Still more on the "lost tomb of Jesus"

The Scientific American has weighed in on the “lost tomb of Jesus.” Excerpts of a recent article appear below:

In researching our special report on the upcoming Jesus Tomb documentary, fronted by James Cameron (of Titanic fame), I encountered more than a few angry scholars and archaeologists.

Of special note was Tal Ilan, whose Lexicon of Jewish Names was essential to the statistical calculation made by Andrey Feuerverger, the U. of Toronto professor of statistics and mathematics who is quoted in the documentary…

In an interview I conducted this morning, the scholar Tal Ilan, without whose work these calculations would have been impossible, expressed outrage over the film and its use of her work--she's the source of the quotation in the headline of this post.

Jodi Magness, a professor of archaeology and Jewish history of that period at UNC Chapel Hill, had this to say in an interview conducted yesterday:

…I think it's a very important point to make - that this is almost a wikipedia form of scholarship.

They're presenting it or setting it up as though we have a discovery and you can
react and it's all legitimate and valid which it's not

Finally, Carney Matheson…conducted the DNA examination the film cites. Basically, the filmmakers scraped a tiny amount of biological material out of the ossuary (or bone box) labeled Jesus, and a tiny amount out of the one that they think belonged to Mary Magdalene. Matheson then sequenced the mitochondrial DNA in both samples in order to establish that whoever those two boxes once contained was not related on their mother's side--in other words, they're not family. It's a negative
result that doesn't say much (and it begs the question - if you were gathering
material for testing, why not test the boxes that you believed belonged to
related people, such as Jesus and his mother, as well?)