Archaeologists may have found the mansion of one of the priests that condemned Jesus. Its bathtub serves as a clue to these findings. Find more about this discovery in an article from NBC News.
Archaeologists say they have uncovered a first-century mansion on
Jerusalem's Mount Zion, complete with an ancient bathtub that just might have
belonged to one of the priests who condemned Jesus to death.
"Byzantine tradition places in our general area the mansion of the
high priest Caiaphas or perhaps Annas, who was his father-in-law," Shimon
Gibson, the archaeologist co-directing the excavation, said in a news release.
"In those days you had extended families who would have been using the
same building complex, which might have had up to 20 rooms and several
different floors."
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| The ruins of what appears to be a high-status residence were dug up on Jerusalem's Mount Zion, just outside the walls of the Old City. Image Source: www.msn.com |
The mansion's location and its fancy features are the main lines of
evidence for surmising that a member of the priestly class lived there,
according to Gibson and the dig's other co-director, James Tabor, a scholar of
early Christian history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. UNC
Charlotte has been licensed by Israeli authorities to conduct the Mount
Zion excavation.
"We might be digging in the home of one of Jesus'
archenemies," Tabor told NBC News. "Someone who was at the trial of
Jesus, and probably voted no."
So which was it: Pharisees or Sadducees? "We think
Sadducees," Tabor said. "That's the class that has the wealth and
more of the control of the temple, and they're in with the Romans."
Bathtub provides a clue
The mansion was built close to the walls of the Second Temple, erected
by King Herod the Great in biblical times. It boasted a three-pit oven — a
luxury in those days — as well as a private walk-in ritual pool and a separate
bathroom.
The bathtub is one of the most significant clues in the mystery surrounding
the mansion's owners. Only three other such tubs have been linked to the Second
Temple period in Israel, Gibson said. Two of them were unearthed in Herod's
palaces at Jericho and Masada, and the third was found in a priestly residence
excavated nearby in Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter.
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| The ancient bathtub, visible on the left side of this excavated bathroom, looks a lot like the modern-day equivalent. Image Source: www.msn.com |
"It is only a stone's throw away, and I wouldn't hesitate to say
that the people who made that bathroom probably were the same ones who made
this one," Gibson said. "It's almost identical, not only in the way
it's made, but also in the finishing touches, like the edge of the bath
itself."
The excavators said they found a huge number of Murex sea snail shells
amid the ruins. Some species of Murex sea snails were highly valued because a
blue dye could be extracted from the creatures. In fact, historians say such a dye was specified in Jewish texts as
the coloring agent for religious garments.
It's not exactly clear why so many shells were kept in the mansion, but
Gibson hypothesizes that they may have been used to identify different grades
of dye, since the quality of the product can vary from species to species.
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| Three round pits served as ovens for the mansion's residents. Image Source: www.msn.com |
The team also explored a 30-foot-deep (10-meter-deep) cistern.
"When we started clearing it, we found a lot of debris inside, which
included substantial numbers of animal bones, and then right at the bottom we
came across a number of vessels which seemed to be sitting on the floor — cooking
pots and bits of an oven as well," Gibson said.
He and his colleagues suggest that Jewish residents might have lived in
the cistern as their final refuge during the Roman siege that led to the city's
destruction in the year 70. In his account of the siege, the Roman-Jewish
historian Josephus said more than 2,000 bodies were
found underground in Jerusalem's cisterns and water systems,
most of them dead from starvation.
Why the mansion was preserved
The mansion's location, and the timing of its demise, may have been played a
role in its preservation: After the Romans pillaged Jerusalem, the area was
deserted for 65 years. And when the Roman emperor Hadrian rebuilt the city in
135, the Mount Zion area was left unoccupied. "The ruined field of
first-century houses in our area remained there intact up until the beginning
of the Byzantine period," in the early 4th century, Gibson said.
Jerusalem's Byzantine inhabitants simply built on top of the older
walls. Two centuries later, the ruins were covered with landfill material that
was dumped on it from above during the reign of Justinian I, due to the
construction of a church complex known as the Nea Ekklesia of the Theotokos
just to the northeast.
"The area got submerged," Gibson explained in the news
release. "The early Byzantine reconstruction of these two-story Early
Roman houses then got buried under rubble and soil fills. Then they established
buildings above it. That's why we found an unusually well-preserved set of
stratigraphic levels."
This year's Mount Zion excavations were conducted between June 16 and
July 11, and the project is slated to continue in 2014 and 2015.
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