Peter Kirby

enemigo,

We don't even know the name of the current owner, and what little info that is reported is odd. The price of sale is given as between $200 and $700—why don't we know the exact figure? The person is said to be Jewish, but Shanks says, "He threw up his hands, 'How could the Son of God have a brother?'" Strange indeed!

best,
Peter Kirby

l-bow

Doesn't _Jesus_ come from the original, _Yeshu_? Today it would probably be translated _Joshua_. So _Joshua_ is a uncommon name, Layman? What does everyone else think?

Sauron

I think there's been some misunderstanding again.

My inclusion of a summary of Rahmani's book was meant to re-inforce the previous statement from godfry n. glad, to wit:


Godfry was offering this as rebuttal to the original article's claims.

The summary of Rahmani's book also reinforces the fact that the practice of ossuary buruial continued into the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and did not stop at 70 AD. Since Godfry seemed to be qualifying his statement with concerns about his memory, I thought it would be useful to point out to him that (on this point anyhow) Rahmani concurs with him.

PS - I have enjoyed reading your posts, Apikorus. They're well-written and scholarly.

Layman

Where did you get this from? I said Jesus was a common name during that era. I simply noted that James was significantly less common than Jesus and Joseph.

l-bow

Layman,

So you're saying Yakob was a uncommon name right? Let's see Abraham, Isaac, JACOB. Yeah I guess Jacob is rare after all

leonarde

Nowhere did Layman say that ANY of the three names were "rare". Are we all reading the
same thread?

Cheers!

FranzJoseph

My first thought too BUT --

Who does it serve? Who would go to the trouble for something that really don't prove squat and causes lots of bad arguments?

I just wanna know who's behind this.
<img src="confused.gif" border="0">

Sheep in the big city

It's God FranzJoseph.
His ways are mysterious

Apikorus

This is a repost of something I just left in a related forum:

To give an idea of just how "rare" a name with a frequency of 2% is, take a look at the following chart from the U.S. census bureau: <a href="http://www.census.gov/ftp/pub/genealogy/names/dist.male.first" target="_blank">Frequency of American male first names according to the 1990 census</a>.

The most common male name is James, with a frequency of 3.318%. The name with a frequency of closest to 2% is Richard; 1.703% of American males have the name Richard.

Of course, the modern American onomasticon is immensely richer than that of Jerusalem during the first century CE, but it is nevertheless interesting to notice that the name "Richard" occurs in less than 2% of the population. Furthermore, the combination "Joseph, son of Charles, brother of Richard", which hardly seems distinctive to most American ears, would, after multiplying individual probabilities, have a frequency of one in 275,000. One concludes that in all of Atlanta (population 4.1 million) there should be about 7 instances of such a "rare" combination.

Of course, naively multiplying probabilities is problematic, because there are correlations in family names. A man named Richard is very unlikely to have a brother named Hilario or Orval - even less likely than the frequency of Hilario and Orval in the general population. Similarly, in Judea, it seems a priori likely that combinations involving three famous biblical names (yaakov, yosef, and ye(ho)shua) would be more common than multiplying probabilities alone (which I strongly suspect is what the scholars interviewed did) would suggest. Strongly Hellenized families would be much more likely to choose Greek names like Alexandros or Theodoros. The probability of having two children named Theodoros and Nataniel (which mean the same thing in Greek and Hebrew, respectively), should be negligible.

Another (anti-)correlation that I bet the scholars Layman quoted didn't think of is this: Jews generally did not reuse the same name in consecutive generations. Papponymy, or naming a child after a grandfather, was a much more common practice. Thus, if your father had a common name like yosef, and you had a common name like yeshua, then you could effectively rule out those names as options for any of your brothers. Given the relative poverty of the first century Jerusalem onomasticon (any population in which a single name, such as salome/shelomzion, can saturate 20% of the population doesn't have much diversity, by modern standards), it isn't long before some of your siblings get saddled with less popular names like yaakov. (Less popular than yosef, but slightly more popular than Richard in contemporary America!)

Put another way, if one naively multiplies probabilities, one concludes that "Joseph, son of Joseph, brother of Joseph" should be 11 times more likely a combination than "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus". Yet, George Foreman's family not withstanding, we all know this is nonsense.

At any rate, some caution and indeed skepticism is called for when interpreting statistics, particularly if the statistical analysis is coming from historians.

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: Apikorus ]</p>

Ted Hoffman

As Toto said earlier:
Personally, I don't think it deserves the attention its being given. Just look at how evasive the "discoverer"/owner is - this shadowy nature has scam written all over it. It undermines the efforts to glean pertinent information by evading close scrutiny by failing to be transparent and by withholding relevant information.
Perhaps if he said exactly where he found it, people would ask for other details like "who else was there to witness the ossuary in situ?", "what activity were they engaged in when they found it?", "where are the bones?" "where were the bones reburied at?" etc.
The site would be combed archaeologically for any related or remaining "evidence" or any evidence that could support the presence of that ossuary at the site etc. For example if the Ossuary were the only one found at that site with no evidence that it is a burial site, that would bring its location to question etc.

At the moment, we are dealing with conflicting scholarly opinions and incomplete information. Someone evidently has something to hide. Or fear.

Never underestimate the power of incomplete information.