Rick Sumner

More aptly, I suppose, I'm an agnostic on whether or not a real Jesus existed, but take a mythicist perspective on the surviving evidence.

I'll probably get more useful feedback from here than from my usual readership, so I've written a blog post on the subject. Longer term posters will recognize what a fundamental change this is. I was genuinely surprised to end up there.

Why I Am a Mythicist

It is perhaps interesting to note that Doherty, or Price, or Carrier etc. convinced me of nothing. The conclusion is genuinely epistemologically based. The closest anyone has come to saying anything similar on the topic that I've encountered is our own spin, and I flatly (and emphatically) rejected him every time.

maryhelena

Regardless of the way one comes to the ahistoricist/mythicist position - the important thing is that one arrives there. Important because it's only by arriving at that position that one can move forward in searching for early christian origins.

It's just a story - it's just a story. It is not a historical account of early christian origins. If its that that we seek, an understanding of how that story arose, then we have to deal with history and put gospel interpretations aside. Get the Jewish history on the table - and then return to that gospel story to see if there is a reflection of history within that story. And if there is - then we have some leads, as it were, to what those gospel writers deemed to be relevant to their storytelling.

(Neither Doherty, nor Price, nor Wells, have influenced my own views on the gospel story. I doubt very much I would have become an ahistoricist/mythicist by reading any of their writings...)

outhouse

man that was alot of writing to get to what, two sentences that summed up your post.



the thing we do have, is a cleartrack record of how ancient hebrews created their mythology.

by using probabilities and the fact they usually have a historical core, [more often then not] sometimes small, sometimes large, and sometimes not at all.

Its easy to deduce that there was in fact a historical charactor in which this was all based.

Its why mythers will always hold less then, the minority position.

Tom Sawyer

Well, that's still more properly termed a "guess" as opposed to a "deduction". There really isn't enough information available either way to come to a reasonable stance on either side of the question.

outhouse

sure there is


romans would never deify a poor, peasant, hybrid tax zealot, teacher/healer

but they did

Tom Sawyer

Or not.

outhouse

I havnt seen a a myther yet produce a replacement hypothesis for why romans deified a peasant, when they have a track record of only deifying emporers ect ect.


The best mythers have is R Price and I can debunk him.


His intelligence is off the charts and his knowledge top ranked, love his work.

But his end result is weak. And that is your champion. After that it falls off faster then the niagra falls as far as any sort of credibility.

Ktotwf

What most people don't seem to get is that he was deified specifically because he was such a stark reversal of the "lordly" type. He appealed to the downtrodden, the masses. He was "our" guy! That is the point!

Rick Sumner

On the contrary. The argument I offer is that searching for the origin of Christianity is impossible. Where our sources stop, so too must our endeavour.

Juma

And how would historicity of jesus follow from this???