There is strikingly little that we can know from the Talpiot Tomb with regard to direct, blood relations between the family members there. Two of the most crucial things to keep in mind about the nature of these Jewish burial tombs are that they were used for extended families, and that these families were buried there for three to five generations. Assuming that the first name on the “son of Joseph” ossuary is indeed “Jesus” and that there was only one man buried in the tomb with the name of Jesus (unlike the two Marys), all we can know is that Joseph, Jesus, and Judah are related as father, son, and grandson, respectively. We cannot even know that one of the Marys is one of their mothers, or what relation Jose or Matthew were to the rest of the family. The others could be grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, adopted children, step-parents, previous children of the step-parents, or the spouses of many of these persons!42 Or the other names in the tomb could be people who all lived and died in this extended family, but during a earlier generation, perhaps before the Talpiot Jesus was even born! So we cannot state any known conclusions concerning Maria, Mariamene, Jose, or Matthew. Thus, quite contrary to the second computation of the Talpiot Hypothesis “Statistics Overview,” we cannot use figures for Mariamene, Maria, or Jose. We simply do not know that information.
We just said that even Pellegrino (and apparently Jacobovici, too) acknowledges that the chances of a man named Jesus who also had a father named Joseph who lived in Jerusalem during the era of the ossuaries is 1 in 79 and that approximately 1008 Jewish men probably had that relationship. Just “straight up,” even after conceding the items mentioned above, that is still a 1008:1 chance against the Talpiot Tomb being the tomb of Jesus. Need we go any further on these grounds alone? But unfortunately for the Talpiot Hypothesis, to compute for the name Judah takes us away from the known family of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, from what we know historically, if the Talpiot Jesus had a son named Judah, that would be more than enough to argue that he is indeed one of the 1008 other men in Jerusalem who were named Jesus with a father named Joseph. For if we gave Jesus a 20 percent chance of having a son, which is probably a much higher percentage than most would grant, this alone would change the probability to 5000:1 that it is not Jesus of Nazareth!
Probably no one has done more work on the statistics of the Talpiot Tomb than Randy Ingermanson. In his initial essay on the topic, he concluded that there was a 10,000:1 chance that the Talpiot Tomb Jesus is not Jesus of Nazareth.43 (After his study, Rosebrough concluded that there was a 15,000:1 chance against all the major premises of the Talpiot Hypothesis being true, from which Rosebrough derived the title of his essay, “archaeological identity theft”!44) But Ingermanson went much further with a second study. Teaming up with Jay Cost, they used a very sophisticated application of Bayes' Theorem, a highly recognized means of using calculus in “improving an initial probability estimate in light of new information.” They figured the problem in several ways, depending on how people answer the “fuzzy factors” where there are differences of opinion. For a typical historian, they arrived at a19,000:1 chance against the Talpiot Tomb being that of Jesus. For a historian who leans toward this being Jesus' tomb, the chances are estimated at 1,100:1. For the historian who leans toward it not being Jesus' tomb, the odds drop all the way to 5,000,000:1! Basically, the lesson of their study is that there are not enough realistic “fuzzy factors” to turn the odds in favor of the Talpiot Tomb being Jesus' burial place.45 As Ingermanson concludes, “The article shows 5 different test cases that give estimates that would be computed by people with a wide range of different mindsets. The interesting thing is that, despite vast differences in assumptions, the final results are not terribly different.”46 Overall, their conclusions are absolutely devastating to the Talpiot Hypothesis.47
There is strikingly little that we can know from the Talpiot Tomb with regard to direct, blood relations between the family members there. Two of the most crucial things to keep in mind about the nature of these Jewish burial tombs are that they were used for extended families, and that these families were buried there for three to five generations.