Confirmation bias, and the story of Jesus' wife

In well-done science, conclusions are based on one thing and one thing alone: the quality of the evidence.  When physicists announced a few months ago that they had data that seemed to support the conclusion that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light, every high-energy physicist  in the world began to sift through the evidence, looking for flaws, looking for inaccuracies, trying to see if the data supported such an earthshattering outcome.  And after rigorous analysis, the result did not stand -- Einstein's fundamental speed limit on the universe seems to have been vindicated once again.

Contrast that to how conclusions are drawn in other realms, where vanishingly small pieces of evidence are considered enough to support any conclusion you happen to favor.

This whole thing comes up because of the recent announcement that a small fragment of papyrus, covered with faded Coptic script, seems to indicate that Jesus might have been married.  [Source]  The finding, which has been analyzed extensively by historian and ancient language scholar Karen King, is the subject of a paper that was presented Tuesday in Rome at an international meeting of Coptic scholars.

Of course, the first question asked was, "Is the artifact a fake?"  And the conclusion was: probably not.  The script was examined by experts, and looks authentic.  The phrasing of the text seems consistent with other early writings in that language.  While the piece is too small to carbon-date, there is apparently some talk of a non-destructive spectroscopy on the ink that could give a rough estimate of its age.  One phrase begins, "And Jesus said, 'My wife...'" and then is cut off.  A later phrase on the piece says, "... she should be my disciple."

So: what we have here is a small fragment of paper, of unknown age, with two incomplete (but admittedly provocative) phrases.  And that was all it took.

Already we have people who are against the Catholic policy of celibacy for the clergy saying that this should change church law.  If Jesus was married, why shouldn't priests be able to?  Folks who want women to be priests jumped on the second phrase; the lack of a clear mention of female disciples in the bible is the only justification for church policy on the issue, they say, and this fragment clearly supports the ordination of women.

Then the woo-woos got involved.  Fans of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and Martin Scorsese's controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which claimed that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, are saying that the fragment supports that contention.  Many of these people seem not to realize that the book and the film both reside in the "fiction" aisle.

Even wilder stories have started up.  Take a look at this article, that claims that the piece of papyrus is a clear vindication of the wacky ideas from Laurence Gardner's The Bloodline of the Holy Grail, in which Jesus survived the crucifixion, lived another hundred years in which he traveled to Tibet, and his wife and children ended up in France where they founded the Merovingian dynasty and ultimately ended up on the throne of Scotland. 

And to all of the above, I can only say: will you people please just chill?

There's a name for taking a tiny, questionable piece of evidence, and pretending that it trumpets support for an idea that you already agreed with; it's called confirmation bias, and unfortunately for the proponents of married priests, female priests, and Jesus being the ancestor of the Kings of Scotland, it's a logical fallacy.  Meaning that thinkers who are being honest should not engage in it.  The evidence we have is flimsy at best; Karen King, who is clearly a scholar of some repute, isn't even willing to hazard a firm opinion about the piece's provenance, but has given a guess that it probably dates from the Fourth Century.  So even if it is authentic, the thing was written three hundred plus years after Jesus died.  At that point, anyone could have written anything, and it wouldn't necessarily have any bearing on the truth of the matter.  The piece of paper could state that Jesus had blond hair and was left-handed and liked to eat donuts for breakfast, and there's no reason to conclude that those statements have any relevance to what the real man was like, since it was written long after anyone who actually knew him had died.

But, of course, unlike in science, that's not how these things work.  The married-priest cadre will certainly be harping on this finding for a while, as will the female-priest cadre.  The Dan Brown Writes Non-Fiction Society is probably also going to continue making little excited squeaking noises about all this, and any woo-woos further out on the plausibility scale will have a field day drawing conclusions from what in any other field would hardly constitute any evidence at all.

As I've observed before: confirmation bias is these people's stock in trade.  So honestly, I shouldn't be surprised.  But I still am, somehow.

Blasphemy, leaky plumbing, and the Weeping Cross of India

It is an interesting distinction, and one many people seem to be unable to recognize -- that there is a difference between being victimized and simply being told that you're demonstrably wrong.

I remember, for example, a former student of mine, a young African American woman who had a chip on her shoulder so big she could have used a visit to a chiropractor, who was in one of my math classes.  She routinely failed exams -- whether from lack of effort or from lack of ability was hard to tell -- but her low grades finally resulted in a parent conference.  During the conference, her mother said that her low grades in math were due to one thing: the fact that I was a racist.  I was giving her daughter low grades, she said, because I was prejudiced against African Americans, and considered them "less intelligent."

I tried (unsuccessfully) to point out that my attitudes toward people of other races had little relevance, especially given that this was a math class -- the girl was seemingly incapable of solving algebra problems correctly.  My marking a problem wrong had nothing to do with her race; anyone who had tried to solve the problem that way would have been marked wrong.

Of course, it made no difference.  People who make a career out of being victims have remarkably little respect for facts and logic.  Whether she thought that her daughter's wrong answers would have magically become right if her math teacher had had darker skin is a matter of conjecture, but that's certainly what it sounded like.

Which brings us to the case of the Weeping Cross of India.  (Source)

In the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni, in Mumbai, there is a cross that began to drip water one day, resulting in a steady trickle that collected at the feet of the figure of Jesus.  Devout Catholics pronounced it a miracle, and began to show up by the hundreds to collect the "tears" in vials, stating that it was "holy water" and could heal people who were anointed with it.  Local church leaders jumped right on the bandwagon, circulating photographs of the miraculous statue, and encouraging everyone to come and witness the phenomenon.

One of the people who did is Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International.  He came to Mumbai on March 10, and after a brief investigation he discovered what was happening; a water pipe in an adjoining washroom had sprung a leak, saturating the wall behind the crucifix.  The water was being wicked up through the porous material of the cross, eventually seeping out and dripping onto Jesus' feet.

You'd think that the Catholic leaders would have a good laugh at themselves, and then hired a plumber, wouldn't you?  You'd be wrong.  Five church leaders, including Father Augustine Palett, the pastor of the church that houses the crucifix, were interviewed by a local news program and demanded that Edamaruku apologize for his "hostility."  He refused, and held his own news conference in which he explained his position, and described how the phenomenon had a purely natural explanation.  The priests responded by demanding that local law enforcement officials arrest Edamaruku for blasphemy, under a clause of Indian penal code that one may not "hurt the sentiments of a particular religious community."  As of this writing, the police are trying to locate and arrest Edamaruku, so far without success, so I'm uncertain as to how this story will end.

What occurs to me is, can these people really not see that there's a difference between being harassed and simply being wrong?  Edamaruku didn't say that the Catholics were bad people, or that they should be discriminated against; he simply said that they had made a mistake.  This is no more blasphemy than my marking my long-ago student's algebra problems wrong was racism.

And as far as India's anti-blasphemy law, under which Edamaruku may well soon be arrested; is it really reasonable that anyone should be able to claim anything, without challenge, simply by the expedient of adding, "and that's my religious belief?"  A statement that is factual in nature can presumably be verified, and its correctness determined by some means that is the same for everyone.  (This is called science, by the way.)  The water in the crucifix either is appearing by miraculous means, or it is not.  Edamaruku determined that it was not.  You do not suddenly turn the claim of its being a miracle into a factual statement by saying, "Oh, but it is my religious belief that the water isn't coming from a leaky pipe!" -- any more than 2 + 2 = 5 as long as you aren't a racist.