semiopen

Too bad there wasn't an order that believed in washing their underware.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Vinnie,

Yes, I think we've agreed, but it is always helpful to get different data to analyze. Whether we look at 1900 U.S. life expectancy, 18th century British life expectancy, 3rd world life expectancy, Ancient emperors' list, or American presidents list, we reach the same conclusion that Eusebius is most likely supplying false dates regarding the longevity of the apostles and the Bishop Polycarp.

Now, we can take this and add it to other problems with Eusebius' narrative:
1) fake letters exchanged between Jesus and King Abgar
2) highly likely interpolation of Jesus story into Josephus' Antiquities
3) Suspect Bishop lists
4) Fourth century Quartodeciman controversies regarding Easter and Passover celebrations transported into the Second century. See here
5)Fairy Tale accounts of Christian Martyrs who control wild beasts and can't be consumed by fire.

When we consider this, we enter into a crisis. It seems the only history of the early Church is untrustworthy. If Eusebius is not giving a trustworthy historical account, how do we go about creating one?

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

show_no_mercy

To be fair, the apocalyptic Daniel gave himself similar powers.

avi

Thank you Jay, do I err, or was not this story of surviving a catastrophic fire, first associated with Zoroaster?

rlogan

I do the damage estimates in lawsuits. Wrongful death, wrongful firing, etc - all of which rely on the life and work expectancy/mortality tables. I had to get a PhD in econometrics to do this, and what I did basically was take the actuary science MS program while I got my economics doctorate.

Forgive that but you are way off in left field and it isn't because I read it wrong.

I have a pretty simple question really - if you want to make statements about the ages at which people died then, why are you not seeking out the ages at which people died then?

There just isn't a good answer for this.

You'll note I have not derived any probablilites yet because what we do is search the peer-review literature first. Do you have access to academic literature? Through the library or university?


jakejonesiv provided some data that clearly puts these claims into the laughable category. We don't need to look at probability tables when not one in 50 emperors lived to age 80. youngalexander has some additional material putting Eusebius' claims into fairy-tale land.


If not one in fifty emperors lived to age 80, (0%) then "a few" out of 100 "followers" (3%) is pretty serious apologetics - but you are seriously cheating to begin with. I think all will acknowledge that emperors have a greater life expectancy than disciples. But there is a potentially greater issue:


Eusebius is making a specific claim about one of the 12 disciples, not a claim about the longest-lived persons in a group of 100.

When you have low probablilities, you can just cheat by assuming there are a lot more than 12 disciples!

For example, if you have a probablility of .01, then assume there are 100 disciples instead of 12 and you get 100*.01 = 1 expected disciple living to age 80.

If the probability is .001 then you just assume a thousand disciples.

So you cheat and shift from the alleged population of 12 disciples to 100 "followers" in order to end up with a statement about a "few" living past 80.

If "a few" means three, then that would actually be 3/12ths or 25% of the original 12 disciples.

There is another level at which this is wrong but what's the point. I said go look at mortality in that period and you object.



Hi - my actuarial background is in fire insurance and I know that history very well. I have a great deal of trouble with this assertion above and would like you to back this up.

In the case of fire insurance, the great fire of London in 1666 gave impetus to the fire insurance industry, and from my study of that over the next 200 years I doubt what you say. Rating by risk and competition in sales produced a profile of market premiums that mirrored those risks. In short: higher risks paid more and lower risks paid less for fire insurance.

Insurance companies studied hard. They were concerend with the kinds of trades people had, whether they had open furnaces, the features of adjoining properties, etc. but they even went way beyond just insurance and started running fire brigades and calculating whether water damage from putting out the fire was worse than the fire itself. The use of explosives in putting out fires. Sophisticated insurance people, to put it mildly.

Companies sold more than one kind of insurance or people served on more than one board. People with actuarial experience moved from one type of company to another so either way it cannot be true that they were sophisticated in one market and unsophisticated in the other.


That brings me to your initial assertion:

"policies were sold exclusively (or at least almost so) to the well off, but the data came from the population as a whole"

That is sloppy phrasing in an issue such as this perhaps. My experience dictates the insurance companies were not stupid and would not even consider matching rich-people premiums to average-people mortality. They would look at insurance customers by risk pool. Lawyers vs. farmers vs. urban vs rurral etc.

