Gullotta, Carrier, and Rank Raglan

In On The Historicity of Jesus, Richard Carrier differentiated between the historical evidence for a claim, say "Jesus lived," and the prior probability that such a claim would be true.  One rightly does this with all claims.  If you say, "I flew to Los Angeles last week," and if I perceive you as a generally honest person, not suffering from dementia, and have nothing particular to gain (say, an alibi in a murder trial), I won't ask to see your ticket stub.  But if you say, "I flew to Mars last week," I'll just chuckle and wait for the punchline.  In both cases the evidence is the same -- your word for what you yourself allegedly experienced in the recent past -- but while lots of people fly to Los Angeles (for some reason), Mars is a long ways off, and I doubt anyone has made the journey yet.  (And given present technology, it would be more than a week if they had.)  So aside from historical evidence per se, we also need to consider prior probability for any claimed event.  

So far, so good. 

Is Jesus a Rank-Raglan Myth-Hero? (Or is Carrier a Scholar-Legend?)

Is Jesus a myth?  Or is Richard Carrier a scholarly legend in his own mind (and just a legend elsewhere?)


Chapters four and five of Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason to Doubt, are dedicated to what Carrier describes as 48 "elements" of background information about Jesus and his times that he believes scholars need to come to grips with, to decide whether or not Jesus ever really lived. (Those of us who lack the imagination to conceive of that as a real issue, will nevertheless find all kinds of interesting materials in these chapters, some interesting for reasons Carrier himself fails to perceive, as we have already begun to see.)  This "elements" section is a huge part of the book, running almost 180 pages, with hundreds of footnotes.  Clearly, Richard Carrier thinks these supposed facts are vital to the case he is making.