Richard Carrier - The Hero Savior Analogy

[Mudhammam]

.....what sense does it make so say that it contains a historical jesus, particularly when you can't even tell me which caricature is more accurate than another?

That's the challenge that historians face when approaching more or less any ancient figure. Did Imhotep really design the first stepped pyramid? Was Socrates really ironic? Was Jesus really an apocalyptic preacher? Etc.

A book full of caricatures about me would be no more representative of "the historical rhythm". Regaradless of the fact that I exist in the here and now, that doesn't actually give anyone any good -reason- to think that I did..centuries (or even just decades) into the future. You'd ask for corroborating data, wouldn't you? You wouldn't be satisfied with a book of exaggerated descriptions of the archetypal redneck as "the historical rhythm", would you? When that corroborating data turns out to be simple misinterpretation all the way to fraud, and so does the book of caricatures...would you -still- feel confident that one of the caricatures is "the historical rhythm"?

If the volume of noise was the same and included a number of mundane and even embarrassing details, I'd feel confident that there are facts to be known about the historical rhythm even if buried underneath a heap of prejudice, exaggeration, and delusion.

Actually Carrier is talking about the quality of the evidence for the godboy.... which is virtually non-existent and would not be accepted as valid for any other character in any other novel.

If that's all he is arguing for here then I concur that it's not a bad analogy. I thought he was making the claim that Rhythm seems to be in his conflation of people as they were (or weren't) versus those "same" people as recorded by their initial devotees in history (the same mistake Christians make but in the opposite direction), i.e. no godboy = no historical man revered as a fictional deity.