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

[CapnAwesome]

"There really is no reason for him not to be" isn't a very compelling historical argument for jesus, even as a man.  There's really no reason that there could'nt have been a guy named steve who lived at my address twenty years ago - and yet there was not.  I'm not disagreeing with you at all, there really -isn't- any reason that jesus or steve couldn't have been real...but that is irrelevant to a mythicist position.  The mythicist position (one of many positions in this category, tbt) is that the -jesus of text- is a jesus of myth and legend.  If there is/was a real man....it is simply not to be found -in the text-.

*bold mine


I think that you are misstating the mythsist position, at least the one that I've heard. When it comes to Atheist and Agnostic historians, say like Bart Erhman or the one that the opening post quotes, obviously they don't believe in the Jesus of the texts. That's because the texts mention god and have tons of supernature mumbo jumbo in them. My understand of the mythisist position is that there was never even a person to start with. That Jesus wasn't based on a human being at all and made up after the fact.

Now I'm going to make a couple of statements on that. Number one and I think this is important, is that I don't really think it matters at all. Mythsists somehow act like their position is more anti-christian than other people, as though it's some sort of contest. Now you take your average internet-mythisist (and the internet greatly exaggerates how common this belief is) and compare him to someone who believes that there was a historical delusional man in the 1st century who believed himself to be the Jewish Messiah (in fact we know there were several) then I don't see position 1 as any more or less 'Atheist' or anti-christian than position 2. However most Atheists online act as though you aren't a proper atheist at all unless you buy into Jesus-mythisism.

Now the reason that I think there was likely a historical basis for Jesus is that the evidence that there is for him is about analogous to other historical figures of his importance. A historical, non-magical Jesus is basically not an important figure in the Roman age. The Gospels come only 30ish years after his death, which for the time, is relatively quick. By comparison Ghenghis Khan, who was a vastly more important historical figure at the time, wasn't written about until almost 100 years after his death. Also like Jesus much that was written about him included the supernatural. That's just how things were done back then and trying to apply modern standards of evidence to ancient peoples is just silly and makes the mythisist movement look very amateur.

I think if you are to say there is made up magical stuff in the gospels and therefore there can't be a real man behind it is similar to saying that Marco Polo's journey didn't really happen because there is a lot of made up and magical things that he wrote about on the journey. Again, made up and magical is in many, if not most ancient writings. It's getting around that that is tricky. If you were to throw out everything that has magical stuff in it when it comes to ancient documents than very few people existed in the ancient world. So when you say that there is no historical Jesus to be found in the Gospels or by the oral tradition that clearly existed leading up to the writing of the Gospels, I think that you can strip away the supernatural (the same way we do as historians with Ghenghis Khan and Marco Polo) and find a historical person, get some basic understanding of what might have happened in his life. Now I am open minded about that we really can't know that much about him, but the mythisist arguments that I've come across commonly mostly rely on applying modern standards to the ancient world and that is the heart of why they on unconvincing.