Reddit Reddit reviews Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus

We found 25 Reddit comments about Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus
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25 Reddit comments about Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus:

u/epieikeia · 19 pointsr/TrueAtheism

Richard Carrier has explored this issue recently in a two-book series (Proving History, and On the Historicity of Jesus. Here is a lecture he gave while the second book was in progress, if you want an overview of the arguments. He's the most prominent historian I know of who considers a mythical Jesus most plausible.

u/McCaineNL · 15 pointsr/SneerClub

Sort of indirectly related to SneerClub subjects, I hope that's ok. Apparently this guy Richard Carrier - of course not himself a New Testament specialist at all - tried to show that Jesus did not exist by waving the Bayes wand. Needless to say, it got rather bad reviews in professional journals. It seems a pretty astonishing example though of the belief that by applying Bayes' formula to any subject, you don't need to actually know anything about it...

u/MegaTrain · 14 pointsr/DebateAnAtheist

Yes, quite a number.

His two peer-reviewed books on the subject:

u/Bilbo_Fraggins · 12 pointsr/DebateAnAtheist

> By the methods and standards of the historical community writ large, a historical Jesus existed.

I'm curious if you have any material to back this up. The most (only?) interesting part of the debate to me is whether historical Jesus studies actually uses good historical methods, and it's the topic of the book Carrier just wrote(which i haven't read yet, but have listened to an interview about).

I'm also not a historian, and really haven't looked into this issue, so I'm interested if you have any insights.

(FWIW, I couldn't care less if there was a historical, non-creedal Jesus or not. I'm really quite puzzled why people seem to care so much. But if everyone's gonna talk about it, I might as well learn something. ;-)

u/geophagus · 8 pointsr/atheism

The similarities of the crucifixion and resurrection to pagan stories are usually overstated.

Richard Carrier has one book out and another on the way addressing the issue from a more scholarly direction. Proving History is the first book. The second is due out in a few months if I remember correctly.

Robert M. Price also has a good work on the subject. The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems

Start with those two. They both have talks on YouTube about the historicity of the gospels. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm utterly convinced, but they are pretty compelling. Carrier and Eherman have had a bit of a feud over the issue and again, Carrier seems to have the better argument.

u/NukeThePope · 3 pointsr/atheism

If the certainty is your only gripe then I'm fully on your side and I apologize for any annoyance. I seem to have misunderstood the thrust of your argument.

By way of a peace offering, I'd like to try and interest you in Richard Carrier's Proving History, wherein he shows how much of the methodology of "classic" history, particularly regarding Jesus, is flawed, and suggests sharper tools for coming up with more confidence-inspiring conclusions.

u/techn0scho0lbus · 3 pointsr/books

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145595

Please have a look at Richard Carrier's great book that questions the historicity of Jesus. Richard is an athiest scholar who doesn't take it as granted that Jesus was a real person.

u/ruaidhri · 3 pointsr/atheism

I saw a lecture Richard Carrier gave where he gives out about jesus myth authors like this, because although Carrier himself is a notable Jesus myth hypothesis espouser, he finds the nonsense that is published saying Jesus is a myth is so flawed that it damages serious scholarly work which examines the historicity or not of Christ.

His book Proving History is an interesting book. It's more about rigor and methodology in history but he does touch on the historicity of Christ throughout. Worth a read nyway.

u/snarkfish · 3 pointsr/atheism
u/otakuman · 2 pointsr/IAmA

I recall Richard Carrier wrote a book precisely about that matter.

Proving History: Bayes' Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus.

u/MJtheProphet · 2 pointsr/DebateReligion

Additionally, you may be interested in Richard Carrier's discussion of the topic, and his new book Proving History and the upcoming On the Historicity of Jesus Christ.

u/MeatBrain · 2 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

Absolutely, Komponisto is the man too! Also, Richard Carrier's video on youtube is fantastic, and his new book Proving History has helped me to organize and answer epistemic worries that I have been struggling with for years. More and more I'm coming to understand why it truly is a revolution for rationality.

u/NNOTM · 2 pointsr/DebateReligion

I personally don't know much about the subject, but I do know that Richard Carrier has written a book about using Bayes' Theorem for examining the historicity of Jesus. I haven't read it, though.

edit: However, a review on amazon states that "Dr. Carrier is writing a second book to follow up this one called "On the Historicity of Jesus Christ" that will address that question. He does touch on the subject somewhat in this book, but the purpose of this book is to lay the theoretical groundwork for the next volume."

u/Kardinality · 2 pointsr/atheism

Good to hear there are still open-minded people out there. I think Richard Carrier is closer to the truth though 1, 2.

u/HighPriestofShiloh · 2 pointsr/mormondebate

>You seem to lean quite heavily on Bayesian Methodology. If you're interested, I'd like to discuss this a little bit more. You seem to be willing to apply probabilities to historic events.

