andrewcriddle

Mary corresponds to Miriam in Hebrew

Andrew Criddle

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

It is clear that the actual calculations had nothing to do with the probability of a "Jesus Family Tomb". And that the "Family" proponents have attempted to play both ends of this discussion as to the actual analysis and meaning of the probability calculation.

James Tabor made this clear on the ANE forum and his blog when he gave a similar calculation about a modern cluster of names in a family having a low probability. This was meant to be analogous to what was done with the tomb calcs.

James Tabor
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANE-2/message/4199
Since Feuerverger has been badly misrepresented in the popular press I hope this will help to clarify things a bit.

http://jesusdynasty.com/blog/2007/03...s-and-numbers/
Names and Numbers: Expanded 3/9/07
"ether or not to assign any special value of “rarity” to a name."... Andrey Feuerverger has a rarity factor for the name on the ossuary Mariamenou [he] Mara, but in doing so he is not assuming, in assigning that number, that this is in fact Mary Magdalene.... mathematical decisions, based on the name frequencies, not on identification with any historical figure.

Then James Tabor gives his analogous example.

"one of my own consultants, David, who works in mathematical models and design, tells me this about clusters of names today. Here he is talking about his own family:... People don’t realize how unique sets of even common names are when it comes to simple probabilities..."

Actually folks who understand probability do understand this well. We all know how any post-facto cluster has a rarity factor. That is why to develop a meaningful probability hypothesis (e.g. as to whether a tomb might refer to a specific family) one has to go backwards and develop a sensible-seeming a priori methodology. This was never done by Andrey, Tabor, Simcha et al. Instead they manipulated numbers to take advantage of the very true ignorance of folks that is referenced by James Tabor -

"People don’t realize how unique sets of even common names are when it comes to simple probabilities".

James Tabor continues..

"Jerusalem ossuary burials are a great sample because they are limited to place and time... The names that were found are the sample size. They are not part of an arbitrary larger list of names in which they just happen to be found."

Tabor then demonstrates the rarity calculations are done independent of whether these are "Jesus Family Tomb" numbers, using his analogous USA example.

"Therefore, out of 34,160 families (a population of 204,960), this particular combination of names and relationships would occur only once."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANE-2/message/4227
"No relationships were assumed in the calculations, just the probability of that particular cluster of names in a grave plot today, assuming everyone named had died as of 2007. The percentages were calculated from the SS administrative stats for name frequencies related to each person named the year of his/her birth."

What Tabor is asserting (when you understand his analogy) is that the calculations themselves are only of the rarity of the grouping. They have no direct relationship to the "Jesus Family Tomb".

For example - if the name turns out to not be Jesus, but a name like Hunan, the probability does not reduce at all (it actually becomes 'rarer' or goes up). Similarly if DNA had been done and it falsified the "Family" theory the cluster of names would have still had the exact same rare probability aspect !

In other words there is nothing that could or would significantly reduce the uniqueness of the name calculations. They are done independently of all the types of considerations and calculations and methodology and design that one would use to try to determine if this is a "Jesus Family Tomb".

Yet the numbers were falsely presented to the public as if they were the probability that this is the "Jesus Family Tomb". A scholastic travesty.

Similarly one of the supporters of the statisticians stated all this much clearer on the Jesus Family Tomb email forum.

In response to some good points made by Dr. James Garner:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheJes...omb/message/41
What Feuerverger did was to release a set of assumptions which shows that the deck was stacked in favor of the discovery which Dr. Tabor is trying to promote.... He's saying - "I just did the calculations based on what they told me."

Please notice the section where Andrew Feuerverger and James Tabor directly contradict themselves on the methodology of "Mary Magdalene". That is because at times they want to pretend that the calculations are the probability of a "Family Tomb", at other times they want to acknowledge that the calcs are actually only a general "rarity of cluster" calculation.

The supporter, Patty Tyler, responded with...

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheJes...omb/message/43
I happen to know some of the statisticians personally

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheJes...omb/message/46
We say no more than this and no less either; viz; what is the probability of finding these collection of names in a tomb together in Jerusalem from the 1st century? ... The odds of finding a grouping such as this, even though the names are somewhat common is highly unlikely ... It is one data point that says we should look further. It is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to support a hypothesis.

