James Cameron, film director of the Titanic, who jumped up and down at the Academy Awards shouting, “I am the king of the world,” has just produced a whopper bigger than the Titanic. Now he claims in a Discovery Channel special, that Jesus’ tomb and ossuary (a 1st century bone box) was discovered in 1980 along with the bones of Mary Magdalene (his supposed wife), his “supposed” son, Judah, along with his “supposed” brother, Matthew and his father, Joseph.

How should we respond to this Discovery Channel documentary?

1. The old counsel “follow the money” has never been more appropriate than in this case. This tomb was found in 1980. Nobody thought it was Jesus then. In 1996 when the BBC aired a short documentary on the subject, virtually all archeologists rejected the link to Jesus and his family. Amos Kloner, the first archeologist to examine the site, said the “idea fails to hold up to archeological standards, but it makes for profitable television.” John Gager, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Princeton University, said, “It’s basically fifteen minutes of fame – and maybe an opportunity to make a quick buck.”

2. The so-called DNA evidence is merely an attempt to lend a pseudo-scientific aura to an impossible claim. Nobody has Jesus’ DNA with which to compare samples from the ossuary. The only thing that is claimed is that a man named Jesus and a woman named Mariamene were not related.

3. The names on the ossuaries were among the most common in the region during the 1st century. For example, 21% of Jewish women in the 1st century were named Mary. It would be like, years from now if you found a tomb inscribed “John, Son of Joseph,” and claimed, “This is clearly the tomb of John Kennedy.”

4. Jesus came from a poor family. John Gager also said the likelihood that Jesus’ family had a burial site or bone boxes is virtually non existent because they were poor and they lived in a small town in what is now northern Israel.

5. The language of the names doesn’t match. Ben Witherington, a prominent New Testament scholar said this: “There is a major problem with the analysis of the names on these ossuaries. By this I mean one has to explain why one is in Hebrew, several are in Aramaic, but the supposed Mary Magdalene ossuary is in Greek. This suggests a multi-generation tomb, not a single generation tomb, and indeed a tomb that comes from after A.D.70 after the Romans had destroyed the Temple Mount. The earliest Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, including the members of Jesus’ family and Mary Magdalene, did not speak Greek. They spoke Aramaic. We have absolutely no historical evidence to suggest Mary Magdalene would have been called by a Greek name before A.D.70. It makes no sense that her ossuary would have a Greek inscription and that of her alleged husband an Aramaic inscription.”

6. Mary Magdalene is not named on the ossuary despite the Discovery Channel’s claims. The name on the ossuary is Mariamene, a name Mary Magdalene was never called in 1st century Christian literature. Rather, she is consistently called Maria well into the 2nd century. The Discovery Channel uses a later Gnostic document, the Acts of Philip, which itself does not identify Mariamene as Mary Magdalene. This identification of Mariamene with Mary Magdalene is the unproven theory of one particular scholar. The second word on the Mariamene ossuary is Mara which is short for Martha, another female name. It is not a reference to Mariamene being a “master or teacher.” Most likely the ossuary contained the bones of a woman named Martha and her daughter, Maria. (Mariamene is the diminutive of Maria.) There is no connection between this ossuary and Mary Magdalene.

7. James Cameron’s religion expert, James Tabor, a Professor of Religious Study at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, formerly claimed in his Jesus Dynasty book that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Pantera. Now he has reversed himself to support the Jesus Family Tomb theory. Both of his claims are, in fact, false.

8. Most importantly, the tomb of Jesus was empty! All of the records we have from the 1st century agree that Jesus’ body was never found. Both the Roman and religious authorities would have strangled Christianity in the cradle had they been able to produce the body of Jesus. If there was, in fact, a tomb which contained Jesus’ bones, Christianity never would have spread like wildfire throughout the Roman Empire. It was the claim of bodily resurrection which made Christianity so compelling. The empty tomb of Jesus remains an irrefutable fact of history.