FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE WALL STREE JOURNAL : October
24, 2002 
  

A Plain Stone Box
By HERSHEL SHANKS
A limestone box from the first century A.D. -- with
the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus"
inscribed on it in Aramaic -- came to light this week
when the Biblical Archeology Review disclosed its
existence in a private collection in Israel. The box,
an "ossuary" used to hold bones, may be the oldest
tangible link to Jesus, and is likely to be most
controversial among Roman Catholics.

The traditional Roman Catholic understanding of
"brother," as used regarding James in the New
Testament, is that it means not blood brother but
kinsman. Early Catholic theology suggests that James
was only the cousin of Jesus. But if the Aramaic
inscription does indeed refer to the three New
Testament figures, it presents a problem for this
traditional Catholic interpretation. For the
inscription clearly states that Joseph is James's
father.

Not all Catholic scholars subscribe to the traditional
interpretation. The distinguished New Testament
scholar and Dominican priest, Father Jerome
Murphy-O'Connor of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique
Francaise in Jerusalem, told me that he believes James
was indeed the son of Joseph -- but by a previous
marriage. In short, he was Jesus's half-brother (this
is the traditional doctrine of Eastern Orthodox
Christianity).

Other scholars, both Catholics and non-Catholics, have
suggested that the inscription is a forgery or that
there might have been someone else in first-century
Jerusalem named James, whose father was named Joseph
and who had a brother Jesus.

Because this ossuary came to us via the antiquities
market, rather than through a professional
archaeological excavation, the question of
authenticity immediately arises. But I am virtually
certain that it is authentic. The ossuary has been
examined by two of the world's leading Semitic
paleographers -- experts in how the shape and form of
ancient letters change over time -- and they have
pronounced it authentic. Language, too, changes over
time. An expert in Aramaic can distinguish, say,
between the Aramaic of the first or third century. A
leading Aramaic scholar has found the inscription
authentic. The inscription was drawn for us by
Israel's leading expert in scripts, who also found
nothing suspicious in it. We also had it tested by the
Geological Survey of Israel; these scientists found a
patina -- a film that develops over centuries on stone
-- in the incisions of the inscription that chemically
matched the patina on the side of the ossuary.

Finally, a forger plies his craft to make money. There
was no such motive here. It was purchased some 15
years ago from an Arab antiquities dealer for a few
hundred dollars. Neither the Israeli purchaser nor the
antiquities dealer recognized the value of what they
had. It lay "undiscovered" until Andre Lemaire of the
Sorbonne saw it and recognized it for what it was.
So the major issue is whether this James and this
Joseph and this Jesus are the ones mentioned in the
New Testament. Each of these names was fairly common
in the first century A.D. Prof. Lemaire computed the
statistical likelihood that these were the people we
recognize from the New Testament: we know the
frequency of the appearance of these names in other
inscriptions from this time and we have a pretty good
estimate of the population of Jerusalem. These
calculations indicate that in two generations there
were probably 20 sets of three people with these
names. Taking account, however, of the requirement
that they must follow a certain order -- Joseph must
be the father and James the deceased and Jesus the
brother -- we are down to about 7 sets.

But the clincher is that Jesus is mentioned as the
brother on the ossuary. Jews in Jerusalem at this time
buried their dead in long niches, called loculi, in
caves. When the flesh desiccated and fell away after
about a year, the bones were collected and placed in a
limestone box about a foot-and-half long, thus making
room for additional burials. We have hundreds of these
ossuaries, but on only one other is the brother
mentioned. The usual formula consists only of the
names of the deceased and his father.

Scholars have suggested only two reasons for the
mention of a brother on an ossuary. Either the brother
was responsible for the burial or the brother was
prominent and the deceased wished to be associated
with him. By the '60s A.D., when James was stoned for
his devotion to Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus was
prominent, and James was head of the Jerusalem church.
Eusebius calls him the first bishop of Jerusalem. The
mention of Jesus on the ossuary seems natural.
Certainty? No. Likelihood? Yes. Whether the question
will ever be definitively settled is doubtful.
Definitive answers are rarely ever found in the wake
of archaeological controversies.

But this simple stone box, carefully and perhaps
lovingly inscribed, somehow transports us back almost
2,000 years to Jewish Jerusalem, out of which
Christianity grew: the use of the vernacular (Aramaic,
not Hebrew or Greek), the stone cutter's trade, the
carver's careful hand, the plain bone box. It was a
world not only of miracles and great events, but also
of the kind of living and dying we all share.
Mr. Shanks is the editor of the Biblical Archaeology
Review.
Updated October 24, 2002 FROM THE ARCHIVES: October
24, 2002 
   

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