Cross Bones (27 page)

I nodded.

“Nice folks at that lab.”

“The IAA agreed to send samples?”

“Not exactly.”

“You sent samples on your own?”

Jake shrugged. “Blotnik refused. What was I supposed to do?”

“Bal sy move,” Ryan said.

“I’l ask now what I asked then,” I said. “What’s the point of genetic profiling when there’s nothing for comparison?”

“It should stil be done. Now, fol ow me.”

Jake led us to the back bedroom, where he’d spread photos on a worktable. A few showed whole ossuaries. Many showed fragments.

“The robbers took a lot of boxes, smashed others,” Jake said. “But they left enough for reconstruction.”

Jake dug a five-by-seven from the stack and handed it to me. It pictured eight ossuaries. Al had cracks. Many had gaps.

“Ossuaries differ in style, size, shape, thickness of stone, the way the lid fits. Most are fairly plain, but some have elaborate decoration. That of Joseph Caiaphas, for example.”

“The Sanhedrin Council elder who committed Jesus for trial before Pontius Pilate,” Ryan said.

“Yes. Though his Hebrew name was Yehosef bar Qayafa. Caiaphas was high priest of Jerusalem from eighteen until thirty-sevenC.E. His ossuary was discovered in 1990. It’s amazing, carved with unbelievably beautiful inscriptions. Also discovered around that time was an ossuary inscribed ‘Alexander, son of Simon of Cyrene.’ That box was also lavishly decorated.”

“Simon was the gentleman who helped Jesus carry the cross on the road to Golgotha.”

Ryan, the biblical scholar.

“You know your New Testament,” Jake said. “Simon and his son Alexander are mentioned in Mark 15:21.”

Ryan smiled modestly, then tapped the photo of Jake’s reconstructions. “I like the ones with the flower petal things.”

“Rosettes.” Jake pul ed out two more five-by-seven glossies. “Now look at these.”

He handed the photos to Ryan. I leaned close.

The ossuary depicted was close to rectangular, with a fitted cover and a pocked surface. In one view, I could make out traces of carved rosettes. The circle-on-circle figures reminded me of the patterns we drew with pencil compasses when we were kids.

In the second view, a crack jagged across one end, made a hard right, and shot northwest up the box’s camera-facing side.

The little bone coffin looked exactly like those Jake had glued back together.

“The James ossuary?” I asked.

“Notice the inscription.” Jake handed us each a magnifying lens. “Do you read Aramaic?” he asked Ryan Ryan shook his head. I gave him a look of feigned surprise.

Jake missed or ignored the exchange. “The astonishing thing about the James ossuary is the unusual refinement in the inscription. It’s much more in keeping with inscriptions found on more lavishly styled ossuaries.”

You could have fooled me. Even magnified, the message looked like a child’s scratching.

Jake’s finger started on the cluster of symbols at the far right end.

“The Jewish name Jacob, or Ya’akov, translates in English to ‘James.’”

“Thus the term Jacobites for the supporters of King James the Second of England.”

Ryan was starting to get on my nerves.

“Right.” Jake’s finger moved left across the famous little symbols. “‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.’” He tapped the cluster of symbols at the left end. “Yeshua, or Joshua, translates to ‘Jesus’ in English.”

Jake retrieved and lay down the photos.

“Now come with me.”

He led us to the rear of the enclosed porch, unlocked a large cabinet, and spread the double doors. Limestone shards fil ed the top two shelves. The reconstructed ossuaries occupied the lower six.

“Apparently these weren’t the brightest looters on the planet. They missed a number of inscribed fragments.”

Jake handed me a triangular shard from the top shelf. The letters were shal ow and nearly invisible. I brought them into focus under my lens. Ryan put his face close to mine.

“Marya,” Jake translated. “‘Mary’ in English.”

Jake pointed to an inscription on one of the reconstructed boxes. The symbols looked similar.

“Matya. ‘Matthew.’”

Jake ran a finger across lettering on a larger box one shelf down.

“Yehuda, son of Yeshua. ‘Jude, son of Jesus.’”

Jake dropped to the third shelf.

“Yose. ‘Joseph.’”

He moved to the box next to Joe’s.

“Yeshua, son of Yehosef. ‘Jesus, son of Joseph.’”

Shelf four.

“Mariameme. ‘The one cal ed Mara.’”

“That writing looks different,” Ryan said.

