Tuesday, March 06, 2007

If you've been following the Jesus Tomb saga, then you may want to read an alternate take on the statistics (and interpretation thereof) by Randy Ingermanson, who has his Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley. Here's a snip from the intro of the rather long article:

In this article, I'll focus on the statistical analysis described in the book The Jesus Family Tomb. There, the authors explain why they believe that the odds are 600 to 1 that the tomb they found contained the bone-boxes of Jesus of Nazareth, his mother Mary, his "wife" Mary Magdalene, his "son" Judah, his brother Joseph, and one other person named Matthew who might be either a disciple or a family member. The book describes a "Jesus Equation" that defines this probability.

I believe that the statistical calculations need to be done differently. I am not here to cast aspersions on Mr. Jacobovici or Mr. Pellegrino or the statistician they asked to do their calculations, Dr. Andrey Feuerverger. Name-calling solves nothing. What I want to do is to redo the calculation in a way that I believe answers the fundamental question more accurately.

And what is the fundamental question? That's very important. In science, getting the right answer is a whole lot easier when you start with the right question. Years ago, when I wrote my book on the alleged Bible code, I found time after time in which the Bible coders had asked the wrong question and then answered it correctly. They concluded that they had found powerful evidence that God encoded secret messages in the Bible. But I believe they were wrong, because they asked the wrong question.

Me? I'm Jesus-Tombed-out.

Post Author: rico
Tuesday, March 06, 2007 9:06:04 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 

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