BTW, Carrier has posted about the book on his blog. His reasons for doing the project about the Historical Jesus:

... my wife and I were buried under student loan debt and I offered myself up to complete any hard core project my fans wanted in exchange for as many donations as I could get to fund my work. They all unanimously said “historicity of Jesus” and came up with twenty thousand dollars. Which cleared our debt and really saved us financially.

So if you want a worked example on any other topic, there's the going price!

Carrier's book may be seen as the first salvo in that attack, but this makes me wish his case had not been presented in the context of such a parochial and disreputable sub-field of history as Jesus Studies.

Boy, do I ever agree with this. I would love to be able to cite Carrier's work (edit: that is, his methodological program) without appearing to take on the baggage of interest in an area that is simultaneously irrelevant and mindkilling -- that is, in which having opinions might be taken as chiefly an indication of tribalism.

Certainly, to really get the attention of historians who might benefit from using Bayes, it does make sense to present the method in conjunction with an application of the method -- preferably one that leads to a really striking, counterintuitive claim being argued for. But the cultural loadedness of using Jesus studies seems likely to forestall Carrier's work having that result.

Tangentially: Perhaps it's emblematic that McCullagh's (non-Bayesian) Justifying Historical Descriptions has a preface that concludes with these sentences: "Finally I would like to acknowledge what I believe to have been God's guidance and support in the production of this book. It is just a pity that the clay He had to mould was so recalcitrant! Please praise Him for what is true in it, and forgive me for what is not." McCullagh does, in fact, present some useful heuristics for historians to use.

Overall, it's an interesting book which I regard as basically correct and a fruitful approach for future research, and Richard Carrier is a good guy whose work should be supported.

On the other hand, so far it's not quite as awesome as I was hoping it'd be when I was writing http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20script recently - I think lukeprog was right in this review that Carrier does his case a disservice by trying to expound Bayesian ideas in a New Testament context where, half the point of Bayesian ideas is to point out how useless the evidence is! That's... not a good way to either demonstrate Bayes is good in history nor to convince people of his overarching claims like 'all correct historical inference is Bayesian inference'.

The way to introduce a new paradigm is to start with its successes, where Bayesian methods led to a correct prediction or retrodiction of an issue where decisive evidence surfaced while before the issue was settled, conventional methods were confused, wrong, or underconfident; and then argue that its practical success combined with your philosophical arguments about Bayesian reasoning being the only correct reasoning is a convincing synthesis, maybe then work out verdicts/predictions/retrodictions on a non-controversial area so the experts can see how they like the conclusions, and only then extend it to highly controversial and difficult (scarce or low-quality evidence) material.

I understand how he would come to write it that way since that's what he was paid to do and Biblical material has become his specialty but I can still regret that the outcome wasn't as good as it could've been.

(Copied over my review from GoodReads.)

Chapter 5 provides a similar analysis of typical "Historicity Criteria" used in Jesus Studies, e.g. "multiple attestation."

Is there a summary anywhere? I just remembered one of Hanson's better papers:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But on uninteresting topics, surprising claims usually are surprising evidence; we rarely make claims without sufficient evidence. On interesting topics, however, we can have interests in exaggerating or downplaying our evidence, and our actions often deviate from our interests. In a simple model of noisy humans reporting on extraordinary evidence, we find that extraordinary claims from low noise people are extraordinary evidence, but such claims from high noise people are not; their claims are more likely unusual noise than unusual truth. When people are organized into a reporting chain, noise levels grow exponentially with chain length; long chains seem incapable of communicating extraordinary evidence.

Think I'll email a pointer to Carrier, it seems very appropriate for one of his footnotes in chapter 4:

18. Accordingly, Hume's antiquated argument against miracles has been corrected using BT, verifying my conclusion here: Aviezer Tucker, “Miracles, Historical Testimonies, and Probabilities,” History and Theory 44 (October 2005): 373–90 (with further sources cited, e.g., p. 374, n. 3); Robert Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Michael Levine, “Bayesian Analyses of Hume's Argument Concerning Miracles,” Philosophy and Theology 10, no. 1 (1997): 101–106; Jordan Howard Sobel, “On the Evidence of Testimony for Miracles: A Bayesian Interpretation of David Hume's Analysis,” Philosophical Quarterly 37, no. 147 (April 1987): 166–86. See also Mark Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus: An Introducrtion to Jesus and the Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), pp. 456–68 (with pp. 363–65); and Yonatan Fishman, “Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews?” Science and Education 18, no. 6–7 (August 2007): 813–37. Also pertinent is Jaynes's Bayesian treatment of ESP, in Jaynes and Bretthorst, Probability Theory, pp. 119–48. As a result, while “naive” Humean arguments against miracles are soundly refuted in Keener (“A Reassessment”), sound Bayesian reconstructions (such as I have briefed here) are not.

(Philpapers, as it happens, links it to a paper by Cavin, "Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence to Establish the Resurrection of Jesus?".)

Are any of Carrier's other books worth reading?

In my experience, people who get excited about bayesian methods and write about applying them to their own field do a terrible job, no better than those who get excited about any other. None of the details of this review move me from a prior of this book being scientism, considerably worse than the typical book about historical methods. Surely what a review of a book on methods needs is examples.