KHUI YESHUA:

Stone Box May Be Oldest Link to Jesus: Scholar Believes 60 A.D. Relic Authentic (Guy Gugliotta, October 22, 2002, Washington Post)

A nondescript limestone box, looted from a Jerusalem cave and held secretly in a private collection in Israel, carries an inscription that could be the earliest known archaeological reference to Jesus, according to new research released yesterday.

The box, an ossuary used at the time of Jesus to hold bones of the deceased that dates to about 60 A.D., has almost no ornamentation except for a simple Aramaic inscription: Ya 'a kov bar Yosef a khui Yeshua -- "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

Andre Lemaire, a French philologist and epigrapher who is the first scholar known to have studied the box, believes the inscription refers to Jesus of Nazareth. [...]

[L]emaire calculated that there could have been perhaps 20 people out of a contemporary Jerusalem population of 80,000 who fulfilled the requirement of being "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

And while mentioning the father of the deceased on an ossuary is relatively common, a brother's name usually appears only if the brother paid for the funeral, "or if the brother is famous," Shanks said. "That certainly would be the case here."

Here's the Biblical Archaeology Review story. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 22, 2002 10:23 AM