Perhaps because Carrier does something interesting here. Of course, he doesn't "explore a hypothesis," but rather (as is mathematically inevitable when using subjective probablity, trivial details on request) he compares the plausibility of plural hypotheses to one another. In particular, he projects the space of seriously possible accounts of Christian origns down to two incompatible hypotheses, which he acknowledges are not collectively exhaustive.You keep mentioning Carrier. I don't really know why. He is not writing a history about Jesus or Christian origins. He is exploring a hypothesis. That's quite different from what we normally think of when we speak of narrative or analytical history.
That's interesting because it is isomorphic to what arch-anti-Bayesian Karl Popper imagined to be the epitome of admirable inference - the head-to-head crucial test between two hypotheses to achieve "eliminative induction." Popper thinks that this is typical of empirical natural science at its best, and I think he has some support from history for that view. At least it seems that elite scientists have sometimes used the technique.
Carrier does seem to lose track of what he's done. Popper is right to say that the outcome can only show that the loser isn't the most credible or "best" hypothesis available. It cannot establish that the winner is anything better than not the worst seriously possible hypothesis. This is true regardless of the margin of victory: 12 to 1, 1200 to 1, 12000 to 1 ... knock yourself out, the only justified conclusion - the only conclusion justified by Bayes - is that there's something worse than Doherty-Carrier (and even then, that's in the opinion of Carrier, your mileage may differ).
Fine. Carrier is not my first choice to serve as Bayes's Apostle to the Historians. If in addition he is also unsuited for the role because he's addressing different questions than historians do, then of course it can be no mystery that he uses different methods. There is no reason to expect Carrier to adopt methods specifically designed for a different set of questions than the questions he wants to pursue.
Butz's law: you don't play the game, you don't make the rules. If historians pursue some well-posed questions and not others about the human past, then they have no privileged say in how other investigators pursue the questions that the historians don't or won't.
You are correct: I wrote "first link" when I meant "second link". I guess I got mixed up with your description of it as "the first one addressing it in depth", so it was the first one I opened. This is what I wrote:
I hate it when people do that to me. Yes, you are absolutely right. I should have specified that this is a paraphrase of what I think your position is, rather than an actual quote by you. Again, my apologies!