Just another Tuesday in Jerusalem

 

"Resurrection Tomb" is a 2012 documentary based on the 2011 book "The Jesus Discovery" by American scholar James Tabor and Israeli-Canadian film maker Simcha Jacobovici. It tells the tale of an intensely controversial archeological excavation in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem. 

Jacobovici is associated with the so-called Jesus Family Tomb at Talpiot. He and his team believes that Mary Magdalene was buried there, that she may have been the wife of Jesus, and that their son Judah is also interred in the tomb. None of which is Biblical, although it does square well with "The Da Vinci Code"! Nearby, quite literally under a residential building, is the so-called Second Tomb, the focus of the present documentary. 

Jacobovici had to fight an uphill battle to excavate the Second Tomb. Bureaucratic red tape, militant Orthodox Jewish activists, and the residents of the house on top of the tomb all tried to stop the dig at various points. The situation was almost surreal. At one point, a man owning a flat in the house demand that the archeologists abort their mission with the argument that he won´t be able to sell his home since nobody wants to live on top of a grave! A rather bizarre claim since it´s never been a secret what was underneath the house...

Oh, and Simcha believes that Jesus was buried in the Second Tomb. I think *somebody* even in Jerusalem would love to buy a condo right above the world´s most famous archeological site (if such it is).

After negotiating with the Orthodox Jewish rabbi, the team gets permission for a "non-intrusive" investigation, which means that they can´t remove anything from the tomb, only take moving pictures with the help of a camera fastened on a robotic arm. At least, they can see art and inscriptions at the ossuaries. Tabor believes that the tomb contains two Christian symbols: the cross and Jonah escaping from the bowels of the big fish. He rather daringly interprets an inscription on one of the ossuaries as "Jesus, Jesus, Rise, Rise". The idea is that the bones of *Jesus himself* were placed in the bone-box, making the inscription an invocation to *him* to rise again!

Needless to say, these findings have not been universally accepted. It seems most archeologists reject both the "big fish" and Tabor´s reading of the invocation. 

In other words: Just another Tuesday in Biblical archeology.