Science and the Tomb of Jesus

Apology from the start: I don't mean to sound like a typical Christian talking head in covering this issue, but there's so many things wrong with this Tomb of Jesus story that I have to lay out what I've seen. I do talk about this from the perspective of a Christian scientist ... well, no, not a Christian Scientist, but you know ... I'll just write what I think and move on!

Well, the days are getting longer, the weather's shifting from snow and cold rain to just cold rain, we've entered the Lenten season and there's a new unfounded Gnostic speculation on the rise. Welcome to March, everybody.

It seems there's nothing more reliable than the annual news cycles. Last year it was Luigi Cascioli and his theory that Jesus was really based on John of Gamela, a revolutionary from the Jewish War period of the late first century. What made him different is he sued an old priest friend of his in Italian courts to make his point and was summarily dismissed. And our cup flowed over last year -- because that's when the National Geographic Channel unveiled the previously unknown Gospel of Judas. That was cool if you're into second-century angelology and the Gnostic tendency to invert Biblical characters, like that guy who wrote "Wicked." But if you're interested in something to actually help your needy spirit ... keep looking. Judas isn't much good.

This year it's another recycled news story based more on a bestseller published in 2003 than on the ancient texts themselves. I don't have too much time to read the first-century history that I want to, but even I could tell at first blush that this was more "Al Capone's vault" than a genuine paradigm shift. The "Last Tomb of Jesus" in question was unearthed in 1980, publicized by the BBC (during Easter!) in 1996, and I first found about it through NT Wright, who used it as an illustration to open an article on the resurrection titled "Grave Matters," which I passed out to my Sunday School class at the time. The theologians I've been able to introduce this story to so far said, "That tomb again? I thought we were past that." But, since gnostic tendencies have been around for 1900 years, and we aren't past those yet, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

If you haven't heard much about this story, do a Google search on "tomb of jesus review." The piece of information relevant to my previous post is that moviemaker James Cameron signed on as executive producer for the Discovery Channel documentary, to show tonight (and, ironically, James Cameron is a common enough name to have several James Camerons in the world). However, all the information has been out since 1980, and even the infamous "600:1" "conservative" statistical analysis details were (finally) published today, so there are no more stones to be overturned, rolled away, or DNA-analyzed. And yet, nobody is convinced.

What I have, in proper time-honored blog form, is analysis and reaction to the situation as a whole. As for critique of the science and statistics here, I personally like Mark Goodacre's NT Gateway blog for a fair but still properly critical response: http://www.ntgateway.com/weblog/

So I see the problems with this as being problems with the science. (The problems with the gnostic religion that science is being used to promote are inherent to that religion and can't be helped, so I won't harp on those, though, by the way, I think gnosticism is a bad parody of what Jesus was all about, so don't expect much sympathy from me on that account either.)

1.) Peer review
Keeping "the greatest archaeological finding" under wraps and revealing it through a press conference one week before the airing of a television special is not scientific. I have a paper out for review right now and I'm looking forward to hearing from the three anonymous expert critical reviewers on how I can make it better. If I just thought my findings were so huge I could just skip that stage I would not be a scientist anymore. The code word for that kind of process is "cold fusion" (Google "Pons and Fleischmann" for more info on that debacle).

There are a few reputable or semi-reputable scholars involved. Unfortunately, most of them, like the DNA analyst or the guy who read the names off the ossuaries, just did their bit well and repudiated the way their findings were used in the overall scheme. Two scholars who in my opinion should know better actually support this work: James Tabor, whose "Dynasty of Jesus" research walks the thin line between scholarship and sensationalism (but whose blog is very evenhanded and worth reading), and James H. Charlesworth, who seems supportive on the Discovery Channel site but hasn't put his side of the story forth yet. Pretty much everyone else talking about the evidence doesn't buy it.

There's a sense in which the "Christian talking heads" are out in force against this but are being ignored. Don't be too upset by that -- some of those talking heads have politicized themselves so much they've lost credibility on these matters with the general public. So be it -- the rank and file New Testament scholars will provide more than enough rebuttal for this all by themselves. The louder the "official church" complains the more the rebuttals seem like a DaVinci-Code-style cover-up, so I think the standard talking heads should lay low, renounce their rights in this case, and let the scholars fight it out. Science is on your side here.

Another comment on peer review: The conventional wisdom on the original 1980 findings, that the names are so common it's ridiculous to suggest the cluster of names is meaningful -- have already been peer reviewed in a sense. NT scholars who study these centuries and know the names backwards and forwards knew about this for 25 years and nobody outside of the press gave it a second thought. In every scholar's head there were subconcious statistics going on right there, in a big community, for everyone to see, and it just got a shrug. Now that enthusiasm (the docu-director) and money (Cameron) have found it, they don't have that database of first-century common names in their heads and they set about cherry picking their data. This is a recipe for cold fusion, or the Gospel of Judas, all over again.

2.) Do your science right in the first place.

I can evaluate the evidence myself, so I can act as a peer reviewer. My own view agrees with the community-at-large's. A letter from that era is written by a "Jesus," to a second "Jesus," as witnessed by a third "Jesus." Josephus talked about several "Jesus"es, including one who tried to act as a Messiah before the fall of the Temple! There is even a second Jesus son of Joseph box (why isn't anyone chasing that down yet? Wait till next Easter to find out!).

