It seems that Professor Lemaire has been fudging his facts a bit in order to make his case.
[ul][quote] …Jews practiced ossuary burials only between 20 B.C. and A.D. 70…
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This is apparently not true.
First, if the Jews really did practice ossuary burial only during that very limited 90-year time frame, time and the process of attrition being what they are, I wouldn’t expect there to be “thousands” or even “a large number” of ossuaries left after two millennia–I’d expect more like “dozens” or “a few”.
Second, in fact, the Jews apparently did NOT practice ossuary burial only during that very limited 90-year time frame–they evidently practiced ossuary burial throughout the Second Temple Period, and the Second Temple Period stretched considerably longer than 90 years, depending on which archaeologist you talk to.
And here’s where you can read Lemaire’s own complete writeup, if you wanna order it for $4.50. You’ll note the slightly biased reporting. We’re not talking “scientific reporting” on the order of the New England Journal of Medicine here. The editor, Hershel Shanks, speaks: http://www.bib-arch.org/bswb_BAR/bswbbar2806f1.html
No, it’s not unusual–see below. Anyway…
So, the box itself is authentic, and the cursive writing may be authentic–but all this proves is that somebody wrote those names on that box in the first century A.D.
So, first of all, it apparently wasn’t unusual to have more than one name inscribed on the ossuary, and second, the fact that there’s “only one other known example” of having the father and brother’s names on the ossuary in Aramaic doesn’t prove anything–it’s probably just a statistical burp.
***He gives it this date apparently because Josephus said so. :rolleyes:
***Isn’t there a Latin term for this, meaning something like, “You’ve already made up your mind what your conclusion is going to be, so you reason backwards from that?” He’s saying that Josephus says that James died in 62 A.D., so therefore, since the bones must belong to that “James”, they must have been put in the ossuary in 63 A.D.
He “estimates”? In other words, he’s just “guessing”? After 2,000 years, he’s going to “guess” how many people there might have been named “James” in 63 A.D. Jerusalem, and then he’s going to “guess” how many of them might have had fathers named Joseph and brothers named Joshua? And he’s not going to tell us upon what census data or other statistical information he’s basing his guesses–we’re just supposed to take his word for it?
And this is part of his “proof”?
Riiiiiight… :rolleyes:
Well, I’m going to guess that there were at least 154 girls named “Tiffany” in 63 A.D. Jerusalem.
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This brings up some questions for me. Who was the other known example? Would Jesus be considered “famous” around 60 A.D. or was he still relegated to a leader of a small Judaic cult that was executed 30 years prior? The NT Jesus could not have conducted the burial but could he have owned the tomb?
There are some scholars who already seriously doubt the authenticity (from the cite)
I think most scholarship already accepted that Jesus was a real historical figure (with some exceptions as JThunder noted). That’s a long, long way from saying he was GOD.
All three names (Ja’akov, Yosef, Yeshua) were extrmely common in first century Palestine, I’m not sure I buy the “only 20” combinations theory. This conclusion is based on what formula? As mangetout pointed out, we would also expect to find a brother’s name if he paid for the funeral.
There is, frankly, no way to prove this thing one way or the other. Even if we were to find the bones of James or Jesus, how could we PROVE they were the bones of James or Jesus. And even if we can prove absolutely that they were real people, so what? Schliemann proved that Troy was a real place, does that also prove that all of the supernatural events in the Illiad were true?
This definition of “brother” is really not that mysterious. Brother meant brother, pure and simple. (The gospels also say that Jesus had at least three sisters BTW) The “cousin” interpretation is really just a forced attempt to reconcile the gospels with the Catholic church’s (non-Biblical) doctrine of perpetual virginity. Also, notice that James’ “father” on the inscription has the same name as Jesus’ father. Coincidence?
The Tekton page cited by JT seems to have missed Alvar Ellegard, who also deserves JT’s “dabbler” label, and Robert Price(and his cohorts), who is an actual scholar. I’m not sure if Price would go so far as to deny that Jesus existed, but would probably say that we have no factual knowledge about his life.
I think this is a fascinating find and (if it holds up) will go a long way to confirming that the New Testament has much factual information about Jesus of Nazareth, a view that most scholars already hold.
Much of the story here reminds me of the apocryphal story told by a Heinlein character of the scholar who spent his entire live trying to prove that the Iliad was not written by Homer but by another Greek of the same name.
