United States: James Cameron and The Lost Tomb of Jesus
On March 4, the American TV Discovery Channel broadcast a documentary entitled The Lost Tomb of Jesus. This documentary by the Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron – who also produced The Titanic – affirms that analyses support the hypothesis that six of the ten ossuaries found inside the tomb bore inscriptions evidencing a link with Jesus, the son of Joseph. Film director Simcha Jacobovici requested that archeological research be continued on the site, in order to make new DNA analysis of the human residue.
Stephen Pfann, a theologian at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem affirmed to the Associated Press Agency that the hypothesis put forth in the documentary was without basis. He thinks that only the skeptics would like to find something which throws doubt on Bible history.
For theologian Max Küchler of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and for his German colleague at the University of Neuendettelsau, the thesis of the Hollywood filmmaker is simply absurd. They said this to the Tages-Anzeiger on March 1. Max Küchler stated that such supposition merely discredits Western scientific circles. All the serious researchers he knows in Jerusalem simply shake their heads before the thesis of Cameron. According to him, the film makes an amalgam between archeological evidences and pseudo-scientific arguments. He deplores the recent tendency among pseudo-scientists to come up with alleged sensational discoveries concerning Biblical characters.
For Wolfgang Stegemann, the American team construed a malicious interpretation of the discovery of a tomb with ten ossuaries in Jerusalem in 1980. This interpretation is based more on a detective story by Dan Brown than on ancient sources. He told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of March 1, that “amateur archeologists” found on two ossuaries the hypothesis of the marriage of Jesus with Mary Magdalen. And he concluded that this interpretation by Cameron would be shipwrecked just like the supposedly unsinkable Titanic.
For archeologists, the tomb is probably that of a Jewish family with the same first names as the persons of Jesus’ family, those first names being common at the time. The Israeli archeologist Amos Kloner, who first discovered the site in 1980, declared to the daily Jerusalem Post, that the claims of the documentary were confused, mixing reality and fiction, and disguising the facts after the manner of Hollywood.
The tomb is located in Talpiot-East, a suburb of Jerusalem, some 5 km from the basilica of the Holy Sepulcher. Israel Antiquities Authority, which is responsible for the site, said they were ready to reopen the tomb, but only with the approval of Jerusalem town Council. However, Gidi Schmerling, spokesman for the town council, told ENI correspondent that no such request had been made.
