Interview with Simcha Jacobovici | Sound Authors Radio
November 4, 2008
Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, June 27. On this day in history a lot of interesting things happened. In 1868 way back then, 140 years ago, Harpers Weekly featured a cartoon about the black voting rights in the presidential election of 1868. We got that on our mind again with Barack Obama being elected (to run) against John McCain this fall. Today it’s a gloomy day out here in New York; its humid, it’s warm but its summertime, which is always wonderful. I have three guests on the show today instead of the usual four. I have a very special guest coming on in the first spot. His name is Simcha Jacobovici.
The second guest will be Gayle Greene who is the author of Insomniac and will talk to us about sleep disorders. At the end of the show a special musician, Dale Ann Bradley an incredible voice, an incredible talent. But my first guest is the author of a book and the director of many films, producer of many films television shows and things like that. The way that I came across his work is through The Lost Tomb of Jesus. There’s a movie, a documentary, and then there’s a book – The Jesus Family Tomb that he coauthored with Charles R. Pellegrino. Welcome to the show Simcha.
Simcha Jacobovici: Thank you very much; nice to be on.
Dr. Kent: Now can you explain to me how to say your name exactly?
Simcha Jacobovici: Well you said it pretty good; you didn’t say it badly at all. You could go Simka Jacobovichi or I’ll pronounce it for you the way it really is simkha yacobovich but simka jackobovich works too.
Dr. Kent: Very nice. So it’s a real honor speaking with you. Tell me a little bit about the Lost Tomb of Jesus the documentary.
Simcha Jacobovici: We have the Lost Tomb of Jesus, which was a two hour documentary which I co produced with Rick Vianstock and Phillip Scoluvab and our executive producer was James Cameron and it aired a year and a few months ago on Discovery US. The Jesus Family Tomb, which came out just in paperback a few weeks ago, you can get it on Amazon for Harper-Collins and these two tell the story, the book and the film, of a discovery in 1980 in the spring in Jerusalem, rather halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where it suggests of a family tomb dating to the time of Jesus, first century.
Then this family tomb they found ten limestone coffins or actuaries, bone boxes and six of them had inscriptions. One of the inscriptions seemed to suggest to the every day mind that this might be or at least should be considered to be the tomb of Jesus. One of the austuaries said on it Jesus, son of Joseph. Another said Maria. There was another Mary in the tomb, there was a Josey, which the Gospel of Mark tells us that particular nickname is what one of the brothers of Jesus was known as; Josey, Josain or Josef in Hebrew.
There was a Juda son of Jesus. Anyway these austuaries were put in a warehouse kind of Indiana Jones-like. They were put in a warehouse and not reported and the tomb was literally covered up with cement and everybody more or less forgot about it until we came along and we discovered the tomb and brought the whole story to the world and it became a front page story. Although some people like it to disappear and they were pressures put on the broadcasters not to air again and so on.
Dr. Kent: I was there. I watched the original Discovery airing of it and I immediately bought the book because I was so fascinated. I guess what captured my attention the most was I guess the hunt for there were these spirit pipes where you put the camera down and then you went somewhere else and it’s just this fascinating search for this one spot and you finally find it and it’s this simple, cement block. Talk a little bit about hwy that cement block was there.
Simcha Jacobovici: You know people are always bestsellers of the Templar and all of this. This is a real life thing, this is not fiction, this is real life. In 1980 they find this tomb. What happens in Jerusalem is the way tombs are found and about over 600 have been found. Either they are looted or a bulldozer finds them when they’re building a building. This one was a bulldozer found it. So you know you’re a contractor, you’re building a high rise, you start breaking ground and you come across a tomb.
According to Israeli law then you have to contact the Israel antiquities authorities. So the archaeologists come over. Time is money, you’re a builder, you put pressure on the archeologist. In this instance they took out all the austuaries and they gave the go ahead to the builders to destroy the tomb and build their building. The builders decided it was too complicated to build over the tomb and what they did is that they built the building a few yards away from where they originally planned. The tomb ended up being in the garden between these four or five high rises. The kids were playing in the tomb, the parents weren’t happy, along came a Yeshiva.
