Is Christ Myth Theory the atheist version of Intelligent Design?

[Bunyip]

I believe it is important in speaking to the credibility of texts.

Are you going to deny the provenance that exists for the Gospels? The times and locations we can place their origination at?

No, I do not need to deny anything.

So we agree that provenance is important, right?

Shall we move on to my next reason for doubting the gospels?

 

[Prophet]

No, I do not need to deny anything.

So we agree that provenance is important, right?

Shall we move on to my next reason for doubting the gospels?

Ha. Next reason? Unless you deny the provenance for the gospels, as you explicitly say you do not do here, you've not established reason number one.

The reason I will not agree to your statement that "provenance is important" is because "is" is the only word in that phrase I feel relatively sure you can't twist in order to further your predictable means of "moving the goalposts" for your equally predictable ends: believing whatever the hell you want without reason.

 

[Mister Emu]

You ask for examples, but when given them tend to dismiss them without any sort of rational pretext. So here are a few other examples;

Bwahaha... I fail to see how examples not actually being examples of your claim is irrational dismissal.

N. T. Wright

This is a fairly extreme statement, one I could see people offering reasonable counter-arguments to. Note, that it doesn't say there is more evidence for Jesus than Tiberius... but that he'd have a harder time accepting Jesus as a figure of literary creation than Tiberius of imagination.

I'm not going to speak for Wright, I don't have the context. So I'll leave my analysis of his statement to that: it is apparently extreme.

Dinesh D’Souza

Are you saying that he is factually incorrect here? That there are more written records near contemporaneous to Alexander, Socrates, or Julius Caesar? Because, he clearly limits his statement to that, not all evidence.

I assume you have conceeded that Wright, D'Souza and Ehrman are all making the claim you describe as ludicrous?

Ehrman clearly didn't. D'Souza clearly didn't. Wright was the most extreme, but still didn't say what you claimed... and it wasn't as extreme an opinion as mythicism... that is Jesus' existence is, if not more than, closer to being so than being doubtful, much closer.

No, I do not need to deny anything.

Then you concede the provenance of the Gospels supporting their credible ability to relay facts about the historical Jesus to us?

 

[Bunyip]

Ha. Next reason? Unless you deny the provenance for the gospels, as you explicitly say you do not do here, you've not established reason number one.

The reason I will not agree to your statement that "provenance is important" is because "is" is the only word in that phrase I feel relatively sure you can't twist in order to further your predictable means of "moving the goalposts" for your equally predictable ends: believing whatever the hell you want without reason.

Have you been drinking or something?
I am not denying anything - please stop repeating the same stupid comments.

 

[Bunyip]

Bwahaha... I fail to see how examples not actually being examples of your claim is irrational dismissal.

Yeah mate, you do that all the time. I gave examples - you can pretend otherwise if that pleases you. Anyone else reading this will see. It is a rather silly tactic.

This is a fairly extreme statement, one I could see people offering reasonable counter-arguments to. Note, that it doesn't say there is more evidence for Jesus than Tiberius... but that he'd have a harder time accepting Jesus as a figure of literary creation than Tiberius of imagination.

I'm not going to speak for Wright, I don't have the context. So I'll leave my analysis of his statement to that: it is apparently extreme.

Are you saying that he is factually incorrect here? That there are more written records near contemporaneous to Alexander, Socrates, or Julius Caesar? Because, he clearly limits his statement to that, not all evidence.

Ehrman clearly didn't. D'Souza clearly didn't. Wright was the most extreme, but still didn't say what you claimed... and it wasn't as extreme an opinion as mythicism... that is Jesus' existence is, if not more than, closer to being so than being doubtful, much closer.

Then you concede the provenance of the Gospels supporting their credible ability to relay facts about the historical Jesus to us?

Back to the point.

You asked why I doubt the gospels, I identified provenance a reason. You do not know who wrote them.

You agree that provenance is important - shall we move on?

(Both you and Prophet keep saying things like 'are you saying this......?' followed by some generally absurd claim that I most certainly have not made. You both then attack this claim that I have not made. What I am saying I express in my posts - please try to address what I am claiming rather than your projections).

