Word: jesus
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Almost no educated person these days doubts that Jesus lived. Some accept it on faith, others on the testimony of a brace of ancient chroniclers, both Christian and Roman. Yet there is something uniquely compelling about an attestation in stone. As Lemaire explained to TIME, "The written word is a bit airy. Listen, you can talk about Egyptian civilization, but the day you visit the pyramids, it speaks to you in a different way." Or as Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, says of the ossuary, "It is something tactile and visible reaching back to the single most...
...these assessments are based on two suppositions: that the box is not a forged item and that the James, Joseph and Jesus inscribed on it are the ones in the Bible. Neither is a foregone conclusion. The history of the ossuary is murky. It was probably looted from a burial cave decades ago. The Biblical Archaeology article includes testimony by geologists and experts in ancient writing with sufficient credibility to convince scholars that the box is not a fake and probably does date to within four decades of A.D. 62, the accepted year for James' martyrdom at the temple. Many...
...owner of the ossuary claims to be stunned by the entire experience. He says he bought it for a few hundred dollars "in the 1970s" as representative of its particular period. He claims he had no idea at the time of its possible significance ("I didn't know that Jesus had a brother.") And he pleads with TIME not to divulge his name or location. "I don't want my apartment turned into a church," he explains...
...years the ossuary sat in obscurity. Jews in Jerusalem in the hundred years before and after Jesus' birth practiced secondary burial--the transfer of bones of the deceased from a first grave into a container that was then deposited in the family burial cave. Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of such boxes, ranging from ornately carved and painted chests to utilitarian containers devoid of any inscription. The James ossuary fell somewhere in the middle. Its owner says he was familiar with its inscription but, as a Jew, was unaware that the names were special. One day last spring he invited Lemaire...
...burial box that way were actually far fewer. In the article, he points out that any mention of a brother on an ossuary was extremely rare and speculates that when it occurred it may have been because that brother was "known" in his own right, as the biblical Jesus was to his circle. Privately, Lemaire adds that the number of James/Joseph/Jesus families who utilized an ossuary is perhaps further reduced when one eliminates those belonging to the Sadducee sect, which did not believe in bodily resurrection and would have been less likely to preserve bones. (Others disagree: the high priest...