Recently, I had a chance to talk with Dr. James Tabor, concerning his work on the identification of the Talpiot Tomb with the “Jesus Family”. Dr. Tabor took note of my strong objections to such an identification and the methodology used to support it. He suggested that I read over the published peer reviewed work on the subject. So, over my winter break, I will be reviewing these articles, with an eye critical for pseudo-scientific articles.
The first paper I am concerned with is Probability, Statistics, and the Talpiot Tomb. Written by Kevin T. Kilty, Ph.D., P.E., and Mark Elliott, Ph.D., both of Laramie Country Community College, is described by James Tabor as a peer reviewed article, and is currently one of two he suggests that is available. However, I have yet to find exactly where or how this article was peer reviewed, and would like any information available concerning this, if someone does know.
The paper presents its focus as threefold:
- Explain and assess the existing statistical analysis of the Talpiot Tomb done by Dr. Andrey Feurverger.
- Analyze selected statistics that have been offered in comparison to the Talpiot Tomb, with a focus on the Dominus Flevit necropolis.
- Assess the nature of the name cluster in the Talpiot Tomb, and see if such statistics can be used in analyzing the theoretical link to the “Jesus Family”
Assessment of Feurverger’s Work
Kilty and Elliott quite rightly are critical of portions of Feurverger’s work, especially his assumption that the names in the tombs could be considered random samples. In fact, names within a family would influence other names, and popular names based on historical figures could distort the population of names even more. As part of this consideration, they note that Feurverger would ignore the actual kin relations found int he tomb, as the arrangement of names would influence the possibility of a specific family, i.e. that it is very unlikely to find two brothers with the same name, but a father and son with the same name would not be terribly rare.
While their conclusion that Feurverger may be off target is supported by their argument, their assessment of his work false short on at least one point. They make note of his stipulation that for the tomb to be statistically comparable to the proposed tomb of the “Jesus Family”, it could not have names not found in text as related to this family. This should be a large area of contention over Feurverger’s work, since there is at least one name in the “Jesus Tomb” that should not be there if it were the “Jesus Family”
Following this, Kilty and Elliott work out probability utilizing arrangements of family members. They compare one set, modeled on the biblical “Jesus Family”, though anomalously including the Matthew inscription in the Talpiot Tomb, which does not fit the biblical family at all, to a family modeled on the most common names found on ossuaries and known naming traditions of the period.
By sampling different arrangements, they find that common names are between 1.1 to 11 times more likely than arrangements of the “Jesus Family”. This seems to point to the possibility that Part of there analysis of this issue is based on a list of popular names taken from period sources. In doing so they relate popularity on all sources to popularity on ossuaries, with the following chart.
| Table 1 | |
| All Sources | Ossuaries |
| Simon | Simon |
| Joseph | Joseph |
| Lazarus | Judas |
| Judas | Lazarus |
| John | John |
| Jesus | Jesus |
| Ananias | Ananias |
| Johnathan | Matthew |
| Matthew | Johnathan |
| Source: Kilty and Elliott, 2007 | |
Kilty and Elliott claim that the similarities in popularity between both sides indicate that ossuaries are a representative sample of the entire population. They offer no statistics to support this, except to state that the population percent for Simon is 9.3% and the ossurary percent for Simon is 13%. These are similar numbers, but surely they could have provided either a test to show the accuracy of this claim, or at the very least the actual percents for each name.
Their final conclusion about such calculations is that since so few samples come from tombs with than a couple inscribed ossuaries, “One ought to use such calculations with some skepticism”, and that tombs with more than two or three inscribe ossuaries are not well represented by existing sample distributions.
Dominus Flevit Necropolis
In response to comparisons between the Talpiot Tomb and the Dominus Flevit necropolis, the authors devote a section of the paper to discussing large burials where similar naming patterns to those found in the Talpiot Tomb occur. There is not much to say on this section, except to some up their conclusion that a subset of a necropolis containing forty-three ossuaries is not statistically comparable to the Talpiot Tomb with its lower number of ossuaries.
Statistical Significance
By this point in the paper, the authors have essentially found that simply taking the probability of the different names in the tomb is both difficult and of little value in discovering the rarity of the name cluster or its potential link to the historic Jesus. As a result, they look to Bayes Theorem and Bayesian statistics for a potential method of testing the results. Effectively this method “starts with some fact” that is used to modify one’s beliefs about the Talpiot Tomb.
