Thanks for your reply Alexander, if you wish to add more, feel more than welcome to do so. This video really irked my blood. A few months ago I was involved in conversation with the leading mythicist D.M Murdock(otherwise known as Acharya S.) which really had me so consumed, and I wouldn't rest in peace till I managed to get in contact with Michael Heiser, who kindly clarified many things for me, anyways, please respond to this as well as you can(if you have time of course), and thanks a lot.

I concur with Brony, Ben Yakov's aphorism about Jesus Mythicists being the atheist equivalent to Young Earth Creationists tends to ring true here.

Isn't Law a Mythicist?

Mysterious Brony wrote:

I don't see why these Jesus Mythicists continue spreading their pseudo-history. Back in the 19th century, the Mythicist hypothesis was prevalent, but now the Mythicist hypothesis has been discredited from academic history. The historical evidence is clear that Jesus did existed and no, "christian apologists" are not the only ones saying this, rather academic history. Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIdCRanZZyw. or Tim O'Neill's blog.

https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/the-did-jesus-exist-controversy-and-its-precedents/

One of the main reasons for it that I've learnt from Dr. Heiser and Dr. Hurtado is that, apparently, none of the historians in today will do the work required for the public in order to diminish this myth, with the few exceptions of Boyd and Eddy in their book, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus and  Stanley E. Porter in, Unmasking the Pagan Christ: An Evangelical Response to the Cosmic Christ Idea. We also have Maurice Casey(an agnostic) who has written, Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 


Thanks for referring Tim O'Neill's blog to me, I'll be going through it now.

Last edited by Dennis (9/20/2015 8:45 pm)

This does lead to an interesting question: I'm not a Christian but I'm not a naturalist in historical method any more than biblical scholars are, because I'm not a naturalist period. What are we supposed to do about claims of miraculous events in historical texts? Sometimes a mythical reading is clearly motivated because the texts in question will be literary or will have obvious context or motivations for exaggerating or poetasizing events, but I can think of, just off the top of my head, having read about well over a dozen cases of seemingly miraculous events in the history of Buddhism, and not even merely in the life of the Buddha, but in the life of what you might call Buddhist Saints. What kind of scholarly motivation could I possibly have for dismissing those kinds of accounts? Only a strict adherence to something like naturalism would seem to force me to constantly want to debunk those claims.

Socrates daimonion also comes to mind- there is nothing but a supposed naturalism that would push us to try and psychologize that phenomenon away.

Last edited by iwpoe (9/21/2015 9:09 am)

Dennis wrote:

Hi, Jeremy Taylor and iwpoe, for the issues that've come up, literary critique would be of great intrigue. Is anyone here familiar or formally/informally trained in the art of literary critique?

What do you mean? So called, literary criticism? I.e. bad interpretations of interesting philosophical texts you get in English departments? Or something else?