Not a useful observation. I discuss why in On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 257 n. 8. There are lots of places in Galilee Jesus doesn’t go. We can’t draw any conclusions from that, unfortunately.

Briefly:

(1) Indeed, I have polished all the Rank-Raglan criteria to improve their clarity and accuracy for the original purpose. This is only partly based on Dundes. It is partly my own refinement. The effect of which is to match the examples actually proffered by Rank and Raglan (thus eliminating their verbal ambiguity in naming the criteria) while making the criteria more strict (and thus harder to score, as any method of criteria should be).

(2) I don’t count scorers from outside Greco-Roman antiquity, as I do not believe those can be relevant. They are too historically and culturally out-of-context, and being post-Christian in a Christian world, too easily a product of influence from Christianity (a phenomenon that cannot be explained for the origins of Christianity itself).

(3) Covington’s math is inapplicable because his set is incomplete (e.g. he left out several: see last paragraph in my commentary on the Hallquist review; and even that list is unlikely to be complete). You would have to make sure you had all high scorers before you could calculate the ratio. I would not even expect Covington to engage the massive literature review necessary to locate all modern and medieval scorers, even in Western culture, much less beyond. And again, such a task would be moot, since those exemplars should not be counted (for the reasons stated in item (2)).

(4) The concern that members even from Greco-Roman antiquity have been left out can only be answered by finding members from Greco-Roman antiquity that were left out. And then recalculating.

(5) Item (1) is why Mithradates does not rate: the criteria were applied so loosely almost anyone would score (OHJ, pp. 231-32, n. 193). That nullifies the utility of the criteria. It’s the wrong reference class (same as the Josephan Christs class: ch. 6 § 5). You should think of it this way: Mithradates belongs to two sets, the set of “loosely scored RR heroes” and the set of “tightly scored RR heroes.” Only the latter set is relevant for my argument. It is a subset of the former set, and by the law of greater knowledge, when you know a member belongs to a narrower set, you have to use the narrower set (if you have good enough data for that set for the switch to produce any benefit in knowledge). Otherwise you are violating a basic principle of logic (omitting known facts).

For example, if you say John is unlikely to have shot several people in the head because he was a politician and politicians rarely do that, you are not deploying valid logic if John was a politician in Nazi Germany. Leaving out the narrowing factor does not get you to a valid counter-class. If John belongs to the narrower class “politicians in Nazi Germany,” then you have to include the consequences of that fact in your analysis.

Yes, you have a correct read on the situation.

Oh, I have the book! Unsurprisingly, I had it open to chapter six when I wrote the question.

I can see a stark difference that exists when you are trying to write a book like OHJ, where you’re trying to give a fairly comprehensive evaluation of the evidence and your audience most likely is unjustifiably certain on various hypotheses, versus when compared to a social situation in which two people are trying to update each other by sharing evidence.

In the former situation, you’re deliberately calling a good deal of attention to the bucket of things that you’ve formed as “a prior”. It’s expected, really, that people respond to it, and I feel a little embarrassed to have asked the question.

The core reason I asked the question at all is that some people who purportedly understand Bayes’ theorem still ignore discussion of evidence in favor of relentlessly moving to attack someone’s nebulous priors, if a difference is detected with respect to their own, and I am confused by this. It’s made me reluctant to share more than the faintest hint about priors, even ones that are meticulously examined.

I don’t know if this sort of lashing out just a reflexive attack on a person who apparently disagrees (the rough equivalent of shouting), or if the attacker is just genuinely confused about the idea that there may be big evidence that has not been shared (potentially for very good reasons, like that it would not be convincing to the other party, or requires quite a lot of background to make any sense of, and will take lots of time, or could hurt someone).

I hadn’t considered that this might be some sort of bizarre attack on the mere idea of inference or straight up apologetics. I believe you have substantially more experience in these sorts of discussions than I do, and if that is in your hypothesis space, then perhaps it ought to be in mine as well. I have definitely seen people declare a variety of subjects as being completely immune to analysis.

I will examine the construction of chapter six more closely, on your advice.

Thank you for your insights. I am very much looking forward to seeing how the format is received. I am enjoying the book.

But this post makes it clear (or should) that apologists who cite references to Pontius Pilate as if that were evidence are doing the equivalent as if they found a reference to British Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair in the Harry Potter series and decided that those works of fiction were a documentary. Thanks.

The question that occurs to me is, why is 12 items on the Rank-Raglan list used as the cutoff?

Because the probability of non-existence rises the higher you score, and Jesus scores near top of the list–and even just from Mark he scores 14. So placing the cut-off at 11 was generous. Once you get below 12, the probability of chance matches is so high the ranking becomes meaningless (you are then talking about too large a reference class, violating the Rule of Greater Knowledge; this is all explained in chapter 6).