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I believe Christ myth theorists are to scientists what intelligent design advocates are to Christians. And by this I mean they are fundamentalist, irrational, hopelessly agenda-driven, bunch of other bad things, etc. And I imagine there's not a single argument Christ myth theorists make that don't have a ID parallel. Let's discuss!

I am more than a little disgusted with the would-be "theory" that we lack the evidence to say Jesus existed and, far more importantly, that there is a better historical explanation for evidence than that he did. However, we can't design empirical tests for Jesus' existence and create predictive models based on whether he did or didn't the way we can for scientific theories. Even if we assume that virtually all of evolutionary theory is wrong and the ID accounts are capable of explaining the evidence we have, they cannot serve as predictive models. Rather, they rely on mainstream evolutionary models and then attempt to explain how ID is not incompatible with these. The predictions and success of evolutionary theory have created entire scientific fields, motivated vast numbers of successful technologies, and continued to provide a framework for scientific progress. ID has done nothing but provide a framework to explain religious conceptions in ways (thought to be by some) compatible with scientific.

By contrast, the (precious few) developed Christ myth theories have proved almost as successful at predicting the kind of evidence we'd find as has more mainstream. This is solely because when it comes to history, new evidence is something of a rarity and the frameworks in which it must be interpreted are heavily theory-laden rather than empirically informed.

We can't really compare the two. Evolutionary theory is a field of science that is the foundation for scientific fields such as evolutionary psychology, is essential to well over a century of successes within biology, has proved invaluable to research areas from medicine to computer science, and is in general a framework in which we can situate vast amounts of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary scientific development & research. ID had no such successes and so far can't.

However, historical Jesus research cannot, in general, be validated in the ways that evolutionary theories can (ID or no). This includes both mainstream accounts and the sensationalist garbage that make up mythicist "historical accounts".

In any academic field, there are mainstream views and extremist views. This doesn't mean that extremist views in every such field are comparable.

 

[Bunyip]

I am more than a little disgusted with the would-be "theory" that we lack the evidence to say Jesus existed and, far more importantly, that there is a better historical explanation for evidence than that he did. However, we can't design empirical tests for Jesus' existence and create predictive models based on whether he did or didn't the way we can for scientific theories. Even if we assume that virtually all of evolutionary theory is wrong and the ID accounts are capable of explaining the evidence we have, they cannot serve as predictive models. Rather, they rely on mainstream evolutionary models and then attempt to explain how ID is not incompatible with these. The predictions and success of evolutionary theory have created entire scientific fields, motivated vast numbers of successful technologies, and continued to provide a framework for scientific progress. ID has done nothing but provide a framework to explain religious conceptions in ways (thought to be by some) compatible with scientific.

By contrast, the (precious few) developed Christ myth theories have proved almost as successful at predicting the kind of evidence we'd find as has more mainstream. This is solely because when it comes to history, new evidence is something of a rarity and the frameworks in which it must be interpreted are heavily theory-laden rather than empirically informed.

We can't really compare the two. Evolutionary theory is a field of science that is the foundation for scientific fields such as evolutionary psychology, is essential to well over a century of successes within biology, has proved invaluable to research areas from medicine to computer science, and is in general a framework in which we can situate vast amounts of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary scientific development & research. ID had no such successes and so far can't.

However, historical Jesus research cannot, in general, be validated in the ways that evolutionary theories can (ID or no). This includes both mainstream accounts and the sensationalist garbage that make up mythicist "historical accounts".

In any academic field, there are mainstream views and extremist views. This doesn't mean that extremist views in every such field are comparable.

Sure. I agree. However, you need to factor in there the fact that the 'mythicist' position is an apologetic strawman. As far as I can tell, not a single one of the popular authors questioning the historicity of Jesus is a mythicist, or has at any point claimed to be. Nor has any member here tried to defend mythicismin these threads. Mythicism is a very different proposition than is questioning the historicity of Jesus.

 

[Prophet]

Sure. I agree. However, you need to factor in there the fact that the 'mythicist' position is an apologetic strawman. As far as I can tell, not a single one of the popular authors questioning the historicity of Jesus is a mythicist, or has at any point claimed to be. Nor has any member here tried to defend mythicismin these threads. Mythicism is a very different proposition than is questioning the historicity of Jesus.

