I’m pretty sure they didn’t have ‘burial arrangements’ in those days. There were no funeral homes. You died, people wrapped you up and stuck you in a local cave.
Christian apologists are armed with a plethora of explanations. I doubt that such proof would shake the faithful.
Maybe he rose, then went back to the tomb later so he could be found in the 21st Century. Maybe his body rose, but his spirit stayed behind. When his “rising” stunt was done, they swapped places, and his spirit is in heaven. Maybe his body was returned to the tomb just to test the faith of believers.
I’m sure there are many more. In any case, it wouldn’t matter much. I once had a discussion with a friend of mine who called himself a Christian, but wasn’t bothered by the fact that many things in the bible might not be true. He said it didn’t change the basic tenet of his faith, which had developed over the centuries and didn’t depend on the bible for support any more. He felt that church attendance would not change even if the bible were conclusively proven to be a forgery by the devil.
Such is the unshakable nature of some beliefs. They are not based on fact, but fantasy.
No, they are held by people who understand that the history of the Bible and its writing leads anyone sensible to comprehend that it’s not a document that can be taken literally and that that means little to the practice of faith.
I grew up Catholic and nobody ever tried to teach me the Bible was a literal work. It appears to be a relatively recent innovation that some people have decided to proclaim they are literalists. Of course, as soon as you hold them up to any examination, their claims are shown to be nothing other than hot air, since they do not ‘literally follow every word of the Bible’. If they did, they’d be shunning menstruating women and shellfish and stoning their disobedient children to death.
I meant the question of “what are the odds” as a GQ type question. I have no idea what they are, and hence I asked. But I do assume people were a good bit less populous than they are today, so I have to wonder whether the argument that “it’s a common name” is a very good one.
Things like doing DNA testing, taking fingerprints, or looking at mugshots is simply a matter of determining what the odds are that this is your guy. Almost no data is 100% incontrovertible. It can just have odds higher or lower than needed to make it infeasible for it to be anyone else.
Are you genuinely interested in the answer?
If you are, please start another thread - this would be a hijack of this one.
In point of fact, there is no good evidence that there were any contemporary rumors of an empty tomb at all. The empty tomb does not appear in any Christian literature until at least 40 years after the crucifixion and there was no traditional site for the tomb until Constantine’s mother “rediscovered” it in the 4th century. The empty tomb story is very likely a Markan invention, especially since the bodies of crucifixion victims were virtually never given over for proper burials. It’s far more likely that Jesus body was either left on the cross to rot or buried in a communal criminal’s grave (generally a lime pit). The whereabouts of his remains were probably unknown to any of his followers even if some of them may have had some kind of visionary experiences or “appearances” after his death. The first claim of physical resurrection of his body is not found until the Gospel of Matthew, some 50 years after the crucifixion. There is actually no direct evidence that any of the disciples ever claimed to have witnessed a physically resurrected Jesus. We have no first hand testimony from any of them and Paul claims only that Jesus had "appeared’ to them (in a different chronology from any of the Gospels), but he does not describe the nature of these appearances, does not mention a tomb and makes no distinction between the the appearances to the disciples and the appearances to himself. Moreover, he claims to have gotten all his information about this directly from Jesus and “not from any man.”
In short, anyone who wants to argue the absence of contemporary Roman or Jewish denials of the resurrection first needs to prove that anyone was claiming such a thing to begin with. I personally don’t believe they were. I believe, at most, that some of Jesus’ followers were only claiming to have had visions of him after the crucifxion (maybe months or years later). Paul at least gives us at least secondary evidence for that. We have nothing at all for an empty tomb tradition before Mark’s Gospel (written by someone who probably never met a disciple).
Problem with this: this mysterious tomb was found in Talpiyot, well south of the city. The tomb where Jesus was interred was in the Northwest corner of the city, inside the city walls. It was one of the caves carved out of Golgotha, a large rocky hill. The entire Golgotha area was largely leveled by Emperor Hadrian in the second century to make way for two temples – one to Jupiter, and one to Aphrodite. In the fourth century, these temples, in turn, were razed by Emperor Constantine, who also undertook a thourough excavation of the area, purportedly uncovering a tomb. He dug up the tomb (finding pieces of the ‘true cross’) and built a huge basilica there. It’s where the Holy Sepulcher Church is today.
If this recently uncovered tomb belonged to Jesus of Nazareth, then either a) he lived to a ripe old age, or b)his remains were moved several miles after his death and initial burial.
Middle class was wealthy. In Judea, you basically had (1) poor as dirt, (2) merchants and priests, and (3) Roman nobility.
But my point is that both those odds are irrelevant. There are not sufficient data to form any odds. All we know is that the names were the most common. We don’t know exactly how common. Plus, determining what people to count as the population is wide open to interpretation. Should we cound all the people in Judea? In Jerusalem only? In Palestine? In Nazareth? Bethlehem? All Semites? Who can say.
So if eighty percent of people in whatever population had those names, then it wouldn’t be remarkable to pick them out of a hat. Applying statiscial odds to this is reminiscent of creationists who argue that the emergence of the universe is too unlikely.
