The Statistical Case for the Identity of the "Jesus Family Tomb"

I wish to preface my remarks here by making clear that I am not a trained statistician and my concerns about the way that the statistical tests have been set up here are the concerns of a layman. They are therefore subject to correction from real experts.

Before beginning, let's get the key information at our fingertips. The Statistics claim is discussed at Monday's Press Conference (Discovery Channel Website, links on left), in Simcha Jacobovici's interview (especially Parts 3-4), in the Tomb Evidence PDF from the Discovery site (go to p. 13), and in three pages on the Jesus Family Tomb website headed Probability, The Football Field and Probability: Principles Adopted.

The major part of the case that the Talpiot tomb is Jesus' family tomb is based on a statistical claim. It is thought to be so unlikely that this cluster of names, so familiar from the New Testament record, would show up by accident that the identification of this tomb with the family of Jesus is on firm ground. What are the chances, they ask, that one would find a Jesus son of Joseph together with a Maria, a Mariamne and a Jose? Their answer is that the chances are something like 600:1 on a conservative estimate. The identification between this tomb and Jesus' family is all but certain.

I think this case is severely flawed. The essential problem, as I see it, is that the matches between the Talpiot tomb and the early Christian literary record are factored into the calculations in a positive way, but the non-matches are simply ignored, or treated as neutral. This will not do. If a case is built up on the notion that a remarkable cluster of names in a given places matches with a known cluster of names in another place, it is essential that the non-matches are taken seriously too, all the more so when some of the non-matches are not only non-matches but also contradict the literary record. The non-matches are simply absent from the statistical calculations here. The non matches in question are three, and the first of these needs to be underlined because it is being treated not only as a match but as one of the key matches:

• There is no reliable historical tradition that Jesus was married to a woman called Mariamne (or for that matter Mary, Salome, Joanna or anyone else). It is important to underline this. It is an unexamined assumption that lies behind all the film-makers' discussion of the "family tomb". The ultimate source of this is, I am afraid, popular fiction like The Da Vinci Code. I would not want to assume that the film-makers' research here was deficient by suggesting that The Da Vinci Code was the source of their information but remarkably, they are actually citing it in their remarks in favour of the identification, as if The Da Vinci Code is here giving shared knowledge.* Now given that no reputable historian of Christian origins seriously thinks that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (or anyone else, as far as we know), the presence of a Mariamne in the tomb can in no way be allowed to be a part of the statistical calculations here. We cannot assume unevidenced data in setting up the calculation. If the statistical calculation is to have any validity at all, we must work only with the known quantities.


• There is no reliable historical information that anyone called Matia was related to Jesus' family. The film-makers appear to be aware of this, and talk about the possibility that he might be a relative by marriage, perhaps one of Jesus' sister's husbands. (At the press conference, it is even suggested that he might have been the Gospel writer). One cannot allow negatives like this to be left out of consideration. The Matia ossuary is a non match with any of the data we have about Jesus' family and it cannot be left out of the calculations. In other words, this is not simply a piece of neutral information that one can leave to one side. It needs to be given negative weight, to detract from the probability that this is Jesus' family tomb.


• There is no reliable historical information that a character called Judas son of Jesus was connected with the Jesus movement. Indeed, this is evidence that contradicts the literary record in a striking way. Let us be clear about how important the appearance of this character is. There is no record of Jesus having any children, and so the evidence here contradicts the identification of the tomb as Jesus' family tomb. It will not do to say that our evidence is incomplete, or that this is an argument from silence, or that we should not rule out the possibility that Jesus had children. The point is that the case being made by the film makers is a case built up on the basis of an alleged remarkable match between one set of data (the names on the ossuaries) and another set of data (the early Christian record). Where that is the basis of the case, it is essential that non matches between the sets of data are taken as seriously as the matches, all the more so where non-matches actually contradict elements in the early Christian record.

Perhaps some will respond by pointing out that professional statisticians have been consulted. Were they not the ones responsible for these calculations? One of Simcha Jacobovici's major claims about the years of research that have gone into this television programme is that previously archaeologists were not talking to statisticians, and so the archaeologists simply did not realize how remarkable this cluster of names was. Jacobovici consulted four statisticians. I have not been able to find out the identities of the other three, or what they said, but there is one who is prominent in the publicity for the film, Dr Andrey Feuerverger, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Toronto. He was on stage with James Cameron, Simcha Jacobovici, James Tabor and James Charlesworth at Monday's press conference and he is featured on the Discovery website on the programme. Clearly he knows a lot more about statistics than most of us, and I would not dream of trying to second guess him. But he revealed a very important piece of information at the press conference, that he is not an expert on the New Testament or archaeological data, so he was working with the data given to him by the programme makers. The relevance of this is that a significant and fatal bias was introduced into the analysis before it had even begun.

One can view the data that was given to Feuerverger on the Discovery website, in the PDF packet of documentation, where the grounds for the statistical analysis are given. It is clear from this that the task he was given was to work out the probability of a certain cluster of names occurring, where in each case all known examples of the given name in the given period were divided into all known naming possibilities in the given period. And the names he worked with were Jesus son of Joseph, Mariamne, Maria and Joseph. The name Matia was initially factored in too, and then removed "since he is not explicatively [sic] mentioned in the Gospels". But the problem is not just that Matia is not mentioned as a family member in the Gospels, it is that the greater the number of non-matches, the less impressive the cluster becomes. Or, to put it another way, it stops being a cluster of striking names when the cluster is diluted with non-matches. Mariamne needs to be taken out of the positive calculation and instead treated as a non-match; Matia needs to be treated as a second non-match; Judas son of Jesus needs to be treated as contradictory evidence. These three pieces of data together detract radically from the impressiveness of the given cluster.

At the risk of labouring the point, let me attempt to explain my concerns by using the analogy of which the film-makers are so fond, the Beatles analogy. This analogy works by saying that if in 2,000 years a tomb was discovered in Liverpool that featured the names John, Paul and George, we would not immediately conclude that we had found the tomb of the Beatles. But if we also found so distinctive a name as Ringo, then we would be interested. Jacobovici claims that the "Ringo" in this tomb is Mariamene, whom he interprets as Mary Magdalene and as Jesus's wife, which is problematic (see Mariamne and the "Jesus Family Tomb" and below). What we actually have is the equivalent of a tomb with the names John, Paul, George, Martin, Alan and Ziggy. We might well say, "Perhaps the 'Martin' is George Martin, and so this is a match!" or "Perhaps John Lennon had a son called Ziggy we have not previously heard about" but this would be special pleading and we would rightly reject such claims. A cluster of names is only impressive when it is a cluster that is uncontaminated by non-matches and contradictory evidence.

In short, including Mariamne and leaving out Matia and Judas son of Jesus is problematic for any claim to be made about the remaining cluster. All data must be included. You cannot cherry pick or manipulate your data before doing your statistical analysis.

* One example of this is Jacobovici's interview, Part 4, where he says: "There are two Marys in Jesus' life, as everybody knows, one is his mother, you know, the Virgin Mary, and the other is, Mary Magdalene, you know, post Da Vinci Code everybody knows Mary Magdalene." There are actually at least four Marys in the Gospels, not two: (1) Mary mother of Jesus, (2) Mary Magdalene, (3) Mary sister of Martha, (4) Mary of James and Joses, and (5) Mary of Clopas, though (1) and (4) may be the same person, or (4) and (5) may be the same person. None of these is described as Jesus' wife.