The gravest story ever told?

James Cameron, director of Titanic, has unveiled what he claims is the coffin of Jesus Christ.

reports.

Today's headline on the Cinema Blend website says it all: "James Cameron To Terminate Christianity."

The director of Titanic yesterday unveiled what he believes may be Jesus's coffin. He called it possibly the first physical evidence of Christ's life of earth. With echoes of The Da Vinci Code, Cameron believes Christ may have married Mary Magdalene and fathered a son, Judah.

He insists that the coffin, and the DNA fragments it allegedly contained, do not threaten Christianity.

This seems a curious claim. The Resurrection of Christ and his Ascension into Heaven are at the heart of Christianity. If Cameron's find were proved to be genuine, it would be a huge blow to 2,000 years of Christianity. But it is a huge "if."

For a start, this is not a new discovery. The plain limestone box, or ossuary, was one of 10 discovered in a cave tomb stumbled on by builders in Jerusalem 27 years ago.

Relatives

The severely disintegrated bones found in the coffins were reburied according to tradition, but human matter collected by Cameron's film-makers has provided DNA profiles.

As the two DNA samples were not of blood relatives, they say, it suggests Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a couple.

Even after their discovery, boxes merely gathered dust on storage shelves because the names on the inscriptions on six of them were so common that they did not excite those who first catalogued them.

But the film-makers say statistical analysis shows the odds are at 600-1 in favour of the tomb being that of Jesus's family. They believe five of the inscriptions represent the key New Testament figures - not just of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but also Mary, Matthew and Joseph - while a sixth could be a son of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Cameron told the audience: "I have never doubted that there was a historical Jesus, that he walked the Earth, but the simple fact is that there has never been a shred of physical archaeological evidence to support that fact until right now."

The coffins linked to Christ himself bears the words "Yeshua bar Yosef", Aramaic for "Jesus son of Joseph" and said by the film-makers to be so rare that out of thousands of inscriptions catalogued, only one the same has ever been found. Those thought to belong to his parents, Mary and Joseph, were inscribed with the Hebrew "Maria" and "Yose".

DNA analysis shows the people whose bones were placed in the coffins linked to Jesus and Mary Magdalene were not brother and sister or son and mother. This suggests it is possible they were actually a couple.

And a mysterious bone box marked with Aramaic script which translates to "Judah Son of Jesus" could be that of their son.

Church

The film suggests this might have been the "lad" described in the Gospel of John as sleeping in Jesus's lap at the Last Supper. But archaeologists and clergymen in the Holy Land angrily derided the claims.

Most Christians believe Jesus's body spent three days at the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, while Talpiot is nowhere near the church.

Attallah Hana, a Greek Orthodox clergyman in Jerusalem, said the documentary "contradicts the religious principles and the historic and spiritual principles that we hold tightly to".

"The historical, religious and archaeological evidence show that the place where Christ was buried is the Church of the Resurrection," he said.

Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, was interviewed in the documentary and said the film's hypothesis held little weight.

And Justin Thacker, head of theology at the UK Evangelical Alliance, is one of many rubbishing the film.

"The Christian church has nothing to fear from this latest attempt at headlines. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ continues to be based on solid evidence," he said.

Cameron insisted the film was "absolutely not" a publicity stunt. "What this film shows is, for the first time, tangible, physical, archaeological and in some cases forensic evidence," he said.

His critics remain unconvinced. They believe Cameron's theory, like the Titanic, will vanish without trace.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus will be shown on Sunday in the US and later next month on Channel 4 in the UK.