TombTwo

Question #4: Don't statistics prove that it was extremely unlikely that any family other than the family of
Jesus of Nazareth would have its members share the names that are in the Talpiot tomb?

No. The use of statistical analysis offered in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" needs a lot of corrections and clarifications. This
can be explained very easily. Andrey Feuerverger, a statistician at the University of Toronto, begins his computations by
working out some probabilities, based in part from data from earlier research by Tal Ilan:

The odds of being named Jesus, son of Joseph: 1 in 190.

The odds of being named Mariamene: 1 in 160.

The odds of being named Matthew: 1 in 40.

The odds of being named Joseph: 1 in 20.

The odds of being named Maria or Mary: 1 in 4.

Feuerverger gives the cumulative odds of what Jacobovici has called the "Jesus Equation": 1/190 x 1/160 x 1/40 x 1/20
x 1/4 = 1/97,280,000. This means that the probability that any five people, selected at random, would have these five
names = 1 in 97,280,000. Next, he removed Matia (Matthew) from the calculations, "since he is not explicatively
mentioned in the Gospels." This yields the odds that four people in Jerusalem, selected at random, would have the names
Jesus son of Joseph, Mariamne, Joseph, and Maria: 1 in 2,400,000.

Feuerverger's next step is to divide that number "by the statistical standard of 4 (or 25%) to allow for unintentional biases
in the historical sources." I'm not sure what this reference to "unintentional biases" is about, but let's keep going.
Feuerverger's "Third Computation" lowers the odds to 1 in 600,000.

Then, in his "Fourth Computation," Feuerverger divides 600,000 by a thousand, to "Adjust for all possible First Century
Jerusalem tombs," which yields his conclusion: if we knew that a family-tomb existed which contained a family with the
names Jesus son of Joseph, Mariamne, Mary, and Joseph, there is a probability of 99.83% that the Talpiot tomb is their
tomb.

However, that computation involves the assumption that we already know of a family with members named Jesus, son of
Joseph, Joseph, Mariamne, and Mary which had a tomb in Jerusalem. Without that assumption, the statistics merely
show the odds that there would be two tombs in Jerusalem with family-members with these names. But some factors in
the data that Feuerverger used need to be considered.

I accept Tal Ilan's estimate that the odds that a Jerusalemite male in the first century would be named "Jesus son of
Joseph" were about 1 in 190. It should be noticed here that this name guarantees that this individual would have a
family member named Joseph (namely, his father). The 1-in-20 factor involving Joseph's name is thus eliminated.

The 1-in-160 estimate about the name Mairamne is speciously applied to Mary Magdalene, who is never called
"Mariamne" in the Gospels. In the fourth-century fairy-tale "Acts of Philip," Mariamne is identified as a sister of Philip;
she is never called Mary Magdalene. Nor does Origen, a third-century writer, identify Mariamne as Mary Magdalene.
The assignment of the name "Mariamne" to Mary Magdalene is built on sand; meanwhile, the assignment of the simple
name Mary to Mary Magdalene is sensible, obvious, and overwhelmingly supported by the sources closest to her. The
1-in-160 estimate cannot reasonably be applied to Mary Magdalene. It is more accurate to use the same estimate used
for the ossuary with the name "Maria" -- that is, a 1-in-4 estimate. (At the same time, we could consider that the
statistical odds that Mary Magdalene, or any other woman named Mary, was also known as Mariamne, are about 1 in
160.)

Adjusted to remove unfounded speculations by a Harvard professor, the "Jesus Equation" looks like this:

The odds of being named Jesus, son of Joseph: 1 in 190.

The odds of being named Mary: 1 in 4.

The odds of being named Matthew: 1 in 40.

The odds of being named Joseph: 1 in 20.

The odds of being named Maria (in Greek) or Mary: 1 in 4.

Total cumulative odds: 1 in 2,432,000.

If the name "Matthew" is removed from the equation -- since this name is not mentioned among the relatives of Jesus in
the Gospels -- the total cumulative odds = 1 in 60,800. Then, continuing to use Feuerverger's approach, if the 1-in-
60,800 probability is divided by 4, and then divided again by 1,000, the probability factor = 15.2 to 1.

