The Talpiyot Tomb and the Bloggers

Several other bloggers (including Joel Watts and Jim West) have mentioned this fine new volume from Eisenbrauns, Archaeology, Bible, Politics, and the Media (great Oxford comma there). It is edited by my esteemed colleagues here in the Duke Religion Department, Eric and Carol Meyers.

The volume is the result of the Duke Conference on this subject held in April 2009.  At the time, I blogged about the conference, and you can listen in to an archive of the talks on our iTunes U.  It is all worth reading, of course, but I am happy to provide access here to my essay in the volume (as well as to the table of contents):

The Talpiyot Tomb and the Bloggers
Mark Goodacre

The essay has a response by AKMA, though I can't reproduce that here.

Duke Archaeology, Politics and Media Conference in iTunes U

For some time, the ASOR blog has held a repository of the Duke conference on Archaeology, Politics and the Media (April 23-24 2009). I have now uploaded all the audio files also to Duke's iTunes U. You can access the files here. I have placed them in what I think is the correct order:

Duke Archaeology, Politics and Media Conference (iTunes U)

Please let me know if you spot any errors.

More on the Duke Conference on Archaeology, Media and Politics

Over on Bible and Interpretation, Paul Flesher has a lucid, detailed and interesting account of the recent Duke Conference on Archaeology, Media and Politics:

Seeking the Sacred Past
Paul Flesher

Thanks to Mark Elliott for pointing it out to me; blogged also already by Jim West.

Audio from the Bible, Archaeology and Media Symposium

Thanks to Jim West for mentioning that the full audio is now available for the Duke Archaeology, Politics and Media Symposium, hosted at ASOR:

Audio of Duke Conference on Archaeology, Politics and the Media

Please excuse me for also mentioning that the audio of my talk is available here, and the associated powerpoint presentation here (.ppt) and here (.mht). (I don't have the rights to upload anyone else's talks, of course). AKMA's response is available on the ASOR blog too.

Archaeology, Politics and Media Symposium Write-up

I attended the Archaeology, Politics and Media Symposium at Duke last week and Bob Cargill has helpfully written up a running commentary on the symposium in his blog:

Duke Conference on Archaeology, Politics and the Media: Day 1
Duke Conference on Archaeology, Politics and the Media: Day 2

Archaeology, Politics and the Media Symposium at Duke today

I will be at the Duke Symposium on Archaeology, Politics and the Media today, details here:

Duke Symposium: Archaeology, Politics and the Media: Re-visioning the Middle East

Flyer here. I'll be giving a presentation at the symposium on "The 'Jesus Family Tomb' and the Bloggers"; I have outlined my presentation here in three parts (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3). AKMA is responding, and he will be wearing a tie.

I will, of course, be twittering during the symposium (follow me on twitter).

The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers III: When bloggers apparently fail to make an impact

In the previous two posts on this topic, I have celebrated some of the blogging successes in their critiques of the Discovery Channel documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus.  This was an occasion when several expert voices spoke up quickly and accurately and created a strong wall of opinion that had the effect of seriously undermining the claims made by the film makers.  But it is not always so straightforward.  Indeed, the kind of successes on this occasion are the exception rather than the rule.  It is much more common for academic bloggers to be ignored by the media, even when they are pointing out errors and inaccuracies that are actually embarrassing those making the claims.   A clear example of the kind of thing I am talking about was the following post which I will be discussing in this third and final post on The Talpiot Tomb and the bloggers:

Jesus Family Tomb Website: Errors and Inaccuracies

I published the post on 11 March 2007, a week after the documentary aired.  It took me ages to write.  It was one of those posts with which other bloggers will be familiar, the post that keeps on expanding, requiring lots of research, and which makes you ask repeatedly, "Is this really worth the effort?".   It relates to the "official" website on the "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" at www.jesusfamilytomb.com.  That website, more slick, more snazzy, more detailed than Discovery's site, had gone online at the same time, the end of February, but unlike that site, it was riddled with errors and inaccuracies.

Some of the errors were simply careless, sloppy mistakes, the Acts of Philip for the Gospel of Philip, AC for AD, Jesus 13 with Galilean rabbis rather than 12 at the Jerusalem temple, and so on.  Others, though, were more substantial.  Several claims about the Talpiot Tomb discoveries were so badly stated that they amounted to misleading information, like the claim that one of the ossuaries actually read "Mary Magdalene", alongside other familiar difficulties like the misreading of Francois Bovon's analysis of Mary in the Acts of Philip.

