To make the case for mythicism as the best explanation of the evidence, you have to have it be the best explanation for all<\/em> the material we have. With the exception of some religious conservatives who have made up their minds in advance, everyone<\/em> in the fields of history and New Testament accepts that some<\/em>\u00a0of the material attributed to Jesus in the New Testament was invented. That isn\u2019t mythicism. Mythicism claims that it provides the best explanation for all<\/em> the material, and if there were someone who had made that case, we would know about it. Mainstream scholars have written works that tackle every saying and event in the New Testament. I\u2019m pretty sure that if a mythicist had produced such a voluminous work, it would have come up in the discussion by now. But if there is such a thing, please do let me know. If not, then it is obvious<\/em> that mythicism hasn\u2019t adequately made its case, because like inerrancy, it doesn\u2019t work\u00a0if it\u00a0is only true of part of the material. If there is one error, then the Bible is not inerrant. If there is one piece of historical data about a real Jesus, then mythicism is wrong.<\/p>\n And so as New Testament scholars and other historians pay careful attention to specific details, we get accused in essence of proving \u201cmicroexistence.\u201d But\u00a0authentic material about Jesus leads naturally to an authentic Jesus. We may not know much about him. But I think it is at this point that we really get to the heart of what mythicism is. It seems to be an attempt to sidestep the hard work of sifting through the historical evidence for those nuggest of material that can be judged authentic with a high degree of certainty. And that is what distinguishes academic historical study from mythicism: an unwillingness to make an a priori<\/em> judgment about a figure\u2019s existence rather than on the basis of a painstaking careful investigation of each piece of evidence.<\/p>\n Let me sum up and try to be succinct. Mythicism is a claim<\/em> about all the available evidence, made by a group that has not (whether individually or collectively) provided a treatment<\/em> of all the available evidence to support their claim.<\/u><\/p>\n Although I know some have found the comparison between Jesus mythicism and creationism\u00a0offensive, it seems like the more time I spend thinking about this topic, the more similarities become apparent. It seems to me that the claim of at least some mythicists that mainstream historians fail to address the existence of Jesus directly, much less […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":39313,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[686,3217,5677,7856],"class_list":["post-1659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mythicism","tag-antievolutionism","tag-evolution-science","tag-jesus","tag-mythicists"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/7622297540113836091-2897757424358470745?l=exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com\")