“…this still doesn’t make more probable the theory Jesus didn’t exist.” — Yes, it does. You seem to not grasp the distinction between binary and probability reasoning. Yes, “Maybe” Mark did something else. But you can’t get from “maybe” he did to “probably” he did, without frequency data. How probable is it that Mark did what you think, as opposed to what I think? That is a frequency: how often is what I say, what happened to people like Jesus; vs. how often is what you say, what happened to people like Jesus. That gives us a ratio. Which gives us the frequency. Which gives us the prior probability. This is fundamental to the logic of probability. Exactly the opposite of “absurd,” it is logically necessarily always the case. Of everything.

Hence again, I fully include the possibility that Rank-Raglan heroes are mythologized real persons, just as you suggest. I still find the frequency of that happening, is less than 1 in 3, even at best. Because I couldn’t find actual cases of it happening more often than that (and honestly, not even as often as that). That’s why the RR class is relevant: for the same reason that belonging to it makes the prior probability that Dionysus or Osiris existed low, it makes the prior probability that Jesus existed low. But only the prior. Actual evidence of their existence, can easily overcome that prior.

One cannot disregard evidence tending toward myth. When it usually means myth…it usually means myth. The only question is, how often. And answering that question only gets you to the prior. Not to the actual probability Jesus existed. The prior is not the posterior. The posterior is the combination of the prior and the logical consequences of the evidence particular to Jesus.

Except we know Jesus belongs to a narrower class they do not. Fully addressed in OHJ, Ch. 6.5, “Alternative Class Objection.” Rather like saying Betty Crocker belongs to the reference class of TV celebrities, 95% of whom exist. Wrong math. Betty Crocker belongs to the reference class of TV celebrities who are corporate mascots. Less than 50% of whom exist.

And this consequence can’t be avoided by dividing the attributes, so as to sneak the telltale ones into e and hide them from b, to get the 95% prior you wanted. Because then the data you snuck back into e drops the posterior back below 50% as soon as you reintroduce it. Which you are logically required to do. See “Betty Crocker” in the index of OHJ and, again, Chapter 6.5, but also Chapter 6.2 which explains how the math actually works when you try to arbitrarily pick reference classes and pretend the others don’t exist.

We can’t hide from data. It all goes in. The results can’t be avoided.

The natural reference class for Jesus is ‘purported Jewish messianic figures’, and they all exist.

(1) Lataster writes “The evidence Carrier used in deriving the crucial prior probability was basically that the Gospels portray Jesus in a way that is typical of entirely fictional characters. That doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t exist, but it does mean that a low prior is justified and we would thus require extra evidence (quantitatively or qualitatively) than normal to be convinced of his historical existence (pg. 388).”

This comment by Lataster is absurd. Even if the Gospel of Mark is a literary narrative that doesn’t reflect the events in the life of the historical Jesus, this still doesn’t make more probable the theory Jesus didn’t exist. Maybe Mark wanted to write a narrative piece of eschatological or apocalyptic writing depicting historical figures he knew like John The Baptist, Pilate, and Jesus caught up in events at the end of time. After all, Acts is also a piece of historical fiction that is largely fictional but still about people that existed.

(2) The Rank Raglan mythic hero archetype has nothing to do with the mythicist/historicist debate, because all Jesus’ high score on the Rank Raglan criteria might mean is that Jesus had legendary material added to his biography to make him imitate someone like Oedipus who scores on virtually every category of the Rank Raglan scale (portraying Jesus as greater than Oedipus, like the way the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as greater than Dionysus cf. on Dionysus and Jesus see Dennis MacDonald’s new book).

Interesting I suppose. But I won’t exhaust time to examine that thesis because it can’t have anything to do with how Jews of Philo’s day were reading the text. And only the latter matters for my use of it.

No, that language is common. It doesn’t indicate any particular transmission vector (for a while scholars thought such language, being common in antiquity, meant no one read silently, that they only ever read aloud or heard texts read, but that was soundly debunked).

Philo knew scripture well. He was the most renowned authority on it of his day. There is no plausible way he wouldn’t know the whole verse he quotes a fragment of. And we know for sure he did, because his argument for why that verse is to be read the way he says, involves citing evidence that is in the passage but not his quote (e.g. that the figure there identified is both a High Priest and the Son of God).

(I’ve reproduced phonetically Hayes’s pronunciation of the name spelled “Zerubbabel” in the English translations I’ve looked at.)

“At some point, however, it seems that the Persians got rid of Zerubbavel. . . . So Zechariah’s prophecies seem to be adjusted to refer solely to Joshua. . . . Although chapter 6 in particular seems to refer originally to Zerubbavel, it is altered so that it now depicts Joshua as a shoot or a branch from Jesse’s stock . . . It says that Joshua shall rebuild the sanctuary.”

Hayes is talking only about the Hebrew text. She doesn’t mention the LXX version of Zechariah 6.

I think modern English translations generally use the Hebrew text. For 6:13, I find that some, like NRSV, agree roughly with LXX. “There shall be a priest by his throne . . .” Others, like NASB, have “He will be a priest on His throne . . .”

Hayes’s allusion to the sanctuary suggests that Zerubbabel was deposed before it was completed, making Zechariah 4:9 a failed prophecy. That suggests that the early chapters of Zechariah, like Daniel 11, were written by a contemporary of the events at issue.

Here’s an issue that seems to belong at the beginning of the inquiry. How confident can we be that Philo, in Confusion of Tongues 62, is alluding to Zechariah, or to scripture at all? Is it odd that Philo says he has “heard”, not “read”? Is that a common idiom for Philo, or anyone else, to use for alluding to scripture?

None of them discuss the cosmology of Jesus that directly. They are all writing allegorically (e.g. as I show with the withered fig tree pericope). Just as Paul says his “mother” is an allegory in Gal. 4.

For example, Mark’s passage with the carpenter (actually “craftsman”) remark is a mission allegory for Jesus being The Craftsman (and the Jews being blind to that fact). Or Luke’s passage that has Jesus reveal he was present eons ago to witness the Fall of Satan.

Some of these examples are covered in my book.

The evidence is multiple, though, most being surveyed in Sean McDonough’s Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine (cited in OHJ). Unfortunately too expensive to buy, you could get it through your local public library using InterLibraryLoan. More accessible, and likewise covering a lot of the evidence, Simon Gathercole’s The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (who was used also by McDonough).

More to the point, the Synoptics do not imagine Jesus as identical to God but as his sent emissary and viceroy. Exactly as Paul does, and the Christians before him did. The equation of Jesus and God did not happen until at least seventy years after the religion began.