Jesus' Tomb... Has it been found?

by Elsewhere 58 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Midget-Sasquatch

  Thanks for that latest link Leolaia.

  Since I don't know any greek, hebrew or aramaic I was wondering how Jacobovici et al reasoned that "mara" was "Master". So the first part of the inscription was Greek but then they'd have to read the latter part as aramaic and an truncated or abbreviated form of the word they'd like to infer. Not so straightforward a reading it seems. Of course going with the simplest reading wouldn't help them any.

  I was curious about their evidence but the more you look at it, the more you see how they try to "spin" parts of it and disregard other parts of it.
• 

  Q. Bert

  Genesis 3:6 would be the beginning of humankind's war for independence, which has lasted some 6000 years. And it just took 2 bites to start it all. It would have been better had they both bit their tongues instead.
• 

  jgnat

  If you spend any time with genealogy, you learn to be careful with assumptions. My husband has a very distinctive name (Hungarian). His family of ten immigrated to this country in the late 1950's. They moved in to a small community in rural Alberta. Pretty well if you run in to this last name in Alberta, you are talking to a descendant from that family. Yet, there was a kid in their class with the same distinctive last name, not related.

  I've often thought that a hundred years from now, some poor genealogist would spend years trying to "prove" the link to this "lost" relative.

  I mean, look how many Jesus'es and Mary's are running around these days.
• 

  badboy

  THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC mentioned it in their latest email to me.

  Is there no end to this?
• 

  Leolaia

  Mark Goodacre's blog has another great post pointing out another fatal flaw of the program's statistics. A statistician has written pointing out that the simple statistical test that was performed was one of conditional probability, i.e. the probability of an event on the condition that another event has occurred. In other words, the test is only valid on the condition that Jesus had a family tomb in Jerusalem and that this tomb was among the 1,000 discovered so far! The author Joe D'Mello states that the results have been touted by the program as

  There is only a 1 in 600 chance that this is NOT the Jesus family tomb.” OR, equivalently, “There is a 599 in 600 chance that this IS the Jesus family tomb.

  When in reality the probability is closer to:

  If the Jesus family did indeed have a family tomb (that was among the 1,000 found), then there is a 599 in 600 chance that this particular tomb found is indeed that of the Jesus family

  In other words, this computation starts from the assumption that Jesus' tomb would have been in the sample. D'Mello says: "We know from classical probability theory that P(B) * P(A|B) = P(A and B) (* stands for multiplication) Now, P(A and B) is the probability that the Jesus family had a family tomb AND that the tomb discovered is that of the Jesus family. Note that the media are taking P(A|B) (Feuerverger’s 599/600 number) and wording it in a manner that makes it appear to the general public that it is in fact P(A and B). This is a fallacy and an out right deception!" If one tries to factor in the odds that Jesus' family would have had a tomb to begin with (which was more common among the wealthy), and if one very generously assumes that there is a 1 in 10 chance of this, the odds immediately drop from 99.8% (i.e. 599 out of 600) to less than 10% right off the bat. And one would still need to factor in the odds that this tomb would have been located in Jerusalem (rather than Galilee or elsewhere) and would have been among the 1,000 uncovered already. And this does not even address the other crucial questions, such as why "Mary Magdalene" would be included in the control to begin with (since there is zero evidence that she was part of Jesus' family), how the Mariamene could be considered a "hit" for "Mary Magdalene," the other non-hits that are glossed over, the papponymic naming practices of the Jews which eliminated the possibility of X-bar-X names, and the fact that this tomb was in use for several generations -- suggesting that the named individuals belonged to different generations.
• 

  badboy

  Dosn't it say Jesus was buriedin Joseph of Arimathea(sp?) tomb.
• 

  Leolaia

  badboy....That would be irrelevant since the ossuaries in the Talpiot tomb were used for reburying a person's remains. Reburial was a frequent custom in the first century. The tomb of Joseph of Arimathea would have been a place where Jesus would have bene buried immediately after death, before his body decayed. Once decayed, the bones could then be reburied elsewhere. Joseph's interest was in making sure that the Sabbath was observed.

  Here is another interesting article, this time from Scientific American which reports that a scholar used in the program is incensed at its misuse of her data:

  http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=says_scholar_whose_work_was_used_in_the_&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&ref=rss
• 

  Q. Bert

  Of course, an added wrinkle is that Jesus was resurrected, so no body to be found and analysed. Had they been able to find it, they could apparently then have known, not only Mary's DNA but Jehovah's as well.
• 

  Gerard

  So, I watched the Discovery Channel special last night. Finding all those Biblical names together in a family tomb does deserve of scientific research. But that could have been said in 30 seconds. Instead, the guys took 2h to tell a story that stretched reality and mathematical probability.....good business and book deals for them. The tomb is real; the interpretations were stretched for shock and awe.
  Basically, they linked together a chain of assumptions leading to a "REAL JESUS" tomb. They claimed the names within were uncommon even in isolation and ran some statistics. Of course, the significance of their statistics was shot down immediately by two well informed archeological scientists during a debate after the show, which was a show.
  I particularly laughed when these show-men were corrected on their inaccurate statements and ran to their corner defending themselves as merely "film-makers". A few minutes later the film-makers called themselves "researchers" only to be shut down again by the scientists.
  A waste of time this show, but again, finding all these remains in a single family tomb is worth of scientific attention.
• 

  undercover

  jumping on the Da Vinci bandwagon

  What do James Cameron and Dan Brown have in common?

  They both created mediocre forms of their craft that somehow caught the fancy of the average person and they made millions from it(Cameron = Titanic; Brown = DaVinci Code). Now Cameron wants in on Brown's limelight by producing some more mediocre work on the same mediocre fairy tale that made Brown famous.

  Maybe it's time to send a Terminator back in time to eliminate both of them before their influence was forced upon us...