Radical criticism does not employ any logical method. It is based on a massive epicycle-build that trounces its prior toward zero, and offers no evidence with a favorable likelihood ratio, much less large enough to reverse its tanked prior.

It’s therefore of no use starting with as a premise. It needs a defense that would convince at least a superminority of scholars first. Only then could one build any further thesis on top of it (like how Christianity might have then begun without a real Jesus).

Proper procedure is to build any such thesis right now on only those facts that are either (a) already a consensus or (b) overwhelmingly provable with evidence (and not brobdingnagian speculation). I explain this in the background chapters of OHJ (Chs. 4, 5, and 7).

Nevertheless, I am funded to develop an article with some examples from Detering next year, which will illustrate why radcrit is a methodological failure. But in the meantime, for the general point, see:

How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?

And:

The Historicity of Paul the Apostle

Also relevant may be:

Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?

Note that if you uncharitably assume that is what he meant, then his statement makes even less sense and is even more embarrassing—because mythicists also agree with the existence of that evidence. So he would then not be saying anything relevant.

The only way to get his statement to be meaningful in this context is if he meant that 80% of scholars agree these facts are positive evidence for historicity, which is just a colloquial way of saying “agree these facts entail such favorable likelihood ratios.”

It’s possible Kovacs is so nutheaded he doesn’t even understand that, but then his post is even more incompetent than I found it.

Islam is correct. Facebook does not tell us why access is blocked. It can be for many reasons, not all nefarious. Hence I didn’t say the action was nefarious, only that I didn’t know the reason for it. The natural immediate audience reaction is to ask “Does he have a beef with you?” so I dispelled that with a note that I am not aware of any such reason.

Although it must still be pointed out:

Even limited access settings can be morally problematic here—slander is still slander even when whispered to a single person in a closet. I get the impression Kovacs doesn’t understand that his post is legally libelous and thus immoral, not just erroneous. But to try and slander someone while hiding it being discovered, by any means (even well meaning, such as only communicating that slander to “your friends”), is still censurable behavior.

I don’t know if he will learn this lesson or not.

Thank you for the kind remarks.

As to the question of why, the motives are multiple. For the religious, it’s because they have staked their entire hopes and identity on Jesus being real (and not just real, but exactly the sort of person their sect has constructed him to be, regardless of the historical data). For the nonreligious, it tends to be some sort of emotional hostility to “mythicism evangelism,” whereby mythicism is used to mock or refute Christianity or promote wild conspiracy theories that make atheists (and thus, they worry, themselves) look foolish (rather than merely a serious exploration of history), making it again an identity threat issue. It can also be other things (financial motives; social motives; personal motives; academic motives; etc.). I’ve seen various different motivations spill into view with this.

The problem is that delusionality and irrationality are a natural tendency of human beings, so becoming obsessed with angrily defending a false belief is something humans are just prone to. Critical thinking is unnatural; it goes against our innate intuitions, and is literally scary. That’s why so few do it, at all, much less commit to it as a core life value.

I have formal response papers in development.

But the short answer is: they commit errors in set theory and genre theory that nullify their results (in fact their arguments were already refuted in the original study, e.g. in the Alternative Class Objection section of Ch. 7 of OHJ). They are “forcing in” people who don’t belong to the actual set (in effect creating a wholly new set that cannot logically replace the original one).

The only thing with merit is that they make a solid case for adding Alexander, Apollonius, and Mithradates to the actual set. But since I already allowed up to four of its members could be historical, their finding three does not alter my math in any significant way. Insofar as it has any effect at all, it ironically lowers my upper bound to around 25%, but increases my lower bound to around 20%, and so they have only narrowed the error of margins within the wider margin my study already gave. So anyone committed to historicity a fortiori could just stick with my margins; meanwhile, even this result of theirs has no effect on Lataster’s “overgenerous” case for the edge probability being near 50%.

The first is a four hour YouTube video and I could imagine some reluctance to spend that much time on it. The latter two allegedly passed peer review. The speakers say they already had a conversation with you about this, but I am not aware of either a rebuttal of it from you or proposed revised probabilities.

To be clear, if we change the upper estimate of the probability of Jesus existing from 33% to 80% (arbitrary example), we still have reason to doubt it. So I am not saying that the claim in the title of OHJ is jeopardized by this.

I know that you have repeatedly illustrated why this is a huge equivocation fallacy, but I still find this reason very prevalent in most non-religious responses.

It’s fascinating and refreshing to see how your arguments through rational empirical evidence blows other scholars out of the water. Wow, “OTHJ just explained something completely different than what I listened to on so and so’s podcast…!” Don’t get me wrong, many scholars bring good learning to the table, but critical thinking is what we need MUCH more of…! Thank you for that.

I have been on this Historical search for Jesus and the origins of the NT for some time now and its amazing how the deeper you go, the more things seem to parallel mythological stories of the Greeks and Romans and beyond. My new thought has been simply WHY??? Why do people in Apologetics, and Theology want to insist that ancient writings in Greek, Hebrew, etc…. are historically true and accurate?

The psychology of religious belief is something that’s wildly fascinating to me. It could be as simple as fear of the unknown and what happens after we die. I like what Yuval Harrari said in Sapiens, the cognitive revolution 50/70K years ago gave us the ability to begin to tell stories. Im glad we can tell stories, just not the kind that terrifies and dominate a culture. Keep up the remarkable scholarship Richard, and thanks for introducing me to your friend Davis Fitzgerald. Y’all keep presenting us “students” with the material and we’ll keep doing our homework….!

Todd from TX

Dr. Carrier said “blocked my access to his Facebook post” not “blocked me” which either means that they are friends on Facebook but Kovacs went out of his way to specifically excluded Dr. Carrier from the friends able to see the post or that Dr. Carrier expects, as courtesy, that since he mentioned him by name, he should have made it a public post or at least included him in the target audience.