Originally Posted by ynquirer

You ought to propose a poll among scholars expert on the topic to have the answer you request - I guess.

Originally Posted by aa5874

So, when you claimed that the great majority of scholars put their money on the historical Jesus you must have done a poll or you just guessed?

Originally Posted by ynquirer

That's different: you just have to have a look on scholarly journals. How many of them publish peer-reviewed articles supporting the mythicist position?

Originally Posted by aa5874

So, when you claimed that the great majority of scholars put their money on the historical Jesus you must have done a poll or you just guessed?

Originally Posted by Toto

How many peer reviewed articles have been published refuting the mythicist position?

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

About the same number refuting the theory of a global catastrophic flood a few thousand years ago, which is about zero such articles in my estimate. It was refuted long before there were publications of peer-reviewed articles, and the arguments have not been any better.

Originally Posted by Toto

How many peer reviewed articles have been published refuting the mythicist position?

Originally Posted by gurugeorge

I've spent the last few years on and off hanging around here, and I still can't quite put my finger on what the problem here is, it's really quite subtle.

Here's another attempt:-

For centuries you had this figure, who almost everyone believed was a historical figure, who was a kind of a superhero figure. The SUPERHERO Jesus was considered the HISTORICAL JESUS by most people throughout history. The NT texts were considered to be pretty good proof of the existence of this superhero (of course I'm using "superhero" anachronistically here, just to get a point across quickly, and because it's amusing )

Then along comes the rationalist and scientific revolutions. People start being sceptical about miracles, superhero-type figures, etc. It is understood that the NT texts couldn't reasonably be construed as proof of the historical existence of a superhero figure (Hume, etc. - basically, you can't rule out superheros apriori, but you'd need stronger evidence than the NT to reasonably allow yourself to believe in the NT one. Epistemologically, the NT fails in its purpose of proving that a superhero existed.)

Then along come some rationalists who are also Christians. They want to keep their Christian-religion-cake and eat it. They want to somehow preserve the religion, while rationalising and ditching the superstition from its central idea.

So they take the (prima facie very reasonable, if you're not alert) position that while there obviously cannot have been a historical superhero Jesus, there must have been a historical human Jesus behind the historical superhero Jesus story.

This is just totally does not follow.

The lunatic thing in all this is how the priorly-presumed historicality of the story about the superhero Jesus is just translated across to the presumed historicality of a human figure hypothesised to be behind the myth - without any questioning of this move at all.

i.e. (damn this is difficult to put into words, and I still feel I'm not getting it across) there's a whole bunch of "historical-supportness" that was priorly attached to the superhero Jesus' story that's just shifted across to being supportive of an entirely hypothetical "human Jesus".

But once you ditch the possibility of a superhero Jesus, the evidentiary status of the original texts is up in the air. You cannot presume they are about a HISTORICAL ANYTHING.

The whole thing has to be looked at painstakingly from scratch, in a context in which "historical Jesus" is only one among a number of apriori equally plausible options.

Originally Posted by ynquirer

That's different: you just have to have a look on scholarly journals. How many of them publish peer-reviewed articles supporting the mythicist position?