Now, what are the odds that this is the tomb of a normal family from first-century Jerusalem? Or, to put it another way,
what are the odds of a family in first-century Jerusalem having members with these names? It is automatic that a man
named Jesus son of Joseph would have someone named Joseph in his family; thus the 1-in-20 factor for Joseph is
eliminated from the equation. And considering that 1 in 4 women in that time and place were named Mary, this would
mean that the odds that a family of four would have the names Jesus son of Joseph, and Mary, and Mary, would be . . .
let's see here: something like 1/190 x 1/4 x 1/4 . . . 1 in 3,040 (without "adjusting for unintentional biases" by reducing
by 25%). And the larger the family grows, and the longer the family-tomb is in use, the greater the probability becomes
that a family-tomb would hold the remains of family-members with these names.

So it should come as no surprise -- since there were more than 3,040 families in Jerusalem in the first century, and since
many of those families had more than four members, and since many of their tombs were used for generations -- that a
family-tomb there and then contained family-members with these names. (If we were to consider only the population of
Jerusalem at one particular moment, and accept Tabor's estimate of 50,000 inhabitants, if there were only 3,040 families,
each one would have to have 16 members.) So, probability favors a scenario in which at least 1 in every 3,040 families
in Jerusalem in the first century had members with this combination of names.

Along with these considerations, we should consider random factors: there's pretty much no way to gauge the odds that
a particular family would own a family-tomb in the Jerusalem area, or the rate at which new families settled in Jerusalem.
And the odds of finding names within a family-tomb would not be stable; it would vary according to the number of family-
members, and the ratio of inscribed ossuaries and uninscribed ossuaries.

There are some unusual aspects of Feuerverger's statistics: although his analysis is supposed to be, according to James
Tabor, the result of two years of work, the calculations appear rather straightforward. Also, Feuerverger does not
include "Judah son of Jesus" in his equations, for no apparent reason, unless he eliminated that name at the outset for the
same reason that he eliminated Matthew, that is, on the grounds that "he is not explicatively mentioned in the Gospels."
By that standard, "Mariamene e Mara" should have also been eliminated from the statistics, because the name Mariamene
does not appear in the Gospels either. That wouldn't leave much left of the "Jesus Equation." The "probability factor"
would then end up as 1/190 x 1/20 x 1/4 divided by 4 divided by 1000, i.e., 3.8. Also, Feuerverger's calculations do
not include the factors that involve the differences between the names on the Talpiot ossuaries and the names of Jesus'
family-members. The presence of an ossuary inscribed "Matthew" works against identifying the tomb as one belonging to
the family of Jesus of Nazareth. (As does the "Judah son of Jesus" inscription.) And since "Mariamne" is not a New
Testament name, the presence of this name should be considered a factor added against a connection to Jesus' family.
Plus, the Talpiot tomb had 10 ossuaries, but Feuerverger's approach uses 5-out-of-5 or 4-out-of-4 parameters, even
though the number of relatives of Jesus named in the New Testament is higher than that.

The math in the "Jesus Equation" is fine, but the promoters of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" turn it into an oversimplified
statistical wreck. James Tabor, on his blog, provided a different statistical approach. Is it any better? Let's see. Tabor
proposed that we picture Jerusalem as a stadium in which 50,000 people are sitting. If someone said to that crowd,
"Stand up if your father is named Joseph," and then said, "Stay standing if your name is Jesus," and then said, "Stay
standing if your mother is named Mary," and then said, "Stay standing if a member of your family besides your father is
named Joseph," then only 23 people would be left standing.

Tabor has made some mistakes there. First, the number 50,000 for the population of the greater Jerusalem area is
unrealistically low, because we are not just considering the population on a given day; we are considering the total
number of people who lived in Jerusalem from about 20 B.C. to A.D. 70. Suddenly the stadium is quite enormous.
We're dealing with a hypothetical stadium filled with over 200,000 people. (Scholar Andre Lemaire estimated
Jerusalem's population at "about 80,000" in BAR magazine in 2002, but I will conservatively retain Tabor's lower
number.)

Now -- using the same estimates used by Tabor, but multiplied by four to recognize that we're dealing with four
generations in the Second Temple Period -- let's visit that stadium again.

How many people stand up who are named Jesus son of Joseph? 1,404.

How many people remain standing who are named Jesus son of Joseph, and whose mother's name is Mary? 692.

