And the pagan scriptures: he is the superior Odysseus, Romulus, and Dionysus, too.

I haven’t checked. I am not immediately aware of a strong example of his using Wars, but there might be some examples in the literature (they won’t be very strong ones though or I’d have noted them). Most of what Luke’s author lifted comes from the Antiquities; but the Wars was published before that by some fifteen or twenty years and there is a lot of overlap between them, so there might not have been anything in Wars Luke had any use for.

I haven’t done a detailed study to answer that question. So all I can do is guestimate here.

At just a glance at the data, on the a fortiori side, I put the historicity of Jesus as on par with the historicity of Joseph, Moses, Aesop, and Homer; Moses and Joseph being the ones among those in the RR class. In Chapter 6 of OHJ my a fortiori case allowed the “for the sake of argument” granting of historicity to Joseph and Moses and, for balance, any two non-Jewish members of the RR class, for 4 of the 14 known (not counting Jesus, who makes 15). So, you might then ask, if I had to pick “which two” of those others would I force-rank as the most likely to turn out to be real (though choosing any would be counter to the point), they’d be Hercules and Theseus (owing to the early politicization of their myths, which IMO is not enough to actually think they existed, but is more than we have for the others on the list).

And that’s a fortiori, in which I count the letters of Paul overall as evidence for historicity! (A fact people keep forgetting; see Chapter 11 of OHJ.) This is just on the strength of the rapid mythologization of Jesus in the Gospels, which is actually evidence against historicity (contrary to the usual apologetic notion that myths take longer to arise; that’s only of real people, whereas such rapid mythologization is actually not normal for real persons; it comports more with the models of Ned Ludd and John Frum; see OHJ, index; and near the end of Ch. 6, where I show it is far easier to so rapidly mythologize a non-existent person). I don’t count most of the content of the Gospels as evidence either way; but the extent of mythologization in them forms the basis for my prior probability (it puts Jesus in several classes of men, most of whom didn’t exist: see Chapter 5 of OHJ), and without the letters of Paul, there would be no evidence at all to change that conclusion.

On the a judicantiori side, however, I count the letters of Paul as very strong evidence against historicity, hence the lower bound on my error margins is quite low (1 in 12,000 or so), unlike my upper bound, which gives a historical Jesus a fighting chance (at 1 in 3).

Just curious. Out of the 15 Rank-Raglan characters you list as being in the same reference class as Jesus, which one of them do you think has the highest chance of actually being based on a historical person?

Would it be Jesus? Or is the evidence in Paul’s letters enough to make his non existence even more certain than the other heroes?

Thanks

Correct. That documentary, if that is what it argues, has the historical causation exactly backwards.

I cannot fathom where on Earth you ever read that the Dead Sea Scrolls were stashed in the 140s. Certainly never in any actual academic source.

It’s the other way around.

Again, indeed, that is nonsense.