mountainman

But that's saying nothing. Everyone who has examined the evidence may as well say the same thing as that. The problem is trying to reconstruct an historical narrative using all the available evidence from antiquity, by which the idea of an historical Jesus, either true or false, entered the Roman empire in the form of the Greek New Testament (associated with the Greek LXX). IMO the terminus ante quiem is the 4th century while the terminus post quem appears to be sometime in the 2nd century. The 1st century seems lost to any theories of christian history based on the contemporary assessment of new testament editorship and publication.

blastula

Not to turn this into all gossipy, but Carrier says they had bad blood interaction before this over working on that Sources book they were both involved in.

Regardless, I don't think anyone is, or at least I'm not, complaining about his tone, but rather the substance of what he's said.

blastula

It seems Hoffman finds it distasteful to even consider looking into the question of whether Jesus existed, like it's beneath respectable scholarship.

jgoodguy

Hoffman wrote:

IMHO this is the state of the issue of the HJ at the moment. All we got is crappy evidence that only 'guesswork' analysis is possible to use.

From here
In short it does nothing to claim that the emperor has no clothes, The peasants already know.

Vivisector

And this is the result I would intuitively expect from an objective application of Bayes' Theorem in this context: A (locally) uniform prior density function; that is to say, our knowledge of the present enables us to say virtually nothing of the past.

Applied to other things (e.g., miracles), I'd anticipate a different result.

Cheers,

V.

hiero5age

Overall I found the "student's" comments in the article more to the point than the primary author's, although he makes some important observations as well. He does unfairly denigrate the significance of assessing (however tentatively) the plausibility of textual claims as literal fact, and comes close at points to that infuriating "skepticism is just as dogmatic as fundamentalism" canard, as though walking on water were an event we should assign magnanimous 50-50 agnosticism to.

But the physics-envy charge is spot on. Craig, Plantinga, and Swinburne all try to snow their readers under with woo-woo "I'm proving this with numbers so it MUST be true!" notation, and Carrier remains in the apologist's mindset -- he wants to be the anti-Craig, "our side's Craig", the anti-apologist. The charge in the article that Bayes is contingent on priors is telling, but the problem goes deeper.

In principle, Bayes is about how we ought to update our beliefs in light of new evidence. So in principle, my mechanic trying to figure out whether the problem is the battery or the alternator can use it. Can you imagine some egghead criticising his mechanic for being "insufficiently rigorous" for not spending three hours detailing his reasoning process in formal nomenclature? These things can only obscure rather than clarify.

mountainman

The question "It’s really a question of knowing where to begin." must forever take us back to the non existent evidence. The evidence is that Jesus was a late and invented myth, cobbled together with the technology of the codex. For the gJudas the C14 says rather late but the cobbled fiction of Ireaeus via "Eusebius" says rather early. Which evidence do we follow? How does Bayes Theorem weight such possibilities?

Obviously the benefit is being able to explore various scenarios and rerun the calculations exploring various hypotheses. Bayes Theorem cannot articulate the hypotheses, but it can test their relational explanatory power by modelling all possibilities in an efficient and extendible manner. All the evidence must in the end be addressed, and all hypotheses must in the end be modelled and tested against the evidence. Sooner or later a theory space will become defined for the mythical Jesus that better explains all the evidence than the postulate (and subsequent theories) of an historical jesus. The peasants are comfortable with pious forgery. The academic hegemon have yet to understand this.

jgoodguy

May I suggest that instead of read instead as I agree that a mythic case will the the dominate theory with all the fighting being over how Christianity developed.

mountainman

I am perhaps more of a generalist, and like to think that the dominant theory must in the end be in the field of ancient history. If the historical Jesus as declared in the greek new testament, and by its very first major editor, the Church Historian Eusebius, is false, then by default those who promote a mythical or fictitious Jesus must be able to explain why Eusebius has openly lied about the false ancient history.

AFAIK Carrier's stated task is to apply Bayes's Theorem to the field of ancient history, not for example, theology. Chronology is relevant to the former. In applying Bayes's Theorem to the "Historical Jesus" Eusebius can be variously weighted for possibility of truth and outcomes explored. But in the same breath Eusebius can also be modelled as a simple case of pious forgery and these outcomes explored. The field of ancient history must admit evidence to such a project on the historicity of Jesus and the early christian church until at least the year that the new testament was canonised, and this is after the testimony of the Emperor Julian.