada two-parter. That was absolutely brilliant. But we're talking about something a little different today. We're looking at the burial of Jesus in light of archaeology and the gospel accounts, because we have a lot of extraordinary archaeology that survives, that can tell us more about ancient Jewish tombs and burial customs at the time of Jesus. Right. So yes, we do have a lot of archaeological evidence, although, before I start, let me categorize and say that the evidence that we have, even though there's a lot of it, is a small fraction of what originally existed. And the small fraction that we have is associated primarily with the uppermost classes of Jewish society. So, that's really what we're going to

be focusing on. What we're going to be really talking about are tombs that were used by the wealthy families of Jerusalem, already starting in the period before 586 BC, so what we call in archaeology the Iron Age, the first temple period, the period of Solomon's temple, and then moving through the centuries, through the time of Jesus and up to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD. And through this period, wealthy tombs in Jerusalem are characterized by being rock cut, by which I mean they are artificial caves that were cut into the bedrock slopes around the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, of course, is on top of a mountain ridge. It's very rocky and uneven. And so these wealthy families would cut these, or actually have cut, these artificial caves in the bedrock slopes. And the caves are pretty much

always located outside the walls of the city. The ancient population of Jerusalem did not bury their dead inside the city, inside the walls, but rather outside the walls. And by the time we get to the death of Jesus, the city of Jerusalem was literally surrounded by hundreds of these rock cut tombs on almost all sides, the west side to a lesser degree, but pretty much around the city, you have literally hundreds, there's over 1000 of these rock cut tombs that have been documented by archaeologists until now. And I do qualify and say again, that even though that's a large number, these rock cut tombs have survived, because they're visible in the landscape. And they're pretty much indestructible. I mean, you have to like blow something up in order to get rid of a rock-cut tomb. So they survive in the archaeological

landscape, but they accommodated only a very small percentage of the overall population, which means that the overwhelming majority of the ancient population of Jerusalem was buried in ways that have not left visible signs in the archaeological record. And that's something that we can come back to. We definitely will get onto those tombs in a bit, but let's focus on these rock-cut tombs first of all. Because in regards to the tombs, I'm going to say when they reappear, because we have seen rock-cut tombs before in Jerusalem's history, Because we have seen rock-cut tombs before in Jerusalem's history, but they reappeared in, is it, the Hasmonean period? Right. So rock-cut tombs, because they're associated with Jerusalem's elite population, they were used in periods when there was a significant elite presence in Jerusalem. presence in Jerusalem. And so, we have that before 586 BC, you know, at the end of the period of Solomon's Temple. Then in 586 BC, Jerusalem is destroyed by the Babylonians. The population is

dispersed. These tombs cease to be used. And then we get the reemergence of a significant elite in the city in the middle of the second century BC when an independent Jewish kingdom is established called the Hasmonean kingdom that was ruled by the leaders and the successors of the leaders of the Maccabean revolt, the same revolt that is celebrated today by the modern holiday of Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. And so when the Hasmonean kingdom was established around, you know, in the middle of the second century BC, Jerusalem becomes the capital of that kingdom. And as the capital of the kingdom, you get then the rise of the ruling classes based there. And by way of extension, you get a significant elite presence associated with the ruling class. And that's when these rock cut tombs, you know, begin to be, they're not the same rock cut tombs that were used before 586, but the custom of elite families burying their dead in rock-cut tombs, that reemerges at this time.

that are cut into the bedrock. So, an individual tomb can have just one room that's cut into the bedrock or more than one room, but no matter how many rooms they had, rock-cut tombs were, by definition, family tombs. It's like a mausoleum, like a family mausoleum. So, the tomb would be used by members of that family over the course of several generations. And so, as members of a family died, the individuals then would be laid to rest inside that rock-cut tomb. Now, you mentioned mausoleum there, so I'm going to go on a slight tangent because I know from your work, when looking at the early rock-cut tombs in the Hasmonean period, you see certain influences on their design, particularly in some cases, with iconic mausoleums of the ancient world.

in some cases with iconic mausoleums of the ancient world. Yes. You know, one of the bones I have to pick with the way ancient Judaism is sometimes studied, and not just viewed by people in general, but even by scholars, is that there's a tendency to divorce Jews and Judaism from their larger context and to look at Jews and Judaism as if there's something peculiar and different from everything around them, when in fact, Jews in Judaism were far more like everything else than they were different. And this is also apparent in the tombs and burial customs, because in general, Jews tended to dispose of their dead in ways that were pretty much analogous to the ways other ancient peoples disposed of their dead, although Jewish law prohibits cremation, so Jews did not cremate their dead like the Romans

did, but actually there were other ancient peoples who also didn't cremate their dead. So, we do see, for example, then, elements of foreign, let's call it foreign influence, on Jerusalem's tombs and burial customs right from the start. Even before 586 BC, for example, we see Phoenician influence on the layout and decoration of Jerusalem's rock-cut tombs. Then when we get to the Hasmonean period, we see Greek influence. And then when we get a little bit later into the time of Herod the Great, we see Roman influence. And this is logical because the population of Jerusalem was part of a larger world. They were embedded within a larger world. And so you can't

divorce them from that context. So you asked about the mausoleum. So there's a gap in Jerusalem after 586 BC when rock-cut tombs simply, there aren't any rock-cut tombs because pretty much because there's no elite presence, and then they re-emerge in the middle of the 2nd century BC. When they re-emerge in the 2nd century BC, even though this custom of burying the dead in an artificial rock-cut tomb re-emerges, these rock-cut tombs of the Hasmonean period, the 2nd century, are visibly different from the ones before 586 BC, and that's because of the influence ofonean period, the second century, are visibly different from the ones before 586 BC, and that's because of the influence of external fashions. And the main driver for this, or one of the main drivers, was the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. So just a little bit now about the mausoleum at

Halicarnassus. So ancient Halicarnassus is the modern city of Bodrum on the southwest coast of Turkey, modern Turkey. And that city was the capital of a local kingdom ruled by a local king, a dynast, in the 4th century BC. And in the middle of the 4th century BC, the king, whose name was Mausolus, died, and he was buried in a monumental tomb that became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And that tomb is known as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Mausoleum means it's the tomb of Mausolus. And it became so famous that ever since then, we call monumental tombs mausoleums.

