Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

maryhelena wrote:The only one of the above that I can find is a mention of Courtney:

Page 53/54
If ‘Jesus Christ began as a celestial deity’ is false, it could still be that he began as a political fiction, for example (as some scholars have indeed argued - the best examples being R.G. Price and Gary Courtney)

(Courtney’s book, Et Tu, Judas? Then Fall Jesus!, mentioned in the footnote)

Carrier then goes on to write that such a premise has a “much lower prior probability”. I’m not going to type any more from the book. The book is heavy and unyielding and trying to keep a page open for typing is frustrating.....

Thanks. That's interesting.

Not for anyone else. What on earth would lead you to believe that Carrier would have devoted any space to this utterly insipid theory? It would be like searching for a reference to oneself in the list of lovers of Lindsay Lohan never having met the actress

Here's something I've been wondering about. Where does Richard Carrier get his 33% probability of historicity from? What algorithm does he use and what data does he work from?

lpetrich wrote:Here's something I've been wondering about. Where does Richard Carrier get his 33% probability of historicity from? What algorithm does he use and what data does he work from?

From Bayes' theorem.

On his argument for the use of Bayes' -- http://vridar.org/2011/06/08/bayes-theo ... -conflict/
My own little illustration of how it works -- http://vridar.org/2012/04/22/putting-ja ... sian-test/

Its use is more well known among historians than many realize -- http://vridar.org/2013/07/18/real-historians-do-bayes/

I reviewed some of the earlier chapters of Carrier's book on the use of Bayes' in historical research. See the earlier posts at http://vridar.org/category/book-reviews ... g-history/

Stephan Huller wrote:Not for anyone else. What on earth would lead you to believe that Carrier would have devoted any space to this utterly insipid theory? It would be like searching for a reference to oneself in the list of lovers of Lindsay Lohan never having met the actress

Actually, as I mentioned upthread I do not expect Carrier to care about Caesar.

lpetrich wrote:Here's something I've been wondering about. Where does Richard Carrier get his 33% probability of historicity from? What algorithm does he use and what data does he work from?

Simplistically speaking, he compares the Jesus story to other similar stories and sees what proportion of those stories are historical or mythical. So in this case it's one third historical.

Gday,

lpetrich wrote:Here's something I've been wondering about. Where does Richard Carrier get his 33% probability of historicity from? What algorithm does he use and what data does he work from?

A couple of points :

Firstly note that initially from the background knowledge he decides on 33% as the prior probability by noting Jesus conforms to the Rank-Raglan Hero archetype and assigning Jesus to the reference class of 'conveniently named God-men' (because Jesus' name means Jahweh Saves) and calculates that a conveniently named God-man is at least twice as likely to be mythical than historical (p240), giving a prior probability of at most 33% that Jesus existed.

Secondly for most of the book he evaluates each category of evidence (extrabiblical writings, Acts, the Gospels, the epistles) using Bayesian probability for each case and comes up with two probabilities for each piece of evidence : 1) the most generous case for Jesus being historical, and 2) a more realistic case for Jesus being historical.

He then combines all these results into one grand figure and concludes :
1) at best a 32% chance that Jesus existed
2) more realistically a 1 in 12500 chance that Jesus existed

So his realistic answer is a very low probability indeed : only 0.008 %
Which is essentially zero.


Kapyong

Gday,

Bernard Muller wrote: Of course, I object strongly that Paul's Christians considered themselves as spiritual/adopted brothers of the Lord (I wish I could read element 12 now), which is a cornerstone in Carrier`s argumentation.

Here is Carrier's element 12 in it's entirety :

"Element 12: From as early as we can ascertain, Christian believed they became 'brothers' of the Lord Jesus Christ through Baptism (Rom. 6.3-10), which symbolised their death to the world and rebirth as the 'adopted sons of God' , hence they became the brothers of the Lord, 'the son of God' 101

"101. there are numerous passages that confirm this: Rom. 8:15-29; 9.26; Gal. 3:26-29; 4:4-7; and Heb. 2:10-18; Eph. 1:5; 1 Jn. 5:1-4; (and likewise 1 Jn. 2:28-3:10; 4:8; 5:18-20; with Rom. 6:3-10; Col. 2:12. See also Irenaeus Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 3 and 8; with Carrier 'Spiritual Body' in Empty Tomb (ed. Price and Lowder), pp 142-47. The notion could easily be derived from Ps. Sol. 17.27 "

Actually, as I mentioned upthread I do not expect Carrier to care about Caesar.

ghost 330 Wed Oct 30, 2013 9:12 am

So you weren't really interested in having your question answered, merely in pounding the drum for your pet theory through every thread possible

ghost wrote:

lpetrich wrote:Here's something I've been wondering about. Where does Richard Carrier get his 33% probability of historicity from? What algorithm does he use and what data does he work from?

Simplistically speaking, he compares the Jesus story to other similar stories and sees what proportion of those stories are historical or mythical. So in this case it's one third historical.

I haven't gotten the book in my hands yet, but this summary seems off, especially if it is meant to imply partial historicity. It might have some accuracy in its representation to it if meant to imply that one out of three similar cases have any historicity.