Revision for the Greatest Story Ever Told?
So will the greatest story ever told have to be retold? Even before it airs March 4 on the Discovery Channel, a controversial new documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, has people asking the question.
While scholars are already challenging the film's tentatively framed conclusion–namely, that archaeologists might have unearthed the tomb of Jesus and his family–Christians are beginning to debate what the documentary (and a companion book cowritten by its director) might mean for the core teachings of the faith. Was there a true resurrection if Jesus's bodily remains were interred along with those of his closest relatives? Could Jesus have had a wife and child and still been the Messiah-Christ of tradition?
Produced by Oscar-winning director James Cameron (of Titanic fame) and directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici (whose earlier work includes James, the Brother of Jesus), the film could be called a high-stakes detective procedural, a sort of biblical CSI. But the filmmakers insist that they were not out to "disprove" Christianity or even to create a sensation.
Instead, they say, they hoped to bring together the findings of various archaeologists, New Testament scholars, statisticians, and other researchers who have dealt with a particularly provocative collection of evidence.
"We connect the dots to see what picture emerges," said Jacobovici at Monday's news conference at the New York Public Library.
At the center of the mystery are 10 bone boxes, or ossuaries, taken from a crypt that was unearthed in the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem in 1980. Largely ignored for 16 years as they languished in an Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) storeroom, the objects sparked wider interest when a couple of scholarly articles brought attention to the inscriptions on six of the 10 limestone boxes. In addition to "Jesus son of Joseph," there were two Marys, a Matthew (a possible relative of Jesus's mother), a Yose (the name by which Jesus's brother Joseph goes in the Gospel of Mark), and "Judah son of Jesus."
So why didn't those names set off an immediate alarm? The answer, quite simply, is that to the Israeli archaeologists scrambling to salvage antiquities during a Jerusalem construction boom, the names were anything but unusual. Amos Kloner, author of one of the first articles about the tomb, has pointed out that the name Jesus was found 71 times on objects from the some 900 burial caves unearthed in the same general area. And there was even one other instance of "Jesus son of Joseph." Kloner and other archaeologists have also noted that the crypt in question bore signs of belonging to a comfortable Jerusalem middle-class family—something Jesus's humble Nazarene family definitely was not.
Jacobovici's determined dot-connecting began when he was doing research for a film on another controversial ossuary, allegedly containing the bones of James, brother of Jesus. Shortly after that film came out in 2003, the IAA declared the inscription on the James ossuary a forgery, a finding that other well-known epigraphists have subsequently challenged. As the James controversy roiled around him, Jacobovici kept thinking about another bone box that he had seen in the IAA storeroom, the one inscribed "Jesus the Son of Joseph."
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