Meanwhile, Richard Bauckham, who was consulted for the documentary but has drawn very different conclusions about the tomb, has detailed no less than 13 possible readings for the inscription which James Tabor reads as ‘O Divine Jehovah, raise up, raise up’.
The following blog, christianevidence,
gives this rather negative view of the controversial documentary of 2012, The Resurrection
Tomb Mystery:
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Posted: 16 April 2012
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On the Thursday before Good Friday this year,
the Discovery Channel screened a documentary, The Resurrection Tomb
Mystery, claiming to reveal the earliest evidence for belief in the
resurrection of Jesus. The documentary was about a sealed 1st century tomb
found in Talpiyot, a suburb of Jerusalem, which contains ossuaries, or bones
boxes.
Working with a camera mounted on a robotic arm,
the filmmakers found an image on one of the boxes which biblical historian James Tabor believes is of the great fish in the
story of Jonah. The early Christians used the story of Jonah, who was
swallowed by the fish but later escaped from it, as a parable for the death
and resurrection of Jesus.
Another of the boxes has an inscription which, according
to James Tabor, says something like: ‘O Divine Jehovah, raise up, raise up’.
Tabor, who is at the University of North Carolina, says he is 95 per cent
certain in linking the image and inscription with Jesus.
Simcha Jacobovici, who produced the documentary,
also made The Lost Tomb of Jesus in 2007, claiming that another
tomb, just 200 metres from the ‘Resurrection’ tomb, contained the bones of
Jesus and some of his earliest followers, including Mary Magdalene. That tomb
also contained a number of bone boxes, but the Da Vinci Code-like conclusions
drawn by the documentary were ridiculed by archaeologists who were involved
in excavating the tomb.
This time round, The Resurrection Tomb
Mystery has generated huge debate and disagreement on academic blogs
around the world. Robert Cargill, of the University of Iowa, has demonstrated
that the image of the ‘great fish’ has been clumsily Photoshopped for the documentary to make
it more fish-like. At the time of writing, Simcha Jacobovici and James Tabor
have yet to admit that the image has been manipulated. Robert Cargill and
other scholars believe the image is much more likely to be an amphora, or
storage jar.
Meanwhile, Richard Bauckham, who was consulted
for the documentary but has drawn very different conclusions about the tomb,
has detailed no less than 13 possible readings for the inscription which
James Tabor reads as ‘O Divine Jehovah, raise up, raise up’. Most of them
have no resurrection theme. One of them reads, ‘Here are my bones. I, Agabus,
crumble not away’.
Mark Goodacre of Duke University, North
Carolina, who live blogged the screening of the documentary,
said, ‘I was surprised to see… just how weak the attempts to link the tomb to
Jesus appeared.’
[End of quote]
Richard
Bauckham clarifies the situation in NT blog, in an article that also provides
the location for the biblical town of Arimathea in connection with 1
Maccabees:
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Joseph of Arimathea and Talpiyot Tomb B, by Richard Bauckham
I am delighted to have the opportunity to blog the
following guest post from Prof. Richard Bauckham. It is also available as
a PDF file here.
Joseph of
Arimathea and Talpiyot Tomb B
Richard
Bauckham
The “Resurrection Tomb Mystery” documentary attempts to suggest
that Talpiyot Tomb B was the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Hardly any evidence
for this is actually provided. The only point at which some reason for the
identification is given is this:
“The two [Talpiyot] tombs were found on what had been in the
first century a rich man’s estate, complete with wine press and ritual bath.
And the area is dominated by two hills. Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man and
his name, in Hebrew, means ‘Two Hills.’”
This comment obviously depends on the usual explanation of
Arimathea as representing the Hebrew place name Ramathaim (1 Sam 1:1), and
correctly notices that this is a dual form of the word ramah. The latter
means ‘height’ but is scarcely used except in place-names, either alone, as
Ramah (there are 4 or 5 towns so-called in the Hebrew Bible), or in compounds,
such as Ramoth-Gilead. In such cases, it designates a town built on a high
place. For the Arimathea/Ramathaim from which Joseph is named, there needs
to be a town, not just an estate ‘dominated by two hills’.
That there was a town, or even small village, called Ramathaim,
so close to Jerusalem but mentioned nowhere else in our sources, seems
unlikely.
The most likely identification of Joseph’s place of origin is
with the Ramathaim (textual variant: Rathamin) mentioned in 1 Macc 11:34 as the
headquarters of a toparchy transferred in 145 BCE from Samaria to Judea. This
Ramathaim is clearly not near Jerusalem, but near the borders of Judaea and
Samaria. Eusebius’s Onomasticon places it at the village of Remphis
(Israel map grid 151159), which is about 30 km north-west of Jerusalem. It
should be noticed that the dual form of Ramathaim is an archaic form, which has
survived unusually in this place name (otherwise only in 1 Sam 1:1, which may
refer to the same place, evidently called Ramah later in the narrative of I
Samuel). It is therefore very distinctive (unlike the common Ramah) and we
should not multiply Ramathaims unnecessarily.
The makers of the documentary perhaps assume that, since Joseph
appears in the Gospel narratives in Jerusalem and has a tomb near the city,
Arimathea must be near Jerusalem. But this is a mistake. Like many aristocrats
in the ancient world, Joseph had estates in the country (not necessarily at all
near Jerusalem) but lived most of the time in the city. This is the most
obvious way of explaining why he has a new tomb, not yet occupied, near
Jerusalem. His aristocratic family would surely already have a tomb – back in
Arimathea. But Joseph has decided that he would like to be buried near the holy
city, rather than having his body transported back to Arimathea. We now have a
nice parallel in the case of the Caiaphas family, another aristocratic
Jerusalem family. They had the now well-known tomb in north Talpiyot, where the
high priest Caiaphas himself was interred, together with other family members.
But from the ossuary inscription that was made known to the public only last
year (the ossuary of Mariam daughter of Yeshua of the Caiaphas family), we now
know that there was also a family tomb elsewhere, somewhere in the vicinity of
the Elah valley (where the ossuary is said to have been found), plausibly at
Khirbet Qeiyafa. This will have been where the family estates were located.
(See my article, ‘The Caiaphas Family,’ JSJH 10 [2012] 3-31.)
So the only shred of evidence presented in the documentary for
identifying Talpiyot Tomb B as that of Joseph of Arimathea is entirely without
value.
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