Digging Out the Talpiot Tomb Debate

Back in 2007 there was a documentary and a great deal of subsequent discussion about the so-called Jesus Tomb at Talpiot. I wrote a few posts on the claims here, as well as a couple at ReJesus, but Mark Goodacre provided the most coverage.

I was reminded of these discussions today when listening to the podcast for the BBC Radio 4 maths show "More or Less". Towards the end they discuss the probability of five people meeting whose fathers all had the first names John Charles. The initial calculation comes out to be one in several billion billions, but what's significant in this case is that this is not theoretical, "but" as the narrator says in Magnolia "it did happen".

The team however quickly whittle down this astounding statistic down to something much more reasonable, and you can hear their reasoning about 23 minutes into the podcast (actual file here).

A number of these reasons are also relevant to the Talpiot Tomb question. Firstly it was an actual discovery, so that changes the statistical calculations altogether, secondly the location appears significant, but various other locations would have given rise to a similarly apparent significance. Thirdly, the smaller and smaller the probabilities get the more likely it that a reality blip changes everything.

Coincidentally I was also musing on a related point again this weekend, how we tend to find names cluster together rather than occur at random. I once commented on Mark Goodacre's blog that a modern day example might be the cluster of names Seumas, Mary and Patrick. Individually the probability wouldn't be that high, purely on the basis of their popularity in the population as a whole. But in reality because they are all Catholic names the likelihood of finding such a cluster would be much higher than this simple basis for the calculation. If you searched for it in a Catholic part of Belfast you'd get a much higher number of families than if you searched in Kent, or a Protestant part of Belfast. Given how sectarian Judaism was at the time, it's reasonable to want to know about these names relate to each other before assuming the probabilities are all independent.

Which leads me onto another question. During the Radio 4 podcast the expert says that looking at the 40s and 50s he had difficulty finding "the distribution" even though they had the rankings. So if we're lacking this key piece of data for just 60 years ago, how accurate is the data that was used to calculate the probability regarding the Jesus Tomb? If I remember rightly, the overall figure was calculated my multiplying the assumed probability for each name individually. Now the probability for each name was drawn from other ossuaries found in the region from around the same period of time. The problem with this is that it's not representative of the whole, at best its representative of those rich enough to have a bone box. But Jesus and his family were not rich. Were this to be their tomb then it would only exist because Jesus' life had elected their status. We have no reliable information of the distribution and occurrence of names of people within Jesus' social class and so this is another flaw (amongst many) that the programme makes.

Secrets of the Jesus Tomb at ReJesus

I meant to post this earlier in the week, but my article on last week's Channel 5 documentary Secrets of the Jesus Tomb is now up at ReJesus.

I also noticed that James Tabor, who is interviewed in the documentary, has a short piece on the programme, although he is yet to actually see it. However, he also mentions that this is the first in a series of four documentaries called "Secrets of the Cross" with future shows about Mary Magdalene, Jesus's death, and the Knights Templar. The second film in the series, Who Really Killed Jesus, apparently aired this Tuesday and is now also available on Five on Demand. I'll post a review of that one shortly.

Secrets of the Jesus Tomb: Reviews

I didn't manage to catch Channel 5's Tuesday night documentary Secrets of the Jesus Tomb by CTVC. That said, it's available to view online so I might see if I can find the time before it disappears. Essentially it's covering the same story as last year's The Lost Tomb of Jesus only without involving James Cameron. Here's Five's website blurb:

In 1980, an ancient tomb was unearthed on a building site in the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiot. Inside the tomb, archaeologists Amos Kloner and Shimon Gibson were intrigued to discover several boxes of bones – "ossuary’s"[sic.] – dating from the first century AD. The inscriptions on the side of these boxes included the names "Jesus son of Joseph", "Mary", another Mary in the rare form of "Mariamne", "Jose", "Matthew" and – perhaps most fascinating of all – "Judah son of Jesus".

The similarity of these names to the New Testament family and disciples of Jesus Christ were clear, yet the boxes were removed from the tomb and left untouched in the stores of the Israeli Antiquity Authority for over 20 years. It was not until the early years of this century that Bible historian James Tabor began to wonder if the tomb at Talpiot was in fact the final resting place of Christ.

A series of scientific tests and a close analysis of ancient texts seemed to suggest that this could indeed be the tomb of Jesus, especially if the ossuary ascribed to "Mariamne the master" could be associated with Mary Magdalene. If this connection was made, it would also suggest that the ‘Judah son of Jesus’ ossuary belonged to Jesus’s son.

Five is probably the most lowbrow of British TV's terrestrial channels. (Whoever composed the photo above doesn't seem to have grasped that the bones are meant to be kept in the boxes, and, if you're going to promote a documentary about the "Jesus Tomb" you should probably learn how to spell "ossuaries"). That said there are a number of scholars although it's no surprise to find Bart Ehrman and James Tabor are the most prominent.

Yesterday's papers featured reviews from The Times and The Telegraph, whilst The Guardian simply mentions that the show "attracted 1.4 million" viewers.

Mark Goodacre has a good length review rejecting some of the more dismissive reviews

The documentary makers should, however, be lauded for avoiding sensationalism and for sounding fairly reasonable, at least by the end of the programme. A few features showed some sensitivity to scholarly conventions, like the use of "BCE" and "CE" (unexplained in the programme) rather than "BC" and "AD", but at other points repeated cliché (Christianity rocked to its foundations) and banality (Jesus was not a Christian) will have turned away the educated viewer. And if they said that ossuaries were bone boxes once, they said it a hundred times.

