Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Jack the Bodiless · 03-01-2007, 10:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malachi151

I see now that they have only done testing on the Mariamne and Jesus because that claim those were the only two they could get samples from. Boy, what a coincidence there, the two that can't really establish much. Also, they said its only a test for maternal relations, but that still leaves sister by a step father...

No, it would have to be "sister by a step-mother".

Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to child (of either sex). A mismatch indicates no shared maternal relationship: no mother-child or sibling-from-the-same-mother relationship.

It also follows that, unless nuclear DNA can be obtained, no "Joseph-Jesus" or "Jesus-Judah" relationship can be tested.

blastula · 03-01-2007, 10:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ruhan

The reason that this "Mariamne" is being considered as a spouse is because she is not related to the Mary nor the Yeshua in this grave. As it's a family grave, she had to have been married to one of the men.

I understand that the only DNA tested was that of Yeshua and Mariamne. The other Mary has not been tested.

AtheosRiktØr489 · 03-02-2007, 07:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stuart shepherd

Right on!
The evidence should be as good as the evidence that Jesus was resurrected.

Stuart Shepherd:huh:

False dichotomy, Stuart.

CJD · 03-02-2007, 01:03 PM

Bauckham weighs in. Interesting discussion on the name Mariamenou-Mara, but I'm not sure he sheds light on anything new. One of the major points? "The Discovery Channel film’s claim that the name on the ossuary is the same as the name known to have been used for Mary Magdalene in the Acts of Philip is mistaken." If nothing else, consider his tone.

Sauron · 03-03-2007, 11:56 PM

Be careful of what is being calculated here. As so many creationists and biblical literalists fail to realize, the starting assumptions in any probability calculation have to be justified.

Quote:

What Are We Calculating Here, Anyway?

Feuerverger says he was neither asked nor did he attempt to calculate the odds that the Talpiot tomb was the final resting place of Christ, the Messiah. As Aleks Jakulin, a statistician at Columbia University, points out, "I doubt Professor Feuerverger really estimated 'the odds that these ossuaries were not Jesus's family's final resting place.' Instead … one should say that one in 600 families (on the conservative side) would have that particular combination of names purely by chance, based on the distribution of individual names in the population."

Such a calculation assumes all kinds of things, and is highly dependent on one's starting assumptions. For instance, "A Christian would use [the probability that Jesus is in a coffin] equals zero, because of ascension, so the discussion stops right there," Jakulin says. "Someone else would instead assume that there was a single Jesus, one out of five million."

A Statistical Analysis Is Only as Good as Its Starting Assumptions

"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," explains Feuerverger. "It's not a secret that the assumptions are contestable. I tried to stay with things that vaguely seemed reasonable to me, but I'm not a biblical scholar. At the end of the day, I went with specific assumptions and I try to make clear what those assumptions were."

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.
[...]
As a result, the calculations made by Feuerverger and others rest on premises that must be decided by historians and archaeologists, who are still far from agreement on even the basics of the Talpiot tomb.

"I did permit the number one in 600 to be used in the film—I'm prepared to stand behind that but on the understanding that these numbers were calculated based on assumptions that I was asked to use," says Feuerverger. "These assumptions don't seem unreasonable to me, but I have to remember that I'm not a biblical scholar."

So it's the same thing that we've been telling lee_merrill during all his crippled attempts at using probability: doing the math is easy. Justifying the starting assumptions is hard.

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03-02-2007, 01:03 PM	#104
CJD Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: greater Orlando area Posts: 832	Bauckham weighs in. Interesting discussion on the name Mariamenou-Mara, but I'm not sure he sheds light on anything new. One of the major points? "The Discovery Channel film’s claim that the name on the ossuary is the same as the name known to have been used for Mary Magdalene in the Acts of Philip is mistaken." If nothing else, consider his tone.

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