Findings Reignite Debate on Claim of Jesus’ Bones

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Aryeh Shimron, a geologist based in Jerusalem, said the soil found on two sets of ancient burial boxes was a geochemical match. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

JERUSALEM — Hailed by some as the most significant of all Christian relics but dismissed by skeptics amid accusations of forgery, misinterpretation and reckless speculation, two ancient artifacts found here have set off a fierce archaeological and theological debate in recent decades.

At the heart of the quarrel is an assortment of inscriptions that led some to suggest Jesus of Nazareth was married and fathered a child, and that the Resurrection could never have happened.

Now, the earth may have yielded new secrets about these disputed antiquities. A Jerusalem-based geologist believes he has established a common bond between them that strengthens the case for their authenticity and importance.

The first artifact is an ossuary, or burial box for bones, bearing the Aramaic inscription “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus,” that the Israeli collector who owns it says he bought from an East Jerusalem antiquities dealer in the 1970s. More than a decade ago, the government Israel Antiquities Authority declared the “brother of Jesus” part of the inscription a forgery and pressed charges against the collector; a Jerusalem court ruled in 2012 that the state had failed to prove its case.

The second artifact is a tomb unearthed at a building site in the East Talpiot neighborhood of East Jerusalem in 1980 and thrust into the limelight by a 2007 documentary movie, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.” The film was produced by James Cameron (“Titanic”) and written by Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-born filmmaker based in Toronto. It was first broadcast on the Discovery Channel in 2007.

The burial chamber, which subsequently became known as the Talpiot Tomb, contained 10 ossuaries, some with inscriptions that have been interpreted as “Jesus son of Joseph,” “Mary” and other names associated with New Testament figures. The group of names led Mr. Jacobovici and his supporters to argue that this was probably the tomb of the family of Jesus of Nazareth, a sensational claim rejected by most archaeologists and experts, who said that such names were very common at that time.

Critics like Amos Kloner, the Jerusalem district archaeologist at the time, essentially accused Mr. Jacobovici of jumping to conclusions to promote his movie.

Mr. Jacobovici and his supporters say that if it could be proved that the so-called James ossuary, whose provenance is unclear, originated in the Talpiot Tomb, the names on it, added to the cluster of names found in the tomb, would bolster the chances that the tomb belonged to the family of Jesus of Nazareth.

Enter the geologist, Aryeh Shimron. He is convinced he has made that connection by identifying a well-defined geochemical match between specific elements found in samples collected from the interiors of the Talpiot Tomb ossuaries and of the James ossuary.

When the Talpiot ossuaries were discovered, they were covered by a thick layer of a type of soil, Rendzina, that is characteristic of the hills of East Jerusalem and was apt to impose a unique geochemical signature on the ossuaries buried beneath it.

“I think I’ve got really powerful, virtually unequivocal evidence that the James ossuary spent most of its lifetime, or death time, in the Talpiot Tomb,” Dr. Shimron said in an interview in the lobby of the King David Hotel here as he presented his as-yet unpublished findings to a reporter for the first time.

An unlikely Indiana Jones, Dr. Shimron, 79, was born in the former Czechoslovakia and is an expert in plaster. Now retired as a senior researcher of the Geological Survey of Israel, a government institute specializing in earth sciences, he has been involved in archaeological geology for the last 20 years.

Dr. Shimron based his research on the theory that an earthquake that convulsed Jerusalem in A.D. 363 flooded the Talpiot Tomb with tons of soil and mud, dislodging its entrance stone and, unusually, covering the chalk ossuaries entirely.

“The soil created a kind of vacuum,” he said. “The composition of the tomb was simply frozen in time.”

For the last seven years, Dr. Shimron has been studying the chemistry of samples from chalk crust scraped from the underside of the Talpiot ossuaries and, more recently, from the James ossuary. He has also studied samples of soil and rubble from inside the ossuaries. In addition, for comparative purposes he has examined samples from ossuaries from about 15 other tombs.

Mr. Jacobovici, who has been documenting the research for another movie, said “the production” financed the lab work.

The Israel Antiquities Authority provided access to most of the ossuaries and carried out the major part of the sampling under the direction of Dr. Shimron. A spokeswoman for the authority said that it had provided some technical assistance for Mr. Jacobovici’s movie but that it was “not part of the loop.”

Dr. Shimron was looking for unusual amounts of elements derived from Rendzina soil, like silicon, aluminum, magnesium, potassium and iron, as well as for specific trace elements, including phosphorus, chromium and nickel — signature components of the type of clayey East Jerusalem soil that he says filled the Talpiot Tomb during the earthquake. The findings, he says, clearly place the James ossuary in the same geochemical group as the Talpiot Tomb ossuaries.

“The evidence is beyond what I expected,” he said.

Today the Talpiot Tomb is sealed underground beneath a concrete slab in a courtyard between nondescript apartment buildings on East Talpiot’s Dov Gruner Street, and its ossuaries are under the custodianship of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The James ossuary is back with its owner, Oded Golan, the collector, who lives in Tel Aviv and keeps the box in a secret location.

Yet Dr. Shimron’s findings seem likely to reawaken the controversies of the past.

There is the notion that burial remains, including bone matter, of Jesus of Nazareth would suggest that there could have been no bodily resurrection. Moreover, speculation that one of the bone boxes found in Talpiot may have belonged to Mary Magdalene, while another bore the inscription “Judah son of Jesus,” has only added to the general contentiousness of the finds.

Although 10 ossuaries were unearthed in Talpiot, only nine remain. Though archaeologists said the 10th was a plain, broken box that got thrown away, this, too, has spurred questions and conspiracy theories, including theories that the James ossuary was the 10th and was somehow spirited away.

Mr. Golan, the collector, recently gave Dr. Shimron access to his James ossuary for testing but said he was skeptical about the results.

For one thing, Mr. Golan said in a telephone interview, he bought the ossuary in 1976 at the latest, whereas the Talpiot Tomb was excavated in 1980.

(Had Mr. Golan purchased the ossuary after 1978, it could have been reclaimed by the state under Israel’s antiquities law.)

Even if the chemistry is correct, the James ossuary could have come from another tomb in East Talpiot, Mr. Golan posited, adding that such research required samples from a much broader test base.

“It is very interesting but not enough to determine anything conclusively,” Mr. Golan said of Dr. Shimron’s work. “You would need samples from at least 200 to 300 caves.”

Shimon Gibson was among the Antiquities Authority archaeologists who entered the newly exposed Talpiot Tomb in 1980. He said recently that it was clear that the underground entrance to the tomb had been open since antiquity and that the tomb had filled with soil abruptly as a result of a single quick event — possibly an earthquake.

Dr. Gibson and other archaeologists concluded that tomb raiders had probably been there during the Byzantine period. But he discounted any possibility that the James ossuary had been spirited away when the tomb was uncovered.

“I myself have excavated a handful of tombs that were open and filled with soil,” Dr. Gibson said. “Personally I don’t think the James ossuary has anything to do with Talpiot.”

Still, Dr. Gibson said, the scholarly community was eagerly awaiting the publication of Dr. Shimron’s results in a scientific journal for peer review.

Dr. Shimron, meanwhile, said he was bracing for an inevitable storm of criticism, including from people who find it anathema that a scientist, as he put it, should be “playing around with Jesus and Mary’s bones.”