A few months ago I published a blog post about an anonymous evangelical Christian author who went by the pseudonym “Servetus the Evangelist” who had self-published a new and challenging biblical study on the Trinity titled: The Restitution of Jesus Christ. The original plan was that the author, a well known evangelical, would reveal his identity on the 500th anniversary of Michael Servetus’s birth, but in the meantime, as a kind of playful contest, would release weekly clues as to his identity and invite readers to make guesses.

Recently “Servetus” has announced a change of mind. He promises to reveal his identity this coming Thursday, on November 19th. The following announcement has appeared on his Website:

ANNOUNCEMENT!!! October 18, 2009
I have decided to end this contest and reveal my identity as the author of The Restitution of Jesus Christ on November 19, 2009, almost two years earlier than planned. I will tell on this webpage who I am. And I will tell about the interesting development that has caused me to change these plans. It is something totally unexpected and that I could not have foreseen. Yet I am very excited about it.

Stay tuned, we don’t have long to wait…

I have a new “Op-Ed” piece just posted at the Web site Bible & Interpretation. If you don’t know the site you might spend some profitable time exploring its many features and thick archives, drawing in a “Who’s Who” from the world of Biblical Studies and Archaeology.

My essay deals with the thorny question of whether or not the description of the “Last Days of Jesus” (scholars call this the “Passion Narrative) in the Gospel of John is dependent or independent of Mark, our earliest Gospel. And further, if John is independent, as I argue, does it rest upon sources that might in fact be more primitive, and potentially more reliable, for getting at the “historical Jesus.” You can read the entire essay here:

“The Gospel of Mark: Priority Does not Mean Primacy“

It has been my observation that so much that has been written about the tomb found in 1980 in East Talpiot south of the Old City of Jerusalem, the so-called “Jesus tomb,” has been heavy laden with emotion, presuppositions, and agendas both hidden and more obvious. Accordingly, it was refreshing to read the enlightening essay by Jerry Lutgen, “The Talpiot Tomb: What are the Odds?”  recently posted on the Web site “Bible Interpretation.” You can read it in full here:

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/tomb357926.shtml

Mr. Lutgen’s point might be taken to be an obvious one, mainly that presuppositions heavily influence the work of even the most sober and scientifically oriented statisticians but I found his treatment clear and helpful in sorting through the complex maze of mathematics related to the cluster of names on the ossuaries from the Talpiot tomb. He takes for his comparisons the papers of three statistical studies by Andrey Feuerverger, Randall Ingermanson, and Kevin Kilty & Mark Elliot, and tries to get at the heart of the matter of what drives the numbers, and thus affects the outcomes or conclusions on probability.

Lutgen’s work supports a position I have advocated for quite some time regarding the application of statistical methods to the Talpiot tomb.

I do not think it is possible to construct any meaningful statistical model that will tell us whether this tomb, or any other, might be the hypothetical Jesus of Nazareth family tomb. There are simply too many variables and no one could account for them all, or even anticipate them. Who would be in such a tomb? Where would it be located? How large would it be (inner family only or wider circles)? Would ossuaries likely be plain or decorated? Would inscriptions be Aramaic or Greek or both? And so on and on it goes. The point is we can neither know nor accurately imagine any of these things? The list of potentially factored variables could be infinite.

The function of statistics with regard to onomastics is to establish simple probabilities. That is, what is the likelihood that this particular cluster of names (taken either in generic form, e.g. Yehoshua/Mariam/Yehosef or nickname form Yeshua/Maria/Mariamene/Yose) might occur more than once? That is it. In my own work I have preferred to be conservative and use generic forms of the names in the Talpiot tomb, forms that are then much less rare than those we actually have. But the calculations are firm and the method is sound.

For example, if we had a tomb with the four most common male and female names: Joseph, Judah, Mary, and Salome, with no patrynomic tags, we might have hundreds of tombs with such a cluster based on standard name frequency data for 2nd Temple Palestinian Judaism. These data hold up quite well for ossuaries as well as other onomastic data (literary, inscripitions) taken as a whole (Rahmani compared with say Tal Ilan, or Hachlili).

In the case of the Talpiot names, the data show that this cluster, in these relationships, would not occur more than once, even in a high estimate of Jerusalem population over several decades/ generations. Such a conclusions does not establish mathematically the probability that this is the Jesus of Nazareth family tomb. It has to do with the rarity of the cluster. In other words, it is a response to the oft repeated claim–”oh, the names are common,” with the implications that any number of tombs of the period might contain this same configuration of names. This is the approach that Fuchs used in accessing how common it would have been to have a “James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The probabilities can be worked out with precision and the data on frequency of name distributions is sound and reliable. Essentially, this is what Feuerverger’s work on probability involves, though he did factor in various caveats in order to be as conservative as possible in his calculations. This is the Ockham’s razor of probability theory.

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 upon an infinitely variable prediction of possibilities and expectations, many of which are historically disputable, that are impossible to gauge in a quantifiable way. I surely do not want to discount these efforts and I have welcomed all of these studies, but in terms of method and task, the two approaches are “apples” and “oranges.” I wonder if we will be any nearer to saying anything mathematically about the names in this tomb fitting, or not fitting, an imagined tomb of Jesus of Nazareth than we are at present. As I see it, the identification task has not to do with mathematics or probability, but with proposopography, the kind of thing that Rollston and Bauckham have begun to explore. If one can show that these names either fit, or do not fit, what we as historians might posit as a hypothetical “Jesus family tomb,” then we have something to discuss. Thus our tasks when it comes to the names are: epigraphy, statistics, and finally, history or prosopography. I have published my own attempt at that task in the periodical Near Eastern Archaeology 69:3-4 (2006):132-136, which can be downloaded in PDF format here: TalpiotNEA-Tabor