You’re right. I confused which part of his discussion this related to. And this does matter (not essentially, as you note, but still). I will revise the article accordingly.

Well, to believers, it won’t matter. Either a nonexistent Jesus is an existential threat, or they can revert to the original theology (and believe, as Paul did, that Jesus really was killed by Satan in the clouds, and never really a Galilean preacher). But outside that context, it’s just like any other historical question: how did this religion begin? Just as for the Cargo Cults: whether John Frum existed is simply an incidental question of origins; since if he didn’t, then we have to answer what then did happen, which we happen by accident to know because anthropologists were on the original island when it began.

But there are consequences that matter to historians who are only interested in the nonsupernatural truth: if Frum/Jesus didn’t exist, then we are studying the sacred texts in all the wrong ways and searching for all the wrong answers. We’re wasting time on a futile task (recovering the “real” Frum/Jesus) rather than increasing our knowledge of why stories about them came to be written and what they actually meant when composed.

For an example of what I mean, see Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords?

Ah, thank you. I lacked the specific knowledge of what “mainstream scholarship” meant in context with this topic. I tend to favor theological arguments like “why did Jesus have to die on the cross and be resurrected a day and a half later?” over historical arguments like “did a historical Jesus actually (appear to) die on a cross and rise from the dead a day and a half later?”

Apologists like to separate the historical argument from the theological argument in a divide-and-conquer approach because that allows them to avoid an inconvenient steel-manning of their historical claims to expose the outrageous theological claims about “why?” that, if true, paint a God that is wholly unworthy of worship.

From a mainstream historical scholar’s perspective, what are the important and relevant differences between a heavily mythologized historical Jesus and a nonexistent historical Jesus that is pure fiction? Rereading your post, it seems these differences are important enough to you to caution against viewing him as the former rather than the latter.

Note that we don’t usually need to run Bayesian maths on questions already met with overwhelming evidence (that’s like trying to do math to work out whether you can leap over Mount Everest from its base—why bother, when you already can tell the answer is squarely “No”?).

We also don’t usually need to run maths on questions no one disputes the answers of.

And so, on the first point, the historicity of George Washington is not something we need calculate. The evidence is overwhelming and thus settled. You usually only need math when the evidence is scarce, ambiguous, and problematic.

And on the second point, whether George Washington was unfailingly honest is not really a subject of dispute: everyone agrees he probably wasn’t (even if he was above average in honesty in some degree), simply on priors alone (and the fact that the kind of evidence one would need to reverse those priors doesn’t exist—for hardly even anyone, much less specifically him).

Sub-questions about which stories about him are false or not known to be true (which are not the same conclusion) are moot here, because (to carry over the analogy) all mainstream scholars agree Jesus was heavily mythologized, so we aren’t even arguing that with anyone (except religious fanatics, but that’s why they aren’t describably mainstream and their opinions are generally side-eyed by everyone else for a good reason).

The mythicist position (as so-labeled) is not that a historical Jesus was mythologized (or even mythologized beyond any access to the real man), but that there was no such person at all (and in the mainstream—as in, the only and multiply peer reviewed—version of mythicism, the first generation of Christianity Jesus was solely known as a revelatory being, akin to the Angel Moroni in Mormonism; the notion that he was a person on Earth was invented a lifetime later).

Or perhaps on the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and “father, I cannot tell a lie.”

The percentage chance that George Washington actually existed in history would not show up in such a study, right? Instead, the focus would be on the historicity of the hagiographic claims regarding George’s alleged strong penchant for honesty.

That’s what struck me about this post — most (all?) mythicism claims about Jesus do not rest on the hypothesis that there was no historical basis for the specific character of Jesus but rather that most (all?) relevant religious claims made by these hagiographies of a possibly/likely real person were shaped by common tropes that came from the mythologies of the time when these authors wrote them.

That is, at a fundamental level they are constructing a straw man argument that few (no?) actual mythicists pursue.

That’s been tried, but rarely correctly. Bayes’ Theorem is just like Aristotelian logic: you can use it to make any conclusion you want, if you hide the fact well that your premises are bogus and your datasets rigged and incomplete or incorrectly framed.

For an example, follow this thread. It’s not always spot on conceptually, but it calls attention to how the game is rigged, and what actually needs doing: a correctly conducted, professional stylometric comparison of Shakespeare with any other known author of the time who left a body of work—this is the only correct method, and everything else tried is bullshit (other evidence matters and should be assessed, but it cannot be central, only supplemental).

So anyone who claims to prove a point about that with Bayes, ask: are they relying substantially on stylometrics (word frequency, idiom frequency, average sentence length, punctuation, article and particle use, and other grammatical behaviors)? If the answer is no, toss it in the garbage. They don’t know what they are doing. It’s a scam.

If the answer is yes, then ask: are they doing it correctly? For example, do they have arguments like “Shakespeare used this word one time; Edward used it all the time; therefore Edward wrote Shakespeare”? If the answer is yes, toss it in the trash. They don’t know what they are doing. “Shakespeare used this word one time; Edward used it all the time” is evidence against Edward being the author.

And so on.

Also ask: do they lie? For example, if they claim there is no contemporary evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship, they are lying. And if they never consider that evidence in their math, they are scheming. Once you catch someone lying and scheming, toss it in the trash and never trust them again.

I have not thoroughly checked, but I am not aware of any honest, competent Bayesian analysis of this question. It all seems to be cranks and liars. I suspect this is because math is hard, so honest literature majors shun the method, leaving cranks to pick it up (much as happened with Bayes in Christian apologetics).

Is it?

Because that would be even more damning.