I’m going to interrupt our current series of blogs on One-Sentence Summaries of novels, to make a quick announcement. Tomorrow, we’ll get back to business.
Ahem, my announcement: I have recently had yet another work of art published. This one is not a book, it’s an article.
A little backstory first. As many of my loyal blog readers know, I’ve been a part of the evolving story of the alleged Jesus family tomb since it was announced about a year ago with much fanfare. Like most everyone else on the planet, I am skeptical that this tomb ever housed the mortal remains of Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, it’s possible. The question is — what are the odds?
Being a theoretical physicist and a troublemaker with far too much time on my hands, I have written some articles over the past year that got me quite a bit of notice. In fact, back in late October of last year, a statistics peer-reviewed journal, The Annals of Applied Statistics, asked me to be a referee for the forthcoming paper by Prof. Andrey Feuerverger, the statistician who was hired to analyze the alleged Jesus family tomb.
So I spent a considerable part of November and December reviewing Dr. Feuerverger’s article and writing a response article. I also took the opportunity to do some new calculations to improve on my previous work. One rather unusual issue was that Dr. Feuerverger requested that his paper NOT be circulated prior to publication. (Normally, academics are only too happy to get preprints out as far and as fast as possible.) So I honored that request, and in fact have not really made any public comments on the tomb controversy.
But now Dr. Feuerverger’s article has been published, along with comments by eight referees, including mine. I have posted a new article on my web site that summarizes all the new info (many, many pages in the journal, not to mention a 29 page supplementary article that the journal asked me to include on their web site that details my latest calculations).
You can read all about it in my article: Analysis of Andrey Feuerverger’s Article on the Jesus Family Tomb. I know not all of you will be interested in this, nor will all of you even understand why I’ve put so many hours of my time into this apparently absurd project. The answer is that it was just something I wanted to do, and I didn’t think anyone else would do it quite the way I wanted. So I did it.
Tomorrow, we’ll continue on with our study of those pesky One-Sentence Summaries. See ya then!
You gotta go where your heart is, Randy. Congratulations!
Hi!
I don’t know where my previous comment disappeared…I think it might have been filtered out somehow. So sad. Well, a quick summary of what I wrote:
– Been on a long vacation, glad to be back!
My 1 sentence summary, if you have the time to review it…
“An inept prince must fight his evil younger brother for the throne.”
I’m so glad we are back on this pesky topic… 🙂
Thank you for sharing this article with us. It is great.
Wow, Randy … I’m proud of you in the Lord! I started to read the article, but then you started talking mathematics and totally lost me. HA! But I did send it to my pastor, who will be keenly interested.
Thanks for sharing!
Congratulations Randy! That is awesome!
Could you talk again about how to post an article on your own site to sell? I can’t seem to get to that next step. Should would love a nudge!
“I know not all of you will be interested in this, nor will all of you even understand why I’ve put so many hours of my time into this apparently absurd project.”
If every one of us don’t have our own absurd projects life would be very dull. I find these things fascinating.
Thanks, Randy, for leaving your sane — err, I mean “mad” — imprint on this debate!
Congratulations, Randy! We’re very proud of you! (Ditto Pam, and I’m sending to my pastor too)
What an honor and a privilege for you to use your gifts in this way! (And what a mind-blowing amount of work!) Who knows the impact this will have? If only they gave the Nobel for Christian Apologetics.
Do you think Cameron and Jacobovici will be holding another press release now that this has been published? Hmmmmm.
Hey – Advanced Writing Guy – aren’t you going to share your one line summary of this article? 🙂
I’ll pass this on to my husband who taught theology in a Bible College.
My take: This may be interesting, historically. However, Jesus didn’t STAY there — if He was ever in the tomb, in fact. That is a more important fact, spiritually, than any historical assumption. He is risen!
Wonderful news randy! I bet you’re glad to have it done. I know you’ve been working on it for awhile.
I couldn’t get any of the feed blitz links (from today or last week’s) to work to connect to the blog, so I had to type in the address. Has someone sabatoged it so we couldn’t read your news?
Beautiful. I have always admired God’s order in Mathematics. And now I have another thing to admire my teacher for. You’re a lot smarter than I am, Randy! Congratulations on this most important piece of work!
Whoa. Randy. I have total statistical envy. To be able to play with numbers like that is a real gift. And by “play” I do not mean to discredit your conclusions, but to acknowledge the joy you apparently took in the work!
Randy,
Thanks for letting us know about your new article and of the tremendous amount of study and work that went into it. I’ve read the entire post and article, and you are to be commended. It’s apparent you’ve become an expert on this subject and I’m sure many are taking notice of your depth of knowledge. What an interesting subject. It must have been fulfilling for you to take it on and do the research, formulating your statistics toward your conclusion. Congratulations.
Yay, Randy!!!! You smart guy, you. ;P
I saw you, Randy, several months ago, on the filmed rebuttal of the original “investigation” into the Jesus “tomb.” On the rebuttal program some of the original experts rebutted their own contributions to the first program, citing manipulation of their comments. It’s good to have knowledgable experts on the watch and able to have their voices heard.
Randy, I think I have something on statistics I’ll like us to discuss!