Derided Tomb Earns More Reverential Study

For more than four centuries, residents of Jerusalem -- Jews, Christians and Muslims alike -- have thrown rocks and stones at a monument thought to be the tomb of Absalom, the son of King David who rebelled against his father and threw pre-Christian Israel into turmoil.

But a faint inscription on the tomb, a fortuitous photograph and some inspired detective work have led some experts to believe the monument's true identity is the tomb of Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist.

And not only that. Christian tradition holds that Zacharias was buried in the same crypt as the priest Simeon the Elder, who cradled the baby Jesus and recognized him as the Messiah, and James the Just, brother of Christ.

The tomb is empty of all artifacts now, and the inscription is thought to have been written in the fourth century by Byzantine Christians, long after it was probably looted. So, it is not clear if any of those biblical figures was ever actually buried there. But the Byzantines took their lead from local Christians, who maintained a strong oral tradition about the sites of various landmarks of the early Christian community.

"This is a find of great significance," said Eric Meyers, a professor of religion at Duke University, "not so much because it verifies anything about the personalities from the first century, but because it shows how they were venerated in the early Byzantine period."

"It will change our understanding of the period," added James Strange, a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida. "Later tradition has it that Zacharias and Simeon were all buried somewhere inside the city. If this has historical significance, they were buried outside like everybody else. And they were buried in a monument that had already been there for a century, which is kind of startling in itself."

The inscription's discovery, revealed last month in a French journal, comes on the heels of widespread publicity about the ossuary, or bone box, that was purported to have held the remains of James the Just. That artifact -- which has no link to the tomb-- subsequently was dismissed as a clever forgery.

But the new announcement about the tomb comes from two highly respected researchers: Joseph E. Zias of the Science and Archeology Group at Hebrew University, and Father Emile Puech of the Ecole Biblique in East Jerusalem. Zias is a former curator with the Israel Antiquities Authority and Puech is the chief epigrapher of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project.