Blogs Flog “Jesus Tomb” Claims

By Steven Feldman

March 28, 2007

When The Lost Tomb of Jesus was broadcast in early March on the Discovery Channel, it received tremendous attention in the news media. As often happens, the initial news reports only touched on the main issues involved and, as also frequently happens, the media attention died down quickly.

But the program made some very large claims, most notably that Jesus’ remains had been found (but not recognized for what they are) in a tomb accidentally discovered in Jerusalem in 1980 and that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and had fathered a son with her. These claims have now become the subject of extensive scrutiny in the blogosphere.

Most of what I’ve seen has been negative, and some criticism has veered towards sarcasm and personal attacks (see my earlier blog below), particularly against Simcha Jacobovici, the film’s director, and James Tabor, head of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a consultant on the film, who has emerged as the primary academic defender of film’s claim that the tomb may have been the tomb of Jesus and his family.

One of the first lengthy discussions of a key aspect of the program came on the Higgaion blog (http://www.heardworld.com/higgaion/) maintained by Christopher Heard, a professor of religion at Pepperdine University. Heard wrote a devastating series of blogs last fall that demolished the claims in a previous film made by Jacobovici, The Exodus Decoded. In response to a widely touted statistic offered in the The Lost Tomb of Jesus by Andrey Feuerverger, a professor at the University of Toronto, that the tomb in question was almost certainly (to the tune of 600 to 1!) the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth, Heard pointed out that Feuerverger himself had noted that his calculations were based heavily on the assumption that one of the ossuaries in the tomb was that of Mary Magdalene. If that assumption was wrong, Heard wrote, then “the whole set of calculations begins to look like a house of cards.”

The program’s claim that the remains of Mary Magdalene were in one the ossuaries (bone boxes) in the tomb came from its reading of one ossuary inscription as Mariamenou e Mara, which the show claimed should be read as “Mariamene the Master”; the show further claimed that Mary Magdalene was called Mariamene in later Christian texts and, because of her importance in the early Christian movement, she would have been accorded the title “Master.”
Those claims have been a focus of heated debate. Richard Bauckham, professor at New Testament at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, was one of the first scholars to take issue with that identification. His views appear as a guest post on the Chrisendom blog maintained by Chris Tilling (http://www.christilling.de/blog/ctblog.html); you have to scroll down the blog’s home page and click on “Some Popular Posts.” After a fairly technical discussion of the name, Bauckham concludes, “There is no reason at all to connect the woman in this ossuary with Mary Magdalene, and in fact the name usage is decisively against such a connexion.”

Craig Evans, a professor at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, has posted a comment that calls the program’s conclusions “very doubtful” (http://www.craigaevans.com/tombofjesus.htm). Evans considers all the inscriptions in the tomb, and he, too, rejects the identification of the Mariamene in the tomb with Mary Magdalene.

Perhaps the most forceful opponent of the Magdalene identification has been Stephen Pfann, of the University of the Holy Land, in Jerusalem, who argues that the inscription does not say “Mariamene the Master” but rather “Mariame and Mara” and that the ossuary held the remains of at least two women, neither of them Mary Magdalene. Pfann’s views can be found on the SBL Forum page of the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

Taking aim at the statistical claims made by the program, Randy Ingermanson, at (http://www.ingermanson.com/jesus/art/stats.php) takes issue with some of the assumptions behind the calculations in The Lost Tomb of Jesus and runs some numbers himself. Based on the prevalence of Jewish names in the Late Second Temple and Roman periods in Palestine, Ingermanson concludes that there likely would have been about 1000 men in the first century A.D. named Jesus son of Joseph. He further concludes that about 11 of these men would have had family members with the names found in the tomb.

This is actually one of the most valuable figures I’ve come across in this entire debate because it is based solely on statistics generated by the best data we have available and not heavily weighted by dubious historical assumptions (unfortunately, Ingermanson did not stop there and went on to make some dubious assumptions of his own and concluded that the chances are 10,000 to 1 against the Jesus in the tomb being Jesus of Nazareth). But note that Ingermanson’s calculation yields only a 1 in 11 chance that the tomb is that of Jesus of Nazareth, which is a far cry from the 600 to 1 near certainty that it is, which is what the program claimed.
I was alerted to Ingermanson’s blog by James Tabor, who worked closely with the filmmakers and who has become something of a voice in the wilderness as an academic defender of the show’s claims. Tabor has been posting daily to his blog (http://jesusdynasty.com/blog/), and he deserves some type of award for sheer doggedness. My sense, however, is that he’s fighting a losing battle; the more discussion I see, the weaker the program’s case becomes.

Two other blogs to keep an eye on for this topic are the NT Gateway blog

(http://ntgateway.com/weblog/), by Mark Goodacre of Duke University, and the Codex blog (http://biblical-studies.ca/blog/index.php), by Tyler F. Williams of Taylor University College in Edmonton. Even in the blogosphere, the debate over The Lost Tomb of Jesus is starting to quiet down, but I expect some more lively discussion before it’s all over.