Here is an outline of Bayes Theorem and its relevance to Histoical analysis.

http://www.richardcarrier.info/CarrierDec08.pdf

I recommend anything Richard Carrier.

Here is a book with the methodology in action.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145595

I probably suffer from some extreme confirmation bias as I was completely sold on this method before I ever heard of Richard Carrier. The New Testament was the first book in the canon that are started looking at using bayesian reasoning and it was a result of that analysis that I left Mormonism. I had stopped believing in Jesus before I began examining Mormon unique topics.

When I found Richard Carrier it was simply a validation on the way I aproached the question, he just did it way better than myself.

But I guess you can thank my BYU professors for my atheism. They sold me on statistics (although I was already taking statistics courses in highschool). Statistics has always been very intuitive for me. Learning it formally was such a delight.

If you are new to Bayes Theorem I would say start here. Best explanation I have found online for beginners.

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

u/rivvers · 1 pointr/todayilearned

No we shouldn't.

The controversy is that the evidence for Jesus is from Christian sources, and none of the evidence is from a time when he was said to have lived. There's also no record that he was mentioned in Roman Court, which is very very strange because 1.) Paul was tried at court, and it was not for following Christ even though he was at that time period. and 2.) Pontius Pilate supposedly executed him, and there would be a very bold record of that.


Currently the best source on these theiries are Richard Carrier, and mind you, he is an actual historian, not some crazy dude on the street. Check out his latest book if you're curious: http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145595

These are theories by actual historians, that are just as qualified and respected as Christian Scholars.

I'm not going to debate you because neither of us are qualified to do so, but please realize that there are other world views than your own, and that doesn't mean they're wrong.

u/jubydoo · 1 pointr/atheism

You can't cite the non-existence of a source, unless you sit down and read every book that's ever been written.

The most popular "source" that Christians cite for the historicity of Jesus is Josephus. However a number of historians have shown that those passages in Josephus (along with some others) were inserted after the fact.

Ultimately, though, the argument from skeptics and atheists is this: There is no historical evidence to back up the claims made in the Bible about Jesus. Being such extraordinary claims, one would expect these startling events to have been recorded by contemporary historians, but they were not. Therefore, until better evidence comes along, we are forced to conclude that Jesus -- at least, the Jesus of the Bible -- did not exist.

Here's a couple of good skeptical sources on the historicity of Jesus:

u/NukeGently · 1 pointr/atheism

I'm mostly on your side, but I'd like to oppose your recommendation of Ten Beautiful Lies.

Fitzgerald (of Ten beautiful lies, published as the book Nailed) is a poor representative of Jesus mythicism. He's no scholar, just an author hanging on the coat tails of real scholars, and some of the inaccuracies in his book show it.

Nailed was my first introduction to Jesus Mythicism and Fitzgerald's video about it is compellingly fun, but the material at the beginning about similarities (born on Dec 25, etc) between Jesus and other deities parallels Zeitgeist in being incorrect. I was sadly disappointed when I later discovered this.

Reputable names in the Jesus Myther field are: Earl Doherty, Robert Price, Thomas L. Thompson and Richard Carrier.

On the subject of Josephus and his Testimonium, I enjoyed what this guy had to say on the subject. He's arguing against well known "traditional" Bible historian Bart Ehrman, whose arguments for the historicity of Jesus often devolve into appeals to authority and chest thumping.

Personally, I think the guy to watch is Richard Carrier, whose recent book Proving History proposes using Bayes' Theorem to evaluate the validity of historical claims, and demonstrates that many of the methods used in "traditional" history, especially on the topic of Jesus, are inadequate. I'm looking forward to book 2 in this series, which specifically looks at the Jesus story.

