@Hans Adler, truth and/or verifiability

Let's talk about truth and/or verifiability. You had corrected the name "Stadtzeitung" we have in note #4 of this article into "Stattzeitung", because only the latter was verifiable, you said. Then, by chance, somebody found out the link to the "Stadtzeitung für Freiburg" and the erroneous correction could be reverted. Notice that if there had been no documentation of the "Stadtzeitung für Freiburg" online, but only, say, in a press archive in Freiburg, or if nobody had made the effort to verify the verifiability, the error would not have been detected, and the "truth" would now be, erroneously, "Stattzeitung". A beautiful mistake, by the way, very evangelical, being of the same sort as those we can find in the manuscripts of the Gospel.   ;-)

But let us apply this to another case, take Anton van Hooff, who is in charge to turn King's evidence for "pseudo-science", "severe methodological flaws" and "factual errors". Of course, he has written this, among several name-callings, so this is verifiable. But can we take it seriously? If we look closer we see that the first accusation of van Hooff towards Carotta was to not have taken into account the well known Tacitus-passage about Nero and the "christians". But since Carotta had treated it in detail, van Hooff was exposed, because he had shown that he had attacked a book without having read it, so that he himself was convicted of the "severe methodological flaws" and "factual errors" he tried to impute to other people. The subsequent escalation with the accusation of "pseudo-science" was only his embarrassing attempt to divert from the lack of professionality he had shown. This, too, can be verified. The question is then: Which verification is relevant?

Van Hooff is refered to as a "Senior lecturer of Ancient History and Teacher Trainer for Classics at Nijmegen University, the Netherlands" in the link given in note #17. But we see that at the University of Sofia he is also called "Professor Associate". Looking on the Internet we can verify that he is called a "professor" on several websites. Looking closer we can also verify that he was never a professor, and is by now a teacher in a secondary school, as he himself stated in a newspaper article. So what have we truly verified? That he is a confidence trickster who let himself be called a professor without actually being one, in order to improve his authority as an alleged important scholar? If we look to the list of publications he is giving there, we see that he is speaking of "numerous books and articles" but specifies only one title. Modesty or showing-off?

Van Hooff being a notorious polemicist, can his accusations be taken seriously? Nobody does it in The Netherlands (why is there no article about him in the Dutch WP? – The only Antoon van Hooff listed there is a zoo director, who was ashamed of the homonymy), but he is taken seriously here, in the English WP where most "judges" do not even understand Dutch. Why? Because it is so stated in the German WP already? If we take a look at the history there, we can verify that somebody had first put the article in the category "Pseudowissenschaft" (pseudo-science), but then, this being not allowed because libelous, they "discovered" "Van Hooff", taking him as "proof", without examining his credibility, happy to have the possibility to maintain their libelous allegation in an appearance of legality: it is "only" a quotation! ;-)

So much about verifiability and truth. The question of Pilate, BTW. —