Ingermanson on Statistics March 27

Randy Ingermanson has revisited the issue of statistics with all the variables in place. It can be found at:

http://www.ingermanson.com/jesus/art/stats2.php

The key portion of the five options treated is posted below:

____________

Results

The technical article associated with this page shows how to put everything together into a final answer. There are a number of unknown parameters that go into this, but once you specify each of these, our equation uses Bayes’ Theorem to combine the numbers into an ESTIMATE of the probability that the Jesus of the tomb is Jesus of Nazareth.

Randy Ingermanson has revisited the issue of statistics with all the variables in place. It can be found at:

http://www.ingermanson.com/jesus/art/stats2.php

The key portion of the five options treated is posted below:

____________

Results

Here is a list of the unknown parameters that you need to supply in order to get an answer:

* N: The number of people living in Jerusalem. Most historians would guess between 30,000 and 80,000 for this number.
* g: The number of complete generations who lived and died during the time ossuaries were used. Since ossuaries were only used for about 90 years, this number should be between 1 and 3. (Considering that a generation is born, lives, and dies in somewhat less than 70 years.)
* Whose name frequencies will we use: Rachel Hachlili’s or Tal Ilan’s?
* F1: The relative probability that Jesus of Nazareth had a child, as compared to other men of his generation. This fuzzy factor should be between 0 and 1.
* F2: The relative probability that Jesus of Nazareth might have been buried in a tomb near Talpiot, as compared to other men of his generation. This fuzzy factor should be between 0 and 1.
* F3: The number of "extra Josephs" that you would expect in a randomly chosen tomb that contains a man named "Jesus son of Joseph". This fuzzy factor should be between 0 and 2.

That’s all! Make those six choices and everything else in our equations is determined. If you would like to run the calculations yourself, go right ahead and download the spreadsheet. You’ll find six purple cells near the top of the page. Change the values in those cells and you’ll see a graph of the results, plotted versus the number of bodies in the tomb. (Remember, the archaeologists estimated that there were between 10 and 35 bodies in the tomb.)

We’ll show some sample cases here that cover the gamut fairly well.

Case 1: A "Typical" Historian

We’re not sure what a "typical historian" might be, or even if such a creature exists. But we chose numbers that we thought would be fairly non-controversial:
# N = 50,000: (People in Jerusalem.)
# g = 2: (The number of generations.)
# Tal Ilan’s name frequencies.
# F1 = 1%: (The relative probability that Jesus of Nazareth had a child.)
# F2 = 50%: (The relative probability that Jesus of Nazareth might have been buried in a tomb near Talpiot.)
# F3 = 1: (The number of "extra Josephs" in a tomb with a "Jesus son of Joseph".)