DNA Tests

Of the ten ossuaries pulled from the Talpiot Tomb, now known as the Jesus tomb, one went missing, three were “plain,” and six bore inscriptions.

The first inscription, written in Aramaic (an ancient dialect of Hebrew), states: "Yeshua bar Yosef", “Jesus son of Joseph”.

The fifth inscription, written in Greek, reads: “Mariamene e Mara”, an endearing form of the name “Mariamne”. This is the only inscription found in the tomb written in Greek. It is a version of Mary. In the post-“Da Vinci Code” era everyone knows that the second “Mary” in Jesus’ life was Mary Magdalene.

For millennia, people have speculated about her relationship to him.

What readers of The Da Vinci Code don’t know is Mary Magdalene’s real name.

From the Acts of Philip, a fourth century work ostensibly written about Mary Magdalene’s brother, Phillip, and recently recovered from a monastery at Mt. Athos in Greece, Professor François Bovon (Harvard University) has determined that Magdalene’s name was “Mariamne.”

In the documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, DNA tests are performed on human residue taken out of the “Jesus son of Joseph” ossuary and the “Mariamne” ossuary.

These DNA tests are conducted by Dr. Carney Matheson at the Paleo-DNA lab at Lakehead University in Ontario, one of the leading facilities of its kind in the world.

The degraded samples would not provide enough material for y-chromosome testing. But Dr. Matheson is able to extract enough mitochondrial DNA to test the mother line. The tests demonstrate that the “Jesus” and “Mary” from this tomb are not maternally related.

That means a couple of things. They were not siblings. They were not mother and child or father and daughter. They were unrelated.

People buried in tombs are related in one of two ways: either by blood or by marriage.

The results revealed an explosive possibility: that these two individuals, Jesus, son of Joseph, and Mariamne, were likely related by marriage.