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So did they find the tomb of Jesus?  Has the resurrection been disproved?  Not a chance!  This is just another one of the recent attempts to dupe who the promoters count on being the un-informed public.

The Jesus tomb: There was a tomb, an ossuary or “bone box,” found  in Jerusalem in 1980 which reportedly had the names of a Joseph, Mary, Mariamne Mara (whom they took for Mary Magdalene) and a “Jesus son of Joseph.”A film documentary was made in 2007 by James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici suggesting it was the family tomb of Jesus. But practically no serious scholars give this idea any credibility because:

• All the names inscribed in this tomb were very common. According to Resurrection expert Dr. Michael Licona,^[1] Mary was the most common woman’s name in Jerusalem, and Joseph was the second most common man’s name. One out of every eleven men was named Jesus. Licona spells out the implications of this: “As Cameron’s documentary said, finding the names of John, Paul and George is no big deal, but when you add Ringo to the pool, you may have something. The problem, of course, is that when you really examine things, there’s no equivalent of ‘Ringo’ in the Talpiot tomb.”[2]

• According to calculations by physicist Randy Ingermanson, one out of every seventy–nine males in Jerusalem was Jesus, son of Joseph. Hershel Shanks and Ben Witherington III estimate that during the ninety–year period in which ossuaries were used―from 20 B.C. to 70 A.D.―there were about eighty thousand males in Jerusalem. That means there were approximately a thousand men named Jesus who had a father named Joseph.”^[3] Dr. Licona goes on to say that even if all the other names found are taken into account approximately eleven men would still be in Jerusalem that fit this exact profile.
• Furthermore, this does not take into account the fact that there is absolutely no credible evidence Jesus was ever married and much evidence He was single.^[4]
• Also, the tomb may have included extended family members as well as immediate family. So the Mary or “Mariamne Mara” who was in the tomb could have been an aunt, cousin, etc.
• DNA tests supposedly showed that “Jesus” and “Mariamne” were not related, and so it was automatically assumed they were married. But this is jumping to quite an unwarranted conclusion! She may have been married to one of several other men in the ossuary, or to none of them, since nothing there indicates who her husband was.^[5] Also, the ossuaries often held more than one skeleton, making it difficult to match up the names with the bones.^[6]
• Lee Strobel quotes historian Paul Maier: “This is merely naked hype, baseless sensationalism, and nothing less than a media fraud.”^[7]

So once again careful research exposes another failed attempt to debunk the resurrection of Christ.