Jesus

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

All joking aside, what if they do prove it to be the actual coffin of THE Jesus Christ!

 

What would the implications be??

The implications are enormous GPM. We live in a world where many people believe their personal salvation is based on the resurrection of Jesus.

 

Now, how would one prove that? Maybe there will be a sign in the coffin stating God is in here?

The scoundrels will make millions out of this. The D.C. narrator will start every inane statement with an equally inane question - that is when it is not interfering with a commercial.

Almost impossible to prove for sure. The only thing one can prove, if at all, is that the coffin belongs to Jesus the son of Mary or Joseph, which could be any number of people in Judea. Why would the coffin mention God anyway? All the researcher has to do is to prove that the coffin belongs to Jesus of the NT, and that is gong to be extremely hard to do

[M. Porcius Cato]

I do try to keep and open mind about these things but I cannot help thinking that the evidence offered above is highly circumstantial. After all, Jesus, Mary, Judas, etc were hardly uncommon names in the Holy Land in the 1st Century CE and I don't think it's totally impossible for a family unit to have these names

 

Of course it's not "totally impossible", but it's very, very, very highly improbable.

 

Do the math: suppose that 1 in 10 Nazarene men were named Jesus and 1 in 10 men were named Joseph (and nobody is named Jesus Joseph). What is the probability that 2 randomly selected men would be Jesus and Joseph? (Here's a calculator to figure it out.) The answer is 1%. Given the same prevalence of the names Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the odds get even worse for a randomly chosen 3-some being Jesus and Joseph and Mary. Then, when you toss in Mary Magdalene (a Greek name, which is very uncommon in Judaea), the odds become vastly unlikely.

 

This is like finding a submarine-shaped tomb in London for four guys named John, Paul, George, and Ringo. It's not "totally impossible" that that's not just due to chance, but you'd have to be pretty daft not to recognize them as the fricking Beatles.

 

My bet: it's either Jesus and the gang, or it's a forgery.

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

Well MPC, that's reasonable enough, but my question is - were the names Jesus, Joseph and Mary really in the realm of your "1 in 10" or should we be looking at a larger ratio? After all how do we determine such a ratio? If we are looking at 3 in 10 or 4 in 10 then the hypothesis gets weaker and weaker.

I don't think your Beatles analogy is convincing because Ringo is a very unusual name. Now if you had to stumble into an airship shaped tomb with the names Jimmy, Robert, John-Paul, and John, there is a possibility we are looking at the sarcophagus of the Led Zepplin crew, but there is a higher possibility it could be just a coincidence because those names are very common in England.

I think Jesus, Joseph, Mary and Judas do fall in the latter category. Greek names were common in the Holy Land, even among religious Jews, and the tomb in question does not categorically have Mary Magdalene's name IIRC. It just contains a name that she was commonly known by.

Anyway I am not ruling out any eventuality. My mind is open to both possibilities. I just would like to see more evidence. And all those people out there that are pouring out their righteous indignation are just being silly. What is so scandalous about a man marrying and begetting children?

[Maladict]

Why is this even an issue? The discovery was made at least a decade ago and the inscriptions were duly noted, and dismissed by professional archaeologists. Unless new information has turned up, this should be the end of the story.

Edited February 27, 2007 by Maladict

[Kosmo]

Why is this even an issue? The discovery was made at least a decade ago and the inscriptions were duly noted, and dismissed by professional archaeologists. Unless new information has turned up, this should be the end of the story.

 

It should have been the end of story, but now the marketing machine it's rolling. The end of story will be a year and many million dollars later :angel:

The relevance of the story it's 0. Even if they found an afidavit of a man named Jesus made in the presence of Pilat and The Synhedrion stating that it's not God, christians will still believe in their God.

 

I read just the first article, but the math don't go like MPC said. You don't find a submarine with four names, but a dockyard with many names. How many bones/names were in that tomb? What it's the chance of some of the names beeing the most popular ones? If there are 20 names for sure you will have at least one Mary

If you go to any romanian cemetery you will definetly find a Popescu Ion (like John Smith).

In a rural area, a century ago, most peasants had a just a few names (with no family names). So, if your looking for the names Ion, Maria, Gheorghe, Vasile you will find them instantly. All you have to do is to forget about the others names unconnected with the story.

[Gaius Octavius]

The :horse: begins here in NYC. News conference on the steps of the NY Public Library by the scoundrels. New book out; New movie; new TV program on Discovery Channel this Sunday. Book proves Dan Brown and his :horse: is all true!

 

I guess that the Bible is all wet about the Holy Family being poor since they had a burial tomb. The original find was made in the early '80s. I hope someone sues these :horse: artists into poverty. How cruel of me!

