I mean the point between those.
signed,
Zeno 
Bravo!
I know that. Any aleph-null-tesimal moment before 1 Jan 1 CE 00:00:00 is by definition Before the Common Era.
BTW: “Zeno”? I don’t get it.
You keep missing the point. “Zero” can be considered to be the point of origin of a time line or other sequence. It’s irrelevant what time interval you use, no matter how small.
No wonder. If you had, you would understand the problem a bit more. Zeno’s paradoxes relate to the question of whether space and time are infinitely divisible.
/hijack
If they had computers, in 1 BCE, would there have been widespread panic ala T2K?
/endhijack
I’m not missing the point. The year counter is a one-based index; it has no zero.
By way of example, when was the last time anybody here used the word “zeroeth”?
Who says?
The person with the most to gain form this story is Dr. James Tabor, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago in the area of Biblical studies, with an emphasis on Christian origins and ancient Judaism.
He probably knows more about the Dead Sea Scrolls than any but 10ish people (to pull a number out my a$$) on earth. IOW he is a “real” scholar with an unorthodox view of the Jesus story – with “real” credentails to back those unorthodox views
His blog answers some of these questions.
From link
-----------QUOTE--------
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The name “Jesus” was a popular name in the first century, appearing in 98 other tombs and on 21 other ossuaries**
I guess it depends on what one means by popular. Based on Tal Ilan’s comprehensive survey of forms of the name “Joshua” (Yeshua/Jesus) from 330 BCE to 200 CE in both literary and inscriptional sources we get 103 examples or a 1 in 17.9 ratio compared to all male Jewish names known. As far as ossuaries go, however, the only one that has come from a provenanced tomb with the name “Jesus son of Joseph” is the Talpiot tomb. But the real issue is not the “popularity” of an individual name, but the probability of this cluster of names occuring in a single small family tomb with ten ossuaries, and further, to what degree these names, in the forms we have them, fit or don’t fit what we know historically of Jesus and his family.
<snip>
My statistical consultant gave me a very simple analogy: Imagine a football stadium filled with 50,000 people—men, women, and children. This is an average estimate of the population of ancient Jerusalem in the time of Jesus. If we ask all the males named Jesus to stand, based on the frequency of that name, we would expect 2,796 to rise. If we then ask all those with a father named Joseph to remain standing there would only be 351 left. If we further reduce this group by asking only those with a mother named Mary to remain standing we would get down to only 173. If we then ask only those of this group with a brother named Joseph only 23 are left. And finally, only of these the ones with a brother named James, there’s less than a 3/4 chance that even 1 person remains standing. Prof. Andre Feuerverger, of the University of Toronto, a highly regarded senior scholar in the field did the formal statistics for the Discovery project. His figure of probability came out to 1/600. His paper will be published in a peer-reviewed journal and parts of it are available on the Discovery Web site.
Dionysis Exigus, as I recall.
Irrelevant. Years are still counted from an origin point (not year, point), which can be considered to be zero.
I havent seen the “peer reviewed paper” on the statistics but the bare bones can be seen at http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/tomb/explore/media/tomb_evidence.pdf . IANA statistician but I feel the so called statistics look rubbish. What he did was to take the names in the tomb and multiply by the odds that that name appears to get a figure of say 1/600,000 that a family existed withat combination of names. He then took the number of supposed family tombs of that period (oh say 1000) divided one by the other to get a figure of 600 to 1 that it must be the right tomb.
Where do I start?
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He multipled non-independent probabilities. Namely “jesus son of Joseph” (1 in 190 and “Joseph” (1/20). Well if if a “Jesus son of Joseph” (1/190) is in a family tomb then Joseph would also be in there (1/1 probability).
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There were supposibly two Marys in the tomb (Mum and wife) but spelled differently (one was a very uncommon version). He used the probabillity of the uncommon version (1/160) as well as the common one (1/4). But if one was to take as evidence of being jesus’s tomb any spelling of Mary, then he should have used 1/4 for both.
