Simcha Jacobovici certainly knows how to construct a dramatic movie.
Simcha Jacobovici works inside the tomb with a flashlight.
Photo: Courtesy
His new documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, employs dramatized reconstructions of Biblical-era events, lavishly filmed. The voice-over is at once warm and authoritative. The graphics are sleek - ancient inscriptions leap off from the sides of dusty burial boxes and glow on the screen, with accompanying whooshes and fizzes from the sound effects department.
The narrative is effectively told. Complex historical connections and arguments are presented in short, comprehensible segments, interspersed with modern drama as we flash to this DNA lab, Jacobovici engages that skeptical archeological expert or, in the film's central red herring, the team seek entry to what turns out to be the wrong tomb.
The key evidence is introduced piece by piece, or in this case bone box by inscribed bone box, with appropriate statistical support. At one point the staggering assertion is made that there is a 1 in 97,280,000 chance of the Talpiot burial chamber at issue not being the final resting place of Jesus, his mother, his wife (yes, wife), his brother and other relatives.
By the end, that figure is qualified to a 1 in 30,000 chance, again, of this not being the burial tomb of the founder of Christianity, and by now the bone box of Jesus's son (that's right, son; we've veered dangerously near to Da Vinci Code territory by now) has been introduced into the mix as well.
And through the heart of the movie strides Jacobovici himself, a tall, striking, likable figure. Here he is, marveling as he first sees the "Jesus son of Joseph" inscription on the ossuary that has been left out so casually on a shelf in the Israel Antiquities Authority storehouse in Beit Shemesh. Watch him as he switches effortlessly back and forth between English and Hebrew, and between the languages, for that matter, of archeology, New Testament study and forensic testing. And who can resist him jumping excitedly, fearlessly, into the newly reopened Talpiot tomb (the right one this time)?
Camera crews in tow, Jacobovici tracks back through history - part intellectual, part adventurer: Indiana Jones the investigative journalist.
Even Prof. Amos Kloner, the Jerusalem District archeologist who oversaw the handling of the Talpiot tomb when it was first uncovered, in 1980, amid construction work in the Jerusalem neighborhood of East Talpiot, found Jacobovici's charm and enthusiasm irresistible. Kloner told me on Saturday night that he thought Jacobovici "very likable."
But the effect of Jacobovici's assertions, of course, if you find them compelling, is to make an absolute incompetent of Kloner and, indeed, of the whole Israeli archeological establishment, who failed to recognize that they had stumbled upon one of the greatest discoveries of all time - the final resting place of a man revered by millions upon millions of believers across the millennia, of his revered mother, his wife, his family. Worse still, they were incompetents who sent away whatever remained of the great man's mortal coil for routine Jewish burial elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly, Kloner is having none of it. The film, to him, is a scam. Absurd. Unscientific. "Give me scientific evidence," he said in our conversation, "and I'll grapple with it." But Jacobovici's findings? "Impossible," he said. "Nonsense," he snorted. "He's inventing a story."
THE LOST Tomb of Jesus, which will be broadcast locally next week on Channel 8, is a tale of 10 bone boxes, the ossuaries carried away and catalogued by those Jerusalem archeologists under Kloner's supervision from a 2,000-year-old burial chamber, its entrance marked by a strange inverted chevron (Da Vinci time again) with a circle in it, that today lies sealed beneath an unremarkable rectangular concrete slab between two rows of apartment blocs a short drive into East Talpiot.
The first Talpiot ossuary that Jacobovici talks us through on screen is that purportedly of Jesus himself. Kloner told me the inscription on this box was far from conclusively decipherable.
Harvard scholar Frank Moore Cross, a professor emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is adamant, however, in the movie. "I have no real doubt," he says, that the lettering reads, "Jesus son of Joseph."
Not good enough for Kloner. He knows of four ossuaries, he told me, that bear precisely such an inscription.
But Jacobovici has more - much more.
Ossuary 2 is inscribed with the name of Mary - presumably the Virgin Mary, to whom Christian tradition, the film assures us, often ascribes a Jerusalem burial.
Ossuary 3 is trickier. "Matia," the inscription reads - apparently a nickname for Matthew. It's a name, the filmmakers acknowledge, that "at first doesn't seem to fit." To the rescue comes James Tabor, the chairman of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and a historical and archeological consultant on the Jacobovici project. Mary's ancestry, as documented in the Gospel of Luke, Tabor notes, features five, six, seven or more variants of Matthew down the generations, "so I don't think it's odd that we would have a Matthew in this tomb," he pronounces.
Except that it is odd, since while the filmmakers have already told us that various Christian traditions give Jesus sisters (Miriam and Salome) and brothers (Simon, Judah, James and Joseph), there is no credible text mention or even tradition of a blood-relative named Matthew, a relative close enough to put in your family burial chamber.
No matter, we're on to Ossuary 4. This one is inscribed "Jose" (with a "Heh" on the end). Triumphant now, Tabor tells us that Jesus's brother Joseph is referred to by precisely this nickname in the gospel of Mark.
Ossuary 5 is problematic, too. While the other inscriptions are in Hebrew or Aramaic, this one is in Greek. It's another Mary, but with a twist - a curious variant spelled "Mariamne e Mara" - which might be translated as "Mary known as the master."
