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

[CapnAwesome]

Allow that those presenting (myself included) are not sterling representatives of the theory?  Here, try wiki (caveat emptor...lol).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory

(it's not primary sources, btw, it's non christian sources..a person might argue that all primary sources are christian and plainly incentivized to tell their version of the tale.  I wouldn't, because I don't find the source of a narrative to be compelling or all that informative in this context, only hazarding a guess as to what the argument offered was, that you were unsatisfied with.)

So there is a lot to respond to in that (I have read that wiki page before however), and I'm not sure exactly what you are expecting. I mean much of it is the same. Saying that there are no non-Christian sources in the 1st century just isn't a good argument. This is consistent with what we would expect. Jesus wasn't an important historical figure in his time. I'm not sure that there are any non-Roman sources for Julius Ceasar and he's a vastly more important historical figure. I mean one of those guys says that we have to remain agnostic about the existence of Jesus unless we find a skeleton or Diary (because of the unreliability of the gospels ). If we applied that standard to other historical figures we have to start doubting them all. What we have is four (actually 5 because there was some other early gospel also) sources about a minor figure at the time that come relatively quickly after his death. Some contradict each other, there are some references to places and people that we know to be historical, there is a lot of nonsense and inaccuracies. That is about par for the course in the ancient world. I mean we can use gospel inaccuracies to say that it obviously wasn't divinely inspired, but not to say it has no historical value.

and just to sound like a broken record, I'm going to bring up Marco Polo again, which exactly like the Gospels has some references to places and people that we know to be historical, there is a lot of nonsense and inaccuracies. It's par for the course but we consider it an invaluable historical document. Jesus mythisim not only argues that Jesus is a myth, but in someways argues that we need to change the whole historical process when it comes to the ancient world. I guess that's really my main problem with it.

Adding to the editing wars: It doesn't matter really if it's non-christian or primary. There are no primary sources for Jesus, either Christian or non-Christian That's just pretty normal when it comes to the time period we are dealing with.