Very nice overview of Bayes Theorem and Historical Jesus

[Schreech]

But Analytics, again the inputs are arbitrary?

Ah, but you do not assail the methodology of his deductions derived from those arbitrary inputs.

. I am not a mathematician or a statistician. My interest is in the early christian movements from a historical critical perspective.

It seems to me that Carrier is asking the wrong question and stacking the deck in his favour by making a number of assumption which may or may not be true.

In the evidence we do have, a number of different Jesus' are presented. So a better question for me would be *Stand up the real Jesus*. Given that Jesus existed and bearing in mind that each New Testament document that made it into canon appears to have come from different communities with different views what was he really like?

Mark (70ce) presents a human Jesus with brothers and sisters, a Jesus who is generous with authority, who criticises someone for calling him good (only God is good), No virgin birth, no post resurrection narrative, and his family think he has lost his mind.

I get that Paul never met the human Jesus, but he never questions the validity of the experience of those who had met him. Peter for instance with whom he stays on his visit to Jerusalem and where he nearly gets himself killed by a group of more ardent Jesus followers more strongly attached to Judaic practices such as circumcision and who frankly didn't like his ways.

I think people differed on who Jesus was, right from the beginning and they differed fundamentally about his life and it's significance - but the earliest witnesses took the reality of his life on earth for granted and some kind of belief in resurrection was developed to explain why he was the Jewish Messiah despite being killed.

There are most certainly mythical elements in all the canonical narratives, but I see no reason to doubt that underneath the myth lays a real man, and I don't see how Bayes theorum can help me. It's like cutting a cake with a pick axe.

[Schreech]

Carrier also seems to be off on dates. Nowadays it is being argued that the epistle of James is early and was written in response to Pauline letters doing the rounds amongst the communities. James is remarkable for what it leaves out, but it doesn't deny the historicity of the man Jesus, and neither does the Didache which scholars nowadays see as early. It's eucharistic practice is nothing like Paul's or the gospels (which may have borrowed from Paul). It's Jewish. Is Carrier even aware of all this? Many of his statements and assumptions seem to indicate no depth in the field.

[_Mary]

Philo,
Here's Ehrman's take on Carrier and the Bayes Theorem

As most of you know, I’m pretty much staying out of the mythicist debates now.   That is for several reasons.   One is that the mythicist position is not seen as intellectually credible in my field (I’m using euphemisms here; you should see what most of my friends *actually* say about it….).  No one that I know personally (I know a *lot* of scholars of New Testament, early Christianity, and so on) takes it at *all* seriously as a viable historical perspective (this includes not just Christians but also Jews, agnostics, atheists – you name it), and my colleagues sometimes tell me that I’m simply providing the mythicists with precisely the credibility they’re looking for even by engaging them.   It’s a good point, and I take it seriously.In that connection I should say that I can understand how someone who hasn’t spent years being trained in the history of early Christianity might have difficulty distinguishing between serious scholarship that is accepted by experts as being plausible (even when judged wrong) and the writings of others that, well, is not.   But experts obviously don’t have that problem, and the mythicists simply are not seen as credible.   They don’t like that, and they don’t like it when it someone points it out, but there it is.The other reason for staying out of the fray is that some of the mythicists are simply unpleasant human beings – mean-spirited, arrogant,  ungenerous, and vicious.   I just don’t enjoy having a back and forth with someone who wants to rip out my jugular.  

So, well, I don’t.  (They also seem  — to a person – to have endless time and boundless energy to argue point after point after point after point after point.  I, alas, do not.) Having said that, I should point out the R. Joseph Hoffman – a real scholar with established credentials (I first came to know his work over 25 years ago when he was a professor at the University of Michigan) —  has decided to take on Richard Carrier’s new proposal to apply Bayes Theorem to historical study so as to establish the “fact” that Jesus actually never lived.  I’ve always found the use of Bayes Theorem amusing, in no small measure because prior to Carrier’s use of it to PROVE  that Jesus almost certainly never existed, the theorem was most commonly used, among those wanting historical results, by the likes of Richard Swinburne to PROVE that God *did* exist and that Jesus almost certainly was raised from the dead.   How can they both be right?My first encounter with the theorem was in a debate at Holy Cross with William Lane Craig on the issue of whether historians can prove the resurrection.   Craig followed Swinburne in mounting a mathematical “PROOF” of the resurrection, and I have to admit, I was probably a bit rude, because I simply couldn’t help laughing and telling him that if my colleagues at my university knew that I was seriously discussing the mathematical probability of Jesus’ resurrection they — to a person — would mock me to scorn.   This is what intellectual life in America has come to???   After that debate I got a bunch of emails from mathematicians and statisticians who also thought Craig’s argument was outrageously funny – not to say outrageous – and explained to me mathematically why Craig had absolutely botched the “proof.”My point here is that if the *same* theorem can prove both that Jesus was raised from the dead *and* that he never existed, well, there may be a problem with the proof.To get a sense of some of the problems, I simply here give the link to Hoffman’s interesting, informative, and amusing response to Carrier and his use the theorem to advance his own ideologically driven view on the (non)historicity of Jesus.   It’s a good read.

https://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/t ... s-theorem/

[_Mary]

From the link..

What is known by people who use Bayes’s theorem to advantage  is that there are only certain conditions when it is appropriate to use it.  Even those conditions can sound a bit onerous: In general, its use is warranted when a problem warrants its use, e.g. when–The sample is partitioned into a set of mutually exclusive events { A1, A2, . . . , An }.Within the sample space, there exists an event B, for which P(B) > 0.The analytical goal is to compute a conditional probability of the form: P ( Ak | B ).You know at least one of the two sets of probabilities described below.P( Ak ∩ B ) for each AkP( Ak ) and P( B | Ak ) for each Ak  

[_Mary]

and...

