| March 16, 2008 | Archaeology and the Bones of Jesus Reverend Eugen Bannerman |
Opening Remarks
A “defining moment” is one that stands out uniquely from ordinary events,
and sets your thinking in a new and unexpected direction.
I had a theological defining moment the first time I spoke in a Unitarian church.
I had a theological degree from a Presbyterian College,
was teaching psychology at Ryerson University,
and was asked by a colleague, Murray Paulin, to speak at Don Heights.
During the talk on “Man’s Search for Meaning,”
I mentioned that for many people Jesus was a model of moral and ethical behavior.
I can still remember as clear as sunlight, my friend, Jim Peters, getting up during the Talk-Back part of the service, and announcing for all to hear:
Dr. Bannerman, you speak as if all Unitarians believe there was somebody called Jesus. I’d like you to know there are some of us here, in this very room,
who do not believe Jesus was a real person. He is a myth invented by the church.
I was stunned.
I had met plenty of atheists before,
but never someone who denied Jesus even existed.
I have not forgotten that defining moment, and it was years before I could get my head around to the possibility Jesus didn’t even exist.
Sermon
So what am I doing now, thirty years later, talking about Jesus again in a Unitarian church?
It is because of this book, The Jesus Family Tomb, by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino that came out last Easter (2007).
Some of you may have seen the documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, on Discovery Channel.
Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-born journalist and filmmaker now living in Toronto, who has made a name for himself reporting on archaeological finds, believes he has discovered the family tomb of the historical Jesus.
Simcha admits that for two thousand years there was no proof of any sort from the time of Jesus himself that he was ever on earth.
No writings from his own hand,
no bricks or buildings with his name,
no trial records before judges.
Nothing whatsoever about Jesus has remained from Jesus’ own lifetime.
The first reference to Jesus was by St. Paul 25 years later, who admitted he never met Jesus in the flesh.
And the first gospel by Mark didn’t make its appearance until another 15 years later, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
But now, for the first time ever, Simcha believes he has physical evidence that Jesus existed and had a family.
Now, shouts Simcha, we have more than proof that he existed, we have his casket and the burial boxes of members of his family.
Maybe Jim Peters was wrong?
Let me pause for a moment.
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear this list of names?
Jesus, son of Joseph
Mary, written in Aramaic
Mariamne, written in Greek
Jo’se, a nickname for Joseph
Matia, or Matthew
Judah, son of Jesus
If you saw all these names together,
wouldn’t you think they belonged to the family of Jesus in the New Testament?
Simcha Jacobovici made that assumption, and convinced some important people to help him put the story together on film.
“The story scared us,” admitted James Cameron, who had directed the movie, Titanic, and who helped finance the project.
“It was big—lightning in a bottle. It was going to be controversial.
Did I really want this in my life?
And yet, how could I turn away from the greatest archaeology story ever?”
Here are some of the background details surrounding Jacobovici’s remarkable story and claims.
One Friday afternoon in February 1980,
bulldozers began excavating a site in southern Jerusalem to build the Talpiot apartments.
They accidentally exposed an ancient tomb.
This was not unusual.
Over the last fifty years, hundreds of tombs had been excavated, and thousands of bone boxes, or ossuaries as they are called, were uncovered, photographed, recorded and stored in a warehouse.
As required by Israeli law, the Talpiot apartment developers notified the Israeli Antiquities Association who sent some archaeologists to investigate.
Inside the tomb, the archaeologists found ten ossuaries, six with names on them.
They measured them, numbered them, and trucked them to the Rockefeller Museum warehouse where they joined the thousands of other ossuaries already catalogued.
None of the archaeologists who looked at the original inscriptions thought the names were unusual or significant. All six names were common names from the period.
In fact, as they discovered later, already at the warehouse there were 22 ossuaries with the name “Jesus” on them, and 42 ossuaries with the name “Mary.”
Let me digress for a moment and talk about the Jewish burial custom of 2000 years ago.
Jewish law required that a dead body be buried in the ground on the same day.
About 30 years B.C., they began to bury their dead in caves hollowed out of the limestone cliffs around Jerusalem.
When someone died, family members would bring the body into the tomb.
Here they would anoint it, wrap it in a shroud, and lift it onto one of the side ledges.
A year later they would return with a small limestone box in which they would place the bones or dust of the decomposed body, and then they pushed the sealed box into a niche in the wall where it would rest in peace. If they could afford it, they would have the name of the deceased scratched into the side of the ossuary.
(By the way, you can actually bury some of these old ossuaries for $500 and more, depending on the ornamentation. People in Jerusalem used them as flower planters!)
This was the kind of tomb the bulldozer unearthed at the Talpiot site back in 1980.
Twenty-five years later, while Simcha Jacobovici was filming a documentary on the James Ossuary, he heard about the Talpiot ossuaries and asked to see them.
What he saw made him gasp.
They were the same names as those he recognized from the gospels.
Jesus, son of Joseph.
Jo’se, or Joseph
Maria, or Mary.
Mariamne, also known as Mara.
Matia, or Matthew.
Judah, son of Jesus.
Had he unwittingly stumbled upon the ossuaries of the family of Jesus of Nazareth?
Had he really found the bone boxes of Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, and even what appeared to be a son of Jesus?
If so, this could conceivably be the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.
If so, then Jesus was not physically resurrected, as the Easter story claimed;
nor did he ascend bodily into heaven, as the church taught.
The name “Mariamne,” Simcha found out later, was the second century name for Mary Magdalene.
If she was in the tomb with Jesus, he reasoned, she must have been his wife.
And if so, it stands to reason that Judah could have been their child.
