Statistical analysis of an archeological find. (English) Zbl 1137.62092

Feuerverger, Andrey

Ann. Appl. Stat. 2, No. 1, 3-54 (2008).

Summary: In 1980, a burial tomb was unearthed in Jerusalem containing ossuaries (limestone coffins) bearing such inscriptions as Yeshua son of Yehosef, Marya, Yoseh-names which match those of New Testament (NT) figures, but were otherwise in common use. This paper discusses certain statistical aspects of authenticating or repudiating links between this find and the NT family. The available data are laid out, and we examine the distribution of names (onomasticon) of the era. An approach is proposed for measuring the “surprisingness” of the observed outcome relative to a “hypothesis” that the tombsite belonged to the NT family. On the basis of a particular-but far from uncontested-set of assumptions, our measure of “surprisingness” is significantly high.

MSC:

62P25	Applications of statistics to social sciences
91F10	History, political science

Keywords:

Jesus of Nazareth; distribution of names; onomasticon; statistical inference; conditioning; coincidence; relevance; rareness and surprisingness; tail areas; historical assumptions; a priori; hypotheses; post hoc inference

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