The only difference in the propositions here is that the mythicist and denialist positions is the former is the intellectually honest position between the two. Denying the historicity of Jesus without submitting an alternative to mainstream interpretation of the evidence is a rather transparent attempt to recruit the strength of all possible mythicist positions without having to demonstrate the plausibility of even one. In this way, a denialist is able to gain all the the appearance of strength of submission of an alternate interpretation with none of its responsibility.

 

[Bunyip]

The only difference in the propositions here is that the mythicist and denialist positions is the former is the intellectually honest position between the two. Denying the historicity of Jesus without submitting an alternative to mainstream interpretation of the evidence is a rather transparent attempt to recruit the strength of all possible mythicist positions without having to demonstrate the plausibility of even one. In this way, a denialist is able to gain all the the appearance of strength of submission of an alternate interpretation with none of its responsibility.

Wake up sparky - I'm not a mythicist or a denialist. Your short term memory is a ruin.

 

[Prophet]

Wake up sparky - I'm not a mythicist or a denialist. Your short term memory is a ruin.

Denying the historicity of Jesus without submitting an alternative to mainstream interpretation of the evidence is a rather transparent attempt to recruit the strength of all possible mythicist positions without having to demonstrate the plausibility of even one.

Luckily, I never expect Bunyip to remember beyond the current post he is writing. Bunyip has acclimated me to low standards.

I'm quite aware Bunyip doesn't own up that he is a denialist. I'm not saying Bunyip is even THAT honest to admit his dishonest position. I ARGUED that Bunyip is a denialist. I'm not misremembering. There's no path for Bunyip to just tell me "you forgot, I'm not a denialist" and me to take him at face value, because I've seen Bunyip's arguments. I'm using what he has said against him.

Anytime Bunyip wants to ARGUE that he isn't a mere denialist as I ARGUE, he is certainly welcome to... but Bunyip's merely denying he is a denialist makes my point for me.

REMEMBER: ANY TIME I WANT.

 

[Bunyip]

Luckily, I never expect Bunyip to remember beyond the current post he is writing. Bunyip has acclimated me to low standards.

I'm quite aware Bunyip doesn't own up that he is a denialist. I'm not saying Bunyip is even THAT honest to admit his dishonest position. I ARGUED that Bunyip is a denialist. I'm not misremembering. There's no path for Bunyip to just tell me "you forgot, I'm not a denialist" and me to take him at face value, because I've seen Bunyip's arguments. I'm using what he has said against him.

Anytime Bunyip wants to ARGUE that he isn't a mere denialist as I ARGUE, he is certainly welcome to... but Bunyip's merely denying he is a denialist makes my point for me.

REMEMBER: ANY TIME I WANT.

 

[Bunyip]

The similarity between the ID movement and mythicism is this;

ID proponants attack a strawman version of the Theory of evolution.

They misrepresent the theory they oppose in order to diminish it and attack it.

Apologists attack a strawman version of historical research - mythicism.

They misrepresent the position of their opponants in order to diminish and attack them. In this case by demanding that 'mythicists' present evidence of non-existence and characterising them as denialists, madmen or liars.

That is the similarity - 'mythicism' and the strawman Theory of evolution creationists attack are both apologetic inventions.

Why do so few serious historians defend the mythicist position? A: Because it is not their position.
Why can no evolutionist show me a dog turning into a non-dog? A: Because that is not what evolution would show in the first place.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

not a single one of the popular authors questioning the historicity of Jesus is a mythicist

It's true that many mythicists don't use the term or use other equivalent terms. Raphael Lataster, for example, uses the phrase "JMT proponent" ("JMT" stands for "Jesus Myth Hypothesis"). It's also true that some who did identify as mythicists have backed-off somewhat. For example, after Dunn's devastating criticism Wells wrote: "it will not do to dub me a 'mythicist' tout court." (source). If we shouldn't identify Wells as a mythicist completely this is because he is something of a mythicist (hence the qualifier tout court).

