If we ranked mythicist arguments by their real scholarly value, the idea that Jesus is just a recycled pagan dying-and-rising god would be near the bottom. It ranks lower than Carrier’s Bayesian method, Doherty’s celestial-Jesus theory, and even the debates about Josephus. Most serious mythicists avoid this argument. Richard Carrier has even criticized the pagan-parallels…
In the first part of this article, we examined why Richard Carrier’s Bayesian methodology failed. Specifically, we looked at the reference class he used to derive his prior probability and saw how it was not only manipulated but stacked in favor of Mythicism. While the argument in the first article would be sufficient to undermine…
If I am to be honest, it was with this section that I lost all hope in this book. One of the things I’ve tried to do with this work, and these authors, is to err on the side of being as fair as possible. I’ve attempted to give the authors the benefit of the…
When I decide to study a subject, I get a bit obsessive. Part of the reason for that is because I once was a Jesus myth theorist, and I fell for many of the conspiracies that surrounded that. I was burned before by subscribing to an idea that I was ignorant about. I don’t want…
TLDR: Short answer, Christianity was in decline prior to WWII. Some point to the industrial revolution as to when this change began happening, and by the 1880s, one can see a transformation in religion, as scholarship becomes more critical, and theology has secularism interjected into it. In the US, you also have the rise of…