I don’t agree with you in 100%, but you covered some good points regarding this topic…

To begin with, the name “Jesus” is not even legible on the so-called “Jesus son of Joseph” ossuary, as they could have verified with any serious semitics scholar. The original transcriber himself (see the Israeli Catalogue of Ossuaries) put a question-mark after his reading, and two dots over the “Jesus” part of the name, thus indicating in standard fashion that he was making a conjecture (in this case one that is obviously remote). The film’s producer, however, carefully omitted this fundamental point from his statements to the press, instead saying that the reading had been “conclusively confirmed” by unnamed experts. Yet no one pinned him down on the identities of these experts. For details, see http://jesus-illegible.blogspot.com/

As for James Tabor, he is the same character at the center of the recently debunked claim — one also widely disseminated by the media — that an “Essene latrine” has been found near the site of Khirbet Qumran. This site, readers will recall, is the place where so-called traditional Qumranologists (including, it would appear, Tabor himself) continue to insist, in the face of mounting contrary evidence, that a sect of Essenes lived.

Tabor also appears to be involved in the current biased and misleading exhibits of the Dead Sea Scrolls traveling around the country. One must ask if the museums hosting these exhibits have abdicated their scientific and pedagogical role in favor of one comparable to the role played by newspapers and television.
For details, see http://jesus-crypt-fraud.blogspot.com/ and the other postings published by the authors of that blog.

For Tabor’s “Essene latrine” efforts (also based in part on a misleading use of DNA evidence), see K. Galor and J. Zangenberg at http://www.forward.com/articles/led-…d-sea-latrine/, or the most recent article by N. Golb on the Oriental Institute website, http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/scr/). Golb’s article goes into considerable detail on a variety of inappropriate declarations made to the press, in part by Tabor and his collaborator Joe Zias, over the past decade.

Professor Jim Davila’s blog (March 6, 2007) http://paleojudaica.blogspot.com/ quotes Tabor as asserting to him in an email: “I have never excavated even one tomb, and I am not even an archaeologist and have never claimed to be such.”

Yet Tabor himself, in an article published in the Charlotte Observer, excerpted on the same paleojudaica blog a year ago (February 13, 2006), wrote: “As an archaeologist, I have long observed and experienced the thrill that ancient discoveries cause in all of us. The look on the faces of my students as we uncover ancient ruins from the time of Jesus, or explore one of the caves where the scrolls were found, is unmistakable.”

Tabor’s Ph.D. was awarded to him by the University of Chicago’s Department of New Testament and Christian Literature (which is housed in that institution’s Divinity School building). The title of his dissertation was “Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise”. He clearly has no training as an archaeologist, historian, or semitics scholar, and we will no doubt be left to wonder at the motivations that led him to become involved in these phony scams.

I’ve just been chatting to Dr Ross Clifford. Principal of Morling College in New South Wales and current President of the Baptist Union of Australia, on my radio programme. We had a good chat about the ‘new discovery’.

I’ve put a link to our chat on my blog. http://www.rodneyolsen.net/2007/02/putting-jesus-in-box.html