| International News

Simcha Jacobovici, along with his executive producer James Cameron, maker of the Oscar-winning movie “Titanic,” announced in a press conference at New York’s Public Library that they had found evidence that six ossuaries (stone boxes used in ancient Israel to hold the bones of the dead) had once actually contained the remains of Jesus of Nazareth, Mary Magdalene, a child called “Judah son of Jesus,” among others.

“It’s quite surreal,” to be on stage with ossuaries that could have once held the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Jacobovici said at the press conference where he was surrounded by biblical scholars, a mathematician and others who helped produce “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” which is to be broadcast in the United States on Discovery Channel March 4 and in Canada March 6 on Vision TV.

The ossuaries were inscribed with the Hebrew names “Yeshu Ben Yossef” (Jesus son of Joseph), Yehuda Bar Yeshu (Judah son of Jesus), “Mariamne” or Myriam, Maria, Joseph and Matthew.

At the same time, director Jacobovici has co-written a book called The Jesus Family Tomb, with Charles Pellegrino. Published by HarperCollins, the book is being released this week.

But archaeological and biblical experts from around the world dismissed the film as a rehash of old news and circumstantial evidence.

"In their movie they are billing it as 'never before reported information,' but it is not new. I published all the details in the Antiqot journal in 1996, and I didn't say it was the tomb of Jesus' family," said Amos Kloner, who wrote the original excavation report for the predecessor of the Israel Antiquities Authority and is now a professor of archaeology at Israel's Bar-Ilan University.

"I think it is very unserious work. I do scholarly work ... based on other studies," he told Catholic News Service. "It is all nonsense."

In 1980, the tomb was discovered during construction of some housing. Ten ossuaries were found in the cave, including the six that are the focus of Jacobovici’s documentary. They are in the hands of the Israeli Antiquities Authority and have been discussed in both scientific research and other television programs, including a 1996 BBC documentary that first raised the theory that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene.

Kloner noted that Jesus' family was from Galilee and had no ties to Jerusalem, casting serious doubt that they would have had a burial cave in Jerusalem. He added that the names on the ossuaries were common during that time and their discovery in the same cave is purely coincidental.

He said the tomb belonged to a middle- or upper-middle-class Jewish family during the first century and the cave was in use for 70-100 years by the family.

The Mary Magdalene theory has since been popularized worldwide by the novel The Da Vinci Code and the movie of the same name, which argues that the apostles, all men, had deliberately hidden Mary Magdalene’s role from history.

“Most of the speculation about Mary Magdalene is based on a series of ancient, but non-biblical writings that were discovered in the mid-20th century near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt,” Canadian biblical scholar Father Murray Watson told The Catholic Register.

Father Watson, who teaches biblical studies at St. Peter’s Seminary in London, Ont., and is currently in Dublin, Ireland, where he is studying at All Hallows College, said that fragments in one Gnostic text, called the “Gospel of Philip,” have led some scholars to speculate that Mary Magdalene was loved by Jesus more than the other disciples and that she held a position of leadership in the early church. However, he argued that such readings were based on filling in the physical holes in the manuscript in a way not supported by its context.

“It is a fairly idiosyncratic reading of a very fragmentary text. Very few experts in the field believe that it carries any weight as a reasonable hypothesis today,” he said.

Yet Cameron, in his remarks at the press conference, said he was persuaded by the evidence in his documentary that its claims are true.

“What we find about Mary Magdalene would tend to put her back in her rightful place,” Cameron said. “I think this goes a long way toward reinstating her.”

Father Watson pointed out that the documentary’s claims contradict Christian tradition from the earliest days of the church. “The gospels place Jesus’ tomb very close to the site of the crucifixion, in what is today the northwest corner of the Old City (of Jerusalem).”

This site is now the location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Jacobovici recognized that many first-century Jews would have had the names Jesus and Mary. To counter this argument, he hired University of Toronto statistician Andre Feuerverger to calculate the odds that these names could be in one tomb together. Feuerverger estimates ...