Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina is a leading archaeologist of the Land of Israel (see right). She has written a critical assessment of the claims made by Simcha Jacobovici's (see left) documentary on The Lost Tomb of Jesus. In her assessment titled Has the Tomb of Jesus been Discovered? she concludes:
"The identification of the Talpiot tomb as the tomb of Jesus and his family contradicts the canonical Gospel accounts of the death and burial of Jesus and the earliest Christian traditions about Jesus. The claim is also inconsistent with all of the available information—historical and archaeological—about how Jews in the time of Jesus buried their dead, and specifically the evidence we have about poor, non-Judean families such as that of Jesus. It is a sensationalistic claim without any scientific basis or support".
