Last time we looked at Carrier’s approach and found it to be a very appropriate one.  Judgements, whether educational judgements or historical ones or whatever, are made according to criteria that have a qualitative and quantitative dimension.  Making this explicit is important because we want to get beyond “gut feeling” judgments like “this feels like the student deserves a ‘B’ level grade” for their writing assignment.  This might emerge that the student regularly (quantitative) demonstrates competent (qualitative) use of 5-senses words in the Word choice criterion.  This explains why the teacher prefers the grade level B over the weaker student’s grade who only sometimes and with assistance uses 5 senses words, or the superior student who almost always proficiently employs such language. 

Think of it another way.  If I give you two unmarked bottles of merlot, one worth 5 dollars and the other 60, you are probably going to prefer the 60 dollar bottle and be able to identify which is which based on “preference.”  However, for the sake of a judged contest of fine merlot, we want to make this preference accountable and so go the next step to judge wines according to a quantitative and qualitative reading of criteria such as several key, mostly objective, criteria that expert tasters use to assess quality and complexity. The primary factors are balance, length, intensity, and complexity.  In this way a number rating can be generated to compare the wines, though the assessment and eventual evaluation is obviously determined using quantifiers and qualifiers.

So, for example, we may initially prefer the mythicism model for Jesus because if the names of figures as heavily mythologized as Jesus are put in a hat and one name randomly drawn, the likelihood of drawing the name of an historical figure is a best 1/3.  On the other hand, we may prefer the historicism model because multiple sources (Josephus, Paul, Mark, Matthew) seems to triangulate around the idea that the Jewish elite were somehow responsible for Jesus’ death, and so the mythicist would then need to counter such references as ambiguous, interpolations, etc.  For example, Pauline specialist Benjamin White argues the Jewish blame passage in 1 Thessalonians is authentic because it certainly fits with the idea that (which we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls) there was substantial infighting among the Jews as to who had the true path, and so it would make sense, Paul speaking to a gentile crowd, for him to blame the Jews he thought killed Christ.  The apocalyptics of the passage meant Paul though the final judgment was underway, and so need not refer to poste 70 CE events.  Paul elsewhere says God loved the Jews because they were of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but rejected them because they rejected Christ. Of course, subjectivity enters as to whether you feel a passage is ambiguous or a plain reading, just as someone could hate a fine wine just because they don’t like the taste of wine.