A documentary by "Titanic" director James Cameron claims to have found the burial site of the biblical Jesus and his alleged wife and son in an ancient family cemetery in Jerusalem.
Cameron and his co-filmmaker, Israel-born Simcha Jacobovici said Monday their research suggested Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a son, Judah, who were buried with him. The claim contradicts the Bible's account that the Christian Son of God was single, died when crucified and resurrected three days later and ascended to heaven, central tenets of Christian belief.
The explosive claims in the documentary "The Lost Tomb of Christ" could reignite questions about whether Jesus had an earthly family life - an idea popularised in the hit book and movie "The Da Vinci Code."
Cameron and Jacobovici, an award-winning documentary director, based their film on a tomb unearthed in Talpiot, Jerusalem, in 1980 by a construction crew developing an apartment complex. They cite evidence of names etched on ossuaries, or limestone bone boxes, dug up at the site, as well as DNA evidence they hold and other technical analysis.
US Catholic and Protestant leaders however ridiculed the claims, saying that there is no proof linking the find to the biblical Jesus. "I am not an archeologist or a Bible scholar," Cameron told reporters Monday.
The documentary is to air Sunday on US cable television. Five of the 10 boxes discovered in the Talpiot tomb were inscribed with names believed referring to key figures in the New Testament: Jesus, Mary, Matthew, Joseph and Mary Magdalene. A sixth inscription, written in Aramaic, translates to "Judah son of Jesus."
Such tombs "are very typical for that region," Aaron Brody, associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion and director of California's Bade Museum, told Discovery News, which will carry the documentary on its cable channel.
In addition to the "Judah son of Jesus" inscription, another limestone burial box is labelled in Aramaic with "Jesus son of Joseph." Another bears the Hebrew inscription "Maria," a Latin version of "Miriam," or, in English, "Mary." Yet another ossuary inscription, written in Hebrew, reads "Matia," the original Hebrew word for "Matthew." Only one of the inscriptions is written in Greek. It reads, "Mariamene e Mara," which can be translated as, "Mary known as the master," the television network said.