Ben Witherington responds to the latest claim by Simcha Jacobovici that the James Ossuary came from the Talpiot Tomb, thereby proving that this was the burial place of Jesus the Messiah.

Of course [Aryeh] Shimron has not published his results yet, nor has there been peer review of them by other scholars, but nonetheless another Jacobvici movie is already in the works. This is not how proper and objective scholarship is done, either in terms of the financing, nor in terms of the announcements of results. You don’t sort of make a bombshell announcement of conclusions to the press on Easter weekend before other peers have had a chance to weigh in on the evidence, unless of course you are trying to make an impression of a certain sort. And there is little doubt that a certain agenda is being pursued here, as has been clear before with previous films, and in all likelihood with the forthcoming one. Disinterested pure science this is not.

James Tabor responds to Witherington here, but he does not address the issues that Witherington has raised in the paragraph above. If the scholarship is so solid, why use such unscholarly methods?

HT: Ted Weis