The initial fact that Kilty and Elliott choose to utilizes is that “We know the Jesus Family existed”. Of course, while I think that this is likely true, many have argued against this as a definite fact, based on the lack of clear evidence. Certainly, even supporters of the Talpiot Tomb as the “Jesus Family Tomb” have at one time or another questioned the actual historic makeup of the family. Kilty and Elliott continue to add other bits of evidence to this to reach a final a priori fact, namely that because of all of this, a Jesus Family Tomb likely existed. This again, misses the many arguments that have been posed in the last year arguing, based on social class and location, that Jesus did not have such a tomb (this is of course ignoring any numinous explanations for the lack of a Jesus Tomb).
Through the Bayesian analysis, Kilty and Elliott come to two possible figures. If you call the “Yoseh” inscription “Joseph”, then there is a 6% chance that the tomb was the “Jesus Tomb”, but if you treat “Yoseh” as “Josi”, you recieve a 49% chance that the tomb belongs to the “Jesus Family”. Based on this, they conclude that the cluster of names at the Talpiot Tomb is unique, and seem to lean toward it being the “Jesus Tomb”.
However, their analysis overlooks many issues of the statistics, which they seemingly ignore. Chief among these is the presence of the names “Matthew” and “Judas son of Jesus”. Not only do these not match the biblical Jesus and his family, but they would subsequently lower the probability of this tomb being that of Jesus or his family. Kilty and Elliott choose to ignore these names from their calculations based on their claim that there is no evidence at present to determine the relation of either inscribed ossuary to others in the tomb. This raises two very important issues. First, there is no way to determine relationships between the other ossuaries in the tomb either, unless one is willing to use the biblical texts. This should not mean these names are ignored. Secondly, it seems absolutely absurd to claim that there is no way to relate an ossuary bearing the inscription “Judas son of Jesus” to an ossuary bearing the inscription “Jesus son of Joseph”. There is an obvious and direct explanation right there. Instead, what seems to have happened is that Kilty and Elliott ignored these two inscription for convenience’s sake, since they could not be related to the biblical family of Jesus.
The second question, which I do not believe Kilty and Elliott have answered, and which has been hanging over the heads of this issue since Feurverger’s analysis, is what the validity or value of such statistical analysis is. Clearly statistics can tell us how rare a set of names is, given significant sample sizes and other necessary statistical assumptions, but can they help us identify an individual? The answer has generally been no. Archaeologists do not rely on such methodology, because it is inexact, and non-scientific. Any identification made by such a statistical study is extremely inexact, and as can be seen in Kilty and Elliott’s work, based on any number of assumptions built on top of one another. The only reliable way in which to make such an identification would be direct archaeological evidence.
The final conclusion that should be drawn from Probability, Statistics, and the Talpiot Tomb, is this: the cluster of names appears to be significant, but due to existing samples, it cannot be determined with significant level of certainty to accept this conclusion without skepticism.
Any conclusion more than this overlooks the problems in Kilty and Elliott’s study, and the questionable nature of making identifications based on such statistical analysis.
See: Kilty, Kevin T. and Mark Elliott. Probability, Statistics, and the Talpiot Tomb http://www.lccc.wy.edu/Index.aspx?page=547, accessed 12/19/2007
Filed under: Archaeoporn, Pseudo-Science, Talpiot Tomb | Tagged: Feurverger, James Tabor, Jesus Family Tomb, Kevin T. Kilty, Mark Elliott, Probability, Statistics, Talpiot Tomb
Let me respond to a few of your criticisms. They appear to indicate a misreading of our paper.
First, I know nothing about the “peer reviewed” issue you allude to. We, of course, had colleagues read and comment upon the paper before we put it on-line, so it is peer reviewed in that sense, but we have not submitted it for publication, and I don’t know that we will, so it is not “Peer Reviewed.”
Second, you indicate our work falls short by not making much of Feuerverger’s and our allowance of names that should not be found in the tomb. Yet you do not indicate the name or names. Please elaborate. We feel that even Matthew and Judas son of Jesus are pretty neutral to the question. So we concentrated only on Jesus Son of Joseph, Mary, Yoseh. I fail to see how this invalidates our analysis, or Feuerverger’s for that matter.
Third, we saw that the name frequencies in the general population versus ossuaries, specifically for Simon, were consistent with one another because the 95% confidence intervals overlap so. Please refer to our footnote on this point. You might also note that the name rankings are another statistical measure of similarity–the rankings are very similar–I would say identical within the uncertainty of the rankings themselves.
