A Tomb Once Said to Hold ‘Jesus's Midwife' Might Instead Hold Ancient Royalty
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Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
For centuries, a cave near Jerusalem was believed by Christian pilgrims to be the tomb of an attendant to the birth of Christ.
Salome is depicted in the apocryphal Gospel of James as doubting the 'virgin birth' only to repent and be visited by angels.
A new study suggests that the Salome buried in this tomb was, in fact, not the apocryphal Biblical figure, but rather the younger sister of Judean king Herod the Great.
This story is a collaboration with Biography.com
For centuries, a subset of Christian pilgrims have journeyed to a cave southwest of Jerusalem in Israel referred to as the 'Cave of Salome,' due to its asserted connection to a figure associated with Jesus of Nazareth. Now, a new study in the Israel Antiquities Authority's journal 'Atiqot posits that this cave does serve as a tomb to someone named Salome, but not the one it's long been purported to have been. Rather than the Biblical figure sometimes described as 'Jesus' midwife,' the tomb might have held a figure of Judean royalty.
But if you've only read the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you might find yourself wondering just who this Salome was supposed to be in the first place (while there is a Salome briefly alluded to in Mark 15:40 said to be present at the crucifixion, this is not the Salome in question). For that, we need to dip into a subset of Christian texts known as 'the apocrypha.'
Given the underground origins of Christianity amidst the Roman Empire, it's no surprise that there was not one single written text relied upon to spread the word of the new faith. Even the four Gospels widely considered part of the Biblical Canon are traditionally believed to have been originally composed with different audiences in mind (Matthew wrote for those with a familiarity with Jewish tradition while Mark for a Roman audience, for example).
This means that there are an array of texts, both extant and lost, that offer different, divergent, and at times even contradictory tellings of the story of Jesus than those that were ultimately determined by church bodies to be the 'canonical' works.
One particular and prominent subset of these are what is called the 'infancy gospels,' stories of Jesus during his childhood. Little is said of Jesus' youth in the four canonical gospels, with only Matthew and Luke mentioning the story of his birth, and Luke alone including a single anecdote of a child Jesus visiting a Temple (Luke 2:41-52). But the apocryphal infancy gospels contain a wide array of events allegedly involving a child Jesus, including a confrontation with a literal dragon (the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew).
One of these texts, the apocryphal Gospel of James, introduces the character of Salome. While Salome is present for the birth of Jesus in this text, she was not actually 'Jesus' midwife.' Rather, this gospel depicts the actual midwife during Jesus' birth, referred to only by her title of 'Emea,' crying out to Salome about the virgin birth she had witnessed, only for Salome to dismiss it:
'And the midwife went forth of the cave and Salome met her. And she said to her: Salome, Salome, a new sight have I to tell thee. A virgin hath brought forth, which her nature alloweth not. And Salome said: As the Lord my God liveth, if I make not trial and prove her nature I will not believe that a virgin hath brought forth.'
Salome then goes to witness the newborn child herself and decries her earlier doubts, seeking atonement, and is visited by an angel, healed, and told not to speak of what she had witnessed 'until the child enter into Jerusalem.' Some scholars point to this story of Salome as a predecessor and/or parallel to the more famous story, post-Resurrection, of Doubting Thomas.
As Live Science reports, the aforementioned Cave of Salome gained its religious reputation when an ossuary, a casket filled with bones, was discovered in that cave bearing the name Salome. Adherents to the Gospel of James took to attributing these bones, and therefor the tomb that held them, as belonging to the Salome of the birth story, and began making pilgrimages there. As Live Science notes, those pilgrimages were a common enough occurrence that they continued for two hundred years after the area had been conquered by the Islamic Caliphate in the 7th century.
The cave was excavated in 1984, where they found 'hundreds of clay oil lamps from the eighth and ninth centuries, which archaeologists think were sold to Christian pilgrims so they would have light while exploring the dark cave.' But to determine who might really have been interred in this tomb, the 2025 IAA study, co-authored by Vladik Lifshits and Nir-Shimshon Paran, they looked not at what had been left within the tomb, but rather how the tomb itself had been constructed:
'Lifshits noted the monumental architecture — including a large courtyard at the entrance — indicated that a member of the royal family may have been buried there. The authors also discovered the remains of several luxurious villas nearby, which indicates the site once belonged to a very wealthy family.'
Their study suggests the possibility that the Salome in question may not have been connected to Jesus' birth, but rather to a different figure who factors into the story of the young Jesus: Herod I, also known as Herod the Great.
Biblical tradition holds that Herod I, who ruled from 37 B.C. to 4 B.C., ordered the death of all male babies in Bethlehem, but no objective historical evidence has yet emerged that supports that particular tale. Instead, what is known about Herod I, as Live Science recounts, are his contributions to the kingdom he oversaw: 'For example, he was a prolific builder who restored the decrepit Second Temple on the Temple Mount, and the massive rock walls he had built are still standing today as the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.'
The study asserts that the Salome buried within the cave was Herod I's younger sister, who died in approximately 10AD. This Salome is not to be confused with Herod I's granddaughter who also bore that name. That Salome, recorded in the Bible as ordering the beheading of John the Baptist, would later be immortalized in an array of fictional works like Oscar Wilde's 1893 play and the subsequent 1905 opera by Richard Strauss.
When Live Science spoke to Boaz Zissu of Israel's Bar-Ilan University, a scholar unaffiliated with the study, they conceded that 'The authors correctly identify the original phase as a monumental tomb belonging to local elites of the Herodian period' but suggested 'more rigorous evidential support' was required before it could be firmly established to be the tomb of Salome.
For their part, study co-author Vladik Lifshits conceded as much. 'It's not that I think it must be the tomb of Salome the sister of Herod,' Lifshits told Live Science. 'I'm suggesting that this is one of the possibilities.'
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