The Archaeology of the Jesus Tomb

When I was in college a frustrated roommate snapped at me, “You are cynical about everything but Jesus!” I’ve always taken that as a compliment. No wonder I rolled my eyes when I saw the commercial for the new “documentary” The Jesus Tomb.

After watching it last night, I think Newsweek summarized it best in an article they published last week. The article sums up the case for the Jesus Tomb in four arguments.

1. “recent Biblical scholarship argues that Mary Magdalene’s real name was Mariamene”
2. “DNA tests show that microscopic human remians scaped from the Jesus box and the Maramene boz are not related, at least not matrilineally, leaving open the two humans whose bones were once in those boxes were married.”
3. “The patina on the Talipot [Jesus' tomb] ossuaries… matches that of the James box.”
4. A statistical argument saying that it is too great of a cooincidence to find all these names (surrounding the story of Jesus) to not be the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.

Does this make this diffinitive proof that they found Jesus’ tomb and he did not rise from the dead? No.

At first glance this seems to me to be more about money than genuine scholarship. For one, look at all the publicity surrounding it: a show on the Discovery Channel and a book released at the same time. Also, consider who is directing the show- the director of the blockbuster movie, Titanic. This clearly conceived as a money making venture- leeching off the recent interest in The DaVinci Code. This is the way they are discussing this subject as opposed to the accepted, academic route of publishing in an academic journal for the experts to discuss and decide whether this is a legitimate or false claim.

Second, if you continued to watch the pannel of experts after the show you missed another crucifixion- that of Jacobovich, the show’s journalist driving the research. The experts- a good cross section of Evangelicals, Liberals, Catholics, and agnostics- put Jacobovich in his place. They all seemed to agree that Jacobovich chained together a lot of “ifs” and drew far-reaching conclusions from these possibilities. Every time they called Jacobovich to task he simply retorted, “I’m just a storyteller.” The experts showed how Jacobovich selected the facts he wanted and even resorted to quoting experts out of context to prove his point- even Ted Koppel got into the act.

Questions that were not addressed by the panel of experts, that I would like answered, include the questionable use of statistics. Although I am good at math, I’ve never taken a real statistics class. There seems something funny to me about a couple of the calculations that were made (for instance, arbitrarilly dividing the number by four) and there were some misleading descriptions of the statistics. Additionally, this is an incorrect use of statistics- statistics don’t prove anything. You might have a 1 in 600 chance of winning the lottery (which is a very good chance; this is the chance, according to the show, that this is the tomb of Jesus) but that is still no guarentee you will win it.

There is something seriously suspect to combining statistics and archaeology as well. The power of statistics comes from the law of large numbers- the larger of a sample you have, the more successful of a prediction you can make. Archaeology, on the other hand, inheritly has an extremely small sample. What kind of conclusions can you draw when you combine these two?

In conclusion, I’m just as cynical after watching the show as before. Some might criticize me for this but I don’t think that anyone believes something because of what they see- what they see depends upon what they believe in the first place. This show is a good example of this. Jacobovich’s belief that this could be the tomb of Jesus affected his choice of facts to show, his quoting of the experts, his inferences drawn upon inferences, and his use of statistics to show what he wanted.