The James Ossuary is a 1st-century limestone box that was used for containing the bones of the dead. An Aramaic inscription meaning "James (Jacob), son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" is cut into one side of the box. The ossuary attracted scholarly attention due to its apparent association with the Christian holy family.
The archaeology of Israel is the study of the archaeology of the present-day Israel, stretching from prehistory through three millennia of documented history. The ancient Land of Israel was a geographical bridge between the political and cultural centers of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Despite the importance of the country to three major religions, serious archaeological research only began in the 15th century. Although he never travelled to the Levant, or even left the Netherlands, the first major work on the antiquities of Israel is considered to be Adriaan Reland's Antiquitates Sacrae veterum Hebraeorum, published in 1708. Edward Robinson, an American theologian who visited the country in 1838, published its first topographical studies. Lady Hester Stanhope performed the first modern excavation at Ashkelon in 1815. A Frenchman, Louis Felicien de Saucy, embarked on early "modern" excavations in 1850. Today, in Israel, there are some 30,000 sites of antiquity, the vast majority of which have never been excavated.
Biblical archaeology is an academic school and a subset of Biblical studies and Levantine archaeology. Biblical archaeology studies archaeological sites from the Ancient Near East and especially the Holy Land, from biblical times.
Eilat Mazar was an Israeli archaeologist. She specialized in Jerusalem and Phoenician archaeology. She was also a key person in Biblical archaeology noted for her discovery of the Large Stone Structure, which she surmised to be the palace of King David.
Charles R. Pellegrino is an American writer, the author of several books related to science and archaeology, including Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, Ghosts of the Titanic, Unearthing Atlantis, and Ghosts of Vesuvius. Pellegrino falsely claimed to have earned a PhD, and errors in his book The Last Train from Hiroshima (2010) prompted its publisher to withdraw it within a few months of publication.
Hershel Shanks was an American lawyer and amateur biblical archaeologist who was the founder and long-time editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review.
The Exodus Decoded is a 2006 documentary film by "investigative archaeologist" and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici and producer/director James Cameron. It aired on April 16 on The History Channel. The documentary proposes naturalistic origins for the plagues of Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus.
Simcha Jacobovici is an Israeli-Canadian journalist and documentary film maker.
Hashem El Tarif is a mountain located in northeast Egyptian Sinai. According to Google Earth, the name of the mountain is "Gebel Khashm El Tarif", its coordinates being near 29°40'9.18"N and 34°38'0.28"E.
James Daniel Tabor is a Biblical scholar and Professor of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has taught since 1989 and served as Chair from 2004–14. He previously held positions at Ambassador College, the University of Notre Dame (1979–85), and the College of William and Mary (1985–89). Tabor is the founder and director of the Original Bible Project, a non-profit organisation aimed to produce a re-ordered new translation of the Bible in English. He retired in 2022.
The Talpiot Tomb is a rock-cut tomb discovered in 1980 in the East Talpiot neighborhood, five kilometers south of the Old City in East Jerusalem. It contained ten ossuaries, six inscribed with epigraphs, including one interpreted as "Yeshua bar Yehosef", 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 Lost Tomb of Jesus is a pseudoarchaeological docudrama co-produced and first broadcast on the Discovery Channel and Vision TV in Canada on March 4, 2007, covering the discovery of the Talpiot Tomb. It was directed by Canadian documentary and film maker Simcha Jacobovici and produced by Felix Golubev and Ric Esther Bienstock, while James Cameron served as executive producer. The film was released in conjunction with a book about the same subject, The Jesus Family Tomb, issued in late February 2007 and co-authored by Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino. The documentary and the book's claims have been rejected by the overwhelming majority of leading experts within the archaeological and theological fields, as well as among linguistic and biblical scholars.
The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History (ISBN 0061192023) is a controversial book by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino published in February 2007. It tells the story of the discovery of the Talpiot Tomb on Friday March 28, 1980 and makes an argument that it is the tomb of Jesus Christ and his family.
Eric H. Cline is an American author, historian, archaeologist, and professor of ancient history and archaeology at The George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, D.C., where he is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as Director of the GWU Capitol Archaeological Institute. He is also the advisor for the undergraduate archaeology majors, for which he was awarded the GWU Award for "Excellence in Undergraduate Departmental Advising" (2006). Cline served as co-editor of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research along with Christopher Rollston from 2014–2020.
Jodi Magness is an archaeologist, orientalist and scholar of religion. She serves as the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She previously taught at Tufts University.
Levantine archaeology is the archaeological study of the Levant. It is also known as Syro-Palestinian archaeology or Palestinian archaeology. Besides its importance to the discipline of Biblical archaeology, the Levant is highly important when forming an understanding of the history of the earliest peoples of the Stone Age.
Gabriel Barkay is an Israeli archaeologist.
A number of archaeological excavations at the Temple Mount—a celebrated and contentious religious site in the Old City of Jerusalem—have taken place over the last 150 years. Excavations in the area represent one of the more sensitive areas of all archaeological excavations in Jerusalem.
Ir David Foundation or City of David Foundation, commonly known as Elad [El'ad] is a Jerusalem-based, Israeli settler association which aims to strengthen the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and renew the Jewish community in the City of David, which is also part of the neighborhood of Silwan. The foundation works to achieve its goals by tourism, education, archaeological excavations and obtaining homes in the area to establish a Jewish presence.
Joseph E. Zias, most commonly cited as Joe Zias, was the Curator of Archaeology and Anthropology for the Israel Antiquities Authority from 1972 until his retirement in 1997, with responsibility for items such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, pre-historic human skeletal remains, and artifacts from archaeological sites such as Jericho, Megiddo, and Gezer. He has appeared often in film and television documentaries regarding such artifacts and the subject of the Historical Jesus, including The Shroud of Turin for CBS, Who Killed Jesus on BBC in 1997 and Son of God on BBC in 2001, and is a frequent lecturer.
