Upcoming Deeper Waters Debate

[Bill the Cat]

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[Apologiaphoenix]

I fully hope to do so. The more and more I read up on the issue, the more I am further convinced it is absolute lunacy.

[Boxing Pythagoras]

I fully hope to do so. The more and more I read up on the issue, the more I am further convinced it is absolute lunacy.

At the popular level, I find that it is intensely fueled by people who don't understand the difference between historical Jesus research and simply taking the gospels at face value. The problem is that such people tend to think the historicity of the New Testament is a binary prospect: either the whole thing is literally factual, or else the whole thing should be discarded from historical research.

At the scholarly level, I don't think Carrier's and Price's particular mythicist hypotheses are "absolute lunacy," but I would certainly classify them as being unreasonably speculative. Price's work tends to rely on ideas regarding the dating and authorship of the NT texts which are not really supported by the prevailing scholarship. Carrier's formulation (though, I admit that I haven't gotten his latest book, yet, so I'm basing this on previous writings I've read of his) tends to require some fairly eisegetical reading of his source documents.

That is, of course, not to say that the lunatic fringe mythicists are themselves a myth. There are certainly a number of pseudo-scholars and anti-theists who have latched onto mythicism with a fairly zealous fervor, as if its promulgation will spell the downfall of that oh-so-hated Christianity. Of course, it is the lunacy of people like this, combined with the apparent scholarship of people like Carrier and Price, which leads to popular-level mythicism, so perhaps your point is fair, after all...