Polycarp: we’re on the same wavelength, apparently
—I’m not sure if Price would go so far as to deny that Jesus existed, but would probably say that we have no factual knowledge about his life.—
I think Price is more worth listening to than Wells, and his Jesus Agnosticism is a little more reasonable. His point is not “no Jesus” but rather that what we know of Jesus seems like such an amalgamation that it’s hard to piece together a real man behind the myth.
DDG, you’re being a little over the top. I mean, it’s not exactly a bad thing to use Josephus for reliable dating, though it does rest on the assumption that this is THE James… and the author seems to admit that straight out anyway.
Though I definately would like to know if brothers names were common on Hebrew or Greek ossuaries, just for my own edification.
A brillian post, <b>DDG</b>, but two tiny quibbles.
Your links suggest that the names of brothers, fathers and so forth are found <i>when they are buried in the same ossuary</i>. But the inscription in this case refers to a brother and a father <i>without</i> suggesting that they are buried in the same ossuary, and this may be what makes it unusual.
And I think your dismissal of Lemaire’s estimate of the number of James who would have had fathers called Joseph and brothers called Jesus is a little cavalier. The newspaper report doesn’t give the basis for the estimate, but Lemaire’s own paper may and, without having read that, we can’t really dismiss the estimate quite so scathingly.
But I agree; even assuming that the ossuary is genuine, it is not established - and probably cannot be established - that the James concerned is the James mentioned in the New Testament. And, even if it is, it tells us little or nothing about the validity of Christian faith.
Since you’re calling me…
Actually it would be a pretty good evidence if the thing were authentic. But it seems so unlikely that precisely this ossuary with this inscription would have survived until our times that I’m highly skeptical about its authenticity.We’ll see…(or perhaps we’ll never hear about it again).
By the way, if you remember correctly the debate we had, I do believe that some kind of Jesus did exist (though probably vastly different from the character depicted in the gospels). But I stated that the contrary (Jesus didn’t exist) was very arguable, since there is no independant (non-christian) evidences that he actually lived, and there are some alternative theories about how else this fictionnal character could have appeared (“humanization” of an originally mystical “angelos-christos”, stories deduced from the old testament by misdrah, totally different historical figure whose story and/or teachings have been entirely reformated later, for instance Jesus ben Sira or the essenian “Master of Justice”, etc…)
But since I don’t want to argue again about the meaning of the tiles of the floor in a house excavated somewhere around the Dead Sea, like we did the last time, I’m going to leave the topic at that.
As a matter of fact , it tells us nothing at all. I know perfectly well that Ron Hubbard actually existed, but I still don’t have any inclination to join the church of scientology.
Well, yes, I agree. The most that can be said is that it would tend to suggest that in relation to certain matters which are disputed, the New Testament may be more reliable than some have conceded. If this ossuary is genuine and if the people named on it are the people named in the New Testament (neither of which has been established) then it suggests that the New Testament is accurate in its statements that these people existed and that they bore certain relationships to one another, and this must make it somewhat more likely that it is accurate in relation to the existence of others, and their relationships, and (more contentiously) that it is more likely to be accurate in relation to other matters of fact also - e.g. the statements or teachings attributed to various people. And since, for some people, the factual accuracy of the bible is a matter of Christian faith, this would tend to support that particular aspect of Christian faith.
But even granting all of this, this ossuary tells us nothing about the truth or validity of the teachings set forth in the New Testament.
The main supporters of Josephus as a serious historian are the conservative Christians, who hail him as confirmation of Early Christianity’s validity (“A witness to Christianity!”). Historians mainly see him as, at best, someone who couldn’t resist embellishing his “history” to make it more exciting, and at worst, an Imperial toady and a poser. Hence my reluctance to accept him as a cite.
Oh yes I can. There is no way he can have any kind of scientific basis for making his estimate. There’s no census data from 1st century Jerusalem that would enable anybody at all to extract any kind of information about people’s names back then, other than the broad generalization, “James, Joseph, and Joshua were common names”.
There aren’t any numbers, there’s no data, and you can’t make scientific estimates without data. You can’t just arbitrarily say, “Well, I’m assuming that X percent of any given population will give their sons this particular name, and that they will have fathers and brothers with these other names”, without having some kind of scientific precedent or basis for it.
So he has NO way of knowing, so therefore “20 people named James would have had fathers named Joseph and brothers named Joshua” is a 100% pure IPTNOOMA* estimate.
It wouldn’t make any difference if we did read his whole paper, because all that will be there is more of the same–guesswork, called “estimates”. It all comes down to his opinion, with nothing at all to back it up.
