Jesus Family Tomb

By now you have probably heard about the (no doubt soon-to-be-proved-ridiculous) claim that the tomb of Jesus and his family has been found. This claim is made by the same team that made the ludicrous documentary about the Exodus that recently had some air time. I think one of the team is the film director who made the super-hit "Titanic."

In any event, Mark Goodacre has links to several blogs and sites that deal with this allegation and if the publicity intrigues you, you probably want to check it out.

UPDATE:
Here's another good roundup of discussions on the tomb.

And this is quite interesting. James Davila over at Paleojudaica has some information from Richard Bauckham on statistical data about first century Jewish names and other interpretive issues about the tomb inscriptions, including this tidbit.

We have a data base of about 3000 named persons (2625 men, 328 women). Of the 2625 men, the name Joseph was borne by 218 or 8.3%. (It is the second most popular Jewish male name, after Simon/Simeon.) The name Judah was borne by 164 or 6.2%. The name Jesus was borne by 99 or 3.4%. The name Matthew was borne 62 or 2.4 %. Of the 328 named women (women’s names were much less often recorded than men’s), a staggering 70 or 21.4% were called Mary (Mariam, Maria, Mariame, Mariamme).

Just scroll down until you get to the UPDATE remarks.