The most remarkable elements on this site, though, were not so much statements that were misguided or inaccurate, but entire sections that were nonsense, the Gospel of Thomas as "suppressed by Christian authorities due to the status allotted to Mary of Magadala (sic) as master", or "the Essene Gospel of Peace" as "one ancient manuscript discovered in the Secret Archives of the Vatican" or the following page on "The Gospels Nazarene: The Gospel of the Holy Twelve", which is nonsense from beginning to end:

The Gospel of the Nazarenes or the Gospel of the Holy Twelve is considered to be the original Gospel or one of the first complete written manuscripts of the original word of Jesus.

The term "Nazarene" is used by some to refer to early Jewish followers of Christianity in connection with the ancient Essene sect of Judaism which Jesus is often associated with. The original Gospels of Nazarene are said to have been written by St. John, who passed the manuscript along to a trusted friend in 70 AD following his arrest.

In the nineteenth century, the Gospel of the Holy Twelve was rediscovered by a friar. However, since its exposure to Church Authorities in Rome, it has remained hidden in the Vatican archive, which some say is due to newly discovered content that would discredit the Church and the Council of Nicea.

There is, of course, no reliable historical information contained on this page.

So what happened next?  I documented each of the errors and inaccuracies that I could find, while suspecting that a still more careful reading would reveal many more, and I hoped that the authors of the site would take the list seriously and amend their site accordingly.  Each one still remains on the site to this day.  

To his credit, James Tabor told me that he had reported this list to those responsible for the site but no adjustments were made, either then or in the subsequent two years.

What does this example teach us?  Well, if I were feeling cynical, I would say that it has taught me to waste less time on sites that are driven by commercial concerns and which are uninterested in honest intellectual concerns.  I would note that I am inclined to fall into that naïve academic belief that people will want to set the record straight, that they will want to eliminate disreputable and ignorant statements, and that accuracy, precision and nuance matter.  One of my favourite comments on the post here discussed remarked that while the link to the Gospel of Philip was inaccurate, the links to "Buy the DVD" and "Buy the book" worked fine.

If I were feeling less cynical, though, I would note that even where a glitzy site like this retains misinformation on a large scale, there is value in the academic bloggers publicly setting out the errors and inaccuracies involved.  If googleization democratize the process of attaining knowledge, one of the values of that process is that any researcher looking for material on "the Jesus family tomb" will quickly come into contact not only with the glitzy, commercial, error-ridden official site but also the mundane, non-commercial, accurate academic blogs.  

As in other areas, politics, religion, journalism, the blogs have empowered experts who have something intelligent, well researched and cogent to say.  When we are using the medium thoughtfully, they can place us in a surprisingly influential position, even when those with the money, the staff, the time and the publicity might at first appear seem like formidable opponents.  In spite of our failures, it is a responsibility worth taking seriously.    

The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers II: A Change in Tone

In my previous post, I looked at a success story in the blogging of the Talpiot "Jesus family tomb" affair, where accurate and knowledgeable blogging led to changes in several of the claims made on the Discovery Channel website.  It could be argued that that early success was symptomatic of a larger trend according to which the early, bold and far-reaching statements gave way to something much more cautious.  Many of us felt that we could see Discovery progressively distancing themselves from claims that at first they had embraced.  To go back now and to watch the Press Conference on Monday 26 February 2009 (still available online at the Discovery Jesus Tomb website, direct link here), at which the case was first made, is to see a remarkable degree of confidence in the importance of the alleged discovery, as the president and general manager of the Discovery Channel begins:

You are joining us here for what might be one of the most important archaeological finds in human history.  In the hills of Jerusalem, archaeologists have discovered a tomb, a two thousand year old tomb, which contains significant forensic evidence, and some potentially historic consequences . . . . I would like to briefly discuss how this momentous find came about and how it comes to be before you today.

And James Cameron, who comes to the microphone next, tells the story of his involvement with the documentary, which he went on to produce, and speaks of it as "literally this is the biggest archaeology story of the century".  And so it goes on.  But this robust beginning  gave way,  quite quickly, to a more cautious tone. 

The reaction in the blogosphere, as well as in other media outlets, demonstrated very quickly that the vast majority of scholars assessing the case were not finding it convincing.  Unilke Cameron, who said that as a layman he had found the case "pretty darn compelling", the experts were finding the case unpersuasive.  The statistical case began to crumble as experts cast doubt on elements in the identification of the ossuary inscriptions, and especially its "Ringo Starr", the supposed presence of Mary Magdalene.  The claim that "Mariamenenou Mara" was a unique way of identifying Mary Magdalene appeared to be based on a misreading of Francois Bovon's analysis of the Acts of Philip. I called attention to this before the documentary aired (with a follow up on 11 March), and others made similar points, including Tony Chartrand Burke and Richard Bauckham.  Now Bauckham himself is not himself a blogger, but was guesting on his St Andrews' colleague Jim Davila's Paleojudaica blog before producing a revised version of his thoughts also on Paleojudaica.  Once again the bloggers were adding guest posts from experts to enhance their own efforts, and the effect was pretty dramatic.

