Simcha jacobovici has a gap-toothed leonine grin that says “It’s all good.” His jocularity—hell, his very existence—seems like a direct “screw you” to legions of detractors. Those legions include Ted Koppel and Anderson Cooper, both of whom pilloried The Lost Tomb of Jesus, a film in which Jacobovici storms tombs and DNA tests his way to an extremely sensitive conclusion: Hey, look, I located the resting place of Jesus!

For this and other sins, critics around the world have said he’s in it for the money, a snake oil salesman with a camera. Jacobovici shrugs off the naysayers. Deftly and cheerfully, he counters vilification with his own self-mythologizing. He calls himself, in the course of a single conversation, the “Ali G of archaeology” and the “Jamie Oliver of documentary filmmaking.” Not an inch of his six-foot, three-inch frame is free of ego. He refers to his Emmys (he has three) as often as he does his children (he has five).

He is also a man with good timing. Jesus is a hot topic. A few years before The Lost Tomb debuted, He appeared on a cover of Newsweek and starred in The Passion of the Christ, the latter earning $612 million at box offices worldwide. Dan Brown’s God thriller phenomenon The Da Vinci Code, a purely fictional rendering of religious history bundled as fact, sold more than 40 million copies.

So last February, when the Discovery Channel launched The Lost Tomb at an elaborate press conference at the New York Public Library, 300 journalists from around the world showed up. Two limestone ossuaries, purportedly belonging to Mary Magdalene and Jesus, were transported for the occasion, cloaked in black sheets and flanked by security guards. Jacobovici sat next to his good friend James Cameron, the producer of The Lost Tomb and the director of the highest grossing film ever made, Titanic. Cameron wore a black turtleneck that made him look like he’d been beamed in from the future. The premiere on Discovery was watched by 7.3 million people in the U.S. In Canada, 800,000 watched on Vision. The flurry of interest from CNN and Larry King was at first skeptical in tone, then dismissive. A chorus of condemnation by professors and scholars called it “archaeo-porn.” Joe Zias, a former curator for the Israel Antiquities Authority, built a Web site of rage against the film, telling News­week, “He’s pimping off the Bible. Projects like these make a mockery of the archaeological profession.”

Discovery, which had planned to air the film three times, never ran it again. Jacobovici heard they received a million protest e‑mails in 24 hours. Channel 4 in Britain never ran the film at all, even after purchasing it for $200,000. In India, Christian groups, led by the Mumbai-based Catholic Secular Forum, protested loudly enough that Discovery India pulled the film before airing it and issued an apology for offending the Christian community.

At this point, Jacobovici should have taken a hint. Instead, two years later, he remains one of the most successful filmmakers in Toronto, head of a thriving boutique production company and a star among archaeology nerds. Whether he’s motivated by God or money or a genuine insatiable urge to know, Simcha Jacobovici is consumed by his mission. He has no intention of shutting up.

The crew of associated producers, Jacobo­vici’s film company, is scheduled to meet in a ravine near the Beach, hoping the foliage will pass for Israel. In the ravine, Jacobovici is supposed to ask Barrie Wilson, a nasal-voiced York University religious studies professor, about the sex lives of early Chris­tians. But it is raining, and so the AP offices on Spadina are going to stand in for the ravine that stood in for Israel. Because of these last- minute changes, there is a little cloud of chaos in the room, though it seems possible that Jacobovici carries with him such a cloud wherever he goes.

A boyish 55, Jacobovici has been making documentaries for over two decades. Today, he is shooting a segment for The Naked Archaeologist, a series in its third season and airing in eight countries. Each hour-long episode is dedicated to uncovering mysteries (many you might not have known were mysteries) about the real location of Mount Sinai or whether the giants in Genesis were actual giants. Jacobovici is the show’s director-producer and unlikely host; with his signature bob and galumphing gait, he cracks biblical jokes and cheerfully interrogates academics (his murmuring Romanian–Hebrew–French Canadian accent often makes the badgering seem a little softer, but if it walks like a badger…). These fringe-academic vignettes are packaged with the slick promotional brio of Entertainment Tonight. The DVD copy for one episode reads, “What were they doing in Sodom that was so bad it makes incest look good?” You could add, “Mary Hart will be back after this break with the scoop!”