Two thousand years ago, a wealthy man was laid to rest in the Valley of Hinnom in the outskirts of Jerusalem. At the time, burials there typically involved two steps. The body was wrapped in a shroud, and then about a year later, once the flesh had decomposed, the bones were collected and put inside a stone vessel called an ossuary. Yet in 2000, archaeologists were surprised to discover the remains of the man’s body under a shroud in a sealed grave.

An international team of archaeologists has now explained the unusual entombment: The man’s DNA revealed genetic markers from Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that cause leprosy and tuberculosis, respectively. His grave may have been sealed to confine his infectious body after he underwent the first burial stage. Radiocarbon dating suggests the man died between A.D. 1 and 50, making his the oldest leprosy case confirmed with DNA.

Equal-Opportunity Disease The man’s plaster-sealed grave is in a rectangular two-level tomb carved into the side of a cliff. For centuries, it kept out Jerusalem’s humid air, preserving traces of the man’s flesh and hair. The tomb also contained more than 20 ossuaries of other people’s remains. Late last year, Carney Matheson, a molecular archaeologist from Lakehead University in Ontario, and his colleagues compared the man’s maternal DNA with that from bones in the ossuaries, confirming familial relationships among the bodies. Two of the shrouded man’s family members also had genes indicating tuberculosis infection.
Based on evidence in and around the tomb, Shimon Gibson, the University of North Carolina archaeologist whose team discovered the tomb a decade ago, speculates that the family buried there belonged to the aristocracy and was possibly part of a priestly clan. A piece of the shroud was made from wool probably imported from the Mediterranean regions of Europe. The pieces of hair in the shroud were clean and lice-free and had even been trimmed, probably with scissors. These luxuries were reserved for the rich.

The location of the tomb also indicates its occupants’ status. The site has a direct view of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and is close to the grave of a prominent man named Annas, the father-in-law to Caiaphas, the high priest who handed Jesus over to Pontius Pilate in the Bible. It’s unlikely that a poor family would have been buried in such a privileged burial site, Gibson says.

Rich or poor, the entombment of a leper in the site surprised the researchers, because those with the disease were often banished from their communities and interred in special cemeteries when they died. The findings indicate that exceptions were made for the elite. The discovery also shows that stigmatized diseases, like leprosy and tuberculosis, were not limited to ancient society’s lower castes, as some historians had previously thought.

Science Confirms.

History The man in the so-called Jerusalem shroud most likely lived at the same time as Jesus. In the Bible, Jesus walked among lepers. According to Gibson, the Bible’s mention of leprosy may have referred to an array of skin diseases, including eczema and boils, as well as the actual disease. “The findings show that true leprosy was indeed in existence at the time of Jesus,” he says.

Matheson believes the discovery has “profound medical implications.” Historical medical records from the 19th and 20th centuries indicate that approximately 30 percent of leprosy victims were also infected with tuberculosis. (Leprosy weakens the immune system, making the body more susceptible to tuberculosis infection.) These studies have confirmed co-infection in remains from Hungary, Sweden and Egypt, and similar rates have been recorded in modern leprosy cases. The Jerusalem shroud provides the oldest DNA proof of the deadly association.

The researchers will now look at male chromosomal markers to determine the paternal relationship among the remains found in the tomb. These will include markers associated with the cohanim, an ancient Jewish priestly class. The analysis could help test Gibson’s theory that the tomb was the final resting place of priests who walked among Jesus.