Talpiot Tomb: Reviewed Sandra Scham

This is the third in a continuing series of assessments of the peer reviewed papers concerning the Talpiot Tomb and its proposed associated with the biblical Jesus. For this installment, I turn to Sandra Scham’s article, “Trial by statistics”, in Near Eastern Archaeology.

Scham’s initial introduction deals with the intended spectacle presented by Jacobovici in the documentary, and its ties to The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. From here, she looks to some of the associated scholars, whom she sees as having backed away from their quite strong positions seen in the documentary. Though, I an skeptical that this is solely based on evidence and a clarification of positions, ad Scham reads it. James Tabor still seems to support it quite strongly, and I wonder if the addition of a level of skepticism is potentially a response to the strong negative reaction to the data. Certainly, his book The Jesus Dynasty, is full of similarly hypothetical statements that are still meant to draw the reader to a very specific conclusion. However, if the positions of Tabor and Feurverger have been extremely tentative the entire time (which I believe the follow up discussion to the documentary shows Tabor’s were not), it is instead the fault of the filmmakers for leaving out such an important outlook.

Scham’s analysis of Feurverger’s work and the statistics focuses mostly on his use of assumptions in building his model. Perhaps the most important point that Scham makes, which seems to be applicable to other statistical assessments of the Talpiot Tomb that have been offered, is that the assumptions made may seem valid to statisticians or lay-persons, but among archaeologists, they are clearly much more debatable than presented in Feurverger’s work (I will note here that the Kilty and Elliot do a better job in their presentation of the Yoseh debate, but fall to the same type of assumptions in other areas). By putting this in the light of Feurverger’s statement that “Should even one of these assumptions not be satisfied then the results will not be statistically meaningful.”, Scham illustrates the “unsound” nature of this endeavor. This use of assumptions piled on top of each other is very much indicative of pseudoarchaeology.

I find Scham’s closing, though a bit off topic from statistics, to be important, and present two points that have been relatively unmentioned in the discourses concerning the Talpiot Tomb. First, the identification of an ossuary with the priest Caiaphas, as used for defense of the Talpiot Tomb’s identification with the Jesus family, is quite problematic. Though, Scham leaves me a little unclear on her stance on the subject, I believe she is presenting the argument that in light of the Talpiot Tomb, we should be questioning the identification of the Caiaphas ossuary, and not finding Jacobovici’s support. Secondly, her noting the use of the discovery of the text of Jonah in the Talpiot Tomb, and the seeming inspiration and support Jacobovici presents in this. It is quite right of Scham to point out that this is just film making and not science, story telling, and not archaeology. Which brings her article back to her beginning, and the documentaries, with fables and Dan Brown.

Scham, Sandra “Trial by statistics” in Near Eastern Archaeology, 69 3:4 (2006) 124-125