In other words the whole probability feature was a sham. They demonstrated that the names had a low probability, which would be true of most all combinations of six names in a post-facto probability.

They also discussed possible New Testament correlative aspects and didn't discuss much (or in some cases at all) various anti-correlative aspects. The question about the name of Jesus. The plugging in of Matthew from left field. Joses being a common nickname for Joseph, the questionable translation of the "Mary Magdalene" box, the unlikelihood of a Judas in the family. This would be the heart of the matter in a real study on a sound methodology, both the correlative and anti-correlative aspects.

However none of the correlative or anti-correlative aspects had very significant effect on the actual JFT calculations. The rarity would be there in any and all cases.

Why no significant effect ?

The probability calculations themselves had nothing to do with the potential "Jesus Family Tomb" identification. The numbers were just a rudimentary type of bean-counting, independent of a true "Family Tomb" methodology. This key deception is one area that Tabor, Simcha, Andrey et al. failed the scientific community and the public.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Johnny Skeptic

Message to Praxeus: Will you please tell us 1) how many people saw the body of Jesus put in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, 2) who they were, 3) which people saw the empty tomb who also saw Jesus put in the empty tomb (people who supposedly saw the empty tomb but who did not see the body of Jesus put in the tomb are not reliable witnesses), and 4) who gave the Gospel writers their information about the empty tomb?

Steven Avery

Since this has no relevance to the probability discussion above I will pass. (And it would take us far afield into other issues that are discussed again and again on IIDB.)

In fact, one major point is that all such questions of the tomb and a conjectured family relationship were taken out of the equation of the Tabor production. The probability numbers they trumpeted so loudly had absolutely nothing to do with whether there might have been a tomb or what are the various evidences for or against their theories (such as one's view of the reliability of the Gospel accounts).

They weren't even doing a true analysis of the probability of those names being "related" to Jesus. They simply did a trivial calculation that the names had some rarity (as would almost all clusters) and falsely implied that this virtually mandated rarity makes it a "Jesus family tomb" rarity.

The books were cooked.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Charles Gadda

I believe I should have merged my item on the "link" between the Jesus-Tomb and Essene-latrine claims into this thread rather than posting it as a separate one, so I'm reposting it here in slightly edited form, in case any readers of this thread might not have seen it. Hope I'm not violating any posting rules. Here it is:

After all the hubbub of the past week, it should be pretty clear that the "Lost Tomb of Jesus" film is essentially a hoax.

To begin with, the name "Jesus" is not legible on the so-called "Jesus son of Joseph" ossuary, as any serious semitics scholar will tell you if you show him the tracing. This is why the original transcriber (see the Israeli Catalogue of Ossuaries) put a question-mark after, and two dots over, the "Jesus" part of the name, thus indicating in standard fashion that he was making a conjecture (in this case one that is obviously remote). The film's producer, however, has carefully omitted this fundamental point from his statements to the press, instead asserting that the reading had been "conclusively confirmed" by unnamed experts. For details, see http://jesus-illegible.blogspot.com/

So I started to poke around to try and understand the mechanics of this hoax.

What I found, somewhat astonishingly, is that James Tabor -- the religion professor who is promoting the Cameron film -- is the same character at the center of the recent claim that the finding of undatable feces near the site of Khirbet Qumran supports the (now increasingly disputed) thesis that a sect of Essenes lived there in antiquity and authored the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Tabor is also involved in the current exhibits of the Dead Sea Scrolls traveling around the country, which have been criticized as presenting a biased and misleading picture of the current state of Scrolls scholarship. For details, see http://jesus-crypt-fraud.blogspot.com/ and the other postings published by the authors of that blog.

For Tabor's "Essene latrine" efforts (also based in part on a misleading use of DNA evidence), see K. Galor and J. Zangenberg at http://www.forward.com/articles/led-...d-sea-latrine/, or the most recent article by N. Golb on the Oriental Institute website, http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/scr/).

Professor Jim Davila’s blog (March 6, 2007) http://paleojudaica.blogspot.com/ quotes Tabor as asserting to him in an email: "I have never excavated even one tomb, and I am not even an archaeologist and have never claimed to be such."

