Anyway, I missed that documentary. What were your impressions?

I did see someone on televesion before the documentary making a case for the unlikelihood of there being more that one person whose relatives fit exactly that pattern of names. Two potential problems came to my mind:

1. It looks to me like the family relationships were inserted by the authors, and not spelled out on the artifact itself. So saying "what are the odds of there being a guy named Jesus with a mother and a wife both named Mary, a brother named this and a sister named that..." may have been intentionally self-serving if the artifact did not make it clear what the relationships actually were.

2. I read in a book by Lawrence Gardiner that Mary (or Miriam) was a title within the Essene system, and not necessarily a person's actual name - sort of like "son of David" was a title rather than literally true about who Jesus's father was (Gardiner has an interesting theory about the identity of Joseph of Arimathea, but that's another topic). If this is correct, the name/title "Mary" may have been an indication of affiliation with the Essenes rather than an actual given name. I seem to recall a surplus of Marys in the New Testament, to the point that one is even called "the other Mary". Now if (as Gardiner postulates) the Essenes used old testament names as titles, it might be possible that such name/titles would show up in other Essene communities or families - making the finding of such a cluster less remarkable.

That being said, it would be neat if they do find some connection, some actual evidence, even if it shakes our belief systems up a bit.

What I wanna know is, what kind of basshorns did Joshua use on the walls of Jericho? And did he use a Welti configuration, a circular array, or something else??

Duke