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Artifact Analysis
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- The Shroud of a Leper
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This burial shroud was found in a first-century tomb still wrapped around the remains of a man, most likely a priest, buried in Jerusalem. This is a one-of-a-kind find to date, because the customary practice for well-off individuals was that they would be removed from the shroud when their body had decomposed, and their bones placed in an ossuary or bone box in a niche in the family tomb (a practice known as secondary burial). -
 The reason this man remained in linen, and that his body and the fragile linen have survived, is likely because the tomb was sealed from humidity by plaster, and it was likely sealed because the man had both leprosy and tuberculosis (DNA from his bones revealed both diseases, and the fact that a clump of his hair had been ritually cut and separated from his body suggested some concern about disease and purity). The shroud is interesting for another reason: its weave is quite different from that of the famous Turin Shroud, suggesting that the Turin shroud originated in Europe in the middle ages.-
- Bibliography
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- Division of Marketing & Communication. "DNA of Jesus-era Shrouded Man in Jerusalem Reveals Earliest Case of Leprosy." The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (21 December 2009). Online, http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge126140517732688760.
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- Gibson, Shimon. The Final Days of Jesus: Archaeology as Evidence. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2009.
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- Kloner, Amos and Boaz Zissu. The Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period. Leuven: Peeters, 2007.
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- Matheson, Carney D., Kim K. Vernon, Arlene Lahti, Renee Fratpietro, Mark Spigelman, Shimon Gibson, Charles L. Greenblatt and Helen D. Donoghue. "Molecular Exploration of the First-Century Tomb of the Shroud in Akeldama, Jerusalem." PLoS One 4:12 (16 December 2009) e8319. Online, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2789407/.
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- Shamir, Orit. "A Burial Textile from the First Century CE in Jerusalem Compared to Roman Textiles in the Land of Israel and the Turin Shroud." SHS Web of Conferences 15: 00010 (2015). Online, http://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2015/02/shsconf_atsi2014_00010.pdf.
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