Your faith rests in a football stadium?
Be warned. Your next apologetical defense of Christianity may have to come in the form of counting the number of people standing in a football stadium.
On March 4th, The Discovery Channel will air ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’. The documentary is on the 1980 discovery of a tomb in Jerusalem. The ossuaries in the tomb had several names inscribed: Jesus, son of Joseph, two Marys, another Joseph, Matthew and Judah. The documentary is supposed to investigate the possibility of this being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course, this is nothing new. The connection was made upon the tomb's discovery over 25 years ago. What is new, according to the documentary, is DNA testing, which will be used to hypothesize the connection between the people in the tomb.
Noted talk show host Larry King invited several interested parties to discuss this on his show (view the transcript). It is quite an interview as secular scholars, journalists and theologians go head to head on the issue.
Thankfully, King called on respected evangelical Al Mohler to represent Protestant Christianity. In an exchange, Mohler and James Tabor—a professor of religion—discuss the statistical probability of more than one Jesus having the same familial names as Jesus of Nazareth:
TABOR: You know, I will tell you, Dr. Mohler, if you had a football stadium with 50,000 people and you had all of the Jesuses stand up, it would be 3,000. So that's somewhat common. If you said, how many of you had a mother named Mary? It would go down to 397. If you said, how many have a father named Joseph? It would go down again. And then if you say, a brother named James or Simon, it gets down to one person with just four questions ... But do you think there would more than one Jesus left standing after four questions would be the question. I don't think there would be, because from what I have been told by the stats, that's the math. A father, mother and a brother is going to take you down to a single person.
[Curiously, as Mohler points out, Tabor has written an entire book arguing that Joseph was not Jesus' father.]
Mohler, among others, believes this is all sensationalism based on pseudo-science, revisionist history and unfounded statistical analysis. Still, it's worth following the science and statistics of this debate because it is an issue on which Christianity stands or falls (1 Cor 15). Further, it's good to have an answer if people start asking, “How many Jesuses are in your stadium?”
[P.S. Historical Jesus scholar Ben Witherington has a good summary of the scientific and statistic problems on this issue.]