T he JESUS FAMILY TOMB The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History SIMCHA JACOBOVICI and CHARLES PELLEGRINO foreword by JAMES CAMERON CON T E N T S Foreword by James Cameron v 1 Vault of the Ages 1 2 The Investigation Begins 25 3 The Lost Tomb 47 4 On Probability, Possibility, and the “Jesus Equation” 67 5 Beyond the Book of Numbers 85 6 A Mary Named Mariamne 95 7 The Twin 105 8 The “Jesus Equation” Revisited 111 9 The Jesus Standard 117 10 Whence Came the Nazarenes 123 11 The Rediscovery 135 12 The Voices of Time 159 13 GATTACA: The DNA Story 167 14 A Crime Lab’s Jesus 175 Conclusion 193 Photographic Insert Selected Bibliography 213 Acknowledgments 217 About the Authors Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher FO R E WO R D hat if Jesus didn’t exist at all? Today many experts are saying W exactly that. The theory is that he was a conflation of pagan god-man and death/Resurrection myths with first-century Jewish mes- siah traditions and that he had no more historical substance than Zeus. In various pagan mystery religions predating the first century c.e. (a.d.), Osiris, Attis, and Dionysus were all god-men who died around the time of Easter (the spring equinox) and were resurrected after three days. And all three of these deities predated Jesus by centuries. Christ- mas itself is thought by most scholars to be an adoption of the pagan tradition of celebrating the winter solstice. With many of the basic nar- rative points of the Jesus story, such as the virgin birth and the Resur- rection, predating his supposed existence by hundreds of years, a compelling case has been made that he never existed at all but was a myth created to fulfill a specific need. In the absence of a single particle of physical evidence that Jesus Christ actually lived, this recent move- ment among historical scholars could not be factually refuted. But now, with this stunning book, Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino have delivered not just a particle of evidence but a veritable avalanche of it. Their investigation proves, I believe, beyond any reason- able doubt that a first-century Jewish tomb found in Talpiot, Jerusalem, in 1980 is the tomb of Jesus and his family. What’s even more electrify- ing is what the physical evidence from within the tomb says about Jesus, his death, and his relationships with the other family members found in the same burial site. vi Foreword This book chronicles a three-year investigation of the most stunning archaeological find of the last century. With systematic rigor, Simcha and Charlie analyze the physical evidence, cross-referencing it with clues from both the canonical and the apocryphal Gospels to fill in the first complete picture of the Jesus family. It reads like a gripping detective novel, and one has to pinch oneself to remember that it is real. Abso- lutely real. Once I was asked by an interviewer who was getting bored talking about my films, “If you could meet any person from history, who would it be?” What if there were a time machine that could enable one to go back and look into the eyes of an individual who lived centuries ago? Newton, Ben Franklin, Julius Caesar—how fascinating it would be to see what they were really like. Maybe I would choose Hatshepsut, the only woman in three thousand years of Egyptian history to reign as a Pharaoh, because I’ve always loved stories of strong women. But what I blurted out in reply was “Jesus.” Though I am not reli- gious, I have always assumed that a real, fl esh-and-blood, historical Jesus existed and that he was at the very least a man of extraordinary charisma and personal power. Whether you believe that Jesus was the Son of God or that he was merely a man, it is beyond question that he was one of the most impor- tant men who ever lived; arguably, he is the man whose life continues to have the single greatest impact on our world. But we don’t have a time machine, and the physics suggests that we never will. We must rely on history and its sister discipline, archaeology. So what do we truly know, historically and archaeologically, about this Jesus? One and a half billion Chris tians—more than one-fifth of the world’s population—believe they know exactly who Jesus was. But what do we really know for sure? Until now, there has been zero physical evidence of his existence. No fi ngerprints, no bones, no portraits done from life, nothing. Not a shred of parchment written in Jesus’s own hand. There are, of course, the famous holy relics, such as the Piece of the True Cross and the Shroud of Turin, but these all have questionable provenance and have been dated to centuries later. Most archaeologists dismiss them. Foreword vii As Jesus and his followers walked through first-century Judea, there were no cameras, no tape recorders, no court stenographers. No impar- tial written records come down to us that might give independent proof, such as the minutes of Roman court proceedings. We don’t have even the most basic census records noting his birth. Most of what we know, or think we know, comes from the four great Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But what exactly are these Gospels? To the deeply and unquestioningly faithful, they are the direct and absolute word of God, recorded by the most saintly of men. Histo- rians, however, now view them as composite works, each created by sev- eral authors and based in turn on oral traditions carried on for decades, possibly half a century, after Christ’s actual ministry. There is no histori- cal evidence that any of the authors, if in fact they were individuals, ac- tually heard the words of Jesus from his own lips. Though I’m not a historian by training, I have loved history and ar- chaeology since I was a child. But I grew up with the illusion that his- tory, as it was taught to me, was sacrosanct, because it was all “written down somewhere.” My first foray into a historical/archaeological investi- gation proved that notion wrong. For my motion picture Titanic, I made a detailed study of that di- saster, an event that took place merely a century ago, was described in detail by hundreds of eyewitnesses, and was immediately recorded by an already hypertrophied print media. Despite this, I found the testi- mony to be spotty and contradictory, and some witnesses clearly col- ored their testimony to fit personal or corporate agendas. As a result, huge gaps in our understanding of the event persist. The oceanographer Robert Ballard surprised historians by finding the Titanic broken into two pieces on the seafloor, despite an “official” history that had the ship sinking in one piece. Even after my thirty-three dives to the site and fifty hours of flying robot cameras through the interior, I still do not have a complete picture of what happened. As a result of this twelve-year investigation, I have come to realize that history is a con- sensus hallucination. It is a myth upon which we all agree to agree. The truth is a moving target: new evidence must always be weighed, and “the truth” updated. Historical records must always be questioned, viii Foreword and the agenda or perceptual context of those doing the recording must always be considered. But we learned many surprising things at the wreck site that con- firmed some historical “facts” and challenged others. The steel, the physical evidence lying twelve thousand feet down on the seafloor, cannot lie. Its message cannot be bent by human agendas. The story that Simcha and Charlie tell of the Jesus family tomb is pieced together from hard physical evidence, evidence that cannot lie. It simply is what it is. But the physical evidence must nevertheless be interpreted in a historical context, and that interpretation depends heavily on the sparse details about Jesus and his family that can be gleaned from historical sources. How does the new evidence support or contradict what the historical record has been telling us for two millennia? The Gospels as we know them today have been retranscribed and re- written many times and translated from one language to another—from Aramaic to Greek to Coptic to Latin to various forms of English—with corresponding losses in nuanced meaning. They have been edited by Church fathers, centuries after the original words were spoken, to con- form to their subsequent vision of orthodoxy. And yet, in the absence of the tiniest scrap of concrete physical evidence, they were our only record of the life and times of Jesus. Complicating matters are the other Gospels: the apocryphal texts such as the Gnostic Gospels of the Nag Hammadi Library found in the Egyptian desert in 1945. Buried in an earthen jar to keep them from the Chris tian orthodoxy of the fourth century, which sought to eradicate all the so-called heresies, these precious and astonishing books show the rich diversity of early Christian thought and give clues to the historical story not available in the Big Four of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In the Gospel of Mary and the Acts of Philip, for example, Mary Magdalene is known as the “Apostle to the Apostles,” an important teacher and partner in Jesus’s ministry whom Jesus favored even over Simon Peter.