What Do We Really Know About Jesus?
People talk a lot about Jesus. Generally, they either love him or they hate him. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground.
Frankly, I don't care whether you love him or hate him. Fact is, Jesus of Nazareth has been one of the most important people who ever lived on the planet. He had an amazing influence on how things have turned out for the last two thousand years. And you have to think that he'd be rather appalled by some of the things folks have said about him -- both by his enemies AND his friends.
Given that, it seems to me to be awfully interesting to figure out who and what he was. This is not a theological investigation. This is history, pure and simple. Except that history is rarely pure and never simple.
I'll do my best to pursue this investigation with the single-minded ferocity for which I've pursued plenty of other things in my life. Please note that we are all biased here. Christians are biased. Non-Christians are biased. Everybody's biased. It's a lot easier to see the other guy's bias than it is to see your own. So let's keep the emotional temperature down, shall we? Let's just can all the finger-pointing and innuendoes about people's motives and all that crap. It's boring. Let's talk about the interesting stuff!
Just so you'll know my biases up front, I'm a Christian and I'm a scientist. I have good reasons for being both, and maybe I'll share those here someday. Suffice to say that I live with a certain intellectual tension every day. I like to think it keeps my mind sharp. That tension has several times led me to change my thinking in pretty fundamental ways.
Enough said on that. First order of the day, let's look into the recent allegations of the discovery of a "Jesus Family Tomb." There was a lot of name-calling going on when this thing hit the fan in early March, 2007. Like I said, let's get past that and go to the root of the matter. Is it possible that this thing really is the tomb of Jesus and his family? I spent most of March thinking pretty hard about the matter, because it's really a probability question.
I happen to have a background that lets me contribute a bit to the public debate. I majored in math and physics in college, and then got my Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley in theoretical physics. I've worked for a couple of decades as an industrial physicist and scientific software designer. I work in pattern-recognition right now for Vala Sciences, Inc., a bioscience company. And I wrote one of the leading books on the so-called "Bible code" a few years ago.
The question of the alleged "Jesus family tomb" is very similar to the Bible code, only much simpler. I was able to analyze the evidence and come up with some hard answers, and this has made me one of the go-to guys on the probability calcuations for this tomb.
I wrote an article in early March, 2007, Statistics And The Jesus Family Tomb, that attracted lots of attention from New Testament scholars.
After several weeks of discussions with some of these scholars, I then wrote a second article (with Jay Cost), Bayes' Theorem And The Jesus Family Tomb, which produced even stronger results.
In the spring of 2008, Andrey Feuerverger published his article on the tomb in The Annals of Applied Statistics. I was one of the referees for this article, and the journal invited me to publish some comments in response to Feuerverger's article. I took the opportunity to do a new series of calculations using all the ideas I've seen in the past year. I've summarized everything in a new article, Analysis of Andrey Feuerverger's Article on The Jesus Family Tomb.
Unless new evidence comes to light, this tomb should be regarded as extremely unlikely to have been the family tomb of Jesus.
The case of the "Jesus family tomb" has also reopened popular interest in the famous ossuary belonging to "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus." While this "James ossuary" has been widely reported to be a hoax in the press, that remains unproven. The owner has been indicted by an Israeli court on charges of forgery, but the case isn't going well.
Politics may be involved here. The ossuary was not dug up in a legal excavation -- it was bought on the antiquities market, which the State of Israel would like to shut down. Some have argued that the State of Israel is making an example of the owner of the ossuary by taking him to court. Some good scholars believe the inscription on the ossuary to be genuinely from the first century. It would be difficult to prove it's the ossuary of the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, but that seems to me to be a possibility. I frankly don't care either way. It would be interesting if it were authentic, but would actually contribute very little to our knowledge of Jesus and his family. No matters of faith are at stake on this issue.
Jesus seems to make the news in a big way every year or two. This year it was the Jesus family tomb. Last year the Gospel of Judas. A few years ago, it was Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ. Shortly before that movie came out, I wrote an article on my web site that was seen by many pairs of eyes, and which landed me on a TV special (much to my astonishment). The article I wrote is still worth reading now.