That's where the word comes from. If you visit Bodrum today, you can go to the site of the mausoleum and there's almost nothing left of it on the site because it suffered a lot of destruction over the course of time. The stones got robbed out and built into other buildings, so there's not actually a lot left. The mausoleum was actually famous. It became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, not because of its size, although it was very big, but because it had beautiful sculpted decoration on it that was commissioned by or made by the most famous Greek sculptors of the day. When you go to the grounds of the mausoleum today, there's very little left of the sculpture on the site. In fact, if you want to see most of what's left of the sculpture of the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, you can appreciate this. Do you

know where you have to go? You have to go to the British Museum in London, where they have a room with the sculpture from the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. So you guys to go to the British Museum in London, where they have a room with the sculpture from the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. So you guys there over in the UK who are listening, if the British Museum is opened up, you can go in and take a look. Now, although not much survives on the spot of the mausoleum, we do have enough in the way of ancient descriptions to be able to reconstruct its appearance. And it consisted of a tall raised podium, a big square base that was very tall. And on top of it, there was a building that looked like a Greek temple surrounded with columns. And then it had a pyramidal roof and it had sculpture on top of the roof and it had other sculpture decorating it. And so what happens after the mausoleum is built and it becomes so famous that rich folks all around the Mediterranean started to build their own sort of tombs, family

tombs, in imitation of the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. So you get this fashion of this style of tomb that spreads around the Mediterranean. Now, this is a couple of centuries, of course, before the Hasmonean kingdom. But by the time the Hasmonean kingdom is established and Jews in Jerusalem, the elite in Jerusalem, restart this custom of burying their dead in rock-cut tombs, this fashion has now spread all over the place and it influences them as well. And what they begin to do is make the outsides of their tombs because the inside is still a rock-cut tomb. is make the outsides of their tombs, because the inside is still a rock-cut tomb. But they begin to do something that they didn't do before 586 BC, and that is decorate the outside of the tomb. And the outside of the tomb then is decorated with elements that make it look like, it's not exactly, but are borrowed from the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. And this, by the way, is not because the Jews of Jerusalem ever saw the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. They did not.

But the fashion had spread all over the Mediterranean by then. And in fact, the most famous example, the best example, probably, of a Jewish tomb of this period, the Hasmonean period, that was modeled after the mausoleum at Halicarnassus is one that we don't have in the archaeological record. It hasn't survived. And that's the tomb of the Maccabees at Modiin, the tomb of the family that led the revolt and established the Hasmonean kingdom. Their family tomb is described in great detail in First Maccabees, the book of First Maccabees, and also by the ancient Jewish historian Josephus. And the descriptions indicate that it was a building that

stood on a tall raised podium, and it had columns around it, and it had a pyramidal roof, or actually seven pyramids in this case. But at any rate, there's no doubt that the elements of the tomb of the Maccabees are ultimately inspired by the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. And once the Maccabees built their monumental family tomb at Modiin in this style, the elite Jews of Jerusalem then started to imitate that. And you begin to see this kind of tomb appear in Jerusalem. And we already have, there's a very famous one in Jerusalem called Jason's Tomb on the west side of the city, which dates to about 100 BC. And it's a really great example of this. And so, now I have to like, if it's okay with you, digress just a bit

about what's going on inside the tombs. Okay. So we've been talking a lot about what the outsides of the tombs look like, but we haven't talked about what the insides of the tombs look like, except to say that they're a room cut into bedrock or more than one room cut into bedrock. But what did it look like inside? So before 586 BC, rock-cut tombs generally had a burial chamber, one room or sometimes more than one room, where when you went in, there was a place for you to stand. So you basically went in and you're on the level and you're standing, and you're surrounded on three sides by a bench that's cut out of the bedrock.

So three sides, you have these very wide benches that are surrounding you. And the deceased, the members of the family who were being buried, their bodies were placed on top of the benches that are surrounding you. And the deceased, the members of the family who were being buried, their bodies were placed on top of the benches. They were laid on top of the benches. So they would be wrapped in a shroud, and then the body would be laid on top of the bench. Now, there isn't a lot of room on the benches for a lot of bodies. So at some point, they would have to make room for new burials. And what they would do, what the family would do then, is collect the remains of the earlier burials, by which time the flesh had decayed. So they would collect the remains of the earlier burials, which were just the bones,

and whatever burial gifts had been placed with the body, because sometimes, you know, burial gifts were placed with the bodies. They would collect all that and put it into a hollowed-out space under one of the benches, what's called a repository. And so what you would have in the repository are all the earlier remains, and then the most recent burials would be on top of the benches. Now, when rock cut tombs begin to reappear in Jerusalem in the middle of the second century BC in the Hasmonean period, not only are they different in having being decorated or designed on the exterior sort of with elements that recall the mausoleum at Halicarnassus,

but the interior is also different. The interior arrangement is also different. So Jason's tomb, which is like the earliest example that we have in Jerusalem of this kind of tomb, has two burial chambers, A and B. A is the chamber where the actual bodies were placed, and B was a charnel room. So chamber A is very interesting. There's no longer rock-cut benches. That's not where you place the bodies. Instead, what you have are these long, narrow niches, the length of a human body, that are cut into the sides of the walls going all the way around. And these niches are called loculae. The singular is loculus, the plural loculae. In Hebrew, they're called kochim. So each individual body was wrapped in a shroud, maybe sometimes placed in a wooden coffin, and then was put into the loculus. And then the opening to the loculus

would be sealed off with a stone slab. And over the course of time, again, the loculi would become filled, and as members of the family died, and they would have to make room for new burials. So the remains then would be removed. This is Jason's tomb. The remains were removed from the loculi, and they were piled up on the floor of room B. So room B was a charnel room. It basically was like a big repository, is what it was like. So, you had all the early remains piled up on the floor of room B, and in A, you had the bodies put into the loculi. That's how things are sort of at the, you know, in the Hasmonean period. Now, once this fashion appears in Jerusalem with Jason's tomb,

for example, in the Hasmonean period, it spreads. And as I said, by the time, you know, we get to the time of Jesus, and by the time Jerusalem is destroyed by the Romans in 70, there are literally hundreds of rock-cut tombs which surround the city of Jerusalem. And over the course of this period, so now we're in 1st century BC, 1st century AD, something changes. And that is that in the middle of the reign of Herod the Great, a new element is introduced into Jerusalem's rock-cut tombs, and that is something called ossuaries. So what is an ossuary? An ossuary is a little box or container for the bones. And in Jerusalem, ossuaries are made out of stone, the local stone. They don't have to be. There are other places where you have ossuaries that can be made out of stone, the local stone. They don't have to be. There are other places where

you have ossuaries that can be made out of wood or terracotta, but in Jerusalem, they're made out of stone. Mostly, they're plain. Usually, they're plain, but not always. Sometimes, they're decorated with carved decorations on the sides. The ones in Jerusalem, the decoration is usually these kinds of circles that are called rosettes, and sometimes other things like stylized columns or chalices or things like that. They have lids, and lids can be shaped differently, stone lids. And an ossuary was used to contain the bones that were removed from the loculi. So now instead of what happens is, is that you no longer have a separate room, like in Jason's tomb where you have a separate room that's used as a charnel room or a repository. Now what you get are the remains being removed from the loculi and the bones would be collected and put into the ossuary.

