The Jesus Tomb Hoax

Chase March 4th, 2007

Now we arrive at the major plank of the Jesus Family Tomb documentary, namely the statistics! The claim is simply this: given the names found in the tomb, the odds of this being another family other than Jesus of Nazareth’s are 600 to 1 against, and apparently rising to 30,000 to 1 against if the James Ossuary truly belonged in the “Jesus Family Tomb”Here’s the claim in their own words:

When trying to determine the probability that the tomb uncovered by archeologists did in fact belong to Jesus and his family, Simcha Jacobovici knew he would need to make sure his methodology was sound if his findings were ever going to be taken seriously. To do this, he employed statistician Andrew Feuerverger…Professor Feuerverger began by studying the names’ frequency during the first century A.D. and then multiplied the incidence rate of each with that of every other name. In keeping with his conservative analysis, Professor Feuerverger then divided his total by four to account for any unintentional biases in the historical sources he had referenced. Then that number was divided by 1,000, as this is total number of tombs that may have existed during the first century in Jerusalem.

The Results
Frequency of Names:
• Jesus, Son of Joseph: 1 in 190
• Mariamne: 1 in 160
• Matia: 1 in 40
• Maria: 1 in 4

Based on these results, it would appear that the names in and of themselves were not uncommon at the time. However, once those numbers were multiplied by one another, Feuerverger noted that the chances of them being found together were an extremely remote 1 in 97,280,000. Nevertheless, to allow for any possible criticism regarding the inclusion of Matia (or Matthew) – since this name is not explicitly referenced in the canonical Gospels – Feueverger decided to eliminate him from the equation. The new probability that this was not the family of tomb of Jesus was 1 in 2,400,000. Once the unintentional bias had been accounted for, that number dropped to 1 in 600 (still a low probability from a statistical standpoint). However, when one takes into the account the ossuary containing the name “Yose”, the new probability that this is not the tomb of Jesus suddenly becomes exceptionally rare. That is because this name – a rare nickname for the Hebrew name, “Yosef”. Indeed, as Simcha explains, of the more than 30,000 ossuaries discovered in Jerusalem, only one bearing this name has been found. SOURCE

There are so many issues that can be found in the above text! It’s very generous of the team to eliminate the name Matia from the calculation, but the fact is that the name should be included, and actually hurts the statistical case made by Dr. Feuerverger. Matia is not the name of any known relative of Jesus of Nazareth, and therefore works against the Jesus tomb theory.
The last paragraph is remarkable as well. Despite no text or inscription identifying the name “Yose” with Jesus of Nazareth, the filmmakers jump to the conclusion that “Yose” is in fact “Yosef” (despite their contention that the name “Yose” is found on no other ossuary), and that “Yose”-”Yosef” is the Yosef that was Jesus of Nazareth’s father. The then use this conclusion to imply that the existence of the “Yose” box exponentially multiplies the odds that this is the Jesus of Nazareth tomb. That’s some very suspect logic! Here are some other big flaws with the 600 to 1 contention:

1. All the names in question are very common names: Maria, Joseph, Jesus, Judah, etc. As quoted below, finding these names together in a tomb gives no more information than the modern day discovery of the names John, Michael and David scrawled together on a tree. In other words, these names are very normal, and would would inspect to find them together in large tombs and other such places. As Amos Kloner, the Jewish Archaeologist who led the original find, notes, “It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.” SOURCE
2. The statistics used to generate the exhorbitant figures quoted in the film and book, are based on certain assumptions about the relevant data that were force fed to he statistician. In a recent interview, Dr. Feuerverger says, “I have to tell you that a statistician working with a subject matter expert, in this case biblical historical scholars, essentially is obliged to rely on assumptions that come from them, it’s not a secret that the assumptions are contestable. SOURCE
3. The high figures here are primarily caused by one factor, according to Dr. Feuerverger - the assumed uniqueness of the name Mariemene e Mara. Here’s his quote, “The extraordinariness of the Mariemene e Mara inscription gets factored into the calculation as a very rare name” SOURCE The assumption here is evident - that Mariemene e Mara = Mary Magdalene, and assumption that is thoroughly trounced below. If Mariemene e Mara does not equal Mary Magdalene, then the probabilities begin to swing completely around the other way. Please see the post below for a thorough trouncing of the Mariemene e Mara = Mary Magdalene contention.

