Getting a long lasting TV show with big ratings IS the treasure that they’re all after.
That idea has been floating around at least since 1982, when The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published:
From the Wikipedia item:
Sound familiar? I don’t think your embassy official was delusional (except, perhaps, if he was seriously claiming that he was a direct descendant of Christ), but HBHG was a bestseller, and made enough of a splash when it came out that Dan Brown admitted that it contributed to The Da Vinci Code.
Yes, I know the concept predates The Da Vinci code (when the book came out, it jogged my memory about the story I was told, which I’d more or less forgotten until a friend read the book, described the premise, and I suddenly remembered that this was almost exactly what the embassy guy told me). But I don’t think it was particularly common knowledge in the early 1990s - for sure the story was new to me. Obviously, though, the embassy guy was familiar with it.
He told me with a straight face that he was a descendant of Jesus, so he was either delusional or had a very peculiar sense of humor.
You forgot about Jesus’s younger brother Hong Xiuquan!!
I remember when they found the remains. The impression I got from the news reports was indeed that it was an accidental discovery, so you weren’t the only one to believe that.
I’m glad I know the true story now. I should have read more about it back then.
Ack! I just got curious so I looked the guy up. He left the Foreign Service after ending his career as an ambassador to a not-very-desirable posting and now works for a consulting firm in Thailand. Without thinking I clicked on his LinkedIn page, so now he’s gonna see that I looked him up. It’s been more than 25 years so he probably won’t even have a clue who I am (and my profile doesn’t go back far enough to list the job I had when we worked together).
Or maybe he’ll remember the whole thing and think I got curious about what Jesus’s great-great-greatiddy-great grandson was up to these days 
IIRC, this was somewhere much farther inland, probably Minnesota or thereabouts.
There’s blood on the Turin Shroud and the head covering that supposedly goes with it.
Yeah, Anywhere on the North Atlantic coast, I am fine with, but Minnesota- I am gonna need some pretty solid stuff.
The Shroud is problematic.
Undoubtedly, but that’s what they’d use. There’s nothing else available.
I have to admit, if you got a match to the Shroud, it’d be a interesting result.
It’s not “problematic,” it’s a documented hoax from the late 1300s. Whosever’s blood is on it, it isn’t Jesus’s. It’s not even established that the stains are blood.
One place they get lots of money from is the Government of Nova Scotia.
https://novascotia.ca/news/release/?id=20190903001
Documentary TV Series, The Curse of Oak Island Season 7, produced by Tell Tale International Inc., has been approved for a funding commitment of $3,540,925…
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had argued (using that word in its loosest possible sense) that several prominent families, which it named, were descended from Jesus. Moreover, between its publication and the publication of The Da Vinci Code, lots of other writers had developed those claims about some of those families. One such theory centred on the Sinclairs was relatively well-publicised from the early 1990s onwards. It is not too difficult to see why a very gullible person who knew they were descended from one of those families might then have taken a special interest in those theories and thus come to the conclusion that they were indeed descended from Jesus. While such a belief is very silly, it is actually no more silly than believing that other people are descended from him.
Depends what you call a treasure. Geraldo Rivera discovered Al Capone’s lost treasure, it just happened to be a few empty bottles. A safe from the Andrea Doria was opened on TV and the treasure was a handful of waterlogged silver certificates, worth much more than Geraldo’s bottles.
I first heard of Oak Island in the early 60s on a travelogue TV show. It sounded like a cool mystery and I planned to grow up and find that treasure. But time and again the story was revived, each time enhanced, and now we find the entire island was constructed by aliens burying a treasure several thousand feet down, leaving a series of important clues all of which have been lost after their discovery. So I decided not to bother.
Maybe that’s the answer, then!
Catholic doctrine FWIW is that none of those people were actually siblings of Jesus’s.
True, but that was mainly because they had a vested interest in maintaining the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, and that she didn’t have sex with Joseph even after Jesus’s birth. The most natural reading is probably that they were actual siblings; AFAIK there is nothing in the original text that indicates they were not. (But this thread is probably not the best place to get into the fine points of Biblical interpretation.)
I have another Josh Gates reference. On Expedition Unknown, in the “Warrior Queen’s Treasure” episode, Josh follows some archaeologists who are looking for the burial site of Boudica, a Celtic queen who fought the Romans. They find nothing definitive regarding Boudica, but do use metal detectors to find a trove of Roman silver coins.