Apparently moviemaker James Cameron wishes he had obtained the film rights to The Da Vinci Code.

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What else could explain his association with The Lost Tomb of Jesus? This much-hyped show makes a series of provocative claims about the Christian messiah and his kin: Jesus was betrothed to Mary Magdalene, they had a son named Judah, DNA testing of their remains proves it, and so on.

Yawn. Haven’t we read this novel?

As the mastermind behind Hollywood blockbusters such as The Terminator and Titanic, Cameron knows a catchy story when he sees one. For The Lost Tomb of Jesus, which debuts on the Discovery Channel this Sunday at 9:00 P.M., he’s credited as an executive producer.

“I think it’s the biggest archaeological story of the century,” Cameron has said of this current project. “It’s absolutely not a publicity stunt.”

No, of course not. That’s why its wild assertions are scheduled for unveiling on a breathless television program rather than in a scholarly journal. We all know that genuine publicity hounds would risk eternal hellfire for the chance to submit an academic paper to a low-circulation quarterly that’s peer reviewed by professional archaeologists and scientists. Television is for losers, right?

Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, describe The Lost Tomb of Jesus as a documentary. But it’s not. It’s a “documentary” — just as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 is a “documentary” on the Bush administration. They both actually fall into the genre of conspiratorial advocacy.

At the crux of the program is the assertion that a tomb discovered in Jerusalem in 1980 and reopened only recently contained a group of intriguing ossuaries — i.e., limestone coffins that were popular burial devices two millennia ago. Their chiseled exteriors bear names such as Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. In an inadvertently hilarious segment, the show hauls out a Canadian statistics professor who scribbles numbers on a chalkboard and proclaims that the odds are precisely 600 to 1 that this confluence of names in a single tomb means that Team Cameron has unearthed the final resting place of the holy family.

Yet the filmmakers’ methods are highly questionable. Harvard’s Frank Moore Cross, for instance, makes several on-screen appearances, mostly to read the inscriptions on the ossuaries. The presence of Cross, a distinguished scholar at a top-notch university, is meant to provide intellectual heft to the program. Yet Jacobovici merely has him read the words on the ossuaries. As it happens, nobody denies that they carry these names. But are they actually the ossuaries of the son of God and his earthly parents? Jacobovici doesn’t get around to asking Cross, this eminent professor, for an opinion.