“Good eye. That’s Greek. Hebrew. Latin. Aramaic. Greek. The Mideast was a linguistic mosaic back then. Marya, Miriam, and Mara are al the same name, basical y, ‘Miriam’ or ‘Mary.’ And nicknames were used, just as they are today. Mariameme is a diminutive of ‘Miriam.’” Jake pointed to shelf three.

“And Yehosef and Yose are the same name, Joseph.”

Returning to the top shelf, Jake selected another fragment, and exchanged it for the one I was holding. This inscription made Marya’s look like new. The lettering was so faint it was almost invisible.

“That name is probably Salome,” Jake said. “But I can’t be sure.”

I ran the names through my mind.

Mary. Mary. Salome. Joseph. Matthew. Jude.

Jesus.

The Jesus family? The Jesus family tomb? Everyone fit but Matthew.

I thought, but didn’t say, Oh. My. God.

28

“HOW DO BIBLICAL SCHOLARS OR HISTORIANS INTERPRET THEJesus family?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.

“The historical view is that Jesus, his four brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude, and his two sisters, Mary and Salome, were the biological children of Joseph and Mary. The Protestant view is that Jesus had no human father, but Mary had other children by Joseph.”

“Making Jesus the eldest sibling,” Ryan said.

“Yes,” Jake said.

“The Vatican sees Mary as a perpetual virgin,” I said.

“No siblings al owed,” Ryan added.

Jake nodded. “The Western Catholic view is that the others were first cousins, offspring of Joseph’s brother Clopas, who was also married to a woman named Mary. The Eastern Orthodox view is that God is the father of Jesus, Mary remained a virgin, and the brothers and sisters are the children of Joseph, a widower, by a previous marriage.”

“Making Jesus the youngest.” Ryan was infatuated with birth order.

“Yes,” Jake said.

My mind cataloged.

Two Mary’s. Salome. Jude. Joseph. And someone named Matthew.

Something fluttered in my gut.

“Weren’t these names common, like Joe or Tom today?” I asked.

“Very,” Jake said. “Anyone hungry?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Ryan said.

We trooped back to the kitchen. Jake laid out cold cuts, cheese, flat bread, oranges, pickles, and olives. The cats watched as we helped ourselves.

Ryan skipped the olives.

When we’d sandwiched up, we moved to a picnic table in the dining area. We talked as we ate.

“Mary was the most common female name in first-century Roman Palestine,” Jake said. “For men it was Simon, fol owed by Joseph. Uncovering ossuaries with these names is no big deal. Whatis a big deal is the co-occurrence, the finding of the names in a single tomb. That’s the mind-blow.”

“But, Jake—”

“I’ve studied published catalogs of Jewish ossuaries. Of the thousands of boxes stored in col ections al over Israel, only six are inscribed with the name Jesus. Of those six, only one is inscribed ‘Jesus, son of Joseph.’ And now ours.”

Jake shooed a cat.

“Ever hear of onomastics or prosopography?”

Ryan and I shook our heads.

“The statistical analysis of names.” Jake popped an olive into his mouth and talked through the depitting process. “For example, among his catalog of published ossuaries, an Israeli archaeologist named Rahmani found nineteen Josephs, ten Joshuas, and five Jacobs, or James.”

Jake palmed the pit and popped another olive.

“Another expert studied registered names in first-century Palestine and came up with figures of fourteen percent for Joseph, nine percent for Jesus, and two percent for Jacob. Crunching these numbers, a French paleoepigrapher named André Lemaire calculated that only 0.14 percent of the male population of Jerusalem could bear the name ‘Jacob, son of Joseph.’”

Pit out. Olive in.

“Based on the assumption that every male had approximately two brothers, Lemaire calculated that roughly eighteen percent of the men named ‘Jacob, son of Joseph’ would have had a brother named Jesus. So over two generations, only 0.05 percent of the population would likely be cal ed ‘Jacob, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.’”

“How many people lived in first-century Jerusalem?” I asked.

“Lemaire used a figure of eighty thousand.”

“Of whom about forty thousand would have been male,” Ryan said.

Nod. “Lemaire concluded that in Jerusalem during the two generations before seventyC.E. , no more than twenty people could have fit the inscription on the James ossuary.”

“But not everyone ended up in an ossuary,” I said.

“No.”

“And not every ossuary was inscribed.”

“Astute points, Dr. Brennan. But the mention of a brother is rare. How many Jacobs, sons of Joseph, had a brother, Jesus, who was famous enough for that relationship to be marked on their ossuaries?”

