James Tabor’s Statement
“I wanted to add my statement to your collection. The Blog entry today was not my views on the tomb, but some overall comments on the conference as a whole. Here is my statement:
I am convinced that the Talpiot tomb is possibly, and even likely, the family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth for the following reasons (stated not elaborated, see NEA for the full exposition)
Historical: Jesus was put in a temporary tomb and would likely be moved to a permanent location in the Jerusalem area where his family took up residence over the next 40 years. If we then imagine who might hypothetically be in a pre-70 CE “Jesus family tomb” we come up with an inner core group of: Jesus, any wife or children he might have, his brother Yose, who likely died before 70, his widowed mother Mary, and any wife or children of Yose.
Epigraphical: The names Yeshua bar Yehosef, Yose, which is in fact extremely rare despite statements to the contrary, Maria, and Mariamene, correspond remarkably to the hypothetical “group.”
Statistical: Even without any a priori inclusion of Mary Magdalene in a Jesus family tomb, just the names we have, based on Kilty’s calculations, endorsed by Fuchs, yields a .48 probability. This is far from random, in fact it means if we had two tombs to look at one of them would probably be the Jesus family tomb. Even one in ten would be interesting but .48 I find quite compelling, given the other evidence of history and epigraphy. One can take any other “Yeshua” tomb we have, just as a comparison, and all of them are immediately disqualified or have no names that fit what we might expect in our pre-70 hypothetical Jesus family tomb. Remarkably, this one does.
There are other things I won’t include here but this to me is enough to suggest we should consider this site as possible to probable and not dismiss it. I think lots of this comes down to language. It is one thing to say that one does not find evidence to conclude this is the Jesus family tomb, but that is quite different from saying that the positive evidence outweighs the negative.
The only “negative” evidence of which I am aware would be the idea that Jesus was celibate or never had a child. I think this is highly unlikely, given the practice of eliminating women from our accounts (all the apostles, for a start). Also, I think one can make some positive arguments for Jesus being married, but won’t summarize them here.”
Dr. James D. Tabor
Chair, Dept. of Religious Studies
UNC Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
- Blog feed
I am glad to see that Dr. Tabor is supportive of the Kilty/Elliott paper. I would note with interest that Kilty and Elliott make use of the same methodology that Randy Ingermanson and I used last spring. We used Bayes theorem - which is a statistical tool to “update” the probability of a prior event having occurred, given subsequent observations. In the Spring, Dr. Tabor was quite skeptical of our endeavors, writing:
“Randy Ingermanson and others have suggested that a more Bayesian model be used on the Talpiot inscriptions but I think the task is exceedingly problematic in that it rests up an infinitely variable prediction of possibilities and expectations, many of which are historically disputable, that are impossible to gauge in a quantifiable way.” (http://jesusdynasty.com/blog/2007/03/25/statistical-clouds-and-fuzziness/)
I happen to agree with this statement from Dr. Tabor. In fact, one’s final statistical conclusion is highly dependent upon the assumptions that one makes. Kilty and Elliott’s paper, while very good in most respects, makes a serious of assumptions that are empirically questionable and that drive more than 90% of their statistical power. (That is, when I reviewed the paper in the fall, I found that adjusting their assumptions to better reflect the uncertainty we face drops the probability from upwards of 50% to less than 5%).
Randy and I acknowledged the importance of assumptions back in the Spring, and our paper actually takes into account Tabor’s criticism (which was published before we published our actual paper). What we did then was use Bayes theorem to calculate the probability that this tomb belongs to Jesus of Nazareth over a *range* of assumptions. This gives us an opportunity to assign a probability range based upon a wide array of assumptions.
Our results can be found here: http://ingermanson.com/jesus/art/stats2.php. People who are interested in a moral formal presentation of the problem can look here: http://ingermanson.com/jesus/art/tomb/HeIsNotHere.pdf.
You will see that our final results are quite different from Kilty and Elliott’s.
Comment by Jay Cost — January 21, 2008 @ 7:45 pm
Footnote. For those of you who might not have heard of their paper, I am referring to the essay by Kevin Kilty and Mark Elliott of Laramie County Community College entitled, “Probability, Statistics, and the Talpiot Tomb” (http://www.lccc.wy.edu/Index.aspx?page=547)
As I said, there is much with this paper that I find quite agreeable. I was particularly glad to see that, working independently of one another, Randy & I and Kilty & Elliott chose to adopt the same statistical method to answer the question (Feueverger chose a different tact). A close read of both essays will indicate that the differences between our results and their results is due to a meta-methodological disagreement. Namely, Randy and I approach the following question differently: “How shall we deal with the assumptions that we must make?”