Tabor's next question was, "If we then ask only those of this group with a brother named Joseph only 23 are left."
Multiplied by four, that would mean that in first-century Jerusalem there were 92 men with parents named Joseph and
Mary and a brother named Joseph. But Tabor's presentation seems to smuggle in an assumption: the assumption that the
Jesus in the Talpiot tomb and the Joseph in the Talpiot tomb were brothers. That has not been shown.

Far from it. When L. Y. Rahmani described the ossuary of Joseph in the Talpiot tomb, this is what he wrote: "The
similarity of this ossuary and its inscription with that of Marya on No. 706, both from the same tomb, may
indicate that these are the ossuaries of the parents of Yeshua (No. 704) and the grandparents of Yehuda (No.
702)." This indicates that rather than being brothers, the most likely relationship between the Joseph and the Jesus in the
Talpiot ossuaries is a father-son relationship. As noted above, something like 692 men named Jesus in first-century
Jerusalem had parents named Joseph and Mary, so this is not particularly surprising; nor can it be interpreted as evidence
that the Talpiot tomb is the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.

Tabor steered his readers away from Rahmani's observation that the Joseph at Talpiot may be the father of the Jesus at
Talpiot. Tabor probably realized that that to grant Rahmani's point would be very damaging to the idea that the Talpiot
tomb is the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. He wrote in his blog, "The father Joseph is not buried in this tomb as he would
have died earlier and been buried perhaps in Galilee, so the Yose is likely not the father of the Yeshua bar Yehosef." It is
true that, inasmuch as the Gospels do not depict Saint Joseph as someone who was alive during the ministry of Jesus (he
is last seen in Luke 2, when Jesus was 12 years old), Saint Joseph is deduced to have died and been buried in Galilee
before Jesus began to preach. But it is not true that this makes it likely that the Joseph in the Talpiot tomb is not the
father of the Yeshua bar Yehosef in the Talpiot tomb. Tabor's reasoning about this makes no sense; it's circular.

Saint Joseph can't be buried in two places. Inasmuch as Saint Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus Christ, was buried in
Galilee, if the Joseph in the Talpiot tomb is the father of the Jesus in the Talpiot tomb, then the Jesus in the Talpiot tomb is
not Jesus Christ. He's just one of the 692 people named Jesus who lived in Jerusalem in the first century, whose parents
were named Joseph and Mary.

To review:

Calling the Talpiot tomb the "Lost Tomb of Jesus" because some of the names of the ossuaries are shared by the Holy
Family is like visiting a cemetery in Virginia, finding a tombstone from around 1800 with the name "George Washington,"
and declaring that you have found the Lost Tomb of George Washington. The Talpiot tomb is the tomb of a family in the
first century which had a family-member named Jesus. But it's not the famous Jesus whose ministry and teachings are
described in the New Testament.

The name "Mariamene" has no special connection to the name "Mary Magdalene." The claim that Mary Magdalene was
named Mariamne is based on extremely imaginative speculation drawn mainly from a historically worthless fourth-century
text, the "Acts of Philip," which uses the name Mariamne to identify a sister of Philip; it does not say that Mariamne was
also known as Mary Magdalene.

While DNA-comparisons from the Mariamene ossuary and the Yeshua ossuary show that Mariamene was not Yeshua's
mother or sister, this does not mean that she was Yeshua's wife. It does not even mean that Yeshua and Mariamene ever
met. Also, since Mariamene's inscription is Greek, and all the other inscribed ossuaries are in Aramaic, it is possible that
her ossuary was placed in the Talpiot tomb at a significantly different time than the other inscribed ossuaries.

It is highly doubtful that the James Ossuary is the "missing" tenth ossuary from Talpiot, because the tenth Talpiot ossuary
was measured, and there was a difference of over an inch between its length and the length of the longest edge of the
James Ossuary, and because the tenth Talpiot ossuary was described as plain, while the James Ossuary is inscribed on
one side and decorated on another side, and because the tenth Talpiot ossuary was described as broken, while the James
Ossuary was intact when first publicized in 2002. Furthermore, experts who have analyzed the James Ossuary's lettering
and its patina (including an analysis of oxygen isotopes around the inscription) have concluded that while the ossuary is a
real first-century artifact, the inscription on it is a forgery. Although new discoveries might be able to reverse the experts'
views, the combination of all these factors is an imposing obstacle for the idea that the James Ossuary came from the
Talpiot tomb.