And anyway, we do know that “James” was a fairly common name–and he’s saying that out of a population of at least 60,000, only 20 guys named “James” would have had a father named “Joseph” and a brother named “Joshua”?
I’m sitting here with the Decatur telephone book on my lap. Decatur has a population of about 85,000 which is just in between that 60,000 and 120,000 figure for Jerusalem.
Let’s look up some popular baby names.
Most popular boys’ names in 1970 (these are the boys who are 32 years old now, and who presumably have their names listed in the Decatur phone book):
Okay, now their fathers’ names. We’ll consider that their dads were all born in 1940, which would make them 30 when their sons were born.
**Okay, you wanna guess how many 30-year-old guys there are in the Decatur phone book who are named “John” who have brothers named “Mike” and fathers named “Jim”? Or how about guys named “Jamie” who have brothers named “Dave” and fathers named “Bob”?
(A) There are probably a lot more than 20.
(B) But, how would you even begin to estimate something like that?
(C) There’s absolutely no way of telling, not even of making a halfway serious estimate, without having some kind of actual census data in hand.
I thought the ossuary said that James’s father was Joseph, not YHWH!
::: grins, ducks, and runs :::
I think that UDS and DDG have the matter well in hand. I’ve seen some of Herschel Shanks’s “reasonable analyses” in BAR, and while he’s head and shoulders above, say, ICR, he does tend to bring a fair amount of preconceived conclusion to his arguments.
In particular UDS’s long sentence in his last post setting forth the number of IF’s that have to be resolved here seem to summarize the matter.
I’m inclined to allow at first conclusion that this is probably the James who was Jesus’s brother, who served as the first Bishop of Jerusalem, and of whom Josephus wrote. But only as a tentative presumption, being aware of the strong possibility that it was actually James the Tanner, son of Joseph the Tanner, brother of Jesus who led the revolt mentioned in passing in, IIRC, Mark, or some other Iakov bar Iosef whose brother Ieshua was worth noting (or perhaps who married Iakov’s widow to fulfill the Levirate rule and paid for his late brother’s ossuary, leading to his being named on it).
Here is where the “only 20 people” came from. Not saying its right, only this is where:
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Rachel Hachlili has studied names used at this time in all types of inscriptions. Joseph appeared in 14 percent, Jesus in 9 percent, and James/Jacob in 2 percent of the cases. …in Jerusalem during the two generations before 70 C.E., there were therefore about 20 people who could be called ‘Jacob son of Joseph brother of Jesus.’"
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Well, look, that’s just nuts. The “logic” doesn’t follow at all. I’m not quarreling with Hachlili’s statistics, as her study is all over the Web (Family Names and Nicknames of Jews in the Second Temple Period), but I do quarrel with the use that Hershel Shanks and Andre Lemaire have put her numbers to.
It’s crazy. It’s not a “therefore” at all.
It’s like Hershel Shanks is saying, “In Decatur, the name John appeared on 14% of tombstones, the name Michael on 9%, and the name Jim on 2%…and that therefore this means that in Decatur there were about 20 people named John who have brothers named Mike and fathers named Jim.” But that doesn’t follow at all. Those statistics don’t mean that–you can’t make that kind of deduction from those unrelated numbers.
Also, the ABC article is totally useless for the purposes of shedding any light on this thing. I mean, thanks, Jimmy, for finding it and posting it, but it’s gotta be some sort of prizewinner for “useless quotes elicited from Talking Head masquerading as news”, and they’ve got it under “Sci/Tech News”, God help us. :rolleyes:
“Bible Expert” Ben Witherington III is not an archaeologist, nor is he an expert on inscriptions of the Second Temple Period, nor on Jewish ossuaries. He is, as the title says, a “Bible expert”. He’s an expert in the Bible. He’s professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He’s also an author (20 books, mainly on the subject of “the historic Jesus”) and a columnist for Belief.net, and he does television presentations for A & E and the Discovery Channel. You can see why he’s the “go-to guy” for ABC on this–the ossuary meshes with the “historic Jesus” theme very nicely.
Since the inscription is in Aramaic, he can’t really address it, so he goes ahead and talks about Greek. And he also talks about James a lot, tells us ALL about James. But address the issue of whether the box is authentic, or a fake, or where’s it been all this time? Nah, he’s not qualified to talk about that. He’s here to talk about PROOF for the existence of Jesus.
<< sigh >>
This is why I go to CNN for all my serious news needs.