Luckily, labels need not be self-applied to be accurately applied. Terrorists do not typically refer to themselves as such and nor do spies, the most modest people cannot by definition identify themselves as being very modest, and Richard Carrier has identified himself as a classical scholar in print and denied that he is one in print (and has identified himself as an historian with a doctorate in philosophy despite what his CV asserts his doctorate is). And WL Craig can call himself a historian all he wants, but this doesn't make the travesties he tries to pass off as historical research any more historical research than it makes his attempts at physics actually scientific.


RM Price wrote "Virtually everyone who espoused the Christ-Myth theory has laid great emphasis on one question: Why no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in the secular sources?" Of course, he immediately follows this with "Let me leapfrog the tiresome debate over whether the Testimonium Flavianum is authentic" (which Crossan responded to by saying that "Price's comment...is not an acceptable scholarly comment"). He thereby "leapfrog" over a central piece of the very evidence he claims those like him ("Christ-Myth" theorists) hold. More importantly, he identifies himself as a mythicist when he writes (in the same contributing paper) that evidence like "varying dates...are the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history". This is mythicism.

Likewise, when Acharya/Murdoch wrote "the gospel story of Jesus is not a factual portrayal of a historical “master” who walked the earth 2,000 years ago but a myth built upon other myths and godmen, who in turn were personifications of the ubiquitous solar mythos and ritual found in countless cultures around the world thousands of years before the Christian era" in her book The Christ Conspiracy, she could have followed this with "I'm a devout Christian". She'd still be a mythicist.

When Gandy and Freke write two books lying about the evidence for their view that, not only did Jesus not exist, but that the "original" Christians suffered a hostile take-over from the "literalists" (their word for those who believe Jesus was an historical person) they are mythicists. When Doherty writes the same book twice and concludes each time that the there was no historical Jesus, he's a mythicist.

Mythicism is a very different proposition than is questioning the historicity of Jesus.

Questioning the historicity of Jesus is called "history", "historical inquiry", "historical study", etc. One cannot write historical Jesus research without questioning his historicity. From works as credulous and uncritical as those by Craig, Bock, Bauckham, etc. to the moronically pseudo-critical skepticism professed by those like Carrier and Crossan.

The so-called quest for the historical basically started, in the 1700s, as an attempt to undermine the entirety of Christianity:

"the argument over the existence of Jesus goes back to the beginning of the critical study of the New Testament. At the end of the eighteenth century, some disciples of the radical English Deist Lord Bolingbroke began to spread the idea that Jesus had never existed. Voltaire, no friend of traditional Christianity, sharply rejected such conclusions, commenting that those who deny the existence of Jesus show themselves "more ingenious than learned." Nevertheless, in the 1790s a few of the more radical French Enlightenment thinkers wrote that Christianity and its Christ were myths."
van Voorst, R. E. (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament (Studying the Historical Jesus). W.B. Eerdmans.


Although in the late 18th and early 19th centuries Christianity still had more than a bit of a grip on universities, the critical attacks on the foundations of Christian belief was made in the context of an intellectual climate which forced them to play their opponents' game. So rather than appeal to theology, faith, etc., they actually pretty much invented much of modern historical-critical study and IE/comparative/historical linguistics:

"The first application of critical cognitive values in conjunction with new theories and methods to generate knew knowledge of the past from present evidence was in biblical criticism...Theories and methods that were developed in biblical criticism were exported next to the analysis of ancient Greek and Latin texts" Tucker, A. (2004). Our Knowledge of the Past. Cambridge University Press.

"Where does lexical semantics find its materials?...One source of examples is philological research into older texts, specifically, classical and biblical philology. Because the interpretation of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts is often not immediately obvious, classical scholars naturally came across many intriguing instances of polysemy and semantic change." Geeraerts, D. (2010). Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford University Press.

The mythicist arguments regurgitated online and in popular works were asked and answered in the 19th century (and even parodied). Even radical critics like Bultmann (frequently quote-mined in online and other popular sources) were tired of those like Drews and Frazer who kept recycling the same "hypotheses" and questions while ignoring how they were already answered (actually, that's unfair- Frazer spent years editing his voluminous work in order to try to both defend his thesis while not making a fool of himself after the plethora of scathing criticisms he received for blatant errors). Modern mythicists regurgitate the same bunk asked and answered by the 60,000 19th century biographies of Jesus the great historian Michael Grant castigated for failing to sufficiently deal with the real questions concerning Jesus' historicity. Grant was also highly critical of most 20th century works before his 1977 Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels. However, he still wrote "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned."

