Claims swirl around ‘tomb of Jesus’ | csmonitor.com — A lot of this story is wishful thinking by everyone, especially the agnostic and atheist community who are, frankly, sick of the religiosity that surrounds and condemns them. Read this whole article, it seems very objective. The kicker to me is the assertion that 25-percent of all Jewish women at this time in history were named Mary. I guess John was a popular name for men. It’s the only name in the Bible that had two apostles by the same name — John and John the Baptist. It’s obviously a great name! But I digress. Read this instead.

What really pushed him along, he says, was determining that one of the Marys represented Mary Magdalene (the other, they posit, is the mother of Jesus). It is the only inscription written in Greek, as “Mariamene.” Jacobovici says that a Harvard professor, François Bovon, has determined from a 4th- or 5th-century text, the “Acts of Phillip,” that Mariamene is the name for Mary Magdalene. “Mariamene provided the linchpin, so the second Mary fell into place,” Jacobovici says.

The other evidence presented? DNA tests, which determined that the residues in the Jesus and Mariamene ossuaries showed that the two individuals were not related by blood, leading him to deduce they were married. Then Jacobovici commissioned a statistical analysis by an expert at the University of Toronto, who calculated the probability of this combination of names appearing on ossuaries in the same crypt at 600 to 1.

The deal killer for me might be this:

Professor Kloner himself remains unconvinced. “It makes a great story for TV, but … it’s nonsense,” he told the Jerusalem Post this week. “There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb. They were a Galilee family with no Jerusalem ties. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century.”

He also says that the name, “Jesus son of Joseph,” has appeared on at least three or four ossuaries. Others insist that neither Jesus’ followers nor his family would have thought of Jesus as the son of Joseph and used that inscription.

Usually guys like Kloner have seen so much of this they tend to have a handle on it. Especially when compared to some guys from Hollywood. That said it will still jack up the fundamentalists who will see this as an attack and instead of being reasonable will go nuts. Perhaps that is the real goal here. What fun!