Cameron documentary on Jesus’ tomb troublesome

BY NATHANIEL PETERS THE MIGHTY COMMA

http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2007-03-08/opinions/17007

This past Sunday, the man who taught us that our hearts will go on aired a documentary claiming to have found the burial site and remains of Jesus, his wife Mary Magdalene, their son and some of Jesus’ brothers. James Cameron, the director of the “Terminator” movies and “Titanic,” joined forces with Israeli-born filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici to air “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” on the Discovery Channel. The documentary tells the story of the finding and decoding of 10 ossuaries — burial boxes containing the bones of the deceased — whose inscriptions, the filmmakers claim, translate as the names Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Judah (the supposed son of Jesus) and the brothers of Jesus, Matthew and Joseph.
The New York Times entitled its review “Leaning on Theory, Colliding with Faith.” The article began by noting that creationists reject the theory of evolution and many still venerate the Shroud of Turin; therefore, archaeological evidence calling the resurrection of Jesus into question will not shatter the faith of many Christians. However, what Cameron and Jacobovici have produced does not pass the muster of sufficient evidence for most archaeologists in the United States and Israel, let alone diehard religious believers. The Talpiot ossuaries should give anyone with a devotion to legitimate scholarship cause to question their authenticity.
The Times itself noted that “even an amateur can see that the ifs are stacked to support one hypothesis.” To begin with, the main argument of the film is not archeology, per se. According to MSNBC, Cameron says that the evidence they have produced is based on sound statistics. However, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto calculated that the odds of all six names appearing in one tomb would range from one in 600 to one in 1 million.
As their second argument, the filmmakers claim that Mariamene, the name found on the box also labeled Jesus, is a form of Mariamne, the name given to Mary Magdalene in the Acts of Philip. While this text is treated as gospel truth in the film, it has dubious historical authenticity.
Third, the absence of a genetic link between the remains of Jesus and Mariamene leads Jacobovici to believe that the two are husband and wife.
In the face of these conjectures, a number of archaeologists have protested the hijacking of their discipline for the sake of easy publicity. Leading the charge is Amos Kloner, the Israeli archaeologist who examined the site and first wrote on it in 1996. He declares that the story is “nonsense” and that it “fails to hold up by archeological standards.”
William Denver, who has been excavating sites in Israel for 50 years and whom the Washington Post calls the dean of biblical archaeology among U.S. scholars, agreed. He was quoted in the Post saying, “I’ve known about these ossuaries for many years and so have many other archaeologists, and none of us thought it was much of a story, because these are rather common Jewish names from that period. It’s a publicity stunt, and it will make these guys very rich, and it will upset millions of innocent people because they don’t know enough to separate fact from fiction.”
Jodi Magness, an archaeologist and professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, added that by holding a news conference and airing a documentary instead of taking a more academic route, the filmmakers “have set it up as if it’s a legitimate academic debate, when the vast majority of scholars who specialize in archaeology of this period have flatly rejected this.”
Most of all, archaeologists reject Jacobovici’s assertion that the ossuary purported to belong to James, another brother of Jesus, comes from the same tomb as this one. A few years ago, the James ossuary was revealed with much pomp and circumstance as a sure sign that the James of the Bible was not only a real person, but truly the brother of Jesus. In 2003, while many scholars disputed the discovery, Jacobovici made a documentary film about it for the Discovery Channel. Today, Jacobovici maintains the ossuary’s validity, while the Israeli government has charged five suspects with forgery in its creation.
The Times concludes its review of “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” saying that it raises many “touchy issues” that would be better left untouched, such as using DNA testing to determine the veracity of the Virgin birth. While the historical claims of religions are bound to be “touchy,” that should not make them any less appropriate to investigate. The question of Jesus’ body remains a very important one for over one third of the world, but that makes it no less of a historical claim that could be proven or disproven to a certain extent by archaeological evidence. Whether we could find such evidence if we wanted to is open to debate. However, any investigation of religious historical claims that purports to be archaeological or scientific should use valid scholarship and not pander to sensationalism if it desires to seek the truth.