And ossuaries, therefore, are small containers because they only need to be big enough to contain the longest individual bone in a human skeleton. A femur, I think that thigh bone, right? I think that's your longest bone. And that's as opposed to, for example, a sarcophagus, which is a coffin, which contains the entire body with the flesh on it. That's got to be a lot bigger. So, ossuaries are small boxes. And sometimes they're inscribed with the name of the deceased because sometimes when members of the family were collecting the bones out of the loculus and putting them into the ossuary, they would take a sharp instrument like a nail or something like that and they would scratch or sometimes paint the name of the individual onto the side of the ossuary. So, sometimes

ossuaries also have inscriptions on them. So this is a new thing that appears in the middle of the reign of Herod the Great in Jerusalem's rock-cut tombs. So Herod, just to remind your listeners, Herod the Great ruled Judea as client king on behalf of the Romans from 40 BC until his death in 4 BC. So that means that ossuaries were introduced into Jerusalem's rock-cut tombs somewhere between 20 and 10 BC. And once they appear, they spread like wildfire. We literally have hundreds of ossuaries from Jerusalem's rock-cut tombs, hundreds of them. And these rock-cut tombs and the ossuaries then are used until Jerusalem's destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 AD. So, keeping on that with the Osheries, first of all, when I think of Osheries, I always used to think of like the Macedonian royal tombs where they have Osheros there, but they are like the cremated remains of figures like, well, perhaps I think it is Cannae

and others, but of course it's not cremated remains in Jerusalem, first off that point. The other point I just wanted to say before I let you come back in, is that why in the time of Herod? Why do we see this change at the time of Herod? Right. Those are great questions and they're both connected, right? So everything that I've said until now is pretty much descriptive, right? So we have the tombs, we have the ossuaries, the ossuaries appear in the middle of the reign of Herod. The question is, and here's where interpretation comes in, why ossuaries? Because ossuaries are very distinctive looking. You know, they're automatically associated with this kind of Jewish custom, right, of collecting the bones. I should also point out, by the way, so Jewish law prohibits

cremation. So Jews inhumed their dead, meaning that you bury the whole body. But there is nothing in Jewish law that prohibits moving the body from one place to another, from, let's say, one tomb to another after it's been buried. Well, I guess modern Jewish law would object to that. But anyway, never mind. The bigger point is there's nothing that prohibits moving the bones, taking the bones and collecting them and moving them around. And in fact, the tomb of the Maccabees, which I mentioned before, Josephus' description begins by talking about how the youngest Tasmanian brother, the youngest Maccabean brother, Simon, who was the one who had the tomb built, actually had his brother's bones brought from somewhere else to be placed in that family tomb.

So, you can move the bones around once, you know, after the flesh has decayed and bones did get moved around. So the question, the interpretation question comes in why ossuaries, right? Why did ossuaries, which are so conspicuous looking, suddenly appear in Jerusalem's rock-cut tombs in the middle of the reign of Herod the Great? Now, if you do any kind of research on this, you will automatically come across the prevailing scholarly consensus. It's not universal consensus, but it's very widely sort of accepted. And this is an idea that goes back to several decades, actually, to an Israeli archaeologist named Rahmani, Levi Yitzchak Rahmani. So I'm going to

tell you what Rahmani suggested, but then I'm going to unpack it because it's a complicated sentence. So what Rahmani proposed is that asharis were introduced into Jerusalem's Raqqa tombs around the middle of the reign of Herod the Great in connection with the rise and spread of the Pharisaic belief in the individual physical resurrection of the dead. So what does this mean? So we are now in the late first century BC. So what does this mean? So we are now in the late first century BC. And in this period, there were a number of different Jewish groups or sects or movements or whatever you want to call them, the most famous of which, of course, are the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, which are associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus's movement a little bit later. So, we have information about these groups. The largest and most influential were the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees were basically the Jerusalem elite. They were the 1%. They really were the 1%. So, they were like the high priestly families,

royalty, right? Those kind of people. And because they were the 1%, they were the wealthiest part of society, they were conservatives. They were political conservatives because they had it good and they wanted to maintain the status quo. And they were religious conservatives, meaning that they were conservative in their interpretation of biblical Jewish law, the laws in the five books of Moses. Law, the laws in the five books of Moses. Their point of view was that what's written in the law in the five books of Moses is divine, divinely given, right, to Moses on Mount Sinai, and that humans can't fool around with it. You can't take the laws and you can't reinterpret them differently from what's written. So they were literalists who adhered to the letter of the law. And one of the things, by the way, that I like to say is that the late Chief Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court was a Sadducee in terms of the way that he approached the interpretation of the law, right? A literal interpretation of the letter of the law. That's the Sadducean approach. The Pharisees, you could say they were sort of an upper middle class or middle class. I hate to use those terms because it didn't exist in the ancient world. They've sometimes been described as a retainer class for the, you know, the upper, the uppermost class. So they were, they were prosperous, you know, merchants and farmers and things like that. So they weren't like part of the majority of the population, let's say, I don't know, maybe 80% or whatever, was a population that from our point of view today, the modern Western point of view would be

dirt poor, but they actually were not destitute. They had houses, they had businesses, they had farms or whatever, but they lived just above subsistence level. So they didn't have disposable income. So they didn't have a cushion to protect them from years of famine or drought or stuff like that, any kind of disasters like that, right? So they were very close to being at the years of famine or drought or stuff like that, any kind of disasters like that, right? So, they were very close to being at the edge of that sort of safety net. But the Pharisees were not like that. The Pharisees apparently were a little more prosperous

than that, but they were not, you know, that 1%. And they, therefore, were more liberal in their interpretation of biblical law. And they believed that you could take biblical law, what's written in the letter of the law, and interpret it in different ways. And ultimately, by the way, it was that approach which became the normative approach in Judaism right up until today, the Pharisaic approach. And so, there developed among the Pharisees in this period, a belief in future individual physical resurrection of the dead. This is a belief that the Sadducees rejected because there is no such doctrine of a future resurrection of the dead in the five books of Moses. But among the Pharisees, there developed a belief in individual physical