A Yeshiva is an academy and they have holy books. They have books that synagogues have. They study from them, they pray from them. According to Jewish law you’re not allowed to throw out holy books. So what you have to do is bury them as you would a human being and there is not much space to bury holy books in. So there’s a nearby Yeshiva or academy, they find out that there’s this open tomb in the garden between these buildings. So they say can we put all our books inside this tomb? The local residents say yeah, but you got to seal it because we don’t want our kids going in and out. So that’s what happened. It got sealed with a cement block; it gets filled with holy books. The holy books come apart right? You bury used, unusable holy books that can no longer be used and it gets sealed.
Now as far as the archaeologists are concerned they think the tomb has been destroyed when the building went up. They don’t know and we didn’t know that it still existed so what we did is we made a hunt for the tomb. Does it exist? Where is it? Are there more inscriptions in there? Are there bones in there? Can we get DNA from it? so our film and our book was based on this hunt and we knew that there was another tomb at the same time found some 20 to 30 meters away and in the course of looking for what we called the Jesus Family Tomb, we found the other tomb. Now the other tomb had pipes coming out of it and the reason being is that if there are still dead people in a tomb, according to Jewish law, if you covered the tomb up you have to in a sense provide access for the souls by having these soul pipes you know? These just ordinary pipes that give access between the tomb and the outer air.
When we located that other tomb, it’s under someone’s patio. I mean only in Jerusalem can it happen that you’re living in an apartment and under your patio there’s a 2,000 year old tomb with a bone box still there. You know, dead people still there and there sticking out of your patio floor are these soul pipes. What we did as you say is in the hunt for the Jesus tomb we found this other tomb. We put our robotic cameras, it sounds like National Treasure but its real life. We put our robo-cams down the pipes and we discovered this other tomb that people had forgotten about.
We really retrieved the first ever shots of an unexcavated tomb from the time of Jesus from Jerusalem. So we build the drama of by looking for the tomb along the way we found this other tomb. We realize that’s not the Jesus family tomb, we finally located the tomb in the garden, we were able to remove the cement cover and then was this climactic moment when I actually climbed into what I believe is the Jesus Family Tomb. So all that was dramatic central arc of the film and the book but along that if I could point out there were other investigations. DNA, statistics, patina, people will say statistically what are the odds that the Jesus who was buried in this tomb is Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe it’s another Jesus.
So we looked at stats to understand what are the odds that it is Jesus given the cluster of names. So we looked at patina. Patina is thin layer of sedimentation that occurs when you leave your house for many years you’ll come back and there will be you know dust, chemistry starting to happen on the walls. These tombs have their own chemistry. They have dripping water, they have whatever so there’s encrustation, a skin on top of the limestone on these bone boxes and we did chemical analysis of them to see if they have a fingerprint. Its forensic science meets archaeology. So that was the story, the search for the tomb and the science related to identifying whether it is or is not the Jesus Family Tomb.
Dr. Kent: I guess my real interest lies, that was all fascinating to me and built on top of that there’s this controversy of is James, there’s Mary Magdalene, was she the wife of Christ? Agnostic gospels; how’s it been in the aftermath of releasing this? I can imagine a lot of Christian groups are angry. What does Israel say? What kind of controversy have you been embroiled in?
Simcha Jacobovici: Well when we announced the film at a press conference in New York, James Cameron was there, scientists were there, Discovery was there, it made front pages pretty much all over the world. I was on CNN, on Larry King and so on. The reaction was there were different reactions. We didn’t get into theology. We didn’t say we didn’t get into resurrection and these kinds of things.
