The Talpiot Tomb (or Talpiyot Tomb) is a rock-cut tomb discovered in 1980 in the East Talpiot neighborhood, five kilometers (three miles) south of the Old City in East Jerusalem. It contained ten ossuaries, six inscribed with epigraphs, including one interpreted as Yeshua bar Yehosef ("Jeshua, son of Joseph"), though the inscription is partially illegible, and its translation and interpretation is widely disputed. The tomb also yielded various human remains and several carvings. The Talpiot discovery was documented in 1994 in "Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel" numbers 701–709, and first discussed in the media in the United Kingdom during March/April 1996. Later that year, an article describing the find was published in volume 29 of Atiqot, the journal of the Israel Antiquities Authority. A controversial documentary film, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, was produced in 2007 by director James Cameron and journalist Simcha Jacobovici, and was released in conjunction with a book by Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino titled The Jesus Family Tomb. The book and film make the case that the Talpiot Tomb was the burial place of Jesus of Nazareth, members of his extended family, and several other figures from the New Testament—and, by inference, that Jesus had not risen from the dead as the New Testament describes. This conclusion, while weakly supported by a statistical analysis of the names involved, is rejected by the overwhelming majority of archaeologists, Christian theologians, linguists, and biblical scholars.
History The archaeological team that excavated the tomb in 1980 determined it to be from the Second Temple period, which lasted from about 515 BCE to 70 CE. Typical of the area, a tomb of this type would be assumed to have belonged to a wealthy Jewish family. About 900 similar tombs have been unearthed in the same area.
Discovery and excavation The tomb was discovered on March 28, 1980, by construction workers laying the foundations for an apartment complex, when preparatory demolition work accidentally uncovered the tomb's entrance. The site was visited the next day by Amos Kloner, the area supervisor for the Israel Department of Antiquities (IDA, now the Israel Antiquities Authority, or IAA.) Kloner drew up a set of preliminary sketches and requested a permit for a salvage dig to be directed by Yosef Gat. The permit was issued Monday, March 31, but work actually began the day before. Although it has been said that the team was given only three days to complete the work, Gat's notes indicate that the work proceeded "intermittently" until its official end on April 11, with most of the work completed within the first two days. Construction of the apartment buildings was completed in 1982. The children of Tova Bracha, a local resident, managed to get into the tomb and play inside. Bracha notified the authorities, who sealed the entrance for safety reasons. The children found some discarded Jewish religious texts that had been placed in the tomb, which was being used as a genizah. The tomb, which is not open to the public, is located in a courtyard on Dov Gruner Street, down a flight of stairs at the corner of Olei Hagardom and Avshalom Haviv Streets. It was reopened in 2005 by Jacobovici, without permission from the Antiques Authority, during filming of his documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, and resealed by officials shortly thereafter. In 2008, Ruth Gat, the widow of the archaeologist who supervised the original excavation, claimed that her husband kept the discovery a secret until the mid-1990s because he feared a wave of antisemitism would ensue if the tomb's existence was made public. However, such claims have been rejected by scholars, who pointed out that Yosef Gat died well before the inscriptions in the tomb were deciphered and translated and, in any case, he lacked the expertise to read the inscriptions.
Layout The tomb is carved from the solid limestone bedrock. Within are six kokhim, or burial shafts and two arcosolia, or arched shelves where a body could be laid out for entombment. The ossuaries were found within the shafts.
Artifacts
Ossuaries Ten limestone ossuaries were found, with six of them bearing epigraphs although only four of them were recognized as such in the field. The archaeological team determined the ossuaries to be of little note, and delivered them to the Rockefeller Museum for analysis and storage. According to Jacobovici, Cameron, and religious studies professor James Tabor, one of the unmarked ossuaries later disappeared when it was stored in a courtyard outside the museum. This claim has been criticized by both Joe Zias, former curator of the museum, and Kloner. Each of the ten ossuaries contained human remains, said to be in an "advanced state of deterioration" by Amos Kloner. The tomb may have been multi-generational, with several generations of bones stored in each ossuary, but no record was kept of their contents, and no analysis appears to have been done to determine how many individuals were represented by the bones found. In addition, three skulls were found on the floor of the tomb below the 0.5 metres (1.6 ft) fill layer, and crushed bones were found in the fill upon the arcosolia. The scattering of these bones below the fill indicated that the tomb had been disturbed in antiquity. All the bones were eventually turned over to religious authorities for burial.
Symbols A chevron and circle pattern is visible above the entrance of the tomb.
Media coverage The BBC first aired a documentary on the Talpiot Tomb in 1996 as part of its Heart of the Matter news magazine. At that time, Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said the claims of a connection to Jesus did not hold up archaeologically ("They just want to get money for it"), and others were similarly skeptical.
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