A documentary by the Titanic director claims to have found the burial site of the biblical Jesus and his alleged wife and son in an ancient family cemetery in Jerusalem.
Alfons Luna
NEW YORK: A documentary by Titanic director James Cameron claims to have found the burial site of the biblical Jesus and his alleged wife and son in an ancient family cemetery in Jerusalem.
Cameron and co-filmmaker, Israel-born Simcha Jacobovici said on Monday their research suggested Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a son, Judah, who were buried with him.
The claim contradicts the Bible's account that the Christian Son of God was single, died when crucified and resurrected three days later and ascended to heaven, central tenets of Christian belief.
The explosive claims in the documentary The Lost Tomb of Christ could re-ignite questions about whether Jesus had an earthly family life -- an idea popularized in the hit book and movie The Da Vinci Code.
Cameron and Jacobovici, an award-winning documentary director, based their film on a tomb unearthed in Talpiot, Jerusalem, in 1980 by a construction crew developing an apartment complex.
They cite evidence of names etched on ossuaries, or limestone bone boxes, dug up at the site, as well as DNA evidence they hold and other technical analysis.
United States Catholic and Protestant leaders however ridiculed the claims, saying that there is no proof linking the find to the biblical Jesus.
"I am not an archeologist or a Bible scholar," Cameron told reporters Monday.
But "as a documentary filmmaker I should not be afraid of pursuing the truth," he said.
"I know they will say that we try to undermine Christianity. That is far from the case. This investigation celebrates the real existence of these people."
The documentary is to air Sunday on US cable television.
Five of the 10 boxes discovered in the Talpiot tomb were inscribed with names believed referring to key figures in the New Testament: Jesus, Mary, Matthew, Joseph and Mary Magdalene. A sixth inscription, written in Aramaic, translates to ‘Judah son of Jesus.’
Such tombs "are very typical for that region," Aaron Brody, associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion and director of California's Bade Museum, told Discovery News, which will carry the documentary on its cable channel.
In addition to the ‘Judah son of Jesus’ inscription, another limestone burial box is labeled in Aramaic with ‘Jesus son of Joseph’.
Another bears the Hebrew inscription ‘Maria’, a Latin version of ‘Miriam’, or, in English, ‘Mary’.
Yet another ossuary inscription, written in Hebrew, reads ‘Matia’, the original Hebrew word for ‘Matthew’.
Only one of the inscriptions is written in Greek. It reads, ‘Mariamene e Mara’, which can be translated as, ‘Mary known as the master’, the television network said.
Jacobovici, the documentary director, producer and script writer, said a statistical analysis of the names being found together makes it extremely unlikely that it would be anyone else but the biblical family of Jesus.
Jacobovici and his team also obtained two sets of samples from the ossuaries for DNA and chemical analysis. The first set consisted of bits of matter taken from the ‘Jesus Son of Joseph’ and ‘Mariamene e Mara’ ossuaries.
The second set consisted of patina, a chemical film encrustation on one of the limestone boxes.
The human remains were analyzed by Carney Matheson, a scientist at the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.
Mitochondrial DNA examination determined the individual in the Jesus ossuary and the person in the ossuary linked to Mary Magdalene were not related.
Since tombs normally contain either blood relations or spouses, Jacobovici and his team say the DNA results suggest Jesus and Mary Magdalene could have been a couple.
The documentary producers believe that 'Judah,' the alleged son of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, could have been the 'lad; described in the Gospel of John as sleeping in Jesus' lap at the Last Supper.
US religious leaders laughed at the claims.
"It's good hype," David O'Connell, the president of Catholic University told CNN television.
R Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, branded the film a "farcical documentary" full of "really far-fetched claims." "The DNA testing is to me the most laughable aspect of this," he told CNN.
"You have to have the basis of a DNA sample that would make any sense," he said. "No one has the DNA of Mary."
Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner, who documented the tomb as the Jewish burial cave of a well-off family more than 10 years ago, says there is no evidence that it was the burial site of Jesus, and that that the names are a coincidence.
"I'm a scholar. I do scholarly work which has nothing to do with documentary film-making. There's no way to take a religious story and to turn it into something scientific," he said in a telephone interview.
"Who says that 'Maria' is Magdalena and 'Judah' is the son of Jesus? It cannot be proved. These are very popular and common names from the first century BC," said Kloner, a professor at Israel's Bar Ilan University.
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