What we did is we reported on the existence of the tomb. But people some people were delighted. They said wow, I thought you know. Some people just liked it as an adventure, as a real life national treasure of a real life templar mystery. Some people were delighted that Jesus was not a myth because they thought he was a myth and here we had brought archaeological evidence to suggest that he and his family were real and there is history in the Gospels. Some people have started going to the tomb and treating it like a shrine, leaving flowers on Easter and so on and making physical contact with Jesus and His family.
But some people were very upset because they thought well you know, their understanding of say ascension is that Jesus ascended to Heaven with his body, bones organs and everything so therefore the fact that there were bone chips in the austuary called Jesus son of Joseph might mean that he did not ascend to heaven physically. Some people said well he could have ascended spiritually but others said no, we don’t buy that. This could not be Jesus because there wouldn’t be any bone chips.
We retrieved DNA from that and next to the Jesus son of Joseph in this tomb there’s a woman named Maria Mena. Maria Mena is a Greek version of Miriam. According to Christian tradition, it’s what Mary Magdalene was known as. Mary Magdalene means Mary of Magdala; it’s like Mary the New Yorker. That’s not what it would say on her tombstone. So what would it say? Well it would say her name and Christian tradition says that her name was the Greek version of the Hebrew Miriam. In the acts of Phillip for example, fourth century text, we have her, she’s named Mariam Mena or Mariamnae and its used to differentiate her from the mother of Jesus, which is known as Maria as in Ave Maria. An Aramaic becomes a Latin version of the Hebrew Miriam.
So next to Jesus here there is a Maria Mena, just what you would expect Mary Magdalene to be called. Now if you’re buried in a family tomb you’re either related by blood or by marriage. We did DNA on bone chips, from little tiny chips from the Maria Mena austuary and from the Jesus austuary. They did not match up, suggesting that they were married rather than related by blood and suggesting that Juda, son of Jesus, buried in this cave, was their son. Now for some people all of this was very disturbing because they said wait a minute, Jesus didn’t physically descend to heaven? Wait a minute, you mean he was married to Mary Magdalene? Wait a minute; they had a son named Judah?
All of this was upsetting so what happened was a tremendous amount of, I mean there’s a lot of internet chatter, there’s been I think six books against my book. Dr. Charlie Pellegrino and I, we wrote the book and I think there have been six books and three films already arguing against our presentation that this might very well be the tomb of Jesus. There’s so much pressure brought to bear on Discovery that they aired it once and even though it was their highest rated show of the year, actually more than a year, they never aired it again. They pulled all subsequent airings. Because there were over a million emails I think threatening sponsors and so on.
I don’t understand that because if somebody is strong in their faith, the way to maintain their faith, I don’t understand you maintain your faith by censoring of the people. My computer doesn’t compute that. In the UK, channel 4 bought it and never aired it even once. On the other hand, in France it aired. It aired in most places in the world to high ratings, lots of debate, and right now it kind of went off the front pages because one side is being censored, at least on television.
Dr. Kent: What does it feel like within your own life? There’s some chance that it’s not the tomb of Jesus, but from going through the proof, it’s quite likely. What does it feel like within your own life to have maybe found it?
Simcha Jacobovici: How would you feel if you brought to the world what is, I think you know, what all of these, what all of Hollywood fantasizes, right? There all these books about templars and tombs and blood lines, all these things are fantasy and yet how would you feel if you actually did the real thing? Suddenly there was this tremendous pressure on the one end to basically stifle the debate. I find it amazing that everybody is not talking about it all the time. I think it says something about the psychology of our predominantly Christian society that the society would rather deal with a tomb of Jesus in fiction than with the real thing. You know what I mean?
Dr. Kent: The Holy Grail, right?
Simcha Jacobovici: Yeah, but don’t show up with the Holy Grail. Let’s just keep making movies for the search for the Holy Grail. Lets make movies and write books about the bloodline, DaVinci Code, but don’t actually introduce me to someone, don’t actually show me an austuary that says on it indisputably, Jesus. Don’t show me that.