resurrection of the dead. And that belief, again, is one of the things that eventually became normative in Judaism right up until today, but the Sadducees rejected it. So, Rahmani's suggestion then is that it's this belief in a future individual resurrection of the dead that underlies the rise and spread of Ashwari. So, let's now think about why he made this connection. So, if we go back to Jason's tomb, right? In Jason's tomb, you had chamber A, which is the chamber where the bodies get buried, that's with the loculi, and then you have chamber B, which is the charnel room. So, over the course of time, as new skeletal remains and stuff are dumped onto the, not dumped, but you know, whatever, onto the floor of chamber B, and people are walking in and out, right? So, over the course of time,

the physical remains of the deceased that are piled on the floor of Chamber B are going to be dispersed. Some of those body parts, some of those skeletal remains will get broken into pieces, crushed, and some of them will get lost. And so, if you are envisioning a future physical individual resurrection of the dead, when the time comes, some of those individuals will be missing vital body parts. They'll be gone. So, what Rachmani suggested is that ossuaries were introduced into Jerusalem's rock-cut tombs so that the remains of each individual could be preserved intact in their own container awaiting this future resurrection. Now, it's a really cool idea.

And again, as I said, it's actually very widely accepted among many of my colleagues, but it's easily demonstrably wrong. And it's demonstrably wrong for several reasons. Go on. Yes. So first of all, there's a whole list of reasons. So first of all, most ossuaries, not most, but many, many, contain the remains of more than one individual.

So it's clear that these are not individual containers, or at least a lot of the time they were not. They had remains of more than one individual in them. For example, in 1980, a very famous tomb, a rock cut tomb, was discovered south of Jerusalem in the area of Abu Tur, which is called the Tomb of Caiaphas, because it contains two ashoris that are inscribed with the name Caiaphas, and it's actually a reasonable, although unprovable, assumption that this is the tomb of the very same high priest and his family who presided over the trial of Jesus. And one of the ossuaries that's inscribed, and it's inscribed Joseph, son of Caiaphas, that ossuary contained the remains of six individuals, an elderly man, an older woman, a couple of teenagers, and a couple of younger children. And this is not uncommon to have more than one individual in each ossuary. So first of

all, the idea that these are little individual containers waiting, you know, each person waiting their little, you know, resurrection from the dead, that doesn't work. But that's not a deal breaker. What is a deal breaker is that it is clear that most ossuaries do not contain, in fact, I think for the most part, they do not contain the complete remains of a skeleton. It is clear that, you know, the people who use these tombs were not concerned to collect every single bone in the skeleton and put it into the ossuary. So what you get are incomplete skeletal remains in the ossuaries. the ossuary. So what you get are incomplete skeletal remains in the ossuaries. And in fact, there's actually a passage in rabbinic literature from a little bit later, which talks about the fact that you don't need to collect all the bones. Well, hello, well, that kind of defeats the purpose, don't you think? I mean, really? And in fact, at the same time that ossuaries were used,

the Jews who used these tombs continued to gather bones in different ways. So sometimes you find piles of bones in unused loculi, or sometimes you find them in a pit in the floor, or sometimes just piled up in the corner of the tomb, even when you have ossuaries. So it's clear that this is not the guiding concern. The guiding concern is not we're going to collect every single individual bone and, you know, have it intact in its little container. And then the other thing is, and there's a whole other thing, which is that according to our sources, the belief in individual physical resurrection of the dead is associated with the Pharisees. And we have various sources that talk about this from Josephus to Acts of the Apostles, and then of course, later rabbinic, you know,

the later rabbinic literature. So, this is a belief that originated with the Pharisees that was not accepted by the Sadducees. And now let's think about who owned these rock-cut tombs. So, a lot of the rock-cut tombs that we have are demonstrably associated with families that presumably were Sadducees. So, the tomb of Caiaphas that I just mentioned, there's the tomb of Queen Helena of Adiabene, there's the tomb of Nicanor's tomb on Mount Scopus, there's the tomb of Benechazir. I mean, many of the rock-cut tombs that have ossuaries in them belong to people who must have been Sadducees, the very group that rejected a belief in individual physical resurrection of the dead. I'm not saying that all rakka tombs were, you know, used by people who were Sadducees, but at least some of them were. So, in other words, Rahmani's

idea, as attractive as it is, is simply unsustainable. So, then that still leaves open the question, why ashwaris? Here, I follow a couple of Israeli colleagues who had previously made the suggestion, and I think it's absolutely right. Again, we have here a case where Judaism has been divorced from everything else, and it's being looked at in this religious context instead of as part of the larger Greek and Roman world. And what these colleagues have pointed out is that what the Jews are doing is analogous to what the Romans are doing in this time. Now, how did Romans, we're in the first century BC, right, late first century BC, so first century BC, first century AD. How did the Romans dispose of their dead in this period?

So the prevailing right of disposing of the dead in Rome at this time among Romans was cremation, which we've seen Jews, you know, biblical law prohibits, but the Romans cremated their dead. Now, ancient cremations, when you cremated a body in antiquity, and it's actually similar to if you go to a place like Varanasi in India, for example, today, you can still see this. And I've been to Varanasi and I have seen it. You're cremating the body on a pyre of wood. And therefore, the temperatures are not nearly as high as the temperatures in a modern crematorium.

Right. So if you go to a crematorium and you have a body burned today, you get, you know, a little pile of ash at the, I mean, it's completely burned. But in that kind of a cremation, what the Romans were doing or what you see in a place like Varanasi today, you are left afterwards with big chunks of bone, fused bones and stuff like that with some ash. And those remains were collected and put into a cinerary urn. And what is a cinerary urn? So when I say cinerary urn, a lot of people think of the kind of like vase that you put on your mantelpiece or something. But it's not. Cinerary urns, Roman cinerary urns were actually little stone boxes.

