DOC PROVES JESUS HAS THE POWER TO FASCINATE.

Byline: David Kronke

Television Critic

Give the makers of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" points for brass: They're potentially uncorking the biggest scam since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's vault.

Trouble is, the arguments for claiming to have discovered the tomb and the ossuaries that contained the remains of Jesus and his family are only vaguely persuasive -- not even former CIA director George Tenet would've declared this evidence a "slam dunk."

While some research is assiduous, there are a couple of glaring analytical oversights that might have made their arguments more compelling, and a little less shaky along the way.

The tomb was discovered in 1980 while construction workers were bulldozing an area in Jerusalem to make room for an apartment complex. No one made much of the names on the ossuaries -- "Jesus, Son of Joseph," "Mary," "Matthew," a diminutive of "Joseph" (one of Christ's brothers), one suggested to have belonged to Mary Magdalene (based on writings centuries after her death) and "Judah, son of Jesus" -- until executive producer James Cameron (who's well-known for thinking big) and documentarians Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino united two years ago.

Jacobovici had made a documentary on another ossuary labeled "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," which was later declared to be a forgery (and which he tries to refute here). But that prodded him on to this project.

Ossuaries were only employed for about 100 years at the turn of the first millennium. A thousand have been unearthed; only a few were labeled. Although the names were all quite common in their day, a statistician puts the odds that another family would have this precise configuration of names at at least 600 to 1.

And it takes nearly an hour for the filmmakers to relate the particulars of the above paragraph. Needless to say, there's a lot of padding in the film, some painstaking procedural stuff to prove minor points, interviewees saying essentially the same thing repeatedly, and a protracted sequence in which the filmmakers snake a micro-

camera through a pipe into the sealed tomb they believe held Jesus.

Much effort is expended on explaining how the camera works, though anyone familiar with the concept of a colonoscopy will be unmoved; then, the camera encounters an obstacle, and the guys mull their choices:

"We're going to break into the tomb with a plumber?" one asks incredulously.

"You got a better idea?" the other replies.

Eventually, they realize they're in the wrong tomb. What is this, the Keystone Documentarians?

And the point of getting into the tomb is murky, at best, because the provenance of the ossuaries isn't yet established. They employ sophisticated DNA testing to establish that the remains in the ossuaries labeled Jesus and (perhaps) Mary Magdalene weren't those of blood relatives. That, they suggest, could mean that they were buried together because they were married. (This overlooks the fact that several other men were interred there as well.)

But the filmmakers didn't think to go the extra step to see if DNA samples linked Jesus to Mary, or if DNA samples linked Judah to Jesus and (perhaps) Mary Magdalene.

And they argue that the notion that Jesus had a son (which some are calling a blasphemous charge) was kept a secret in the gospels to protect him. They don't explain, however, why that was necessary, given that he died in his youth and the gospels were all written well after that.

Nonetheless, this has caused controversy among Christians who believe in a literal interpretation of Jesus' ascension into heaven and argue there would be no earthly remains to entomb. As the film points out, "the ascension could've been spiritual" (which is always how I had interpreted it, even back in my days in Sunday school).

One might think that they'd want to embrace these findings as further proof of the historical Jesus, but perhaps they, like me, found it an intriguing but ultimately unconvincing theory.

David Kronke, [phone]

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THE LOST TOMB OF JESUS - Two and one half stars

What: Controversial documentary purporting to have discovered the vessels that contained the remains of Jesus and his family.

Where: Discovery Channel.

When: 9 tonight, followed at 11 p.m. by a panel discussion moderated by Ted Koppel.

In a nutshell: Despite much padding, it's not quite persuasive enough to rock Christendom.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo: (1 -- 2) Documentarian Simcha Jacobovici examines a wall of what is purported to be the tomb in which Jesus was interred; it was unearthed during excavations in Jerusalem in 1980. At right is an ossuary said to hold Jesus' remains; the vessel bears the inscription "Jesus, Son of Joseph."