Ossuaries in first century Jerusalem tomb could be a direct link to Jesus.

Ossuaries in first century Jerusalem tomb could be a direct link to Jesus.(GM)(TJD)..A team of international scholars claims to have found the first archaeological evidence dating from around the time Jesus lived, and which could be linked directly to his earliest followers.
Exploring a previously unexcavated tomb three kilometres south of Jerusalem, the researchers discovered burial boxes, or ossuaries, decorated with early Christian iconography.
Dropping a flexible, robotic camera into the cave, they found two limestone ossuaries decorated with carvings of a large fish that appears to be swallowing a man.
Until now, the earliest known Christian art, located in catacombs beneath the city of Rome and in Coptic caves in the Egyptian desert, dates from the late third or early fourth century AD.
The majority of the Rome images depict the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale, presumably because the term ‘the sign of Jonah’ is used by Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
The fish image was adopted by Jesus’ disciples to signal a belief in resurrection.
They believed that Jesus, like the prophet Jonah in the Biblical account, was miraculously reborn after three days.
The new discovery, the scholars said, would appear to move the evidentiary clock back by at least 200 years if, as the scholars suggest, they date from before 70 AD, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans.
On another box in the tomb they found a Greek inscription which, translated, calls on God or Jehovah to rise up or to raise up, an apparent reference to resurrection.
The research team included Israeli archaeologist Rami Arav, of the University of Nebraska, and James Tabor, chair of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina.Read the full story here.