Reaction Is Mixed to Discovery Believed Linked to Jesus’ Life : History: Israeli archeologists have found what they believe may be the tomb of the man who presided at Christ’s trial. Some scholars call the finding ‘significant,’ while others are skeptical.

Despite decades of effort, archeologists have had little success documenting the people and events in the life of Jesus as portrayed in the New Testament.

The few exceptions for whom independent evidence has been found are relatively minor players in the Christian drama, such as Nicanor, the Alexandrian Jew who donated gates to the Herodian temple in Jerusalem, and Yehohanah, granddaughter of Theophilus, who became High Priest shortly after Jesus’ death.

It was thus with great excitement that many scholars greeted the report this week in the Biblical Archeology Review that Israeli archeologists have discovered what they believe to be the tomb of the High Priest who presided at Jesus’ trial and handed him over to the Roman authorities for crucifixion.

The discovery is, perhaps, doubly valuable because some scholars have recently been reassessing the importance of the role played by the High Priest in Jesus’ life, concluding that he was one of the key figures.

Caiaphas was the primary individual who encouraged money-changers and animal vendors to set up shop inside the temple to facilitate worship by selling sacrifices and thereby help Jews define their cultural identity. It was Caiaphas’ anger over the eviction of these merchants by Jesus, more than any other event, that led to Jesus’ death, say scholars such as Bruce Chilton, a professor of religion at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

“I can hardly imagine a more significant discovery from that period,” said Chilton, author of a new book about Caiaphas, called “The Temple of Jesus,” which is being published this week. “The discovery has the potential to give us great new insight into the period during which Jesus lived.”

It is “one of the most spectacular archeological finds in recent years,” said Zvi Greenhut of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who authored one of two papers about the discovery in the Review.

Others, however, were less enthusiastic. “It’s an interesting confirmation of the fact that there existed a person with this name,” said James Robinson, a professor of religion at Claremont Graduate School. “It’s not a sensation in proving that the Bible is right, or whatever, but it is certainly nice that these kinds of archeological things pop up from time to time.”

Such archeological evidence “is not what the Gospels are about,” said Jacob Neusner, a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

“The Bible is not a history book. It’s a book of faith,” Neusner said. “The presence or absence of archeological evidence is monumentally irrelevant to Christian faith, to Judaic faith, to Muslim faith or any other. Religion is not about historical fact, it’s about religious truth, and religious truth comes from God. . . . Validating a very minor detail through the discovery of a coffin is not going to lead nonbelievers to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is the point of the stories.”

Apart from the potential religious significance, the discovery will provide new information about that historical period. “This is a dialogue of sorts with people from 2,000 years ago,” said Ronny Reich, a specialist on Aramaic languages with the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem who authored a second paper on the tomb in the Review.

The tomb was discovered by accident in November, 1990, during the construction of a water park in the Peace Forest on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Workmen building a road unearthed a cave and called in the Antiquities Authority. Greenhut responded and observed that the roof of the cave had collapsed.

“But even while standing outside, I could see four ossuaries, or bone boxes, in the central chamber of the cave,” he wrote. “This was a clear indication that this was a Jewish burial cave from the Second Temple period (1st Century BC to 1st Century) because ossuaries were used only in Jewish tombs during this period.”

Ossuaries were used for what is known as secondary burial. In the initial or primary burial, the body was laid out in a niche carved into the wall of the cave. Sometime later, after the flesh had decomposed, the bones were collected and placed in an ossuary, usually made of limestone and often decorated and inscribed.

The reburial, Greenhut said, reflects a belief in the physical resurrection of the body, for which purpose the bones were collected and preserved. Typically, bones of several individuals would be placed in one ossuary.

Inside the cave, Greenhut found four burial niches and a rectangular pit that had been dug in the floor by the entrance. Such “standing pits” are typical of Second Temple-period burial caves, he said, and allowed ancient mourners to stand erect in the low-ceilinged cave. Another pit in the corner, a kind of primitive ossuary, also served for the collection of bones.

But the most exciting parts of the find were the 12 limestone ossuaries in the chamber. Six of them “were found turned over without covers, scattered about and sometimes broken,” according to Greenhut, indicating that grave robbers had visited the tomb but not finished their work.

Four of the ossuaries bore Aramaic inscriptions with names such as “Miriam daughter of Simon,” “Salome” and an abbreviation that is thought to mean “Simon,” all common names of the period.

But the other two ossuaries were the real prizes. One bore an inscription on its side saying “Caiaphas.” Caiaphas is now believed to be a kind of family name or nickname, Greenhut noted, and he believes this to be the ossuary of the High Priest’s father. The second--and most elaborately decorated of all the ossuaries--bears inscriptions on both the side and the end reading “Joseph son of Caiaphas.” This is thought to be the High Priest’s final resting place.

According to the contemporary Greek historian Josephus, the only major source of information about the period other than the Bible, the Jewish High Priest from AD 18 to AD 36 was called Joseph Caiaphas. Elsewhere in his text, Josephus calls him “Joseph who was called Caiaphas of the high priesthood.”

Inside this ossuary, Greenhut found the bones of six different people: two infants, a child between 2 and 5, a body between 13 and 18, an adult woman and a man of about 60 years. The other ossuary with a Caiaphas inscription contained the bones of five people with a similar age distribution, except there was no older man in it. (After study, the bones were reburied on the Mount of Olives.)

One other object found in the ossuaries help to date the remains. In the ossuary labeled Miriam daughter of Simon, Greenhut found a bronze coin of Herod Agrippa I dated to AD 42-43 in the skull of an adult women. Burying the deceased with a coin placed in the mouth as payment to the Greek God Charon for ferrying the deceased’s spirit across the River Styx was a pagan custom that was practiced in other areas of the Middle East.

“Now--for the first time--we find it as well in a Jewish burial in Jerusalem,” wrote Reich.

Caiaphas has been unfairly vilified by history, Chilton argues. His “delicate settlement” with Roman authorities gave Jews “the unusual privilege in the Roman Empire that they were not required to make sacrifices to the emperor on civic occasions,” he said.

The settlement “also allowed worship to go on in the Temple until it was destroyed in the revolt of AD 70,” Chilton added. “Jews were defined in large part by their ability to go to the Temple, to make sacrifices. . . . Jesus’ interference in that was the event that brought about his execution.”

The new discovery, Chilton concluded, indicates that Caiaphas’ contemporaries viewed his efforts as a success. “This is not the tomb of a great failure whom one is trying to forget. This is the tomb of a person of great status who died with much respect.”