What a yawn! After The Da Vinci Code we now have The Lost Tomb of Jesus. This is a television special to be aired by Discovery Channel today. It will encourage credulous viewers to believe that archaeologists have discovered a tomb containing the physical remains of Jesus Christ and members of his family.
In 1980 - 27 years ago - archaeologists discovered ossuaries containing the remains of several people who apparently lived at the time of Christ. The boxes were marked with names, including Mary, Judah, and Joseph. On one box the name was illegible, but it might have read "Jesus".
The Discovery Channel special adorns the bare, unpromising facts about the tomb in Jerusalem with a complex network of unproven theories. Thus, producers speculate that one ossuary, labelled "Mariamene", could contain the remains of Mary Magdalene. This ossuary was buried with the one that might have been labelled "Jesus". Since DNA tests reportedly showed that the two people were not blood relatives, the producers draw the conclusion that they were married.
Based on this long series of fanciful assumptions, the programme determines that The Da Vinci Code was right, and Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
When this burial vault was found, the discovery drew no particular attention. There was no reason to believe that this tomb contained the remains of the Lord's family. Indeed there were several excellent reasons to believe that it did not.
Amos Kloner, an Israeli archaeologist who wrote the original excavation report on the site for the predecessor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, called the claim "nonsense".
"In their movie they are billing it as 'never before reported information,' but it is not new. I published all the details in the Antiqot journal in 1996, and I didn't say it was the tomb of Jesus's family," said Kloner, now a professor of archaeology at Israel's Bar-Ilan University. "I think it is very unserious work. I do scholarly work... based on other studies," he said.
Dominican Fr Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a Biblical archaeologist and expert in the New Testament at the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, who was interviewed for the film two years ago, said he did not believe there was any truth to the claim. "It is a commercial ploy that all the media are playing into," he said.
Fr Murphy-O'Connor said the names found on the ossuaries "are a combination of very common names. Half of all Jewish women in the first century were called either Mary or Salome. It doesn't mean much at all," he said. "You can prove anything with statistics." The DNA tests could "only prove that they are human," but "certainly did not prove" any familial connection, he said. Fr Murphy-O'Connor noted that Kloner had written about the findings a decade ago, and though it was all out in the public domain nobody had been interested.
The Lost Tomb of Christ is the work of two men: James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici. Let's take a glance at their credentials.
Cameron is a successful film director, who gave us Titanic and The Terminator. He is also a fan of science fiction, a member of the Mars Society (dedicated to colonisation of that planet), and a man who admits that he cannot properly weigh the claims of his own programme. "I'm not a theologist," Cameron told reporters. The word is "theologian," but Cameron isn't someone who worries about details. In making this film, Cameron relied on Jacobovici.
"Simcha has no credibility whatsoever," the curator of Jerusalem's Rockefeller Museum told Newsweek. Unlike Cameron, Jacobovici is not entirely new to the business of archaeological discovery; he has a track record. In 2002, he was instrumental in preparing another Discovery special, about what was alleged to be the tomb of "James, the brother of Jesus."
Then as now, legitimate archaeologists were sceptical about the discovery that Jacobovici touted. Finally in 2005, Israeli authorities exposed the "tomb of James" as a fraud, and indicted five people on charges of forgery.
Basilian Fr Thomas Rosica, a Biblical scholar and head of Toronto's Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation, said this latest film shows that "self-proclaimed experts" have learned nothing from the James ossuary incident.
"One would think that we learned some powerful lessons from the media hype surrounding the James ossuary several years ago, and how important public institutions like the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum of Toronto) were duped in their hosting such fraudulent works," he said.
Fr Rosica said: "Why did the so-called archaeologists of this latest scoop wait 27 years before doing anything about the discovery? James Cameron is far better off making movies about the Titanic rather than dabbling in areas of religious history of which he knows nothing."