Steven Avery

Points well taken. Maybe the specific point should be asked to James Tabor since he blogs around and still has the Jesus Dynasty Forum. Ask him specifically why multiple answers were given, what efforts were made, what he had heard about this before the Koppel show. It is true that only doing one test is theatrics more than science. However I am slow to discount Simcha's "final answer" as only one of convenience.

Shalom,
Steven

Charles Gadda

Steven --
I'll leave that one up to you -- the idea of engaging in an exchange with the co-promulgator of the "Essene feces" claim (see Golb's 2007 article on the Oriental Institute website) exhausts me.
Charles

spin

Sorry, but I haven't really been following this thread recently, but "Essene feces"! That's wonderful. I would say that the only way to know that it was "Essene" was to see it deposited. I wonder then if the feces found in loc.51 were "Essene" as well. Magness claimed that it was a toilet on the "Essene" site, but naturally the Essenes didn't use it. She was probably privy to the deposit in that case.


spin

Charles Gadda

Yes -- see http://jesus-crypt-fraud.blogspot.com/ and the details provided there on Tabor's involvement in the Essene toilet claim.

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

While above I have talked about the difficulties of 'post facto probability' this whole area is also similar to the discussion of the 'prosecutor's fallacy'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_fallacy
The term prosecutor's fallacy refers to fallacies of statistical reasoning often used in legal arguments which can take several forms ...

This is much closer to the methodological and post facto probability considerations than most all of the discussions of Simcha & Tabor & Andrey math manipulation that is on the web.

And the only web mention of this I have found is ..

http://iscience.wordpress.com/2007/0...w-up/#more-119
http://clioaudio.com/2007/03/04/600-...sus-follow-up/
600-1: A Tomb of Jesus follow-up

"appears to confirm that this is an example of the Prosecutor’s fallacy... These assumptions are the very things we are testing for ... what cannot logically be done is take these assumptions back to shore up the attributions. Yet this is exactly what Prof Tabor is doing in the press conference when he asks how many Jesuses would have a mother called Mary or a brother Joseph and builds the case for attribution from there."

A good exercise would be to go into this more in regard to the Simcha extravaganza and it should best have been pointed out by the mathematicians writing on the issue (at most it was pointed out in an oblique way, that the math actually done should be interpreted differently than done by Andrey et al). It is clear that 'prosecutor's fallacy' is one way to describe the underlying methodological manipulation.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY

Steven Avery

Greetings.

Nehemia Gordon has discussed well two aspects of the Tomb controversy in a web page just put up.

The first point of note is about one of the supposed 'unusuals'. Nehemia essentially affirms what we have upthread (Notsri and others contributing) about the commonness of the name Joses.

http://www.hebrewyeshua.com/articles/yeshua_tomb.html
The Tomb of Yeshua son of Joseph in "East Talpiot" by Nehemia Gordon

The name Joses or Yose is correctly identified in the documentary as an abbreviated form of Joseph (Yoseph). However, then the documentary goes on to call it "a rare nickname". Simcha Jacobovici, one of the authors of the documentary, makes a big deal about the uniqueness of the nickname Yose, arguing that only Yeshua of Nazareth had a brother with this nickname. Contrary to this claim, Yose was an extremely common nickname for Joseph. In fact, the name appears in the earliest manuscripts of the Mishnah, written exactly as it appeared on the ossuary: YWSH יוסה. Indeed, there are no less than 20 Rabbis in the Mishnah and Talmud named Yose (YWSH). Rabbi Yose the Galilean may have been the most famous of these rabbis but there were many others such as Rabbi Yose ben Chalafta and Yose ben Yoezer. So the claim that there was something particularly rare about the nickname Yose is simply not factual.

Notice how the Jesus Family Tomb website and James Tabor parley the misinformation about the supposed rarity of Jose.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1D5KVRDSQKSZB - James Tabor
The “Joseph” in the tomb has the rare nickname Jose and in terms of the “Jesus Family Tomb” hypotheis he would most likely be the “lost” brother of Jesus known as Joses in Greek.

http://www.jesusfamilytomb.com/evide..._equation.html
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” ..