Like mythicists, from the early 18th century through Grant, those who have directly addressed the "Christ-myth theory" have rarely used the term "mythicist". Yes, the term didn't exist during the period in which these arguments were new or fairly new, and yes we have seen increasingly less works directed towards mythicist arguments as these have gone from recycled to tired to flogging possible fossil evidence of a dead equine. This includes scholars like Bultmann commonly cited by mythicists despite their disdain for the position.

"A rose by any other name" would be just as wrong. Bauer, Carrier, Doherty, Drew, Freke, Gandy, Loman, Murdoch, Pierson, Price, Robertson, etc., did and can continue to borrow something from one another and those like (albeit that "those like them" became more and more hacks and online quacks and less and less those even capable of reading the primary and secondary literature let alone being members of academic circles). They have continued to espouse similar views with slight variations. Above all, they have continued to promote the view that our evidence supports the idea that Jesus didn't exist.

That, not what they call themselves, is what makes them mythicists.

 

[Sapiens]

No. That is the one where you said evidence comes from scripture not historical evidence. Again... scripture, not historical evidence.

Do you not understand that the structure 'x not y' means x is not identifiable with y?


Go for it.


I agree with that point. Not most historically evidenced person in ancient history <> weak historical support in any way. Jesus is, again, very well supported in historicity, which you have denied.


No it isn't. First, no historian is going to reject four biographies; all ancient history is filled with propaganda. So, just how much of Roman history(not to mention every other country throughout time, even our history right now is filled with propaganda) do you want to throw out? That "step outside the NT" is irrelevant, like saying "step outside the fossil record and evolutionary biology and the case for evolution isn't so hot".

Yes there is lots of propaganda, but there is a difference between the exaggerations of say the "deification" of Caesar as an honor and the need of the NT to sell a complete belief system. Sure, they're at base level similar, but in practice they're worlds apart.

Critical Textual Analysis
Historical Method

Two items you should really look up before you go spouting off about rationality. You aren't in the realm of rationality right now, and you have the appearance of ignorance.

You see, all the stuff I well and truly believe in the Bible... most of that gets thrown right out on principle of it not being historical in content... God, miracles, all that jazz. And then historians take a whole list of analytical tools to look for things like biases(Christian writers in the Gospels against the Pharisees for instance) and cultural influences, etc. Then they cross reference with other works, the oral history, etc. to find out what is and is not reliable and how reliable those things actually are. By doing this, we can take a text that has propaganda(which is fairly all of them) and then parse that out as best we can to determine what really happened.

BTW, so was that response all of Roman history, I mean we have to throw out anything that has propaganda right?

No, as I noted earlier there is a difference between exaggeration for effect and invention (theft from previous cultures in some cases) from the whole cloth of ann entire belief system.

Now you're going to pretend you didn't insult, mister "shouldn't attempt rational discourse"?

Tell me, does it burn somewhere deep inside, where you viscerally know that you are rejecting science, rejecting logic and rationality to hold your unsupported beliefs because your biases won't let you give them up? That you are intentionally stunting yourself intellectually? That any ability to cognitively harmonize "My beliefs are x" and "I believe as I do because of rigorous application of logic and rationality" is inherently compromised?

As noted elsewhere, I have no beliefs, my world view is probability based.

What specifically, leads you to believe that the gospels do not produce a good case for the existence of a historical Jesus at their core?

It is a matter of intent. The gospels must be suspect because their intent partakes more of the used camel lot than the ivory tower.

No, no it isn't. The claim you created was 'more than anyone else in ancient history', not 'more than almost anyone else from that specific time period'. Massively different claims.


I did, checked three pages: either atheists debunking the argument or Christians responding well duh! Nary a Christian making the argument in three pages, so I didn't go further. Saw one guy use it as a thought experiment about mythicist denialism and historicity, but that isn't actually making the argument... one of those urban legend things I'm wagering(everybody's heard it happens no one's actually seen it).