 

Dem Bones!, Dem bones!

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

The relevance of the story it's 0. Even if they found an afidavit of a man named Jesus made in the presence of Pilat and The Synhedrion stating that it's not God, christians will still believe in their God.

 

I don't think anyone is trying to stop Christians from believing in their God. A story does need to be investigated for academic reasons. I don't see your point

[Primus Pilus]

Archaeologists, scholars dispute Jesus documentary @ CNN

[M. Porcius Cato]

I read just the first article, but the math don't go like MPC said. You don't find a submarine with four names, but a dockyard with many names. How many bones/names were in that tomb? What it's the chance of some of the names beeing the most popular ones? If there are 20 names for sure you will have at least one Mary

If you go to any romanian cemetery you will definetly find a Popescu Ion (like John Smith).

In a rural area, a century ago, most peasants had a just a few names (with no family names). So, if your looking for the names Ion, Maria, Gheorghe, Vasile you will find them instantly. All you have to do is to forget about the others names unconnected with the story.

 

Obviously the math won't be identical to my toy example. You've missed the point entirely, which was to illustrate the difference between independent probabilities and joint probabilities. This is the critical distinction that is ignored by endlessly-repeated rejoinder that the names on the tombs were common ones and thus highly likely. It's true that the names were frequent, but the conjunction of the names were low frequency. For some reason, biblical scholars appear to be utterly ignorant of this elementary fact of probability.

 

The dockyard analogy is also highly misleading because the conjunction of the 4 names was not merely spatial. Kosmo is right that this would be a concern if the scholars had uncovered a 100-ossuary site and merely found scattered there an ossuary for a Jesus, and another one for a Joseph, and another one for a Mary, and another one for a Magdalene. Except for the Magdalene finding (which is a zero-frequency name across all the sites in Jerusalem), there would be nothing uncommon about this at all. What would be uncommon, however, is if these 4 ossuaries were clearly connected. And it is the connection that the DNA testing (as well as inscriptions, like "Jesus, son of Joseph") establishes.

 

Frankly, given the overall state of statistical illiteracy among people in the humanities, I'm not at all surprised that interest in this find was dormant for a decade.

[Maladict]

It's true that the names were frequent, but the conjunction of the names were low frequency.

 

Yet still high enough to keep any sane person from declaring it the tomb of Jesus on that basis alone.

[Gaius Octavius]

MPC: "My bet: it's either Jesus and the gang, or it's a forgery." Or anyBODYs else!

 

It really is snow-jobbing in NYC. :1eye:

 

Edited February 27, 2007 by Gaius Octavius

[M. Porcius Cato]

It's true that the names were frequent, but the conjunction of the names were low frequency.

Yet still high enough to keep any sane person from declaring it the tomb of Jesus on that basis alone.

 

If the probability of this conjunction occurring due to chance is less than 1/20, it would be accepted by nearly any medical journal in the world. According to the authors, the chance probability is more like 1/600.

 

What I find fascinating, btw, is the vast double-standard in the thresholds people set for probability and belief. What is the probability that a Nazarene was a killed on a cross and rose from the dead? What is the probability that a Nazarene lived a normal life with a wife and a kid and was buried with his mom and dad? The Church maintains the first as a certain likelihood for Jesus, and they claim the second to be an unbelievable improbability because there is a 1/600 chance that it was otherwise. Why don't they just drop the pretense and say that they don't care about archaeology because they have their faith? At least they'd leave archaeology (and statistics) uncorrupted.

[Primus Pilus]

Did anyone think to check for damage to the wrists and ankles?

[Gaius Octavius]

MPC, you really are in the soup now.

 

"What is the probability that a Nazarene was a killed on a cross and rose from the dead?"

That is the nature of God.

 

"The Church maintains the first as a certain likelihood for Jesus, and they claim the second to be an unbelievable improbability because there is a 1/600 chance that it was otherwise."

The first is claimed a 'certainty' - period.

The R.C. Church doesn't bother with probability. You speak of the physical world.

 

"Why don't they just drop the pretense and say that they don't care about archaeology because they have their faith?"

Of course 'they' care about archaeology. They are amongst the foremost practitioners of the art.

'They' simply don't accept crack pottery

 

Did anyone think to check for damage to the wrists and ankles?

 

Excellent point!

[M. Porcius Cato]

Of course 'they' care about archaeology. They are amongst the foremost practitioners of the art.

'They' simply don't accept crack pottery

To care about archaeology and not care about probability is a contradiction. Archaeology yields patterned data, and the whole trick is to disentangle noise from signal, which is the central problem of statistics.