By the way, I’ve got to tell you that I think this story you know I mean you could shut up Galileo, you could shut up Copernicus, you could argue that the earth was flat for a while and you think you won a victory on the day you shut up Galileo, but at the end of the day the earth is round and its not at the center of our universe. So at the end of the day, truth has a funny way of coming out.
Dr. Kent: When people in predominantly the United states talk about creationism, we’re not descended from apes and they talk about things like that. This is very near to that. Its fascinating to me that Discovery Channel didn’t re-air it. I was waiting for it. I watched it when it came out, I caught the press release from New York. Is it frustrating to you that this project is over? I know you’re working on many other projects; you’ve won tons of awards. Is this project a pet project of yours? Is it something you always come back to?
Simcha Jacobovici: I don’t think it’s over. I think there’s science happening as we seek pursuing it. I think you hear the noisy scientists that say oh this is nonsense, this is bullshit, but you don’t hear the ones that are quietly working in labs around the world trying to see or in libraries. You don’t hear from them but for example, this statistician Professor Andre Foyerburger in our film and our book, he estimates in the film the odds of this is tomb of Jesus are 600:1 in favor. Everybody said oh, he’s just hamming it up for the camera, he didn’t write a scientific paper, he wasn’t peer reviewed, this is nonsense.
Well, in the years since, he’s refined his model; he presented his paper at the biggest gathering of statisticians in the world. This past month or last month, his paper was published after being peer reviewed and I think its called the Annals of Applied Statistics, the most prestigious statistical journal in the world. It turns out that the odds aren’t 600:1 in favor; they are actually 1600:1 in favor. Now that didn’t make headlines that the odds that this is the tomb of Jesus. It went up from 600 to 1600 and guess what? The paper wasn’t just peered on television. So it was peer reviewed and published in a prestigious journal.
So the science is ongoing and I think sooner or later this story, like I said the paperback just came out and sooner or later the story will be back on the front pages because the evidence continues to suggest and just more and more evidence is suggesting that this is the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and most of his family.
Dr. Kent: What I find fascinating about it is I didn’t know much about austuaries. I spent time in Jerusalem but it’s not something that is really all that public, the knowledge that there’s this tomb. They’d leave the body out until it become bones and then they’d put the bones in these bone boxes. Can you talk a little bit about the actual story of what might have happened?
Simcha Jacobovici: Well, people have mythologized the story of the historical Jesus and when they come into contact with the actual history they are sometimes elated and often upset. My job by the way, I don’t cross I don’t argue with people theology. I respect peoples beliefs and I don’t, I’m not a Christian, I’m a Jew, and I don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus and so on, but I’m not a profitizer. If somebody believes what they believe, it’s fine. It’s not my business to argue theology. My business is not to have archaeology cover it up.
I report on archaeology and so my business is to provide people. I won last year an Emmy along with my colleagues on a film of sex trafficking of women from the former soviet union, which by the way was very odd to me to win an Emmy in investigative journalism in the same year I believe I found the tomb of Jesus but I didn’t get the Emmy for finding the tomb of Jesus. But the thing is, my job as a journalist and I’ve got three Emmys in investigative journalism. I’m not bragging, that’s my profession. So my job is to report, to investigate and report. People mythologize the story; my job is to bring the facts out.
When you read a story in the Gospel that Jesus was crucified, his body was taken down, it was wrapped in a shroud; you know people think it’s the shroud of Turin and then it was put in a tomb. Then they came three days later; the shroud was empty, his body wasn’t there, the tomb was empty and there were sightings of Jesus and therefore he was resurrected and so on. When you read that, I remember as a young person when I read that and I heard that, I asked a simple question to myself. I don’t get that story. Why did they put him in a tomb or a cave? People die, you take them off a cross, you dig a grave and you put the dead person in the grave. I mean, you know, everybody agrees.
