tombboximage.jpgThe producer of the movie Titanic, James Cameron made a movie about to be released. With the help of his director Simcha Jacobovici, they are claiming that they found a tomb with the remains of Jesus Christ and his family. In the movie, they are preach that Jesus Christ did not resurrect but his body was buried in the family tomb in Talpiyot, Israel along with 9 of his family members.

They claim DNA evidence to prove their case. DNA evidence?! Then their case must be solid as a rock and should be case closed. Well, not so fast. What does the DNA evidence mean here? Did they find in one of the bodies a God gene? Or did they compare this DNA to the DNA on Shroud of Turin? For DNA evidence to have any weight in establishing identity you need another sampling from a sure source. For example a criminal suspect’s DNA sampling compared with a DNA sampling found on his victims body proves that he is the perpetrator. You need two sources of DNA to make a conclusive comparison. In this case DNA testing may reveal that all 9 people are related to each other. Well, chances are that they are related since they are buried together. So what?

This does not prove a thing that one of them was Jesus.

Tim McGirk gives a good brief history of their claim on time-blog.com:

Let’s go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.
Israel’s prominent archeologist Professor Amos Kloner didn’t associate the crypt with the New Testament Jesus. His father, after all, was a humble carpenter who couldn’t afford a luxury crypt for his family. And all were common Jewish names.

Their claim is not an original one. They join a company of other sensation seekers equally bizarre. Before Cameron and Jacobovici others have claimed the locations of Jesus’ tomb from India to Japan.

People do and claim weird things to get media attention. Some shave their heads and use umbrellas to assault reporters, some claim to be the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby, and others claim to have discovered the tomb of Jesus with his body in it.

Guess what the media is going to do? They will eat this alive, feeding on it with frenzy. It also helps that the object under attack is the core belief of Christianity; their favorite dish to feed on, just like they did with the Da Vinci Code. I think Dan Brown might have a solid copyrights violation case against Cameron and Jacobovici. (Image is complements of Jacobovici’s blog.)