Since a four-day Jerusalem symposium devoted to assessing the controversial "Talpiot Tomb" concluded last week, and the distinguished array of participants went their separate global ways, there's been a fair amount of victory-claiming... from both sides.

An ossuary bearing the inscription 'Mary'. Could this be the original burial box of Mary, mother of Jesus?
Photo: Courtesy

Supporters of the theory that the First Century burial cave, nestling beneath apartment buildings on East Talpiot's Rehov Dov Gruner, was the last resting place of the family of Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps of Jesus himself, are asserting vindication, since the renowned scholars didn't consensually laugh the Jesus-clan theory out of town and, indeed, agreed that further investigation was required. The symposium "considered the evidence and is opening the door for further research," said Simcha Jacobovici, the filmmaker whose The Lost Tomb of Jesus last year brought the issue back into the headlines 27 years after the cave was uncovered. "It's time that the world seriously considered that the Jesus family tomb may very well have been located."

Opponents are asserting the opposite, noting that many of the scholarly presentations were highly skeptical and that the symposium reached no definitive conclusions and recognized no unarguable, scientific proof of a Jesus link. "Most negative assessments of archeologists and other scientists and scholars who attended [the symposium] have been excluded from the final press reports," complained Duke University's Professor of Jewish Studies Eric Meyers and another dozen scholars in a statement that listed archeological, statistical, DNA and other objections. "We wish to... make it clear that the majority of scholars in attendance - including all of the archeologists and epigraphers who presented papers relating to the tomb - either reject the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus's family or find this claim highly unlikely."

Caught charismatically and authoritatively in the middle of the disputatious sides is symposium chair James Charlesworth, a renowned expert on Jesus who is professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary and director of its Dead Sea Scrolls Project. His succinct symposium summary is that it "ended inconclusively... Both sides have been pushing to say that their side won. It didn't."

Unlike many of the archeologists, epigraphers, statisticians et al who converged to join their Israeli colleagues last week, Charlesworth, an ordained Methodist minister, has not gone home. He has been coming to Israel since 1968 and is on sabbatical here - a visiting scholar in the History Department of the Hebrew University - until April. And Charlesworth fully intends to do as much as he can in the next three months to start getting to the bottom of the Talpiot tomb - figuratively and, he hopes, literally.

He does not, he stresses in the course of a fascinating conversation at Mishkenot Sha'ananim this week, "believe we'll ever have definitive conclusions" about the cave and its tantalizing contents. "But we'll have better questions," he says.

To that end, he is now to set about obtaining permits to reenter both the Talpiot Tomb and an adjacent tomb which has never been properly excavated, and wants to put together the most expert team he can so that, if such access is permitted, it is not wasted.

Though he is unconvinced that the ossuary with the crudely scratched inscription "Jesus son of Joseph" is the burial box of the founder of Christianity, Charlesworth is open to the possibility that the tomb, which contained nine more ossuaries, five of them also inscribed, is related to the Jesus clan.

And while he takes courteous pains not to criticize the Israeli archeologists who uncovered the find in 1980 for their ostensibly underwhelmed handling of their potentially shattering discovery, Charlesworth is immensely intrigued by the possibilities.

"Every single name [on the ossuaries] in the tomb can be found in the New Testament either directly or indirectly related to Jesus's clan," he points out.

An extraordinary constellation of names?

"Yes, I'd use the word extraordinary," he agrees. "If I'd found a 'Jesus son of Joseph,' a 'Mary' and a 'Jose,'" he sparkles, "I certainly wouldn't have tried to suppress the possibility it related to a human figure. I also wouldn't have jumped to the conclusion that we have a match."

But the discovery, he enthuses, "should have elicited a 'Wow! What have we found?'

"And that's where we are now," he goes on. "I want to get an honest inquiry going, in which you are open to every possible conclusion."

Charlesworth is a truth seeker, operating without fear that anything that could come out of the Talpiot Tomb could challenge core Christian or Jewish beliefs. And he wants to gather similarly open-minded colleagues from the relevant disciplines to explore further, people "without strong feelings," he stresses, "people who don't think they already know the answers."

To speak with him is to scramble from Old Testament to New, from scientific rigor to deeply held personal belief, from obscure expertise to current affairs. At times, he seemed to bring history to life across the table. Answering my questions, his mind darted from the present to 2,000 years in the past. I took notes till my hand ached and then some. Excerpts:

How would you sum up the results of the Jerusalem symposium?

I deliberately chose people who violently oppose each other [to make presentations]. Experts from every field - archeologists, experts in DNA, ceramics, epigraphy, forensic autopsy, the architecture of tombs, philology, carbon-dating, patina...

I want to stress that the symposium was focused on 'Jewish views of the after life and burial practices in Second Temple Judaism.' And we've been getting a lot of very important information regarding views of the after life and archeological evidence of tombs before [the year] 70 in Jerusalem.

The scientists have not suggested that the Talpiot Tomb reflects anything to do with Jesus himself. The open question is that perhaps it is related to his clan. This is where statistics come in. We haven't been able to solve this. Is 'Jose,' the name of one of Jesus's brothers, as unique as people claim, for instance?