“Yehuda, son of Yeshua. ‘Jude, son of Jesus.’”

Jake dropped to the third shelf.

“Yose. ‘Joseph.’”

He moved to the box next to Joe’s.

“Yeshua, son of Yehosef. ‘Jesus, son of Joseph.’”

Shelf four.

“Mariameme. ‘The one called Mara.’”

“That writing looks different,” Ryan said.

“Good eye. That’s Greek. Hebrew. Latin. Aramaic. Greek. The Mideast was a linguistic mosaic back then. Marya, Miriam, and Mara are all the same name, basically, ‘Miriam’ or ‘Mary.’ And nicknames were used, just as they are today. Mariameme is a diminutive of ‘Miriam.’” Jake pointed to shelf three. “And Yehosef and Yose are the same name, Joseph.”

Returning to the top shelf, Jake selected another fragment, and exchanged it for the one I was holding. This inscription made Marya’s look like new. The lettering was so faint it was almost invisible.

“That name is probably Salome,” Jake said. “But I can’t be sure.”

I ran the names through my mind.

Mary. Mary. Salome. Joseph. Matthew. Jude.

Jesus.

The Jesus family? The Jesus family tomb? Everyone fit but Matthew.

I thought, but didn’t say, Oh. My. God.

“HOW DO BIBLICAL SCHOLARS OR HISTORIANS INTERPRET THEJesus family?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.

“The historical view is that Jesus, his four brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude, and his two sisters, Mary and Salome, were the biological children of Joseph and Mary. The Protestant view is that Jesus had no human father, but Mary had other children by Joseph.”

“Making Jesus the eldest sibling,” Ryan said.

“Yes,” Jake said.

“The Vatican sees Mary as a perpetual virgin,” I said.

“No siblings allowed,” Ryan added.

Jake nodded. “The Western Catholic view is that the others were first cousins, offspring of Joseph’s brother Clopas, who was also married to a woman named Mary. The Eastern Orthodox view is that God is the father of Jesus, Mary remained a virgin, and the brothers and sisters are the children of Joseph, a widower, by a previous marriage.”

“Making Jesus the youngest.” Ryan was infatuated with birth order.

“Yes,” Jake said.

My mind cataloged.

Two Mary’s. Salome. Jude. Joseph. And someone named Matthew.

Something fluttered in my gut.

“Weren’t these names common, like Joe or Tom today?” I asked.

“Very,” Jake said. “Anyone hungry?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Ryan said.

We trooped back to the kitchen. Jake laid out cold cuts, cheese, flat bread, oranges, pickles, and olives. The cats watched as we helped ourselves. Ryan skipped the olives.

When we’d sandwiched up, we moved to a picnic table in the dining area. We talked as we ate.

“Mary was the most common female name in first-century Roman Palestine,” Jake said. “For men it was Simon, followed by Joseph. Uncovering ossuaries with these names is no big deal. Whatis a big deal is the co-occurrence, the finding of the names in a single tomb. That’s the mind-blow.”

“But, Jake-”

“I’ve studied published catalogs of Jewish ossuaries. Of the thousands of boxes stored in collections all over Israel, only six are inscribed with the name Jesus. Of those six, only one is inscribed ‘Jesus, son of Joseph.’ And now ours.”

Jake shooed a cat.

“Ever hear of onomastics or prosopography?”

Ryan and I shook our heads.

“The statistical analysis of names.” Jake popped an olive into his mouth and talked through the depitting process. “For example, among his catalog of published ossuaries, an Israeli archaeologist named Rahmani found nineteen Josephs, ten Joshuas, and five Jacobs, or James.”

Jake palmed the pit and popped another olive.

“Another expert studied registered names in first-century Palestine and came up with figures of fourteen percent for Joseph, nine percent for Jesus, and two percent for Jacob. Crunching these numbers, a French paleoepigrapher named André Lemaire calculated that only 0.14 percent of the male population of Jerusalem could bear the name ‘Jacob, son of Joseph.’”

Pit out. Olive in.

“Based on the assumption that every male had approximately two brothers, Lemaire calculated that roughly eighteen percent of the men named ‘Jacob, son of Joseph’ would have had a brother named Jesus. So over two generations, only 0.05 percent of the population would likely be called ‘Jacob, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.’”

“How many people lived in first-century Jerusalem?” I asked.

“Lemaire used a figure of eighty thousand.”

“Of whom about forty thousand would have been male,” Ryan said.

Nod. “Lemaire concluded that in Jerusalem during the two generations before seventyC. E., no more than twenty people could have fit the inscription on the James ossuary.”

“But not everyone ended up in an ossuary,” I said.

“No.”

“And not every ossuary was inscribed.”

“Astute points, Dr. Brennan. But the mention of a brother is rare. How many Jacobs, sons of Joseph, had a brother, Jesus, who was famous enough for that relationship to be marked on their ossuaries?”

I had no answer so I replied with a question.

“Do other name experts agree with Lemaire’s estimate?”

Jake snorted. “Of course not. Some say it’s high, others say it’s low. But what are the chances of this whole cluster of names in one tomb? The Marys, Joseph, Jesus, Jude, Salome. The probability must become infinitesimal.”

“Is this the same Lemaire to whom Oded Golan first revealed the James ossuary?” I asked.

“Yes.”

My eyes drifted to the heel bone with its peculiar lesion. I thought of Donovan Joyce and his bizarre theory of Jesus living on to fight and die at Masada. I thought of Yossi Lerner and his bizarre theory of Jesus’ bones ending up at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

Believing it was Jesus, Lerner had stolen the skeleton we were calling Max. But Max’s age at death had proven Lerner wrong. My skeletal estimate put him at forty to sixty. That estimate also made Max too young to be the octogenarian who had penned Grosset’s Jesus scroll.

Now Jake was suggesting another bizarre theory, and another candidate. Jesus had died by crucifixion, but his body hadn’t risen, it had remained in its tomb. That tomb had become the final resting place of the Jesus family. That tomb was in the Kidron. Looters had found that tomb and stolen the James ossuary from it. Jake had rediscovered that tomb and recovered the remains of ossuaries and individuals the looters had left behind. I had blundered onto a hidden loculus in that tomb, and found a burial no one else had. The shrouded bones of Jesus.

My stomach went from a flutter to a knot.

I lay down my sandwich. One of the toms began a slow ooze toward it.

“Was James well-known in his day?” Ryan asked.

“You better believe it. Let’s back up a bit. Historical evidence suggests Jesus was born to a lineage known as Davidids, direct descendents of David, a tenth-centuryB. C. E. king of Israel. According to Hebrew prophets, the Messiah, the final king of a restored nation of Israel, was to come from among this royal line. The Davidids, with their radical revolutionary potential, were well-known to the Herod family, who ruled Palestine at the time, and to the Romans, right up to the emperor. These ‘royals’ were watched very closely, and at times, hunted down and killed.

“When Jesus was crucified in thirtyC. E. for his claim to messianic kingship, his brother James, next in the Davidid line, became top dog in the Christian movement in Jerusalem.”

“Not Peter?” Ryan asked.

“Not Peter, not Paul. James the Just. That fact is not widely known, and rarely given proper consideration. When James was stoned to death in sixty-twoC. E., for basically the same kind of messianic claims as Jesus, brother Simon stepped up to the plate. After a forty-five-year run, Simon was crucified under the emperor Trajan, specifically because of his royal lineage. Guess who came up to bat next?”