The significance is that this effect (the probability of non-existence rises the higher you score) is an observation, not a prediction; hence there is something significant about the score, regardless of the causal interdependence or oddness of some of the criteria (an issue I address in ch. 6). That’s what makes it useful. If you added more criteria, you would have to raise the benchmark, so as to ensure you are still tracking this phenomenon, and not just adding random people to the class.

For the same reason…

…why the exact Rank-Raglan list at all? Would a subset of items be better?

Because it’s the narrowest applicable reference class for which we have a lot of data. That’s “a lot” by ancient history standards, not scientific standards. But still far more than we have for any other class (I give examples in chapter 6). No other class comes close, leaving margins of error too wide to use (which is why I find the other mythic elements in the Gospels unusable as evidence against historicity; the Rank-Raglan class is the only one for which we have a sizable number of class members to draw inferences from, and note that even then I allow a wide margin of error).

A subset would increase the probability of chance matches and thus reduce the relevance of the class (per above) and also result in missing otherwise identifiable members of the class (because of the spotty survival of evidence, we don’t have the complete dossiers on every prospective member).

To the contrary, we should want to increase the criteria as much as possible, without resulting in leaving out too many applicable cases, or including too many inapplicable ones. So you want a criteria-set that creates (a) a lot of examples fitting the profile (i.e., not just two exemplars; which requires less criteria) and (b) reduces the risk of examples fitting the profile purely by accident (which requires more criteria). So you want something that’s not too little and not too much.

Since Jesus scores 14 to 20, we don’t want too many fewer than that to count (to ensure we are placing Jesus in a relevant class, and not just ignoring the fact that he scores so high), but we also don’t want so many required that all you have left in the class are Jesus and Oedipus. Conversely you want to avoid the multiple comparisons fallacy. So you need parallels that are widely paralleled, i.e. by many exemplars, and not things that appear only twice (see “Lincoln-Kennedy” in the index).

Mathematically you could do this the long way and run up your iterated priors by progressively narrowing the class (from the set of all who score 1 hit and above, to the set of all who score 2 hits and above, and so on). Thus it actually doesn’t matter where you cut it off, unless you cut it so far to where you have so small a class that you eliminate the utility of even having the class (because this creates margins of error too wide to be useful, as per every other case).

I cut to the chase in ch. 6 by showing that even if we started with something like the “score 1+” class, by the time we got to the “score 12+” class we would end up in the same place as if we just started at the 12+ class. But if you really wanted to, you could burn several pages of math doing every step singly all the way there. The trick is finding class members at each stage (a lot of unnecessary work), in order to graph how historicity declines. Knowing that that will be a waste of time in the end saves you the trouble of doing it. You could even show that by calculating for every possible ratio at every possible stage of this iterated process: you still end up in the same place. And that’s what I show in ch. 6 (with some examples).

And then, once you got beyond 12, you would be narrowing the class so much that your margins of error start to consume your ratios, negating any utility of continuing. The margin of 1-to-4 historical out of 15 members is the best you are ever going to get.

The key observation is how there are so few historical persons beyond a certain point, and within a class of non-trivial size, and Jesus is well beyond that point. If this was just all random accident, there should be as many historical persons (by proportion) scoring above 11 as score below. That that isn’t the case entails this is a thing, and not an accident: it really genuinely is unusual for any historical person to score so high. So that Jesus scores well above that is a significant observation. All I do is calculate how significant, even allowing for wide margins of error.

Do I use BT in other things? Yes. But usually not explicitly (so that I don’t have to explain the framework). It is easily done without the person you are talking to even being aware of it (unless they are also Bayesians).

Do I detect a preference for attacking my priors? Curiously, no. Almost always they attack e or P(e|h) or P(e|~h). Except when I am explicit about using Bayes–then will they flip to attacking the prior instead–often because that is the apologetic they’ve been trained in (the mantra “arbitrary priors” is like “a banana is obviously intelligently designed”), or the thing they least understand (making it easier to confuse ignorance with incredulity). But I also know how to preempt those attacks, and designed chapter 6 in OHJ to do so, making it a lot harder. Indeed, technically impossible, since there I actually start with every possible prior, and show that we end up in the same place (so no attack on the prior is possible; they have to attack the reference class’s likelihood ratio, which is attacking the evidence). Notably, that trick can be used in every other Bayesian argument about anything, so it’s worth getting the book just to have that model for doing that, in defense of any sound prior you ever employ.

As my cited pages in NIF show, other historians discussing Acts have said exactly the same thing. So experts are with you on that one. Until they don’t want to be.

If so, have you observed a preference in people for attacking your priors (if you choose to disclose them) instead just considering the evidence you put forward?