Fourth, the initial fact that we used as our Bayesian “prior” is not just that the family existed which would have a value of 100% (or darned close to it), but that there is a tomb in the Jerusalem area that is “A Jesus Family Tomb” and that any tomb taken at random would have something like a 0.001 probability of being “this tomb.” It may be true that people would argue over the composition of this family, just as they will argue over the contents of a tomb for such a family. The provenence of this is scholarship–providing a range of reasonable possibilities that we alluded to. Our purpose was to look at name evidence alone and decide two things. 1) using our prior what is the posterior probability that this tomb fits the profile of a Jesus Family Tomb? 2) how important is the name “Yoseh” to this calculation?
Fifth, Regarding the names Matthew and Judas Son of Jesus once more. We did not ignore these names. But because we have little idea what they represent we did not include them in our Bayesian calculations. We did speculate on the inclusion of these inscriptions in the tomb, and I refer you to our footnotes on that subject. There is no way that the mere inclusion of these names invalidates the tomb as a Jesus Family Tomb in any sense.
Sixth, with regard to whether or not our name analysis is inexact and unscientific, let me state that you are half-right! It is an inexact analysis, and I believe that Elliot and I hedged sufficiently to not offend the gods of inexactitude. However, inexact does not mean unscientific. What we and Feuerverger, and also Randy Ingermanson and Jay Cost, have attempted is novel and not likely to become generally acceptable for a time. However, the use of a name under circumstances of uncertainty (as opposed to actual identification) to point uniquely to a historical individual is, in fact, used by historians and archeologists all the time. Please refer to the quotation we included from Bauckham, but also think about your own chosen field of archeology and think of the many times that inscriptions are unearthed, and under some amount of uncertainty, attributed to some unique person or attributed to being about some unique person on the basis of probability–even if the probability is only implied by other data and remains unspoken, or simply a matter of concurrence among experts.
Seventh, several additional important points that we covered in our paper are universally overlooked. We used statisticcs, in the sense of descriptive statistics, to show that many statements of fact regarding the tomb, made by experts, are not at all supported by raw data. Any fair reading of our work would acknowledge that as being of importance. Maybe inexactitudes and pseudoscience exist only in the eye of the beholder?
Finally, “social class and location” may have agreat deal to say in regard disproving conjectures made about this tomb. However, at the present time these look to me, and I am not speaking for Elliott who is the historian here, look to me like appeals to authority. There are no contemporaneous documents that clearly identify the social class and location of Jesus or most other members of the family (James may be an exception). So these observations too depend for their relevance on chains of reasoning and argumentation and contain uncertainty to an unknown degree.
I will offer my responses to the issues raised in order. As for peer review, I understand now the situation of this paper, however, as my original post indicates, Dr. James Tabor, has on his page, labeled it as so. I did note that I could find no information on the review process or publication. It would be helpful to have a website, or part of the document explaining the methods of presentation.
Second, how are these names no neutral, they invalidate the match to the Jesus family from the biblical account? The more often I read these being pushed aside, the more it feels like a cold reading trick, ignoring a clear miss to focus on the hits.
Third, no matter how similar the rankings are, that is not a clear representation of their frequencies in a population. The percentages and calculations provided in the footnote (12 I believe) are only for the single name Simon. This does not necessarily invalidate anything, but would be a great point of clarification if all such tests were presented.
Forth, I am certainly not an expert on this variety of statistics, but in all truth both prior suppositions are not very good. First, while you are willing to argue a likelihood of roughly 100% for a Jesus family, and I would too, this is debated among many people, and certainly the makeup of any such family has also been debated. Dr. Tabor, in his book the Jesus Dynasty, offers numerous possible alternatives as family members or arrangements. Secondly, as many scholars have made clear since the beginning of this hot issue, there is no clear evidence at all that this family would have a tomb or that it would be in this region. This is very much up in the air.
Fifth, how do these names not invalidate it as the biblical Jesus Family’s tomb? If your prior assumption is that this family was real and had a tomb, shouldn’t the names actually match? Of all the familial relations possibly present in the tomb, the Judah and Jesus ossuaries are the ones most clearly linked, yet you say you cannot find a link, and that links do not argue against it being the biblical family?
Sixth, the scientific method, as applied in archaeology calls on two things, evidence and epistemology. There is clear evidence that this tomb does not match the biblical Jesus, yet it is ignored. As for epistemology, this, at present, seems to also be against the identification of the tomb as Jesus’. As for archaeologists linking small texts or inscriptions with figures from the bible etc, maybe this is not an example of why we should accept the Talpiot Tomb as being Jesus’, but the Talpiot Tomb is an example of why archaeologists should not be so quick to make such assumptions in their work. I can also say that this is a tradition that is strongest in fields such as biblical archaeology, and many scholars would do no such thing.
