The first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ in Israel Discovered, 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years

The image is eerily familiar: a bearded young man with flowing curly hair. After lying for nearly 2,000 years hidden in a cave in the Holy Land, the fine detail is difficult to determine. But in a certain light, it is not difficult to interpret the marks around the figure’s brow as a crown of thorns.

The extraordinary picture of one of the recently discovered hoards of up to 70 lead codices – booklets – found in a cave in the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee is one reason Bible historians are clamouring to get their hands on the ancient artefacts.

If genuine, this could be the first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ, possibly even created in the lifetime of those who knew him.

The tiny booklet, a little smaller than a modern credit card, is sealed on all sides and has a three-dimensional representation of a human head on both the front and the back. One appears to have a beard and the other is without. Even the maker’s fingerprint can be seen in the lead impression. Beneath both figures is a line of as-yet undeciphered text in an ancient Hebrew script.

Astonishingly, one of the booklets appears to bear the words ‘Saviour of Israel’ – one of the few phrases so far translated.

The owner of the cache is Bedouin trucker Hassan Saida who lives in the Arab village of Umm al-Ghanim, Shibli. He has refused to sell the booklets but two samples were sent to England and Switzerland for testing.

An investigation has revealed that the artefacts were originally found in a cave in the village of Saham in Jordan, close to where Israel, Jordan and Syria’s Golan Heights converge – and within three miles of the Israeli spa and hot springs of Hamat Gader, a religious site for thousands of years.

According to sources in Saham, they were discovered five years ago after a flash flood scoured away the dusty mountain soil to reveal what looked like a large capstone. When this was levered aside, a cave was discovered with a large number of small niches set into the walls. Each of these niches contained a booklet. There were also other objects, including some metal plates and rolled lead scrolls.

The area is renowned as an age-old refuge for ancient Jews fleeing the bloody aftermath of a series of revolts against the Roman empire in the First and early Second Century AD.

The cave is less than 100 miles from Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and around 60 miles from Masada, scene of the last stand and mass suicide of an extremist Zealot sect in the face of a Roman Army siege in 72AD – two years after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

It is also close to caves that have been used as sanctuaries by refugees from the Bar Kokhba revolt, the third and final Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire in 132AD.

The era is of critical importance to Biblical scholars because it encompasses the political, social and religious upheavals that led to the split between Judaism and Christianity.

It ended with the triumph of Christianity over its rivals as the dominant new religion first for dissident Jews and then for Gentiles.

In this context, it is important that while the Dead Sea Scrolls are rolled pieces of parchment or papyrus containing the earliest-known versions of books of the Hebrew Bible and other texts – the traditional Jewish format for written work – these lead discoveries are in book, or codex, a form which has long been associated with the rise of Christianity.

The codices seen range in size from smaller than 3in x 2in to around 10in x 8in. They each contain an average of eight or nine pages and appear to be cast, rather than inscribed, with images on both sides and bound with lead-ring bindings. Many of them were severely corroded when they were first discovered, although it has been possible to open them with care.

The codex showing what may be the face of Christ is not thought to have been opened yet. Some codices show signs of having been buried – although this could simply be the detritus resulting from lying in a cave for hundreds of years.

Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, the lead codices appear to consist of stylised pictures, rather than text, with a relatively small amount of script that appears to be in a Phoenician language, although the exact dialect is yet to be identified. At the time these codices were created, the Holy Land was populated by different sects, including Essenes, Samaritans, Pharisees, Sadducees, Dositheans and Nazoreans.

There was no common script and considerable intermingling of language and writing systems between groups. Which means it could take years of detailed scholarship to accurately interpret the codices.

Many of the books are sealed on all sides with metal rings, suggesting they were not intended to be opened. This could be because they contained holy words which should never be read.

A Scientist Thinks These Ancient Roman Nails May Have Been Used To Crucify Jesus Christ

According to a new analysis, two corroded Roman-era iron nails which some have claimed pinned Jesus to the cross seem to have been used in an ancient crucifixion. The controversy about the origin of the nails was reignited by this study.

The latest research indicates that the nails of the tomb of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who supposedly handed Jesus over for execution to the Romans for execution. Slivers of wood and bone fragments suggest they may have been used in a crucifixion.

The connection to Caiaphas and the new evidence did not completely show that the nails were used to crucify Jesus in Jerusalem in A.D. 33, Geologist Aryeh Shimron, the lead author of the study published in the journal Archaeological Discovery.

“I certainly do not want to say that these nails are from the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth,” Shimron told Live Science. “But are they nails from a crucifixion? Very likely, yes.”

