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mediator53's review
5.0
Utterly fascinating! The math can be a challenge at times, but not the logic. Looking forward to the next instalment in this most interesting (and vitally important) debate.
slapshottechnology's review
challenging
medium-paced
5.0
Fantastic look at all the lack of evidence for an historical Jesus. Looks of references to lack of primary sources, lots of data.
mark_lm's review against another edition
5.0
A massive detailed scholarly work. You cannot read this and fail to learn scores or hundreds of things about the history-sociology-theology of antiquity. The author’s use of Bayes Theorem did not initially seem problematic to me, and I supposed that the attempt to summarize all of his arguments was worthwhile (when all is said and done, he favors that the odds that an historical Jesus existed is less than 1 in 12,000), but the arbitrariness of the prior probabilities, and the peculiarity of some of his arguments, e.g. comparing the probability that an historical person meets the Rank-Raglan hero type criteria with the probability that a non-historical person does, sometimes made the effort seem like window dressing. The author’s use of Bayes Theorem has been widely attacked, but there are obviously a lot of opponents with strong feelings to any non-religious analytical discussion of Jesus, to say the least, and after reading their objections on the Internet, I’m confident that at least some of them don’t know what they are talking about. (The clearest discussion that I’ve found so far is here: https://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/a-mathematical-review-of-proving-history-by-richard-carrier/). Nevertheless, I agree with the author anyway, and I thought that his book was fascinating.
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Additional comment: If you are looking for the probability of event B and it is conditioned on many events A, then all of the events A have to be pairwise disjoint events, i.e. they make up a single probability space altogether. That this is true in Carrier’s book is not clear to me.
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Additional additional comment: You might like this video of the author discussing this book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTllC7TbM8M.
==============================================
Additional comment: If you are looking for the probability of event B and it is conditioned on many events A, then all of the events A have to be pairwise disjoint events, i.e. they make up a single probability space altogether. That this is true in Carrier’s book is not clear to me.
==============================================
Additional additional comment: You might like this video of the author discussing this book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTllC7TbM8M.
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