Two issues this morning, both involving "probabilistic" arguments that seem shaky to me.
Identifying with an archetype
I don't see that Raglan's scale adds anything to a proposition that is not in dispute: the Gospels feature a hero named Jesus, showing his entertaining adventures with a band of merry men. If the question were whether the Gospels are historical essays, then the answer would be, presumably, "No, hell no," - or at least unsuccessful essays if that was the authors' intent.
However, the main question is whether Jesus actually lived. I don't see the point in treating this as a "census problem," how many people who are written about with fantastic bits are real vs. imagined. Narratives are not generated by random processes, they are generated by writers deciding to exert the effort to tell a story, and choosing to tell that story rather than another one.
Mark doesn't say why Mark bothered to write a story about Jesus and his merry men, or why he chose to write about Jesus instead of about Julius Caesar or Hercules. If you have an opinion about Mark's intentions, then that opinion surely can be expressed as a probability, just as any other uncertain opinion can be expressed as a probability.
That probability, based on your spidey sense, will be no less useful or interesting than the proportion of "literary hero" stories whose protagonists are real people you happen to count. The reason is that applying that proportion to the problem of Mark is nothing other than restating an opinion that whatever Mark's unknown intent was, it was typical of the intents of the authors of the other stories you looked at. In other words, your spidey sense speaks again.
Whatever probability you choose, it is largely a statement about you, what you believe and how strongly you believe it. Bayes is always a statement about the beliefs of the Bayesian who uses it, or her client. That does not make Bayes useless, but it does render fatuous an extended discussion of whether a personal prior of 33% arrived at through much singing and dancing (reportedly Carrier's confession) improves upon a prior of 50% arrived at by flipping a coin.
The discretion of Paul in sixty dependent trials
By Paul's reckoning, the living Jesus didn't yet outrank Paul - each of them, in life, is or was the same thing, a tzedek. Living Jesus has nothing on Paul. Paul has personally visited the Third Heaven, Paul has personally done the miracles expcted of an apostle (and even now, few claim that Jesus.ever did anything more than they claim for the apostles, too - except the ressurection-and-ascension, and most living Christians profess that Jesus' mother did that). Paul may have had better teachers than Jesus, in Paul's estimation.
An important occasion when Paul addressed something from the "sayings tradition," is the teaching on divorce and remarriage (a mess for a tzedek since it is in conflict with Mosaic teaching), 1 Corithians 7: 10-16. Look at how Paul handles it. He makes damned sure he is not blamed for the demanding and counter-Mosaic teaching. He attributes it to the Lord, but does not quote Jesus.
Why should he? Jesus' words iin life are no more legislative than Paul's own words here and now. Paul's allusion to the teaching has the same authority as Jesus' statement at the time. Jesus can add nothing to Paul's saying that that is how it is - except that Paul wishes not to be blamed for it, probably because he's read Torah and besides, it's a pain in the butt. Maybe not as bad as trimming Mr Happy, but a lower-body pain all the same.
And then Paul goes on to make it equally clear that his own instruction (about when believer and unbeliever, in a "mixed marriage," divorce), is him speaking. He carves out an exception to what he just said that Jesus said. Paul needn't and doesn't explain. Paul's words are legislative, just as Jesus' were..Paul in life and Jesus in life are peers. They can both tell people what to do, 'cause they said so, and they're both speaking with God's commission.
Later, Mark will have a story to tell, probably thinking that Jesus outranked him from early on. Mark quotes Jesus liberally. Paul has already told his story before he writes anything we read, and Jesus didn't outrank Paul in life. Paul doesn't clearly quote Jesus, except on the eve of Jesus' death, after Jesus had made an appointment for his promotion physical, which Paul knows Jesus passed. Jesus almost outranks Paul by then, but not a day before then.
