The Man Who Knew Jesus

Airing tonight at 7pm EST on National Geographic Television in the US is our new series “Lost Faces of the Bible”. The series deals with four facial reconstructions of skulls found in Israel dating to pre-Biblical, Biblical and post-Biblical times. Because of problems with ultra-orthodox Jewish religious groups – who do not want to disturb the dead – facial reconstructions have not been done in Israel. We are the first. The reason we were able to do this was because we had minimal contact with the skulls. We CAT scanned skulls and then created 3D replicas using 3D printers that converted the CAT scans into perfect copies of the skulls.

In this blog, we reviewed two of the reconstructions: “The Face of Delilah” i.e., a Philistine woman who lived in the right place and the right time as the Biblical Delilah, and the face of an Esau like 6,000 year old warrior. The third episode deals with “The Man Who Saw Jesus”.

The skull whose face we reconstructed was found in an ossuary – a limestone bone box or coffin – in Kibbutz Sassa in the Galilee. “Sassa” seems to come from the Aramaic “Tsatsa” which means “nail”. Maybe the area was identified with early Jesus followers who identified with the “nailed” or crucified one. When this Galilean was originally found, he was wrongly dated to the second century CE/AD, but we conducted C-14 tests on the bones and the readings are firmly in the first century! In other words, this Galilean seems to have died around the year 45 CE/AD, around 13 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. If Jesus was as famous a healer as the Gospels suggest, then this man surely knew him. We can imagine him, for example, attending the Sermon on the Mount.

The forensic team for this program was headed by Professor Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University. The clay reconstruction was done in Montreal by Victoria Lywood and the digital reconstruction was done in Boston by Greg Mahoney.

Never before has a first century Galilean face been reconstructed. Never before have we been able to look into the face of a man who knew Jesus.

Click here to see my recent article “Archeological detective work” on The Times of Israel