I believe my piece calls the use of such statistical analysis to identify an item or inscription with an individual pseudo-scientific, not your work. You seem relatively clear on the fact that it will take other evidence, though at times leaning too much toward supporting such conclusions.
Social class and location may not necessarily be an outright argument against the identification of the tomb with Jesus, but they are certainly statistically important, and by necessity ignored in such methodology as those utilized here. The picture of the non-elite, to which Jesus likely belonged, is so sketchy, that statistical analysis of this group cannot be carried out well. The frequency of rare name, such as Yoseh, may be entirely different in such levels of society, and those normally found in texts.
I certainly believe that my reading of your paper is fair, and that the problems I have noted remain. I certainly can accept the statistics of this being a relatively unique set of names, but find equating this with the Jesus Family in the bible extremely troublesome, not the least bit because of the clear misses present. This seems to me to be an large problem based on the method of prior assumptions used in this paper, and yet to be successfully overcome. I also still hold that most modern archaeologists would not use such methodology or seek to prove or disprove such textual ties, and attempts to do so seem tightly rooted in the traditions of biblical archaeology.
I hope that you will note that my very final conclusion drawn on this paper was that I, having read your paper, do accept that while these names may be common, the cluster appears to be unique. I also quite like, and do note the importance of, your improved methodology noting family structure. This is certainly a great improvement over other studies of this data, as is your recognition of the non-random nature of name choice in this population.
I would like to make a couple of points.
Firstly, the fact that there was a Judas-son-of-Jesus
and a Matthew cannot possibly have a negative effect
on the calculation. It is never stated in the bible,
or anywhere else from the period, that Jesus was
single, or that he had no children. In fact, all
references to his marital state seem to have been
airbrushed out of the gospels and other books.
Bearing this in mind, no inference can be drawn at all
from the Judas-son-of-Jesus inscription, except a very weak positive, in that the biblical Jesus had a
brother named Judas, so it was an unsurprising name for a son of Jesus.
Similarly, the name Matthew cannot be used as a
negative, unless it can be proved that no Matthew
existed in the close family circle. Nobody can claim
that every family member is known. A Matthew could be another son of Jesus, or Mary’s second husband, or anything, frankly. So the name Matthew does not
contravene any known evidence.
Thirdly, the social class thing is a bit of a red herring. A man like Jesus, with hundreds or even thousands of followers, would surely be given a special burial. Especially given the religious nature of his following. Many hands make light work, and the the local limestone is soft and easy to work. ( as evidenced by the writing ). And if the bible is correct, Jesus had four brothers who were sons of a carpenter, so hammer and chisel work should come easily.
And lastly I see no problem with the location, it’s an hours walk from popular sites for the crucifixion, an
easy job for a man and donkey to carry a body that
far, and in keeping with the laws on rapid burials.
I’ve done my own calculations on the odds, it doesn’t
take a genius, and just using the three ossuaries,
Jesus, Maria and Joseh, I get more than fifteen to
one against this cluster being a random coincidence.
i.e, odds on it’s the Biblical Jesus.
The only way you can make it unlikely, is to ignore
the facts, and treat Maria as Mary, and Joseh as
Joseph. And that’s what most critics seem to do.
If scholars throw out all the misses, then they might as well throw out all hits.
Once you include individuals who are not listed in the text of the bible, then you are no longer comparing it to the biblical family of Jesus, and calculations becoming meaningless in identifying the individuals.
Second, as to your calculations. Even if you somehow show low odds for a group of names, this does not mean it is the biblical family, just that such an occurrence is somewhat unexpected.
Unexpected things are found all the time in the archaeological record, and more often then not they are meaningless chance.
That’s the point I’m making. A name is not just a hit or miss. There is also a no-score. A hit is a known name, a miss is a name that should not be there, and a no-score is a name that there is no evidence for either way. Matya and Judas are no-scores, as they don’t don’t match any evidence, but neither do they contradict any.
As for statistics, they will never prove validity, just reflect the odds.
Imagine if the so-called Mariamene ossuary had read magdalene, instead.
The matter would still not be proved, the odds would just be stronger.
( actually, I agree it’s more likely that it reads Mariame and Mara ).
I think what statistics do prove is that this was a highly significant find, and should never have been dismissed as it was, and should have been taken seriously and investigated properly.
The statistics do show that the arguments made to dismiss it’s importance ( ie, the names were common etc.) were not sincere, but just an effort to bury the story.
From the quality of their rebuttal arguments, and the lack of effort, it’s hard not to conclude that the Israelis tried to make this story go away right from the start.