What other (not Christian) scholars are saying about the Jesus Tomb Film
Chase March 4th, 2007
When debunking the claims that the Jesus Family Tomb film makes, it strains credibility a bit refer to the Bible chapter and verse to present one’s arguments. The argument “Jesus body can’t be in the Jesus Family Tomb because Luke 24:51 says that Jesus was taken into heaven after the resurrection” may be a true argument (and I think it is), but it is not a credible argument to make with one who does not accept the Bible as historically authoritative. Similarly, it isn’t totally fair to debunk the Jesus tomb claims using only the words of Evangelical New Testament scholars, credible as those scholars might be. In that vein, here is a list of quotes and sources where various secular and Hebrew scholars give reasons why they believe the Jesus Tomb film is inaccurate. These quotes are not organized in any particular order. Click on the word SOURCE next to each quote to find out where it came from - the links will open in a separate page.
* Amos Kloner, who originally excavated the tomb, and Joe Zias, former curator of archaeology at the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Kloner told the Jerusalem Post that the documentary is “nonsense.” Zias described it in an e-mail to The Washington Post as a “hyped up film which is intellectually and scientifically dishonest” SOURCE
* Jodi Magness, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, expressed irritation that the claims were made at a news conference rather than in a peer-reviewed scientific article. By going directly to the media, she said, the filmmakers “have set it up as if it’s a legitimate academic debate, when the vast majority of scholars who specialize in archeology of this period have flatly rejected this,” she said. Magness noted that at the time of Jesus, wealthy families buried their dead in tombs cut by hand from solid rock, putting the bones in niches in the walls and then, later, transferring them to ossuaries.She said Jesus came from a poor family that, like most Jews of the time, probably buried their dead in ordinary graves. “If Jesus’ family had been wealthy enough to afford a rock-cut tomb, it would have been in Nazareth, not Jerusalem,” she said. Magness also said the names on the Talpiyot ossuaries indicate that the tomb belonged to a family from Judea, the area around Jerusalem, where people were known by their first name and father’s name. As Galileans, Jesus and his family members would have used their first name and home town, she said.“This whole case [for the tomb of Jesus] is flawed from beginning to end,” she said. SOURCE
* Amos Kloner also said the filmmakers’ assertions are false.”It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave,” Kloner said. “The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.” SOURCE
* Tal Ilan, who compiled the Lexicon of Jewish Names [ which was used by the filmmaker’s statistician ed. note.] and who vehemently disagrees with the assertion that this could be Jesus’ tomb, says that the names found in the tomb “are in every tomb in Jerusalem. You can get all kinds of clever people who know statistics who will tell you that the combination is the unique thing about [these names], and probably they’re right - if you want just exactly this combination it’s more difficult to find. But my research proves exactly the opposite - these are the most common names that you could expect to find anywhere.” SOURCE
* “How possible is it?” Stephen Pfann [A scholar quoted by the Jesus Family Film] said. “On a scale of one through 10 - 10 being completely possible - it’s probably a one, maybe a one and a half.” Pfann added that the inscription read as “Jesus” has been misread by suggesting that the name “Hanun” might be a more accurate rendering. SOURCE
* William G. Dever, who has been excavating ancient sites in Israel for 50 years and is widely considered the dean of biblical archaeology among U.S. scholars, writes, “I’ve known about these ossuaries for many years and so have many other archaeologists, and none of us thought it was much of a story, because these are rather common Jewish names from that period,” he said. “It’s a publicity stunt, and it will make these guys very rich, and it will upset millions of innocent people because they don’t know enough to separate fact from fiction.” Dever, a retired professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, said that some of the inscriptions on the Talpiyot ossuaries are unclear, but that all of the names are common. SOURCE
* “I don’t think the James Ossuary came from the same cave,” said Dan Bahat, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University. “If it were found there, the man who made the forgery would have taken something better. He would have taken Jesus.” (He is debunking the Jesus Family Tomb film’s claims that the James, brother of Jesus, Ossuary, found in the 1970s came from the same cave.) SOURCE
* In 1996, when the BBC aired a short documentary on the same subject, archaeologists challenged the claims. Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said the idea fails to hold up by archaeological standards but makes for profitable television. “They just want to get money for it”, Kloner said. SOURCE
* “I am skeptical about Jacobovici’s claims, not because of a faulty reading of the ossuary which reads yeshua’ bar yosep [Jesus son of Joseph] I believe, but because the onomasticon [list of proper names] in his period in Jerusalem is exceedingly narrow. Patriarchal names and biblical names repeat ad nauseam. It has been reckoned that 25% of feminine names in this period were Maria/Miryam, etc., that is variants of Mary. So the cited statistics are unpersuasive. You know the saying: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This quote is by Harvard’s Frank Moore Cross, who is a consultant on the Jesus Family Tomb film, but obviously not a believer in filmmakers theories! SOURCE
Interestingly, at least three of the scholars quoted above (Amos Kloner, Stephen Pfann, and Frank Moore Cross) are cited as experts on the official Jesus Family Tomb site - giving the impression that these leading scholars are actively lending credence to what is being claimed.