Editorial: Statistics and "The lost tomb of Jesus"

Abstract

What makes a problem suitable for statistical analysis? Are historical and religious questions addressable using statistical calculations? Such issues have long been debated in the statistical community and statisticians and others have used historical information and texts to analyze such questions as the economics of slavery, the authorship of the Federalist Papers and the question of the existence of God. But what about historical and religious attributions associated with information gathered from archeological finds? In 1980, a construction crew working in the Jerusalem neighborhood of East Talpiot stumbled upon a crypt. Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority came to the scene and found 10 limestone burial boxes, known as ossuaries, in the crypt. Six of these had inscriptions. The remains found in the ossuaries were reburied, as required by Jewish religious tradition, and the ossuaries were catalogued and stored in a warehouse. The inscriptions on the ossuaries were catalogued and published by Rahmani (1994) and by Kloner (1996) but there reports did not receive widespread public attention. Fast forward to March 2007, when a television ``docudrama'' aired on The Discovery Channel entitled ``The Lost Tomb of Jesus'' touched off a public and religious controversy--one only need think about the title to see why there might be a controversy! The program, and a simultaneously published book [Jacobovici and Pellegrino (2007)], described the ``rediscovery'' of the East Talpiot archeological find and they presented interpretations of the ossuary inscriptions from a number of perspectives. Among these was a statistical calculation attributed to the statistician Andrey Feuerverger: ``that the odds that all six names would appear together in one tomb are 1 in 600, calculated conservatively--or possibly even as much as one in one million.''