Claims swirl around 'tomb of Jesus'
Archaeologists and scholars challenge the evidence from a TV documentary that would challenge Christianity's foundations.
from the March 1, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
What really pushed him along, he says, was determining that one of the Marys represented Mary Magdalene (the other, they posit, is the mother of Jesus). It is the only inscription written in Greek, as "Mariamene." Jacobovici says that a Harvard professor, François Bovon, has determined from a 4th- or 5th-century text, the "Acts of Phillip," that Mariamene is the name for Mary Magdalene.
"Mariamene provided the linchpin, so the second Mary fell into place," Jacobovici says.
The other evidence presented? DNA tests, which determined that the residues in the Jesus and Mariamene ossuaries showed that the two individuals were not related by blood, leading him to deduce they were married. Then Jacobovici commissioned a statistical analysis by an expert at the University of Toronto, who calculated the probability of this combination of names appearing on ossuaries in the same crypt at 600 to 1.
"The tomb is a fact, the names are facts, the DNA relationship is a fact, the statistical studies are facts," insists Jacobovici. "There was enough to say it's time to bring this to the attention of the world and let a scientific, academic, theological debate begin."
And begin it has. While film producer James Cameron calls the evidence "compelling," Professor Kloner himself remains unconvinced.
"It makes a great story for TV, but ... it's nonsense," he told the Jerusalem Post this week. "There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb. They were a Galilee family with no Jerusalem ties. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE [Christian Era]."
He also says that the name, "Jesus son of Joseph," has appeared on at least three or four ossuaries. Others insist that neither Jesus' followers nor his family would have thought of Jesus as the son of Joseph and used that inscription.
"The names are coincidental," says Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University. "The historian Josephus records 21 Yeshuas [Jesus], and those are people famous enough to be included in his histories. And 25 percent of Jewish women at the time had the name Mary."
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