You may enjoy Carrier's video talk, So…if Jesus Didn’t Exist, Where Did He Come from Then? , which summarizes his more important findings.

u/peto0427 · 1 pointr/exchristian

I would recommend Nailed by David Fitzgerald, Proving History by Dr. Richard Carrier, and On the Historicity of Jesus, also by Dr. Carrier

And I’ve perused Nailed, and have read both of the books I recommended by Dr. Carrier

u/AlwaysUnite · 1 pointr/atheism

You may be interested in these five books: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. These examine the claimed evidence of the existence of a historical jesus without presupposing any of christianity is true (i.e. they were written by atheist scholars). They judge it way more likely that the jesus story is a melting pot of earlier myths and stories without any basis in fact.

u/doofgeek401 · 1 pointr/Apologetics

Right away, a curious observer would find themselves wondering how, if this Theorem is the wonderful instrument of historical objectivity both Craig and Carrier claim it to be, two people can apply it and come to two completely contradictory historical conclusions.  Yet they both use Bayes Theorem to attempt to "prove" historical things.  Something does not make sense here.


Then if we turn to who doesn't use Bayes Theorem to analyse history we find this category includes ... pretty much every single historian on the planet.  Again, this should strike the objective observer as distinctly odd.  After all, if Bayes Theorem can genuinely be applied to determine the truth or otherwise of a historical event or proposition, it's exceedingly strange that thousands of historians all over the world are not applying this remarkable tool all the time.  Richard Carrier maintains that this is because every historian on earth, except him, is too ignorant and mathematically illiterate to understand the wonders of this remarkable tool and only he has been clever enough to realise that it can be applied to history.  Given that Thomas Bayes ' theorem was first published in 1763, our objective observer would be forgiven for finding it remarkable that no-one noticed that it could be used in this way until Richard Carrier, an unemployed blogger (and a person who isn't taken seriously by most scholars), came along.

​

There are two problems here when it comes to trying to apply Bayes Theorem to history: (i) Carrier and Craig need to treat questions of what happened in the past as the same species of uncertainty as what may happen in the future and (ii) historical questions are uncertain precisely because we don't have defined and certain data to feed into the equation.


Bayes Theorem only works in cases where we can apply known information.  So, in the example above, we know how often it rains in a year and we know when the weather forecast is and isn't correct.  So by inputing this meaningful data, we can get a meaningful result out the other end of the equation.


This is not the case with history.


Bayes Theorem's application depends entirely on how precisely the parameters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality.  With a historical question, Carrier is forced to think up probabilities for each parameter he put into the equation.  This is a purely subjective process - he determines how likely or unlikely a parameter in the question is and then decides what value to give that parameter.  So the result he gets at the end is purely a function of these subjective choices. 


In other words: garbage in/garbage out.


So it's not surprising that Carrier comes up with a result on the question of whether Jesus existed that conforms to his belief that Jesus didn't - he came up with the values that were inevitably going to come up with that result.  If someone who believed Jesus did exist did the same thing, the values they inputted would be different and they would come up with the opposite result.  This is why historians don't bother using Bayes Theorem.


So what exactly is Carrier doing by applying this Theorem in a way that it can't be applied?  Apart from being incompetent, he seems to be doing little more than putting a veneer of statistics over a subjective evaluation and pretending he's getting greater precision. 


Not surprisingly, despite his usual grandiose claims that his use of Bayes Theorem is some kind of revolution in historiography, his book Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (2012)   has pretty much sunk without trace and been generally ignored by historical Jesus scholars and historians alike.  His failure to convince anyone except a gaggle of historically clueless online atheist fanboys of his vast genius means that Carrier is most likely to remain what he is: an unemployed blogger and general nobody with a fringe thesis.

u/vibrunazo · 0 pointsr/atheism

All of those are old tired arguments thoroughly debunked by Richard Carrier one by one. Who is the only historian in the history of humanity who has papers on the historicity of Jesus actually published on peer reviewed journals. So up to this day, his research on the subject is the only one that can be called scientific.

He shows all the evidence we do have shows there was never a Jesus. No, not even in the sense that the biblical stories were inspired by a real man. There was never that real man to begin with, it's straight made up myth from start to finish.

http://www.amazon.com/Proving-History-Bayess-Theorem-Historical/dp/1616145595

u/christgoldman · 0 pointsr/DebateAnAtheist

In history, especially as it applies to the Christian tradition, you should never go with what the majority says for many good reasons. You should check every bit of work you find and read it for yourself. The majority of biblical studies is a cess-pool of preconceived notions and bad scholarship.

More:

The End of Biblical Studies, Hector Avalos

Online: Ignatian Vexation, Richard Carrier

Proving History, Richard Carrier

One of the first Great examples of using historical methods on theological issues: The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, David Friedrich Strauss (1860)