Finally, a mathematician actually gets the math right on the Jesus Tomb hypothesis. Conclusion? We have not found the tomb of Jesus. For those who already know the backstory and want to jump right to it, read Bayes’ Theorem and the “Jesus Family Tomb” by physicist Randy Ingermanson. He approached the problem like a physicist dealing with any old problem in data analysis (the problem is not so much different from how particle accelerator data are analyzed). He was assisted by political scientist Jay Cost, another who has good experience running Bayesian models like this. This expands on Ingermanson’s work on this published under peer review as Randall Ingermanson, “Discussion of: Statistical Analysis of an Archaeological Find,” Annals of Applied Statistics 2.1 (2008): 84-90 (responding to Feuerverger).

Backstory: James Tabor and some others have been pushing the claim that a tomb uncovered in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem (hence now called the Talpiot tomb) is the actual burial place of Jesus (and we not only have his “coffin,” but his DNA! As well as evidence he had a child named Judas by Mary Magdalene, also buried therein, also with her DNA!), and they published a book and a documentary arguing their case. (I’m just being colloquial. The tomb’s not full of coffins, of course, but ossuaries, a cultural analog). They had a mathematician backing them (Dr. Andrey Feuerverger), but his math has been consistently bogus from day one. For example, even though we have vastly better odds of randomly getting a name in a group of ten-to-thirty bodies than in a group of five, he kept running the math for five, even though there were ten-to-thirty bodies buried in that tomb. He also adopted a number of dubious (and some outright refuted) factual assumptions (for example, regarding the names of the women in the tomb: see, as one instance, the penultimate paragraph of my previous article on this tomb). By these devices, he found the odds were 600 to 1 in favor of this being the actual tomb of Jesus.

What happened: Ingermanson and Cost apply the correct math (Bayes’ Theorem, valid historical premises, proper treatment of variables, and correct mathematical models, e.g. acknowledging that more than five people were buried there). They find that by standard historical assumptions, the odds are 1 in 19,000 against the Talpiot tomb being the tomb of Jesus, and even by more generous assumptions the odds are 1 in 1,100 against (I put my own assumptions into their model and came up with 1 in 200 against), while even the most fanatical “I desperately want this to be the tomb of Jesus” estimator can only get odds of 1 in 18 that the Talpiot tomb is the tomb of Jesus. Thus, it probably isn’t, even if we are ridiculously generous to the hypothesis that it is.

So much for that. Done and dusted.

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