The Apostles and Brothers of Jesus

Excerpt: The Talpiot tomb, a tomb excavated outside Jerusalem in 1980 and brought to worldwide public attention in 2007, contained ten ossuaries, six of which were inscribed with names. The English equivalents of the names are Jesus son of Joseph, two Marys, a rare diminutive form of Joseph, a diminutive of Matthew, and a Judah son of Jesus. Because of the similarities between this collection of names and certain names appearing in the Christian New Testament, some are curious as to whether the Talpiot tomb may have once interred the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and some of his relatives. A number of statisticians have weighed in on the issue, and come to drastically different conclusions, admittedly based on different assumptions.1 The diversity of conclusions is at least in part due to the difficulty of modeling the problem for the purpose of statistical analysis.

Here we will consider a question of identity among certain persons in the New Testament that lends itself to a much more straightforward probabilistic analysis.