Jesus Tomb Discovery Team's 'Jonah Whale' a Deception, Say Scholars

The controversy surrounding the Jesus Tomb discovery in Jerusalem continues as scholars and archeologists argue over a 2,000-year-old "Jonah Whale" engraving which some say represents the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Other scholars suggest, however, that the team behind the discovery has been deceiving the public.

Led by filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, an archeological team including biblical historian James Tabor, professor and chair of religious studies at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, used a robotic arm and camera in 2010 to chart through a 1st century CE Jerusalem tomb they say contains the bones of Christ, his family and some of his disciples.

The findings were released in the book The Jesus Discovery: The New Archaeological Find that Reveals the Birth of Christianity. The tomb allegedly contains ossuaries with inscriptions containing the names of the holy family, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, next to each other. Jacobovici and Tabor said that it was unlikely such a sequence of names was coincidental, but others have insisted those names were common at the time and might indeed be purely coincidental. Read more