See If You Get The Point: Archaeology Magazine Hints At Jacobovici's Jesus Tomb Motive
Pastor Dale Morgan
See If You Get The Point: Archaeology Magazine Hints At Jacobovici's
Jesus Tomb Motive*
Added: Mar 6th, 2007 8:14 AM
The "Jesus Tomb" on TV
by Sandra Scham
An unconvincing case, and an ulterior motive?
Simcha Jacobovici, the filmmaker behind "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," a
Discovery Channel special airing at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 4,
believes that he knows where Jesus is buried--in a tomb in the southern
Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot that was discovered by an Israeli
archaeologist in 1980 and, mysteriously according to the filmmaker, not
publicized.
He has assembled an impressive number of experts to comment upon his
theories, from Israel Antiquities Authority spokesmen to forensic
specialists and statisticians. It worth noting, however, that none of
these individuals, with the sole exception of Jacobovici himself and his
statistical expert, seem entirely convinced by the evidence presented.
The constant references to the wildly popular and absurdly wrongheaded
thriller The Da Vinci Code might explain the reluctance of many scholars
not related to the project to buy into these conjectures. But even one
of the film's proponent experts, James Tabor of the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte, has said that the tomb only "arguably" might be
connected to the Jesus of Nazareth.
We last heard from Jacobovici when he decided to make a film about the
"monumental" discovery of an ossuary bearing an inscription "James the
brother of Jesus." Along with Herschel Shanks, who promoted the ossuary
and other finds now deemed dubious in Biblical Archaeology Review, and
others, the filmmaker is still touting the authenticity of that find in
the face of charges of inscription forgery from the Israel Antiquities
Authority. (See "The James Ossuary" saga for more on this.) Not one to
be discouraged by accusations of fraud and impending legal
complications, Jacobovici is now taking the case many leaps forward. In
the opinion of the filmmaker and his assembled experts, the James
ossuary is a lost--more accurately, stolen--antiquity from what he
refers to as "the Jesus Family Tomb."
The film itself is a good deal less frenzied in its treatment of the
subject than either the press conference that announced it or any of the
subsequent media coverage. It is actually a rather interesting
exploration of how one proceeds to reconstruct an archaeological context
that no longer exists. That the filmmakers were not entirely successful
in this is most because of the nature of the evidence as well as to
their own absurd expectations. The tomb has been built over with an
apartment block, the bones given a decent Jewish burial as Israel's
agreement with its religious authorities requires in the case of
skeletal remains, and only the limestone repositories remain as a
provocative clue to the sacred relics they might have once housed.
The evidence is presented step by step, much as any good attorney might
do before a jury, to create a compelling case to the layman. For
scholars, however, at least those who are not too busy fulminating on
television about the publicity-seeking proclivities of those associated
with this project, this case is an eminently flawed one. Aside from the
fact that many archaeologists who have recovered such ossuaries have
testified to the frequency of the names "Jesus," "Mary," and "Joseph" on
the burial equipment from this period, the use of statistical analysis
alone, or primarily, to prove an archaeological theory is something that
many of us have attempted to get away from.
At one time we archaeologists loved statistics, happily performing
complex regression and cluster analyses on our data and spitting out
conclusions from our computers that, likely, proved the conjectures we
had begun with. In the last two decades, however, we have begun to
question these facile validations of our common sense. The problem is
with the data. The methods may be perfectly suited to a world in which a
representative sample, normal distribution or even an idea of what the
population in question might be is possible. Archaeological evidence is
precisely the opposite. We do not, in point of fact, know any of these
things. In the words of one former statistically enthralled antiquarian,
"Even when the odds were good, we knew that the goods were odd."
Thus, unlike Jacobovici and company's impressively qualified
statistician, the assertion that there was a 1 in 600 to 1 in 1,000
chance that ossuaries with the names inscribed on the Talpiot examples
might be found in one tomb, has failed to impress archaeologists. We
know that we have seen these names before and we know that the universe
from which statistical analyst Feuerverger's results are drawn is a
flawed one that no amount of mathematical manipulation can overcome.
The other part of the filmmakers' case is less complex--and considerably
less compelling. Although there were no bones to be found, a DNA
analysis was performed on the residue of two ossuaries purportedly
having contained the bones of Jesus and his wife Mary Magdalene. While
the fact that scientists were able to perform such a test on mere
residues from the boxes was impressive, the results of the tests were
not. The DNA samples obtained were determined to be not from closely
related individuals. Since it was supposedly a family tomb the
assumption was made that the individuals must have been married.
Good assumption--if, in fact, it were possible to state with certainty
that the presence of unrelated individuals either by blood or marriage
in a supposed family tomb is impossible. The truth is that DNA analyses
are seldom done on remains from ossuary tombs of this period so the
assumption is, again, based on mere conjecture. A famous tomb found in
North Talpiot, not very far away from the one in question, not only
contained ossuaries with inscriptions bearing the names Mariamne (Mary)
and Joseph but also ossuaries that contained the bones of several
individuals at once--including one inscribed as "the Son of Caiaphas"
that contained the bones of a female. Pity the poor archaeologists with
this kind of record to work with but, at least, we are not often
burdened these days with the mandate that we find biblically related
artifacts to validate our work.
Despite its unsound premise there are two moments in this film that
should speak to the scholar even if the rest of it fails to do so. In
one segment Jacobovici argues with an Antiquities Authority official
about the identification of an ossuary from the North Talpiot tombs with
the high priest Caiaphas of New Testament fame. This is, indeed, a case
of Israeli archaeology being, in effect, hoisted on its own petard. If
the Caiaphas identification is a valid one--which we doubt--why not the
identifications that Jacobici is proposing?
Another telling part of the film is Jacobovici's discovery of the
discarded Book of Jonah in his tomb, put there in modern times by rabbis
who needed to dispose of them in a consecrated space. Jonah, so the
filmmaker tells us, was essentially the world's first true missionary.
It is presented as yet another "coincidence" that has led the filmmaker
to his inevitable conclusions but one wonders if this particular moment
actually explains the motivations of the individuals connected with this
project more fully than the supposed scientific evidence.
Sandra Scham is a contributing editor to ARCHAEOLOGY and the editor of
Near Eastern Archaeology.
Š 2007 by the Archaeological Institute of America