“We know from Josephus that wood was scarce in Jerusalem, so the Romans would have left the upright in place, and only the crossbar would have been carried. Both parts would have been used repeatedly.”

“So the arms were tied, not nailed,” said Ryan.

“Yes. Crucifixion originated in Egypt. In Egypt they tied. Remember, death wasn’t caused by nailing. Hanging from a cross weakens the two sets of breathing muscles, the intercostals and the diaphragm, leading to death by asphyxiation.

“The victim would have been positioned with the legs straddling the upright and each foot nailed laterally. The calcaneus is the largest bone in the foot. That’s why the nail was driven through the calcaneus, from outside to inside.”

The Jesus family tomb. A crucified man in a shroud.

Realizing where Jake was going, I flapped a hand at the heel bone lying on his counter.

“There’s no way to know if this is due to trauma. The defect could be the result of a disease process. It could be postmortem damage. A worm or snail hole.”

“It could have been made by a nail?”

Jake’s eyes burned with excitement.

“It’s possible.” My voice carried little conviction.

Crucifixion? Of whom? We’d already excluded one candidate. Max was too old at the time of his death, if you believed traditional scripture. Or too young, if you believed the Joyce theory based on Grosset’s scroll. Was Jake suggestingthese were the bones of Jesus of Nazareth?

As with Max, a tiny part of my brain wanted to believe. A larger part didn’t.

“You said you recovered other bones from the Kidron tomb?” I asked.

“Yeah. Looters don’t give a rat’s ass about skeletal remains. They just dumped the bones on the tomb floor when they carted off the intact ossuaries. We got those. We also got bones that were adhered to the insides of the boxes they smashed and left behind.”

“I hope those remains were in better condition than these.” I pointed at the contents of the Tupperware.

Jake shook his head. “Everything was fragmentary, and preservation wasn’t great. But the dumped bones were still in discrete piles with ossuary fragments mixed in. That helped in sorting out the floor individuals.”

“Did someone analyze the material?”

“A physical anthropologist with the Science and Antiquity Group at Hebrew University. He was able to identify three adult females and four adult males. Said that’s all the information he could get out of the assemblage. There was nothing measurable, so he couldn’t calculate statures or run population comparisons of any kind. He found no indicators of specific ages, no unique individual characteristics.”

“Did he spot any lesions similar to this one?”

“He mentioned osteoporosis and arthritis. That was it as far as trauma or disease.”

“Were any of the other bones found in loculi, like our guy here?” I asked.

Jake shook his head. “They wanted boxes, not bones. Thank God the bastards didn’t go knocking out walls. I still can’t believe you found a hidden loculus. And a shroud. Oh my God! Two thousand years. Do you know how many people have been in and out of that tomb? And you found an undisturbed burial. Oh my God!”

Behind Jake, Ryan lip-syncedOh my god.

“Where are the other bones now?” I asked

“Back in”-Jake did the E.T. shimmy thing with his fingers-“holy ground. And the Hevrat Kadisha won’t say where. But I’ve got the anthropology report.”

Ryan imitated the shimmy thing.

A grin crawled Jake’s face. “Most of them, anyway.”

“Oh?” I floated one brow.

“A few little scraps might have gotten misplaced.”

“Misplaced?”

“Remember our phone conversation about DNA testing on the Masada skeleton?”

I nodded.

“Nice folks at that lab.”

“The IAA agreed to send samples?”

“Not exactly.”

“You sent samples on your own?”

Jake shrugged. “Blotnik refused. What was I supposed to do?”

“Ballsy move,” Ryan said.

“I’ll ask now what I asked then,” I said. “What’s the point of genetic profiling when there’s nothing for comparison?”

“It should still be done. Now, follow me.”

Jake led us to the back bedroom, where he’d spread photos on a worktable. A few showed whole ossuaries. Many showed fragments.

“The robbers took a lot of boxes, smashed others,” Jake said. “But they left enough for reconstruction.”

Jake dug a five-by-seven from the stack and handed it to me. It pictured eight ossuaries. All had cracks. Many had gaps.

“Ossuaries differ in style, size, shape, thickness of stone, the way the lid fits. Most are fairly plain, but some have elaborate decoration. That of Joseph Caiaphas, for example.”

“The Sanhedrin Council elder who committed Jesus for trial before Pontius Pilate,” Ryan said.

“Yes. Though his Hebrew name was Yehosef bar Qayafa. Caiaphas was high priest of Jerusalem from eighteen until thirty-sevenC. E. His ossuary was discovered in 1990. It’s amazing, carved with unbelievably beautiful inscriptions. Also discovered around that time was an ossuary inscribed ‘Alexander, son of Simon of Cyrene.’ That box was also lavishly decorated.”

“Simon was the gentleman who helped Jesus carry the cross on the road to Golgotha.”

Ryan, the biblical scholar.

“You know your New Testament,” Jake said. “Simon and his son Alexander are mentioned in Mark 15:21.”

Ryan smiled modestly, then tapped the photo of Jake’s reconstructions. “I like the ones with the flower petal things.”

“Rosettes.” Jake pulled out two more five-by-seven glossies. “Now look at these.”

He handed the photos to Ryan. I leaned close.

The ossuary depicted was close to rectangular, with a fitted cover and a pocked surface. In one view, I could make out traces of carved rosettes. The circle-on-circle figures reminded me of the patterns we drew with pencil compasses when we were kids.

In the second view, a crack jagged across one end, made a hard right, and shot northwest up the box’s camera-facing side.

The little bone coffin looked exactly like those Jake had glued back together.

“The James ossuary?” I asked.

“Notice the inscription.” Jake handed us each a magnifying lens. “Do you read Aramaic?” he asked Ryan

Ryan shook his head. I gave him a look of feigned surprise.

Jake missed or ignored the exchange. “The astonishing thing about the James ossuary is the unusual refinement in the inscription. It’s much more in keeping with inscriptions found on more lavishly styled ossuaries.”

You could have fooled me. Even magnified, the message looked like a child’s scratching.

Jake’s finger started on the cluster of symbols at the far right end.

“The Jewish name Jacob, or Ya’akov, translates in English to ‘James.’”

“Thus the term Jacobites for the supporters of King James the Second of England.”

Ryan was starting to get on my nerves.

“Right.” Jake’s finger moved left across the famous little symbols. “‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.’” He tapped the cluster of symbols at the left end. “Yeshua, or Joshua, translates to ‘Jesus’ in English.”

Jake retrieved and lay down the photos.

“Now come with me.”

He led us to the rear of the enclosed porch, unlocked a large cabinet, and spread the double doors. Limestone shards filled the top two shelves. The reconstructed ossuaries occupied the lower six.

“Apparently these weren’t the brightest looters on the planet. They missed a number of inscribed fragments.”

Jake handed me a triangular shard from the top shelf. The letters were shallow and nearly invisible. I brought them into focus under my lens. Ryan put his face close to mine.

“Marya,” Jake translated. “‘Mary’ in English.”

Jake pointed to an inscription on one of the reconstructed boxes. The symbols looked similar.

“Matya. ‘Matthew.’”

Jake ran a finger across lettering on a larger box one shelf down.