Talpiot Tomb: The Lost Tomb of Jesus Christ and His Family?

The Talpiot Tomb is a rock-cut tomb discovered in 1980 in the East Talpiot neighborhood, five kilometers south of the Old City in East Jerusalem (Israel). The archaeological team determined it to be from the Second Temple period, which lasted from about 538 BC to AD 70. It is also assumed that a tomb of this type would have belonged to a wealthy Jewish family.

The tomb was discovered by construction workers who were laying the foundations for an apartment complex when preparatory demolition work accidentally uncovered the tomb's entrance. Construction of the apartment buildings was completed in 1982. Due to the fact that some children got into the tomb and played inside, the authorities sealed the entrance for safety reasons.

In 2005, a team led by biblical historian James Tabor, who is professor and chair of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, and the controversial filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, opened the tomb again and claimed to find a 2,000-year-old engraving on an ossuary, which they say depicts Jesus' resurrection. The limestone burial box contained human bones and an inscription that has been interpreted as "Yeshua bar Yehosef" ("Jesus, son of Joseph").

Altogether, ten limestone ossuaries were found, with six of them bearing epigraphs, although only four of them were recognized as such in the field. The archaeological team determined the ossuaries to be of little note, and delivered them to the Rockefeller Museum for analysis and storage. In addition, three skulls and crushed bones were found on the floor of the tomb, indicating that the tomb had been disturbed in antiquity. Their footage was incorporated into the 2007 documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, in which the authors claimed that the Talpiot Tomb was the burial place of Jesus of Nazareth, as well as several other figures from the New Testament. Of course, this claim was disputed by many archaeologists and theologians, as well as language and biblical scholars.

Analysis of mitochondrial DNA that was performed by Lakehead University on the remains found in the ossuary marked "Jesus son of Joseph" and the one marked "Mariamne" or "Mary" (who some claim to be Mary Magdalene) found that the two occupants were not blood relations on their mother's side. Based on these tests, the makers of the documentary suggest that "Jesus" and "Mariamne" were probably married "because otherwise they would not have been buried together in a family tomb," but the remains were not dated using radiocarbon to further sustain this supposition. Neither was any announced DNA testing performed on the others ossuaries to see if any familial relation existed there. Additionally, scholars argue the DNA tests only prove that they did not have the same mother and they could easily have been father/daughter, half brother/sister, cousins, or any number of possibilities that do not include a matrilineage line.

Shroud of Turin: The Real Face of the Son of God?

The Shroud of Turin is a length of linen cloth bearing the image of the face and body of a bearded man who appears to have suffered physical trauma in a manner consistent with crucifixion. There is no consensus yet on exactly how the image was created, but it is believed by some that the 14ft-long linen cloth was used to bury Christ's body when he was lifted down from the cross after being crucified 2,000 years ago, despite radiocarbon dating placing its origins in the Medieval period.

The image is much clearer in a black-and-white negative than in its natural sepia color. The negative image was first observed in 1898 on the reverse photographic plate of amateur photographer Secondo Pia, who was allowed to photograph it while it was being exhibited in the Turin Cathedral. The shroud is kept in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, northern Italy.

The origins of the shroud and its image are the subject of intense debate among theologians, historians, and researchers. Scientific and popular publications have presented diverse arguments for both authenticity and possible methods of forgery. A variety of scientific theories regarding the shroud have since been proposed, based on disciplines ranging from chemistry to biology and medical forensics to optical image analysis.

In 1978, a detailed examination carried out by a team of American scientists found no reliable evidence of how the image was produced. In 1988, a radiocarbon dating test was performed on small samples of the shroud. The laboratories at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology concurred that the samples they tested dated from the Middle Ages, between 1260 and 1390.

In March 2013, experiments conducted by scientists at the University of Padua (Italy) dated the shroud to ancient times, a few centuries before and after the life of Christ. The tests dated the age of the shroud to be between 300 BC and 400AD, but with an error margin of 400 years due to the unknown influences of temperature and humidity on the samples during their lives.

The Catholic Church has neither formally endorsed nor rejected the shroud, but in 1958 Pope Pius XII approved of the image in association with the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. More recently, Pope Francis and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI have both described the Shroud of Turin as “an icon.”

As well as can be expected, the shroud continues to remain one of the most studied and controversial archaeological objects in human history.

Jehoash Inscription: A Legitimate Tablet which Describes Renovations of King Solomon's Temple?

