The Tomb of Jesus

I hate to jump on the publicity bandwagon regarding the Talpiot "Lost Tomb of Jesus," but hopefully this is worthy of some attention. Of course, I'm a Christian minister, so you won't be surprised which side of the argument I'll come down on, but this goes beyond a matter of faith to good, old-fashioned evidence. And it shows just how ridiculous this whole thing is in the first place.

Since this affair came into the spotlight I've been hoping to get a look/picture/drawing of the inscriptions themselves, since those are the basis for the hullabaloo. A comment on Ken Schenck's blog finally directed me here, where you can download the original reports on the excavation and contents of the tomb. These reports include a drawing of the "Jesus son of Joseph" inscription, and this is what it looks like:


I am not an archaeologist, nor do I have a terminal degree in Semitic studies, but I know enough about inscriptions to know that the "Yeshua" part of the inscription (the scribbles on the right side) are almost completely illegible. The original report by L.Y. Rahmani includes a question mark by the Yeshua reading, and even that question mark is pretty generous. Now, if you're putting together a report for the purposes of cataloging the ossuary, I can understand why including a guess is better than leaving it blank, so I do not fault Rahmani. But using this inscription as the basis for a book and a Discovery Channel documentary is completely absurd. Most of the other inscriptions are reasonably clear, but they aren't the linchpin of the entire argument. (Incidentally, the "Mariamenou e Mara" interpretation is also rather garbled, in my opinion, but I'm willing to grant them that one.)

In other words, assuming that this drawing is a reasonably accurate representation of the actual inscription, the "Joseph" part of the inscription (the left third) is clear enough that I'll buy it. The "son of" part, "br" in an Aramaic inscription, is very unclear. I'll grant them the "r," and based on the standard "X son of Y" formula in Aramaic inscriptions, it makes sense to assume there's a "b" in there somewhere. That leaves us with the difficult task of finding "Yeshua," or "yshwa" (depending on how you transliterate) in the mess on the right. An ayin ("a"), maybe, but beyond that, I can't find any of the other letters.

Tabor, Cameron, Jacobivici, and friends should be ashamed of themselves. This is the worst kind of money-grubbing, controversy-milking sensationalism. They aren't scholars, they're ringmasters.