There's More about Mary

Dr. Stephen Pfann, President of the University of the Holy Land/Center for the Study of Early Christianity, offers this analysis of the inscription on the Mary ossuary claimed to be Mary Magdalene in the alleged Jesus tomb:

Rather than MARIAM(E)NEMARA (or MARIAMENOUMARA), “Mary, known as master,” the inscription reads, MARIAMEKAIMARA, or, “Mary and Mar[th]a.” As Pfann documents, the first person buried was a MARIAME (Mary), and later a second scribe added “and Mar[th]a” when the bones of a person by that name were added to the ossuary.

Here is Pfann’s color-coded markup of what he sees as the three different words in the inscription.

 

Pfann provides a scan from a document from around the same period. Note the similarity between the blue “kai” in the first picture and the red word in the second picture.

 

 

 

It is well-known that ossuaries were often used to store the bones of more than one person and inscriptions were sometimes added later.  This interpretation would fit with that information.  Given that and the fact that family tombs were used over generations, these names can't even be placed in the same generation, living at the same time.  These people's lives could have been decades aprt. 

What is clear, and wasn't even noted in the film, is that even the reading of the inscriptions is open to some interpretation and not unequivocal.  There was a lot of interpretaiton and assumption being presented as fact in that film.

(HT:  Biblical Foundations and Between Two Worlds)

Comments

[Sam]

Good grief, that's some sloppy handwriting! I don't see how anybody can read it.

[Joshua]

I'm glad so many people are so zealous for the truth of the Holy Bible. I pray that we are as zealous in obedience to it.

[Aaron Snell]

I dunno, Sam, it looks about like my handwriting would were I to try to inscribe Greek script into stone :)

[Sam]

It looks to me more like one those doohickies you see at grocery stores and stuff where you slide your credit card and use the screen with an artificial pen to sign the receipt.