Does it give you the same level of certainty that a physics experiment on the acceleration rate of gravity on falling objects does? No. Does it give a fair level of it? Yes. Especially when at least 5 independent sources corroborate an event.

I suspect we differ on what a "fair level" is. I don't demand 100% like a physics experiment, but I become uncomfortable with less than 90% probability.

 

[Bunyip]

It's true that many mythicists don't use the term or use other equivalent terms. Raphael Lataster, for example, uses the phrase "JMT proponent" ("JMT" stands for "Jesus Myth Hypothesis"). It's also true that some who did identify as mythicists have backed-off somewhat. For example, after Dunn's devastating criticism Wells wrote: "it will not do to dub me a 'mythicist' tout court." (source). If we shouldn't identify Wells as a mythicist completely this is because he is something of a mythicist (hence the qualifier tout court).

Luckily, labels need not be self-applied to be accurately applied. Terrorists do not typically refer to themselves as such and nor do spies, the most modest people cannot by definition identify themselves as being very modest, and Richard Carrier has identified himself as a classical scholar in print and denied that he is one in print (and has identified himself as an historian with a doctorate in philosophy despite what his CV asserts his doctorate is). And WL Craig can call himself a historian all he wants, but this doesn't make the travesties he tries to pass off as historical research any more historical research than it makes his attempts at physics actually scientific.


RM Price wrote "Virtually everyone who espoused the Christ-Myth theory has laid great emphasis on one question: Why no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in the secular sources?" Of course, he immediately follows this with "Let me leapfrog the tiresome debate over whether the Testimonium Flavianum is authentic" (which Crossan responded to by saying that "Price's comment...is not an acceptable scholarly comment"). He thereby "leapfrog" over a central piece of the very evidence he claims those like him ("Christ-Myth" theorists) hold. More importantly, he identifies himself as a mythicist when he writes (in the same contributing paper) that evidence like "varying dates...are the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history". This is mythicism.

Likewise, when Acharya/Murdoch wrote "the gospel story of Jesus is not a factual portrayal of a historical “master” who walked the earth 2,000 years ago but a myth built upon other myths and godmen, who in turn were personifications of the ubiquitous solar mythos and ritual found in countless cultures around the world thousands of years before the Christian era" in her book The Christ Conspiracy, she could have followed this with "I'm a devout Christian". She'd still be a mythicist.

When Gandy and Freke write two books lying about the evidence for their view that, not only did Jesus not exist, but that the "original" Christians suffered a hostile take-over from the "literalists" (their word for those who believe Jesus was an historical person) they are mythicists. When Doherty writes the same book twice and concludes each time that the there was no historical Jesus, he's a mythicist.


Questioning the historicity of Jesus is called "history", "historical inquiry", "historical study", etc. One cannot write historical Jesus research without questioning his historicity. From works as credulous and uncritical as those by Craig, Bock, Bauckham, etc. to the moronically pseudo-critical skepticism professed by those like Carrier and Crossan.

The so-called quest for the historical basically started, in the 1700s, as an attempt to undermine the entirety of Christianity:

"the argument over the existence of Jesus goes back to the beginning of the critical study of the New Testament. At the end of the eighteenth century, some disciples of the radical English Deist Lord Bolingbroke began to spread the idea that Jesus had never existed. Voltaire, no friend of traditional Christianity, sharply rejected such conclusions, commenting that those who deny the existence of Jesus show themselves "more ingenious than learned." Nevertheless, in the 1790s a few of the more radical French Enlightenment thinkers wrote that Christianity and its Christ were myths."
van Voorst, R. E. (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament (Studying the Historical Jesus). W.B. Eerdmans.


Although in the late 18th and early 19th centuries Christianity still had more than a bit of a grip on universities, the critical attacks on the foundations of Christian belief was made in the context of an intellectual climate which forced them to play their opponents' game. So rather than appeal to theology, faith, etc., they actually pretty much invented much of modern historical-critical study and IE/comparative/historical linguistics:

"The first application of critical cognitive values in conjunction with new theories and methods to generate knew knowledge of the past from present evidence was in biblical criticism...Theories and methods that were developed in biblical criticism were exported next to the analysis of ancient Greek and Latin texts" Tucker, A. (2004). Our Knowledge of the Past. Cambridge University Press.

