What was found. In November 1990, workers building a water line in the Peace Forest (North Talpiyot, just south of Jerusalem's Old City) broke through the roof of a 1st-century Jewish burial cave. The salvage excavation by Zvi Greenhut (Israel Antiquities Authority) recovered a group of ossuaries, the limestone bone-boxes used in Jewish secondary burial c. 20 BC–AD 70. One ornate ossuary is twice inscribed in Aramaic "Yehosef bar Qayafa" (Joseph son of Caiaphas); a plainer one reads "Qafa"/"Qayafa" alone. The decorated ossuary held the bones of six individuals, among them a man of about 60. A coin of Herod Agrippa I struck AD 42/43 was found in the skull of another ossuary in the cave (a pagan-flavored burial custom appearing here in a Jewish tomb).
The identification (attributed, with the caution). Josephus gives the high priest's full name as Joseph, called Caiaphas (Antiquities 18.2.2; 18.4.3), the Gospels' "Caiaphas" (Matt 26:3; John 18:13-14), high priest AD 18–36, who presided at Jesus' hearing. Greenhut and the epigraphers who published the inscriptions argued the elderly man in the "Yehosef bar Qayafa" ossuary may well be that very high priest or a member of his family.
The stated cautions: the reading of the rare name's spelling is debated, the name need not be unique to one family, and the tomb itself is modest for so grand a figure, so the find is best stated as: an ossuary bearing the high-priestly family's name, from the right place, class and decades, a remarkable convergence, argued (not proven) to be the Caiaphas of the trial. (Principal publications: Z. Greenhut, "The 'Caiaphas' Tomb in North Talpiyot, Jerusalem," 'Atiqot 21 (1992); R. Reich on the inscriptions, same volume; popular write-up Greenhut, BAR 18:5 (1992).)
Sources (read live 2026-06-12): Z. Greenhut, "Burial Cave of the Caiaphas Family," Biblical Archaeology Review 18:5 (1992), author's own account (PDF read in full); citation to 'Atiqot 21 verified via search.
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