Controversy dogs Cameron's claim of discovery of Jesus Tomb

Controversy is dogging Academy award–winning director, James Cameron's claim that the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth has been discovered.

On Monday, February 26, in New York Public Libray, surrounded by scholars and archaeologists, including filmmaker archeologist Simcha Jacobovici, Cameron displayed two stone ossuaries, or bone boxes, that he said might have once contained the bones of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

The findings are the subject of a documentary he produced called "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" and a book "The Jesus Family Tomb."

The evidence and interpretations of the artifacts would be presented in a documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" on the Discovery Channel, March 4, at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The 90–minute documentary that would be aired is bound to outrage Christians and stir up a titanic debate between believers and skeptics.

The Jacobovici documentary comes more than 10 years after similar speculation about the so–called Jesus family tomb made world headlines, prompting a London Sunday Times feature entitled "The Tomb that Dare Not Speak Its Name" and a BBC documentary.

Touted as probably the "greatest archaeological find in history" by the Discovery Channel, the ossuaries, excavated from Talpiot Tomb in South Jerusalem, Israel, bear names, which took 20 years for experts to decipher, believed to be associated with key figures in the New Testament: Jesus, Mary, Matthew, Joseph and Mary Magdalene. A sixth inscription, written in Aramaic, translates to "Judah Son of Jesus."

At least four leading epigraphers have corroborated the ossuary inscriptions for the documentary, according to the Discovery Channel.

"It doesn't get bigger than this. We've done our homework; we've made the case; and now it's time for the debate to begin," Cameron told a news conference at the New York Public Library.

"It's mind boggling. It's an altered reality," Toronto documentary director Jacobovici said.

"You have to kind of pinch yourself," said Jacobovici, known as the Naked Archaeologist after a Vision TV series. "Are we really saying what we are saying?"

"This has been a three–year journey that seems more incredible than fiction," he said. "The idea of possibly finding the tomb of Jesus and several members of his family, with compelling scientific evidence, is beyond anything I could have imagined."

"People who believe in a physical ascension — that he took his body to heaven — those people obviously will say, wait a minute," he said, adding that he hopes the film sparks more scientific study of the tomb and the ossuaries found inside.

The claims made by Cameron and Jacobovici have generated criticisms from various people who have debunked their theories as "nonsense."

While Dr. Shimon Gibson, one of the archeologists who discovered the tomb in 1980, said that he had a "healthy skepticism" the tomb may have belonged to the family of Jesus, another archaeologist Professor Amos Kloner was more vocal.

Prof. Kloner of Bar–Ilan University near Tel Aviv, Israel, who also carried out excavations at the tomb on behalf of the Israeli Anqiquities Authority (IAA), disputed the documentary's conclusions by saying that the Talpiot Tomb, the 2,000–year–old cave contained coffins belonging to a Jewish family whose names were similar to those of Jesus and his relatives.

"I can say positively that I don't accept the identification (as)...belonging to the family of Jesus in Jerusalem," Kloner told Reuters. "I don't accept that the family of Miriam and Yosef (Mary and Joseph), the parents of Jesus, had a family tomb in Jerusalem."

"They were a very poor family. They resided in Nazareth, they came to Bethlehem in order to have the birth done there – so I don't accept it, not historically, not archeologically," said Kloner, a professor in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archeology at Bar–Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

"It's a beautiful story but without any proof whatsoever. It makes a great story for a TV film," the professor said. "But it's impossible. It's nonsense." Kloner said Jesus's father, after all, was a humble carpenter who could not afford a luxury crypt for his family. All names on the caskets were common Jewish names, he added.

Kloner, who said he was interviewed for the new film but has not seen it, said the names found on the ossuaries were common, and the fact that such apparently resonant names had been found together was of no significance. He added that "Jesus son of Joseph" inscriptions had been found on several other ossuaries over the years.

"There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb," Kloner said. "They were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle–class family from the 1st century CE."

Kloner, in his comprehensive report on his excavations at the tomb, interestingly, mentioned that he found nothing remarkable in the discovery. The cave, the report said, was probably in use by three or four generations of Jews from the beginning of the Common Era. It was disturbed in antiquity, and vandalized. The names on the boxes were common in the first century (25 percent of women in Jerusalem, for example, were called Miriam or a derivative). The report did not speculate on family relationships, nor did it make any connection between the inscriptions and the figure countless Christians through two millennia believe physically rose from the dead and, according to tradition, "ascended into heaven."

According to Kloner, after the ossuaries were discovered, the bones were reburied according to Orthodox tradition, leaving just the boxes with inscriptions and human residue to be examined though DNA testing.

Professor L. Michael White, of the University of Texas, said he also doubted the claims were true.

"This is trying to sell documentaries," he said, adding a series of strict tests needed to be conducted before a bone box or inscription could be confirmed as ancient. "This is not archeologically sound, this is fanfare."

Christian clergy too have pooh–poohed the claims. "I think this is mere fanciful and absurd theorising. Every Christian knows that Jesus the Son of God and Man died and rose again on Easter Sunday," New York Archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling was quoted in New York Post as saying.

Jacobovici's critics did not mince their words.

