A Lead Isotope Connection: The Talpiot Jesus Tomb and the Ancient Sepphoris/Nazareth Water System. Video by James Tabor, 2025
A Tale of Two Tombs-Part Two: The James Ossuary & The Talpiot Jesus Tomb by James Tabor, 2022
A Tale of Two Tombs–Part One:The Tomb of the Shroud by James Tabor, 2022
The Geochemistry of Intrusive Sediment, Sampled from the 1st Century CE Inscribed, Ossuaries of James and the Talpiot Tomb,
Jerusalem
by Aryeh E. Shimron1*, Moshe Shirav1, Kevin T. Kilty2, Ludwik Halicz1,3, Rolf B. Pedersen4,
Harald Furnes4
From Tabor’s Patreon Post here about Jerry Lutgen.
Some of you might enjoy reading some of his amazing articles. He is gifted with sheer intelligence and mathematical thinking. Keep in mind these were written years ago when we were just accessing our preliminary evidence and Jerry would be the first to tell you that our new evidence needs to also be favored in–but they remain two of the classic responses to the pioneering statistical work of Feuerverger, Fuchs, and others.
“The Talpiot Tomb: What are the Odds?” https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/tomb357926
“The James Ossuary in Talpiot: More About Probability” https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/opeds/2015/04/lut398012
Here is [Tabor’s] summary of things as the preliminary work on the James ossuary soil samples were being accessed by Aryeh Shimron: https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/new-evidence-james-ossuary-and-its-probable-connection-talpiot-jesus-tomb
And now there is this! “A Lead Isotope Connection: The Talpiot Jesus Tomb and the Ancient Sepphoris/Nazareth Water System” https://youtu.be/_qygFBWSCA8. [This link is also in the above list of links.]
See the paper by Terry Traster cited below, which is in his Dropbox directory.
A Proposed History of the James Ossuary:
Provenance, Looting Chronology, and the Talpiot Garden Tomb
Terry Traster, Pharm.D.
Independent Researcher
August 2025 Revised July 2026
Conclusion – [Extracted from his paper.]
- The body of James was most likely interred in the Garden Tomb before 70 CE, though
intermediate stages of varying duration cannot be excluded so long as the ossuary reached the
tomb prior to the seismic events of 363 or 749 CE. - An earthquake dislodged the blocking stone, and the tomb was subsequently filled with
sediment, either during a single event or through sequential seismic episodes separated by
decades or centuries. - The seismic disturbance left the tomb partially exposed to dust and water infiltration.
- The area immediately surrounding the tomb was briefly surveyed and then extensively
developed in the early to mid-1970s, providing the opportunity for the ossuary’s removal. - A photograph presented by Golan, dated to approximately 1976, documents the James
Ossuary with its full inscription in his parents’ home. - The James Ossuary was not among the ossuaries recovered from the Garden Tomb in 1980.
- Rosenfeld et al. (Feldman, 2019) and Shimron (2019) have independently linked the James
Ossuary to the Talpiot Tomb through patina and geochemical analyses. - Multiple scholars consider the James Ossuary a plausible candidate for a missing eleventh
ossuary from the Garden Tomb. - Data on the exact number and location of ossuaries outside Kokhim were likely lost during the
looting and through subsequent disturbance by neighborhood children in 1980. - The convergence of evidence, development activity in the immediate vicinity during the
1970s, the ossuary’s position outside a kokh, and the photographic documentation support the
conclusion that the James Ossuary was looted before 1980.
The James Ossuary most likely occupied a position outside the kokhim in the Talpiot Garden
Tomb. It is most likely an eleventh ossuary, as Gibson and colleagues have proposed. The looting
most probably occurred during the early 1970s when the tomb was briefly opened by developers,
though the earlier twentieth-century explorations and the 1980 discovery remain secondary
possibilities. No significant barriers exist to the hypothesis that the James Ossuary was an
eleventh ossuary, not located in a kokh, looted during the early 1970s development of East
Talpiyot.
