Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus

Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus   As one analyst put it, BT actually explains “what are regarded as sound methodological procedures” and reveals “the infirmities of what are acknowledged as unsound procedures” in almost any empirical field. 1 In other words, Bayes's Theorem underlies all other methodologies and thus explains why certain methods are regarded as sound, and others not—even when advocates or detractors of various methods are unaware of BT's capability in this regard. This entails a testable prediction, that all valid empirical methods reduce to BT: any method you propose will either be logically invalid or it will be described by BT. One might challenge how universally that's true, but here I will demonstrate that it at least holds for historical methods. I'll start with the most widely applicable examples, increasing in degrees of generalization, then test a few common methods of narro...