And sometimes they were decorated. Sometimes they had carved decoration on the sides. If you go to museums, you can actually see Roman cinerary urns on display in some museums. If you go to museums, you can actually see Roman cinerary urns on display in some museums. And so what the wealthy Jews of Jerusalem did, beginning in the middle of the reign of Herod, was to adopt the trappings of Roman burial customs. They couldn't cremate their dead because they're prohibited from doing that by Jewish law, but they could and did adopt the custom of collecting the remains into a little stone container. And that's what an ossuary is. So it's actually like a cinerary urn, except that it's containing the bones of

the skeleton instead of the cremated remains. And then you ask, well, why does this happen in the middle of the reign of Herod? And Herod, of course, had very close connections with Augustus or Octavian and then Augustus and his family. And in fact, Herod was very good friends with Marcus Agrippa, who was Augustus' son-in-law and who Augustus had planned to succeed him, but Marcus Agrippa died before, you know, Augustus did. But anyway, in the year 15 BC, Marcus Agrippa visited Herod's kingdom and Herod gave him literally a royal tour of the kingdom. And very interesting, it is right around this time that we see a very heavy dose of Roman influence on the wealthy Jews of Jerusalem in terms of the way that they decorate and furnish their houses. So we

see, you know, the sort of decoration with Roman-style wall paintings and mosaics and furniture and dishes. And we see this influence also on the death style with the adoption of of ossuaries. And this is all trickling down from the royal household, right? So, Herod and his family, you know, have these direct connections with Augustus and his family, and they're adopting all sorts of fashions. And then the Jerusalem elite imitate that, right? It trickles down and we begin to see that influence on them as well. And so this is sort of how you have to imagine the wealthy Jews of Jerusalem were disposing of their dead in the time of Jesus, right? So in these sort of rocket tombs that have the ossuaries in them that have the locula.

We've talked a lot then about the elite tombs and we're getting down instead to the time of Jesus and we're going to get onto the story of Jesus in a second. But first of all, we need to cover it. It's the non-elite burials. We don't have as much surviving about it, but what do we know about the non-elite burials at this time? Actually, if you don't mind, I would like to bring that up after talking about the gospel accounts. We can do that. Of course we can. But another problem with the study of burials in particular in Jerusalem and actually elsewhere in the country is that because rock-cut tombs are virtually indestructible and very conspicuous in the archaeological landscape, they have pretty much been the sole focus of discussion and

attention by archaeologists. So, everybody talks about rock-cut tombs, and they ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population was not buried in rock-cut tombs. And this is demonstrable because all you have to do is do calculations of numbers, which I have done, of Jerusalem's population and the number of rock-cut tombs that we have. And even if you double, triple, quadruple the number of rock-cut tombs that have been documented in the area of Jerusalem, they would still only accommodate a small fraction of the overall population of Jerusalem. So, it's clear that a majority of the population was buried or disposed of in ways that did not leave visible signs in

the archaeological record. And another thing to remember, by the way, is that a lot of people in antiquity, the most unfortunate people, were not properly disposed of at all. We have legislation from Rome about this, where, you know, literally there were services where they would collect corpses from the streets of Rome and then dispose of them in a giant pyre outside the city walls. And there's a wonderful passage from Suetonius's Life of Vespasian, where it describes the emperor Vespasian sitting at his breakfast table, and a dog trots in with a human arm in its mouth and dumps it under his dining room table. So, not everybody even received a

proper burial, and a lot of times, you know, the remains would just be scavenged, and that's one reason why in ancient Judaism, dogs were not looked upon very well, because they're associated with corpse impurity, because they literally scavenge., I mean, actually Jezebel, right? What happens to the corpse of Jezebel after she's tossed out of the window of the palace? Her body is eaten by dogs, right? So a lot of people didn't receive even a proper burial and remains were randomly disposed of in various places if a person didn't receive, you know, a proper burial. But even the poorer classes who didn't have rock-cut tombs, if they did receive a proper burial, it was in a manner that did not leave much in the way of visible signs in the archaeological record. But we can

come back to that. Okay, we'll come back to that. That's all good. So let's go on to the burial of Jesus. Our main literary source is the Gospels, what do they tell us about the burial of Jesus? We have a description of the death and burial of Jesus in all four of the canonical Gospels. And before I look at the actual passages that I want to discuss, just to sort of encapsulate what's going on here. So the story goes, Jesus was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, apparently on Friday. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown. It goes from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. So he's sentenced to death and he is crucified on Friday. You know, crucifixion was a method of execution where you didn't know how long it would take for the victim to expire on

the cross. It could take days before the victim expired on the cross, and it was a very long and painful death because eventually you died of asphyxiation because your body couldn't hold itself up and it slumped and you eventually stopped breathing. But Jesus apparently was already in pretty bad shape by the time he was nailed to the cross, and he dies fairly quickly, sometime in the middle of the afternoon on Friday. So somewhere, you know, around three o'clock in the afternoon, something like that on Friday, which means that he dies on the cross very shortly before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, which again starts at sundown on Friday. And at this point, a wealthy and prominent follower of Jesus, whose name was Joseph of

Arimathea, rushes to Pontius Pilate to ask permission to take Jesus's body and place it in his own family's tomb, which he needed to do because he was not related to Jesus. And Pontius Pilate gives him the permission. So, I want to look at the gospel accounts of this. I want to focus on Mark and Matthew. Now, we have the story in all four of the canonical gospels, but I focus on Mark and Matthew because they're probably the earliest of the four accounts. I'm not a New Testament scholar, but you know, Mark is thought to date to somewhere around 70 AD, just shortly before or shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem. And then we have Matthew after that. And again, they're very similar, but let's see what they say. So Mark says,

although it was now evening, yet since it was the preparation day, that is the day before the Sabbath, Although it was now evening, yet since it was the preparation day, that is, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a highly respected member of the council, who was himself living in expectation of the reign of God, made bold to go to Pilate and ask for Jesus' body. And he, Joseph, brought a linen sheet and took him down from the cross and wrapped him in the sheet and laid him in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock and rolled a great stone against the doorway of the tomb. That's Mark. Matthew is a very similar account. In the evening, a rich man named Joseph of Arimathea, who had himself been a disciple of Jesus, came. He went to Pilate and asked him for Jesus's body. Then Joseph took the

body and wrapped it in a piece of clean linen and laid it in a new tomb that belonged to him that he had cut in the rock, and he rolled a great stone over the doorway of the tomb and went away. So both of these accounts, they're very interesting to me as an archaeologist because they are largely consistent with archaeological evidence, by which I mean that you have here a man who is described as being wealthy and a prominent member of society, maybe a member of the Sanhedrin, right, who's a follower of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, whose family has a rock-cut tomb. And he takes the body and he puts it into the rock-cut tomb, and then he rolls a great stone across the doorway of the tomb to seal it. And in fact, we have a couple of tombs in Jerusalem, including the tomb of Queen Helena of Adiabene, where we

