Did James Cameron find Jesus?





It makes a great story for a TV film. But it's completely impossible. It's nonsense. There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb. They were a Galilee family with no ties in Jerusalem . The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle class family from the 1st century CE .~ Amos Kloner †



~ Jodi Magness †



Jesus' family, being poor, presumably could not afford a rock-cut tomb, as even the more "modest" ones were costly. And had Jesus' family owned a rock-cut tomb, it would have been located in their hometown of Nazareth , not in Jerusalem . For example, when Simon, the last of the Maccabean brothers and one of the Hasmonean rulers, built a large tomb or mausoleum for his family, he constructed it in their hometown of Modiin. In fact, the Gospel accounts clearly indicate that Jesus' family did not own a rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem -- for if they had, there would have been no need for Joseph of Arimathea to take Jesus' body and place it in his own family's rock-cut tomb! If Jesus' family did not own a rock-cut tomb, it means they also had no ossuaries ~ Jodi Magness †



L. Y. Rahmani, an Israeli archaeologist who compiled a catalogue of all of the ossuaries in the collections of the state of Israel , observed that "In Jerusalem 's tombs, the deceased's place of origin was noted when someone from outside Jerusalem was interred in a local tomb." On ossuaries in rock-cut tombs that belonged to Judean families, it was customary to indicate the ancestry or lineage of the deceased by naming the father, as, for example, Judah son of John (Yohanan); Honya son of Alexa; and Martha daughter of Hananya. But in rock-cut tombs owned by non-Judean families (or which contained the remains of relatives from outside Judea ), it was customary to indicate the deceased's place of origin, as, for example, Simon of Ptolemais; Papias the Bethshanite (of Beth Shean); and Gaios son of Artemon from Berenike. Our historical and literary sources (such as the Gospels, Flavius Josephus, among others) often make the same distinctions between Judeans and non-Judeans (for example, Galileans, Idumaeans, Saul of Tarsus, Simon of Cyrene, and so on). If the Talpiyot tomb is indeed the tomb of Jesus and his family, we would expect at least some of the ossuary inscriptions to reflect their Galilean origins, by reading, for example, Jesus [son of Joseph] of Nazareth (or Jesus the Nazarene), Mary of Magdala, and so on. However, the inscriptions provide no indication that this is the tomb of a Galilean family and instead point to a Judean family

What in the world is the "Jesus Family" doing, having a burial plot in Jerusalem , of all places, the very city that crucified Jesus? Galilee was their home. In Galilee they could have had such a family plot, not Judea . Besides all of which, church tradition -- and Eusebius -- are unanimous in reporting that Mary died in Ephesus . Paul Maier †



How come there is no tradition whatever -- Christian, Jewish, or secular -- that any part of the Holy Family was buried at Jerusalem? Paul Maier †



Carney Matheson The only conclusions we made was that these two sets [DNA for Jesus and Mariamne] were not maternally related. To me it sounds like absolutely nothing. †

How come there is no tradition whatever -- Christian, Jewish, or secular -- that any part of the Holy Family was buried at Jerusalem?

(See also

The versions of computations appearing in the media are only simplifications. Furthermore, the results of any such computations depend heavily on the assumptions that go into it... It is not in the purview of statistics to conclude whether or not this tombsite is that of the New Testament family. Any such conclusion much more rightfully belongs to the purview of biblical historical scholars who are in a much better position to assess the assumptions entering into the computations. The role of statistics here is primarily to attempt to assess the odds of an equally (or more) `compelling' cluster of names arising purely by chance under certain random sampling assumptions and under certain historical assumptions. In this respect I now believe that I should not assert any conclusions connecting this tomb with any hypothetical one of the NT family