Richard Carrier and Rank-Raglan Heroes, Part 1

Richard Carrier and Rank-Raglan Heroes

The core of Richard Carrier’s argument for the a-historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is his use of the Rank-Raglan mythotype to establish a low prior probability of Jesus’ existence.  For something so key to his argument, however, Carrier plays very fast and loose in his use of the mythotype. Specifically,

1. He modifies key criteria to better fit the story of Jesus of Nazareth;
2. He biases his scoring in favour of finding Jesus of Nazareth a member of the mythotype;
3. He biases his scoring against finding historical figures to be members of the mythotype; and
4. He uses a biased sample of the mythotype in establishing his prior probabilities.

The first three of these points have been pointed out before, notably by James McGrath (“Rankled by Wrangling over Rank-Raglan Rankings”) and Johan Rönnblom (“Is Jesus a Rank Raglan Hero”).  Daniel Gullota has also made similar points in his review of “On the Historicity of Jesus”.  That review, however, is behind a paywall and inaccessible to me.  I only know of its contents through Carrier’s response to that review.  Unlike the first three points, I am not aware of anybody previously making the fourth point.
 

In this blogpost, I will restrict my discussion only to Carrier’s treatment of the Rank-Raglan mythotype, and specifically how he modified the criteria.  I will not discuss how he scores results, and how he selected his sample for comparison. Nor will I concern myself with his use of Bayes theorem on the data to generate a prior probability of Jesus of Nazareth being historical.

Richard Carrier, Rank-Raglan Heroes, and Bayes Theorem

I recently prepared this as a comment on a small part of Richard Carrier's video critique of Bart Ehrman's claims in his debate with Robert Price.  The comment, however, appears to be to large for YouTube to digest, and I would like to have it available for reference, so I am posting it here.  It will be of little interest unless you are interested either in the historical Jesus (or Mythicism with respect to Jesus), or Bayes Theorem.  If you fall into the first camp, but are not familiar with Bayes Theorem, here is a brief introduction (which, however, does make a mistake in assuming the second test [5:12], as described by him, would be independent).