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TagsBY TERI GATTO
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
A Biblical scholar and a documentary filmmaker claim to have found the tomb where Jesus was buried.
James Tabor, a Biblical scholar and Simcha Jacobovici, a documentary filmmaker, explored an ancient Jerusalem tomb by using a camera attached to a robotic arm and, according to the London’s Daily Mail, found several limestone boxes or ossuaries, which date from the first century.
One of the boxes has a four-line Greek inscription that could be translated into “Divine Jehovah, raise up, raise up.”
The newly published book, “The Jesus Discovery: The New Archaeological Find That Reveals the Birth of Christianity” by Tabor and Jacobovici chronicles the discovery of the tomb. This spring the Discovery Channel will air a documentary on the authors’ findings.
“They made a remarkable discovery. The tomb contained several ossuaries, or bone boxes, two of which were carved with an iconic image and a Greek inscription. Taken together, the image and the inscription constitute the earliest archaeological evidence of faith in Jesus’ resurrection,” says the Amazon.com description of the book.
"If anyone had claimed to find either a statement about resurrection or a Jonah image in a Jewish tomb of this period I would have said impossible -- until now,” said Tabor in a Fox News report. "Our team was in a kind of ecstatic disbelief, but the evidence was clearly before our eyes, causing us to revise our prior assumptions."
The Jesus Family Tomb, found in the 1980s, is only 200-feet from Tabor and Jacobovici’s discovery. This first tomb was never fully explored because Orthodox Jews objected to having a burial site disturbed.
Tabor is chair of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and the author of "The Jesus Dynasty" and other books.
Jacobovici is the host of the television series "The Naked Archaeologist" and authored the book "The Jesus Family Tomb." In 2006, he was part of a team that won the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award for the PBS Frontline documentary “Sex Slaves."