"Where does lexical semantics find its materials?...One source of examples is philological research into older texts, specifically, classical and biblical philology. Because the interpretation of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts is often not immediately obvious, classical scholars naturally came across many intriguing instances of polysemy and semantic change." Geeraerts, D. (2010). Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford University Press.

The mythicist arguments regurgitated online and in popular works were asked and answered in the 19th century (and even parodied). Even radical critics like Bultmann (frequently quote-mined in online and other popular sources) were tired of those like Drews and Frazer who kept recycling the same "hypotheses" and questions while ignoring how they were already answered (actually, that's unfair- Frazer spent years editing his voluminous work in order to try to both defend his thesis while not making a fool of himself after the plethora of scathing criticisms he received for blatant errors). Modern mythicists regurgitate the same bunk asked and answered by the 60,000 19th century biographies of Jesus the great historian Michael Grant castigated for failing to sufficiently deal with the real questions concerning Jesus' historicity. Grant was also highly critical of most 20th century works before his 1977 Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels. However, he still wrote "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned."

Like mythicists, from the early 18th century through Grant, those who have directly addressed the "Christ-myth theory" have rarely used the term "mythicist". Yes, the term didn't exist during the period in which these arguments were new or fairly new, and yes we have seen increasingly less works directed towards mythicist arguments as these have gone from recycled to tired to flogging possible fossil evidence of a dead equine. This includes scholars like Bultmann commonly cited by mythicists despite their disdain for the position.

"A rose by any other name" would be just as wrong. Bauer, Carrier, Doherty, Drew, Freke, Gandy, Loman, Murdoch, Pierson, Price, Robertson, etc., did and can continue to borrow something from one another and those like (albeit that "those like them" became more and more hacks and online quacks and less and less those even capable of reading the primary and secondary literature let alone being members of academic circles). They have continued to espouse similar views with slight variations. Above all, they have continued to promote the view that our evidence supports the idea that Jesus didn't exist.

That, not what they call themselves, is what makes them mythicists.

After all - why use ten words to say essentially nothing. When two thousand will fill so much more space.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

After all - why use ten words to say essentially nothing.

Because I was under the impression you were able to read.

When two thousand will fill so much more space.

And be correct. However, as your playing the victim, using ad hominem attacks (while "whinging" that you're a victim of these), and are completely ignorant (and have repeatedly shown this) who the **** cares? You don't know what you're talking about, you've know evidence to support you, and you've nothing to stand on. I eagerly await your next dodge.

 

[outhouse]

Because I was under the impression you were able to read.


And be correct. However, as your playing the victim, using ad hominem attacks (while "whinging" that you're a victim of these), and are completely ignorant (and have repeatedly shown this) who the **** cares? You don't know what you're talking about, you've know evidence to support you, and you've nothing to stand on. I eagerly await your next dodge.

Ignore feature will save you frustration with this one.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Ignore feature will save you frustration with this one.

You're right. You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a moron and too obsessive when it comes to those who don't know what they are talking about but act like they do. I'm working on it.

 

[Bunyip]

Because I was under the impression you were able to read.


And be correct. However, as your playing the victim, using ad hominem attacks (while "whinging" that you're a victim of these), and are completely ignorant (and have repeatedly shown this) who the **** cares? You don't know what you're talking about, you've know evidence to support you, and you've nothing to stand on. I eagerly await your next dodge.

Zzzzzzzz.......

And I have given up awaiting your first attempt to actually respond on point.

To be honest, if you put me on ignore as Outhouse has that suits me fine. Then I can respond to anything you say that I wish to respond to - and not have to waste my time filtering through your epic meandering diatribes in order to see if at any point you do in fact engage with whatever point I made. (which you never do).

 

[oldbadger]

The idea that Jesus never existed.

You got that wrong.
Christ myth theory is the tenet that Christ is a myth, not Jesus.