name means she comes from magdala. this one is a pretty good contender. all in all, it s pretty exciting. we have to be wary about being overexcited. but it s good stuff. what s your feeling about the relationship between magdalene and jesus? you mean mary magdalene, well, i m sure that she wasn t his wife. i would say that she s definitely jesus closest female disciple. one of the things we find out about her from the new testament is that she is the apostle to the apostles. the first person to get commission to tell the news that jesus is resurrection. all right, duke university professor mark goodacre, thank you so much. so much more straight ahead in the news room right after this.
he is a professor at duke and author of the series finding jesus. let s begin with the brothers what evidence is there that jesus had a brother or brothers. when you read matthew s gospel they even name them. james judas, joseph and simon. he had sisters too, but sadly, we don t nose what their names were. so what is, i guess what is the story behind this the box and how convinced are you that it s authentic? there s no question that the box itself is a genuine first century bone box. these are the boxes they put the bones in after they have rotted away. there s no question that the box
is genuine. if there s an inge skripgs on to the box, james, brother of jesus, one of the difficulties is that it just turned up as you said mysteriously it just arrived on the act tick quitities market. a that makes it really difficult for archaeologists. does it make it hard to believe? the thing is when you re doing the kind of work that i do which is all about looking at texts and looking at these kind of artifacts, it s not really a question of faith or believe, it s what the evidence actually says and the reason this box is so controversial because there are sines that link it to the first century which make it very exciting but there s controversy whether it s authentic to jesus and his brother james. mark goodacre thank you so much and everybody can learn about this in the first episode