TedM

I have read up some on the statistical issues. For those interested, here's the statistical paper, and commentary which was finally published about the Talpiot tomb: http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?servi...oas/1206367801The statistics employed are too advanced for me, as I don't recall what was taught in advanced probability years ago. This article http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/tomb357926.shtml indicates that the experts have widely varying results, primarily having to do with the assumptions involved.

I have decided to start by not really having any assumptions OTHER THAN the idea that if there was a family tomb of Jesus, it could have been in Jerusalem and it could have included the ossuaries that are found in the tomb of Talpiot. The issue for me is this: How likely is it that SOME OTHER family of 8(6 ossuaries) would have the names Yoseh, Yeshua, son of Yehosef, and Maria on them? SO, I will look at the following:


1. What are the odds that out of 6 marked ossuaries, exactly one of them would have the name Yoseh, another Yeshua, son or Yehosef, and a third with the name of Marya, and the remaining 3 anything else?

2. If I apply the odds to the number of groupings of 8 family members that could have existed during the Second Temple Period, how many such groups might contain those names?

3. How surprising then would it be for there to have been found such a group of ossuaries, and what does that imply?


Next post..

TedM

the forum is messing up...I'll post later the results..

outhouse

His name as far as I know would have been Yehoshua in Galilean Hebrew , not yeshua


You also, do not have exact dating to prove anything.

TedM

freakin forum isnt allowing 3 quick postings one after another..

bad math...

outhouse

Why is it, onlt people with money to gain are backing this tomb as being credible.

Every other historian or scholar will not have anything to do with it.




By the way, nothing wrong with this forum.

TedM

I have read up some on the statistical issues. For those interested, here's the statistical paper, and commentary which was finally published about the Talpiot tomb: http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?servi.../1206367801The statistics employed are too advanced for me, as I don't recall what was taught in advanced probability years ago. This article http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/tomb357926.shtml indicates that the experts have widely varying results, primarily having to do with the assumptions involved.

I have decided to start by not really having any assumptions OTHER THAN the idea that if there was a family tomb of Jesus, it could have been in Jerusalem and it could have included the ossuaries that are found in the tomb of Talpiot. The issue for me is this: How likely is it that SOME OTHER family of 8(6 ossuaries) would have the names Yoseh, Yeshua, son of Yehosef, and Maria on them? SO, I will look at the following:


1. What are the odds that out of 6 marked ossuaries, one of them would have the name Yoseh, another Yeshua, son or Yehosef, and a third with the name of Marya, and the remaining 3 anything else?

2. If I apply the odds to the number of groupings of 8 family members that could have existed during the Second Temple Period, how many such groups might contain those names?

3. How surprising then would it be for there to have been found such a group of ossuaries, and what does that imply?


Next post..

TedM

1. What are the odds that out of 6 marked ossuaries, one of them would have the name Yoseh, another Yeshua, son of Yehosef, and a third with the name of Maria, and the remaining 3 can be anything?

Odds of any one ossuary having a form of Joses, (Jesus' brother in the Gospels): 7/712 (based on 7 such forms found among 712 ossuaries)

Odds of any one ossuary having Yeshua, son of Yehosef or some variation: 1/192 (per wiki on Talpiot tomb)

Odds of any one ossuary having a form of Mary's name: 43/712


The odds of one ossuary having a form of Joses is 7/712 Since there are 6 the odds of ONE of those 6 having a form of Joses is 6*(7/712) (edit -- by itself not true--conditions may make it ok)
For each of those conditions, there remain 5 ossuaries.
The odds of one of the remaining 5 having Yeshua, son of Yehosef is 5/192
For each of those conditions there remain 4 ossuaries
The odds of one of the remaining 4 having a form of Mary is 4*43/712
Now, there remain 3. Since they can be ANYTHING, the odds for the remaining 3 being anything is 100%, or 1

Therefore, the odds of any one ossuary having a form of Joses, and the remaining 5 having one that has Yeshus, son of Yehosef, and another of the remaining 5 having a form of Mary are:

AND uses * (multiplication)
6* 7/712 * 5/192 * 4*43/712 *1 = = .00186 (corrected)

This means that out of a 100,000 groupings of 6 ossuaries we would expect 186 of them to have the 3 ossuaries as described above.

Next post...

TedM

In the last post I calculated that out of a million groupings of 6 ossuaries we would expect 462 of them to have the 3 ossuaries as described above.

The next question is:

2. If I apply the odds to the number of groupings of 8 family members that could have existed during the Second Temple Period, how many such groups might contain those names?

Ossuaries were used during the roughly 100 year Second Temple Period that ended in 70AD. Estimates of population are vary wildly, from 50,000 to over 1 million. I'll assume 250,000. Based on an avg life expectancy of say 30 years, we can say that roughly 800,000 people died during this period, and were candidates to be buried in ossuaries. This would make for an average of 100,000 (800,000/8) family groupings to compare our results from #1 with.

Next post...

TedM

3. How surprising then would it be for there to have been found such a group of ossuaries, and what does that imply?

How many of the theoretical 100,000 family groups of 8 names, 6 ossuaries would we expect to have one with a form of Joses, another with a Yeshua, son of Yehosef, a third with a form of Mary, and the 3 something other than these?

The math works out nicely: 186 out of 100,000 family groups could be expected to have this cluster.

What does this imply? Of all the family groups that COULD HAVE ossuaries, 186 of them COULD HAVE the combination described above. The Talpiot family tomb therefore could be any one of those 186, including the family tomb of Jesus. So one COULD say that there is only a 1 in 186 chance that this tomb was that of Jesus Christ and his family.

HOWEVER, The 'surprising' part is this:
The very fact that the tomb found DOES have those 3 ossuaries. That's because only 712 names have been found. That's only 89 groups of 8.

The odds of having found such a family tomb out of what has been found:

.00186 *89 = .1655, or 16.55 percent.

That is, the odds that ANY of the 89 groups of 8 names/6 ossuaries would have those 3 combinations out of the 100,000 possible groups would be only 16.55%. Put another way, the odds that ANY of those 186 family groups would be among the ossuaries found so far is only 16.55%!

That's surprising. What does it mean?

1. It is an odd coincidence that such an interesting cluster has been found out of such few samples.

or

2. The unlikely preservation of these names occurred BECAUSE of WHO was involved. It may be that pains were taken to ensure that there WAS a family tomb for Jesus, and while it is missing various people (Joseph, Jude, Simon, his sisters, maybe James), it did at least have Jesus, his brother Joses, and his mother Mary. As such the likelihood of being found would be greater because the numbers were in essence 'jerry-rigged' by this action. Insight on how much of the average population was buried in ossuaries would be helpful for analyzing this point.

I may well have done the math wrong here (eeks, I did!--corrected now, I think), so my conclusions could be off. I welcome any comments, especially from any statisticians

I might note that I avoided the Mary Magdalene or James ossuary issues--either one of those by themselves would pretty much settle the issue. Each is part of an ongoing debate which I decided to ignore for purposes of this analysis.


I see the statistics publication link didn't take, above: Here's the link: http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?servi...oas/1206367801

TedM

pretty sure the math isn't right still. Sorry. workin on it..