A Hollywood director yesterday unveiled what he claimed to be the most astounding archaeological discovery of all time: the coffin of Jesus Christ.

James Cameron, the director of Titanic, was promoting a new documentary that has angered Christians with its claim that not only did the resurrection and ascension of Christ never occur but also that Jesus had a son.

Cameron used a New York press conference to show two limestone boxes that he said had once held the bodies of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their son, Judah.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus, which Cameron directed and will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel this weekend, argues that the plain limestone box, known as an ossuary, was one of ten discovered in a tomb stumbled on by builders in Jerusalem in 1980, and first excavated by a British archaeologist. One of the boxes even bears the title “Judah son of Jesus”. The site is some distance from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, traditionally held to be the place where Jesus was buried.

Six had names etched into them, which were translated as Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamene (thought to be the real name of Mary Magdalene), Joseph and Matthew. Simcha Jacobovici, who directed the documentary, said that the inscription translates as “Mary Magdalene the Master”.

When the coffins were discovered, the inscriptions provoked little interest. The Israeli Antiquities Authority said that the names were common at the time. The boxes no longer hold bones because the remains were reburied after the discovery, as is the custom after archaeological finds in Israel.

However, human matter collected by the film-makers has provided DNA profiles, which suggest that the Jesus and Mariamene on the coffins were not related by blood, but were a couple.

Supporters of the claim that the coffin of Jesus had been discovered used a statistician to calculate the odds of another family with the same names. “The numbers range from 1 in 100 to 1 in 1,000 that there is some other family,” said Andrey Feuerverger, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. Cameron called the evidence “pretty darn compelling”.

However, David Merovah, a curator of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, said: “To start with those names in a single tomb and leap from there to say this is the tomb of Jesus is a little farfetched, to put it mildly” Amos Kloner, the first archaeologist to examine the site, said that the idea failed to hold up by archaeological standards but made for profitable TV.

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