William Dever: The Lost Tomb of Jesus Is A Publicity Stunt

IN THE NEWS

An article in the Washington Post today declares that the claim that the lost tomb of Jesus has been found is only a publicity stunt.

Alan Cooperman, reporting for the Washington Post writes:

Leading archaeologists in Israel and the United States yesterday denounced the purported discovery of the tomb of Jesus as a publicity stunt.

Scorn for the Discovery Channel's claim to have found the burial place of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and -- most explosively -- their possible son came not just from Christian scholars but also from Jewish and secular experts who said their judgments were unaffected by any desire to uphold Christian orthodoxy.

I'm not a Christian. I'm not a believer. I don't have a dog in this fight," said William G. Dever, who has been excavating ancient sites in Israel for 50 years and is widely considered the dean of biblical archaeology among U.S. scholars. "I just think it's a shame the way this story is being hyped and manipulated."

The Discovery Channel held a news conference in New York on Monday to unveil a TV documentary, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," and a companion book about a tomb that was unearthed during construction of an apartment building in the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem in 1980.

James Cameron, the filmmaker who explored the wreck of the Titanic and directed an Oscar-winning feature film based on its sinking, is executive producer of the documentary. Its claims are based on six ossuaries, or stone boxes for holding human bones, found in the tomb.

The filmmakers contend that the inscriptions on the boxes say Yeshua bar Yosef (Jesus son of Joseph), Maria (Mary), Yose (Joseph), Matia (Matthew), Mariamene e Mara (Maria the Master) and Yehuda bar Yeshua (Judah son of Jesus). They maintain that "Mariamene e Mara" is Mary Magdalene and that Yehuda bar Yeshua may be her son by Jesus.

Simcha Jacobovici, the film's Israeli-born director, said in a telephone interview yesterday that he commissioned four statistical studies that concluded that the odds of those particular names appearing in a single family tomb from the 1st century are "somewhere between 600 and 2.4 million to one."

Jacobovici also said tests on the patina, or surface residue, of the "James Ossuary," which surfaced in 2002, indicate that it also came from the Talpiyot tomb. Israeli authorities have pronounced the James Ossuary, which purportedly held the bones of a brother of Jesus, a forgery and are prosecuting its owner. Jacobovici, who made a 2003 Discovery Channel film about it, maintains it is real.

Dever, a retired professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, said that some of the inscriptions on the Talpiyot ossuaries are unclear, but that all of the names are common.

"I've know 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," he said. "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."

Similar assessments came yesterday from two Israeli scholars, Amos Kloner, who originally excavated the tomb, and Joe Zias, former curator of archaeology at the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Kloner told the Jerusalem Post that the documentary is "nonsense." Zias described it in an e-mail to The Washington Post as a "hyped up film which is intellectually and scientifically dishonest."

Jodi Magness, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, expressed irritation that the claims were made at a news conference rather than in a peer-reviewed scientific article. By going directly to the media, she said, 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," she said.

Magness noted that at the time of Jesus, wealthy families buried their dead in tombs cut by hand from solid rock, putting the bones in niches in the walls and then, later, transferring them to ossuaries.

She said Jesus came from a poor family that, like most Jews of the time, probably buried their dead in ordinary graves. "If Jesus' family had been wealthy enough to afford a rock-cut tomb, it would have been in Nazareth, not Jerusalem," she said.

Magness also said the names on the Talpiyot ossuaries indicate that the tomb belonged to a family from Judea, the area around Jerusalem, where people were known by their first name and father's name. As Galileans, Jesus and his family members would have used their first name and home town, she said.

"This whole case [for the tomb of Jesus] is flawed from beginning to end," she said.

Read also:

“Scholars Criticize Jesus Documentary” by Karen Matthews.

Dever’s authoritative words should put to rest the claims of the producers of "The Lost Tomb" that this is the tomb of Christ.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: James Camerom, Jesus’Ossuary, The Lost Tomb, Simcha Jacobovici, William Dever

Archaeologists and the Lost Tomb of Christ

Archaeologists are denying the validity of James Cameron’s claim that the tomb at Talpiyot is the tomb of Jesus’ family. Archaeologists say that there are more than 900 tombs like this one within two miles from where the so-called “the lost tomb of Christ” was found.

In a report by ABC News, Matt Gutman wrote:

Two years earlier, Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner was the first to find the tomb. He found the tomb and the ossuaries — the urns or vaults used to hold the bones of the dead — interesting but of no particular archaeological importance. He said there are more than 900 buried tombs just like the "Jesus" tomb within a 2-mile radius of Talpiyot. Of them, 71 bear the name Jesus and two Jesus, son of Joseph. The tomb in Talpiyot is one of them. But the inscription, he said, was barely decipherable and therefore questionable.

At the time, Jesus was a very common name, as was Mary. But the cluster of all those names together, Jesus, Joseph Mary, not to mention what the filmmakers claim is Jesus' son, Judah, son of Jesus, is indeed unusual. Simply because the tomb is labeled a tomb that "belonged to a Jesus, doesn't make it the tomb of Jesus Christ," Kloner told ABC News.

Jerusalem-based biblical anthropologist Joe Zias goes a step further to discredit Cameron's documentary. "What they've done here," Zias said, "is they've simply tried in a very, very dishonest way to try to con the public into believing that this is the tomb of Jesus or Jesus' family. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus."

Zias pointed out a number of contradictions that he said undermine the claim. Jesus was a very common name at the time — Mary even more so. Zias said 48 percent of women living at the time were named Mary, Mariam or the Hebrew name Shlomzion. In addition, Jesus' family was poor. Those who paid for the tomb were middle-class, at least. If Jesus' family did have the cash, the family tomb would likely have been situated in Nazareth. After all, Jesus was known as Jesus of Nazareth

James Cameron told a news conference at the New York Public Library that two stone ossuaries, or bone boxes, found at Talpiyot might have once contained the bones of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The claim that James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici are making, that the end of Christianity has arrived, is just that, their opinion. Both men are film producers who have a product to sell. In addition, Jacobovici is a writer who is promoting his book.

Cameron and Jacobovici are not archaeologists and they are not theologians and yet the media is accepting their claim that, after more than 2000 years of Christianity, they have discovered what no one else has been able to do in all these years: prove that Jesus died and that the resurrection is a myth.

There are many people who are willing to accept Cameron’s and Jacobovici’s claim that Christianity has been preaching a false gospel all these years. This is the cry of atheists, that Christianity is false.

Atheists ask for a sign: prove to us that Jesus was real. Well, Cameron gave them a sign: here are the bones of Christ. Presto! Christianity is false.

Only gullible people can believe Cameron’s claim. In a recent interview on television, Jacobovici said that there is a statistical probability that this is the real tomb where Christ was buried. A person can manipulate numbers and arrive at almost any preconceived conclusion. You cannot prove historical claims by using statistics.

The Lost Tomb is just another effort at making money using Jesus as the attraction. Again, I say, Christians have nothing to worry about the two filmmakers’ claim that Christianity is false. The tomb at Talpiyot is the wrong one; Jacobovici should look for an empty tomb.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary.

Tags: Archaeology, James Cameron, Jesus’ Ossuary, Simcha Jacobovici, The Lost Tomb