But Yose actually only appears three times in the Lexicon of Jewish Names. One thing you could argue, and I'm not saying I would argue it but I might work with it if I was asked to, is that it's a rather appropriate version of a name for one of the brothers of Jesus. If you look in the New Testament - one of the gospels names the brothers of Jesus, and that particular brother is named Yose - obviously a translation for some greek version of his hebrew name. The uncommonness of the name drives to some extent the sharpness of some of the numbers that we're actually seeing.

Then what you can try to do, and it may require approximations, you have to try to list all the possible things that oculd have happened and in each case assess how surprising it is - and then take all of those that are at least as surprising as what you've got, and then just add up all of their probabilities together to get a kind of a p value.

This p value basically speaks to one thing—it speaks to the likelihood that there would have been another family alive at that time whose tomb this could reasonably have been; whose cluster of names was such that this could have been their tomb.

In doing the math you have to take into account that there were more than one tomb that has been looked into. I think at least 100 tombs have been looked into. So we're seeing the best of 100 observations, and there are at least 1000 tomb sites that are actually known to be in existence, and there may in fact be more of them—I've been told that there could be as many as 2,000 tomb sites all together. So we have to factor in the fact that what we've seen is possibly the best observation out of 1000 or 2000.

Depending on how you do the calculation you're going to get some range of numbers, and every statistician will have a different range of numbers. And you're going to get numbers on the order of 1 in 100 to perhaps as much as 1 in 1000 - that being the odds against there being another family with that particular combination of names.

We're also taking into account the fact that many families could not possibly afford ossuarial burials - that was an expensive proposition. There are some quite good estimates out there on what the population of Israel was during that time, as well as good estimates on what the birth and death rates were. So one can estimate how many people died during the entire era in question. All of those things need to factor in to the statistical calculation.

It's not a secret that these assumptions are contestable. I tried to stay with things that vaguely seemed reasonable to me, but I'm not a biblical scholar - at the end of the day I went with specific assumptions and I try to make clear what those assumptions were. I've been clear with you that the extraordinariness of the Mariemene e Mara inscription gets factored into the calculation as a very rare name - other people might say this is not like this.

Truthfully, I think that the cluster of names is a very interesting one. It's somehow apt, there are a number of names in that cluster and each time you add names to a cluster it alters the probability values, so six names is not a bad number to work with. It is an impressive collection. It might have made life easier all around if the probability numbers came in much much lower than 1 in 100 or if it came in much higher than 1 in 1000. As with many of these things, one needs to say that further study is warranted. So biblical scholars will have to think carefully in order to vet the assumptions that are reasonable to a calculation of this nature.

I did permit the number one in 600 to be used in the film. I'm prepared to stand behind that but on the understanding that these numbers were calculated based on assumptions that I was asked to use. These assumptions don't seem unreasonable to me but I have to remember that I'm not a biblical scholar.

At the end of the day, what does one in 600 mean? That number is saying that amongst those people who could afford ossuarial burials, the odds that there being another family that appeared in an ossuary that was like that or even more convincing than that, the odds against that are in that order, one in 100, one in 600 or one in 1000, depending on what you allow in your assumptions.