Suppose by illustration, a society had exactly six names: ‘one’, ‘two’, … ’six’. and these names all occurred with equal frequency. Now suppose we had documentation of a family with two brothers named ’six’ and ‘five’ and then a tomb is found with ossuary inscriptions that read ’six’ and ‘five’. Feuerverger‚Äôs approach would seem to be to take 1/6 and 1/6 and multiply them to come up with 1/36 and conclude that this is the probability of a tomb with this configuration.

The problem here is that mutliplying frequencies this way implies ORDER. The actual probability of a two-inscription tomb containing a ’six’ and a ‘five’ is more like 1/18. (If one thinks of rolling dice, the first die could be ’six’ and the second one ‘five’ or vice versa.) (Actually, the probability is likely higher than 1/18 because in family groups names are not randomly assigned — two brothers would not typically both have the same name.)

In the case of the Talbiot tomb, one could perhaps make a case for multiplying the frequencies for ‘Joseph’ and ‘Jesus’ because of the implied order. In other words, in both the documented history and in the tomb, Joseph is the father and Jesus the son. We would not have a match with a tomb that said ‘Joseph son of Jesus’.

However, in the case of Mary and Jose, the relationship in the tomb is not specified. This makes use of simple multiplication absurd.

In the case of the hypothesized brother, for example, consider that the filmmakers would have claimed a ‘match’ had this fourth ossuary said ANY of Joses, James, Simon or Judas. This does not seem to be taken into account in the calculation at all. Surely a more reasonable approach would have been to sum the frequencies of all four of these names to come up with a group frequency for this hypothesized ‘brother’ ossuary.

Have you been following the story of the Tomb of Jesus? I haven’t been following it in detail, I’ll admit, just reading the odd blog post here and …

Jeremy and Donald, the points you raise concerning the rest of Jesus’ family named in the NT are very good. Why were ossuaries with their names not also discovered in the tomb? And who are the otherwise unknown others whose names were were found therein?

There are ways of taking those problems into account in estimating statistical probabilities, but Dr Feuerverger did not do that. If he had, though, his calculation wouldn’t look like a five-minute back-of-the-envelope job.

Second, if I understand correctly, in this tomb there were way more than these four people, something on the order of thirty-five. Why were just these names chosen? Let’s redo the odds, except I just calculate that in a tomb of thirty-five random first century Jews, there will be (at least) one Mariamne, one Mary, one Yose, and one Jesus son of Joseph.
At least 1 Mariamne: 10.38%
At least 1 Mary: 99.07%
At least 1 Yose: 58.77%
At least 1 Jesus son of Joseph: 8.81%

Assuming that the presence of Yose is an independent variable, the probability of finding all four in a tomb is 0.54%. If it’s not, then the odds are closer to 1%.

Now, if you want to prove something, show me that these people are connected in the way proposed by this presentation. Then, the odds start to work out the way they suggest.

I would unpack that a little. The analysis assumes that there is a tomb that Jesus and his family were together buried in and that such tomb is extant.

Other elements that seem to me to decrease the probability:

4. No one in Jesus’ family that we know of was named Matthew, and several important names we do know in his family are not here, including James/Jacob and Simeon/Simon. James was even known to have spent his whole life in Jerusalem and seems to have died there, so why wouldn’t he be in this tomb? This does change the calculations considerably.

5. What is the likelihood that Jesus’ family was buried near Jerusalem (rather than Galilee) and in the same tomb with him if all along they’d been pretending that his body wasn’t around?

6. Doesn’t the calculation assume more than just the combination of names but a particular spousal relation between this Jesus and one of the women and between this Joseph and the other of the women? We do not know that, but I think the numbers assume we do.

7. To assume this Mariadne might be Mary Magdalene, other judgments were made that some have questioned, which might mean their unlikeliness should be factored in. One involves the connection between one of her names and the meaning “master”.

8. If this theory is correct, then something extremely unlikely must have happened. Lots of people who knew full well that Jesus’ body was sitting in a tomb somewhere were dying for a belief that he was raised from the dead and had ascended to heaven. That is unlikely enough that any calculations as to the likelihood of this combination of names appearing needs to be help up against the considerable probability that Jesus, if his body still existed somewhere, would not have been with bodies of anyone related to the people who were going around advertizing him as having been resurrected and ascended.

“John Marshall, a religious studies professor at the University of Toronto, said he’d like to know how a family from Galilee would have ended up being buried in Jerusalem.”

Since the movie Titanic, people should know that James Cameron does not do history well. He is not good with facts. But the strange thing is that there are people out there who are foolish enough to believe every word of this kind of junk.