Steven Carr

Have there been peer-reviewed articles pointing out what is wrong with Earl Doherty's thesis?

Jeffrey Gibson

To my knowledge there has never been a peer reviewed article pointing out anything about Earl's thesis. But this hardly seems to be the case because reviewers would not take it on. Witness, e.g., the publication (or via: amazon.co.uk) of the essay on no Jesus by Bob Price by the conservative evangelical Inter-Varsity Press.

It seems to be because Earl apparently has never submitted his books to the places he needs to submit them to if he wants to have his work peer reviewed -- namely, to review editors of peer reviewed journals. As I reminded him on several occasions, such submissions would have happened automatically had he published his work through an actual academic press rather than a vanity press, as he chose to do.

However, his work has been surveyed in The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd.

Jeffrey

Toto

The two examples you give are conservative evangelical publications. IV Press is run by the Campus Crusade for Christ people, and Boyd and Eddy try to justify believing in miracles. These are not the sort of academics Doherty needs to review his work

The Jesus Seminar outrightly refused to consider his case.

Steven Carr

So how do scholars know it is wrong if they have never seen a peer-reviewed refutation of it?

ApostateAbe

There are some theories that are absurd on the face. For example, I don't know about any formal refutation of the theory of the electric universe, the theory that gravity is actually electromagnetism. It is popular among a fringe group of lay people, and yet I wouldn't blame physicists for dismissing it offhand. Doherty's theory that the earliest Christians knew that Jesus was a myth comes off as sort of a facepalmer to someone who studies the subject. There is no record of such theological divisions in the early church, contrary to what we would very much expect--early Christian writings are filled with theological debates, mainly documents of the proto-orthodox church arguing against everyone else, and such a change in doctrine would be marked by very contentious arguments. So Doherty's theory is on the same level as someone claiming that early Christians believed that Jesus crawled out of a volcano. You can go ahead and believe it, but it takes only four words to refute it--"Where is the evidence?"

Petergdi

No, Campus Crusade and Inter-Varsity are quite different.

Liberal Evangelicals are welcome at Inter-Varsity, they're pretty much excluded by Campus Crusade..

Peter.

aa5874

So, when it is written in the NT SUPPOSEDLY by Christians that Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, from where did Jesus crawl?

Steven Carr

You mean that if Doherty were correct we would see orthodox Christians claiming they were not following cleverly invented stories, and denouncing Christians who said Jesus had not been a flesh and blood Jesus?

And the mythicist hypothesis has been refuted time and time again by countless scholars, which explains why there are no peer-reviewed articles refuting mythicism? It has been refuted, so there are no articles refuting it....

Ktotwf

The only argument every presented to counter the Mythicist hypothesis is, "Well, no serious scholar believes it!"

It is like a snowball of self righteous contempt from the Apologists.

(As you can guess, this is the incorrect way of arguing things.)

"No serious scholar" is willing or able to say anything of value about the actual, historical life of Jesus, but apparently EVERY scholar is willing to say with 100% certainty that he was a real man who lived. Smells fishy to me.

ApostateAbe

My claim is that the theory is absurd on the face, so there are no articles in important publications refuting it. Since you brought up the "cleverly invented stories" bit, I'll just copy and paste what I said to you before in a different thread.
It is completely normal for religions to denounce doubt about their claims of miracles. Clearly, the "Transfiguration" story really was a cleverly invented story, and doubt about such a thing would come from outside the church and at least it would be present inside. In other words, it is the sort of thing we would expect regardless of whether or not Doherty is correct. The thing we do not see is what makes Doherty's theory seem absurd--Christian writers arguing with other leading Christians about the existence of Jesus.

You also say that "we would see orthodox Christians... denouncing Christians who said Jesus had not been a flesh and blood Jesus", and I take it you mean that the prediction is fulfilled by proto-orthodox Christians arguing with the Marcionite Christians. However, there is a world of difference between an explicitly mythical Jesus and the Marcionite Jesus. The Marcionite Jesus was developed well after the proto-orthodox Jesus was established, and he was clearly not explicitly myth. Yes, the Marcionite Jesus was not flesh and blood, but he was something like a phantom--he fooled everyone into thinking that he was flesh and blood when he was really made of spirit. This doctrine was apparently designed to solve theological problems that were very troubling at the time--that humans and gods are mutually exclusive, and gods are immortal. Written in the middle of the second century, the gospel of Marcion is derived from the gospel of Luke with only a few trivial differences. Tertullian writes about Marcion:

His followers cannot deny that his faith at first agreed
with ours, for his own letter proves it: so that without further ado
that man can be marked down as a heretic, or 'chooser', who,
forsaking what had once been, has chosen for himself that which
previously was not.

Doherty's theory is that the myth-Jesus adherence goes back the first generation of Christians, and it made its shift in the second generation. That means we should see signs of the shift in the writings of Paul and the synoptic gospels, not in the second century.