James ossuary

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The James Ossuary

The James ossuary is a limestone bone box that was supposedly discovered in 2001 and is said to have contained the bones of James the Righteous († 62). In 2003 a commission of inquiry came to the conclusion that the bone box had been provided with a forged inscription in order to make it appear as the ossuary of James.

A grave of James, mentioned several times in the New Testament , would not only be an archaeological sensation, but would also raise theological questions - for example in the denominational controversy as to whether there were bodily siblings of Jesus or only cousins ​​called “brothers” and “sisters”.

Discovery and Origin

Close-up of the Aramaic inscription

In 2001 an Aramaic inscription was discovered in the Tel Aviv antiquities collection of Oded Golan on a limestone ossuary , which, according to an initial paleographic analysis, appeared to come from the 1st century AD:

יעקוב בר יוסף אחוי דישוע- Ya'aqôv bar Yôsef achûy daYeschûa ' ,
" Jacob , son of Joseph , (his) brother of Jesus ".

The ossuary is said to have been found by grave robbers in the south of Jerusalem and entered the antique trade in the late 1970s. In 2002/2003, the artifact was exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and was confiscated by police from Golan's home on July 21, 2003.

Public presentation

The find was presented to the media in Washington in October 2002 by the television station Discovery Channel and the journal Biblical Archeology Review .

In 2007, the ossuary came back into the media, as the film producer and director James Cameron 's film " The Jesus grave claiming" the ossuary came from that found in 1980 grave in southern Jerusalem suburb Talpiot , which he called the grave of Jesus identified wants.

Question of authenticity

While some scholars such as André Lemaire , epigraphist at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, believed authenticity was possible, others were experts in biblical languages ​​such as Joseph A. Fitzmyer of the Catholic University of America in Washington (DC), Neil Asher Silberman , then at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , or Jeffrey R. Chadwick from Brigham Young University were immediately skeptical. The last nine letters (" brother of Jesus ") seemed to differ in writing style from the first eleven.

In דישוע encounter conspicuous letter shapes (very diagonal slash in ד and very drawn out י). Chadwick interprets it to be an original approach, in Hebrew language formאחיישוע ("The brother of Jesus") to write (the text does not use word separators), while scratching afterwards by extending the י on אחי to ו and the change of the first two lines of the started ש to די into the Aramaic syntactically more correct form אחוידישוע ("(His) brother of Jesus") was changed.

The Israel Antiquities Authority commissioned an epigraphic, microscopic and geochemical survey. In 2003, the investigative commission came to the conclusion that the inscription of the addition on the ossuary was a forgery, which was subsequently copied from different inscriptions in Levi Rahmani's Catalog of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collection of the State of Israel (No. 396, 570, 573), scratched into a layer of weathering on the back of an old ossuary and artificially given a patina .

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.
The blogspot entry is not sufficient as evidence, this is not scientific. Secondary literature - Theophilus77 ( discussion ) 17:14, Apr 16, 2015 (CEST)

This was contradicted in 2006 by Wolfgang E. Krumbein, professor of geology, geochemistry and microbiology at the University of Oldenburg . The assessment of the investigative commission was in several cases both methodologically and inherently flawed. The formation of the specific composition of the patina, which was found inside the inscription, not only took at least 50-100 years. The patina within the characters is identical to samples from a surface of the ossuary that is far from the inscription. The authenticity of the examined objects is not proven beyond doubt.

The American journalist Ted Koppel said on his show The Lost Tomb of Jesus - A Critical Look that the head of the Suffolk Crime Lab had never confirmed that the patina of the James ossuary matched the patina of the Yeshua ossuary found in the tomb.

literature

  • André Lemaire: Burial Box of James the Brother of Jesus . In: Biblical Archeology Review . tape 28 , 6, November / December, 2002, ISSN  0098-9444 , pp. 24-33 .
  • Neil Asher Silberman , Yuval Goren : Faking Biblical History . In: Archeology . tape 56 , 5, September / October, 2003, ISSN  0003-8113 , p. 20-29 .
  • Ryan Byrne, Bernadette McNary-Zak (Eds.): Resurrecting the Brother of Jesus. The James Ossuary controversy and the quest for religious relics . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2009, ISBN 978-0-8078-3298-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ = achû [h] î ; with appended synaeresis personal suffix -hî the 3rd sg. masc. ("to be") as the syntactic prolepse common in Aramaic.
  2. ↑ Jeffrey R. Chadwick: Indications that the 'Brother of Jesus' Inscription is a Forgery. In: The Bible and Interpretation. November 2003 (with drawings of the inscription on the ossuary), accessed April 16, 2015; see. the above note on syneresis (omission of the normally written ה) in the Aramaic personal suffix.
  3. ↑ Ben Witherington: Ossuary Rises from the Patina Dust - the Latest Bombshell , with quotations from WE Krumbein, University of Oldenburg.
  4. ^ Wolfgang E. Krumbein: Preliminary Report: External Expert Opinion on the three Stone Items. In: Biblical Archeology Review. Finds or Fakes (Biblical Archeology Society website), 2005, Follow-up Report (PDF), accessed May 4, 2015.