Here are some articles that delve into the above problems in a deeper fashion:

• Dr. Paul Maier, “There are 21 Yeshuas cited by Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, who were important enough to be recorded by him, with many thousands of others that never made history. The wondrous mathematical odds hyped by Jacobovici that these names must refer to Jesus and his family are simply playing by numbers and lying by statistics. ” SOURCE
• From Scientific America: Among the assumptions that Feuerverger made to yield his odds: that the scholarly text he used as a source of names (to determine the frequency and distribution of Jewish monikers in the era of Jesus) was a representative sample of the five million Jews who lived during that era. He assumed this even though the text, called the Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity was published in 2002 and only includes 2,509 names. Tal Ilan, who compiled the Lexicon of Jewish Names and who vehemently disagrees with the assertion that this could be Jesus’s tomb, says that the names found in the tomb “are in every tomb in Jerusalem. You can get all kinds of clever people who know statistics who will tell you that the combination is the unique thing about [these names], and probably they’re right - if you want just exactly this combination it’s more difficult to find. But my research proves exactly the opposite - these are the most common names that you could expect to find anywhere. SOURCE
• Also from Scientific American: It was only when Feuerverger assumed that some of the names were exceptional, and fit with scholars’ beliefs about the historical family of Jesus, that his calculation became worthy of advertising. According to Feuerverger, the most important assumption by far was the one that dealt with the inscription that appears on the ossuary that the documentarians assert belonged to Mary Magdalene.
  “The extraordinariness of the Mariemene e Mara inscription gets factored into the calculation as a very rare name,” says Feuerverger. By the logic of the historians and archaeologists enlisted by the production team, this inscription is so rare that Feuerverger could safely assume that this was the only woman who possessed this name out of all of those listed in the Lexicon. This changed the odds that this tomb belonged to just any Mary Magdalene from roughly one in three to one in 80. SOURCE
• Pulpit Magazine (included because it’s a good illustration, better worded than mine above!): To put that in today’s American society (according to a 1990 census), “Joseph” would be equivalent to the name “John” (as the second-most-popular name), “Mary” equivalent to the name “Mary” (which is still the most-popular woman’s name), and “Jesus” would be equivalent to the name “David” (as the sixth-most-popular name).
  If we found a gravesite today in which there was a tombstone for “John,” and another for “David, John’s son” – Would we be able to assert with any degree of certainty which “David” we were talking about? I wonder how many “Johns” there are (or have been in the last two centuries) in the United States who have had a wife named “Mary” and a son named “Dave.” Certainly many more than just one. Then, if we knew that the “David” we were looking for was unmarried and from Los Angeles, but the grave we found was for a “David” who was married and was buried in New York, what would we conclude? SOURCE
• From Dr. Craig L. Blomberg, Denver Seminary : So two Marys in an extended family calls for about as many raised eyebrows as a modern Hispanic family with two Marías. For that matter, would anyone bat an eye if that same family had a José (Joseph) and a Jesús as well? Would this prove that such a family included the long lost descendants of Jesus himself?
  Or take a more chronologically relevant example. Scholars have long known about (and tourists can still visit) the tomb in Bethany where inscriptions were discovered referring to Mary, Martha and Lazarus (and others). But every scholar worth his or her salt, no matter how conservative, acknowledges that those names were just so common that even to find them together in one tomb in the very town that the Bible says the three New Testament characters by those names lived proves statistically insignificant. It’s entirely possible that it happened completely by chance. There may easily have been a whole bunch families in Bethany with lots of children, including three with those names, in an age when parents had as many children as they could in hopes that a few might survive to care for them, if necessary, in their old age.
  The same approach must be taken with the cluster of names in the Talpiot tomb. In fact, Bauckham’s tables extracted from Ilan’s monumental reference work add one very interesting footnote. The Hebrew woman’s name listed as ninth most common (actually tied for eighth with Imma) was Mara, like the form announced to have been found with the second Mary in the Talpiot tomb. Not only does Mara not mean Magdalene but, although it could be the Grecized feminine equivalent to the Aramaic masculine mar or “master,” it actually appears on one ossuary, discovered elsewhere in Israel much longer ago, as an alternate form of the name Martha. And the feminine form of “master,” in a highly patriarchal culture, was not used nearly as often as the masculine form. So the “Mary” that may have been a spouse to this Joshua/Jesus more likely was named Mary Martha, not Mary Magdalene, and not Mary the Master. SOURCE
• From Dr. Gary Habermas, perhaps the world’s greatest authority on the Resurrection: From the ossuaries alone, we know of no other connections. We do not know even that “Maria” is Jesus’ mother. We do not know that the relation of “Matthew.” Further, no early source records Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene. Clearly, there is no way to link this tomb to the Jesus of the New Testament (see bottom half of chart at right). As we have said, several ossuaries are known to bear the name “Jesus son of Joseph,” and the addition of “Judah” only complicates the puzzle; it gives us no help in identifying this as Jesus of Nazareth. And as we said, if the name “Jesus” is unclear or turns out to be a different name, as some scholars have argued, then everything is moot. Thus, the statistical analysis given in the Discovery Channel’s “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” reached its striking conclusion by making several assumptions that are supported neither by ossuary inscriptions nor by DNA. SOURCE

It would be easily possible to paste ten more paragraphs of information here, but that would prohibit us from tackling some of the meatier issues below, like the Magdalene contention, coming up next.

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