Cameron: Jesus tomb film is a ‘detective story’

Cameron: Yes, I think we certainly understood that this would be controversial. And by the way, we welcome peer review. We think that this is a significant find and we think that this bears a lot more study than a Discovery Channel documentary has the resources to do. Did we talk about the repercussions of this? Of course, we did. In fact, I was even hesitant to get involved in this project I had to think, do I want this in my life. But ultimately my decision was as a documentary filmmaker, a story this important needs to be told. So I decided to pursue it.

Now in respect with the resurrection, and Simcha can speak to this as well, neither one of us are theologians, but certainly we’ve been dealing with biblical scholars, biblical archeologists, and so on, so we have a passing knowledge in that area. The resurrection itself is not challenged. Jesus may well have risen. And having risen, according to the scriptures, walked the earth, for an additional 40 days, appeared in corporeal form and spiritual manifestations, including a child, and including someone that his disciples didn’t recognize at first and things like that. And then ultimately ascended to heaven.

Where you get stuck is the physical ascension to heaven, taking his bones and body with him to heaven, instead of leaving them behind on earth. Many Christians don’t take that literally, some do. That is where I think there is going to be controversy or denial or pushback or people think it is a fake or whatever they want to say. Again, we’re not theologians and we’re not even archeologists. We’re documentary filmmakers, so we can only report what the experts are saying. I think if you see they film and you read the book, you’ll see that a very compelling case is made and it does ask many questions and many people should discuss this.

Jacobovici: I’m not a Christian, but philosophically speaking, but philosophically speaking, people are jumping to the conclusion that finding physical evidence of a burial place of Jesus is some how challenging the resurrection. Logically, it really isn’t. I’ve spoken to some theologians and they’ll have to weigh in. Since Christian theology holds that Jesus was dead for three days and he rose. During those three days whether he was in this tomb or that tomb doesn’t deny or confirm resurrection. So I think people are jumping to a conclusion that is really not part of the investigation of this film. Yes, the ascension, if people believe in a spiritual ascension, there is no issue. People believe in a physical ascension then that’s something Christian theologians will have to discuss. But what we have done, we have just come back and reported a set of facts. There is a tomb. There are inscriptions in it. They match the gospel story. They match the noncanonical text: The text that didn’t make it into the Christian bible.

Cameron: And the Synoptic Gospels are well matched. It was interesting last night we were talking to James Tabor, who was one of our consultants, one of our experts on this. He’s the head of religious study at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he was saying, if someone had come to me and asked me to profile what I would expect to find in the Jesus family tomb, I would’ve said that there first of all there would be the tomb of James, because he succeeded Jesus in the early Christian church. He ran it for a while before he was himself was martyred. So it would be the tomb of James. He would have the wherewithal to create to greener the family tomb. In there would be the mother. Mom would be there. Mary Magdalene would be there. The brothers would be there. The sisters would be there. And Jesus would have been there. We believe the unmarked ossuaries contain the bones of the sisters. And if you look at what was in the tomb it almost exactly matches what biblical school and history would have expected to find in the tomb.

Jacobovici:  You have to remember that the tomb was dismissed in 1980, when it was first discovered, for two reasons. It wasn’t even published. Even a report wasn’t written. We wouldn’t have known it existed except for literally a handful of archeologists. Like four people; five people. It was dismissed today by people who haven’t seen the film. They are still dismissing. One is yes there were two Marys, but the second Mary wasn’t Mary Magdalene, and these were common names. Therefore, there is nothing to it. It’s like finding John, Paul, and George, but it doesn’t mean you found the Beatles. The people who were dismissing this as common names were archeologists. Yes, they have a skill set, but it’s not statistics. So what we did was we asked statisticians if is this impressive, if this is compelling. And what they said was individual the names may be common, but the cluster is statistically compelling.

TODAY: The other controversy here is the role Mary Magdalene played. If the ossuary contained her bones that would change some of the tenants of Christianity.

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