Are the Gospels & Acts Historical? A response to Gregor and Blais’ (2023) statistical analysis

Oregon Convention Center 

In September, 2023, the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus published a paper by Gregor and Blais which concluded that the name frequencies in the Gospels & Acts had no better fit to the best historical database of 2100+ first century Palestine male Jewish names than a uniform distribution (i.e. the names were made up). Furthermore, they wrote, "our statistical analysis identifies some, albeit weak, evidence against [the historical] thesis." (Gregor, Kamil and Brian Blais; 2023; Is Name Popularity a Good Test of Historicity? A Statistical Evaluation of Richard Bauckham's Onomastic Argument; JSHJ; Brill; 21:171-202. DOI: 10.1163/17455197-BJA10023) We applaud Gregor and Blais' great contribution with their careful data curation and groundbreaking statistical analysis of ancient name frequency data. Unfortunately, however, there were some methodological flaws which we will address. More importantly, we will offer an independent statistical analysis of the Gospels & Acts name frequency data and show that it actually fits the historical database pretty well.

onomastics

historical name frequency data

Gospels and Acts

goodness-of-fit 

Section on Text Analysis