After “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” premiered on March 4, the Discovery Channel yanked three scheduled repeats of the film. Given that the film’s claims of Jesus’ bones being discovered in an ancient ossuary have been unanimously rejected by archaeologists and scholars, this wasn’t surprising—at least not to us. But the film’s creators, Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron, still didn’t get it.
In the March 26 edition of TelevisionWeek, Jacobovici had this to say: “The fact that nobody has been able to punch a hole in our reporting is a testament to how well we’ve done our homework. Even if it’s only a 50-50chance [of it being Jesus’ tomb], it’s still the biggest story on the planet.”
It was nice to know that Jacobovici was not as cock-sure as Cameron was. The director of “Titanic” wrote in the Foreword to the book, The Jesus Family Tomb, that their work proves “beyond any reasonable doubt” that they’ve found the bones of Jesus.
Now if that were the case, The Jesus Family Tomb—which corroborates the film’s findings—would be replete with evidence. But as we told the media in a March 27 news release, there is not one endnote or footnote in the book. It doesn’t even have an index.
The big story wasn’t “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” itself, but the avalanche of scholarly criticism that it triggered. From the Biblical Archaeology Society to esteemed professors in Israel, experts have torn this fable to shreds. So much so, in fact, that in honor of Cameron, we dubbed his latest film “The Titanic Fraud.”
