Titanic' attack on Christ's Resurrection*

Filmmaker claims discovery of Jesus Christ's family crypt

Posted: February 25, 2007

The Oscar-winning director of "Titanic" is expected to announce in a
news conference tomorrow that his next film project is a documentary
suggesting Jesus wasn't resurrected, was married to Mary Magdalene and
had a son.

James Cameron is producing "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," claiming the
discovery of 10 stone coffins in a Jerusalem suburb in 1980 is actually
the family crypt of Jesus of Nazareth.

The 90-minute film will be shown on the Discovery Channel at a later date.

The film makes the case that Jesus had a son named Judah with Mary
Magdalene.

Prominent Jerusalem archaeologist Amos Kloner is disputing the claims,
saying, "It makes a great story for a TV film. But it's impossible. It's
nonsense."

Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, claim also to have DNA
evidence to back their story.

Jacobovici is trying not to alienate the faithful, by suggesting the
ascension into heaven by Jesus could still have occurred spiritually if
not physically.

"People who believe in a physical ascension – that he took his body to
heaven – those people will say, 'Wait a minute,'" warns the director.

The news comes a year after the release of "The Da Vinci Code" movie,
based on the best-selling novel of 2004 by Dan Brown, both of which also
claimed Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus.

James Tabor, chairman of the religious studies department at the
University of North Carolina who is interviewed throughout the
documentary, says it will not be so easy to dismiss this work.

"This is archaeology," he claims. "We've got the casket. We've got the
bones. I think we can say, in all probability, Jesus had this son,
Judah, presumably through Mary Magdalene."

The coffins reportedly carried the names of Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary,
Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua. Some archaeologists who
studied the find point out those were common names in Israel 2,000 years
ago.

A statistician is brought into the documentary to suggest finding that
combination of names in a first century crypt at 600 to 1.

The news conference is schedule to be held in New York and a website has
been created to tout the media event. A companion book, "The Jesus
Family Tomb," published by Harper-Collins, is set for release this week.