Quotes from pages 374-375 of OHJ in the 3 page subsection called "The Mysterious Vanishing Acts", where he discusses Luke's mention (or lack of mention) of Jesus' family in Acts. I've bolded comments where he gives his evalution percentages for this subsection:
- I must conclude that the history of the early church as recounted in Acts looks very much unlike what we would expect on minimal historicity. Contortions are required to get what we have to fit (such as assuming ad hoc that in fact Jesus had no family, or that strange motives were available to erase them from history completely, motives that would not sooner motivate a rewrite of what they said and did or what happened to them). Even the point about there being no missing body (the narrative simply makes no sense on the supposition that there was one; but makes perfect sense on the supposition that there wasn't, which agrees with there being no Jesus to bury) and the disappearance of Pilate (as if he would be wholly unconcerned that a man he executed was reported to have escaped) are exactly what we expect on minimal mythicism, but not exactly what we expect on minimal historicity. But there at least we can retreat to combining minimal historicity with an early resurrection doctrine that did not require a missing body. Though I think that is much less ad hoc (since a strong, independent case can be made that that isll probably in fact what the original Christian resurrection doctrine was), it is not 100% guaranteed.
Or we can retreat to supposing Acts is almost complete fiction, and thus all of its strange omissions are just the result of Luke being an insufficiently imaginative writer. On that theory, having inherited no material about the early church other than perhaps the letters of Paul, Luke had no knowledge of Jesus' family, and so didn't think to include them in his tale. Likewise everything else that makes no historical sense. This entails a dilemma: one must either reject Acts entirely as evidence (being so wholly fabricated that it cannot be trusted as reliably attesting to anything), or one must accept that its omissions are improbable on minimal historicity but exactly to be expected on minimal myth. This does not mean impossible, just improbable. So we must assign some probability less than 100%. This is true even if Luke is wholly fabricating, since even then it is not 100% likely he would forget these things. Those omissions are unlikely even in fiction, requiring an explanation, which requires a supposition not in evidence, which lowers the probabiIity of any explanation we muster.
My most generous estimate would be a 4 in 5 chance (roughly an 80% chance) that Luke would write Acts 2-28 as we have it, if he used or was aware of any kind of genuine sources for the early history of Christianity. Which is the same as saying there is only a 20% chance he would have included material about the brothers of Jesus or any of the other missing people in his life (and thus an 80% chance he wouldn't). Yet I think an 80% chance Luke would completely omit Jesus' family from the whole public history of the church, as well as other things we should otherwise expect to be there, is being absurdly generous. My more realistic estimate of this probability would be 2 in 5 (or a 40% chance he'd leave all this stuff out; hence a 60% chance that he would have said something about these missing people and events). If, however, Luke neither used nor knew any real stories or sources, but just made it all up (or adapted sources that did), and given that he himself was clearly a historicist (or certainly was selling that dogma with these books, whatever he personally may have believed), then there is no longer any logical connection between these bizarre omissions and any actual absences in the history of the church. But even then these omissions would not have 1 to 1 odds. as if they were equally mysterious on h or ~h, because they would stil l be at least a little weird, requiring a supposition (not in evidence) that Luke was not a sufficiently imaginative writer to realize what he was leaving out.
I think it's improbable that Luke had no lore to work from, no information about the earliest missions or the family of Jesus. Regardless of whether he used any of it or not, it's surely more likely that at least a basic outline of what happened was known to him. I think there had to be by his time tales about the role and fate of Jesus' family (especially Mary and James, or even Jude), if such people existed; and likewise what happened in Jerusalem the first time it was announced that an executed convict had risen from the dead. So was Luke writing in total ignorance or from a starting point of at least some knowledge? I'll assume the latter (on what to do if you disagree, see §7).
- ... nothing in Acts is unexpected on minimal mythicism, as on that account anything historicizing in it is a mythical invention of Luke's (and we've proved Luke was doing that a lot), while the omissions and vanishing acts would be the inevitable result of there being no historical Jesus. So the same consequent probabilities on ~h can be treated as all 100% across the board. That leaves the probability of Acts looking this way on h equal to 72% at best, and 20% at worst. The content of Acts is therefore evidence against the historicity of Jesus.
