Physics Guy wrote: ↑Tue Jun 27, 2023 8:15 pm
It would help a lot to assess the methodology of the mythicists if we could see how well it worked on some other cases in which concrete but fictitious historical details were invented and attributed to superhuman figures of legend or religion.
That’s the start of carrier’s case. What do you mean?
Do Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill have undisputed home towns? Do their parents have names? Do any of their stories include run-ins with real historical figures? Like, does Pecos Bill ever meet Wild Bill Hickok? Does Paul Bunyan cut down a tree for Abraham Lincoln?
They aren’t ancient characters. Jesus’ story was written at a time when like figures were already in the literature, if you will. Heracles for instance was obvious well knwon by mark as he utilized Heracles’ myth in his own character creation.
If so, can Carrier's methods be applied to indicate, without just assuming it, that all those historical details were just retconned inventions about legendary heroes who never really existed at all? Can we then turn around and check to make sure that the method doesn't try to tell us that George Washington and Daniel Boone were mythical, just because legends grew up around them?
Yes we can. GW and Dan Boone don’t seem to fit the bill. They don’t make the list. Jesus is perhaps the most heavily mythologized character out there.
I mean, it would seem like a good way to calibrate the methodology. We just need a few precedent cases for the backwards kind of myth-making that Jesus mythicists postulate, and then some cases of mythologized real people, to see how well the methodology distinguishes them.
That’s been done and talked about here in previous threads.
Sorry long quote but I don’t to rehash this again while still trying to be helpful and responsive to your complaint:
In my study I surveyed various approaches to that question, but settled on one for having two virtues over all the others: since Jesus undeniably belongs to the superset of highly mythologized persons, we want to find any subset of ancient persons who were definitely highly mythologized that has the most members of any such set, and whose belonging to that set was difficult to achieve, requiring the largest conjunction of peculiar features. These two conditions typically work at odds: as you have to meet more peculiar features to fit a set, the fewer people who are going to fit it.
I surveyed examples of that phenomenon by looking at other highly dramatized sets Jesus belongs to, like the Socrates-Aesop “countercultural hero” set (Element 46) and the “ascending-hero” set (Element 48), whose most famous member is Romulus, mythical founder of Rome (see Richard Miller’s peer-reviewed analysis in Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity, which wasn’t yet published in 2014 but I did cite an early article of his on the subject). These sets are highly particular but have very few pertinent members, creating a statistical risk of anomaly too great to work with (see my analysis of this point, and of the mathematical point to follow, in my response to Kamil Gregor). I also looked at suffering savior lords (Element 31), none of whom were historical (yet all of whom were set in history and given de facto historical biographies), but even those are only a handful in number. Jesus, it turns out, unusually belongs to a lot of heavily mythologized sets. Which simply reflects the general fact that he was highly mythologized. But it’s hard to identify the total membership of such a superset, since what qualified as “highly” mythologized is hard to nail down so precisely.
But lo, we have a set that does meet both the conditions needed for doing that: the Rank-Raglan Hero set (Element 48), which, counting Jesus, has fifteen members, and whose membership requires a significant number of peculiar conjunctions, too many for chance accident (or even gerrymandering) to produce membership to any likelihood worth worrying about. The significance of this is not that Jesus was molded to be one of these heroes. That’s as incidental as that he was molded to fit the Socrates-Aesop set and the Ascending Hero set, and to look like yet another suffering personal savior Lord, and to be a new Moses and Elijah, and so on. Any of that can be done to a historical person as well as a purely mythical one. Rather, what’s significant is that we know Jesus was highly mythologized, and yet here we have a usable proxy to that set to measure with: being substantially rendered into a Rank-Raglan hero is an instance of high mythologization; and we have fifteen people from that same era also being that mythologized; so now we have a definable and countable reference class representative of the larger (if more vague) superset of all “highly mythologized persons.”
If you want to know how typical it was for a highly mythologized person to turn out to ever have been historical—since obviously both real people and fake ones could receive this treatment, so what we want to know is how often—you can look at the Rank-Raglan set and see how many members of that set were historical. That will proxy to the entire category of highly mythologized persons, because it is one instance of being highly mythologized, has a lot of members, and is hard to belong to. It’s unlikely Rank-Raglan heroes were “more often” historical or mythical than any other kind of highly mythologized person. If few (or indeed none) of them were historical, then it is unlikely any other kind of comparably mythologized person is going to be any more often historical than that, much less a person who is both mythologized into that set and also other highly mythical sets (there is no plausible way that fact is going to increase the prior probability of Jesus being historical).
Certainly, if you want to claim something else, you have to empirically prove it; otherwise, once we see Jesus is in this set and none of its other members were historical, to maintain Jesus nevertheless existed we must admit that Jesus has to be a rare exception to one empirically observed rule. Which makes the historicity of Jesus a remarkable claim, requiring remarkable evidence. Just as for other members of that set, it would be weird for Jesus to be the lone historical example. And weird is just another way of saying improbable. (All the objections one might have to this, such as regarding how quickly this happened to Jesus, or other sets Jesus might also belong to that have more historical members, and so on, I fully address already in OHJ.)
