Talpiot Tomb

The Talpiot Tomb (or Talpiyot Tomb) is a rock-cut tomb discovered in 1980 in the East Talpiot neighborhood, five kilometers south of the Old City in East Jerusalem. It contained ten ossuaries, six of them with epigraphs, including one with the inscription that has been interpreted as "Yeshua bar Yehosef" ("Jesus, son of Joseph"), though this text is not well-formed (i.e. sloppy) and highly disputed. The tomb also yielded various human remains and several carvings.

The Talpiot find was first published in 1994 in "Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel" numbers 701-709, and first discussed in the media in Britain during March/April 1996. Later in 1996, an article describing the find was published in volume 29 of Atiqot, the journal of the Israel Antiquities Authority. A controversial 2007 documentary film produced by Canadian film director James Cameron and investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici titled The Lost Tomb of Jesus and a book written by Jacobovici, together with Charles Pellegrino, The Jesus Family Tomb present findings that the authors believe prove that the Talpiot Tomb was the burial place of Jesus of Nazareth, as well as several other figures from the New Testament. This claim is disputed by many archaeologists and theologians, as well as language and biblical scholars.