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 ("Jeshua, 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 producer/director James Cameron and filmmaker/journalist Simcha Jacobovici, and was released in conjunction with a book by Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino titled The Jesus Family Tomb. The book and film make the case that the “Talpiot Tomb”, discovered outside Jerusalem in 1980, was the burial place of Jesus of Nazareth, members of his extended family, and several other figures from the New Testament. Many Christians interpreted that claim as implying that Jesus had not physically risen from the dead as the New Testament describes. . The identification has generated considerable scholarly debate and several books. Although many non-experts in statistics, including historians, archaeologists and theologians, weighed in on the statistical analysis, Prof. Andrey Feuerverger, a statistician at the University of Toronto, published two peer-reviewed articles in the prestigious Annals of Applied Statistics which argued in favor of the statistics, with dissenting opinions.