The Jehoash Inscription is the name of a controversial artifact rumored to have surfaced in the construction site or in the Muslim cemetery near the Temple Mount of Jerusalem. Chiseled in ancient Hebrew and dated to the ninth century BCE, the tablet describes renovations of the First Temple, which is said to have been built by King Solomon, that were ordered by Jehoash, son of King Ahaziah of Judah. It corresponds to the account in II Kings 12:1-17, in which the king laments the state of the temple and commands that money which the priests collect from the people be used to fix it up.

While some scholars support the antiquity of the patina, which in turn strengthens the contention that the inscription is authentic, the scientific commission appointed by the Israeli Minister of Culture to study the Jehoash tablet concluded that various mistakes in the spelling and the mixture of different alphabets indicated that this was a modern forgery. The stone was typical of western Cyprus and areas further west. Patina over the chiseled letters was different from that on the back of the stone and could easily be wiped off the stone by hand.

In a press conference in Jerusalem on June 18, 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority commission declared the inscription a modern forgery.

The Israel state confiscated the sandstone artifact, charging collector Oded Golan (yes man, the same antiquities collector who is the James ossuary's owner) with forging it and other antiquities and dealing in them.

The court didn't actually rule in 2012 whether the tablet, ossuary, and various other artifacts were genuine or not, just that the state hadn't proven that they were fake, and therefore Golan couldn't be charged with dealing in fake antiquities. Despite the court's ruling, the state refused to return the tablet to Golan and petitioned to bring the lawsuit to the Supreme Court, which has now had its say. On October 17, 2013, a panel of three justices rejected the state's argument 2-1, and ordered that the tablet be restored to Golan.

James Ossuary: Archaeological Evidence of Jesus of Nazareth?

The James ossuary is a 2,000-year old chalk box which was used for containing dead bones. Carved into one side of the box there is an Aramaic inscription that reads, "Ya'akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua" (English translation: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus"). The inscription is very significant for adherents of Christianity because, if genuine, it might provide archaeological evidence of Jesus of Nazareth.

For a 90-year period, from 20 B.C. to A.D. 70, the Jewish burial custom was to place the body in a cave for a year or so and then retrieve the bones and put them in a bone box—ossuary—that could then be placed in a niche in the family tomb.

Several hundred such boxes from that era have been found, 215 of which have inscriptions. Only two boxes mention a brother.

The box was originally tested in Israel by scientists at the Geological Survey Group, who judged it to be about 2,000 years old. But the inscription divides the believers and the non-believers due to the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which determined in 2003 that the inscriptions were forged at a much later date. Also, statistical analyses of ancient names suggest that in contemporary Jerusalem, there would be an average of 1.71 people named Ya'akov (James) with a father Yosef (Joseph) and a brother named Yeshua (Jesus).

According to the James ossuary's owner, an Israeli engineer and antiquities collector named Oded Golan, the box came from the Silwan area in the Kidron Valley, southeast of the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem. Golan purchased the artifact from a Jerusalem-based dealer in the 1970s.

In December 2004, the James ossuary's owner was charged with 44 counts of forgery, fraud, and deception, including forgery of the Ossuary inscription. In 2012, Golan was acquitted of the forgery charges but convicted of illegal trading in antiquities. He was also fined 30,000 shekels and sentenced to one month in jail for minor non-forgery charges related to the trial. The judge said that this acquittal "does not mean that the inscription on the ossuary is authentic or that it was written 2,000 years ago."

Saitaphernes' Golden Tiara

On April 1, 1896, the Louvre announced that it had purchased, for 200,000 gold French francs, a gold tiara that had belonged to the Scythian king Saitapharnes . According to experts at the Louvre, a Greek inscription on the tiara confirmed an episode dating to the late 3rd century or early 2nd century B.C.

At 7 inches in height and weighing a little more than a pound in solid gold, the pointed dome-like tira was decorated with a lower, narrower band that shows genre scenes of Scythian daily life; an upper, wider band shows episodes from The Iliad, including Agamemnon and Achilles quarreling over Briseis.

Shortly after the Louvre exhibited the tiara, a number of experts challenged its authenticity. Among them was the German archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler, who noted stylistic problems with the tiara's design and questioned the lack of aging apparent on the artifact. For several years, the Louvre defended the authenticity of its treasure. Eventually, news of the story reached Odessa.

Almost immediately, questions about its origins arose, and the crown's amazing state of preservation was the key clue.

In 1903, a Russian jeweler from a small town near Odessa, Israel named Rouchomovski told the Louvre's researchers that he made the tiara per order for a certain Mr. Hochmann, who gave him books showing Greco-Scythian artifacts on which to base the work. It was a gift "for an archaeologist friend."

