The First Century Void

[Fake Messiah]

Haven't you considered the likelihood that the "Contra Celsum" is a fraud?  Is there an actual copy of the original manuscript?  

I haven't. Do you have any indications it is a fraud? Now there is no treatise by Celsus that survived which was titled "The True Word", not as a whole only what's left in "Contra Celsum", but that is not strange considering that Christians were responsible for preserving books and they simply destroyed what they considered that may disgrace their religion. I mean take something banal as "Archimedes Palimpsest" - which was just about science and didn't talk about Christianity and yet monks erased it; perhaps not because they found it offensive, but still, they didn't like it enough to preserve it, so they erased it and used it to write their prayers over it.

I think that you mis-understand what the mythicist position is. For instance Ehrman is certainly not on the side of Christianity, and he can be found in many places calling the mythiscist position foolish. And noting that no serious mythiscist holds a major teaching position in history or theology in any major university.

Well we are going in circles aren't we? We already had this discussion. Ehrman had this positions but like you describe they were weak and ad hominem, because what you are parroting here that Ehrman's said "foolish mythicists" is meant Ehrman's attack on Thomas L. Thompson, whom I mentioned to you before and no doubt I will have to do it again.

Even Philip R. Davies, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, England called Ehrman's attack on Thompson outrageous. Davies not only defends Thompson's work on this matter, he acknowledges that Thompson and Thomas Verenna have amassed a great deal of evidence demonstrating that whether he was real or mythical, the profile of Jesus in the New Testament is composed of stock motifs drawn from all over the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.
Davies argues this whole debate should be taken seriously and can't be snubbed outright or dismissed as the work of amateurs. He fully recognizes that the evidence for Jesus' historicity is no slam-dunk, and that in light of how weak and extremely problematic it actually is, nothing warrants the degree of rhetoric coming from critics like Ehrman. On the contrary, Davies counters that acknowledging the possibility that Jesus didn't exist is the only way the field can maintain any academic respectability:

"surely the rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth should be tested to see what weight it can bear, or even to work out what kind of historical research might be appropriate. Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case and the highly emotive and dismissive language of, say, Bart Ehrman’s response to Thompson’s The Mythic Past shows (if it needed to be shown), not that the matter is beyond dispute, but that the whole idea of raising this question needs to be attacked, ad hominem, as something outrageous. This is precisely the tactic anti-minimalists tried twenty years ago: their targets were ‘amateurs’, ‘incompetent’, and could be ignored. The ‘amateurs’ are now all retired professors, while virtually everyone else in the field has become minimalist (if in most cases grudgingly and tacitly). So, as the saying goes, déjà vu all over again."

And so on - read the whole article
http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/dav368029.shtml