The fact of the matter, as far as I know, and as I thought anyone would realize is that Bayes’ theorem is a theorem which follows from certain axioms. Its application to any real world situation depends upon how precisely the parameters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality. At this stage, however, I find it difficult to see how the heavily feared ‘subjectivity’ can be avoided. Simply put, plug in different values into the theorem and you’ll get a different answer. How does one decide which value to plug in?

^^^exactly.

[_richardMdBorn]

and...

The fact of the matter, as far as I know, and as I thought anyone would realize is that Bayes’ theorem is a theorem which follows from certain axioms. Its application to any real world situation depends upon how precisely the parameters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality. At this stage, however, I find it difficult to see how the heavily feared ‘subjectivity’ can be avoided. Simply put, plug in different values into the theorem and you’ll get a different answer. How does one decide which value to plug in?

^^^exactly.

I was one of three guests on a two hour Chicago radio program last year. The host raised the issue of Drake's equation about the probability of advanced civilzations existing outside of the earth in the Milky Way. Another guest, who is a NASA lunar geologist in Houston, scoffed at DE since he doesn't think any of the terms can be estimated. How do you know if the probability of term X is one in ten versus 1 in 10^100 in DE. In the same way, how do you assess the strength of the gospels' evidence for Jesus' existence versus Roman references to him from the second century versus Josephus' two references to him (acknowledging the problems with one of the two references). Providing an equation where all of the terms cannot be estimated may make you feel sophisticated, but it's a worthless exercise in my opinion.

[_Mary]

Richard, so basically you are saying that both Drake's equation and Bayes Theorem in this case are useless because all the values are arbitary and subjective?

Drakes Equation has the potential to be useful if we had telescopes that could measure the atmospheric composition of exo planets.

Likewise Bayes theorem could be useful if we had a time machine or an infinite number of parallel universes. ;)

[_Maksutov]

I was one of three guests on a two hour Chicago radio program last year. The host raised the issue of Drake's equation about the probability of advanced civilzations existing outside of the earth in the Milky Way. Another guest, who is a NASA lunar geologist in Houston, scoffed at DE since he doesn't think any of the terms can be estimated. How do you know if the probability of term X is one in ten versus 1 in 10^100 in DE. In the same way, how do you assess the strength of the gospels' evidence for Jesus' existence versus Roman references to him from the second century versus Josephus' two references to him (acknowledging the problems with one of the two references). Providing an equation where all of the terms cannot be estimated may make you feel sophisticated, but it's a worthless exercise in my opinion.

Excellent point. Drake's Equation is useful for stimulating speculation but not for arriving at conclusions.

[_Analytics]

Hi Analytics,

Thanks for the kind response to my questions and the example. Before I begin to lob criticisms further let me make sure I understand. Did you just arbitrarily input the weighting numbers for illustration purposes or did you actually apply what you believe the numbers should be?

Second, with questions like the existence of Jesus how do you apply Bayesian reasoning when the probabilities are so high? For example, when you weigh the argument of no contrary but you further bring it into the 2nd century and beyond you reach what I consider nearly a falsification of the mythicists position. Anyone who has read the church fathers recognizes the extreme radar for "heresy" and stomping it out and the sanitizing of doctrine that took place. So Earl Doherty believes Jesus was resurrected in a celestial mystical place but not on the dirt and ground earth. Yet, we have heresy's being stomped out left and right in the early church writings. Historically there would have had to have been a shift - from the mystical understanding to the real dirt and ground Jesus being the majority position. For the dirt and ground theory to become the majority position the mystical idea wouldn't just disappear from history it would be fuller stomped out like any other "heresy". But what we see is nothing, nothing at all. For me this and the argument of no contrary don't need Bayesian reasoning we are simply in the mythical idea being so improbable it is silly without even discussing all the other arguments against the mythicist position.

Third, how do authoritative arguments get weighed? The mythicist position is held in a less minority position than creationists, the real Jesus is accepted by the extreme vast majority of academic experts, atheist, agnostic, theist, Christian and Jew? Do we as non experts use a different Bayesian reasoning or are we allowed to just say none of them apply Bayesian reasoning?

mikwut

Hi mikwut,

I only have a few minutes, but:

1- Those numbers are directionally what I personally believe, but are mainly illustrative.
2- Personally, I just don't find the 2nd-century evidence you cite very relevant. What we know for sure is that Christianity was evolving, because all religions evolve. With shorter lifespans, a new religion, and an illiterate population, it must have been evolving very quickly then.
3- Personally, I don't give much weight to authoritative arguments in general. But in principle, you could ratchet up the a priori as arbitrarily high as you want to account for the consensus.

[_Analytics]

b3: Conspiracy of Silence. We know that Peter and Paul existed and started Christianity, and we still have their writings. However, they talked about Jesus Christ resurrected, not Jesus of Nazareth, the celebrity that went around preaching, healing, feeding, and raising the dead. (see Earl Doherty for more details).

I've heard this argument before but I don't think it works. And if proto gospels were floating around, they wouldn't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel. Note that Luke, the author of Luke-Acts was Paul's companion (see the change from third to first person in Acts 16). One can make a strong argument that Luke wrote both Luke and Acts, with Luke clearly written first. Acts ends with Paul still alive. It's a relatively short book. If Paul had been executed before the completion of Acts, surely his death would have been included. Thus, Acts was written before 65 and Luke before that. Ancient sources claim that Mark was based on the recollections of Peter. Thus, the attempt to split the gospels from the Pauline-Petrine writings does not work as well as you think it does. I note that you have a very late date for Mark (c 80).

Acts could have been written decades after Paul's death, and then ended the way it did because that is when the person writing it ran out of paper or died himself.