When the documentary aired on Sunday 4 March, Discovery added an extra programme that followed on immediately afterwards -- a studio discussion, hosted by Ted Koppel, The Lost Tomb of Jesus -- A Critical Look. It was this programme that launched Jonathan Reed's now famous charge of "archaeoporn".  Some at the time saw the scheduling of this programme as an opportunity for Discovery to imply some critical distancing from the claims made in the documentary, claims that they had been heartily endorsing only a week earlier.  When the first repeat of The Lost Tomb of Jesus was dropped from Discovery's schedules, it began to look like they were indeed feeling less confident about the documentary than they had at first.

I should add that it was not only the bloggers who played a role in holding the programme makers to account.  One key event was the appearance of Eric Meyers with Simcha Jacobovici on the Diane Rehm show on 5 March, the morning after the documentary aired.  But in only the recent past, radio appearances and newspaper op-eds would have been the only major public venues for providing critiques of programmes like this.  Now the blogging revolution had changed all that and the reactions were thorough, detailed, varied and fast.

The Talpiot Tomb provided the first major test for the bloggers in our area, and it is a test that they passed with flying colours.  The contrast with the earlier and similar story, the James Ossuary, only a few years earlier, in 2002,  is significant.  Then blogging was only in its infancy, and in our area it was non-existent.  (Jim Davila's Paleojudaica, the pioneer, began in March 2003;  this blog began six months later in September 2003).  The James Ossuary story took some time to unravel and although furiously debated on the then more popular e-lists, the latter did not attract the same degree of expertise or the same degree of publicity now reached by the blogs.  Indeed, two occasional bloggers were themselves involved directly with the project, Darrell Bock, who was highly critical of the the documentary's claims, and James Tabor, who remained sympathetic, and provided a sane if lonely voice speaking up for Jacobovici.

At this point, perhaps you will be thinking that there is far too much by way of celebrating blogging success, so in the next part I will look at an example of a complete failure to achieve any change at all, and the failure was mine.

The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers I: An Early Success

On Thursday this week I am giving a short presentation at the Duke Symposium on Archaeology, Politics and the Media: Re-Visioning the Middle East (Flyer). My topic is "The Talpiot Tomb and the Bloggers".  Naturally, I will be outlining my presentation here, with some hyperlinks to the relevant material.  In this first post, I would like to begin with an example of how blogging successfully held the programme makers to account and resulted in changes to the claims made.   Most of the links below are to the NT Blog where you can find further links to the relevant information, and you can get a feel for the original timeline, which on this occasion is important.

The Lost Tomb of Jesus was first broadcast across a two hour slot on Discovery Channel at 9pm on March 4 2007.  Several of us live blogged the event.  But by this point, Discovery's publicity machine had been in full force for several days;  there was a press conference, a snazzy "official" website and Discovery's own website.  The bloggers got to work on this informtion straight away and by the time the documentary had aired, there were already major question marks against the claims being made by Simcha Jacobovici and the other programme makers.

The case for the identification between the Talpiot Tomb and Jesus of Nazareth is based largely on statistics.  The cluster of names found in this tomb is said to correspond to a remarkable degree with the names of Jesus and his family.   Before the documentary had aired, I was highly sceptical of the statistical case, not least because it appeared to rely on a dubious identification between Mariamene and Mary Magdalene while at the same time failing to take seriously important contrary evidence, Judas son of Jesus, and ignoring the non-match Matia.

Simcha Jacobovici had hired a top statistician, though, and surely, he argued, his expertise should be taken seriously. The statistician in question was Dr Andrey Feuerverger, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Toronto. I wrote the following:

Clearly he knows a lot more about statistics than most of us, and I would not dream of trying to second guess him. But he revealed a very important piece of information at the press conference, that he is not an expert on the New Testament or archaeological data, so he was working with the data given to him by the programme makers. The relevance of this is that a significant and fatal bias was introduced into the analysis before it had even begun.

