There were two types of fame on display at the press conference Monday morning in a grand, sky-lit room at the back of the New York Public library. There
was director James Cameron, towering like a a six-foot-plus druidic
monolith in a dark jacket and black turtleneck. And there was a light tan
limestone box about two feet long lying on a table in front of Cameron — which the Titanic director was presenting as the burial box of Jesus Christ.
All things being equal, we know who would be the bigger draw. But all things
were not equal. Those in the room knew that Cameron was provably authentic.
The other guy? Much more problematic.
Cameron , biblical film documentarian Simcha Jacobovici
and a handful of their expert consultants were at the Library to publicize
Jacobovici’s The Jesus Family Tomb, which will run this Sunday on the
Discovery Channel, and a HarperSanfrancisco book of the same name. Their
claim is that there was indeed a Jesus family tomb in what is now suburban
Jerusalem: and that the two bone boxes on the table in front of them, exported
from Israel, had contained the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, whom the
filmmakers assert was Jesus’s wife and the mother of a son named Judah.
Meet the Jesuses! Cameron told the press that when Jacobovici, who has been
working on the project for years, laid it out for him in detail, he
thought, “I’m not a biblical scholar, but it seemed pretty darned
compelling.” He added, “I said, this is the biggest achaeology story of the
century. And I still believe that to be true.”
If true, of course, it is more than that. If true, it is a contradiction, in
the most earthy, concrete way, of the Bible, which claims that Jesus was
taken up bodily into heaven.
But as its creators have revealed more and more of it over the last two
days, key parts of it seem increasingly like debatable
conjecture.
Here’s the set-up. In 1980 a construction crew in the Jerusalem suburb of
Talpiot chanced upon a first-century tomb, which are not uncommon in that
city. The Israeli Antiquities Authority found 10 bone boxes there, and
stored them in a warehouse. Some bore inscribed names: Jesus, son of
Joseph; Maria; Mariamene e Mara; Matthew; Judas, son of Jesus; and
Jose. Each name with the exception of Mariamene seemed common to their
period, and it was only in 1996 that the BBC made a film suggesting that.
given the combination, it might be that family. The idea was eventually
discounted, however, because, as University of St. Andrews New
Testament expert Richard Bauckham asserted in a subsequent book, the names
with Biblical resonance are so common that even when you run the
probabilities on the group, the odds of it being the famous Jesus’s family
are “very low.”
Jacobovici, however, remained fascinated, and announced at the press
conference what he had added to the equation:
—University of North Carolina scholar James Tabor told him that Mariamene
was the name some Christians gave to Mary Magdalene. If true, that added a
rather uncommon name to the statistical mix. .
—Jacobovici also contends that “Jose,” a name that appears in the Bible as
that of one of Jesus’s brothers, is rarer than previous scholars thought.
— He came up with a new process called “patina fingerprinting,” which
purports to show that a different bone box that popped up in the hands of an
Israeli collector some years ago and is alleged to have contained the
remains of Jesus’s brother James originally came from Talpiot, which would
raise the coincidence level even higher.
—And Jacobovici managed to get tests done on DNA from the “Jesus” and
“Mariamene” bone-boxes that indicated that they were not related on their
mother’s sides: therefore, Jacobovici quotes the DNA expert as saying, if
this was indeed a family tomb, the two “would most likely have been husband
and wife” .
That last bit alone should give some sense of how problematic some of
Jacobovici’s conclusions are. A sampling of difficulties:
— If “Jesus” and “Mariamene” weren’t related matrilineally, why jump to the
conclusion that they were husband and wife, rather than being related
through their fathers
— The first use of “Mariamene” for Magdalene dates to a scholar who was born
in 185, suggesting that Magdalene wouldn’t have been called that at her
death.
— St. Andrews’ Bauckham defends his probabilities, noting that Jacobovici
was comparing his name-cluster to the rather small sampling of names known
to have been found on bone boxes, while his own basis for comparison, which
adds names from contemporary literature and other sources, makes the combo
far less unusual.
— Asbury Theological Seminary professor Ben Witherington, a early Christianity expert who was deeply involved with
the James Ossuary, says there are physical reasons to believe it couldn’t
have originated in the Talpiot plot.
Darrell Bock, a professor at the conservative Protestant Dallas Seminary, whom
the Discovery Channel had vet the film two weeks ago, adds another
objection: why would Jesus’s family or followers bury his bones in a family
plot and “then turn around and preach that he had been physically raised
from the dead” If that objection smacks secular readers as relying too
heavily on scripture, then Bock’s larger point is still trenchant: “I told
them that there were too many assumptions being claimed as discoveries, and
that they were trying to connect dots that didn’t belong together.”
Your move, Mr. Titanic.
