Mary Magdalene and Other Family Connections?

But Jacobovici and Pellegrino go much further than this. Postulating that Jesus and Mariamene were married, they also argue that the latter was really Mary Magdalene, reminiscent of Dan Brown's hypothesis in The Da Vinci Code.⁶

Here's how the argument progresses:

“Mary” was known in Greek as “Mariamene.”

Her name was actually written as “Mariamn-u,” that is “…of Mariamene.”

The second portion of the inscription “Mara” is a Greek rendering of an Aramaic word meaning “Lord” or “Master.”

So the full inscription “of Mariamne” means “also called Lord/Master.”

The title on the ossuary is “perfectly consistent with the Mariamne described in the Acts of Philip as the sister of Philip. There she is also explicitly equated with the woman the Gospels called Mary Magdalene.”

“The Acts of Philip was widely quoted by early Christian writers but was eventually lost save for a few fragments.”

In June 2000, Bovon and Bouvier published the complete translation-into-French of the Mount Athos version of the Acts of Philip, with its identification of Mary Magdalene as “Mariamene,” the sister of the apostle Philip.⁷

Therefore, since “Jesus the son of Joseph” was not related by blood to “Mariamene,” then they must have been married. And since Mariamene is probably Mary Magdalene, as just indicated by the argument above, then the “Judah son of Jesus” who is also buried in another ossuary in the same tomb must be their son.⁸ Other probable connections to the Holy Family can also be made. The other Mary was probably Jesus' mother and the Joseph in Jesus' tomb was his father. “Yose” (Jose) was probably Jesus' brother (which is spelled similarly in Mark 6:3), rather than a nickname for Joseph.

The name “Matthew” is similar to some of the names of Jesus' ancestors (Luke 3:23–25).

A last probability, according to the Talpiot Hypothesis researchers, pertains to the “missing ossuary” that came out of the tomb. Although there were originally ten ossuaries in the tomb, later inventories showed that one of them was missing; it was not with the others. So it has been asserted that this missing box might actually be the famous “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus” ossuary. This, of course, would argue for even tighter family connections.

As Tabor remarked even a year ago, “I noticed that the dimensions of the missing tenth ossuary are precisely the same, to the centimeter, to those of the James Ossuary.” Perhaps Oded Golan, the owner of the James ossuary who went to trial on the supposition that he received the James ossuary illegally, actually found the James ossuary not in the 1970s, as he claims, but about 1980, “when the Talpiot tomb was discovered?”⁹

The James Ossuary. Photo: Biblical Archaeology Society of Washington, D.C./Getty Images.

Perhaps a little less sure, Jacobovici and Pellegrino argue that, while not precisely the same, the James ossuary is of similar size to the measurements that were taken of the missing tenth ossuary. “So, the missing ossuary and the James ossuary may be one and the same after all.”¹⁰

In order to test further this possibility that the two ossuaries are the same, last July 31, 2006, a series of tests were conducted on random ossuary samples that had been collected in Israel. A reddish soil type—terra rossa—is found in the hills around Jerusalem. It is rarer and more red than some other soils, and contains a high iron content. According to the tests, “This was all consistent with the patinas on the James and Talpiot tomb ossuaries.” While most of the ossuaries tested differently, “compared to other patina samples from ossuaries found in the Jerusalem environment, the Talpiot tomb ossuaries exhibited a patina fingerprint or profile that matched the James ossuary and no other.”¹¹ Another possibility exists, too. Tabor credits Shimon Gibson as first suggesting that the James ossuary might not have been the tenth ossuary at all, but merely another one that may have been stolen from the Talpiot Tomb the first weekend when the tomb was left open.¹²

A farmer in the Hill Country of Judea working terra rossa. Photo: HolyLandPhotos.org

So the Talpiot Hypothesis holds that the Talpiot Tomb is the burial site of Jesus of Nazareth's family. Marya is Jesus' mother and Joseph is his father. Mariamene is Mary Magdalene, Jesus' wife, and Judah is their son. Jose is Jesus' brother, not his father. And his brother James was probably also buried in this same tomb.

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