Talpiot Tomb

The Talpiot Tomb (or Talpiyot Tomb) is a rock-cut tomb discovered in 1980 in the East Talpiot neighborhood, five kilometers (three miles) south of the Old City in East Jerusalem. It contained ten ossuaries, six inscribed with epigraphs, including one interpreted as "Yeshua bar Yehosef" ("Jesus, son of Joseph"), though the inscription is partially illegible, and its translation and interpretation is widely disputed. The tomb also yielded various human remains and several carvings.

The Talpiot discovery was documented in 1994 in "Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel" numbers 701-709, and first discussed in the media in the United Kingdom during March/April 1996. Later that year an article describing the find was published in volume 29 of Atiqot, the journal of the Israel Antiquities Authority. A controversial documentary film, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, was produced in 2007 by director James Cameron and investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici, and was released in conjunction with a book by Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino titled The Jesus Family Tomb. The book and film make the case that the Talpiot Tomb was the burial place of Jesus of Nazareth, members of his extended family, and several other figures from the New Testament—and, by inference, that Jesus had not risen from the dead as the New Testament describes. This conclusion is disputed by many archaeologists, theologians, and linguistic and biblical scholars.

The archaeological team that excavated the tomb in 1980 determined it to be from the Second Temple-Herodian period, which lasted from about 538 BC to AD 70. Typical of the area, a tomb of this type would be assumed to have belonged to a wealthy Jewish family. About 900 similar tombs have been unearthed in the same area.

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