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.

“Jesus Tomb” Debate Gets Ugly Fast

Is there a BAR Crowd?

By Steven Feldman

March 16, 2007

You didn’t have to be a genius to know that the television program The Lost Tomb of Jesus would generate boatloads of debate and criticism. The show claims to have identified the ossuary (or bone box) of Jesus and his family; according to the program, the Jesus family tomb was discovered in 1980 in south Jerusalem and then ignored because the archaeologists who discovered it were oblivious to its significance. The show further suggests that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that they had a son together named Yehuda (Judah or, ironically, Judas); joining Jesus in the tomb, the show continues, are the remains of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Jose, a brother of Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark. As if those claims were not enough, the program also suggests that a controversial ossuary inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” was a tenth ossuary originally discovered in the tomb but then went missing, only to turn up in the possession of an antiquities collector (the inscription has been branded by some as either a complete or partial modern forgery).

With such dramatic claims—which many saw as a challenge to the very heart of Christian belief—the reaction was bound to be fierce. And it has been. Unfortunately, some of the reaction has also been nasty and threatening. The program was directed by Simcha Jacobovici, a Toronto-based filmmaker, and produced by James Cameron, famous for having directed Titanic. Also closely associated with the program is James Tabor, chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; I have known Tabor for many years and consider him a friend. I have strong doubts about the program’s assertions, but I have no doubt that ugly personal attacks have no place in the discussion. No sooner had the program aired than I saw references to “Jews in Hollywood” once again trying to destroy Christian values. Cameron is a part of the film industry, of course, but he’s not Jewish (neither is Tabor), and the last time I looked at a map, Toronto and Charlotte were not in southern California.

Less ugly, though still barbed and personal, was the reaction by Joe Zias, a physical anthropologist who used to work for the Israel Antiquities Authority. In a posting on his web site, Zias strongly condemns the program and the people involved with it, including what he calls the “BAR crowd,” referring to Biblical Archaeology Review, which is published by the same organization that sponsors this Web site. In Zias’ words, this “crowd” “is a collection of individuals who have been deeply involved with BAR, mainly textual scholars who pose from time to time, when convenient, as archaeologists.”

Zias is thinking primarily of Jacobovici, Tabor and Shimon Gibson, all of whom were involved with the television program and who have had in the past a connection to BAR. Jacobovici directed a documentary about the James ossuary shortly after it was first described in the pages of BAR, and Tabor and Gibson have written for the magazine. But if Zias thinks that makes them a part of the “BAR crowd” or that we agree with their claims, he’s quite wrong.
BAR was very critical of an earlier program directed by Jacobovici called The Exodus Decoded. It claimed that a volcanic eruption of the Mediterranean island of Thera was the impetus for the Biblical Ten Plagues. BAR published a critical article about the show’s claims that was written by Manfred Bietak, who excavates in Egypt and who was interviewed for the program by Jacobovici. We also published a strongly negatively review, by Bible professor Ronald Hendel, on our Web site.

Tabor and Gibson appeared in BAR most recently to lay out their case that a cave they have excavated had been used by John the Baptist. But BAR had already reported, when Tabor and Gibson first announced their claim, that many archaeologists in Israel scoffed at the idea. Nor did Gibson fare any better in our review of his book on the subject. For that matter, Tabor’s book, The Jesus Dynasty, also received a critical review in BAR (going over this history, I’m impressed that Tabor has stayed friends with me!).

So there’s no “BAR crowd,” just scholars who have written for us in the past (such as Zias!), which includes many of the world’s leading archaeologists and Bible scholars. And, for Zias’ information, we had no involvement with The Lost Tomb of Jesus. The program can be challenged on many grounds (and it already has been), but keep the personal attacks and the misinformation out of the debate.