This can’t be artificial. There is no statistically credible way to gerrymander a set of so many mythical persons with so many particular criteria having to be met. This can be done with small sets (hence I discuss the infamous Lincoln-Kennedy convergences in OHJ as an example of a gerrymandered set) or with easy-to-meet conditions for membership (like “religious founders” with just one or two cherry-picked things in common); but hard-to-meet conditions for membership cannot possibly “conveniently” rope in over a dozen members none of whom happen to be historical. Any such attempt would inevitably rope in a lot of historical members, too—unless it was objectively unlikely for historical members to meet those conditions. Which is precisely what we want to know.
Even so, a set as small as fifteen still requires large margins of error to account for potential statistical anomalies, and so I set in my study a large error margin of 4 members. That means, of the fourteen besides Jesus, in actual fact we have no reason to believe any were historical, for a count of 0 historical members (leading to a Laplacean probability any new member would be historical of 1 in 16); but on the other side of my error margin I assume maybe, unbeknownst to us, as many as 4 were historical, leading to a Laplacean probability any new member would be historical of near enough to 1 in 3 that I just set that as the upper bound.
So anyone else we might dig up in historical records who fits the Rank-Raglan class we can say has at best a 1 in 3 chance of being historical—until we look at any evidence particular to them, which could establish they are indeed in that 1 in 3 (or 1 in 16), and therefore one of those exceptions. Jesus just so happens to be someone else in historical records who fits the class. So we cannot privilege Jesus. He cannot be any more likely to be historical, on prior considerations alone, than anyone else in the set (from Moses to Hercules). To act otherwise would be to substitute prejudice for objective historical fact. If you want to argue for a different frequency of ancient historical persons in that set, you have to do the work and prove it. Until then, I’ve met a sufficient burden of evidence: I found no other members in antiquity; and all the members I found were ahistorical; it’s hard to qualify as a member; yet there were a lot of members; and Jesus is a member. You have to simply deal with this fact.
I also increased the a fortiori strength of that case by being more stringent on membership requirements than Rank or Raglan were, such that in some cases I got lower (and in no case higher) scores for the heroes they graded as belonging to the set. This was due to some of the details claimed for them to make them fit one or another criterion being a bit too vague to be certain. For example, Raglan counts Oedipus as “reputed to be the son of a God” based on an inference that maybe he implied it at one point in his mythic cycle, but I find that inference too vague to count. Whereas I grant Raglan counting “the circumstances of his conception are unusual” because, indeed, central to Oedipus’s entire myth is a mystery over who his parents were. Who conceived him was not only in doubt, but indeed turns out so unusual as to result in him unknowingly killing his father and marying his mother.
Note a key fact here: this does not mean miracles or the supernatural are required to meet any of the criteria for Rank-Raglan heroes. That can be a mechanism chosen in any given story, but there are also entirely realistic ways to get the same result. For example, that the hero’s mother “is a virgin” does not mean “virgin at his birth” (though of course that, too, would qualify) but simply “virgin at his conception,” or at least at consummation with the hero’s father. In other words, it just means his mother was a maiden when she married his father—as opposed to having had previous husbands or lovers. Perfectly ordinary.
As such, many historical people would have met that singular criterion, for example. It only starts to match a mythic pattern when found in conjunction with a larger number of other convenient facts. Raglan settled on twenty-two, and counted as members anyone meeting more than a handful. Being more stringent again, I count a member only if they score more than half of Raglan’s twenty-two criteria, which means a minimum score of 12. Any one of those twelve coincidences could be historically common (some maybe less so, but nevertheless, they are things that “could” happen, and not just impossible miracles). But to have at least twelve of them (out of a potential twenty-two) is simply not historically possible by chance accident—it would not be expected to occur historically even once, much less fifteen times!
This is what makes this evidence of mythologization. All these heroes have definitely been mythologized; indeed even conformed to what was evidently a quite popular mythotype. This should not be controversial. It’s as obvious as that Jesus was conformed mythically to Moses and Elijah (or even, as I also document, Socrates and Aesop). But what we can discern from this discovery is this: we can now look in that set to see how often historical people were that heavily mythologized; and when we do, we find that none were, so far as we know. So evidently it was not common for historical people to become this heavily mythologized. They still could have been (hence my lower and upper error margins of 1 in 16 and 1 in 3). But we cannot claim they typically were. Which means we should not expect Jesus to have been—without evidence. This makes Jesus different from just any random person, like an ordinary military general or a government administrator or a politician’s wife or any other mundane person: such people typically do turn out to be historical (as I explain, for example, with respect to Hannibal, and more generally in an entire chapter on this difference in Jesus from Outer Space). So all we are doing here is empirically differentiating between mundane people, and people like Jesus—people merely mentioned in historical accounts, and people heavily mythologized.
https://www.richardcarrier.information/archives/23816“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
