The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Part 2
Posted on March 13, 2007
Filed Under archaeology, fraud, religion, tomb, jesus |
None of the criticisms of Jacobovici’s work actually demonstrate that his hypothesis is wrong. There is a real chance that he is right, and right for the right reasons.
Let me be clear. The probability used by Jacobovici was 599 in 600 chances that this was the tomb of the New Testament Jesus of Nazareth. This is clearly wrong, because it is based on assumptions that themselves only have a small probability of being right. For example the probability is based on the assumption that Miriamne e Mara is Mary Magdalene. If that assumption is false, then the probabilities calculated would be about 1 in 160, roughly 0.6%.
However, let’s revisit the statistical analysis.
First, the name Jesus, or Yeshua. This name was shared by roughly 4% of the population. The local population was about 50,000 in the first century, and the period that this style of burial was common spanned about four generations, giving a population of about 8,000 Yeshuas, meaning that the name Yeshua alone means that there was a 1 in 8,000 chance that this was Jesus of Nazareth. About 10% of the men were named Joseph, leaving about 800 men named Yeshua who had a father named Joseph. So far, so good.
Mary, however, creates a bit of a problem. About 25% of the women were named Mary, so we would expect almost every tomb with multiple burials to have at least one Mary, or even several. So, even two Mary’s in the tomb really brings us no closer to Jesus - probably every man of the time had several Mary’s in his life. Jacobovici’s analysis centres around the specific form of the name used in one book of the New Testament, which matches the form on one of the ossuaries in the Talpiot tomb (please note, I am accepting some of his claims here, although I have not verified them - this is somewhat risky given his lack of enthusiasm for exactitude). Jacobovici claims that this ossuary is unique, and that no other ossuary has an inscription in exactly that form. If this is true, then we might be able to assign some probability level to this inscription. For the sake of discussion, I’m going to arbitrarily assign it a probability of 50% - there’s a 50% chance that this is significant in identifying Jesus’s mother out of all the other Mary’s in 1st century Judea. We are now down to a 1 in 400 chance that this is Jesus of Nazareth.
Next, we have the name Yose. This is a nickname for Joseph, so this may very well be the Joseph who is the father of the person in the Yeshua ossuary. Therefore, he has already been counted. But, again, this is a unique occurrence of an inscription that matches the form found in one of the Gospels. So, again, I am going to assign it an arbitrary probability of 50%. We now have a 1 in 200 chance that this is the right Jesus.
Matthew is a nullity. The presence of this inscription doesn’t change the odds one way or the other. There is no mention of a Matthew as part of Jesus’s family in the New Testament. There is also no argument that the New Testament is not meant to be taken as a complete and closed list of all of Jesus’s relations. So, we’re still at 1 in 200.
Judah, son of Jesus is also a nullity. The New Testament, as I see it, sets out to chronicle what was unusual about Jesus and not what was ordinary. An adult male was expected to be married and to have children. There was no particular reason for the New Testament writers to mention this status, as it was not unusual. There would have been reason for them to specifically mention his celibacy, if that was a significant part of his life or of his teaching. They do not. So, we’re stalled at 1 in 200.
Last, we come to Miriamne e mara. And that, we will discuss in Part 3.
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I’m very much enjoying this, for what it’s worth. Can’t wait to read the next installment.
Thanks. I appreciate that. Speculation is always more fun than working.