Ossuary of Yehohanan
The narrative of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection forms the backbone of the Christian faith. Without Christ’s death, there would have been no resurrection. Without His resurrection, there would be no Christianity. As such, there is a great deal riding on proving or disproving that the gospel accounts of His death are accurate.
For years, skeptics thought they had found the smoking gun when it came to disproving the entire episode. The Bible is adamant that Christ was buried after His crucifixion. Romans, however, usually left the bodies of crucifixion victims to rot on the cross as a warning to others. The two, skeptics argued, were inherently contradictory. Then, an ossuary was unearthed in Israel containing the bones of a young man named Yehohanan. Like so many other Jews, he was given a proper burial and his bones placed in an ossuary after the flesh had rotted away. Unlike most Jews, his ossuary had an extra artifact in it, an iron nail driven through his heel bone. Yehohanan had been crucified, but he was still allowed a proper burial. As such, there is precedent that the same could have happened to Jesus of Nazareth.