Simcha continues about how many ossuaries there are that don't have Jose, without even mentioning how many have names at all, how many have Joseph and how easily Jose and Joseph could be interchangable for the same person (like Joe and Joseph today). And he totally omits the non-ossuary evidence for the commonness of the name.

Some of this is also discussed on the blog of Wallace G. Smith, who has a math background.

http://wallacegsmith.wordpress.com/2...b-calculation/
The Tyranny of Assumptions in the “Jesus Tomb” Calculation

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Steven Avery

The second interesting paragraph from Nehemiah has to do with the claimed name of Maria.

http://www.hebrewyeshua.com/articles/yeshua_tomb.html
The Tomb of Yeshua son of Joseph in "East Talpiot" by Nehemia Gordon

An odd claim in the documentary is that the name "Maria" מריה, written on one of the ossuaries in Hebrew characters, is "a rare Latinized version of Mary". The documentary points out that Yeshua's mother was named Miryam (MRYM מרים) but claims she was called "Maria" by the Latin-speaking followers of Yeshua and therefore the Latin version of her name was written on her ossuary. It is not clear to me why someone would write a Latin form of the name Miryam in Hebrew characters on a 1st century ossuary. If this is the Latinized form of the name shouldn't it appear in Latin letters? And why would Yeshua's Latin-speaking followers thousands of miles away influence the way his mother's name appeared on her ossuary? If the name is in Hebrew characters, it is strange to assume it is a "Latinized form" when it makes perfect sense as a native Hebrew name. The Hebrew letters MRYH מריה would most naturally be read as Merayah, which appears as the name of a male priest in Nehemiah 12:12. So rather than being a Latinized form of Maria, the ossuary in the "Talpiot Tomb" was probably from that of a man named Merayah.

Quite interesting.
Worth of comment from others in the field.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

blastula

On the probabilities, yes they do need to make many assumptions to come up with a number, but I don't see anything wrong with acknowledging the assumptions and saying this is the number they came up with. Assuming the ossuary names actually are what they claim they are and assuming that those names are actually in Jesus's family and assuming they can get an accurate distribution of names from that time, they can compare those names and come up with the probability for that grouping of names.

I think that's fine as long as it isn't made to be more than it is. It still doesn't tell us (as described in the prosecutor fallacy) the a priori probability that Jesus and/or these alleged family members existed at all and that they would be placed in any tomb.

Steven Avery

Ultimately any particular cluster of names will have a low probability, ranging from low to extremely low. That is not the issue. If you could say ahead of time .. this is the one group of names that is significant, or so-and-so number of groups, then the simple calc resulting number could have real significance .. otherwise it is a diversion.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blastula Assuming the ossuary names actually are what they claim they are and assuming that those names are actually in Jesus's family and assuming they can get an accurate distribution of names from that time, they can compare those names and come up with the probability for that grouping of names.

Even with all those very, very difficult assumptions .. assumptions which a good probability theorist could not remotely make or take .. the probability "for that grouping of names" is still not the primary issue. What if there were many thousands of possible groupings of names that would allow for a "Jesus Family Tomb" claim ? (And I am quite sure there are many more than that.) How would that factor into the "probability" result that is finally determined ?

Quote:

Originally Posted by blastula I think that's fine as long as it isn't made to be more than it is.

It clearly was. That is one reason why the film website had to furtively and radically change the original claim. The claims were totally bogus and they were designed to deceive millions of people.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blastula It still doesn't tell us (as described in the prosecutor fallacy) the a priori probability that Jesus and/or these alleged family members existed at all and that they would be placed in any tomb.

Amen.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Cege

Maybe I was mistaken, but the point I took was that Jose/Yose was an unusual nickname to be put on an ossuary.

Many, many people worldwide have gone by nicknames during their life, but I'm not sure that a high percentage of them have their nickname rather than their given name on their tombstone, or the equivalent.

(my first post on this thread, but I did see the 2-hour program and the 1-hour 'roundtable' discussion following it.)