TombOne

"I've discovered the lost tomb of George Washington! I found the inscriptions "George Washington"
and "Martha Sue, also called Greta" on a tombstone in Alexandria, Virginia, and without a doubt, the
tombstone dates from about 1800. Plus, George and Martha Washington had no offspring, which is
consistent with this tombstone that listed no children. I figure that "Greta" must mean "Great,"
because she was a great leader."

If someone made a claim like that, what would you say? You might say, "It's just a recurrence of the same (or
similar) names." Or maybe, "You've found the tomb of someone named George Washington, but it's not the tomb
of the George Washington who was the first President of the United States. President George Washington's tomb is
at Mount Vernon."

But suppose the claim-maker insisted, "This is the real tomb of President George Washington. The people
who claim that George Washington's tomb is at Mount Vernon are mostly Americans who admired
George Washington; you can't trust them to see things objectively." You might think he had some sort of
anti-American agenda. But then suppose he said, "I've written a book about the lost tomb of George
Washington. You can buy it now, just $24.95! I also have a fascinating DVD for sale on the same topic!
How many copies do you want to order?"

You might start to laugh.

But it's no joke. A similar claim is being made about the tomb of Jesus in a coming movie called "The Lost Tomb of
Jesus" on The Discovery Channel, and HarperSanFrancisco Publishers is releasing a book with the same theme.
The movie revolves around the idea that the man known today as Jesus Christ never arose from the dead, and that
after His corpse decayed, His bones were placed in an ossuary -- a small stone box, like a miniature coffin -- and
the ossuary was placed in a tomb, where ossuaries containing the bones of His mother Mary, and the bones of Mary
Magdalene, and the bones of Jesus' son Judas, and other family-members, including one named Matthew and one
named Joseph, were also placed.

The main scholars behind "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" are the director Simcha Jacobovici and Dr. James Tabor, a
professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Tabor's 2006 book The Jesus Dynasty included a
section about the Talpiot tomb -- a tomb south of Old Jerusalem that was accidentally discovered in 1980 -- and the
ten ossuaries it contained. Five of the ossuaries in the Talpiot tomb were inscribed with Aramaic names: Joseph,
Mary, Jesus son of Joseph, Matthew, and Judas son of Jesus. A sixth ossuary was inscribed in Greek with the name
"Mariamene e Mara." "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" consists mainly of an attempt to connect these names to the family
of Jesus of Nazareth. It also attempts to prove that the "James Ossuary," an artifact which was heralded in late 2002
as the ossuary of James, the brother of Jesus, is genuine (a panel of experts studied the James Ossuary in various
ways, and concluded that its inscription was a fake), and that the James Ossuary was originally in the Talpiot tomb.

The four basic claims offered by Simcha Jacobovici are as follows:

(1) The individual named Mariamene in the Talpiot tomb is Mary Magdalene.

(2) DNA-samples from the ossuary of Mariamene and from the ossuary of Jesus son of Joseph show that
Mariamene was not the mother or sister of Jesus.

(3) The patina -- the natural mineral build-up -- on the James Ossuary matches the patina on the ossuaries from the
Talpiot tomb, showing that the James Ossuary was originally in the Talpiot tomb.

(4) Statistically, the odds are extremely low that two families in the first century would have members with the names
which are known to be the names of members of the family of Jesus of Nazareth, and the family entombed at
Talpiot.

Now I will examine these claims. Along the way I will suggest some shortcomings of Dr. Tabor's research.

Question #1: Is "Mariamene e Mara" another form of the name "Mary Magdalene"?

Answer: "Mariamene e Mara" means "Mariamne, also called Mara." Mary Magdalene is never referred to in the
New Testament as "Mary Magdalene" or as "Mara." The name "Mary Magdalene" is no more related to the name
"Mariamene e Mara" in Greek than the name "Mary MacDonald" is related to the name "Mary Jane" or "Mary
Anne." Finding someone named Mary Anne does not mean you've found Mary MacDonald.

The name "Mariamne" (of which "Mariamene" is a variant form) was the name of several women mentioned by the
first-century writer Josephus, including two wives of Herod the Great (the ruler of Judea when Jesus Christ was
born). Nothing about the name "Mariamene" suggests a special connection to Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene's
distinctive surname indicates where she was from: Magedan, in Galilee. (In a few copies of the Gospel of Mark, the
name "Magdala" or "Mageda appears at 8:10 instead of the otherwise obscure "Dalmanoutha.")