Taken by the desire to acquire the tiara, the Louvre had missed warning signs that could have saved them considerable embarrassment. The tiara was flawed; there were traces of modern tools, there was modern soldering (though cleverly concealed), and an inscription was raised in relief.

The Louvre still owns the Tiara of Saitaphernes. In 1954, the museum included it in its "Salon of Fakes," along with eight Mona Lisas.

Ancient Persian Princess

This mummy was allegedly found after an earthquake near Quettaand, Pakistan. The alleged Persian princess had been put up for sale on the black antiquities market for 600 million Pakistani rupees, the equivalent of US$6 million. On October 19, 2000, Pakistani authorities were alerted. The "sellers" were accused of violating the country's Antiquities Act, a charge which carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

It was started in November 2000, when the international press reported an amazing find: a mummy, which was claimed to be that of an ancient Persian princess, over 2,600 years old. The mummy was encased in a carved stone coffin inside a wooden sarcophagus and was wearing a golden crown and mask. Of course, the Persian princess was immediately hailed as a major archaeological discovery.

The princess was wrapped in ancient Egyptian style. All of the internal organs had been taken out of her body in the same way that the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. Her cloth-bound body was dressed with golden artifacts, with an inscription on the golden chest plate that read, "I am the daughter of the great King Xerxes, I am Rhodugune." The situation led archaeologists to speculate that she might have been an Egyptian princess married to a Persian prince, or a daughter of Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia. However, mummification had been primarily an Egyptian practice, and mummies had never been found in Persia before.

When the curator from the Karachi National Museum, Dr. Asma Ibrahim, began her investigation into the mummy, a different story began to emerge. There were some strange puzzles about this ancient princess. The inscriptions on the mummy's breastplate had some grammatical errors, and there were peculiarities in the way she had been mummified. Several detailed operations common to Egyptian mummification had been omitted. It began to look like the mummy was not the princess she was supposed to be; perhaps she was a more ordinary ancient mummy dressed up to be a Persian princess by forgers trying to increase her value. So, forensic experts all over the globe analyzed the mummy and her magnificent trappings and discovered that she is an elaborate fake.

Sadly, this mummy had an even darker history. Computerized tomography scans and X-ray photographs of the body inside the mummy revealed that this was no ancient corpse but a woman who had died in the recent past, and that her neck was broken. An autopsy confirmed that this young woman may indeed have been murdered to provide a body for the fakers to mummify, a body that they intended to pass off as an ancient mummy for millions of dollars on the international art black market.

The Piltdown Chicken

Early in 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist, and Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, joined forces to follow what they termed "evidence of the evolutionary 'missing link' between apes and humans".

The findings during excavations at Piltdown, England included a piece of a thick human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds, a jawbone with two teeth, and a variety of animal fossils and primitive stone tools.

Believing the skull fragments and jawbone to be from the same individual, Smith Woodward made a reconstruction. It suggested an early human with a large brain, indicating a level of intelligence that set it clearly apart from the apes. The jawbone, ape-like but with human-looking teeth, linked the skull with its supposed evolutionary ancestors. So, they decided that the evidence added up to an early human relative who lived about 500,000 years ago.

In the 40 years since the original 1912 announcement of Piltdown Man, increasing numbers of ancient human fossils have been discovered, most notably from Africa, China, and Indonesia, but also from Asia and Europe. However, none of these discoveries showed the large brain and ape-like jaw of Piltdown Man. Instead, they suggested that the jaw and teeth became human-like before the evolution of a large brain.

As the discrepancies became too many to ignore and as new dating technology emerged, investigations on the Piltdown fossils recommenced.

At the Natural History Museum in the late 1940s, Kenneth Oakley ran a series of fluorine tests that made use of fluorine's tendency to accumulate in calcium-containing organic matter such as bones and teeth. Oakley discovered that the fossils were probably less than 50,000 years old, not nearly old enough to be from a species with such ape-like features.

Further research proved that the skull and jaw fragments actually came from two different species, a human and an ape, probably an orangutan. Scratches on the surface of the teeth, visible under the microscope, revealed that the teeth had been filed down to make them look human. Also, it discovered that most of the finds from the Piltdown site had been artificially stained to match the local gravel.

In November 1953, Piltdown Man hit the headlines again, this time to be revealed as a hoax. The so-called "missing link" between humans and apes now became a sensation as a sophisticated and infamous scientific fraud. But who did it, and why? Many people have been suspected but no one really knows the answer.