Waiting on some material from my proofreader, and decided to put some excerpts from our soon coming kindle publication, DaVinci, The Templars and the Tomb of Jesus – something I anticipate will be out this week.

The Introduction
During the recent debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, Ken Ham was asked the question, “What would cause you to change your mind about evolution?” While listening to that section of the debate, my own answer came immediately to my mind: “Find the body.”

By this, of course, I mean the body of Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 15:16-19 clearly connects the veracity of the Christian faith with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. When it comes to a challenge to the Christian faith, I always begin my evaluation here. The division between most modernist theories concerning the New Testament and the underlying evidence is extraordinary.

There are good reasons to continue to believe the Bible. While numerous challenges have been raised to the Resurrection, most of these have failed, in some cases spectacularly.

One of the newer challengers to the Biblical record was made in 2007. The Discovery Channel ran a special by Shimi Jacobovich, entitled the “Lost Tomb of Jesus,” and a book, The Jesus Family Tomb, which was published soon after the film was released.

Both projects display a combination of poor scholarship, bad logic and the ability to tell a compelling story. While most of the work is questionable speculation with a veneer of sophistication referencing archeological study, science and mathematics, the presentation is well done.

Presentation skills can have an effect similar to marinating a freezer-burned piece of meat with barbeque sauce: it makes something that is of questionable value appear more appealing than it actually is by hiding the poor quality of the meat.

. . .

Lies and Statistics

The film and book explicitly claim “there is only a 1 in 600 chance that this is not the Jesus family tomb.” This statement, they say, can be restated this way “there is a 599 in 600 chance that this is the Jesus family tomb.” The film makers consulted a mathematician named Dr. Andrey Feuerverger to formulate the statistical probability. . .

To understand how they have compiled these figures, see figure 2. Once we remove the data connected to Miramne (for the reasons noted above), as Dr. Feuerverger did with the Matthew and Judah ossuaries, the statistical argument changes to a mere 1 in 3.8. Yet, there is an additional problem with this argument.
. . .
Conclusion
Once these other factors are considered, speculation is all that is really left of this titanic of a documentary.

We have some names that match the names of Jesus’s family; a number of names that do not match what we know of Jesus’ family and a lot of speculation to make the evidence fit the theory; I will give Jacobovich this much credit: he has quite an imagination.