Jim West also makes a few comments, mainly based on Andrea Mullaney's review in The Scotsman.

Edit: Having Just watched this a few further comments to add. Firstly, I think this documentary benefited from being shown over a year after the Jesus Tomb story first broke (or at least regained our attention). One of the comments made at the time was that the because the news was released such a short time before the documentary there was no time for the wider scholarly community to sift it properly. Now that time has passed some of the objections to the theory that this is in fact Jesus's tomb have been allowed to, um, ossify.

Secondly, as I only had this on in the background, I only caught some of the visuals, but it seemed that, at least on that level, that it was nicely put together. It was nice to see someone looking genuinely middle eastern playing Jesus, and there were some interesting angles and nice dissolves etc.

Finally, it seems that Helen Bond was involved at some stage as she is pictured on the Channel Five website, but she seems to have been cut out of the final programme. That's a not only a little bit cheeky, but also a bit of a shame. It would have been nice to have a few more British scholars involved.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus: The Morning After the Night Before

As I mentioned on Friday I wasn't able to catch the programme on "The Discovery Channel" last night, but fortunately Mark Goodacre did and blogged the whole documentary section by section. It's a pretty comprehensive look at the filmmakers' claim, so I advise you to have a read for yourselves. Mark also has a number of other posts on this story, including a number on the statistical case as well as one where he comments on some of my comments.

Elsewhere, Peter Chattaway mentions The Body (2001) a dramatic film about a priest investigating a skeleton which may have been that of Jesus. I've not seen the film, and had forgotten it even existed. Peter certainly didn't think that highly of it anyway.

Then there's Tyler Williams's summing up of The Lighter Side of Jesus’ Tomb, which includes a link to a few comments by one of my favourite cartoonists Scott Adams (Dilbert). That led me to this gem:

What is up with these buried cities that archaeologists keep discovering? I’m trying to figure out how a city gets buried unless a volcano is nearby. In my house, for example, when the crumbs on the kitchen floor reach ankle height, I start thinking about sweeping. Call me a neat freak if you must, but I wouldn’t just keep eating bagels until I lose the refrigerator.

What's strange is how people feel the need to offer serious explanations for the questions Adams poses. Boy, does he know his key demographic inside out. For what it's worth, I also can't help wondering if somewhere along the line, Dogbert is involved in this whole "Jesus Tomb" saga.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus

I've been slightly reticent to post about this film here as firstly, it's been covered in so many other places elsewhere, by people who are far more expert than I, and secondly because I won't get the opportunity to see the film for some time anyway, and by then I imagine that this will all have died down. (My guess is that it will appear at Easter over here, with Channel 4 being odds on favourites to screen it - they did after all show the heavily Tabor influenced The Secret Family of Jesus on Christmas Day this year). I have however posted on it at rejesus where I've tried to restrict my comments to the area of statistics.

But as I've thought about my approach a bit more over the last couple of days, it's occurred to me that this is a film, and it is about the bible, at least in some sense, and whilst it's not an dramatised / narrative film (although it will undoubtedly contain a great deal of both) but a documentary, it is undoubtedly of relevance to this blog. By contrast there are a number of well known theologians who waded into this early on but have since been big enough to admit they were a bit too overzealous in places (namely Richard Bauckham and Ben Witherington)

So I'm going to write about the actual film here, which has tended to be buried amongst the discussion about the subject matter, and I might craft another post at a later stage which looks at some of the arguments.

One thing that is clear is that whilst the filmmakers have not given much thought ot peer reviewing their findings, they have certainly spent a lot of effort into putting together a substantial official website. In addition to all the usual stuff, there's a wealth of clearly and simply laid out pages with attractive design. Likewise The Discovery Channel also has a fair bit of information on the film, as well as some more "news" type pages. The film is first due to air on Sunday, March 4th, at 9 p.m. ET/PT. I would guess it would be repeated several times by Discovery.

The team that has made the film has been fairly well publicised. James Cameron's (Titanic) name has been all over the news regarding this film, but he's actually only involved as an executive producer, rather than as director. The directing honours go to Simcha Jacobovici (Exodus Decoded) who was also involved with producing and writing. Interestingly he also made James, Brother of Jesus, although I've not been able to find out the conclusions of that documentary.

A number of theologians and archaeologists are also involved, although it seems that the degree to which they have been involved, as well as the extent to which they agree with the filmmakers conclusions. So James Tabor agrees enough to have reversed some of his previous positions from The Jesus Dynasty, whereas Amos Kloner is standing by his original claim from 1980 that there was not an ossuary in this particular tomb inscribed "James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus". Darrel Bock claims to have seen the script at an early date, but not to really have been involved, and L.Y. Rahmani’s ossuary catalogue seems to have been a key source. John Dominic Crossan's name also appears on the official website, but it's far from clear how closely he has been involved.

Finally there are a number of other experts involved. François Bovon and Shimon Gibson are also named on the discovery site. In terms of experts from other disciplines, one key "witness" is Dr. Andrey Feuerverger - Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Toronto. He is the statistician, although it's difficult to know what kind of information he was given to work with. Did it really justify a professor, or did they just need someone with good reputation to lend the project some credibility? Two other credits; Felix Golubev is one of the other producers, and Charlie R. Pellegrino is the other writer.

Anyone who is desperate to see this and doesn't have access to The Discovery Channel will be pleased to know that the DVD is available for sale already. The programme is also accompanied by a book which is also for sale. Summaries of the deabte are being posted at two of my favourite blogs - Codex and NT Gateway. James Tabor is also advancing the arguments in favour at his Jesus Dynasty blog.