Are the Gospels and Acts historical? The female names compared to the historical distribution...
Tuesday, Aug 5: 10:50 AM - 10:55 AM
1966
Contributed Speed
Music City Center
In June, 2024 we published evidence that the 82 male Palestinian Jewish names in the four Gospels and Acts in the Bible fit the distribution of the 2,185 historical reference names pretty well. The method used was the chi-squared goodness-of-fit test (Van de Weghe, Luuk and Jason Wilson. 2024. Why Name Popularity is a Good Test of Historicity. Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. June 26, 2024. DOI: 10.1163/17455197-bja10035). This is contra Gregor & 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), whose methodological flaws we highlighted. In this follow-up study, we apply the same methodology to the 21 female names against the 341 historical reference names. While the conclusions are not as strong, due to the smaller sample size, the fit is still better than any historical work examined. We verified the goodness-of-fit test results with a simulation. We chose the speed poster format precisely to invite feedback in order to improve future work – please stop by!
Bible
Gospel
goodness-of-fit test
historical
text analysis
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Section on Text Analysis
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