have exactly that arrangement of a great rolling stone that you push, you know, across to seal the doorway. So, it's very interesting to me as an archaeologist that when you look at these accounts, they are largely consistent with what we know about how wealthy Jews in Jerusalem buried their dead in the time of Jesus. This does not prove that the story is historical, but it is consistent with the archaeological evidence, which means that whatever the source or sources of this story were, they were familiar with how Jews in Jerusalem, wealthy Jews in Jerusalem, disposed of their dead in the time of Jesus. So, to me, that's interesting. Now, this then raises the question,

which is what you asked before. There's something very strange going on, because as we've seen, these rock-cut tombs are family tombs. And of course, Jesus was not related to Joseph of Arimathea. So, we have here something unusual going on, which is that Joseph takes somebody who's not a member of his family and lays his body in his own family's rock cut tomb. And that's a circumstance that needs to be explained. That's not something that's normal. You didn't do that. It would be as odd today as if you took some random stranger and put their body in your own family's mausoleum. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. took some random stranger and put their body in your own family's mausoleum. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. So, how do you explain that? First of all, we have to understand, let's just say for

a minute, we didn't have this story. What would have happened to Jesus' body? How would it have been disposed of if Joseph of Arimathea had not come along and offered his own rock-cut tomb, right? What would have happened? So, this raises the question that you asked before, which is how did the majority of the population dispose of their dead if not in rock-cut tombs, right? This majority who are poor but not destitute. So, again, there are different ways of disposing of the dead, but apparently the sort of common way was to dispose of the body in a way that's similar to what we do with our dead today, and that is to dig a trench grave into the ground, six feet deep, literally, six feet deep,

and then you would take the body and wrap it in a shroud and maybe place it in a wooden coffin and lay it at the base of the trench and seal that off with stone slabs or mud bricks, and then you would fill the trench back in with dirt, and then you would erect a headstone, a tombstone, at one end. Now, we know that these graves exist because we do have them in the archaeological record. The problem is, there are several problems. One problem is that they're very easily destroyed, covered over, plowed up, so they don't survive well in the archaeological record. We have a cemetery like this at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, where the community buried their dead in this way, and it's in the desert, so it was never covered over. So we have a cemetery like this at

Qumran. But in most settings, these kinds of graves have not survived. So the other problem is that these kinds of graves were very widespread among different peoples throughout time and space. Look, we still bury our dead in a way that's very similar to that today. The Bedouins in Israel bury their dead in a way that's very similar. And in fact, at Qumran, there are Bedouin graves of this type that have been confused with graves that were used by members of the Qumran sect because they look very much the same. And the problem is, is that most of the time, these bodies were not, because they were poor members of society, they were not buried with burial gifts, which makes them very hard to date.

But we do have evidence that other kinds of peoples used this type of burial throughout time and space. And in fact, on the other side of the Dead Sea, on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, there's a large cemetery that was used by Nabataeans, who were Arab people, in the time of Jesus. And there's a cemetery with like 3,000 of these graves there. So, this was a very common type of grave, but the problem is that we don't find a lot of them in the archaeological record. They haven't survived well. And when they do survive, they're very hard to date. So, what we can imagine is that had Jesus not been placed in Joseph of Arimathea's rock cut tomb, had somebody actually taken his body and disposed of it, he would have been buried in a trench grave like this, right?

Now, that assumes that you have somebody who's going to do that for you. And in fact, that's the reason why in the Roman world, you get the formation of burial societies. People actually, when they were alive in antiquity, joined burial societies and paid money precisely to ensure that after they died, somebody would dispose of their remains properly, right? It's like today you buy a cemetery plot for yourself. Well, in antiquity, you joined a burial society for that reason. So, what happens with Jesus is very interesting. You would have imagined that his body then would have been taken and placed into a trench grave, but that doesn't happen. And why doesn't it happen? So, the story, according to the gospel, is that Jesus expires on the cross shortly before the beginning of the Sabbath. At that point, according to the accounts, he had

been deserted, abandoned by his followers and by his family, right? And what you would have needed to have happened for him to be buried in a trench grave would have been for there to be somebody there who could have taken the body, and you would have had to have had a trench grave ready, because there's no time to actually dig a trench grave before the beginning of the Sabbath at this point. But you would have had to have had somebody who had prepared a trench grave and taken the body and laid it in the trench grave. Now, this was not going to happen, because there's nobody there to take care of that. Joseph of Arimathea, who apparently was a wealthy, prominent Jew, and I believe that actually underlying this episode are two points of Jewish law that are lost on most

modern readers of the gospel accounts. So, these two Jewish laws are that, one, according to biblical Jewish law, you should be buried within 24 hours of death. And even the worst criminals, according, this is Deuteronomy, even the worst criminals are entitled to be buried within 24 hours of death. And even until today, Jews are concerned to bury the dead within 24 hours of death. This is why Jews don't hold wakes, for example. Muslims also have the same thing. You're supposed to be buried within 24 hours of death, right? Now, I should also say that there's nothing that says that if you're not buried within 24 hours of death, that, you know, you're punished, right? That you're like doomed

to purgatory or something like that. There's nothing like that. But it is, it's an ideal, and Jews generally try to adhere to that ideal. And that was also true in antiquity. So ideally, you want to make sure your concern is that the body should be properly disposed of, given a proper burial, within 24 hours of death. And I think probably underlying this, among other things, is the concern that the body isn't left to be scavenged by, you know, dogs or something like that, right? You want to make sure the body is properly disposed of. There is no concern, by the way, of how the body should be buried. In other words, it doesn't matter if you put it in a rock cut tomb or you put

it in a trench grave or whatever. The point is, is that it receives a proper burial within 24 hours of death. So the second Jewish law is that it is prohibited to bury someone on the Sabbath or on festivals. And the Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday, and it ends on Saturday when you begin to see the first stars. And so, what would have happened here in the episode of Joseph of Arimathea is, had Joseph of Arimathea not offered Jesus' body, you know, had not offered to take Jesus' body and put it in his own family's rock cut tomb, what would have happened? Well, maybe somebody would have then come along and eventually taken the body and disposed of it, but they would have had to have waited until after the end of the Sabbath on Saturday, Saturday night, to put it in a trench grave or whatever, by which point you will have exceeded the 24-hour limit. And so, I believe that Joseph was concerned to make sure that Jesus received a burial in accordance with biblical law, and therefore, he does something exceptional. He goes to Pontius Pilate, he requests permission

to take the body, and he puts it in his family's rock-cut tomb, which apparently was located somewhere nearby. And I don't want to, like, feed into conspiracy theories or anything like that. I will just point out that there is nothing in Jewish law that would have prohibited the body being moved to another grave or another location or something after the Sabbath ended, right? I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm just saying there's nothing in Jewish law that would prohibit that. But the concern here is to make sure that Jesus' body was buried in accordance with Jewish law, and I think that that's what underlies this gospel episode. And it's very interesting

that this episode is recorded in all four gospel accounts, although, you know, Luke and John go further in elaborating on it. So, by the time you get to like the end, you know, Jesus' body is being fully anointed and perfumed or whatever. But the underlying account is the same in all four of the canonical gospels. But the underlying account is the same in all four of the canonical Gospels. That's all super interesting, particularly regarding Jewish law, Jodie. But further on from that, I mean, in regards to archaeological evidence, do we have any evidence showing that crucified individuals could be placed in rock-cut tombs?