Furthermore, the Gospels use variation when referring to Mary Magdalene:

Matthew 28:1 -- Mariam ("Maria" in some manuscripts, including codices A, B, D, W, and the traditional
Byzantine Text) h Magdalhnh

Mark 16:9 -- Maria th Magdalhnh

Luke 8:3 -- Maria h kaloumenh Magdalhnh.

They never call her Mariamne.

So where is Jacobovici getting this connection from? What is the basis for the assertion

that "Mariamene" is "known in early Christian sources as the form of the name

"Miriam/Mariam" used for Mary Magdalene"? As it turns out, the main "early

Christian source" is neither early nor Christian. It's the "Acts of Philip," a text written in

the late fourth century. A medieval copy of "Acts of Philip" was discovered in Greece

by Francois Bovon, a Harvard professor, and another researcher (Bertrand Bouvier).

In "Acts of Philip," the name "Mariamne" is used. But it is not used to describe Mary

Magdalene; it's the name of a sister of Philip. The asserted connection between the name

"Mariamne" and Mary Magdalene is a highly imaginative assertion: not only does the

"Acts of Philip" fail to identify Mariamene as Mary Magdalene, but the "Acts of Philip" is

a fairy-tale sort of text, separated from the lifetime of Mary Magdalene by over 250 years.

Also, a prominent theological writer named Origen, who died in A.D. 254, made use of the name "Mariamne" in
Book 5 of "Against Celsus," ch. 61, where he wrote that Celsus had claimed to know various religious groups:
"Marcellians, so-called from Marcellina, and Harpocratians from Salome, and others who derive their name from
Mariamne, and others again from Martha." Then Origen wrote, "We, however, who from a love of learning examine
to the utmost of our ability not only the contents of Scripture, and the differences to which they give rise, but have
also, from love to the truth, investigated as far as we could the opinions of philosophers, have never at any time met
with these sects." Here, and in "Acts of Philip," Mariamne is mentioned along with Martha, so if any connection to a
New Testament character is to be proposed, it is to Mary of Bethany, not Mary Magdalene.

The "Mariamene e Mara" inscription was considered by L.Y. Rahmani to be a double-name, "Mariamne, a.k.a.
Mara." Another researcher, Tal Ilan, proposed that it means "Mariamene the Master." I favor Rahmani's
interpretation. But either way, the name "Mariamene" has no particular connection to Mary Magdalene. We see on
this ossuary neither the simple name "Mary" or her distinctive surname "Magdalene." Instead we have a name which
has no more connection to Mary Magdalene than it has to any other woman named Mary in first-century Judea.

Question #2: Do DNA-sample taken from two of the Talpiot ossuaries show that the person named
Mariamene e Mara was not the mother or the sister of the person named Jesus son of Joseph?

Apparently yes, but that does not eliminate several other possibilities. It does not show that Mariamene was not
Joseph's wife, or Matthew's wife, or Judas' wife. She may be related to none of the other people in the Talpiot
tomb. This possibility may be supported by the observation that the other inscriptions are in Aramaic, but hers is in
Greek, and Mariamene's ossuary is more ornately decorated than the other inscribed ossuaries.

One must ask why, if Mariamene was closely related to Jesus and Judas, their names are in Aramaic but hers is in
Greek. A hypothetical but logical answer is that those who entombed Mariamene favored Greek over Aramaic,
while those who entombed the others whose remains were in inscribed ossuaries did not. This, in turn, suggests that
Mariamene's ossuary was placed in the tomb at a significantly different time than the other inscribed ossuaries.
Archaeologist Amos Kloner noted that the Talpiot tomb "was probably used for three or four generations," and this
would account for the linguistic shift.

So, the DNA evidence does not imply much. It does not show that the person named Jesus and the person named
Mariamene were married. It does not show that the person named Jesus and the person named Mariamene ever
met.

Question #3: If the patina on the James Ossuary matches the patina on the ossuaries from the Talpiot
tomb, doesn't that imply that the James Ossuary was originally in the Talpiot tomb?

It depends on what sort of a "match" one is talking about. Apparently Robert Genna, a crime-lab specialist in the
Suffolk County Crime Laboratory in New York, has run some sort of comparison between "patina taken from the
Talpiot Tomb and chemical residue obtained from the "James" ossuary." He told Discovery News, "The samples
were consistent with each other." The promoters of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" have said that 30 other samples from
other ossuaries were also tested, and only the material from the James Ossuary shared the patina "fingerprint" of the
Talpiot tomb.