It was a radical, and adventurous thought, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and bore a son named Judah.
If so, then the church will no longer be able to deny the information it had suppressed for 2000 years.
Simcha Jacobovici realized he needed more data to prove his Jesus’ family theory.
He knew it would eventually all come down to statistics.
“What are the odds that the Talpiot tomb really belongs to Jesus of Nazareth and not some other Jesus?” he asked himself.
It has been estimated that during the 100 years of ossuary use in Jerusalem—the custom stopped after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD—the male population was around 80,000.
Using the 16 most popular names at the time, 7,200 sons would have been called “Jesus”, and 11,200 sons would be called “Joseph”.
Multiplying the percentages against each other, we get 1008 male children who would have been called “Jesus, son of Joseph” during the century under discussion.
That doesn’t sound like a great discovery.
Simcha was not daunted.
He had training in statistics and probabilities.
How many of those 1008 men living in the time of Jesus were buried with a Mary, or a Mariamne, or a Matthew, or a Judah?
After factoring the probability of each name in the tomb cluster, and multiplying them against each other, Jacobovici came up with his “Jesus family equation:”
The odds were 2.5 million to one in favor of the Talpiot tomb being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.
That’s the proof Jacobovici was telling the world.
Has he convinced you?
Actually, very few people, then or now, were convinced by Jacobovici’s figures.
The archaeologist who numbered the original boxes in 1980, continues to feel strongly there is nothing unusual about the names in the tomb.
For example, 25% of the girls at the time were called Mary or Miriam.
Of the twelve female disciples named in the New Testament, eight are named Mary.
Further, a University of Toronto statistician has come up with another statistical probability:
The odds are 600 to 1 that the combination of names appeared in the tomb by chance.
Others have asked why Jesus would have a family tomb in Jerusalem if the family was poor and from Nazareth.
Still others wanted to know why the family would have a tomb at all if they were poor.
Compared to other tombs, the Talpiot tomb is most likely that of a middle-class or wealthy first century family from Jerusalem.
Simcha is a journalist and not a scientist; however, to his credit, he had DNA tests conducted on two of the ossuaries, that of Jesus and Mariamne.
Not surprising, the results came back that they were not related!
Just what we would expect if they were husband and wife, Simcha beamed.
But others wondered why he did not proceed with DNA tests on all the ossuaries.
Was he afraid that this might reveal that none of the ossuaries were related and that it was not a family tomb at all but a public one?
The criticisms of Simcha’s assumptions and misquotations have not stopped.
In January of this year (2008), Princeton University hosted a symposium on the tomb.
Not one of the fifty scholars who spoke felt the claims of the book and documentary could be substantiated.
“The film is all nonsense,” noted the author of the 1980 excavation report.
“It makes a great story for a TV film,” but it is not archaeological science.
So we are back where we started before Jacobovici’s book and movie was released:
There is still no physical evidence of the existence of Jesus from his own time.
Perhaps Jim Peters is right after all!
This does not mean Jesus was not a flesh-and-blood person as described in the later gospels, but only that there is no proof of his existence from his own time.
I conclude with these thoughts and questions:
What does all this mean for us today?
This failure to find contemporary evidence for Jesus has led some scholars to speculate that Jesus may not have been a historical person, but a spiritual ideal that evolved over time, as preached by Paul and the early church.
This is essentially the view of Tom Harpur, whose book The Pagan Christ has become a bestseller and was used as a study guide in many churches, including Unitarian churches.
Tom Harpur, who used to believe in a historical Jesus now believes Jesus is no more historical than Osiris or Zeus, Hercules or Horus.
Instead of a real man in Palestine, Jesus is a mythical ideal of the potential for spirituality inherent in all of us.
Hence any discussion of whether we have the physical remains of the earthly Jesus is entirely beside the point.
This, of course, is what Unitarians like Jim Peters have said all along.
One more thought from Harpur.
Harpur frequently spoke at Don Heights and other Unitarian congregations in Toronto,
and understood them very well.
When he was invited to speak at the CUC Council in Hamilton in May 2005, he gave them this advice:
I have one strong suggestion. There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians currently looking for a spiritual home. But they’re not looking just for a debating society or for membership in a group of do-gooder, would-be intellectuals. They want, in the midst of the other good things Unitarians have to offer, a truly living experience of God. They want meaning now and a future hope. (The Canadian Unitarian, Summer 2005).
In the spirit of Harpur, the awakening of the divine energy within each person is what humans want, and what the story of Jesus, mythical or historical, is all about.
THANK YOU.
Sources and Epilogue
The Jesus Family Tomb, by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, Easter 2007.
The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Discovery Channel, and Vision TV. Available as DVD.
A reading by Robert Gifford from Tom Harpur’s book, The Pagan Christ (2004).
All of this brings us to the central Christos myth, which in its many different forms lies at the heart of every ancient religion.
The work of the latest scholars establishes beyond doubt that the single vast theme (in fact, the central teaching) of all religion is indeed the incarnation of the divine in the human.
In the various sun gods, from Hercules of Greece to Horus of Egypt, humans could see pictured their own history, their destiny, and their eventual conversion into angels of light. The same is true of the Gospel Jesus figure.
The ancients placed at the myth’s centre an ideal person who would symbolize humanity itself in its dual nature of human and divine.
This ideal person—the names were Tammuz, Adonis, Mithras, Dionysus, Krishna, Christ, and many others—symbolized the divine spark incarnate in every human being.
“Beneath the superficial consciousness, wrapped up with the concerns of ordinary existence in each mortal, there slumbers the unawakened energy of a divine nature.”
--Tom Harpur, Easter 2004
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