Is Name Popularity a Good Test of Historicity?: A Statistical Evaluation of Richard Bauckham’s Onomastic Argument

In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham argues that the popularity of personal names in Gospels-Acts corresponds remarkably well to name popularity among late ancient Palestinian Jews and that this can only be the case if Gospels-Acts characters are in most cases historical as opposed to inv...

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主要作者: Gregor, Kamil (Author)
其他作者: Blais, Brian
格式: 电子 文件
语言:English
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出版: 2023
In: Journal for the study of the historical Jesus
Year: 2023, 卷: 21, 发布: 3, Pages: 171-202
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B 专有名词学
IxTheo Classification:HC New Testament
HH Archaeology
TB Antiquity
Further subjects:B Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
B Onomastics
B Prosopography
B Richard Bauckham
B Eyewitnesses
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总结:In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham argues that the popularity of personal names in Gospels-Acts corresponds remarkably well to name popularity among late ancient Palestinian Jews and that this can only be the case if Gospels-Acts characters are in most cases historical as opposed to invented in the process of ‘anonymous community transmission’. We re-examine Bauckham’s conclusions, asserted with a remarkably high level of confidence but almost entirely without an actual statistical evaluation of his onomastic data, and perform the appropriate statistical analysis on the most recent onomastic dataset. We show that Bauckham’s thesis offers no advantage in explaining the observed correspondence between name popularity in Gospels-Acts and in the contemporary Palestinian Jewish population over an alternative model of ‘anonymous community transmission’. Moreover, our statistical analysis identifies some, albeit weak, evidence against Bauckham’s thesis.
ISSN:1745-5197
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal for the study of the historical Jesus
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/17455197-bja10023