The last of my guest posts on Bart Ehrman\u2019s blog<\/a> about my book What Jesus Learned from Women<\/em><\/a> appeared yesterday.\u00a0Given that Bart Ehrman and I share an interest in promoting mainstream scholarship over against the misrepresentation of texts and history by conservative Christians and atheist mythicists, I had initially been inclined to start my guest post about Junia on Ehrman\u2019s blog<\/a> with that as a bridge\/intro. If Paul had a relative who was a founding member of the Jesus movement, there from the earliest days, that ought to be a death knell for mythicism, although as with all pseudoscholarship, no evidence ever seems to be enough to keep diehard believers from remaining true to their cause nonetheless.<\/p>\n Since I\u2019m writing on theology and progressive rock at the moment as well, I can\u2019t avoid asking what constitutes a \u201cfounding member\u201d of a religion or a band. You can talk about the band Genesis and not feel the need to mention Chris Stewart on drums. That isn\u2019t just because drummers tend to be ignored or disconsidered. (I am reminded of\u00a0 famous joke, often misattributed to John Lennon<\/a>, as an answer to the question whether Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world. The reply was that Starr isn\u2019t even the best drummer in the Beatles.) Joanna\/Junia was involved from very early and funded the movement. She was a founding sponsor, a patron. While even if Paul merely met Jesus\u2019 brother it would be more than adequate evidence for a historian, Paul also had relatives who were \u201cin Christ\u201d before him, i.e. part of the movement around Jesus in the earliest period. We often have the impression that Paul, as it were, took over on lead vocals in the band Christianity. Yet that is because in our album of the \u201cGreatest Hits of the Early Church<\/a>\u201d that we call the New Testament, he does so much of the \u201csinging.\u201d Part of the work of historians and other historical scholars is to do justice to the fact that what predominates in literature does not accurately represent the reality of the time that produced that literature. So often, more was written by those whose views were then considered least persuasive, since they had to make their case more strongly and more often. And to conclude the metaphor, all of this is relevant to addressing the mythicist scenario in which Christianity began with a lead singer that only existed in the imagination of the band members.<\/p>\n Chris Hansen has a new article out in the latest issue of the\u00a0Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism<\/em>, volume 16 (2020)<\/a>. The title is \u201cLord Raglan\u2019s Hero and Jesus: A Rebuttal to Methodologically Dubious Uses of the Raglan Archetype.\u201d<\/a> In it he engages mythicist writers such as Richard Carrier who attempt to use the problematic Rank-Raglan scale to mount an even more problematic argument against the historicity of Jesus on that basis. He interacts with my article in\u00a0Bible and Interpretation<\/em>, the article that I think has my most alliterative title thus far, \u201cRankled by Wrangling over Rank-Raglan Rankings: Jesus and the Mythic Hero Archetype.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Also related to Jesus:<\/p>\n