Right. So that's a really interesting question. So we have one remain, and I'll explain why in a minute. But generally speaking, in antiquity, if you were convicted of a crime, the manner in which you would be executed, if you were sentenced to execution, varied depending on your status, whether you were upper class, lower class, or whatever. And depending on the nature of the violation, the nature of the crime. need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. So different criminals were executed in different ways by different groups. And this was true both among the Jews, the Jewish Sanhedrin, and also among the Romans. Now, the Romans used crucifixion

as a method of execution primarily for lower class people, not just Jews, but lower class people, and for people who were convicted of crimes like treason. So, Jesus falls into that category. And that method of execution was used precisely because it was a very long and slow and painful way to die. And it was also a very visible way to, you know, to punish somebody, right? Upper classes were not executed in that way. For example, the Hasmonean king, Mattathias Antigonus, was executed by Mark Antony by being beheaded, which is an instantaneous manner of death. So that's a much more, in a way, a much more humane way to kill somebody than crucifixion. Paul was not executed by crucifixion because he claimed to be a Roman citizen who was entitled to a trial

in Rome, right? So, he sent off to Rome after he was arrested in Jerusalem and then held at Caesarea. He sent off to Rome and he was tried and then presumably executed, but not by crucifixion because he's a Roman citizen. So, if we now agree that rock-cut tombs were used by members of the elite primarily, or the wealthier members of society, then this is precisely the group that would largely not have been executed by crucifixion if they were found guilty of violating Roman law, not Jewish law. By the way, the Jewish Sanhedrin did not use crucifixion as a method of execution. When and if Jews did execute criminals, they used methods that resulted in immediate death rather than a prolonged death precisely because something like crucifixion can lead you to a problem like you have with Jesus,

where you don't know when the victim is going to die, and you could end up with the victim dying at a point when it's right before the Sabbath or a festival, they can't be given a proper burial in accordance with Jewish law, when Jewish law says that even the worst criminals are entitled to burial within 24 hours of death. So the Sanhedrin would never have executed somebody with crucifixion because of the problem of not knowing when the victim was going to die, right? It had to be an instantaneous and instant death. So that's one thing. So first of all, presumably, the majority of people who were interred, buried in rock-cut tombs, were the kind of population that if they were found guilty of violating Roman law, would not have been crucified. The other thing, the other problem, though, is that

crucifixion does not leave much in the way of traces on the body. So, sometimes victims were tied to the cross, and then when they're taken down, they're simply untied. But if they were nailed up, the nails, of course, had to be pulled out when you take them down from the cross. So, we actually only have one victim of crucifixion who's been identified in a rock cut tomb in Jerusalem. This was a bone that was found in an ossuary where what happened is when they nailed this person to the cross, it was a guy named Yohanan, the nail hit a knot in the olive wood. It was an olive wood cross and it bent and they couldn't pull the nail out. And so they must've cut the wood off of the cross and the nail was still in his bone through his heel. It's a heel bone. And you know, the bone was placed into the ossuary like that and the nail was still in his bone through his heel. It's a heel bone. And, you know,

the bone was placed into the ossuary like that with the nail still sticking through it. But that's the only one that we have. But that's the reason why you would not expect to find much in the way. Now, I get a lot of emails from people with inquiries about these sorts of things. And there's one person who sends me a lot of emails about Jewish tombs and burial customs. And he recently sent me an email saying, well, wouldn't forensic analysis be able to identify if a victim had been nailed to the cross? And I mean, I don't know. I'm not a forensic scientist. So I don't know whether methods, that kind of forensics could, you know, if you took some of the bones from Jerusalem's

ossuaries and analyze them, if you could tell that they had been damaged by a nail, I don't know. But on the other hand, I also think that not having signs of that, as I said, we wouldn't expect actually to have that in the archaeological record anyway, given that these were tombs that belonged to the upper classes pretty much. I mean, that is so interesting how we even still we have this one like bone surviving that does have a nail in it it seems like even that is quite an extraordinary case it's it's on display in the israel museum in jerusalem so next time you're able to go they have a very nice section uh in the archaeology wing of the israel museum that has different ossuaries um and you

know they have among other things they have that that heel bone with the nail on display as we're starting to wrap up this podcast it does seem to sound from what we talk about with the rock cartoons with the archaeology with the gospel accounts now of course we're approaching from the archaeological viewpoint but it does seem to you that the archaeology it does correlate with the story in the gospels yeah. Yeah. So, I don't want to, you know, you can't prove, right? What we can do is we can say that, again, the archaeological evidence is largely consistent with what we read in the Gospel accounts. The Gospel accounts, if we start with Mark, go back to within, you know, four decades of the death of Jesus. So, this is a tradition, apparently, that goes back, you know, pretty early

in Christianity. And, of course, we do have a site in Jerusalem, that goes back, you know, pretty early in Christianity. And, of course, we do have a site in Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which has been venerated as the spot where Jesus was crucified and buried, at least since the time of Constantine. So, the early 4th century and, you know, probably going back further than that. And so, I mean, we do have a constellation of evidence here that I think is largely consistent. And this, by the way, countering claims that, you know, the tomb of Jesus was located somewhere else in Jerusalem. And so, I find the gospel accounts to be, you know, consistent from an archaeological point of view, consistent with what I would expect. I'm slightly hesitant, but I've got it in my notes here, the story of the Talpiot tomb. Is that something you want to debunk? I can talk about it. I mean, how much time do we have? Okay. Go for it. Go for it. So there's a, and your listeners can Google Talpiot, which is spelled T-A-L-P-I-Y-O-T, or sometimes you take out the Y, but Talpiot. Talpiot is a neighborhood in Jerusalem,

