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By Jeff Emanuel Posted in Archaeology | History | Liberals | Media — Comments (43) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Like clockwork, as the month leading up to the Easter holiday comes around, a major media outlet uses its platform to poke Christian viewers with a figurative stick by running (or, more often, re-running) any one of their archive rooms full of shoddily-researched, often long-disproven “Does this finally prove that Christianity is a bunch of bunk?” stories.

Last year, it was James Cameron’s documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, about a tomb which had supposedly been found to contain the remains of Jesus, his wife Mary Magdalene, their son Jude, and the rest of their family, including Jesus’ brother, James. Passed off as brand-new, religion-damning information at a pre-documentary debut press conference hosted by the black-clad Cameron, this “discovery” was, as usual, nothing of the sort.

Read on.

The “Talpiot Tomb,” named for the suburban Jerusalem neighborhood in which it was discovered, was found in 1980 during a construction project. Just another of the 900 or so tombs of wealthy residents found in the area (all dating from the period of the Second Temple, ca. 538 BC to 70 AD), the find was published twice in the 1990s, neither of which claimed that it was a link to the Christian Jesus. In 2005, an investigative journalist named Simcha Jacobovici, along with James Cameron and the documentary crew, broke into the tomb in order to shoot footage for the Lost Tomb film. It was re-sealed by the Israeli Antiquities Authority shortly after.

The documentary was widely panned by archaeologists and historians associated with the tomb and with historical study of the area. R. Joseph Hoffmann, a scholar and Chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, said that the film was "all about bad assumptions,” including its starting-point of assuming that the boxes taken from the Talpiot Tomb actually did contain the bones of Jesus and his family, and daring the world to disprove that assertion. That starting point made rationalizing the rest of the “evidence” presented in the documentary strikingly easy, said Hoffman, who observed that it is "amazing how evidence falls into place when you begin with the conclusion—and a hammer."

Hoffman was far from the only scholar who decried Cameron and Jacobovici’s work as a farce. "It makes a great story for a TV film, but it's completely impossible. It's nonsense," said Amos Kloner, the professor of archaeology who oversaw the initial 1980 excavation of the Talpiot Tomb. Further, Hebrew University archeologist and epigraphist Leah DiSegni said that the names found in the tomb, Mary, Joseph and Jesus, were among the most common names of the day (in fact, two forms of “Mary” made up the known names of 21% of all Hebrew females of the day, and the name “Jesus” was the 6th most popular among Palestinian Jews of the time). “It would be like finding a tomb with the name George on it in the future and asserting that it must have been the tomb of President George Bush,” said DiSegni – and that is assuming that the names was legible, which the scratchy etching on the side of the box in question is not.

"Simcha [Jacobovici] has no credibility whatsoever," said Joe Zias, who was the curator for anthropology and archeology at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem from 1972 to 1997 and personally numbered the Talpiot ossuaries. He continued:

He's pimping off the Bible … He got this guy Cameron, who made 'Titanic' or something like that—what does this guy know about archeology? I am an archeologist, but if I were to write a book about brain surgery, you would say, 'Who is this guy?' People want signs and wonders. Projects like these make a mockery of the archeological profession.

Jodi Magness, Professor of Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, wrote that:

the identification of the Talpiyot tomb as the tomb of Jesus and his family contradicts the canonical Gospel accounts of the death and burial of Jesus and the earliest Christian traditions about Jesus. This claim is also inconsistent with all of the available information - historical and archaeological--about how Jews in the time of Jesus buried their dead, and specifically the evidence we have about poor, non-Judean families like that of Jesus. It is a sensationalistic claim without any scientific basis or support.

Jacobovici and Cameron, along with TIME and CNN, claimed that a symposium at Princeton this January, in which their assertions about the tomb were further pilloried, had lent enough support to the “Jesus Tomb” that the case – which they had never acknowledged to be closed against them – had been “re-opened.” This was shown to be an even more delusional claim than the original ones made in the documentary, as fourteen of the scholars present at the symposium, including Drs. Zias, Magness, and Kloner, signed a letter protesting the fact that Cameron and Jacobovici were further misrepresenting their positions post-symposium on the veracity of the “Jesus Tomb” story.

Despite this supposed “re-opening” of the “Jesus Tomb” case, the story that will be broadcast this Easter is not the one of the Talpiot Tomb, but a story that is older and far more clouded by lies, missed interpretations, and legal issues.

This year’s story will be broadcast on CBS’s long-past-its-prime 60 Minutes, and the story slated to be dusted off and put on the air as “new news” is a five-year-old one that is, in fact, connected to the “Jesus Tomb” – that of the “James Ossuary.”

For the uninitiated, an “ossuary” is a container constructed for the purpose of housing human bones. They can range from small clay boxes, common in the ancient Near East, to giant buildings, like the Sedlec Ossuary , a Roman chapel in Czech Europe that is furnished with artistically-arranged bones from 50-70,000 human skeletons. The so-called “James Ossuary” is one of the former, a small limestone box inscribed with the words, “Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui diYeshua” (in English, that is “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”).

The James Ossuary was claimed by many – including Cameron and Jacobovici in their 2007 documentary – to have come from the Talpiot Tomb, and to be further proof that Jesus had a brother (contrary to Catholic belief). Only nine of the ten ossuaries discovered in the Talpiot Tomb are currently in the possession of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, and the James Ossuary has been claimed to be the tenth (and missing) stone box.

However, a closer look at this story reveals a tangled web of forgery, deceit, lies, and criminal prosecution, all of which culminated in the door being closed on the James Ossuary years ago – not that facts would influence CBS’s decision about airing the story on an Easter Sunday five years after the James Ossuary was debunked. After all, with no new pointy sticks to poke the Christian population with – and with a need for something far more spectacular than cartoons or stuffed teddy bears to get a rise out of the Christian community (unlike their Muslim brethren) – a recycled sensationalist story had to beat no story at all.

So, with the introduction having been covered, let us delve into the true story of the James Ossuary – a story which, for those who are not familiar with its sordid intricacies and machinations, may seem too remarkable to even be real.

(Coming in Part II)

Jeff Emanuel holds a degree in Classical Archaeology from the University of Georgia.