Gotcha, thanks!

The only ossuary clearly with the name Jesus on it is the James ossuary (other than the “Judah son of Jesus” ossuary, but that circularly presumes Jesus had kids; otherwise, that’s a different Jesus in the family, this being an intergenerational tomb with three different languages present).

Whether there is also an ossuary in the tomb with “Jesus son of Joseph” on it is disputed and IMO doubtful. Michael Heiser correctly observes the name there actually appears to be Ishi (two letters). One has to make a bunch of exceptions to inscriptional practice to get it to be Yeshua (four letters; or three if abbreviated), and then adopt an implausible thesis:

“It is difficult to believe that whoever was given the privilege of preparing the ossuary for the fallen leader of a new religion, whose influence had already spread through all Israel, would prove so inept as to make the name barely legible.”

Adopting all these ad hoc assumptions further reduces the probability of any hypothesis depending on them.

I’m confused – I thought the Jesus ossuary was in the tomb, but it was the James ossuary that was not (but considered as possibly coming from it)

Noted and emended.

Richard, just a small point; 1 in 26 and 3.8% are essentially the same proportion.

You now list Bauckham’s rate on “ossuaries,” which is not 5%, and that’s the wrong datum anyway. The frequency of ossuary naming will vary statistically because it is random. The base rate will correspond to the actual frequency of the name in question. Which, if you mean Jesus, is 1 in 26, not “3.8%” [admittedly a trivial difference, per following comment]. This is explained by Bauckham himself in the very same source (I literally have his book sitting in front of me).

And whatever the rate is, that can tell us nothing of whether this is a specific Jesus (Joshua), of all the thousands there will have been.

The population of Palestine was in the millions in any generation, and many more when we no longer know what generation an ossuary derives from (remember these ossuaries do not have precise dates, and so the pool of candidates is the population over their date range, not in any given year).

But even 80,000 divided by 26 is over 3,000 men named Jesus even in any single year. That’s “thousands.” Simon is vastly more common. James twice as common.

And families were large. So the probability of conjoined brothers (much less cousins!) is not the simple combined probability of two names. You have to run a converse permutation equation. And you also have to account for mismatches (names in a family burial never associated with the family of Jesus), and family size (how many ossuaries are at the site, containing how many persons, since a single ossuary could hold several).

That is in fact what the article is about that you are commenting on: running the correct math. Which you are just ignoring for some reason. Indeed, this is illustrated by the existence of several “tombs of Jesus” with similar name clusters that have been claimed to be “the” Jesus tomb over the past century, which, being impossible, illustrates how easy it is to get accidental name clusters like this.

And finally, DNA would tell us nothing we do not already know. Except, maybe, for instance, whether a Simon is a brother in law and not a brother, or a half but not a full brother, or even a cousin, but apologists will then just say “that counts.” Yet if we are to include brothers in law in the math, the frequency of accidental matches goes substantially up. Similarly if we treat names with no filial identifiers no matter the filiation (so, a cousin or a son or grandson or a father or a grandfather named Simon suddenly now “counts” for some reason: that only increases the pool of names to draw from and thus increase the frequency of accidental matches, and thus reduces the probability that this is “the” one).

Holding all else equal (no other information) and assuming a random ossuary drawn out of a hat is 3.8%. Maybe my logic isn’t fully panned out but all else equal I would expect that to be the baseline probability.

Not sure how you get thousands of Cousins named Simon and Brothers as James in a population of 80,000 people in 1st century Palestine. Mathematically you could only get some 16,000 pairs (80,000/5 assuming a father and mother). But statistically that number is highly unrealistic. In fact having the familial connections this strong seems to be approaching uniqueness but I am not an expert here on 2nd temple judiasm. Just a dude with wikipedia.

Out of some 3000 ossuaries, virtually none of them is named James much less James “brother of Jesus” (inscription is contested, I know). But you would then have a Mary who is mother of a Jesus and a Joseph who is a Father to that same Jesus. You would have a James who was discovered independent of the 3 who is the Brother to this Jesus and we have soil tests and field measurements placing him as likely in the tomb. We would then have a St. Simon (I think that is who he means…I am not doing the test, just reporting what I think I heard him say online) who is predicted to be another brother to this Jesus. The ossuary was not buried in the same tomb with Jesus. This allows for an archeological experiment which had a prediction before the test. I mean how much more do you need to start to say that this ‘family’ is uniquely defined and the ossuary names are predicting the outcomes based on the biblical narrative?

Last, I heard there is some idea of looking at the Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera roman soldier from the Talmud as they found his grave. Making a DNA match there would be a bit interesting.

As far as the Son Judas and Matthew, I am certain there is a large amount of Fraud in Ancient Jewish/Christian religion. They did discover an apocryphal text that indicate Mary Magdalene and Jesus might have had some relationship so its not too far out of the range of speculation.

Anyway, I am going to take it you expect no impact even in the ‘steelman’ case.

Probabilities taken from the Wiki Article Below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talpiot_Tomb

You’ll need to cite a more concrete source. I don’t know what you mean by a “naive %” or what you mean by “that are Yeshua.”

I also do not know why you think the count on ossuaries matters (as there were no laws forcing a skewed naming on ossuaries, their distribution is simply a product of the general name distribution, and thus we cannot “forget” the total name data and act like the frequencies on ossuaries represent the actual probability of being named on an ossuary: that probability remains the general name distribution altogether, not its random output onto ossuaries).

And I still don’t get what you even mean at all. The actual name frequency of Jesus is far below 5%. It’s 1 in 26. Jacob is roughly half as frequent. But that is the frequency of the name being had by a Jewish man, not the frequency of that man being Jesus Christ. So what is even your point?

James is not a rare name. Nor would its being rare on ossuaries have any causal connection to the family of Jesus (there was no Jewish law forbidding writing the name James on an ossuary unless it was the brother of Jesus Christ, for example).

And this still does not explain where you get the “five” percent, or what that is even supposed to be a “percent” of.

And you aren’t making any sense with the DNA thing. Thousands of Jameses (Jacobs) would have had biological brothers or cousins named Simon. So why would confirming two were related get us anywhere near confirming this was the family of Jesus specifically?

You are also working off faith assumptions, not data (there is no indication that Jacob had a “cousin” named Simon; that Simon was a cousin was a later Christian theological doctrine, not anything in any text of the time). And the data we do have is poor (that Jesus even had a brother named Simon only comes from Mark, an unreliable third party; there is no such indication in Paul, for example, nor anywhere even in the book of Acts). But apart from that, “testing” DNA doesn’t get anything we don’t already have (the names on the ossuaries); and that simply shows the name clusters are too common to be associated with our Jesus.

There is a Is large inventory of these ossuaries already Which gave a rough estimate of the likelihood of names. james appears to be a very rare name.

If I recall correctly simon is jesus’ cousin. He wasn’t buried in the tomb so Is he is an archiological control. An unbiased experiment where If they are indeed cousins you have a good match.