Joe Zias

Joseph E. Zias was the Curator of Archaeology and Anthropology for the Israel Antiquities Authority from 1972 until his retirement in 1997, with responsibility for items such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, pre-historic human skeletal remains, and artifacts from archaeological sites such as Jericho, Megiddo, and Gezer. He has appeared often in film and television documentaries regarding such artifacts and the subject of the Historical Jesus, including The Mysterious Man of the Shroud for CBS, Who Killed Jesus on BBC in 1997

Shroud of Turin The PBS documentary Secrets of the Dead: Shroud of Christ, which aired in April 2004, presented new and controversial claims that the Shroud of Turin was the authentic burial cloth of Jesus. Several experts disputed these opinions, since carbon-dating tests performed in 1988 placed its origin 1300 years too late. Specifically, Zias noted that the shroud depicts a man whose front measures 2 inches taller than his back and said, "Not only is it a forgery, but it's a bad forgery."

Megiddo church In 2005, archaeologist Yotam Tepper was in charge of a dig near Megiddo, Israel, uncovering the ruins of what was clearly an early Christian church. The IAA, Zias's former employer, claimed that the site could be dated to the third century A.D., which would make it the earliest Christian church unearthed in the Holy Land, and possibly one of the earliest in the world, older even than the edict of Emperor Constantine which legalized Christian worship. Zias, however, disagreed in print: "My gut feeling is that we are looking at a Roman building that may have been converted to a church at a later date." At a time when Roman authorities still prohibited Christian practice,"If I were a Roman soldier in the third century, I certainly wouldn't want my name on it," he said. "This would not have been a good career move. In fact, it sounds like the kiss of death." Historian Yisca Harani was similarly skeptical, wondering why early church historians would fail to mention a successful place of worship, if it were one. Similarly, Zias said that the original team "had the story and went around trying to find the proof." These and later comments by Zias led Jacobovici to sue for libel, winning a judgment of from a Jerusalem court in 2015. The press noted, however, that the decision "did not rule that Jacobovici's assertions were correct, just that Zias… had gone too far in his criticisms."