More Disproof of the "Jesus' Family Tomb Claims"

This blog continues where our last one left off. 

In the Charles Quarles’ anthology Buried Hope or Risen Savior? Richard Bauckham helpfully places the frequency of the names found on the ossuaries in perspective.  One of them, Mathia (or “Matthew”) does not correspond to anyone in Jesus’ family and there is no reason an apostle would have been buried with a family that was not his.  “Maria” is not the Latin name for Mary, mother of Jesus, but a common Hebrew transliteration of Greek-speaking women named Mary, suggesting someone from outside of Israel or a cosmopolitan person within Israel, not the peasant woman from Nazareth.  Jesus’ mother would have been “Mariam” in Hebrew.  The other Mary ossuary, with the name spelled “Mariame” does not correspond to any known reference to Mary Magdalene, not even in the later apocrypha.  It is true that the DNA from this ossuary did not match that of the remains in the “Jesus” ossuary, but that does not prove these individuals were married, though it certainly allows for it.  Other forms of non-biological incorporation of individuals into extended families, including by adoption, are likewise possible.  Plus, Dan Brown’s DaVinciCode notwithstanding, there is not a shred of evidence from antiquity that actually supports Jesus ever having married and much that suggests he did not.

In possibly the most important chapter in the book, mathematicians William Dembski and Robert Marks highlight massive problems with the simplistic formulas used to produce the claim that the odds were 600 to 1 against the tomb being that of anyone other than Jesus of Nazareth.  Much more reasonable estimates of the number of people during the century of the use of this style of ossuary in Israel who could have wound up buried near Jerusalem (theoretically anyone who regularly made pilgrimage to Jerusalem at the various annual Jewish festivals), combined with more realistic population estimates and the use of Bayes’ theorem rather than simple multiplicative probability equations, all along side the frequency in Israelite culture of the names on the ossuaries, suggest that thirty families in Israel during that time period would have had a Jesus son of Joseph, another Joseph, a Mary and a Judah.  This on the conservative estimate of ten persons on average per family, but on the more generous estimate of twenty persons per family (many died at a young age), there would have been 154 such families.  Now who wants to bet on the numbers?

One more installment to come.