There was no Jesus

[Qutzupalotl]

61. Very peculiar presentation of this statistic:

The veracity of his sayings and deeds was decided by a group vote. Scholars were invited to place plastic beads in a box: red (three points) if Jesus said it; pink (two points) if he probably said it; grey (one point) if he didn’t, but it reflected his ideas; black (zero) if invented. When tallied, there were black or grey beads for 82 per cent of Jesus’ Biblical sayings, and 84 per cent of his deeds.

So a group of scholars voted on each saying or incident, and if there was one (two if we are being generous, since they used the plural) black or gray beads, that counts as a black mark. But it does not seem at all surprising that there is some degree of doubt among scholars about each incident. The way it is phrased creates the impression that those numbers represent the consensus opinion, rather than the fact that there were one or two individual doubters in a group we know included several atheists. That strikes me as misleading, or at least an odd way to phrase that.

A more representative presentation would be to show a bar graph for each question, or at least tell us how many of the other colors there were, so we could gauge the proportions and winnow out the more spurious quotations. That would have been nice to include, and even seems like a deliberate oversight, given the author had access to all the results.