There is no reliable historical information that a character called Judas son of Jesus was connected with the Jesus movement.It needs to be given negative weight, to detract from the probability that this is Jesus' family tomb. In other words, this is not simply a piece of neutral information that one can leave to one side. The Matia ossuary is a non match with any of the data we have about Jesus' family and it cannot be left out of the calculations. One cannot allow negatives like this to be left out of consideration. (At the press conference, it is even suggested that he might have been the Gospel writer).
The film-makers appear to be aware of this, and talk about the possibility that he might be a relative by marriage, perhaps one of Jesus' sister's husbands.
I would not want to assume that the film-makers' research here was deficient by suggesting that The Da Vinci Code was the source of their information but remarkably, they are actually citing it in their remarks in favour of the identification, as if The Da Vinci Code is here giving shared knowledge.* Now given that no reputable historian of Christian origins seriously thinks that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (or anyone else, as far as we know), the presence of a Mariamne in the tomb can in no way be allowed to be a part of the statistical calculations here. The ultimate source of this is, I am afraid, popular fiction like The Da Vinci Code. It is an unexamined assumption that lies behind all the film-makers' discussion of the "family tomb". There is no reliable historical tradition that Jesus was married to a woman called Mariamne (or for that matter Mary, Salome, Joanna or anyone else).The non matches in question are three, and the first of these needs to be underlined because it is being treated not only as a match but as one of the key matches: The non-matches are simply absent from the statistical calculations here. If a case is built up on the notion that a remarkable cluster of names in a given places matches with a known cluster of names in another place, it is essential that the non-matches are taken seriously too, all the more so when some of the non-matches are not only non-matches but also contradict the literary record. The essential problem, as I see it, is that the matches between the Talpiot tomb and the early Christian literary record are factored into the calculations in a positive way, but the non-matches are simply ignored, or treated as neutral. The identification between this tomb and Jesus' family is all but certain.
What are the chances, they ask, that one would find a Jesus son of Joseph together with a Maria, a Mariamne and a Jose? Their answer is that the chances are something like 600:1 on a conservative estimate. It is thought to be so unlikely that this cluster of names, so familiar from the New Testament record, would show up by accident that the identification of this tomb with the family of Jesus is on firm ground. The major part of the case that the Talpiot tomb is Jesus' family tomb is based on a statistical claim. 13), and in three pages on the Jesus Family Tomb website headed Probability, The Football Field and Probability: Principles Adopted.
The Statistics claim is discussed at Monday's Press Conference ( Discovery Channel Website, links on left), in Simcha Jacobovici's interview (especially Parts 3-4), in the Tomb Evidence PDF from the Discovery site (go to p. They are therefore subject to correction from real experts.īefore beginning, let's get the key information at our fingertips. I wish to preface my remarks here by making clear that I am not a trained statistician and my concerns about the way that the statistical tests have been set up here are the concerns of a layman.