The Brother Of Jesus?

(2 of 5)

But all 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 academics, however, have expressed reservations about Lemaire's claim to somehow be able to eliminate virtually all the other Jameses roaming Jerusalem during that period. Thus what might otherwise have been a kind of archaeological/religious coronation turns into something slightly different: a scientific detective story with extremely high religious stakes.

The 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.

His hope to avoid being overwhelmed by pilgrims seems a bit forlorn, however, especially when a reporter notes that the soil at the bottom of the now famous ossuary is littered with bone chips.

"YOUR BRAIN GOES, TICK!"

The town of Silwan, nestled below the southern wall of the Old City, is a fairly typical Jerusalem-area Arab village--densely settled, tense and poor. But it does possess one distinction: numerous 1st century subterranean Jewish burial caves, some of which now double as basements for Silwan's rough cinder-block houses. Unofficial excavations by residents and by professional looters, although illegal, have long supplied the antiquities market with pots, lamps and other artifacts. According to the ossuary's owner, the dealer who sold it to him told him it was found in the Silwan area. The owner says it is highly unlikely that anyone will be able locate the cave from which it came.

For 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--in Jerusalem on a scholar's break from his job as head of the Hebrew and Aramaic philology and epigraphy department at the Sorbonne in Paris--to examine some inscriptions in his collection. As an afterthought, the owner mentioned the names on the James box and showed Lemaire a photo.