Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus is a methodological study by American historian Richard Carrier arguing that historical inference in general, and Historical Jesus research in particular, should be conducted explicitly within a Bayesian framework that separates background knowledge from evidence specific likelihoods. The volume critiques the traditional criteria of authenticity and proposes that valid historical procedures can be described by, and reduced to, Bayes theorem.[1][2]
Carrier positioned Proving History as the first of two linked volumes, with a subsequent application study to test competing reconstructions of Christian origins. Prior to release he announced that the manuscript had gone through a peer review process at the press and described the project as a corrective to failures of criteriological method in New Testament studies.[3] He presented the work as an attempt to formalize what historians already do in practice when weighing hypotheses and evidence.[1]
The follow-up volume, On the Historicity of Jesus, applied the Bayesian methodology developed in Proving History to evaluate competing theories about Christian origins and Jesus historicity. Published in 2014, this second book used probability theory to systematically compare the relative likelihood of a historical versus mythical Jesus, while demonstrating the practical application of Bayes' theorem to historical questions.
Method and scope
Carrier argues that historical reasoning is probabilistic. He recommends explicit modeling of priors from background knowledge and explicit likelihoods for the evidence, with sensitivity analysis and careful control for dependence among sources. He contends that the widely used criteria of authenticity in Jesus research lack demonstrated reliability when used as stand alone rules and should be either retired or subsumed as conditional components within a Bayesian workflow.[1]
Criteria examined
Criterion
Carrier's assessment
Proposed Bayesian treatment
Dissimilarity
Risks privileging eccentricity and undercounts dependence between sources
Treat as a weak likelihood ratio when rival hypotheses make differential predictions about independence and novelty
Embarrassment
Vulnerable to motivated narration and retrospective rationalization
Applicable only when specific, externally anchored embarrassment predictions differ by hypothesis and can be bounded
Multiple attestation
Often misapplied because source traditions are not independent
Use only after modeling literary or oral dependence and then weight by effective independence
Coherence
Can produce circular confirmation
Permit coherence scoring only within explicit competing models and compare relative fits rather than absolute assertions
Reception
Academic and para academic reception focused on feasibility and utility rather than on any single historical conclusion. Aviezer Tucker reviewed the book in History and Theory, supporting the general use of probabilistic reasoning in historiography while disagreeing with aspects of Carrier's application.[4]
New Testament scholar James F. McGrath published a detailed critical review, disputing claims about the criteria of authenticity and the transferability of Bayes style updates to contested ancient data.[5]
Historian of religion R. Joseph Hoffmann criticized the project in essays arguing that Carrier mischaracterizes how historians work and that the approach promises more than it can deliver for ancient biography.[6]
Independent reviewers produced extended responses on methodology. Tim Hendrix wrote a Bayesian focused critique addressing reference class definition and independence assumptions.[7] Neil Godfrey examined chapters in a multipart review, welcoming probabilistic clarity but questioning some historical judgments.[8]
Subsequent reviews of Carrier's follow-up work, On the Historicity of Jesus, cited Proving History as their methodological foundation. Daniel N. Gullotta's essay in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus summarized and rejected key probability assignments, noting earlier blog and web based reviews of Proving History.[9][10]
Shorter reviews appeared in rationalist and skeptic outlets, often sympathetic to the call for explicit probabilities while divided over implementation.[11]
References
1 2 3 Carrier, Richard C. (2012). Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN978-1616145590.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