(Another obstacle is that Oded Golan, the person who is suspected of forging the ossuary's inscription, has said that the
James Ossuary was in his possession before 1980, that is, before the Talpiot tomb was discovered. Also, according to a
report at www.haaretz.com , in the course of his trial, Oded Golan has presented photographs of the James Ossuary
which are time-stamped. Gerald Richard, a former FBI agent, testified for the defense that "Nothing was noted that
would indicate or suggest that they were not produced in March 1976 as indicated on the stamps appearing on the
reverse side of each print." If this evidence is legitimate, it means that the James Ossuary was in Oded Golan's
possession about four years before the Talpiot tomb was discovered in 1980.)

And, the use of statistics in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" is thoroughly flawed. A salvaged, reasonable form of the "Jesus
Equation" would show that 1 in 3,040 families in first-century Jerusalem may be fairly expected to have family-members
whose names include Joseph, Jesus the son of Joseph, Mary, and another Mary. The probability would increase the
larger a family grew, and the longer their family-tomb was in use. But random factors are also involved, such as the odds
that a particular family would own a tomb in the area near Jerusalem.

From these considerations, it should be obvious that "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" is not a research-driven enterprise, and
that it involves false assumptions, unjustifiable speculations, the misrepresentation of statistics, and the mistreatment of
other pieces of evidence.

THE END

Post-Script:

I wish to briefly share a few miscellaneous thoughts about "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" and the work of one of the people
responsible for it.

Some of James Tabor's claims are simply false. One minor example occurs on p. 29 of The Jesus Dynasty. Tabor
described the front of the Talpiot tomb: it "had a strange decoration carved into the fa�ade over the entrance - a circle
with an inverted pyramid over it." On the opposite page, there is a picture of the front of the tomb, and the decoration
does not feature an "inverted pyramid." It is, as Amos Kloner stated in 1996, "a pointed gable carved over a circle and
an incomplete rosette."

A more significant error occurs on pages 230-231 of The Jesus Dynasty, where Tabor claimed, "Pious scribes who
copied Mark made up an ending for him and added it to his text sometime in the fourth century -- over three hundred
years after the text was composed!" That is incorrect, inasmuch as Irenaeus, writing in about the year 184, quoted from
Mark 16:19 (in Against Heresies, Book 3, 10:5-6) and identified it as text from the closing section of the Gospel of
Mark. Tabor also states that "Two other "made-up" endings were later put into circulation, as shorter alternatives to this
longer traditional ending." That statement, too, is incorrect. These errors are disappointing to find in a book by a
professor who has been teaching about the Gospel of Mark for over 25 years.

Tabor sometimes presents evidence selectively, or avoids mentioning significant details altogether. For
instance, he knows that the name "Mariamne" is not the same as the name "Mary." He mentioned Herod the Great's wife
Mariamne in The Jesus Dynasty, using her name. But in his description of the Talpiot ossuaries, he used the name "Mary"
to describe the "Mariamene" inscription, with the predictable effect of more easily associating it with Mary Magdalene.

Tabor has a theological bias. Dr. Tabor does not take seriously the possibility that Jesus rose from the dead. He
wrote, responding to some reviews of his book, "Those who have predetermined views do not appear to be pursuing an
open quest for evidence." But Tabor's own views about Jesus are predetermined by his theological assumption that
miracles do not happen. His online comments, in which he explicitly denies that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, and
that He rose from the dead, speak for themselves:

"I assume that Jesus must have had the normal DNA that comes from a human mother and father, and that
the if the tomb into which he was temporarily and hastily place after his execution was empty someone must
have removed Jesus' corpse. It is that simple. Since I know neither the father nor what happened to the body,
but I do suggest a few possible speculative scenarios, I guess I have to plead guilty of "speculation." But is
there really any serious alternative? Seriously?"

Yes, Dr. Tabor. Yes, there are other serious views of God besides the view that God lacks either the power or the will
to ever perform miracles. Yes, there are other serious views besides the view that God did not want to, or was unable
to, raise Jesus of Nazareth from the dead after He died on a Roman cross.

It looks like one of the reasons why Dr. Tabor does not consider the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be the real tomb
of Jesus, from which Jesus arose, may be because he dismisses the possibility that Jesus arose from the dead and
ascended to heaven. To him, it seems, the real tomb must be somewhere else. In this respect, it seems to me that he
appears to be working from a predetermined view which colors his research. The flaws in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus,"
however, are plain to see without taking this bias into consideration.