EASTER IS around the corner, so it must be time for a dramatic revelation that will blow the lid off Christianity.
Remember the Gospel of Judas? Right around now last year, the "newly discovered" (actually, knocking around for 30 years until a high-price buyer could be found) Gnostic papyrus was supposed to prove that Judas Iscariot was actually a good guy. This year, the breaking news, to be uncovered tonight on the Discovery Channel in a $4-million documentary film produced by James Cameron of "Titanic," is that archaeologists have found Jesus' tomb in Jerusalem and that the ossuary containing DNA from his bones proves that he didn't rise from the dead. Talk about the Titanic -- Cameron's findings aim to sink an entire religion.
As with the Gospel of Judas, the tomb is not a new discovery. Construction workers stumbled upon the 2,000-year-old structure in Jerusalem's Talpiot neighborhood in 1980. Inside the small tomb were 10 ossuaries, carved stone caskets containing bones that reflected the 1st century Jewish burial practice of wrapping corpses in linen and spices until the flesh decayed, then moving the bones into a small box. Four of the ossuaries were carved, in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, with familiar-sounding names: Jesus, son of Joseph (Yeshua bar Yehosef); Judah, son of Jesus (Yehuda bar Yeshua); and two Marys (Maria and Mariamene).
Rabbis had long since buried the bones inside the tomb, as is Israeli custom, but the Yeshua and Mariamene ossuaries contained mitochondrial DNA that, when tested in 2005 showed that the two occupants seemed to be biologically unrelated. That was enough for Cameron and his fellow documentarian, Simcha Jacobovici: They concluded that Mariamene was Mary Magdalene, wife of Yeshua or Jesus, and Yehuda was little Jude, their offspring. The other Mary ("Maria") had to be Jesus' mother, they decided, and the Talpiot discoveries were dubbed "Jesus' family tomb."
Most archaeologists and biblical scholars consider Cameron's and Jacobovici's theories to be pure speculation, pointing out that the names "Jesus," "Mary," "Joseph" and "Jude" were common Jewish names during the 1st century and have been found on numerous ossuaries (there is even another "Jesus, son of Joseph" ossuary).
