Skeptical

Yes, that's what I meant. Thanks for the clarification.

I have seen arguments that the assumptions behind the stats were flawed, but other than the flawed assumption that the Mairamme ossuary is Mary Magdalene, are there specific other problems with the assumptions that you see or is there a reference discussing this that you think is worth looking at?

Thx.

Skeptical

That's an excellent question, because it wasn't clear to me which exactly they were saying and there was so much hyperbole around this that it was hard to zero in on exactly what the claim was.

At first, I thought the claim was that the Jose form of Joseph was unknown on any other ossuary AND that the only use of Jose in the Hebrew and Christian bibles is when a brother of Jesus is referred to as Jose. However, now I can't say for certain that's what they said, I will watch that part again and post back.


That is very interesting. I am fairly confident that they did not say it wasn't common in the Talmudic literature, but I couldn't swear to it. They also really played up the Jose as being uncommon, so if they didn't mention the references in the Talmudic literature that is another red flag.

blastula

My recollection is they said no other ossuary had the name Jose.

Steven Avery

Hi Skeptical,

The problems in post facto probability are often misunderstood because a bullseye result is staring you in the face and you are trying to go back to before the event and have the "mind" of what types of calculations make sense if you did not know what you know.

The only article I saw on the web that came close to dealing with these issues by seeking a tabula rosa probability calcuation was one by Doug Weller on ANE.

His post is here and I would hope he would write a bit more.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANE-2/message/4135
Re: [ANE-2] Whose tomb ? - Doug Weller

There are additional questionable assumptions but the big issue
is building a model for a sound probability calculation. This is
more basic than the significance of any individual assumption
unit. What the film did in terms of statistics was GIGO.. the
statistical model was flawed so the results were essentially
meaningless, even if there were not various concerns about
this and that name.

The Joe D'Mello article dealt with some of these issues but in
a less direct way .. accepting the calculations as done by
the film folks and trying to figure what those numbers really
mean. The Doug Weller approach is to put the horse in front of
the cart.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Skeptical

Agreed. I believe this is the "texas sharpshooter" fallacy. You shoot at a barn, all your shots cluster, and then you draw the bullseye around the shots.

I read through his analysis, and it makes some sense, although one thing his analysis doesn't seem to address is the probability of the family's leaving a tomb. His calculation indicates that there would be 12 families with "Jesus family" like names, and I can believe this since it seems reasonable given the frequency of the names. However, the next step in the analysis is to calculate the probability of how many of those families would have left a tomb. (in fairness, the film stats does at least attempt to take that into account, dividing by 1000 at one step)

My understanding is that 1,000 tombs have been found, so using his number of 10K families from that period, that would yield only 10% left tombs. (or, at least we have only found tombs for 10% of the families from that period)

Calculating that times the 12 families yields only 1.2 family tombs in Jeruselem from that period that would match the "Jesus family" names. Correct?

I realize this is very "back of the envelope", so this may not be on the money, and it doesn't take into account any variations in socio-economic status as it relates to naming, so perhaps the 10% is not evenly spread. I'm sure I may be missing something else as well, but it seems like the number is not 12 to 1 but more like 2 to 1 or less.

Having thought about this some more, one big factor I see is that even if the calulations are right, what they would show is the liklihood of a "Jesus family" LIKE cluster of names being found in a tomb in Jeresulem. There seems to be a big element that is missing: what is the liklihood that that the Jesus family, not just Jesus, would be in tombs in Jeruselem in the first place.

Leaving aside other factors, I am not aware of any early (or late for that matter) Christian traditions that place the Jesus family in Jeruselem. If there is a low probability that the family is even in Jeruselem, all these stats are meaningless.

I would really like to see an independent, non-biased analysis of all the factors. The analysis you linked to is not bad, it's at least a decent attempt. I'd like to see more from some professional stataticians.

Steven Avery

I agree, and you have added some elements for consideration.

Correction to my earlier post:
The analysis was actually prepared by Danielos as a writein on the Ben Witherington blog -
http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/...mb-theory.html

Not by Doug Weller, who brought it to ANE and has also posted on the Witherington blog. It would be nice to invite Danielos over to this thread. I invited Doug Weller, he replied and pointed out that the calcs were not his .

I did find another probability discussion of some pizazz. Here are two extracts but there is also a discussion of difficulties of particular names. The reference to the other person who questioned the identification of the name of Jesus is a comment made by Stephen Pfann.

https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?b...91081733525003
docmichael

"As done in the Cameron analysis, calculating the odds of this particular cluster of is meaningless and establishes nothing. I could calculate the odd of finding the particular array of objects that are on my desk at the moment, and they would be astronomical. Does this say anything special about my desk? No. It simply says that it exists and is unique."

"Apart from the logical errors in the statistics, it seems to me that the theory begins with an error in logic. The presumption seems to be that there IS a Jesus family tomb somewhere, and that Jesus is in it. The statistics try to answer the question, "What are the odds that this is that tomb?" and concludes, "Bingo! This is probably it!" (This is in fact how the case is stated on the statistics page of the Discovery web site)...By slyly framing the debate in such a way that what is sought to be proven is already assumed to be true, everything is turned round 180 degrees."

One might say that docmichael overstates in reverse but his points do address the fundamental conceptual probability fallacy in the film and book presentation.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Malachi151

I'll ask again, where did they get the names Salome and Miriam for Jesus' sisters? Salome is only mentioned in Mark, but not as his sister, and I find no Miriam at all in the Gospels.

MHF

I've been thinking some more about the statistical argument. One thing that's
been left out of the computation is the number of names that would have been
considered a match.

For example, with Mary Magdalene, it appears that any name used for her
in the canonical as well as the non-canonical books counts as a match.
But if one counts that way, then one has to add up the frequency for each
of the names that would have been considered a match, and use the sum.

The same should then be done for the other names as well. In the computation,
they should not use the frequency of that one name found in the inscription,
but one should use the sum of the frequencies of all names that would be
considered a match for this particular family member.

This changes the odds, if they are now 600 to 1, then that 600 number would
be quite a bit lower if we replace each frequency by a sum of frequencies.

I'm also starting to wonder about why one has to multiply the odds by 1000.
This 1000 was the number of graves found in Jerusalem. Why do we have
to multiply by that number? Shouldn't we instead be multiplying by the
number of families?

It seems to me that multiplying by 1000 is only OK if we know in advance
that Jesus' family had a grave, and that the total number of graves is 1000.
But we don't know either of those two things. So it seems to me that we'd
have to multiply by the number of families, and I assume that this is a good
bit more than 1000. If there were say 100,000 families then the 600 to 1
drops to 6 to 1, and with the reasoning mentioned above it might drop further.

Anything with a probability better than 50% should be taken seriously I
think. Has this threshold can be reached? Or is additional evidence needed
for this? Although I am still fascinated that there may actually be physical
evidence of Jesus' existence, I'm starting to think now that additional
evidence might be needed to get the probability estimate back up again.

Roger Viklund

In "New Ossuary NOT First Jesus Evidence" at http://www.unknowncountry.com/mindframe/opinion/?id=67 it is said:

blastula

Yep, and if you factor in that they considered Matthew a match because it was found in the Luke genealogy, then they should have added in all the names from both genealogies into the calculation too. Plus, add in all the names ever used or speculated to be part of Jesus's family in any of the Apocrypha.

That would change the odds a bit.