The Truth is Written in Stone

By Kenneth E. Lamb

© 2002 by Kenneth E. Lamb

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Published in the December 2002 issue of

The Pentecostal Herald

While not everything in the Bible has been proven true by archeological evidence, the fact remains that there is no archeological evidence that proves the Bible is untrue.

Another piece of New Testament evidence proving the Bible’s truth flashed onto the world’s radar screen Oct. 21, 2002 when Dr. Andre Lemarie of the Sorbonne University in Paris announced his findings, published in the November/December issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review, stating he discovered the most direct evidence yet of Jesus and the Apostles in Jerusalem.

Dr. Lemarie writes he was shown an ossuary, a limestone box used for storing the bones of a deceased person, by a Jewish antiquities collector in Jerusalem who told him it was found in a cave south of the Mount of Olives. Ossuaries were used as part of a two-step burial process that Jews in Judea regularly practiced in the first century. First the decedent’s body was laid out in a cave until the flesh decayed, usually about one year. Then the bones were gathered together and placed into the stone ossuary for final burial in a tomb.

The collector found a curious Aramaic scribbling on each side of the ossuary, and asked Dr. Lemarie to examine it for a translation. Dr. Lemarie was shocked at what he read: “Ya’akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua,” “James, the son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus.”

The Jewish collector had little knowledge of Christianity. Upon being told what the words meant, he exclaimed, “How can the Son of God have a brother!”

Dr. Lemarie told the world in his article, “It seems very probable that this is the ossuary of the James in the New Testament. If so, this would also mean that we have here the first epigraphic mention – from about A.D. 63 – of Jesus of Nazareth.”

What are the chances he is correct?

According to Dr. Lemarie, the procedure of putting bones into an ossuary existed only from about 20 B.C to A.D. 70. The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in that year put an end to the practice as Romans drove the Jews out of their capital city.

Because of this historically brief time, only about 20 men named James were likely to have a father named Joseph and a brother named Jesus. Narrowing the focus even more is finding the brother’s name on the ossuary at all. Common practice would be to limit the names to those of the decedent and the father; to include the name of the brother meant the brother was someone special in the community whom the deceased proudly proclaimed as his relative.

One other fact forces the conclusion it is James’ ossuary: the carving style on the ossuary. When the ossuary was examined by the highly reputable Geological Survey of Israel, they found nothing to even suggest the inscription was cut by modern tools. The mineral composition itself was reliably identified as originating in the Jerusalem area. The inscription style itself was found only in the last two or three decades before the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion at the end of the century’s sixth decade.

Of about 895 ossuaries examined by a top Israeli archeologist, only about 200 had inscriptions on them. Overwhelmingly, the language used was Greek. Finding one in Aramaic is in itself remarkable; so far only one other has ever been found.

But finding the language used by James is not so surprising. While Greek was the universal language of literature, and Latin the language of law, Hebrew was reserved in Judea for local laws, the practice of Temple rituals and conversations among the Sadducees, Pharisees and other mavens of Judaism.

The Jews of Christianity, however, were by and large not a part of those classes. While the Book of Acts documents in 15:5, “the sect of the Pharisees which believed” were also active members of the church, the political situation of the Sadducees and Pharisees vying for power over the Temple and the city made Christianity strongly appealing to the working class and tradesmen. Acts further verifies in 21:20 that James told Paul, “thou seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are which believe” in Jerusalem. Aramaic was their language, so fittingly James would choose it as his final inscription.

The historian Josephus, writing late in the first century A.D. records that “the brother of Jesus the so-called Christ, James by name,” was ordered murdered by the Sanhedrin in about A.D. 62 by stoning. His crime? Teaching that Jesus was divine.

Prior to the discovery of this ossuary, the most recent physical evidence of Jesus’ name was a papyrus fragment from the second century, probably about A.D. 125. The new evidence of the ossuary moves the reality of Jesus and the Apostles right into the contemporary timeline of the first century A.D..

The world’s news organizations had no trouble finding top scholars who thought the find was genuine and significant.

The New York Times quoted Dr. James C. VanderKam of the University of Notre Dame as saying, “Since the research comes from Andre Lemarie, I take it very seriously. If it is authentic, and it looks like it is, this is a helpful non-Biblical confirmation of this man James.” The Times added Dr. VanderKam went on to describe Dr. Lemarie as “an authoritative epigrapher, a specialist in ancient inscriptions, whose research is through and evaluations judicious.”

The Biblical Archeology Review seems much more certain of its historic significance in documenting the Bible’s accuracy about the reality of Jesus and the Apostles. In its press release on the finding, it quoted Hershel Shanks, the publication’s editor, saying, “The James ossuary may be the most important find in the history of New Testament archeology.”

The release was headlined “Ossuary of Jesus’ brother backs up Biblical accounts.” Its first paragraph led off by saying, “This container provides the only New Testament-era mention of the central figure of Christianity and is the first-ever archeological discovery to corroborate Biblical references to Jesus.”

The release goes on to add, “The new find is also significant in that it corroborates the existence of Joseph, Jesus’ father, and James, Jesus’ brother and a leader of the early Christian church in Jerusalem.”

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