Uploaded December 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
I critique a central pillar of Blais and Gregor's attempted refutation of Richard Bauckham's name statistics argument: They remove from the sample of persons in the Gospels and Acts any person whose existence is attested in other documents--specifically Josephus, the acknowledged Pauline epistles, and Papias. This reduces the sample of persons from the Gospels and Acts from 79 to 53. They justify this strange procedure on the grounds that they themselves do not contest the existence of these persons, due to their outside attestation, as if it were simply obvious that therefore their occurrence in the Gospels and Acts is simply irrelevant to the name statistics argument so that they should be removed from the sample. I argue that this is an important mistake.
I critique a central pillar of Blais and Gregor's attempted refutation of Richard Bauckham's name statistics argument: They remove from the sample of persons in the Gospels and Acts any person whose existence is attested in other documents--specifically Josephus, the acknowledged Pauline epistles, and Papias. This reduces the sample of persons from the Gospels and Acts from 79 to 53. They justify this strange procedure on the grounds that they themselves do not contest the existence of these persons, due to their outside attestation, as if it were simply obvious that therefore their occurrence in the Gospels and Acts is simply irrelevant to the name statistics argument so that they should be removed from the sample. I argue that this is an important mistake.