Also, the other names are common. So, out of 10 cards, you drew two Marys (25% chance of any card being a Mary), one Josh son of Joe, one Judas son of Josh, a Joe, and a Matt. To truly calculate the probability of this we have to include all Biblically connected names, including Elizabeth, John the Baptist, John the Apostle, Peter, etc. in the first circle and Peter, Mark, Cleopas, etc. in the "connected to the family" circle that Matthew and Magdalen (not blood relations) would fall into. The statistics were done on cherry-picked names that treated negative evidence as neutral.

The "Odds are 600 to 1 that this is Jesus' family tomb" is reminiscent of Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict odds, although I'd argue that at least McDowell had the temerity to make his odds of prophecies coming true utterly astronomical. Again, we've had scholarly brains running unconscious odds on these names for 25 years now and nobody has cared, until the money came along.

What's scary is the number of blogs that misapply these statistics in calculating the odds of a connection. One blog takes the frequency for Joseph and multiplies it by the frequency for Mary and concludes that a Joseph-Mary combination is less frequent, so the filmmakers may have a point. These are amateur statistics that are not thought through, and do not include all the possibilities, only the specific set that occured, when other arrangements would have also been thought "significant." What if we found a Luke and a Simon? If they were buried next to each other would that prove a relationship?

Also, note the name "Miriamne": a rare, diminutive form of Mary. This "smoking gun" is connected to Mary Magdalen through a fourth-century text "Acts of Phillip" and a third-century comment. Before that we have several references to a "Miriamme" instead, which also appears to be derivative from the "Miriam" of the gospel accounts or their sources. If this is the real ossuary I'd expect the second-century form, not the fourth-century form. It just makes more sense that the m-to-n change is a spelling mistake accumulated hundreds of years later than that the "truth was concealed" for hundreds of years ... with "m" instead of "n"!

3.) Science must include all the data

The Gospel accounts are data. The second-century writings are data. The location of the tombs in Jerusalem, not Nazareth, is data. The fact that a body most decompose for six months before being placed into the ossuary is data. None of these add up with the filmmaker's story, but they, like the collaborator's objections, are written off as conspiracy.

If you include Acts of Phillip, a fourth-century source, you must somehow include most of the others or you invoke a massive conspiracy theory where the truth was lost but the lies are all that remains. Conspiracy theories can be fun, but even in the X-Files they had to be plausible. The Da Vinci Code, quoted favorably by the filmmakers, implies that the Dead Sea Scrolls were about Jesus -- I just went to a museum exhibit at the Pacific Science Center that showed me the actual scrolls, and they're solidly Jewish. More Jewish than the Temple, the Essenes would say. Just because people bought the book doesn't mean it happened. But it does mean those people will probably watch your show and buy the stuff on the commercials.

Worst of all is the director's attempt at reconciliation, stating that if Jesus died and rose again once, maybe he did so a second time. He has a theory that the Exodus happened, with the Red Sea parting, and all, but the commonly accepted date is ~100 years off. He's trying the same thing here but there's a big difference: there are huge problems with understanding how the gospel and Pauline theology could have happened without a specific bodily resurrection. It's just too integral to each and every argument. Why would James not become a de facto leader, the new messiah, as would usually happen to the brother of a martyr? Why would Jesus be always referred to as Lord in Paul and inserted into the daily Jewish prayer (the Shema) a la Daniel 7 without resurrection? This is NT Wright's case, but I find it so compelling because it makes the development of the New Testatment make sense, all springing from this weird Easter-Morning-and-40-days-following experince, detailed twenty years later in 1 Cornithians 15. Trying to kick that out, to make the resurrection a spritual experience, and ascribe everything after the crucifixion (including the explosive growth of the church) to fantasy requires faith in several apostles' creativity and consistency across generations within a matter of decades that I just don't have. To posit that the "real church" was the gnostic heresy and that "The Truth" really shows up as an inverted, accommodationist faith 2-4 centuries later does not make sense to me.

Speaking as a scientist, it takes more than two Marys, a Josh, and a Joe to change my mind.

What this is really about is not science vs. faith, but a gospel of accommodation and gnosticism vs. one of resurrection. If Jesus had a son and decomposed, then he himself said some great stuff and was a heroic martyr (although for what purpose?) but he ultimately was only that -- a teacher who got mixed reviews and mixed results. What he was really about, then, was information, education. It's neutered theology relative to the alternative, that he really did get out of that tomb, eat fish and honeycomb, etc. and that the Creator and Father of all really did pass his judgment for Jesus, giving him the verdict of Not Guilty, and by the way, Lord of Creation. That's the question: did the creator restore that man or not? That's also why this discussion goes to the very heart of the faith, and why Jacobovici's dismissal is wrong.

The stakes are high, the matters are profound, and this debate is actually kind of fun, which is I spend so much time on it. The problem is the people who don't have the interest in Josephus and first century history. There are people out there who will just read the headline, or the superficial evidence uncritically. I heard a story today of children repeating this headline, from exactly that perspective. Recycling a story just because there's money behind it is a form a bribery all too common to the press; I know, I have a B.S. in P.R. Little ones are being offended here, and it reminds me of statements from some great teacher once about millstones and the sea. If that doesn't sound like the Titanic itself, I don't know what does.