On the other hand, details about what sort of process was used to define and isolate the "fingerprint" of the Talpiot
tomb's ossuaries' patina are not yet known. Nor is it known just how material from the James Ossuary was
analyzed, or from what part of the James Ossuary it came from. For such details, I will have to wait for patina-
analysis experts to review this newly invented method of patina-fingerprinting.

In the meantime, this might be a good place to mention that although, in the Nov/Dec 2002 issue of Biblical
Archaeology Review magazine, analysts Dr. Amnon Rosenfield and Dr. Shimon Ilani stated that they found "No
evidence that might detract from the authenticity of the patina and the inscription" on the James Ossuary in the
Sept/Oct 2003 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, the following experts weigh in against the authenticity of the
inscription on the James Ossuary: Amos Kloner, Tal Ilan, Esther Eshel, Jacques Neguer, Yuval Gorel, Uzi Dahari,
and Avner Ayalon. In their comments, one finds phrases such as, "It appears to me quite clear that the inscription is
not authentic" and "The letters' patina could not have formed within the Jerusalem area's climatic conditions," and so
forth. Their conclusions came not only after epigraphical analysis (i.e., consideration of the inscription's lettering) but
also after chemical analysis of the patina of the ossuary's non-inscribed and inscribed portions.

Before the "patina-fingerprinting" analysis was undertaken, James Tabor wrote in The Jesus Dynasty (p. 20), "There
is also reliable circumstantial evidence that it [the James Ossuary] was looted from our Tomb of the Shroud [a
different tomb, NOT the Talpiot tomb] either when it was first robbed in 1998, or perhaps just before we
discovered it looted a second time in June 2000. Was it possible that we had unknowingly stumbled upon the
Jesus family tomb?"

Tabor called the evidence that the James Ossuary was not from the Talpiot tomb "reliable," and suggested that a
different tomb was possibly the Jesus family tomb. This indicates, to me, that Tabor may be more easily impressed
by some things than most scholars would be. It also indicates that he was able to call some evidence "reliable" in
2006, and then turn around in 2007 and propose that his "reliable" evidence may be completely wrong.

In The Jesus Dynasty, Tabor wrote (p. 32) that one of the ossuaries from the Talpiot tomb is missing, and that the
dimensions of this missing tenth ossuary and the James Ossuary "are precisely the same, to the centimeter."
However, Amos Kloner listed the dimensions of the tenth Talpiot ossuary as "60 x 26 x 30 cm." The dimensions of
the James Ossuary were given as follows in the Nov/Dec 2002 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, on pages
27-28: "It is 20 inches long (50.5 cm) at the base and flares out to almost 22 inches (56 cm) at the top. Although
one of the short sides is perpendicular to the base, the other is slanted, giving the box a trapezoidal shape. The
ossuary is 10 inches (25 cm) wide and 12 inches (30.5 cm) high." The height and length match, but not the length.
(In L.Y. Rahmani's catalogue, measurements are made to the half-centimeter.) Even using the upper measurement
(56 cm), that's 4 centimeters (more than an inch) of difference. (According to Dr. Rochelle Altman, "the size of an
ossuary tends toward an average of around 24 inches in length by 13 3/4 inches in height by 12 inches in width."
The shared height of 12 inches is nothing unusual.)

Furthermore, in Amos Kloner's report, the tenth ossuary is described as "Plain." The James Ossuary, though, has a
20-letter Aramaic inscription on one side, and rosette-decorations on another side. At the "Jesus Family Tomb"
website that promotes the movie and the book, one can read the claim that "Ossuary 80/509 disappeared before it
could be checked for inscriptions and decorations." That is hard to believe, since the dimensions of this ossuary
were measured and were included in Kloner's report. Are readers to believe that an archaeologist measured this
ossuary without noticing its inscription and decorations???

In The Jesus Dynasty, p. 31, Tabor claimed, "The official catalogue of ossuaries in the State of Israel collection,
published by Rahmani in 1994, also includes just nine ossuaries from this tomb." However, in that catalogue, in his
comments on the ossuary of "Mariamene e Mara," Rahmani wrote, "The Department retained nine ossuaries (Nos.
701-709) recovered from a double-chambered loculi and arcosolia tomb in 1980; a plain, broken specimen was
also found." By my way of counting, nine plus one equals ten.

In order for the James Ossuary to be the tenth ossuary from the Talpiot tomb, it would have to change from a plain
ossuary to an inscribed, decorated ossuary, and it would have to grow in length by more than an inch, and it would
have to change from a broken ossuary to an intact ossuary. I hope this conveys some idea of the basis for my
doubts about the validity of the "patina-fingerprint" analysis that is said to establish that the James Ossuary is the tenth
Talpiot ossuary.