"Simcha has no credibility whatsoever," said Joe Zias, who was the curator for anthropology and archeology at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem from 1972 to 1997 and personally numbered the Talpiot ossuaries. "He's pimping off the Bible...He got this guy Cameron, who made 'Titanic' or something like that – what does this guy know about archeology? I am an archeologist, but if I were to write a book about brain surgery, you would say, 'Who is this guy?' People want signs and wonders. Projects like these make a mockery of the archeological profession."

Jacobovici, however, is not complaining. With Cameron's help, he got Discovery's backing and a US$ 3.5 million budget.

The filmmaker has also backed his claims on four main points. First, he said, recent Biblical scholarship argues that Mary Magdalene's real name was Mariamene, a common first–century derivative of Miriam. Second, DNA tests show that microscopic human remains scraped from the Jesus box and the Mariamene box are not related, at least not matrilineally, leaving open the possibility that the two humans whose bones were once in those boxes were married. Third, the patina on the Talpiot ossuaries – that is, the mineral crust accumulated over centuries – matches that of the missing James box. This "discovery," if provable, is complicated but critical to Jacobovici's argument: the match means, he said, that the James ossuary originally lay in the Talpiot cave, thus answering questions about the James box's provenance. It also increases the probability that the tomb belongs to the Holy Family. Jesus had four brothers, according to the Gospel of Mark; two of their names—Joseph (or Jose) and James – were found in the Talpiot tomb.

The technique Jacobovici used to "prove" the match between the James ossuary and the Talpiot tomb is a technology he calls "patina fingerprinting," which he and his coauthor Charles Pellegrino (a scientist who helped Cameron write "Ghosts of the Titanic") essentially invented for the purposes of this project. By comparing the mineral content of shards from the Talpiot ossuaries with shards from James, and by looking at them under an electron microscope with the help of a CSI specialist, Jacobovici and Pellegrino said they have a match. But do they? It is impossible to know for sure. For John Dominic Crossan, leader of the liberal Jesus Seminar and author of "Excavating Jesus," the biggest questions relate to the early break–in: who vandalized the cave, when, what did they do there and why?

Jacobovici's documentary speculates that the James ossuary was stolen shortly after the tomb was found. The archaeologists examining the tomb 26 years ago found 10 ossuaries, but only nine are in storage at the IAA. In The Lost Tomb of Jesus, it is alleged that the James ossuary is that missing box.

But there is one question that has not been answered in the documentary, one that emerged in a Jerusalem courtroom just weeks ago at the fraud trial of James ossuary owner Oded Golan, charged with forging part of the inscription on the box.

Former FBI agent Gerald Richard testified that a photo of the James ossuary, showing it in Golan's home, was taken in the 1970s, based on tests done by the FBI photo lab.

In this regard, Jacobovici conceded in an interview that if the ossuary was photographed in the 1970s, it could not then have been found in a tomb in 1980. But while he did not address the conundrum in the documentary, he said in an interview that it is possible Golan's photo was printed on old paper in the 1980s.

Golan's forgery trial in Israel is still going on. Golan has denied the charges.

The fourth part of Jacobovici's argument is statistical. Individually, he conceded, all the names on the Talpiot ossuaries are common. Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary said he has a first–century letter written by someone named Jesus, addressed to someone else named Jesus and witnessed by a third party named Jesus.

However, Andrey Feuerverger, Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at the University of Toronto, recently conducted a study addressing the probabilities that would soon be published in a leading statistical journal.

Feuerverger multiplied the instances that each name appeared during the tomb's time period with the instances of every other name. He initially found "Jesus Son of Joseph" appeared once out of 190 times, Mariamne appeared once out of 160 times and so on.

To be conservative, he next divided the resulting numbers by 25 percent, a statistical standard, and further divided the results by 1,000 to attempt to account for all tombs — even those that have not been uncovered — that could have existed in first century Jerusalem.

The study concludes that the odds are at least 600 to 1 in favor of the Talpiot Tomb being the Jesus Family Tomb. In other words, the conclusion works 599 times out of 600.

Feuerverger calculated for Jacobovici that if James is added to the equation, there is a 30,000 to one chance that the Talpiot Tomb belonged to the holiest families in Christendom.

But if this were the tomb of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what of the other holy tombs, accepted by tradition or posited by scholars, around the world? The Roman Catholic Church accepts two places for Mary's grave: one beneath the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem, the other in Ephesus. Constantine said in 328 that the final resting place of Jesus Christ – from which he rose – lay on the rock at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

In a book published just last year, James Tabor, a Biblical scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the leading academic voice who lends enthusiastic, if qualified, support to Jacobovici's claims, wrote that he looked for, and found, a legendary tomb of Jesus near the city of Safed.

In the midst of all these both Cameron and Jacobovici remains sanguine.

"I don't profess to be an archeologist or a Biblical scholar. I'm a film producer. I found it compelling. I think we're on firm ground to say that much," said Cameron.

Jacobovici agreed. "People will have to believe what they want to believe," he said.

Believable or not, one thing is certain – the discovery is certainly going to revive greater interest in the life of the person, the one man – Jesus of Nazareth – who forever changed the course of history.