Historian explains why Jesus ''mythers'' aren't taken seriously by most Historians

[abaris]

My own opinion on this (unlike O'Neill, I'm an actual historian, by education and training, if not by profession) is that the situation is pretty closely mirrored by the 'Arthur of Britain' problem.

Yes, I'm pretty much the same as you. Although I got my training at the university of Vienna and am in no way specialised in ancient history but made my degree writing about what's called contemporary history in my corner of the world. Meaning the 20th century.

One of my first lessons when starting to study history was to be presented with a text. No author, no time period and no geographical origin was offered. We were encouraged to come to our own conclusions based only on the actual text. In my case it was from the GDR, which was still existing at the time. Certain keywords in the narrative pointed in that direction. The lesson was to be critical of one's sources and that's something I think is missing when dealing with the likes of Bart Ehrman for example, who doesn't have any training as a historian and therefore misses out on critical text analysis. Starting with the definition of history through the ages, which was entirely different in ancient times than it is today. Hearsay was considered a valid source and the underlying meaning was to present an ideal, not actual events.