Its part of Christian theology that he was dead for three days. The pope believes that. Before you can have a resurrection the person has to die. Everybody according to the Gospels were surprised that he arose. So for three days he’s dead. Now if you take a dead body, why didn’t they just put him in a grave? Why did they put him in a tomb and roll a stone and all the rest of it? Well if you don’t know that’s how some people were buried in Jerusalem in that time, the story makes no sense. But in fact, the Gospels are accurate. It’s called secondary burial.
Many people what they did is they took a body, wrapped it in a prayer shawl or shroud, left it on a shelf in the rock hewn tomb because according to Jewish law you have to be buried in the ground before sunset. Again you’ve seen the Gospel said we’ve got to bury him before sunset; that’s accurate. It’s Jewishly accurate. Let’s not forget that this is not happening in Japan this story, its happening in Judea, the land of the Jews. All the Apostles, all the Disciples, everybody except the Romans are Jewish. So what’s happening is, including Jesus is Jewish. He’s getting wrapped in a shroud, he’s put in a rock-hewn tomb because according to rabbinic law that counts as being buried in the ground, and he’s left there.
Now why is he left there? I mean there’s thousands of such people that have been found. People were buried that way and what would happen is families would come back a year or 14 months later after the body had decomposed and gather up the stone, the bones, and put them in stone bone boxes. Now, why did they do that? We don’t know. Some people speculate it had something to do with resurrection. There was a Messiah fever in the air. People thought it was the end of days.
You know the resurrection of the dead is about to happen so in a kind of ancient what’s it called when people freeze dry their bodies now; cryogenics. They wanted to keep their bones together in a box for the day of resurrection. I heard people say no, that’s not why; land was scarce in Jerusalem but putting people in these boxes, you could fit three, four people in a burial site. It was economic; the family could visit the tomb and so on.
For whatever reason, the way Jesus is buried in the Gospel is an actual rendition of a secondary burial. That means you leave the body to decompose, that’s the first burial. Then you come back, gather the bones and put them in a bone box. That’s the second burial. The gospel says well, they came back three days later and there was no more body; He had risen. But the Gospel of Matthew says that some people say the Disciples came and took the body and buried it elsewhere. So right in the Gospels you have an alternative theory.
They may have believed in a spiritual resurrection, but right in the Gospel it says that some people say the disciples came after the Sabbath and reburied him. If that’s accurate then the tomb that we identified or publicized and made famous may be that second tomb.
Dr. Kent: This has been a real pleasure; I could speak with you for hours. I believe that you did find the tomb of Jesus and after reading the book and watching the film, I think many people do and at the very least I think it’s a beautiful thing to bring out to the public and show this was a human being and this is an archaeological find that could be world changing.
Simcha Jacobovici: It could be the greatest archaeological find of the millennium. By the way we have a website called losttombofjesus.com and a lot of this controversy and Professor James Stabler of the University of North Carolina in Charlotte; he has this Jesus dynasty website. He did this dynasty and you can really track it; biblical archaeology review magazine has a website. You could track and you say you could talk forever. People have been debating is that really Mary Magdalene, maybe it says something else, there’s like still a lot of passion and debate on the internet over the book, the film. You can order the film by the way and you’re not going to see it on TV. I think the last word hasn’t been said on the subject.
Dr. Kent: The paperback just came out of The Lost Tomb of Jesus and the film is available.
Simcha Jacobovici: Jesus Family Tomb.
Dr. Kent: Right, the Jesus family tomb.
Simcha Jacobovici: The lost tomb of Jesus is the DVD and the book is called the Jesus Family Tomb. If you go to amazon.com you can get both.
Dr. Kent: Wonderful; and I have the DVD in my collection and I passed it along to my parents and my mother especially loves it. Its been a pleasure speaking with you and I wish you all the success in the world.
Simcha Jacobovici: Thank you.
Dr. Kent: I’ve been speaking with Simcha Jacobovici it’s been a real pleasure.
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