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The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History

SIMCHA JACOBOVICI and CHARLES PELLEGRINO
foreword by JAMES CAMERON

What if Jesus didn’t exist at all? Today many experts are saying exactly that. The theory is that he was a conflation of pagan god-man and death/Resurrection myths with first-century Jewish messiah traditions and that he had no more historical substance than Zeus. In various pagan mystery religions predating the first century C.E.(A.D.), Osiris, Attis, and Dionysus were all god-men who died around the time of Easter (the spring equinox) and were resurrected after three days. And all three of these deities predated Jesus by centuries. Christmas itself is thought by most scholars to be an adoption of the pagan tradition of celebrating the winter solstice. With many of the basic narrative points of the Jesus story, such as the virgin birth and the Resurrection,predating his supposed existence by hundreds of years, a compelling case has been made that he never existed at all but was a myth created to fulfill a specific need. In the absence of a single particle of physical evidence that Jesus Christ actually lived, this recent movement among historical scholars could not be factually refuted.

But now, with this stunning book, Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino have delivered not just a particle of evidence but a veritable avalanche of it. Their investigation proves, I believe, beyond any reasonable doubt that a first-century Jewish tomb found in Talpiot, Jerusalem,in 1980 is the tomb of Jesus and his family. What’s even more electrifying is what the physical evidence from within the tomb says about Jesus, his death, and his relationships with the other family members found in the same burial site.

This book chronicles a three-year investigation of the most stunning archaeological find of the last century. With systematic rigor, Simcha and Charlie analyze the physical evidence, cross-referencing it with clues from both the canonical and the apocryphal Gospels to fill in the first complete picture of the Jesus family. It reads like a gripping detective novel, and one has to pinch oneself to remember that it is real. Absolutely real.
Whether you believe that Jesus was the Son of God or that he was merely a man, it is beyond question that he was one of the most important men who ever lived; arguably, he is the man whose life continues to have the single greatest impact on our world. But we don’t have a time machine, and the physics suggests that we never will. We must rely on history and its sister discipline, archaeology. So what do we truly know, historically and archaeologically, about this Jesus? One and a half billion Chris tians—more than one-fifth of the world’s population—believe they know exactly who Jesus was. But what do we really know for sure?

Most of what we know, or think we know, comes from the four great Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But what exactly are these Gospels? To the deeply and unquestioningly faithful, they are the direct and absolute word of God, recorded by the most saintly of men. Historians,however, now view them as composite works, each created by several authors and based in turn on oral traditions carried on for decades, possibly half a century, after Christ’s actual ministry. There is no historical
evidence that any of the authors, if in fact they were individuals, actually heard the words of Jesus from his own lips.

Our society has a schizophrenic relationship to the concept of empirical proof. We rely on a complex science of criminal forensics in our justice system. We use advanced instrumentation to analyze minute samples of blood, fiber, and DNA evidence, all with the purpose of determining the fate of individuals, sometimes with life-or-death consequences. And yet, according to recent polls, 45 percent of Americans don’t believe in evolution. Almost half of this rational, show-me-theproof society is capable of ignoring two hundred years of scientific investigation—science performed with the same rigor and the same instrumentation used to judge a man’s life.

Some of the most respected experts in biblical history and archaeology have contributed to this investigation. Even so, our results will be challenged—as they should be. That is the scientific process that drives toward an accepted truth. Our investigation must be followed by others to examine the evidence in greater detail (and with better budgets), and this larger investigation and peer-review process should take years, perhaps decades. But I believe that the results of Simcha and Charlie’s initial investigation are extremely convincing.

As I write, it is Christmas Eve. The world is as torn by war as ever, and those wars are centered more in biblical lands than they have been for almost a millennium. A few months ago, the last part of our film production was delayed because Lebanese Katusha rockets were falling too close to our locations in Nazareth. Jesus’s cry for compassion among men is as desperately needed a message today as it ever was. At Christmas we celebrate the birth of a man who called to the spark of goodness that exists within all of us, a man who gave the world hope two thousand years ago. His words, thoughts, and deeds have echoed down through the centuries undiminished.

But who was this Jesus?
Read on. You’re about to meet him.

James Cameron
December 24, 2006

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