Y. scholars target 'Jesus Tomb' claims
"The Jesus Family Tomb," written by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, ranked 10th on last week's New York Times' best seller list in the nonfiction category. But the majority of biblical scholars who are familiar with the work say it is little more than a slick blending of heavy fiction with slim fact.
The book's story line was also recently the subject of a controversial documentary, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," which aired earlier this month on the Discovery Channel. It shows ossuaries — stone boxes — containing what the authors say are likely the bones of Jesus, his mother, Mary, as well as Mary Magdalene, and a purported "son" of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, known as "Judah," along with others.
It also says that an ossuary found a few years ago and inscribed in Aramaic with the name "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" was once part of the "family tomb" collection.
Richard Holzapfel, managing director of the Religious Studies Center at BYU, has gathered a team of fellow scholars who will discuss what he said are the book's numerous misinterpretations and manipulations of archaeological data and historical interpretation during a conference on Saturday, April 7.
The group sat down recently with the Deseret Morning News to give a preview of some of the issues.
The book and film assume that only family members were buried in such tombs, Holzapfel said. "But we have evidence that some non-family members were put in such tombs." The stone boxes were often used to hold the bones of multiple people, he said.
"Just by studying the bones, they are different bodies. So we know the burial box could contain multiple people."
As an archaeologist who has done excavation work in Israel, Chadwick said the fact that Jewish, Christian and secular scholars almost uniformly reject the assertions in the book and movie is telling. "Jewish and secular scholars have no reason to want to make the case for or against this" other than their interpretation of historical artifacts and records, he said.
Jackson said not only were the names Jeshua, or Jesus, and Joseph extremely common during the first century, "it's clear to anyone who reads the New Testament, to every Christian, that they're not going to bury Jesus in a box and call him 'the son of Joseph."'
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