Thank you. Can you analyze the error for readers who don’t know the Office?

In particular, what mistake do you think is being made here? Is it conflating a real scene about something else? Or what do you think happened?

That would help convey how these mistakes occur and help people verify this one.

Thanks.

Did you find any claims in those worth my responding to?

(Which means claims not already refuted here, and that are not already self-evidently illogical or false.)

And if so, could you quote them here?

(Or at least their first sentence, describing the claim; so, if that is then followed by data, you can leave that part out here and I can check it there.)

I will reward any such effort with a reply. 🙂

I wanted to add this that apparently Marshall made more responses towards this blog in the following month of February in 2017

https://christthetao.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-literacy-of-richard-carrier.html

https://christthetao.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-literacy-of-richard-carrier.html

Exactly.

This is how you know they are done: when the article they claim to be rebutting, already rebuts their rebuttal.

You evidently need to read my book. I explain exactly what you just did. In particular I explain in Chapter 6 of OHJ that 1/16 (by Laplace’s Rule of Succession) is the lower bound on my estimate for prior probability and around 1 in 3 the upper bound.

In other words, my error margin allows the possibility of being wrong about several of the members of the set. How I come by that very generous margin of error is explained there. And yes, I do say it’s being extremely generous to historicity. That’s called arguing a fortiori. A procedure explained in detail in my methodological book, Proving History.

What I don’t understand is why you put the prior at one in three. If there are 15, all of whom are not historical, wouldn’t the best it could be one in 15? I get being conservative, but multiplying that by 5 seems a lot to me. So it seems to me that the upper bound on historicity should be considerably lower than you calculate. I know you have a range of 1/12000 to 1/3 as the final probability. I just think 1/3 is unrealistically high.

Johan you do make good points and a lot of what you say is valid. But you might be missing the forest for the trees. The gist of the argument is that Jesus’s biography is so mythologized to the extent that the only people who equal that level of mythologizing are nonhistorical, and that no historical person has ever been mythologized that much. This premise holds true independently of whether the Rank Raglan criteria are valid or whether Richard modified them, or even whether a whole new set of criteria is used in the first place. Either way, Jesus will end up in the company of overwhelmingly nonhistorical characters as opposed to historical characters. This is an important fact that has to be factored into the probability calculations somewhere and cannot be ignored or brushed aside. The real question is whether there is any reason to believe that more than 1/3rd of such mythologized characters are based on historical people. And if so, how much more? It would have to be a lot more to challenge the final conclusion of OHJ. Even a doubling of the prior probability would still leave a final probability of historicity of only 66%, which is hardly a solid foundation to justify the bravado and bombastic confidence of the historicist camp.