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Where were Jesus’s brothers and sisters mentioned in the bible?
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The division by the number of tombs is nonsense and does not yield a useful number. The most important number is the number of families in Jerusalem at that time. Let us say that our revised probabilities give me a figure of 1/190 x 1/4 x 1/4 = 1/3000. If there were 9,000 families in Jerusalem then the odds that that is Jesus tomb is 1/3. If there were 90,000 families then the figure is 1/30.
I would be interested for any real statistician to look at it
Matthew 13:55-56
Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things?
Mark 6:3
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?” And they took offense at Him.
Yeah, but Mark 0:0 invalidates all of this.
Very relevant. Our year numbering system is year 2 before, year 1 before, year 1 of, year 2 of. There exists no zero point; there is no point between “Before X” and “Of X.”
sorry I was unclear. What I meant to say was “Where in the tomb is Jesus’s brothers and sisters who are mentioned in the bible and so should be in the tomb as well”
I just want to highlight this point for more learned people to comment on. He seems to be using pure statistics to put the probability that a man named Joseph would have a son named Joseph at ~.133. Now, off the top of my head, I can’t recall anybody from the OT having the same name as his father. However, given the relatively small pool of names (that have been implied thus far), I’d have to think that more than 13% of fathers of that time named one of their sons after themselves. Can any scholars comment on how prevalent “juniors” were at that time in that culture?
Apparently, this tomb contains a father of Jesus named Joseph and also a brother named Joseph. Of course, that latter is completely irrelevant, since the only Joseph said to be related to the Biblical Jesus was dad. But even if the Bible did say that Jesus had a brother Joe, it’s still not an independant probability, since then as now, many boys were named after their fathers.
The measuring of years since the birth of Christ was started before the invention of the the concept of zero. Therefore, the AD/BC system has no zero in it. It is an expression of an alternate mathematical language, in which 1 follows immediately after -1.
But here’s the problem. There is no evidence whatsoever that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus. None. A couple of wild hypothesis and a popular fiction book is it. So assuming that the second Mary is Jesus’s wife is a HUGE stretch.
Nor does the evidence from the tomb say that the Matthew is the brother of that Yeshua, or that the Jospeh is the father or any relation at all. It does give the name of Jesus son of Joseph, and a Judah son of Jesus, but the tomb does not in any way indicate that the Joseph in the tomb is the father referred to or that THAT Jesus is the father of the Judah thus interred. Sure, we can guess a familial relationship as they are all in the same tomb. Nor is Matthew one of the known names of a brother of Jesus, in fact, Jesus’s brothers are named “James and Joses and Judas and Simon” and thus, it is very unlikely there was another brother named Matthew.
So, the computation is bogus. He blithely makes the assumption there is an unknown Brother named Matthew, and the Jesus was married to Mary. So,when he throws those bogus assumptions into the math, of course the numbers look good. Now, he does eliminate Matthew in a later compuation (“not “explicatively” mentioned in the Gospels” :rolleyes: ) , but still there is no reason to assume the “other Mary” is Mary Magdalene. Nor is there anything, anywhere, even in myth for a Judah son of Jesus. :dubious:
So really, the only evidence is that it’s **a **Jesus son of Joseph- related in some way to a Mary.
Nor is there a body for the Jesus there. So, even if it was a tomb, it could be an empty tomb. Perhaps the empty tomb of Jesus was preserved and his relatives buried nearby. Unlikely, sure.
Well, my knee jerk reaction to why he would be buried with his family in Jerusalem is easy.
One goes where the jobs are. If you are not a farmer, that means you are free to wander off to the big city. As to why he would be called Joseph of Nazareth? Well, in a street of carpenters if you want to find a particular Joseph, who happened to be from Nazareth instead of Caesarea, you would ask around for Joseph of Nazareth, not Joseph of Caesarea.
I would think that Joseph, having moved to Jerusalem would have taken his family along to live with him, also neatly enforcing the apocryphal tale of Jesus talking with the temple priests. He was a neighborhood kid.