Thomas Madden: The Lost of Tomb of Jesus — one year later
A year ago the Discovery Channel delivered a cheery Easter message to America’s Christians: Jesus is dead – and we found his tomb.
After much fanfare and hype, The Lost Tomb of Jesus aired on March 4, 2007 to an audience of 4.1 million viewers. The documentary, which was directed by the journalist Simcha Jacobovici (better known as the host of The Naked Archaeologist) and produced by James Cameron (better known as the director of Titanic and True Lies), revealed that the Biblical account of Jesus’ burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and subsequent Resurrection was just wishful thinking. The truth, they claimed, was that the deceased Jesus was brought to his family tomb in Jerusalem, where he remained good and dead.
And Jacobovici and Cameron had the facts to prove it. For example, they revealed a stone ossuary (a repository for bones) that just possibly might have the words “Jesus, son of Joseph” on it. (The handwriting is poor, so scholars disagree on the actual inscription.) Another of the ossuaries has the name “Mary” on it. And another one is inscribed “Mariamene e Mara,” which — if you squint your eyes just right — looks like “Mariamne,” which was used by a writer more than 200 years later to refer to Mary Magdalene. Get it? That fits perfectly with the chronicle of ancient wisdom known as The Da Vinci Code, which asserts that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married! Even more startling, one of the other ossuaries bears the name “Judah, son of Jesus,” who must have been the son of Jesus and Mary (obviously born before Mary rushed off to have her daughter in Gaul, as The Da Vinci Code attests).
With so much evidence to support their case, no sane person could deny that these filmmakers had made a monumental archaeological discovery. One wonders what real archaeologists do all day! The documentary further backed up its case with plenty of dramatic reenactments, high-tech graphics, and even a statistical study that put the odds against its being wrong at more than 600-to-1.
Having presented their discovery, Jacobovici and Cameron sat back and waited for the accolades of the scholarly community to roll in. They’re still waiting. You see, as it turns out, the “Lost Tomb of Jesus” wasn’t lost at all. It wasn’t the tomb of Jesus either. Instead, it was the Talpiot Tomb, discovered by archaeologists – real ones — more than 25 years earlier. It had long since been analyzed, and the results published in a scholarly journal. The conclusion of the experts was that it was a fairly standard cave tomb of a wealthy Jewish family of the first century. The names on the ossuaries, including “Jesus,” which is a form of “Joshua”, were very common at that time. Heck, one in five women were named “Mary”! There was no more reason to believe that the Jesus of this tomb was Jesus of Nazareth than there is to believe that James Cameron is actually James Dean....