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The questions you posed can only be assessed by a Bayesian application to the evidence. Take your first question Are people more likely to be fervent about a charismatic healer or preacher they saw with their own eye? Or a fable told them about a personality from the previous century? And...

That's not how historians use Bayes. The questions you have raised for probability estimates actually beg the question of historicity. They assume situations that would exist if the core of the gospel story is historical -- which is what we are trying to determine, so we can't begin with that...

Anyone who thinks the evidence for Jesus is on a par with any other historical person from ancient times has never taken the very short time it takes to see exactly how historians know other ancient persons existed. Comparing the sources for Caesar and Jesus Comparing the evidence for Jesus...

"Romans" is not a single ideological group. There can be many independent ideological viewpoints among Romans. There can be many rival partisan groups within the collective "Romans" (whatever "Romans" means -- city of Rome inhabitants? Italians? citizens? slaves?) Caesar had supporters and...

Albert Schweitzer was no fool and he wrote at length against the Christ myth arguments of his day. But one thing he did understand is that the historian needs INDEPENDENT evidence to confirm hypotheses or the reliability of data that comes from a single source. With Julius Caesar, Hannibal...

Personally I find another scholar, Whitney Shiner's conclusion, the most satisfactory. He addresses the well-known motif of irony found throughout the Gospel of Mark. This gospel at almost every step with every episode raises questions that can open up the meaning to opposing interpretations...

Some may think MacDonald is a somewhat eccentric scholar because of his argument that the Gospel of Mark draws upon Homeric epics in addition to biblical material. So here is another quotation from another more mainstream critical scholar, Mark Goodacre, who has the same opinion of the...

I was curiously accused of twisting scriptures when I pointed out that there are scholarly arguments out there that interpret the Gospel of Mark's centurion's "confession" as a sarcastic gloat over the death of Jesus on the cross instead of as a genuine confession of faith. By pointing out that...

Another irony is that most Christians do indeed believe in a Jesus who is alive in heaven, who cares personally for them, who was very much the person found in the gospels -- so in that sense, the question of "historical Jesus" is irrelevant for most believers: a mythical Jesus is all there is...

The irony! "Markan irony" is a well known trope in New Testament studies. Someone posts a clip of Dennis MacDonald saying what rot mythicism is. Yet Dennis MacDonald is also one who seriously argued that the centurion at the foot of the cross was being sarcastic(!) when he said, "Surely this was...

I know this is not your main point, but in the interests of keeping a discussion on an even keel, it is not even "evidence" that the author was there to watch a crucifixion, etc. Evidence per se needs to be independent of what it is testifying for. All a narrative can tell us is what the author...

To demonstrate that it is not some sort of dishonest distortion that the argument that the centurion's words spoken at the death of Jesus were some sort of irony or sarcasm in the Gospel of Mark (I have never even suggested they are the same for the later gospels -- they are not!) , interested...

Let's be clear about what I actually wrote. I wrote: "(As for the Roman soldier's confession at the end of the crucifixion scene, there are reasonable arguments that that little anecdote was introduced into the first gospel as an ironic twist: "So this! was the son of God! What a joke!" Those...

Woah there! The sarcasm of the Roman soldier idea is found serious scholars and presented in peer reviewed publications. I am not saying I agree with it -- I don't know -- but it when balanced against the thrust of the preceding taunts it is not a culpable distortion. Can you explain how "one...

The problem with the view that Paul or the gospels meant to convey a message that we are all guilty and in some vicarious sense responsible for the death of Jesus is that Paul nowhere expresses such guilt himself and doesn't try to tell his converts that they should, either. And it doesn't...

Interestingly, Markus Vinzent demonstrates that until late in the second century Christian writings didn't place much emphasis on Christ's resurrection and return. What was front and center as the saving act of Jesus was his death. Paul's letters were "(re?)discovered" by Marcion in the middle...

Even if he wasn't a "very good Jew" that still leaves him as part of "the tribe". I have just finished reading a history of gnostic origins and the author made a good point when he said that even though gnostic teachings were "anti-Jewish" (e.g. teaching that the Creator god was a lesser god...

Yes indeed -- your analogy with Socrates is spot on. That was a well known theme before Plato and has been a favourite ever since, among Jewish storytellers and others--- the idea of a righteous man being too good for this world and a blind and ignorant and wicked mob killing that righteous man...

When I was asked to contribute a chapter to this book I was relieved that I did not have to argue a case for Jesus mythicism. To me, there is no case to answer: The Jesus of the gospels is recognized as mythical by critical scholars and the Jesus of Paul's letters is a theological construct...