So You Want to be a Jesus Mythicist? | Hope's Reason

So You Want to be a Jesus Mythicist? | Hope's Reason

What you have to believe, the facts you have to fudge, the history you have to whitewash, in order to believe that Jesus is nothing but a mythical figure, a pastiche of older myths.

"Insist that the only valid textual evidence would be a completely unbiased, philosophically and religious free secular document that lists the facts according to modern standards of historiography. Of course, there are no ancient documents like that for any historical figure. That just means you need not worry that some Christian apologist is going to pull out some new document. You have already disqualified any potential historical text. One of the things that you need to do, is make sure to keep a different standard for historical investigation for Jesus than one would use for some other historical figure....

"The second part of the Jesus myth theory is that Jesus is based on pagan myths. This can be tricky because if someone picked up Egyptian or Greek myths, it would not be obvious that they are reading the story of Jesus. It is better to keep them away from the original myths so that they do not get confused. The best way to make your point is to summarize the myths using Christian language and summarize the Gospels using pagan language. The similarities will be much more obvious."