If you had started with the phrase "insurance companies found mortality to be the same across these two demographics" I would have felt differently.

But what you said made it sound like they used the wrong data but as luck would have it, the mortalities were the same and therefore the wrong data resulted in the right premiums anyway.

I don't believe that. I want to see the mortality data that shows it is the same for rich as it is for poor in 18th century London.

For one thing, mortality was way higher in the cities than the countryside - plague and other endemic disease - and the rich had the option of travel outside the city during outbreaks.

Petergdi

But requiring all of them to be of the twelve is unwarranted, isn't it?

It still doesn't make the odds favourable.

I'm sure that they would have loved to have started with stratified data, but I don't believe that such data existed at the beginning. Even collecting ages at death didn't start until 1728.

I think I avoided saying rich vs. poor, and instead said rich vs. average. At least I meant to do so. It is more defensible. The very poorest might be much worse off without changing the balance between average and wealthy much.

The plague had gone from London by this time. But I think it is right to think of the ways in which rich would have been better off than average. In poor countries today, the wealthy have got better access to clean water, better sanitation, better nutrition and better access to modern medicine. Were these factors stratified by wealth nearly as much in pre-industrial societies?

Peter.

Vincent Guilbaud

It seems Philosopher Jay forgot something when he said:
as he the factor '12' is lost!

rlogan added it, but his math is not totally correct:
Real formula is:
bernoulli formula

If we apply this formula to our case:

Let's take some hypothetic data:
Probability for a disciple to live to 90 = 0.001 = 0.1%
Number of disciples = 12

P(2/12 Disciples > 90) = (12*11/2)*(0.001)^2*(0.999)^10 = 0.000065
With an odd of 65 per Million, it becomes the domain of miracle...

Notice that 12 is exagerated since Juda killed himself and others were martyred rapidely...

But let's see with other numbers:
Number of disciples = 100

P(2/100 Disciples > 90) = (100*99/2)*(0.001)^2*(0.999)^98 = 0.0045 = 0.45%
still not enough ....

But if Jesus had 1,000 disciples
P(2/1,000 Disciples > 90) = (1,000*999/2)*(0.001)^2*(0.999)^998 = 0.18 = 18%

At last, this sounds possible though less than 1/5 chance to happen.

So, according to math and Eusebius, we can conclude that at his death,
Jesus had an army of more than 1,000 disciples ready to die
to spread his resurection or maintain an oral tradition
telling again and again the parabole of the mustard seed.

Vinnie

Your still not reading. We all agree pretty much.

We don't agree that Jesus' initial followers were only 12 in number, however. I referenced an article and I read several others before I did this. There i hardly anything reliable in regards to numbers in Ancient Rome to produce a life table and the peer reviewed article I referenced strongly urges against using parallel examples.

A an aside, I do think Polycarp did reach a ripe old age (two sources..martyrdom and irenaeus and both are in very close proximity to his death)... I think that was the impetus for the connections to the apostles after his death....though it is possible he himself lied but there is no evidence of that in his letter....I think his age was the springboard for Irenaeus. He knew the apostles and John and was traned by them and I knew him (thus connecting himself through a well known figure in the 2d century to the apostles).

Vinnie

Vinnie

Not to say I disagree but two things//questions:

A poor person had to work with their hands while an emperor did not. I take it the poor worked long and hard and were probably in relatively good shape. I correlate exercise with longevity.

How many of those emperors died of natural causes (e.g. not because of war, political assassinations, etc.)?

As for that latter question I am asking it just for the sake of asking it because I would like to know.

Finally, being rich back then, might not get you better medical treatment if it was all piss poor to begin with. Though I admit ignorance in regards to Roman medicine though I feel very confident it was primitive at best and the best remedy was to not get sick or hurt...

Vinnie

I think we also established that John didn't write anything in the later 90's have we not?

Where does that tradition come from specifically anyways? Is it Tertullian? I google the snot out of it but can't find it....