One can view the data that was given to Feuerverger on the Discovery website, in the PDF packet of documentation, where the grounds for the statistical analysis are given. It is clear from this that the task he was given was to work out the probability of a certain cluster of names occurring, where in each case all known examples of the given name in the given period were divided into all known naming possibilities in the given period. And the names he worked with were Jesus son of Joseph, Mariamne, Maria and Joseph. The name Matia was initially factored in too, and then removed "since he is not explicatively [sic] mentioned in the Gospels". But the problem is not just that Matia is not mentioned as a family member in the Gospels, it is that the greater the number of non-matches, the less impressive the cluster becomes. Or, to put it another way, it stops being a cluster of striking names when the cluster is diluted with non-matches. Mariamne needs to be taken out of the positive calculation and instead treated as a non-match; Matia needs to be treated as a second non-match; Judas son of Jesus needs to be treated as contradictory evidence. These three pieces of data together detract radically from the impressiveness of the given cluster.

In an attempt to make the point by extending and reapplying an analogy that Simcha Jacobovici was fond of, I continued:

At the risk of labouring the point, let me attempt to explain my concerns by using the analogy of which the film-makers are so fond, the Beatles analogy. This analogy works by saying that if in 2,000 years a tomb was discovered in Liverpool that featured the names John, Paul and George, we would not immediately conclude that we had found the tomb of the Beatles. But if we also found so distinctive a name as Ringo, then we would be interested. Jacobovici claims that the "Ringo" in this tomb is Mariamene, whom he interprets as Mary Magdalene and as Jesus's wife, which is problematic (see Mariamne and the "Jesus Family Tomb" and below). What we actually have is the equivalent of a tomb with the names John, Paul, George, Martin, Alan and Ziggy. We might well say, "Perhaps the 'Martin' is George Martin, and so this is a match!" or "Perhaps John Lennon had a son called Ziggy we have not previously heard about" but this would be special pleading and we would rightly reject such claims. A cluster of names is only impressive when it is a cluster that is uncontaminated by non-matches and contradictory evidence.

In short, including Mariamne and leaving out Matia and Judas son of Jesus is problematic for any claim to be made about the remaining cluster. All data must be included. You cannot cherry pick or manipulate your data before doing your statistical analysis.

That post appeared on Thursday 1 March.  (Actually I remember being up late that night to write it, and the time stamp of 1.45am confirms that memory).  Within 24 hours, I was able to publish a follow-up based on a helpful but technical email from Joe D'Mello who was concerned about some of the claims being made on the Discovery Channel website.  D'Mello was able to go much further than I, and others like me, were able to go.  We were largely questioning the data that had been fed to Feuerverger, but D'Mello could see that there were problems also in the interpretation of the statistical calculations.  D'Mello was disputing the following claim that appeared prominently on the Discovery Website:

A statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters (Discovery Channel/Vision Canada/C4 UK) concludes that the probability factor is 600 to 1 in favor of this tomb being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

D'Mello was clear that this conclusion was not justified by the data.  I invited him to write a guest post for me;  and he wrote to Feuerverger and Discovery.  Within two days, now the day of the broadcast itself, D'Mello had secured important corrections from Feuerverger, including the following:

In this respect I now believe that I should not assert any conclusions connecting this tomb with any hypothetical one of the NT family. The interpretation of the computation should be that it is estimating the probability of there having been another family at the time whose tomb this might be, under certain specified assumptions.

Again, I published the material here and again it was not the end of the story. By March 10, D'Mello had secured an agreement that there should be an adjustment on the Discovery website itself, a correction that duly appeared three days later, on 13 March, and then throughout the site by the end of the week, on 16 March. Perhaps the most significant of the changes was this one:

Dr. Andrey Feuerverger, professor of statistics & mathematics at the University of Toronto, has concluded a high statistical probability that the Talpiot tomb is the JESUS FAMILY TOMB.

changed to

Dr. Andrey Feuerverger, professor of statistics at the University of Toronto, has concluded (subject to the stated historical assumptions) that it is unlikely that an equally "surprising” cluster of names would have arisen by chance under purely random sampling.

It is easy to see that the second statement is significantly weaker than the first.

The discussion of the statistics continued for some weeks and months after this initial flurry of emails and posts, and I should make special mention of the work of Randy Ingermanson, who was involved in the discussions right from the beginning and went on to write what I think of as the definitive piece on the subject, Analysis of Andrey Feuerverger's Article on the Jesus Family Tomb. But I have homed in in this post on the early contributions of Joe D'Mello, and the discussions of the statistics in this blog, because it illustrates one of the upsides of the blogs. By providing informed comment in an up-to-the-minute way, the blogs can, on occasions like this, hold the media to account, exposing problematic claims and faulty logic. It was, I think, the combination between speed and accuracy that made the impact. The reactions were speedy, at the very time that the eye of the media was upon us, and when Discovery wanted to avoid criticism. The reactions were informed and accurate, the blogging revolution allowing connections to be made between Biblical scholars and statisticians.

In the next part, I will turn to the broader picture of the blogging of the Talpiot Tomb, and how it had success in changing the scene.