In 1990, workers laying a water line south of Jerusalem’s Old City broke into a 1st-century Jewish burial cave. The salvage excavation (Zvi Greenhut, Israel Antiquities Authority) recovered ossuaries, the limestone bone-boxes of Jewish secondary burial, one of them ornate and twice inscribed in Aramaic “Yehosef bar Qayafa,” Joseph son of Caiaphas. Josephus gives the high priest of the trial exactly that full name, “Joseph, called Caiaphas”, and among the bones was a man of about sixty. The publishers argued this may be the very high priest of Matt 26:3, or his family; the stated cautions: the rare name’s reading is debated, the name need not mark one family only, and the tomb is modest for so grand a figure. Best said as the find itself: an ossuary bearing the high-priestly family’s name, from the right place, class, and decades, argued, not proven, to be the Caiaphas of the trial.
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The Caiaphas ossuary
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- Matthew 26:3bsb
At that time the chief priests and elders of the people assembled in the courtyard of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas,
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