The Brother Of Jesus?

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He believes that the Jerusalemites who would have inscribed a burial box that way were actually far fewer. In the article, he points out that any mention of a brother on an ossuary was extremely rare and speculates that when it occurred it may have been because that brother was "known" in his own right, as the biblical Jesus was to his circle. Privately, Lemaire adds that the number of James/Joseph/Jesus families who utilized an ossuary is perhaps further reduced when one eliminates those belonging to the Sadducee sect, which did not believe in bodily resurrection and would have been less likely to preserve bones. (Others disagree: the high priest Caiaphas was a Sadducee, and his ossuary turned up in 1990.) One might also subtract the trios who used uninscribed ossuaries, and those whose survivors could afford no ossuary at all. When one is done subtracting, Lemaire believes, there is a 90% chance that the James on the ossuary was the biblical brother of Jesus. "I don't use the 90% figure in the article because there are too many unknowns," he says somewhat apologetically. He settled for "very probably" instead.

"SOME SEMBLANCE OF CAUTION"

By this point, however, many other scholars had parted ways with Lemaire. P. Kyle McCarter, chair of the Near Eastern studies department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., notes that the log of inscription names from which the Sorbonne professor derives his percentages may not actually reflect their frequency in Jerusalem as a whole, contaminating his calculations. He comments, "It wouldn't be my inclination to quantify it in that way." (Meanwhile, Camil Fuchs, head of Tel Aviv University's statistics department, running numbers from the article, claims that Lemaire overestimated the final tally. Fuchs claims that there would have been only five possible Jameses.) Rather than focusing on the numbers, McCarter and other specialists with whom TIME talked seemed obsessed with two facts. All were horrified that the artifact had been ripped out of context, partly because looting is immoral but, more important, because, as McCarter says, it "compromises everything. We don't know where [the box] came from, so there will always be nagging doubts. Extraordinary finds need extraordinary evidence to support them."

At the same time, however, he and his colleagues are, like Lemaire, fascinated by the appearance of a brother's name on an ossuary, which has been documented only once before in an Aramaic inscription. "It immediately suggests [this Jesus] was somebody important," says Ben Witherington III, a New Testament specialist at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky who is co-authoring, with Shanks, a book on the ossuary. Granted, there needs to be "some semblance of caution," says Eric Meyers, professor of Judaic studies at Duke University who has published on ossuaries. The combination of the three names could be simply a coincidence. "But there is a strong possibility that the artifact is what Lemaire says it is: the oldest extra-biblical archaeological evidence of Jesus."

Concedes Biblical Archaeology's Shanks, "It's a question of judgment, not scholarly expertise. It is possible that the brother was simply responsible for the burial. Or that the brother was prominent in real estate. But frankly, to me, the chances [that he wasn't the biblical Jesus] are slender."