Discussion of : Statistical Analysis of an Archeological Find

1. Introduction. The starting points of Feuerverger's paper are both exciting and promising: A scientific puzzle of major importance is settled by a novel statistical approach. The puzzle is related to the re-analyzed inscriptions on the ossuaries from an ancient tomb from Jerusalem unearthed in 1980. The new analysis, also documented in a book [Jacobovici and Pelle-grino (2007)] and a documentary movie [Cameron (2007)], claims that the inscriptions indicate that this may be the burial site of the New Testament (NT) family. Undoubtedly, if validated, a discovery with potential to stir major interest both in academic as well as in religious circles. At this point, the statistical methodology is called to settle the controversy and a new statistical approach is developed to handle the intricacies of the complex problem. The results presented in the paper seem to justify the prior excitement. In terms of the new approach, the defined level of " surprisingness " for the cluster of names in the tomb is found to be very high, that is, under the specified provisos, there is a very low probability that a random sample of such ossuaries contains a cluster of names which is more surprising than the cluster found. Furthermore, when the probabilities related to the level of surprisingness are translated into the classical terms of conditional odds ratios, the odds that the Talpiot tomb is that of the NT family are also found to be very high. It seems like the statistical methodology succeeded in settling the controversy , and the verdict is in favor of the tomb being the NT family tomb. In the process, a new approach was developed to settle cases in which judgment has to be rendered on whether or not a multiple characteristics event is or is not a result of random draws. On a personal note, I confess that I would have been very pleased to be able to conclude my discussion with two positive statements: (a) that I found