Where did the nails originate?

Israel Hershkovitz, a renowned anthropologist at Tel Aviv University, received the nails in an unmarked box from the collection of Nicu Haas, an Israeli anthropologist who died in 1986. According to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Haas obtained them from a tomb excavated in the 1970s, decades before the Caiaphas tomb was discovered, according to Haaretz. 

But the IAA doesn’t know which tomb the nails came from, and no records of their provenance have ever been found. In a controversial 2011 documentary called “The Nails of the Cross,” however, filmmaker and journalist Simcha Jacobovici suggested the nails were those lost from the Caiaphas tomb — and that the high priest may have been so overcome with guilt about the crucifixion of Jesus that he kept the nails as a memento. 

Haaretz reported that some scholars, though no names were given, have called the latest research highly speculative.  But Shimron, a geologist based in Jerusalem who’s retired from the Israel Geological Survey, said the new study gave weight to the documentary’s ideas. Shimron has not studied the two nails that are the subject of Jacobovici’s 2011 documentary before now, though he was involved in a 2015 study tied to another of Jacobovici’s controversial documentaries on the archaeology of Jesus.

Workers widening a road discovered the first-century “Caiaphas” tomb in 1990 in a neighbourhood in the southeast of Jerusalem. The tomb contained 12 ossuaries —– one marked with the name “Qayafa” and another, ornately decorated with motifs of flowers, marked with the Aramaic name “Yehosef Bar Qayafa,” or “Joseph son of Caiaphas” in English. Most archaeologists now accept that the tomb was used to bury the first-century high priest Caiaphas and his family, the study said. 

Caiaphas, who is is mentioned several times in both the Christian New Testament and history of the Jews written in the late first century by Flavius Josephus, presided over a sham trial of Jesus for blasphemy, after which Jesus was handed over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate for execution, according to the Gospel of Matthew. The execution was reportedly carried out on Friday, April 3, 33, when Jesus was nailed to the cross — a common Roman method of capital punishment.

Jerusalem tomb

In the latest study, Shimron and his co-authors compared samples from the two nails with sediments from the ossuaries in the Caiaphas tombstone chests used to hold the bones of people after they had decayed for about a year on a rock shelf. It found that not only did the physical and chemical signatures of the nails and the ossuaries match, but they also seemed to be unique.

For example, the ratios of isotopes of carbon and oxygen — variants of these elements — in both sets of samples suggested they both came from an abnormally humid environment, and they both had significant “flowstone deposits” —– layers of calcite carbonate formed by flowing water.

These findings match the conditions in the Caiaphas tomb, which is located near an ancient aqueduct and often would have been flooded by its overflow. The researchers also found evidence on both the nails and the ossuaries of a specific fungus — an unusual type of yeast — that grows only in very damp conditions and has been found in no other tomb in Jerusalem. “I think the nails came from that tomb,” Shimron said.

Their analysis of the nails with an electron microscope also found slivers of wood on the nails, which they recognized as cedar, and tiny fragments of bone —– unfortunately now fossilized. Those discoveries heightened the possibility that the nails came from crucifixion, but they did not prove it, Shimron said.

Mysterious nails

The IAA says their records show that two iron nails were also found in the Caiaphas tomb — one inside an unmarked ossuary and another on the ground near the ornate ossuary, possibly where it fell when it was disturbed by tomb robbers — but they were later lost. 

The excavator of that tomb suggested they might have been used to scratch inscriptions on the ossuaries, but that idea was never investigated, Shimron said. The new study indicated the nails from Tel Aviv University were indeed those lost from the Caiaphas tomb, despite the IAA’s denial, he said.

According to the theory presented in Jacobovici’s documentary, they might have been buried with Caiaphas because crucifixion nails were thought to be magical — a belief noted in ancient Jewish writings. And because Caiaphas is only known for his role in the crucifixion of Jesus, it’s possible that the nails are linked with that event — although it can only be a supposition, Shimron said. 

Hershkovitz, who still has possession of the two nails, told Live Science he was not convinced by the latest study, but he did not rule out the possibility that the nails came from the Caiaphas tomb. The nails are long enough to have been used on a person’s hands in a crucifixion, and they are bent upward at the end, — perhaps to prevent the hands being lifted off the cross, he said.

But the presence of bone fragments did not prove the nails were from a crucifixion, because bones from the tomb may have stuck to the nails. “Ossuaries are full of human bones,” he said.

Still, “there is a possibility — and we have to keep an open mind for every possibility, as scientists,” Hershkovitz said.