I had no answer so I replied with a question.

“Do other name experts agree with Lemaire’s estimate?”

Jake snorted. “Of course not. Some say it’s high, others say it’s low. But what are the chances of this whole cluster of names in one tomb? The Marys, Joseph, Jesus, Jude, Salome. The probability must become infinitesimal.”

“Is this the same Lemaire to whom Oded Golan first revealed the James ossuary?” I asked.

“Yes.”

My eyes drifted to the heel bone with its peculiar lesion. I thought of Donovan Joyce and his bizarre theory of Jesus living on to fight and die at Masada. I thought of Yossi Lerner and his bizarre theory of Jesus’ bones ending up at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

Believing it was Jesus, Lerner had stolen the skeleton we were cal ing Max. But Max’s age at death had proven Lerner wrong. My skeletal estimate put him at forty to sixty. That estimate also made Max too young to be the octogenarian who had penned Grosset’s Jesus scrol .

Now Jake was suggesting another bizarre theory, and another candidate. Jesus had died by crucifixion, but his body hadn’t risen, it had remained in its tomb. That tomb had become the final resting place of the Jesus family. That tomb was in the Kidron. Looters had found that tomb and stolen the James ossuary from it. Jake had rediscovered that tomb and recovered the remains of ossuaries and individuals the looters had left behind. I had blundered onto a hidden loculus in that tomb, and found a burial no one else had. The shrouded bones of Jesus.

My stomach went from a flutter to a knot.

I lay down my sandwich. One of the toms began a slow ooze toward it.

“Was James wel -known in his day?” Ryan asked.

“You better believe it. Let’s back up a bit. Historical evidence suggests Jesus was born to a lineage known as Davidids, direct descendents of David, a tenth-centuryB.C.E. king of Israel. According to Hebrew prophets, the Messiah, the final king of a restored nation of Israel, was to come from among this royal line. The Davidids, with their radical revolutionary potential, were wel -known to the Herod family, who ruled Palestine at the time, and to the Romans, right up to the emperor. These ‘royals’ were watched very closely, and at times, hunted down and kil ed.

“When Jesus was crucified in thirtyC.E. for his claim to messianic kingship, his brother James, next in the Davidid line, became top dog in the Christian movement in Jerusalem.”

“Not Peter?” Ryan asked.

“Not Peter, not Paul. James the Just. That fact is not widely known, and rarely given proper consideration. When James was stoned to death in sixty-twoC.E. , for basical y the same kind of messianic claims as Jesus, brother Simon stepped up to the plate. After a forty-five-year run, Simon was crucified under the emperor Trajan, specifical y because of his royal lineage. Guess who came up to bat next?”

Ryan and I shook our heads.

“Athird relative, Judas, took over the movement in Jerusalem.”

I thought about that. Jesus and his brother claimants to the messianic title of King of the Jews? Okay. I could buy into a different political perspective. But what else was Jake suggesting? Jesus stil in his tomb?

“How can you be certain that the Kidron tomb dates to the right period?” My voice sounded tense. I felt suddenly edgy.

“Ossuaries were only used from about thirtyB.C.E. to seventyC.E. ”

“One of the inscriptions is in Greek.” I waved a hand at the Tupperware lying on the counter. “Maybe these people weren’t even Jewish.”

“The mixture of Greek and Hebrew is very common in first-century tombs. And ossuaries were used only for Jewish burial.” Jake anticipated my next question. “And almost exclusively in and around Jerusalem.”

“I thought Christ’s tomb was under the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, outside the Old City,” Ryan said, rol ing a slice of Muenster around a pickle.

“So do a lot of folks.”

“You don’t.”

“I don’t.”

“Jesus was from Nazareth,” I said. “Why wouldn’t the family plot be there?”

“The New Testament indicates Mary and her children took up residence in Jerusalem fol owing the crucifixion. Tradition has it Mary died and was buried here, not up north in Galilee.”

There was a long silence during which the tom slunk to within inches of my feet.

“Let me understand this.” The cat skittered backward at the sound of my voice. “You’re convinced the James ossuary inscription is real.”

“I am,” Jake said.

“And that the thing was looted from the tomb we visited.”

“Rumors have always placed the ossuary’s origin in that location.”

“And that that tomb was the final resting place of Jesus’ kin.”

“Yes.”

“And that the lesion in this shroud calcaneus suggests one of the tomb’s occupants was crucified.”