DCHindley

You could probably assign relative rating to different categories of data (relic, monument, primary document, secondary document, elapsed time from period referenced, distance between places of composition or discovery, etc). Still, that wouldn't be helpful settling a HJ/MJ debate. I am not sure how one could resolve relationship issues between sources/date/traditions. One to one relationships can go in either direction, and then there are cases where two points of data are related by means of a common influence. If one were to use proportions of evidence to total evidence, then you would run into incredible problems: who selects the evidence to use in comparison, on what criteria, and do we really fully know and can access everything that has been preserved to date. How do we know that fate has preserved a representative sample of everything going on in any one period of time and region?

I think the best we could do would be evaluating the relative likelihoods, rather than probability, of things.

DCH