by Elsewhere 58 Replies latest jw friends
Wow I'm really sorry to see so many knee jerk reactions in here.
All the evidence they portrayed is valid. DNA, mathematical, timeline... all of it.
The real show stopper will be a few years from now when they say they typed the DNA found in Jesus' box to that of the DNA found in Joseph's box. C'mon, you know what the results are...
C'mon, you know what the results are...
I aknowledge that the finding of the tomb containing remains of all names together is interesting. Now it is the turn of science, agree?
Please note that invoking a mitochondrial DNA test (as oposed as a the more powerful genomic or nuclear DNA) on two individuals -Jesus and Mariamene e Mara- is NOT indicative of their marital status and a biological relationship remains inconclusive, as testing the mitochondrial genome can only prove if two individuals are related by common descent through maternal lines only from a common ancestor and is thus of limited value, for instance: it could not be used to test for paternity such as a father/daughter relationship.
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a powerful tool for tracking maternal lineage, and has been used in this role for tracking many species back hundreds of generations. Human mtDNA can also be used to identify individuals, however it is not used to discriminate involvement of people at crime scenes.
Scientific reslts and truth are not not based on faith or wishfull thinking. It is time for science to take over, as a story is not history.
Keeping money-makers film-makers out of the equation will be useful; In my opinion, expect at least 10 years' delay to run tests, replication & verification by other scientific teams and result interpretations.
On the other hand, for accuracy, one must not allow religious groups to officialy interpret forensic findings.
Edited to add:
By the way, their statistics were based on asumptions and bias so are not valid but are a big Hollywood joke that will certainly sell book$. What they presented can be safely put in this analogy: You want to play and win the PowerBall (a lottery game), so :
IF you get the first number right and IF you get the second number right and IF you get the third number right and IF you get the fourth number right and IF you get the fifth number righ and IF you get the sixth number right, then there is no doubt at all that you won the lottery with a certainty better than 1 / 600.
Understand that their line of reasoning is only pseudo-scientific, that is, they told a story of a chain of unbasedassumptions and pretended there is a mathematical accuracy to it; THAT was their dishonest, money-making approach, together with invoking a mtDNA test.
G
I forgot to watch the show....Glad I missed it.
Keeping
money-makersfilm-makers out of the equation will be useful; In my opinion, expect at least 10 years' delay to run tests, replication & verification by other scientific teams and result interpretations.On the other hand, for accuracy, one must not allow religious groups to officialy interpret forensic findings.
So true.
Please note that invoking a mitochondrial DNA test (as oposed as a the more powerful genomic or nuclear DNA) on two individuals -Jesus and Mariamene e Mara- is NOT indicative of their marital status and a biological relationship remains inconclusive, as testing the mitochondrial genome can only prove if two individuals are related by common descent through maternal lines only from a common ancestor and is thus of limited value, for instance: it could not be used to test for paternity such as a father/daughter relationship.
True, DNA cannot prove marital status, but the position of the two ossuaries suggests the two individuals were married to each other.
I wonder about Judah's (the son) ossuary. Why was it in the tomb? He must have died at a young age, without descendants.
Wow I'm really sorry to see so many knee jerk reactions in here.
The criticism that the program has received from biblical scholars and statisticians has been reasoned and well-deserved; please see the blogs referenced in this thread that lay out the logical and methodological flaws of the program. These are not "knee-jerk" reactions but appropriate criticisms of the way the program manipulates and misconstrues the statistics, employs circular reasoning and special pleading, and makes other errors of fact. As for myself, I already was justifiably skeptical to begin with because I already had witnessed Jacobovici's propensity for pseudo-scholarship in his abyssmal Exodus Decoded program, and knew the kinds of errors and leaps of logic he indulges in.
All the evidence they portrayed is valid. DNA, mathematical, timeline... all of it.
In no sense is the claim that "there is a 1 in 600 chance that this is Jesus' family tomb" stastically valid, as I've already pointed out in this thread. Even the statistician who lent his services for the program rejects this interpretation of his probabilistic analysis ("I now believe that I should not assert any conclusions connecting this tomb with any hypothetical one of the NT family"), an analysis which also depended wholly on the data and assumptions fed to him by Jacobovici (especially the assumption that "Mariamenou" should be considered a match for Mary Magdalene, an assumption which "drives the outcome of the computations substantially"). The DNA finding, while valid, did not really have the ability to falsify the central claim of the program. Had the result been positive, the "Mariamene" could have been identified with one of Jesus' anonymous sisters in Mark 6, or an unknown maternal aunt, or an unknown niece. Neither does the negative result indicate that "Mariamene" was a spouse of the Talpiot Jesus, as opposed to a sister-in-law, paternal aunt, or other relation (or non-relation). Only testing the DNA of the Talpiot "Maria" would have had the ability to falsify this premise, but they were not able to do this. As for all the other evidence and points, the program cites and interprets them in a manner that assimilates them to its overall thesis. For example, the program starts out claiming that "not a single name in the tomb contradicts the Gospel story", that we don't find a name like Amy, and then later on mentions the ossuary for Yehuda which is precisely an example of this and which should be a negative hit on identifying the Talpiot tomb as the "tomb of Jesus", but this is resolved through special pleading (i.e. by giving the initial hypothesis primary weight over the evidence by formulating another hypothesis that accomodates the evidence to the a priori hypothesis), and an elaborate scenario is even constructed with respect to the "Beloved Disciple" to give credence to this conjecture. I also saw plenty of circular reasoning; for instance, about halfway through the program I noticed that they were already calling the Talpiot tomb the "Jesus family tomb" as if the identification was already established. And there were a host of other assumptions that were not even mentioned, such as the assumption that the Talpiot tomb belonged to a single family that lived at roughly the same time.
To keep you guys updated on some of the commentary in the biblioblogs, here are some recent posts and articles of interest:
http://neonostalgia.com/weblog/?p=196
http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/03/jesus-tomb-show-biblical-archaeologists.html
http://dev.bible.org/bock/node/119
http://www.sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleId=640
http://www.joezias.com/tomb.html
And check out this interview of Jacobovici and Eric Meyers on the Diane Rehm show:
Well said. A waste of imagination, not to mention the waste of time to the many who may have hoped to be educated, at least somewhat.
For example of how the statistics are misrepresented, check out Jacobovici here in this video from his website (http://www.jesusfamilytomb.com/experts_statistician.html), wherein he claims that the probability "ranges from a very optimistic 2,500,000 to 1 that this is the tomb of Jesus, or if you go very, very conservative, 600 to 1 that this is the tomb of Jesus.... 600 to 1 that this is the tomb of Jesus".
Compare with Andrey Feuerverger's statement: "It is not in the purview of statistics to conclude whether or not this tombsite is that of the New Testament family....I now believe that I should not assert any conclusions connecting this tomb with any hypothetical one of the NT family". He also notes that the 600 to 1 estimate is based on assumptions that may drive "the outcome of the computations substantially".
Here is a new wikipedia page on the program:
As plausible as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in conjunction with Santa Claus; with just as much potential commercial mileage.
New statements from the statistician used in the program:
http://ntgateway.com/weblog/D%27Mello2.pdf
He has asked the Discovery Channel to correct the incorrect claims it has made on his statistics. And here is an interesting article about him in the Wall Street Journal:
