Does mythicism have any constraints? Mainstream historiography, at least ideally, tries to allow extant historical sources, sifted through and evaluated as to their reliability, to constrain its conclusions. Often the evidence will underdetermine the conclusion, so that more than one conclusion may be compatible with the evidence. But some “conclusions” (if we can call them that, since in general they are determined in advance) will still be incompatible with the evidence, and historians will rightly reject such options.
What constraints, if any, are there on mythicism? It seems to me that the approach mythicists tend to take is to eliminate constraints rather than identify and adopt them. Although types of mythicist scenarios and claims vary, they all seem to ask “what if” questions of a similar sort: What if instead of “according to the flesh” what he really meant was “in the realm of the flesh situated above the firmament”? What if by “brother” he meant some specific religious functionary in the early Christian movement? What if that passage is an interpolation even though there is no evidence that it is?
Those interested in rigorous historical investigation need to ask the following question: Could such an approach, which strives to find alternative meanings for any inconvenient evidence, not turn any ancient figure into a myth? If we redefine “emperor” in our earliest sources about Rome as a celestial spiritual entity who leads the empire, and treat all texts about such figures as allegories, could we not make even well-attested political figures into pure myths?
So does mythicism have any constraints other than the human imagination? And if not, does that not tell us something about whether it deserves to be considered something scholarly?
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