Statisical Analysis: Jesus' Tomb?
Statisical Analysis: Jesus' Tomb?
On the surface at least, and with a couple of potential exceptions, the family names in the Talpiot Tomb seem to fit nicely with the known family members in Jesus of Nazareth's household. Is there any way to be more specific about whether or not we could have a potential match here?
To check out their hunch, Jacobovici and Pellegrino sought the services of Andre Feuerverger, a statistician from the University of Toronto. While most of the Talpiot names are very common, what is the likelihood that just this particular cluster of names would all be together?
Tabor explains that the initial statistics for the Talpiot grouping have nothing to do with whether or not they fit the family of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, they were arrived at in a two-part process. First, what is the likelihood that such a cluster of names would be found in one place or in a single family? Second, these findings then were compared to Jesus' family according to the names presented in the Gospels.13
Based on the available information and the family connections mentioned above, Feuerverger arrived at the following figures for this cluster of names alone: there is a 1 in 190 chance of having a Jesus son of Joseph, a 1 in 160 chance for Mariamne, a 1 in 40 chance for Matia, a 1 in 20 chance for Yose, and a 1 in 4 chance for Maria. Multiplying these odds yields a likelihood of 1 chance in 97,280,000 of getting this specific list of persons together.
Then the second set of computations was done, comparing the family buried in the Talpiot Tomb to the Gospel listings of Jesus of Nazareth's family members. The name “Matthew” was eliminated during this step, because he is not explicatively mentioned in the Gospels as a direct member of Jesus' family. Then other adjustments were made for unintentional biases in the historical sources, as well as to allow for all possible first-century Jerusalem tombs, arriving at a final probability factor of a 1 in 600 chance that the Talpiot Tomb was not the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. So the conclusion was that the two families were probably the same, to a very high degree of likelihood, and thus Jesus is probably buried in this tomb.14