Jesus's tomb

On Easter Monday, British television will air a James Cameron documentary about the tomb of Jesus. This controversial documentary will not feature the venerated tomb of the risen Lord, but a tomb containing the coffins and ossuaries that the documentary claims to be those of Jesus and the holy family.

This tomb, known as the Talpiot tomb, contained the coffins of the Holy Family, according to the documentary. A fine story from which Hollywood can easily spin a fantastic make-believe movie. Cameron of Titanic fame preferred to put it on the small screen.

Let us go to facts. The Talpiot tomb was excavated in 1980 by archaeologist Amos Kloner, a professor at Israel's Ben-Ilan University. Twenty-seven years ago, when opened, the Talpiot tomb, was found to contain 10 stone coffins and three skulls. Names visible on six of the coffins were translated as Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamme, Joseph and Matthew.

According to Biblical scholar and archaeologist Fr. Murphy O'Connor, the names of Jesus, Mary and Joseph were very common among Palestinian Jews at the time of Jesus's life. In fact the 10 most common names found in burial places, dating from the first century AD, were (out of 2,625 males found) Simon (243) Joseph (218) Eleazar (166) Judah (164) John or Yohanan (122) Jesus (99) Hananiah (82) Jonathan (71) Matthew (62) Manaen or Menahem (42). As for women (328) recorded names found the most common were Mary or Mariamne (70) Salome (58) Shelamzion (24) and Martha (20). Thus, some 90 per cent of tombs in the region would throw up similar name combinations as those found in the Talpiot tomb.

The eminent Jewish archaeologist Mr Kloner, who discovered the tomb, commented thus on Mr Cameron's attempt to form the Holy Family link to the Talpiot. "It makes for great TV, but it is impossible that Jesus and his relatives, who were from Galilee, with no ties to Jerusalem, would end up in Talpiot."

Cameron's documentary crew subjected matter in the Talpiot coffins to DNA testing which revealed no familiar link between Mariamme and Jesus. The Mariamme in the Talpiot tomb soon became Mary Magdalene (although there is nowhere mention in the tomb that she came from Magda). Thus the theory (as in the Da Vinci Code) that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Now, DNA does not reveal any link between spouses, but only between members of the same family root. Thus, from this erroneous conclusion, the documentary points to Judah as the result of this union. This is contrary to the Da Vinci Code theory that the offspring from the union was a girl. That the DNA found that several of the remains in the Talpiot tombs were inter-related was to be expected. The same result will be achieved in most, if not all the tombs both of then and now all over the world! It was a poor try to make the documentary look scientific!

The ancestral home of Joseph was Bethlehem and his adult home Nazareth. When Jesus began his call, Joseph was apparently already dead. Why would he be buried in Jerusalem? Why should a Matthew be buried with Jesus? No one ever mentioned Matthew as a brother or relative of Jesus.

Another archaeologist who gave a helping hand in this documentary is James Tabor. Last year he wrote a book (The Jesus Dynasty) in which he puts a certain Panthera as being the father of Jesus and that Jesus was buried in Galilee. Now he seems to abandon his theory and to join the Cameron bandwagon!

Such feeble attempts to try to destroy the very fundamentals of our faith and religion - the resurrection of Christ - will soon come to nothing as was the case with the Da Vinci Code. Let them dig and speculate !