After a few days, though, the buzz died down, and
The Lost Tomb of Jesus seemed as old as last week’s
TV Guide. Having cashed his checks, James Cameron went back to making movies. Simcha Jacobovici, on the other hand, continued to maintain that there was a strong possibility he was right. Meanwhile he went back to his regular show,
The Naked Archaeologist, in which he is neither naked nor an archaeologist.
Over the past year, the scholarly consensus on the tomb has become virtually unanimous. As Dr. Jodi Magness of the Archaeological Institute of America
wrote, the documentary’s claim is “inconsistent with all of the available information - historical and archaeological — about how Jews in the time of Jesus buried their dead, and specifically the evidence we have about poor, non-Judean families like that of Jesus. It is a sensationalistic claim without any scientific basis or support.”
So that’s that?
Well, not quite. On January 13-16, 2008, the Princeton Theological Seminary hosted a symposium in Jerusalem that brought together leading scholars and archaeologists, including Kloner and Joe Zias, the former curator of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Jacobovici attended as well, as did plenty of news cameras and journalists. When it was all over,
Time reported that the symposium’s experts were “deeply divided” on the question of whether this was the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth or not. Jacobovici described himself as “vindicated.” And there was even a bombshell: The widow of Joseph Gat, one of the original archaeologists of the tomb, claimed that her husband had always believed it was the tomb of Jesus but had remained silent because he feared a backlash of anti-Semitism.
Time and
CNN left the impression that the stuffy scholarly community was finally coming around.
When the symposium’s scholars returned home and picked up their copy of
Time or switched on CNN, they got quite a shock. Deeply divided? That wasn’t the symposium that they had attended. Aside from that Naked Archaeologist sitting in the corner, they couldn’t remember much of anyone arguing that the Talpiot Tomb belonged to Jesus of Nazareth. Why did CNN give all that air time to Jacobovici and none at all to the fifty-some experts taking part in the symposium? They were upset, to say the least.
And so the experts revolted. Geza Vermes, a fellow of the British Academy and professor emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University,
wrote that the arguments of Jacobovici and the documentary were “not just unconvincing but insignificant” and “most of the fifty or so participants shared this opinion.” A long list of distinguished symposium attendees wrote
their own letter decrying the press reports: “Nothing further from the truth can be deduced from the discussion and presentations.” They noted that the deceased Mr. Gat, whatever he may or may not have said, “lacked the expertise to read the inscriptions” on the ossuaries. “To conclude, we wish to protest the misrepresentation of the conference proceedings in the media, and make it clear that the majority of scholars in attendance — including all of the archaeologists and epigraphers who presented papers relating to the tomb — either reject the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus’ family or find this claim highly speculative.”
If the scholars were expecting an apology from
Time or CNN, they were sorely disappointed. Neither one seems to have even noticed their protest. Both organizations still have the stories posted on their websites. After all, archaeologists are such spoilsports. There’s no sense in letting them ruin a perfectly good story.
The scholarly case on the tomb may be essentially closed, but the sensationalist fantasies are alive and well. After all, Dan Brown, author of
The Da Vinci Code, can’t make all the money, can he? It’s frustrating, though — particularly for scholars who have spent their careers trying to uncover and disseminate the truth. One cheesy documentary, it seems, is worth a thousand good books and journal articles.
In time, though, the
Lost Tomb of Jesus and its parent,
The Da Vinci Code, will fade away, joining the long parade of past pseudo-history fads like Erich Von Daniken’s
Chariot of the Gods? and Immanuel Velikovsky’s
Worlds in Collision.
Christians will just have to make due with the Empty Tomb.
—Thomas F. Madden is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. His newest book, Empires of Trust: How Rome Built — And America is Building — A New World (Dutton), will be released in July.< Back 1 2 
