James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici's recent documentary that claims a tomb in Jerusalem is the resting place of the family of Jesus is wishful thinking at best. These two gentlemen may sell a lot of books and be in line for Hollywood royalties in the future, but it may well be at the cost of some credibility.
The tomb in question was discovered 27 years ago in Talpiot, a neighborhood outside Jerusalem. This discovery was far from a novelty. Hundreds of tombs have been discovered in the Jerusalem area.
The man who was responsible for the excavation of the tomb in his capacity as district archaeologist for Jerusalem, Professor Amos Kloner of Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, describes the Cameron documentary as "amateur" and "full of inconsistencies".
During the excavation of the tomb, ten ossuaries were discovered. One of the ossuaries went missing. The Israel Antiquities Authority took possession of nine of the ossuaries and they were duly processed and stored.
The documentary goes to great lengths to "prove" that an ossuary that showed up in the hands of an antique dealer bearing the inscription - "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" - was in fact part of the original group. After some scientific tests viewers are led to believe that the lost ossuary has indeed been found.
There are two large problems with this. First, according to Kloner, the reason only nine of the ossuaries were stored by the Antiquities Authority was due to lack of storage space. The tenth ossuary was discarded and bore no inscription of any kind. Secondly, experts have exposed the ossuary in the hands of the antique dealer as a forgery and fraud.
Kloner has other problems with the documentary. He claims Jacobovici wasn't even in the right tomb, and had mixed up the cave shown in the documentary with the original tomb located some 60 feet away. He also claims that the tomb now being promoted as Jesus' family tomb is in fact a "ganezia" - a burial site for religious texts that are beyond use. In the Jewish tradition texts in poor condition bearing the name of God can't simply be thrown away, they have to be buried.
Other objections to the documentary cited by Kloner, include the lifting of information taken from scholarly works published in the 1990's, without any credit being given to the sources.
The author, Bruce Feiler, who has written a number of books on biblical themes raises other doubts about the claims of Jacobovici and Cameron.
Feiler notes that the Jewish burial rite involving ossuaries, includes a once yearly memorial service undertaken by relatives. At such times the ossuaries are generally removed from the burial site for the ceremony. Since Jesus came from Galilee, how in an era of donkey mobility would relatives be able to make such a long trip every trip every year in order to fulfill these religious duties?
It's also important to consider that the names on the ossuaries were commonplace at that time. Aver Green, an associate of Feiler, has calculated that roughly 21% of women were known as Mary, and that Joseph and Jesus were among the top four male names.
The claim that the Mariamne Mara of the tomb had a son with Jesus, pushes the bounds of credulity. There is absolutely no way of proving this. At that time such tombs were not strictly family tombs - some were communal tombs. The testing of Mitochondrial DNA reveals no maternal link between the Jesus and Mary of the tomb. Assuming this testing is even accurate, this certainly doesn't lead to the "truth" that they were married and that she was the mother of his child. All it shows is that they weren't related matrilinearly, but there could have have been a link through a male relative.
Moreover, if Mariamne Mara did in fact marry into the purported tomb "family", who is to say she was the wife of Jesus, or more correctly, Yeshua. She could have easily been the spouse of either Yehudah, Yose or Matia. The assumption that she was a wife is also purely arbitrary. She could have easily been a daughter.
Perhaps most critically there is a problem with the DNA testing itself. How can Jacobovici be sure that the DNA samples from the ossuaries belonged to the named occupants. The contents of the ossuaries had been handled over the centuries by many different people, including contemporaries from the Israel Antiquities Authority. Since no intact remains exist, how is it possible to assert that the DNA retrieved is in fact what it is claimed to be? The answer is, there is no way to be certain. So to proceed from such questionable "evidence" to the conclusions drawn in the documentary's shaky hypothesis, is indeed an exercise in fictional conjecture.
However it does make for a good story, one calculated to grab attention, not unlike the "The Naked Archaeologist" himself.
Aidan has a BAHons/B.Ed and taught for a period in the UK and Canada. He lives in Ontario and is married with a daughter. He's also a cartoonist and has been a contributor to a variety of magazines and newspapers over the years. You can visit his blog at http://aidanmaconachyblog.blogspot.com/
