This post contains Terry Traster’s 7/8/2026, response to my comments at Tabor’s Circle site. Along with his comments as pasted below he attached a PDF for the book (500+ pages) he references: Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity:
Palestine 330 BCE – 200 CE. That file named “Tal Ilan Lexicon.pdf” is in the Names in Antiquity directory in Dropbox. All emphasis below is mine.
Tom Davis – Tal Ilan [she] wrote the book on how many times names occur in all records from about 330 B.C. to 200 A.D. The total of male names is 2509. Of those 2509, Yeshua occurs 104 times, or about at a rate of 4%; Joseph occurs 9% of the time. The unicorn is Yoseh as written in Mark 6:3 and some copies of Acts for Joses Barsabbas. Joses/Yoseh is a nickname of Yosef. There are a few other nicknames like it, but only Yoseh from the Talpiot Tomb is an EXACT translation of Mark 6:3. Yoseh occurs at a rate of 0.04%
As popular as Yeshua & Yosef are, there is only 1 other ossuary that is Yeshua, son of Yosef.
All the statistics & numbers, put them aside & think of it like this: in all of the sources for 530 years, there is only 1 person named Yoseh in Hebrew or Aramaic. Mark translated this to Joses. If you locate the Yoseh from Mark 6:3, you locate the brother of Jesus. We have; it is the Talpiot Tomb.
Now add in this same tomb has a Yeshua, son of Yehosef; a Maria, the rare version of Mariam as it appears in the Gospels; and the unique spelling Mariamene, the form of Mary Magdalene as it appears in Hippolytus and Matthew, which is not common & I show was likely a brother of Yeshua but also appears in the genealogy of Jesus.
Now add the geochemistry of the James ossuary shows it was likely from the Talpiot Tomb.
No honest person could look at the data & conclude this was not the Jesus Family Tomb.
To be clear, I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus & consider myself a Christian AND I honestly conclude this is the Jesus Family Tomb.
I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions. I enjoy the interaction!
In a follow-up comment, he provided the link to a related article that cites Tal Ilan. That article is Yoseh/Yosey – Heavyweight Names at Talpiot by Eldad Keynan, Bar Ilan, Israel, October 2012.
Extracted third paragraph: One of the claims made by TT [Talpiot Tomb] detractors is that Yoseh is not rare at all and therefore not unusual. Another claim made by these same detractors is that Yoseh and Yosey are actually the same name and the variation in spelling is due merely to the differences between Hebrew and Aramaic, which are close cognates. It is these assertions by the detractors of the TT that I will address.The following article includes material from the lecture I delivered during the proceedings of the Princeton Theological Seminary symposium which focused upon the Talpiot Tomb. The symposium was held in Jerusalem in January of 2008 and the proceedings of the symposium will be published in the near future by Eerdmans Publishing House. I have added new insights and sources regarding this particular subject for this article.
