mountainman

I see you often engaging in logic but very very rarely engaging in the evidence outside of the covers of the humorless fiction known as the new testament. The historicists claim is that there exists evidence to substantiate the hypothesis of the historical jesus. My claim is amost exactly the opposite - that we have a vacuum of evidence before the all important 4th century when the religion appears in the courts of the Roman Emperor on his meteoric rise to a fascist supremacy.



The evidence itself may be interpretted in such a manner. We have a Great Silence before Eusebius that is easily explained by 4th century fabrication. It's up to you to cease using rhetoric as a means of examining the evidence, and to either cite evidence in support of your conjecture, or evidence that does not fit my conjecture.

And you have yet to deal with the evidence. I have examined all the evidence between the 1st century and the 5th. I am interested in the evidence itself. For example, if your position argues for an historical "Paul", then I would like to know what evidence you think your position is reliant upon.

aa5874

Well, so far, the evidence from antiquity suggests that the 4th century Roman Church did NOT INVENT the Jesus story but it was STOLEN from Jesus believers and called their OWN.

The ROMANS even STOLE their God. What a thing!!!

To BUILD an EMPIRE you have to STEAL a LOT!!

It is just that the ROMANS STOLE everything on EARTH, and in "HEAVEN".

Doug Shaver

I don't think so. Actually, what would constitute incredible progress would be his changing the mind of anyone who was not neutral and qualified.

Doug Shaver

Yes, I believe he is. However, a proper defense of my belief would take way more free time than I have available right now. I will try in the next day or so to come up with a precis that will at least convey a hint of where I'm coming from. I don't have high hopes of succeeding, but I'll give it a shot.

It may depend on what you think constitutes resolution. Do I think the arguments will end as soon as he publishes his results? No, not for a minute.

I do understand your concern about applying any computational tool, especially probabilistic, to any subject as controversial as this one. The idea goes against an awful lot of conventional thinking. But then, a lot of us think it was too much conventional thinking that got us into this intellectual quagmire in the first place.

Toto

There are some comments on Bayesian statistics in this thread

Doug Shaver

And they're right. That evidence does exist. It just doesn't substantiate their hypothesis as well as they think it does.

Not really. What you're claiming is that all the evidence before the 4th was faked.

You say so.

You have to prove it before anybody needs to explain it.

I have no need to cease what I haven't begun.

You haven't shown me any to deal with.

It's been a while, but you asked me that question at least once before, and I answered it then. If you were not paying sufficient attention to remember my response, I am not the least bit surprised. You consistently, and persistently, recycle your arguments as if they had never before been addressed in this forum.

avi

Thank you Doug. Well written.

A. Umm, no, I am not going to ask you to elaborate your position, though I suspect that many of us would both welcome such elaboration, and profit from reading it.

What I will ask, since I acknowledge, and respect the fact, that your time is both precious and limited, is this: can you provide one reference, one link, just one will suffice, where Bayes' theorem has been successfully employed, in any field of inquiry, to resolve an issue of contention, by relying, in exercising the theorem, upon two or more data sources, both of which are acknowledged to have been either unreliable, inaccurate, incomplete, or distorted in some way?

Thanks for the link,

B. I didn't realize that my objection to use of Bayes' theorem, given an uncertain data stream, falls within the category of "conventional thinking". My ego is crushed.

Holy cow. Just a regular chap, after all my hard work to appear eccentric. What a very sad day for the Irish.

Well, nevertheless, I will push on here, Doug. I am sorry to disagree with you, on this second point, but, I don't believe that it is "too much conventional thinking", which has immersed us in "this intellectual quagmire".

I believe, contrarily, that our current imbroglio has little to do with thinking, and much to do with bona fide data, or rather, the absence thereof.

avi

aa5874

What is "THE EVIDENCE" for an historical Jesus? Even HJ Scholars ADMIT that there is LITTLE or NOTHING known about HJ.

It is ALREADY KNOWN that Only the forgeries in Antiquities of the Jews mention a character called Jesus Christ.

In fact, there is ZERO credible sources from antiquity for an HJ.

It is COMPLETELY ERRONEOUS that there is "evidence" for HJ when even Scholars have PRESUMED his existence.

The HJ argument has been PROMOTED through "Chinese whispers" and it is time we STOP making claims about "the evidence" for HJ that has NOT been found.

avi

Thanks for the link, Toto.

I enjoyed reading the posts there, very interesting.

None of them, however, appear to address my fundamental concern, namely, whether or not it is appropriate, for anyone, to employ Bayes' theorem in an environment possessing uniquely, data sources which are corrupt, unreliable, and forged.

I appreciate, from the many comments at that link, and in this thread, that folks here on the forum are eager to move forward, (as am I) in a rational, objective fashion, rather than in our more typical, blundering, subjective manner, but, I still wish to sound a note of caution, not against Carrier, himself, nor against the use of probability and statistics (including Bayes' theorem) as tools to identify potential explanations for conundra, but simply to warn against imagining that progress has at last descended upon us, when we face a tableau of numbers, instead of text.

avi

Toto

Carrier's point of view is that Baysians statistics is a way of dealing more systematically with how we argue.