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The Letters of James and Peter | Learn More
Burial Box of James the Brother of Jesus "In the fall of 2002, a startling story with important religious significance hit the secular news wires. Scholars were claiming that the ossuary (burial box) of James, the brother of Jesus Christ, had been discovered in the Jerusalem area. Major network news programs and news magazines alike carried the story, based upon information contained in the November-December 2002 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. The discoverer of the box, and the author of the BAR article, was Dr. Andre Lemaire, a professor who directs the Hebrew and Aramaic philology and epigraphy section at the Sorbonne in Paris. One of the world's foremost specialists in ancient inscriptions, Lemaire has published more than 400 articles and papers. When someone of his reputation makes a startling claim, people sit up and take notice. For six months in 2002, Lemaire was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he met a private collector who had an ossuary dated to the first century ad. When Dr. Lemaire examined the box and read the inscription, he was startled by its possible implications, and he began a scholarly investigation to discover whether the box was authentic.
The James ossuary was on display at the Royal Ontario Museum from November 15, 2002 to January 5, 2003.
Ossuaries like the one Lemaire found were used in the Jerusalem area from about 20bc until the Roman assault on the city in 70ad. Burials in the Jerusalem area normally took place in limestone caves carved into the hillsides. Wrapped in a linen burial shroud, the body of the deceased was placed on a ledge in a family burial cave. About a year later, family members returned and placed the then-skeletal remains in an ossuary. The box was inscribed with the name of the deceased, and stacked with similar boxes containing skeletal remains of other family members who had previously been interred in the cave. This is what is meant by the common Old Testament phrase that a person after death "rested with his fathers" (1 Kings 11:21, 43). The same burial cave often kept the bones of generations of the same family. What made Dr. Lemaire and others conclude that this particular ossuary had once contained the bones of a family member of Jesus Christ? To begin with, the inscription on the side read: "James the son of Joseph the brother of Jesus." Inscriptions normally used the formula "x the son of y." A brother would be mentioned only rarely, when that brother was of unusual prominence. Since the Bible speaks of a James who was the son of Joseph and brother of Jesus Christ, and we know that this James died in Jerusalem in 62ad—when