A retired Israeli geologist has reported a geochemical match between dirt in the Talpiot Tomb — where coffin-like boxes were found with Aramaic inscriptions understood to read "Jesus son of Joseph," Mary Magdalene, and "Judah son of Jesus" — and soil in a burial box inscribed "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus," according to
The New York Times.
The Talpiot Tomb was discovered at a construction site in the Jerusalem neighborhood of East Talpiot, or Armon HaNetziv, in 1980. The area had been uninhabited when it was captured by Israel from Jordan in 1967's Six Day War.
The Talpiot findings were popularized in the 2007 documentary
"The Lost Tomb of Jesus," produced by James Cameron and written by Simcha Jacobovici, that was broadcast on the Discovery Channel.
The tomb has since been sealed and its burial boxes, or ossuaries, are in the custody of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The James ossuary is in the hands of a private Tel Aviv collector, who has said that he purchased the box in 1976 from an Arab dealer.
In 2012, a Jerusalem court dismissed charges of fraud against the collector brought by Israeli authorities, the Times reported.
Geologist Aryeh Shimron, 79, reported that, after seven years of study, he had identified Rendzina soil in both sets of artifacts, tying the provenance of the James ossuary to the Talpiot Tomb. His lab costs were picked up by Jacobovici, an Israeli-born filmmaker based in Canada, who is planning a follow-up film, according to the Times.
"I think I've got really powerful, virtually unequivocal evidence that the James ossuary spent most of its lifetime, or death time, in the Talpiot Tomb," Shimron told the Times.
If the relics are indeed connected, this could be seen as reinforcing the view that the Jesus of the Talpiot Tomb is the Jesus of the New Testament. Such a claim would be rejected outright by Christians, since it infers burial remains of Jesus of Nazareth and is
contrary to the Resurrection.
The burial boxes further infer that "Jesus" was married to Mary Magdalene, and that they had a son named Judah, contrary to the biblical Jesus.
Experts say that these were all common names during the Second Temple period, according to the Times. A statistician who studied Second Temple era names, however, told the Hebrew-edition of
Haaretz that these names were not common in Judea.
Shimron believes that an earthquake that struck Jerusalem in A.D. 363 dislodged the stone covering the entrance of the Talpiot Tomb. The soil that inundated the tomb "created a kind of vacuum" that froze "the composition of the tomb" in time, the Times reported.
Ten ossuaries were believed to have been in Talpiot, though only nine were found. This has spurred the hypothesis that the 10th box is the James ossuary.
Archaeologist Shimon Gibson was involved in the original excavations done by the Israel Antiquities Authority in 1980. He said it was likely that the tomb was disturbed by raiders in the Byzantine era. He doubted, however, that the James ossuary has anything to do with the Talpiot Tomb, according to the Times.
Critics maintain that it is a giant leap to connect the Talpiot and James artifacts to figures in the Christian Bible, the Times reported.
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