I am open though to the fact that my experience can be unusual as the Arabic speaking community who even cares about these things is very small and usually care due to personal beliefs, academic specialization or being Islamic/Christian apologists so a huge selection bias is at work.

My everyday experience in the UK is also heavily influenced by the fact that I live in Cambridge (which is a small city and on average has a very liberal and highly educated population) and work in a molecular biology and bioinformatics institute so my colleagues are mostly biologists and software engineers where these distinctions are widely understood even among the religious in them.

There is no archaeology that links to Jesus. That Pilate existed is not evidence Jesus did. They aren’t even related by family much less succession of reign. So there is no analogy here.

Your reasoning is consistently always crap. And consistently always ignores everything I actually argue. It is for the latter reason, after multiple warnings, that you are hereby banned from commenting on my blog ever again.

I do not want to hear from you.

But couldn’t we make a similar argument for the historicity of Jesus using the same kind of evidence for the historicity of Gilgamesh?

For example, the historicity of Gilgamesh is based on his association with Enmebaragesi in the SKL, the Tummal inscription and the epic of Gilgamesh, whose existence happens to be supported by archaeological evidence (vase fragments). We could make the same argument for Jesus. In all of our primary sources, Jesus is always associated with Pontius Pilate, whose existence is also supported by archaeological evidence (the Pilate stone). This archaeological evidence verifying Pilate’s historicity would enhance the notion that Jesus is also historical, just as it does for Gilgamesh.

In fact, using this method would strengthen the case for Jesus’s historicity even more than for Gilgamesh. The primary sources and archaeological evidence either date from the lifetime of Jesus or not long after it, whereas half a millennium separates the archaeological evidence for Enmebaragesi and the primary sources for Gilgamesh. Sources composed within living memory will be more accurate and reliable than those composed centuries later, which means Jesus has a much firmer historical basis than Gilgamesh.

That’s not quite true. Follow the link. Near contemporary and credible sources for Gilgamesh are listed (remember, texts typically long predate latest extant manuscripts of them, e.g. the oldest manuscript of Tacitus dates 10th century but preserves a source dating to the 2nd century; ditto Sumerian texts vs. “manuscripts”).

Example. Example. Example.

We don’t have anything like this for Jesus.

The matter is not simply relative dating of manuscripts. It’s of reference class vs. likelihood ratios, i.e. how typically are government records of rulers faked, particularly records naming kings confirmed real (reference class) and how likely is it that all the evidence we have for Gilgamesh would exist if Gilgamesh didn’t (likelihood). When we add those up we get a probability favoring historicity (albeit not strong, which is why you’ll note historians will still express hesitation in their certitude of Gilgamesh’s existence). This doesn’t happen for Jesus. We only have mythical sources, and contemporary letters that don’t clearly place him on earth. No state documents. No ancillary corroboration.

Yes, but none of these references to Gilgamesh are found in contemporary sources. They were written centuries after his reign (circa 2800 to 2500 BC), which is exactly what we don’t have for Jesus.

Ah. I didn’t know that. I see they have evidence supporting the historicity of Gilgamesh that we don’t have for Jesus, such as government records and king lists preserving information from his time (that’s how they can date him). For example:

Historical evidence for Gilgamesh’s existence is found in inscriptions crediting him with the building of the great walls of Uruk (modern day Warka, Iraq) which, in the story, are the tablets upon which he first records his great deeds and his quest for the meaning of life. There are other references to him by known historical figures of his time such as King Enmebaragesi of Kish and, of course, the Sumerian King List and the legends which grew up around his reign.

That’s not true, I have never trolled, spammed or name-called on this blog. I am always respectful. But if it makes you happy, I will spend the $42 needed to purchase your book and I won’t ask you any more questions about Bayesianism until I’m finished reading it. Then we will discuss Bayes’ Theorem again, but with actual quotations from the book.

It was written during late classical antiquity. Of course it doesn’t prove the historicity of Orpheus, I cited it as a counterexample to your statement that pseudonymous works are always impersonal. If it helps, Hermes Trismegistus appears in his own dialogues.

Here’s my source on the historicity of Gilgamesh:

Most historians generally agree that Gilgamesh was a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk,[6][7][8][9] who probably ruled sometime during the early part of the Early Dynastic Period (c. 2900 – 2350 BC).[6][7] Stephanie Dalley, a scholar of the ancient Near East, states that “precise dates cannot be given for the lifetime of Gilgamesh, but they are generally agreed to lie between 2800 and 2500 BC.”[7] No contemporary mention of Gilgamesh has yet been discovered,[8] but the 1955 discovery of the Tummal Inscription, a thirty-four-line historiographic text written during the reign of Ishbi-Erra (c. 1953 – c. 1920 BC), has cast considerable light on his reign.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh

If you really want to know how frequentism reduces to Bayesianism, read my whole concluding section on that in Proving History, Chapter 6. Which was peer reviewed by a mathematics professor.

You have repeatedly showed me you are too lazy and disrespectful to bother reading anything to become informed. So either stop asking me questions like this or actually read what you are told and ask me informed questions about what you read.

I will start blocking you if you don’t start acting responsibly and do this.