People have been asking my opinion, so I thought I’d throw it out there in blog format, instead of just strewn about in a bunch of comments across a variety of blogs.

For those who managed to avoid it (consider yourselves lucky), the Discovery channel aired something last Sunday called “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” which asserted that the family tomb of Jesus had been found, and it shows that Jesus was married to Mary Magdelene and had a son named Judah. In the ramp up, there was a lot of noise in the Christian blogosphere about it. I was expecting to be unimpressed by the presentation, but after watching it, I began to wonder if this was really it.

But, let’s take a look at the actual evidence that was presented.

1. There was a tomb found with ten “bone boxes”, or ossuaries. Six of them contain inscriptions, which are:
   • Jesus, Son of Joseph
   • Mary
   • “Jose” (a diminuative of Joseph — Joey?)
   • “Mariamne e Mara” (we’ll get into this later)
   • Matthew
   • Judas, Son of Jesus
2. They tested mitochondrial DNA found in the “Miaramne e Mara” and “Jesus, Son of Joseph” ossuaries, and it was determined they weren’t related through a matrilieal line.
3. One ossuary was missing from the tomb, which they asserted was the James ossuary. This is probably false, but since the thing is probably a fake, it’s the last I’ll address this issue.

The hypothesis presented by the documentary is: “The ‘Jesus, Son of Joseph’ ossuary is Jesus of Nazereth, the Christ of Christianity”. Now, the only direct evidence we could have for this would be based on association with real things connected to Jesus the Christ. Unfortunately, we don’t have anything like that. So we don’t have a way to prove this directly.

What we can ask is if this tomb corresponds to what is documented about Jesus the Christ. Specifically, we know from Matthew 13:55f that Jesus grew up in a family consisting of the parents Mary and Joseph, and brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, and some sisters (not named, in normally sexist style).

Assuming that the lack of sisters, James, Simon, and Judas, only having one Joseph, and the presence of Matthew and a son of Jesus named Judah are not treated as falsifying evidence for this hypothesis (which they are), we find out that this profile matches 0.067% of first century Palestinian men (search for 67 here for the math). Assuming there was only 10,000 such men buried in first century Palestine, we’d expect to find 6 to 7 matches. So finding one isn’t a shock.

And the fact that we have all this falsifying evidence — all this evidence that doesn’t match with the documentation on Jesus — means that we’ve found one of the wrong 6 or 7.

Now, the “Mariamne e Mara” ossuary. First of all, it’s not Mary Magdelene. So just stop even considering it. And it’s not “Mariamne called the Master” (where “the Master” is to be construed as a religious title), it’s “Mariamne and Martha”, which probably means that it’s both a mother and child. And the DNA evidence that says Mariamne isn’t maternally related to Jesus doesn’t prove they’re married: Mariamne could be the daughter or aunt (father’s sister) of the person in the Jesus ossuary.

So, at the end of the day, I guess I’m not impressed. But I am fascinating to watch the mess at the blogs for Ben Witherington and James Tabor. Witherington is a foremost New Testament scholar, and James Tabor is the archaeological consult behind this thing. These are two are deeply vested in what’s going on, and they’re both very intelligent, and it’s impressive to watch them go at it.

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Dear sir or madam:

I write this in response to this
Open Letter to Ann Coulter. My response is: nope. Sorry- too late.

Ann Coulter has never been “witty, intelligent, and provactive”. She has always been a shrill purveyor of rank hatred. At the CPAC conference she did not “cross the line”, or at least ways anymore than she has done pretty much every time she has opened her mouth. This is the lady who opinioned “”my only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” Who regularly “jokes” about killing liberal members of the supreme court. Another quote- from long before the other night- is the “we need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too.”

This is not provocative. This is psycopathic.

Nor is Ann Coulter at all unqiue. She is an ideological and political soul-mate to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michele Malkin, and many others. And it’s not just limited to the paid media personalities. One does not have to read very much of right wing blogs like RedState.org or Little Green Footballs, or listen long to right wing radio, to discover sentiments even more extreme and violent than those espoused by Coulter.

“Ya gotta dance with them what brung ya” works both ways- ya gotta dance with them ya brung. It is far too late to distance yourself from the views of Ann Coulter, now that they’re being recognized (and rejected) for what they are. You can no more reject here than I, as a liberal, can reject Howard Dean or Al Gore. You can not lionize them one day and denounce them the next. The fact that blind, bigoted hatred is not the image you wish to project (the lie you wish to sell), never the less it is the truth.

And while you’re at it, the same applies to George W. Bush. You have spent six years building him up- the war president, the compassionate conservative, Mr. Mission Accomplished, our commander in chief. Bush’s budget shortfalls are not signifigantly different from the massive deficits of Bush I and Reagan. W’s contempt for the Constitution is only somewhat worse than the contempt shown by Reagan and Bush in the Iran Contra scandal. Iraq was not the first country we attacked without provocation- as Panama and Grenada will attest to. You are several decades too late in denouncing these policies, simply because now they have become unpopular.

This also applies to the Iraq war, and the lies given for going. It’s become popular, now that both have lost their allure, to start denouncing them. Too late. They’re yours.

There are some people who still consider themselves Republicans and Conservatives who did not support Bush, the Iraq War, Coulter, etc., even when it wasn’t popular to do so (Chia- I’m talking about you here). To these people, I say that this is the Republican party as it exists today. Take a good, long, hard look. If the party of Lincoln, of Teddy Rosevelt, of Eisenhower, exists today, it exists as a wing of the Democratic party. If you support the Republican party, you are supporting the Ann Coulters of this world.

Signed,
Brian Hurt

P.S.: It seems that she’s done this before. From this FOX News article, we find out that:

Last July, Coulter received some criticism for similar remarks, first saying that Bill Clinton shows “some level of latent homosexuality,” then answering questions about her comment by telling MSNBC “I don’t know if he’s gay. But Al Gore — total fag.”

Which simply goes to show how unexceptional (for her) her remarks really were. Hat tip to the Daily Howler for the lead.

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I just got off the phone with one of the people from the Experience Report review committee. Things sound REALLY promising for having me present at Agile 2007: my experience report was apparently exactly what they were looking for, it was well-written, and I apparently did just fine presenting myself over the phone. C’mon, baby…daddy needs a free registration!

The kinda weird part is the sense I got while on the phone. It was probably just me and my feeling of being put-on-the-spot, but I got the sense that part the examination was an examination for my Agile orthodoxy: in particular, that I didn’t think I had the One True Development Process. Apparently they were a bit concerned about that from the tone of my writing. Now that I think about it, I bet they get that a lot, particularly in experience reports.

Let’s hope the Hands On session goes just as well. I’d love to beat heads about test-driven development in OCaml with other smarties.

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Looks like skip lists made it into Java6 — there isn’t a naked version that I can find, but they crop up in java.util.concurrent as a nifty way to bypass some awkward synchronization issues.

Edit: Pointed out in comments that it’s just since Java6, not Java5. I didn’t realize Java6 changed the core API!

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