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Originally posted by HalfMooner

Unless the inscription on the "Jesus" tomb concludes with, "Yes, THAT Jesus," this stuff proves nothing. Still you gotta admit, Discovery's got itself a hot property, and people will be arguing over those ossuaries for years!

All in all, this really seems to be as irrelevant as the "evidence" some Christians present for Jesus' existence. It looks to be simply a clever spin on some random old ossuraries.

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Jim Bawden
Television Columnist

"Archaeological discovery of the millennium!"

That's Toronto filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici on his latest TV epic, The Lost Tomb Of Jesus.

It may not be good history, good archaeology or good theology, but it's good TV.

Never one for understatement, Jacobovici jumps into a controversy and never looks back. Like his previous documentaries, what's fact and what's speculation in Lost Tomb may be difficult for viewers to separate, but it's entertaining and never dull.

It doesn't air until next week but, typically, Jacobovici has already stirred up enough interest in his theories to generate advance publicity rare for programs on relatively obscure channels far up the cable dial.

In the first of his biblical spectacles, a 2003 film on another hot topic, James Brother Of Jesus, he proudly stated, "I just made a film about a box." And then he produced a stone ossuary (a box for bones) with an ancient Aramaic inscription reading, "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Scholars soon charged that part of the inscription was a fake, etched in modern times.

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A top Israeli archaeologist on Monday rubbished claims featured in a documentary by award-winning film directors that the burial site of Jesus has been located and which suggests he had a son.

The Oscar-winning James Cameron and Israel-born Simcha Jacobovici are to unveil their explosive conclusions at a New York news conference on Monday ahead of the March 4 premiere of their film on the Discovery Channel.

The claims in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" are based on the 1980 discovery of a tomb containing 10 caskets in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talpiot.

Some of the caskets were inscribed with the Hebrew names Yeshu Ben Yossef (Jesus son of Joseph), Yehuda Bar Yeshu (Judah son of Jesus), Martha and Myriam (Mary) -- all names associated with key players in the New Testament.

But archaeologist Professor Amos Kloner, who documented the tomb as the Jewish burial cave of a well-off family more than 10 years ago, is adamant there is no evidence to support claims that it was the burial site of Jesus.

"I'm a scholar. I do scholarly work which has nothing to do with documentary film-making. There's no way to take a religious story and to turn it into something scientific," he told AFP in a telephone interview.

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Originally posted by beskeptigal

One of the many ridiculous claims is that there is a space where the bone box could have been that was recently claimed to say "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus". Fer cryin out loud, the evidence is there is a space it could have been in? This is strictly entertainment sold as science.

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Originally posted by leoofno

I got a giggle out of this (from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17388557/site/newsweek/):

"Hankins argues that Christianity is strongly rooted in historical fact, both in context and in the events that unfold in the Bible, and it is that historicity, he says, which separates the faith from what he calls, “other world religions that are based in myth.” "

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"Hankins argues that Christianity is strongly rooted in historical fact, both in context and in the events that unfold in the Bible, and it is that historicity, he says, which separates the faith from what he calls, “other world religions that are based in myth.” "

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Originally posted by furshur

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"Hankins argues that Christianity is strongly rooted in historical fact, both in context and in the events that unfold in the Bible, and it is that historicity, he says, which separates the faith from what he calls, “other world religions that are based in myth.” "

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That is a pretty odd thing to say considering Mohammad is clearly a historical figure.

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Both Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi's reputations have suffered in recent years as a consequence of the trenchant criticisms by Patricia Crone (especially in Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, pp. 203-30), where she argues that much of the classical Muslim understanding of the Koran rests on the work of storytellers and that this work is of very dubious historical value. These storytellers contributed to the tradition on the rise of Islam, and this is evident in the steady growth of information: "If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next storyteller would know the date of this raid, while the third would know everything that an audience might wish to hear about it."

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A tale from a crypt
A preliminary comment

March 2, 2007

Oh, the tales some people will tell (and the money they will make) in an attempt to undermine the Christian faith! In recent years, many of the attacks against the Bible have been aimed at the book of Genesis and its account of creation and a global flood. Increasingly, though, skeptics have been using archaeology to attempt to also undermine the rest of the Bible's 65 books.

This Sunday evening, a “documentary” produced by famed Hollywood director James Cameron, titled The Lost Tomb of Jesus, will be shown on the Discovery Channel. Cameron and his cohort claim that the film will successfully argue that a Jerusalem tomb unearthed in 1980 contained the coffins and remains of Jesus and his family—including Mary Magdalene, allegedly the wife of Jesus, and a son “Judah” whom the two supposedly had. Of course, among other problems we have with these claims, this is contrary to the accounts in the New Testament in which we are told that Christ, after His death on the Cross, rose physically from the dead. It's a doctrine all Christians must defend, for our faith is in vain if Christ did not rise from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:14). In reality, this film is just the latest in a long line of variations on the rumor that started just after Jesus' ressurection, as we see in Matthew 28:12-15. We wonder if many skeptics who have long denied a historical Jesus may now—conveniently—claim there was one, but will smugly add that this “proves” he died and that there was no Resurrection.

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