Judging from the broken ossuaries at the entrance and the fresh soil piled around, the tomb in front of us had most likely just been robbed the night before.
The Israelis have a special armed unit responsible for protecting antiquities, and the desecrating of an ancient tomb is a serious crime. Tomb robberies in this area are relatively rare - perhaps two or three occur over the span of a decade. It is not an unpleasant smell, but one like no other, and something one never forgets. It was pitch dark, but the damp musty smell of such a space, sealed from outside air for thousands of years, filled our nostrils. As we approached closer the rectangular entrance to the tomb was clearly exposed, measuring about a square meter. These were the stone bone boxes that Jews of the 1st century used to hold the bones of the deceased. Moist soil was piled about the entrance and we could see fragments of broken ossuaries scattered all about. The entrance to a freshly opened tomb was visible in the setting sunlight. As it turned out, none of us were to sleep at all that night.Īs we were making our way back to our cars, Jeff Poplin, one of my students, pointed down the hillside below where we had parked. It was beginning to get dark and we needed to head back to Jerusalem to the British School of Archaeology where we were staying so we could get some rest. We finished our tour of half a dozen tombs about 7 p.m. I certainly had no idea that we were about to stumble onto something that would relate to my lifelong research regarding the historical Jesus, and more specifically to the Jesus dynasty itself. None of us had the slightest inkling of the exciting discovery just ahead, or the stealth operation that was about to begin. On that late evening Gibson, who is an Israeli archaeologist, had offered to take us into some of the open tombs to give us an idea of what Jewish burial was like in the time of Jesus. But a significant number are still sealed and intact, covered with topsoil and preserved for the past two thousand years. Many of the tombs are open, having been robbed and emptied centuries ago. The Hinnom Valley is an area thick with ancient rock-hewn tombs, just a stone's throw from the Arab village of Silwan. We had decided to do a bit of archaeological sightseeing as a break from a hard day of digging in the summer heat. It had been an exciting trip, our second season at the "Cave of John the Baptist," as we had come to call it.
Shimon Gibson and I are co-directors of the excavation. The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I am a professor, is the academic sponsor of the dig. I learned this firsthand late one Wednesday afternoon on June 14, 2000, while hiking with five of my students in the Hinnom Valley, just south of the Old City of Jerusalem in an area known as Akeldama.2 We had been in Israel for two weeks excavating a newly discovered cave a few miles west of Jerusalem at a place called Suba, which has the earliest drawings related to John the Baptizer ever found.
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skeleton of a crucified man by a road-building crew in Jerusalem in 1968, or the chance discovery in 2000 of the tomb of the high priest Caiaphas, who presided over the trial of Jesus.1 When it comes to archaeology it seems that time and chance are equal partners with careful planning and method. One thinks of the appearance of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 from caves in the Judean desert, or the uncovering of the 1st-century A.D. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to the historical study of Jesus and the movement he founded, subsequently known as Christianity. It is as if there is some mysterious hidden axiom at work - what we most hope to discover we seldom find, and what we least expect can suddenly appear. Many of the great archaeological discoveries of our time have been accidental.