TALPIOT TOMB WATCH: There's no way I can keep track of everything being written on this subject and I'm much too busy to even think of trying. But I'll try to keep pulling out something interesting from time to time. This Scientific American article qualifies:

Special Report: Has James Cameron Found Jesus's Tomb or Is It Just a Statistical Error?
Should You Accept the 600-to-One Odds That the Talpiot Tomb Belonged to Jesus?
By Christopher Mims

When Associated Producers, the production company behind the new documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, contacted Andrey Feuerverger, he was, to put it mildly, surprised. "This is not in the usual run of things one gets to do," notes the University of Toronto statistician dryly, alluding to Associated Producers's somewhat unusual request that he calculate the odds of a tomb in Israel being the last resting place of Jesus Christ.

Despite his previous lack of interest in biblical archaeology, Feuerverger would spend two years on what turned out to be a labor of love. At the end of all of his figuring, he told the documentarians, including director James Cameron of Titanic fame and award-winning investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici, that there was a one in 600 chance that the names—Jesus, Matthew, two versions of Mary, and Joseph—scribbled on five of the 10 ossuaries (or caskets for bones) found in the Talpiot tomb could have belonged to a different family than the one described in the New Testament.

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Read it all -- it's pretty good -- but note the following.

It was only when Feuerverger assumed that some of the names were exceptional, and fit with scholars' beliefs about the historical family of Jesus, that his calculation became worthy of advertising. According to Feuerverger, the most important assumption by far was the one that dealt with the inscription that appears on the ossuary that the documentarians assert belonged to Mary Magdalene.

"The extraordinariness of the Mariemene e Mara inscription gets factored into the calculation as a very rare name," says Feuerverger. By the logic of the historians and archaeologists enlisted by the production team, this inscription is so rare that Feuerverger could safely assume that this was the only woman who possessed this name out of all of those listed in the Lexicon. This changed the odds that this tomb belonged to just any Mary Magdalene from roughly one in three to one in 80.

As Richard Bauckham has explained in his lengthy discussion of this part of the inscription, the word Mara makes much more sense as the name "Martha." (See also Ed Cook's post "Mary the Master.") This means that one of Feuerverger's basic assumptions is wrong. If we make the odds here one in three rather than one in 80, his one in 600 odds have to be reduced to one in 22.5, which sounds more reasonable.

Another point: Professor Bauckham tells me that the tomb held 35 ossuaries/bodies, most of which had already been destroyed by the time the archaeologists got to them. What are the odds that just these six ossuaries of Jesus and his immediate family randomly survived out of the 35? It's not incredibly improbable, but it is unlikely, and makes the scenario advanced in the film yet more implausible.

[CORRECTION (5 March): Richard e-mails:

Just to be accurate, I didn't mean we know there were 35 burials, just that that's the number of burials a tomb of this size could have accommodated. I think I'm right in saying it's very probable there were more than 10.]

There's also this:

U.N.C. Charlotte archeologist Tabor, a consultant on the documentary who has studied over 500 burial chambers throughout Israel, pooh-poohs the naysayers.

Professor Tabor has e-mailed me and others about this sentence:

In a Web article put up yesterday at the Scientific American site I am referred to as someone who has excavated over 500 tombs (sic!). Since I have never excavated even one tomb, and I am not even an archaeologist and have never claimed to be such, this is more than an overstatement. I am sure each of you have experienced such things in dealing with the press. Christopher Minns is a good reporter and tried to do a credible job in his story but I surely want you to know that I would never say such a stupid thing.

It looks as though the sentence has been partially corrected (from "excavated" to "studied"?), but Tabor is still erroneously described repeatedly as an archaeologist. This happens to me a lot too.

UPDATE: And here's an interesting exposition in the L.A. Times of the sensationalist agenda behind the film:

Tomb' can't keep Christianity down
'Tis the season for so-called discoveries to do away with Christianity.
By Charlotte Allen, CHARLOTTE ALLEN is an editor at Beliefnet and the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus."
March 4, 2007

EASTER IS around the corner, so it must be time for a dramatic revelation that will blow the lid off Christianity.

Remember the Gospel of Judas? Right around now last year, the "newly discovered" (actually, knocking around for 30 years until a high-price buyer could be found) Gnostic papyrus was supposed to prove that Judas Iscariot was actually a good guy. This year, the breaking news, to be uncovered tonight on the Discovery Channel in a $4-million documentary film produced by James Cameron of "Titanic," is that archaeologists have found Jesus' tomb in Jerusalem and that the ossuary containing DNA from his bones proves that he didn't rise from the dead. Talk about the Titanic — Cameron's findings aim to sink an entire religion.

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