I think the tradition that the tomb was inside the city was started by Constantine’s mother several centuries after the Crucifixtion. I just flipped through the KJV and, while I might have missed something, all I saw regarding the tomb was that it was donated by a wealthy follower of Jesus, and that it had a big rock at the door. Nothing about its location, though his followers are able to visit it from Jeruselum, so its probably close to that city.
Umm…OK? I’m not sure what your point is.
In point of even more fact, what’s not “good” to you might well be “good” to me. 
Coupla things about that:
(1) Forty years was not a long time back then for an oral tradition to be carried. Other oral traditions had been carried for hundreds of years. There were techniques (like singing and signing) that made it easy to do, and
(2) The oral traditions did include references to the resurrection, which certainly implies an empty tomb.
The site of it doesn’t concern me. It’s empty, unless it was reused, so it doesn’t matter where it is.
Umm… Well, you said:
Wasn’t Jesus buried in a tomb donated by a wealthy follower located in Jeruselum though, at least according to the Bible?I answered that the middle class (which Kloner said the family was, and which Joseph of Arimathea was) was wealthy. So, in short, my point was to answer your question. 
Are you guys serious? Do you think it bothers a Mormon that modern acheology in the Americas contradicts just about everything they believe? Do you think it bothers them that not potsherd, not a stone, not a piece of wood, inscribed in “reformed Egyptian” has been found? That not one sign of the “Christian” civilization that allegedly involved a high civilization of millions of people from 34 CE to 500 CE, has been found?
Did you know that the Holy Shroud of Turin is STILL displayed by he Catholic Church, years after carbon 14 testing proved the cloth was produced a few hundred years ago?
IT WOULD NOT MAKE AN IOTA OF DIFFERENCE.
Think of Faith as a form of vaccine against logic and reason.
I don’t really have any vested interest in the issue, but I believe Constantine (or more accurately, his mother-in-law Eutropia) was correct.
In the early fourth century, there was a scism in the church. The two sides were led by gentlemen by the names of Eusebius and Athanasius. In 325, the emperor settled the matter by simply picking a side, and Eusebius ended up being excommunicated. A major prelate of Athanasius’ church, Makarios, headed up the excavation effort at Golgotha. Most telling for me is that when Makarios unearthed the tomb and immediately declared that it was Jesus’, Eusebius agreed with him. He wrote that the event was “contrary to all expectation.” That would be like Hillary suddenly declaring that there were WMDs after all.
Is there any indication in the tomb at all that this is the corpse of Jesus of Nazareth, said to be the Messiah, crucified by the Romans, c. 3 BCE-30 CE? Or is it just that the names themselves all fit?
Frankly, it’d be amazing if we found the bodies of anyone specifically named in the Bible at all, if they weren’t specifically marked and remembered as such. Add to this Dio’s comments on the unlikelihood of an executed criminal getting an honored burial, and the whole Mary Magdalene thing, and this just seems unlikely to me.
No, but people who could afford them did have tombs hewn out of rock in preparation for their own death, as may have been the case with Joseph of Arimathea.
The names don’t even fit perfectly, according to Kloner. They’re just “similar”.
Let me amend that, then. There is no evidence, period. 
There is no evidence for any oral tradition of an empty tomb and there is no mention of it in any pre-Markan Christian literature. Not only that, but it is unlikely in the extreme that the body of a crucified insurgent would have been given over for burial by the Romans.
We don’t actually know what the oral tradition included, but what little might be inferred from paul only suggests a tradition of 'appearances," not a physical resurrection. As a matter of fact, Paul actually denies that bodies can be physically resurrected and calls his followers “fools” for believing that they could. Paul claims that resurrection occurs in a “spiritual body,” not the physical one. The first real claim for a resurrected body is found in Matthew’s Gospel (c. 80 CE). No such claim is found in Mark, Q, Thomas or the Pauline corpus. What would constitute an indication that such a tradition existed orally before Matthew?
It wouldn’t imply anything about an empty tomb even if it could be shown that anyone believed in a physical resurrection in the first half century after the death of Jesus. It might imply an absence of remains in a criminal’s grave, but since the location of those remains would have been unknown to any of his followers (if there was even anything left of them), it wouldn’t have been anything that could have been verified…and it wouldn’t have been a tomb.
The point is, there should have been a known site of veneration from the earliest days if the empty tomb tradition stemmed from any known geographical location. Sometimes apologists try to argue that the earliest Christians wouldn’t have cared because the tomb was empty, so the location didn’t matter to them. I find that to be a fatuous argument. It would still be the site of (presumably) God’s greatest miracle. It would have been venerated. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher doesn’t hurt for vistors. If they didn’t care then, why do they care now?
Then assume they’re all equally common. If there’s all of 10 male names for everyone in the area, and 10 female, then there’s a one in ten chance that any person will have a certain name from their sex’s set.
If you know where all Jesus could potentially be buried, then probably the population of those towns added together would be sufficient.
So then it doesn’t hurt to do compute the odds, does it?
Except that I’m not applying any odds. I’m asking what odds those would be. And unlike evolution and whatnot, there isn’t any sort of thing like natural selection for people’s names. It largely is just a random pick out of a hat.
Indeed. I would be very doubtful that this is Jesus and his family. If it is though, it would probably be one of the more impressive historical finds of the last few centuries given the amount of effect the man has had on the world.