ApostateAbe

Good lesson. It is not a game of tennis to me.

jgoodguy

It appears to me that between the HJers and the JMers that is some sort of agreement for mutual mass destruction by derision.

Toto

more on Schweitzer:

Vridar: Schweitzer on the historicist mythicist debate

Steven Carr

SCHWEITZER
Added to this, all hypotheses which have so far been put forward to the effect that Jesus never lived are in the strangest opposition to each other, both in their method of working and their interpretation of the Gospel reports, and thus merely cancel each other out.

CARR
Of course, there are so many historical Jesus theories that scholars are now saying that they merely cancel each other out...

ApostateAbe

I don't think it is something Schweitzer said off the cuff. The critical historical-Jesus theories are in agreement with each other on at least a rough profile of Jesus and the foundation of Christianity, despite their differences in details--they very much tend to agree that Jesus was a traveling preacher who was born in Nazareth, was baptized by John the Baptist, had 12 disciples, traveled the rural areas preaching with parables, was betrayed by Judas, was crucified by Pontius Pilate, and was succeeded by Peter and then Paul. Not that there won't be at least one outlier who disagrees on any given point.

But, since mythical-Jesus advocates have no methodology for making sense of the evidence, only criticism and skepticism, their models differ in all of the details in the most drastic ways you can imagine, from one MJ-model to the next. What does the majority of MJ-advocates agree upon? Almost nothing. They can hardly even come to a consensus on the point that Jesus never existed. It is a big embarrassment, and I don't think the embarrassment can be so easily rebutted with a tu quoque. It reflects the fundamental flaws in their methodologies, and, yes, I know that some of them lay the blame for such divisions on flaws inherent to the entire field.

discordant

Mythicists couldn't possibly beat this, because non-existent profiles can't be compared for agreement.

jgoodguy

Yes, that is like having a scientific theory where the same inputs have random outputs. It becomes apparent that the rather sparse evidence gets overwhelmed by personal bias.

ApostateAbe

It doesn't need to be a profile of Jesus. Jesus-minimalists have an abundance of facts reflecting the early Christian myths, and they could at the very least use a historical methodology to find an origin and timeline of the development of the Christian myths. That is what critical HJ-scholars have actually done.

ApostateAbe

I strongly disagree. I have had a dispute with Toto and others about the amount of "evidence" for the origins of Christianity, and the disagreement stems from what the definition of "evidence" should be. I claim that there is actually an abundance of "evidence," but there is a disagreement because others believe that "evidence" only counts as "evidence" if it reinforces a particular theory.

So, I switched to using the term, "facts." There is an abundance of facts concerning the origins of Christianity, and those facts are the ink of the ancient manuscripts (even though the ancient claims are all untrustworthy). We have more than enough relevant facts to be able to draw conclusions, either toward a mythical Jesus, a historical Jesus, or something else. The output is not random, if you have an appropriate methodology. The critical HJ-scholars have consensuses on many more points than you may think. A consensus is reflected in the scholarly journals, not the bookshelves of public libraries or bookstores and not the Internet.

Toto

These agreed upon facts amazingly resemble the gospel narrative that so many of these critical historical Jesus theorists accept as a matter of faith!

Skepticism is a methodology, and makes more sense of the evidence than gullibility.

So they agree on all details of Jesus' existence.

It is not an embarrassment. It is evidence of intellectual ferment and the lack of enforced orthodoxy.