Re: Jesus tomb found? religious implications
I didn't see the actual documentry, but I did see a discussion of it on CNN. One panalest raised the point that pious Christians would readily name their offsprings after Jesus, Mary, Matthew and so on...to such an extent that having one family with those names is not at all shocking.
I kind of buy that...even within the early history of Islam, it wouldn't be uncommon to find a Muhammad married to an Ayesha...where Muhammad had a cousin named Ali, who was married to a Fatima. Come to think of it...I may be able to ciite examples in my own family :)
Of course, the problem here is that Semetic names are pretty verbose. It would be Muhammad bin etc. to so many generations. I'm curious, didn't the jews have a similar name tradition? Was Mary's full name there? Another thing I don't know is how many generations of names did semetic names aggregate...was it just up to the father?
the likelihood of the exact same names with exact same relationships is a little tough, thoe names..no other names..same relationships.
and also that sort of reverence happens later..not in the same time so you are talking atleats one or two generations later, unless people changed their names right then.
I mean in muslim history, are we aware of any people with the names and relationships you have mentioned, a Muhammad son of abdullah and amina, married to a khadija, with a daughter named fatima. especially in early history. if someone had that name combo 2 centiries later than by carbon dating u would know that these are people from a different era.