Archaeologists and theologians are dismissing a new television documentary that suggests Jesus’s tomb was discovered nearly 30 years ago during an excavation in Jerusalem.

Two small limestone boxes that a documentary director, Simcha Jacobovici, says may have contained the bones of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were in New York yesterday as filmmakers promoted “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” which premieres Sunday on the Discovery Channel. The 88-minute film, whose executive producer is the Academy Award-winning director of “Titantic,” James Cameron, centers on 10 ossuaries, or bone boxes, and what filmmakers say is new evidence that they belonged to Jesus and his family — including a son of Jesus, named Judah.

The ossuaries are apparently inscribed with names that translate to Jesus, son of Joseph; Judah, son of Jesus, and Mariamene, which may have been Mary Magdalene’s full name. Joseph, Mary, and Matthew were the names on the other engraved boxes found in the tomb.

Christian doctrine holds that Jesus was resurrected from the dead three days after he was crucified — and that his tomb was found empty.

Speaking to the press yesterday at the New York Public Library, Mr. Cameron said the documentary is not an assault on Christianity. By contrast, he said the program provides skeptics “tangible physical, archaeological, and in some cases forensic evidence” that Jesus walked the earth some 2,000 years ago.

While those involved in producing the film say the findings are historic, many who study biblical archaeology and history call it a ludicrous commercial venture entirely unsupported by the facts on the ground.

“It’s basically 15 minutes of fame — and maybe to make a buck,” a professor emeritus of religion at Princeton University, John Gager, said of the project. Mr. Gager said the likelihood that Jesus’s family had a burial site or bone boxes is virtually nonexistent because they were poor and lived in a small town in what is now northern Israel.

The bones contained in the ossuaries were buried in 1980. Remnants of DNA left inside the boxes that the filmmakers say may have belonged to Jesus and Mary Magdalene prove that the two were not maternally linked, and perhaps husband and wife, according to the documentary.

The names on the ossuaries were among the most common in the region during the first century — and in no way mean that the bone boxes were those of the biblical Jesus and his family, the chairman of land of Israel studies and archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, Aren Maeir, said. “It’s like, if years from now, you find a tomb inscribed ‘Michael, son of William,’ it wouldn’t necessarily mean that it belonged to Mayor Bloomberg,” he said.

Christian clergy yesterday also dismissed the documentary’s findings. “If anyone were to come up with proof of the body of Jesus, that would be a major blow to Christian faith,” the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, who edits a journal on religion, First Things, told The New York Sun. “This is certainly not that type of proof, or even a serious suggestion.”

Rev. Neuhaus said the documentary is the latest in a long line of attempts by people “who don’t have the well-being of the Christian faith in mind” to cast doubt on Jesus’s resurrection.

Joining Mr. Cameron at the public library yesterday were Mr. Jacobovici, who last year directed “The Exodus Decoded” for the History Channel; the chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, James Tabor, and a professor of statistics at the University of Toronto, Andrey Feuerverger, among other academics, as well as a Discovery Channel executive who backs the documentary’s findings.

The special projects coordinator of the Israel Antiquities Authority traveled to New York with the ossuaries, which have been kept at a storage facility near Jerusalem since 1980.

Mr. Jacobovici said he hoped the film would be the foundation for further exploration of the ossuaries and its contents.