A group of scholars has posted a statement rejecting the claims of the "Lost Tomb of Jesus" that the Talpiot tomb belongs to Jesus a week after a conference in Jerusalem revisited some of the controversial film's assertions.
In a statement posted Monday on the Duke University Religion Department's blog site, key figures in the discovery of the 1980 Talpoit tomb and other experts who attended the conference agreed that most scholars had rejected claims that the tomb belonged to the author of Christianity, despite media reporting otherwise.
"We wish to protest the misrepresentation of the conference proceedings in the media, and make it clear that the majority of scholars in attendance – including all of the archaeologists and epigraphers who presented papers relating to the tomb – either reject the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus’ family or find this claim highly unlikely," reads the statement.
Among the scholars who signed the statement were Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, an archaeologist who participated in the dig, Amos Kloner, who supervised the dig, and Duke University professor Eric Meyers, who was among the five panelists in the concluding session.
"It's very unfortunate that a serious meeting of scholars on Jewish belief of the afterlife got so mixed up with media spin," Myers told The Christian Post on Tuesday.
The consensus by the scholars dealt a huge blow to claims made by “The Lost Tomb of Jesus" filmmakers, “Titanic” director James Cameron and Jewish investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici.
In the film, Cameron and Jacobovici suggested that archaeologists had found the family tomb of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, challenging most Christians’ belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The duo went further to also suggest that Mary Magdalene was buried in the tomb, that she and Jesus were married, and that an ossuary labelled "Judah son of Jesus" belonged to their alleged son.
The experts – which included archaeologists, statisticians and experts in DNA, ceramics and ancient languages – arrived at their conclusion after five days of testimonies and presentations at last week's conference entitled “Third Princeton Theological Seminary Symposium on Jewish Views of the Afterlife and Burial Practices in Second Temple Judaism: Evaluating the Talpiot Tomb in Context.”
Myers said he was "unalterably" and "unequivocally" opposed to the identification of the East Talpoit tomb as belonging to Jesus.
New Testament Language and Literature Professor James Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary, the conference's organiser, also joined Myers and Gibson in the concluding panel to reject claims that the tomb belonged to Jesus.
While there was no formal vote on the matter, the professor said that virtually all the scholars at the conference held the same views.
Myers, who specialises in archaeology and the history of Second Temple, said there are two main reasons why he rejected the claims put forth by Cameron and Jacobovici.
The first dealt with the statistical analysis presented by Andrey Feuerverger, professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Toronto. Feuerverger had calculated that there was a 1 in 600 chance that the particular cluster of names found on the Talpoit ossuaries would occur in one of the roughly 1,000 tombs discovered so far.
It was not the statistical process he used that flagged the analysis for Myers, but it was the information Feuerverger used to calculate those odds.