a modern neighborhood in Jerusalem, located on the southwest side of the city, not too far, actually, from the Caiaphas tomb. So, back in 1980, this neighborhood was being constructed, and in the course of construction, a bulldozer bulldozed and revealed the facade, the opening to a tomb, which is a fairly modest tomb. It doesn't have a huge, it's a little bit decorated, but it's not one of the more ornate rock-cut tombs, but it's a rock-cut tomb. And it has, you know, this little opening cut into the front of it. And inside is a burial chamber with loculi, and there were ossuaries, and there were 10 ossuaries in the tomb. The tomb was, archaeologists were called, the tomb was excavated by archaeologists,

documented, and it was published. There was a full and final scientific report that was published in an Israeli journal called Atikot in 1996. So, okay, so the ossuaries are interesting because some were inscribed, and some of the names on the ossuaries are very interesting. So there's a Joseph, there's a Jesus, there's a Mary, and there's actually others. There's a Judah, son of Jesus, and then there are some other names that aren't known from the gospel accounts. The forms of the names are a little different, too. The Mary is the Hebrew or the Greek, Mariame, Mariame. It's not Mary exactly. Anyway, never mind. Okay. So, but okay, so it's an interesting

constellation of names. But, you know, all of those names were extremely common among the Jewish population of Jerusalem in this period. So, it's like kind of like, I don't know how it is over in England, right? But, you know, here in the US, every other guy is Mike or Bob or Jim. So, very, very common names. And so, so it was until sometime in, I think, the early 2000s when a filmmaker, and it's a filmmaker, not an archaeologist, not a scholar, a filmmaker, stumbled across the publication of this tomb and decided on the basis of the constellation of names on the ossuaries that this must be the tomb of Jesus and his family. family, and then spent a huge amount of money doing all kinds of analyses, scientific analyses of the ossuaries and the bones and all sorts of stuff, doing all kinds of statistical analyses to sort of prove that this was in fact the tomb of Jesus and his family. And it was then broadcast as a, I'm going to put it in air quotes, a documentary on the Discovery Channel in March of 2008. Very

typically, these things get broadcast right before Easter. So it was right before Easter in 2008. It generated a huge amount of controversy. And it generated a huge amount of controversy because, first of all, we have a site in Jerusalem that has since the early fourth century been venerated as the spot where Jesus was crucified and buried, and that is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But also, if this was in fact the tomb of Jesus, then it would mean that, number one, Jesus was married and had a family because there's a Judah son of Jesus. And more importantly, it would mean that Jesus was never resurrected because his physical remains were collected and put into an ossuary. Now, I have no dogs in the theological fight, but I do have dogs in the scientific fight,

whether Jesus was resurrected or not. But on the basis of archaeology and science, there is no support at all for the claim that this is the tomb of Jesus and his family. And I can actually, you know, count the way, I always say, let me count the ways that this is, you know, that this is not the tomb of Jesus and his family. So, first of all, if this was in fact the tomb of Jesus and his family, we would have to disregard the canonical gospel accounts, which we have seen are consistent with archaeological evidence in Jewish law. Why? Because if Jesus's family owned a rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem, there would have been no need for Joseph of Arimathea to take Jesus' body and put it in his family's rock-cut tomb. The Joseph of Arimathea story then is, you know,

you have to disregard it. Now, again, you know, I'm not claiming that the gospel accounts are historically accurate, but they do, they are the earliest, you know, accounts that we have, right? You have to somehow account for that, and you have to have something to replace it with, and they don't. Okay. Second, Jesus's family was lower class, and presumably, them would not have had the means to afford a rock-cut tomb. But if you want to argue, as some of my colleagues do, that Jesus's family was wealthy enough to be able to afford a rock-cut tomb, then presumably, it would have been located in Nazareth, their hometown, not in Jerusalem, just like the tomb of the Maccabees was in their hometown, Amodim. If there's no rock-cut tomb, then there's no ossuaries, right? Because ossuaries go with rock-cut tombs, so the names on the ossuaries then are meaningless. And the names on the ossuaries

are, not only are they common, but they're Judean. And when I say Judean, what I mean is that Jews in Jerusalem, when you were called your name, it wasn't like today where we have a first name and a last name. You were called so-and-so, son of, or daughter of so-and-so, right? So I would be Jody's daughter of Herbert or something like that. And so the names, then you have a very small pool of names and they occur over and over again. And it's only when you have an unusual name or an unusual constellation of names that you can start to maybe suggest that this is somebody who we know of from literary sources. Outside of Jerusalem, if you were from outside of Jerusalem, whether you were Jewish or not, you were called according to the place you originated from. So Simon of Cyrene, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Magdala, right? Paul of Tarsus,

Trophimus from Ephesus. I mean, so it's just like that. And we have inscriptions on ossuaries from Jerusalem which indicate that sometimes people who were from outside, you know, Judea were buried in these tombs and it's given. And so, the name, the constellation of names on the ossuaries are Judean. They're not, there's no indication that these people or family came from somewhere outside of Judea, meaning from Galilee or wherever. There's also an assumption here that there are people buried in this tomb who we can't account for in the New Testament accounts. That is, that there are names mentioned on some of the ossuaries,

which we don't know of from the Gospels. And in fact, the people who advocate for this being the tomb of Jesus have to go to some very late sources, you know, Christian sources to try and say, oh, well, we do have this person mentioned in a much later story. Anyway, there's that. And then I think that, you know, one of the most important things for me is the fact that we have no such Christian tradition at all. In other words, the earliest Christian traditions that we have are the Joseph of Arimathea story. Now, if this was, in fact, the tomb of Jesus and his family in Jerusalem, then you would assume that Jesus' followers would have preserved the memory of there being a tomb like this, that that would be somehow, we'd have some record of that

somewhere, some reference to it, and that maybe even the site then would have been venerated, right, by Jesus's followers. We have nothing like that at all. So, all of this to say that there's not one shred of literary or archaeological evidence to support the claim that this is, in fact, the tomb of Jesus and his family. And so, again, all of the, you know, the best information that we have, you know, it's not 100%, we can never be 100%, but, you know, everything points to the gospel accounts and the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which has been venerated literally for centuries, and no support at all for this claim about the Talpio tomb. But it got a lot of publicity.

It did indeed. Well, Jodie, that was absolutely absolutely amazing brilliant chat right there for the last hour or so of course you've done a lot of work not just on jerusalem but on masada that two-part podcast i mentioned at the beginning go and listen to it folks it's a must and jody thanks so much for coming back on the show well and thank you for having me again i appreciate it it was fun and and i hope all your listeners have a happy holiday season.