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On Palm Sunday 1996 the London Sunday Times ran a feature about the tomb of Jesus, suggesting that a new discovery threatened the basis of Christianity. Two bbc producers went looking for fresh material for an Easter Sunday program. They wanted to stimulate discussion on the nature of the Resurrection. Supposing, they asked, someone actually found the bones of Jesus lying around in Palestine: What would that do to Christian faith?

So they looked for ossuaries—bone boxes. They found one inscribed "Jesus, son of Joseph" (actually, they found more than one, but they only followed up one). It had been found in a family tomb; and in the same family tomb were other boxes, labeled Joseph, Mary, another Mary, a Matthew, and someone called Judah, described as "the son of Jesus." The boxes were empty: vandals had apparently got there first, possibly in antiquity. Now, journalists are good at putting two and two together and making seventeen. Could this be Jesus' tomb? Would it cast doubt on the very foundations of Christianity?

The first thing to say is that, even if nobody had ever said Jesus of Nazareth had been raised to life, the probability is still enormously high that this would not have been the tomb of the Jesus, Mary, and Joseph we know from the Gospels. "Mary" is by far the most common female name in the period; "Joseph" and "Jesus" are two of the most common male names, with Judah—or Judas—not far behind.

Discovering a tomb with these names in one family is rather like an archaeologist two thousand years hence finding an English tomb with parents called Philip and Elizabeth and children called Charles and Anne, and claiming that this must be the British royal family. The Israeli archaeologists, none of them interested in defending Christianity, were the first to pooh-pooh the idea of this being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.

Second, if it had been the tomb of Jesus and his family, there are serious oddities. Why is it in Jerusalem, when the family lived in Nazareth where, presumably, Joseph had died some time before Jesus' public ministry? Why is there no mention of James, Jesus' most famous brother, or of Joses and Simon (as listed in Mark 6:3, along with some unnamed sisters)? And why is there a son of Jesus? There is no evidence whatever that Jesus had children, whether in or out of wedlock; his family—that is, his brothers and nephews—were well known in the early church. Sixty years after Jesus' death, his grandnephews were accused by the Roman emperor Domitian of being part of a would-be royal family. If Jesus had had a son, people would have known. It would have mattered.

But the most serious problem is yet to come, and this points forward to the real message of Easter: Bone boxes—ossuaries—were used in the second stage of a two-stage burial process. Many first-century Jews were buried this way. First they were laid on a slab, wrapped in cloth with spices. The tomb was a cave, not a hole in the ground. It would have a movable stone door; the family and friends would in due course lay other bodies on other shelves in the same cave. Then, a year or more later, when all the flesh had decomposed, relatives or friends would return to collect the bones and place them in an ossuary, a box roughly two feet by one foot by one foot, which would then be stored away either in recesses within the same cave or somewhere else. In other words, the burial of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels was only the first stage of an intended two-stage burial.

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April 6 1998, Vol. 42, No. 4