JThunder, I must commend you on the perseverance, if not the variety, of your attempts to convince everyone that Jesus was a historically factual figure, even if you have to use questionable techniques to do so and resort to strangely similar posts across threads, going as far as using the exact same nonsense link on which to base your argument.
We’ve been over this, in the thread you mentioned and that involved a half dozen of us discussing the evidence for Jesus. If I recall correctly there was not one item of evidence you brought up that Clairobscur, myself, or others didn’t invalidate fairly easily. The thread is here: Proof of Jesus?
Regarding the piece of dreck by J. P. Holding that you linked to again in your post here, you will recall I went through that and argued that it was as bad as it stinks. My objections to that propaganda rubbish are to be found on the second page of the thread, a bit more than two thirds of the way down.
In that thread I also went over the main fallacies of your argument as far as the “majority” and “authority” are concerned, something you keep referring to tirelessly.
In that thread I also covered Cecil’s answer to the question “did Jesus exist?” I explained why it doesn’t constitute a satisfactory reference when claiming historicity for Jesus, in spite of the attempts of a few people to use the “Cecil said so” argument (erroneously–Cecil did NOT say so). The material is all still there in the thread.
From my end, it’s starting to seem like you’re carrying out an agenda here.
Nonsense. The deduction is a perfectly sensible one, just so long as one doesn’t pretend that it is anything other than a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
The rarity or otherwise of the James/Jacob-Joseph-Jesus combination was always going to be one of the key questions. Any such discussion, whether by Shanks or his critics, would have got absolutely nowhere if it was just a matter of picking figures out of the air. Shanks has done what any archaeologist would have done when faced with the need to find harder statistics. I guessed that he had probably used the frequencies found on other inscriptions even before I read jimmmy’s post. It’s not a perfect method and the margin of error will be huge, but it is almost certainly the best way to try to quantify the problem.
Indeed, taken on its own terms, Shanks’s statistic is the strongest reason to doubt any connection with the Biblical Jesus. If there were (very roughly) 20 men who could have been called ‘Jacob son of Joseph brother of Jesus’, then the chances are that it is not the one we’re interested in.
Yes, Shanks has some statistics–but it’s what he’s done with them that’s wrong, wrong, wrong.
Don’t you see the point here? The percentage of certain names written on tombstones in Decatur has absolutely nothing to do with the percentage of those people who may have had siblings or parents named “whatever”. The two things aren’t connected at all. This is because you don’t even know what their siblings and parents were NAMED, in connection with the specific name on the tombstone. You do not have that data, that information, those numbers. You just have the statistics covering the single name on the tombstone, “James” 2% of the time, “Joshua” 9% of the time, and “Joseph” 14% of the time. This is what Rachel Hachlili’s study showed. This is the data that Shanks and Lemaire are using–the frequency of occurrence of certain male names in inscriptions from the Second Temple Period.
But you have no way of knowing what their siblings or parents were named, because the data for that simply doesn’t exist. And since you don’t have that data, you can’t extrapolate a guess as to how many of them might have had siblings or parents named whatever.
There are NO numbers concerning how many men on those Decatur tombstones named James also had brothers named Joshua, and there are NO numbers concerning how many men on those tombstones named James also had fathers named Joseph. So since these numbers do not exist, any estimates you make of how many men on the tombstones named James also had fathers named Joseph and brothers named Joshua is inevitably going to be an estimate that you have pulled out of your ass.
Ah, but Shanks and Lemaire HAVEN’T presented it modestly as a mere back-of-the-envelope calculation. No, they have announced it as a FACT, as a definite statistic calculation, and they’ve done this by throwing some numbers around and announcing confidently, “This is what these numbers mean.”
This is a common technique for people who aren’t interested in true scientific inquiry, and who are just out to prove their theory.
Abe linked above, so I guess I’m just piling on, but I wanted to observe that however offensive a believer might consider it to have the foundations of their belief questioned, it could not be more offensive than to have people blithely and dismissively refer to “proof” of the existence of the Jesus who is understood to have become Christ.
You talking to me? Hey, I’m a Christian, but I don’t need “proof” that Jesus existed as a Historical Personage in order to bolster my faith.
If there are Christians out there who have their feelings hurt by my blithely dismissing the ossuary as “not proven”, and by extension, that the existence of Jesus as a Historical Personage is still “not proven” in my opinion, then that’s too bad for them.
There is no way he can have any kind of scientific basis for making his estimate. There’s no census data from 1st century Jerusalem that would enable anybody at all to extract any kind of information about people’s names back then, other than the broad generalization, “James, Joseph, and Joshua were common names”.