Christ’s Tomb Claim Rubbish!
As one who continues in the study of archaeology, has made films in the Middle East and the Holy land and has investigated every claim for significant discoveries in the past forty years, I can smell a false claim from a distance. And the new American “discovery” of the tomb and bones of Jesus are as fake as can be.
A new documentary produced by the Oscar-winning director James Cameron that contradict major Christian tenets on the resurrection of Jesus, and which makes outrageous claims about his son and his wife, are simply money making exercises designed to cash in on the novel, The Da Vinci Code.
This new documentary claims to have discovered the lost tomb of Jesus, and in it his bones and those of his wife and son. First the tomb of Jesus is not lost, but is highly authenticated and is visited by a million people every year. Second, the Americans have discovered nothing – this tomb was excavated by archaeologists fully in 1980.
It is an early tomb containing ten ossuaries — small caskets used to store bones — and one of them bears the title, “Judah, son of Jesus.” This does not mean that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a son called Judah. For one thing, the name Joseph was the most common name in the ancient Jewish world; Jesus was the second most common name given to boys, Judah was the third most common name, and more girls were called Mary than any other name.
Further, the tomb was miles from where the contemporary records indicate Jesus was crucified and buried. Back in 1996, when the British Broadcasting Corporation aired a short documentary on the same subject, archaeologists challenged the claims. Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said the idea fails to hold up by archaeological standards but makes for profitable television. “They just want to get money for it,” Kloner said.
Scholars, Jewish, Christian and non-religious are totally sceptical of the film company’s claims. Some scholars have said that the name “Jesus” on the caskets was not read correctly. They claim the name really is “Hanun.”
It is most unlikely that the poor carpenter of Nazareth was buried in an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave. Professor Kloner, the archaeologist who first investigated the tomb said. “The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.”
Archaeologists also balk at the filmmaker’s claim that the James Ossuary — the centre of a famous antiquities fraud in Israel — might have originated from the same cave. In 2005, Israel charged five suspects with forgery in connection with the infamous bone box.
Although the documentary makers claim to have found the tomb of Jesus, the BBC beat them to the punch by 11 years.
Fake! Fraud! Don’t waste your time and money!
REV THE HON. DR GORDON MOYES, A.C., M.L.C..