Yet Tabor himself, in an article published in the Charlotte Observer, excerpted on the same paleojudaica blog a year ago (February 13, 2006), wrote: "As an archaeologist, I have long observed and experienced the thrill that ancient discoveries cause in all of us. The look on the faces of my students as we uncover ancient ruins from the time of Jesus, or explore one of the caves where the scrolls were found, is unmistakable."

Tabor's Ph.D. was awarded to him by the University of Chicago’s Department of New Testament and Christian Literature (which is housed in that institution’s Divinity School building). The title of his dissertation was "Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise". He clearly has no training as an archaeologist, historian, or semitics scholar, and we will no doubt be left to wonder at the motivations that led him to become involved in these phony scams.

ggazoo

Interesting thread, although the whole thing has been debunked here:

http://www.carm.org/evidence/Jesus_tomb.htm

Skeptical

While there are plenty of legitimate questions, including the dubious statistics used in the documentary, this site has some serious problems with its "debunking".

For example:

"If the gospels are used to verify the names on the ossuaries, why are they not also used to verify that Jesus rose from the dead?"

It is hard to take a site seriously that asks this. Hmm, let me think. Oh, I know, perhaps because it would not be at all unbelievable that there was a Jesus family tomb since at least 1,000 from the time period are known to exist, whereas no living person nor anyone in reliable recorded history has ever seen someone rise from the dead.

And then there's this:

"Why didn't the critics of Christianity produce Jesus' body?"

Hmmm, perhaps because in the first half of the first century Christianity, and anyone associated with it, didn't matter to anyone, including the Romans, unlike the sites claim. The vast majority of Romans had never heard of Christiainity and those that had knew almost nothing about it. They certainly would not have known about its specific claims. (see "the Christians as the Romans saw them")

The only people who would have cared about the claims of Christianity for the first century of its existence were Christians. It simply wasn't important and no one took any notice of it. There were many Jewish "messiahs" during this period, once they were dead none of the Jewish populace much cared about them either. (see "Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs")

I didn't bother to read the rest of it when I saw these. The rest might be better then these ridiculous questions, but I'm not going to waste my time reading bad apologetics.

The best criticism of the film is based on the faulty stats and bad historical claims about Mariamme, not religious prosletyzing.

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

James Tabor has been posting on the ANE (Ancient Near East) forum.
My post above about the probability confusion and manipulation was
put through after a short wait (a moderator had requested a couple of reasonable changes however it was put through before I did so).

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANE-2/message/4260
two ends of the probability equation

James Tabor replied here.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANE-2/message/4264
Re: two ends of the probability equation

And I sent in my reply this morning. Later I will link to it or,
if it does not get posted (I am reasonably confident it will)
post it over here.

I will point out one comment by James Tabor for your consideration.

"Feuerverger .. numbers had nothing to do with
the identification with the Jesus tomb."

Is that the impression you received from viewing the film ?
Is that the impression you get from the books and websites
and blogs promoting the film ?

Would that quote from James Tabor be a nice quote to place prominently in bold on the book, the blogs, the website ? And spoken clearly in the film.

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

GaryP

From Yahoo news;

The inscription, Pfann said, is made up of two names inscribed by two different hands: the first, "Mariame," was inscribed in a formal Greek script, and later, when the bones of another woman were added to the box, another scribe using a different cursive script added the words "kai Mara," meaning "and Mara." Mara is a different form of the name Martha.

According to Pfann's reading, the ossuary did not house the bones of "Mary the teacher," but rather of two women, "Mary and Martha."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070314/...c/jesus_tomb_8


Anybody know if it was common to put two different sets of bones in an ossuary?

Steven Avery

Good question. You can follow

http://www.uhl.ac/index.html

to Stephen Pfann's bio and the email addy.

Stephen is probably as good and accessible a person to answer as anybody. Maybe also some folks like Jack Kilmon or Joe Zias on the email forums. (Each has a differing spiritual perpective, all are well informed on the factual ossuary backdrop.)

The combination of a Greek and semitic script sounds very unusual. You (or I or whoever) might also ask if there are other examples of this at the same time. It is a bit hard to see someone actually going back to a woman's ossuary and adding "of the Lord" or whatever is the proposed "Lord" translation. That really sounds like a stretch although in the big picture I don't know if that is really an important issue (compared to say the overall probability manipulation presentation).

Shalom,
Steven