The Brother Of Jesus?

摘要

It is smooth to the touch, cool and solid. It is worn, but not so much that its extraordinary message cannot be read. The small limestone box, the color of sand, nearly 2,000 years old, sits on its Israeli owner's kitchen cabinet. Its inscription, as with most Semitic writing, starts on the right. "Ya'akov, bar Yosef," it begins, carved strong and deep in the stone. James, son of Joseph. Then, slightly more eroded, "akhui di..." Brother of. And at the end, clearly visible from only close up, "Yeshua." Jesus. The language is the Aramaic spoken by Jews in Jerusalem in the 1st century A.D., but the words are so simple that any Hebrew reader would know the meaning. Here, in this bone-box, or ossuary, once lay the earthly remains of "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Yes, James, the son of that Joseph and ' the brother of that Jesus, whom millions of believers know as the Christ. Or at any rate, such was the claim made on the box's behalf last week at a remarkable Washington press conference by the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review. (The container stayed in Israel, where TIME was given a private showing.) In the publication's cover story, Andre Lemaire, one of the world's foremost scholars of ancient scripts, announced that "it seems very probable that this [box] is the ossuary of the James in the New Testament."