Comment by Jay Cost — January 21, 2008 @ 8:05 pm
Here are correct links for the articles Randy and I wrote:
Non-technical summary: http://ingermanson.com/jesus/art/stats2.php
Technical Analysis: http://ingermanson.com/jesus/art/tomb/HeIsNotHere.pdf
Comment by Jay Cost — January 21, 2008 @ 11:23 pm
A few comments on the article by Kevin Kilty and Mark Elliott are in order:
1) They are in agreement with Jay Cost and me that a calculation based on Bayes’ Theorem is a good way to analyze the data.
2) They are also (apparently) in agreement with Jay and me that the “Mariamenou” inscription is not at all a strong indicator that Mary Magdalene was in the Talpiot tomb. In any event, this inscription plays no role in their computation.
3) They also agree with us that the baseline computation of the tomb should not assume that Mary Magdalene was a likely member of a hypothesized “Jesus family tomb.” They considered 32 possible tomb compositions, corresponding to the 32 different choices one can make on having the mother and four brothers in the tomb or not in the tomb. Mary Magdalene does not figure in any of these 32 tomb compositions.
4) Kilty and Elliott were not aware of the technical article that Jay and I posted on my web site here: http://ingermanson.com/jesus/art/tomb/HeIsNotHere.pdf Therefore, they based their discussion of our work on the informal “layman’s summary” that we posted on my site here: http://ingermanson.com/jesus/art/stats2.php (Kilty told me this via private email.)
5) Kilty and Elliott had not seen the technical article by Feuerverger at the time they published their article. (Neither had Jay Cost and I when we posted our articles in March, 2007.) Feuerverger’s article has been extremely restricted in its circulation, and this has hampered attempts to respond to his calculations. Therefore, both Kilty/Elliott in September, 2007, and Jay and I in March, 2007, responded to the simplified account of Feuerverger’s work that Jacobovici, et. al. showed on their web site, documentary, and book.
6) One point at which Jay Cost and I disagree with Kilty and Elliott is in their treatment of the Yoseh appellation. They maintain that Yoseh is a rare short form of Yehosef, and should be given more statistical weight. In our original computations, we treated Yoseh just like any other Yehosef. This is really an archaeological and linguistic issue, so I have discussed the point with a number of experts, including James Tabor and Stephen Pfann, (whom I thank for their comments). It seems to me that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and I have recently done a new series of calculations. The results will be published when it’s appropriate to do so. (See below for more on this.)
7) Another point at which Jay and I disagree with Kilty and Elliott is in our handling of the “negative evidence.” Kilty and Elliott make no attempt to factor in any counter-evidence. Jay and I explicitly factored in two issues we considered possibly important:
a) Jesus was somewhat less likely to have fathered a son than were other men of his time (based on the silence of sources about a wife and son). We leave it to historians to tell us how much less likely, but we provide a way for the historian to factor this in to our calculations. Kilty/Elliott provide none.
b) Jesus was somewhat less likely to have been buried in the Talpiot tomb than other men of his time (based on the arguments of Jodi Magness that if Jesus were reburied, it would likely be in a trench grave, not a rock-cut tomb). Again, we leave it to archaeologists to tell us how much less likely, but we provide a factor for this in our calculations. Kilty and Elliott don’t, and their article responded to only one of many points in Magness’ argument.
Comments on Feuerverger’s work:
I have recently read Andrey Feuerverger’s article. In keeping with his request for confidentiality, I will reveal no technical details here. However, I can say that Jacobovici’s presentation on his web site/book/documentary was extremely primitive and misleading. Feuerverger’s analysis is quite sophisticated and I like his methodology very much. His results depend very heavily on his assumptions, just as the results of Kilty/Elliott depend heavily on their assumptions, and the results Jay Cost and I found depend heavily on our assumptions. (It should be obvious that all calculations rest on their assumptions.)
I have recently refined my assumptions and have made a new series of calculations that capture my best understanding of the current scholarly consensus. These calculations will become public when Feuerverger’s article is published, because I have no desire to steal his thunder.
Comment by Randy Ingermanson — January 22, 2008 @ 12:12 am
[...] Gibson, Geza Vermes (see also here for another Vermes statement), Israel Knohl, André Lemaire, James Tabor, Chris Rollston, Jane Schaberg, and Rachel Hachlili; Stephen has also included his own statement in [...]
Pingback by biblicalia » Blog Archive » Biblical Studies Carnival XXVI — February 1, 2008 @ 2:00 am
[...] “Statistical: Even without any a priori inclusion of Mary Magdalene in a Jesus family tomb, just the names we have, based on Kilty’s calculations, endorsed by Fuchs, yields a .48 probability. This is far from random, in fact it means if we had two tombs to look at one of them would probably be the Jesus family tomb. Even one in ten would be interesting but .48 I find quite compelling, given the other evidence of history and epigraphy.” From James Tabor’s statement. [...]
Pingback by The View from Jerusalem » “Do you know the way the way to San Jose?” — February 4, 2008 @ 4:43 am