When it boils down to “The lack of evidence is my evidence!”, I think the debate is over.
Well, that’s true for both ambushed and I. 
However, by that standard, you would have to throw out the grand majority of everything we have in our history books. It’s all just reconstructions based on attempts to ferret out what seems to be the most plausible answer in the face of limited and questionable source material. I believe I recall there being some argument that Julius Caesar was just as likely made up. If you insist on throwing away the deductions that bind all our tiny tidbits of evidence together based on their being nothing more than “speculative deduction”, there’s really nothing left previous to–probably–the Renaissance.
Sage Rat, I’ll reply again at more length later, but for now I have a personal request:
Please take a deep, cleansing breath and then re-read through everything I posted in this thread on the historicity issue and our subsequent exchanges once more.
I know I’ve written a hell of a lot of words here, but I’ve already provided powerful rebuttals to all of your objections, including those you made Sunday morning since my previous reply. You need to make new and more persuasive objections rather than keep repeating the same old mantra that you believe – on no credible evidence, argument or counter-argument of any kind yet – that it is somehow more likely that a historical Christian founder existed even with the complete absence of credible evidence that must exist if such a person had actually existed!
Note most importantly that I do not argue that there’s not enough credible evidence for such a historical person, I’m arguing that there’s none at all!
For there are indeed instances in which the lack of evidence for an event or person is utterly compelling evidence that the event never happened or that the person never existed.
Here’s an exaggerated (and fictional) example: Say some UFO reports come in that claim that an alien laser destroyed the White House. The subsequent observation that the White House remained standing, completely unharmed and unscarred is evidence of the absence of evidence for the UFO claims.
Here’s an example from recent (non-fictional) American history: A ridiculously large number of Americans contend that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya. However, had that been true, birth certificates and other corroborating evidence would exist, but the birther’s can’t provide anything other than obviously fraudulent documents. So the absence of evidence is compelling evidence that Obama was not born in Kenya.
SO, all you have to do to utterly destroy my thesis and all the ahistoricist theories is to provide even just one genuinely credible piece of evidence for the biological, historical existence of the founder or the model for the founder of Christianity that you contend existed as a historical person.
Dedicated scholars have been searching for precisely that since German scholars started this effort centuries ago. But not a single bit of evidence has ever been found to be credible by those who were not already convinced, a priori, that such a historical figure must have existed.
Provide even one such bit of evidence and you’ll be very famous world-wide!
Let me know what you come up with.
I understand, Sage Rat, that the ahistoricist position seems quite preposterous and needlessly extreme to you, as it does to nearly everyone else. You, like most, probably see it as some kind of zealously rabid atheism or perhaps just an argument taken to fanatical extremes.
That’s healthy skepticism, and far from denigrating it, I praise such understandable reluctance quite highly. The initial reaction should be considerable skepticism! And the truth about myself is that I utterly condemn and despise extremism among atheists as well as among anyone else, including myself (and have taken a lot of heat my from my fellow atheists for my harsh criticism of atheist extremism, which they claim is an attempt to silence atheists).
But then one must evaluate these arguments with the most clear-headed and careful reasoning, for the razor of skepticism can shave either way. This thesis is not my own invention; while it is undeniably the view of a small minority of scholars, it has been gaining respected advocates for centuries and the pace of its adoption has only been growing since. Highly respected scholars such as Robert M. Price and Burton Mack have joined the skeptics who share this view.
The needed emphasis is lacking in that sentence. As I wrote in my immediately previous post:
You add:
Common sense is very frequently wrong. Surely you’ve seen enough of the world to know that by now! It’s the founding premise of this very site.
The “very first criticisms of Christianity” are those of Trypho, who adamantly insisted in the 2’nd century that the founder of Christianity was invented out of whole cloth, and not even Justin Martyr could cite a single bit of evidence to the contrary! That’s extremely damning to the historicist position.
But it is certainly possible that I am not aware of, or have forgotten, earlier criticism. I thus would be grateful if you would cite such or point us at it, otherwise, your argument fails. In any event, the notion that the founder of Christianity was an ordinary man or just a “grubby cultist of dubious moral character and connections” is modern. It springs from the demythification efforts of relatively modern theologians.
That is simply false and wrong-headed in every possible way! There have indeed been cults and sects who proclaimed founders who turned out to be mythical. How could you possibly doubt this, with hundreds of thousands of cults and sects throughout history?
And the characterization in your second sentence is quite ridiculous and reveals much undue stubbornness. I’ve pointed out several times that I contend that the origins of the founder of Christianity arose from the Qumran community of a century before. The Qumranians wrote of a figure they called the Righteous Teacher (an idealized figure who never actually existed). Over time, the idea of this Righteous Teacher mythology accumulated a whole host of real-seeming attributes, including an ever-growing set of stories and sayings derived from the teachings of Cynic philosophers and the like (definitely including the Golden Rule). By the time first century religious thinkers happened on this set of stories and sayings, they had almost certainly already been associated with a name and a rudimentary biography, certainly a sacred “biography”.
These were not modern thinkers, and they were not skeptical! They found what seemed to them to describe a founder, probably named Jesus (that name’s meaning is would be very significant to them), and so at no time did any of them think they were “making up” anyone, let alone “making up some suspicious character”! They had no way of checking the veracity of the stories nor of confirming this already-made “founder’s” historical existence, so they took his existence for granted and the rest is history.
No, by far the most adroit, sensible, and parsimonious explanation for: the utterly inexplicable silence of Paul and the early epistle writers about a historical, biological Jesus and ministry; the total absence of contemporary, extra-biblical references to Jesus or any of even the major events of his alleged life; the absence of any knowledge of the historical Jesus of the early Church Fathers and their complete inability to empirically defend his historicity; along with the shocking incongruity and irreconcilable discrepancies of the Gospels, even the canonical ones (and one must count all of them or none of them if one wants to be intellectually honest); must be that the story of a first century Jesus is a pious myth. A myth that was never intended by its pious creators to ever be considered to represent a biological, historical personage.
Truth? What is “truth?,” Pilate asked, but did not stay for an answer. Let’s be more cautious about throwing the word “truth” around so casually, okay? Make a case that doesn’t depend on mere assumptions and cultural “givens”. Surely you can do better than just repeat your evidence-free assertion of “plausibility” over and over again!
Whoa, there! There you go with the terrible misrepresentations again. NO ONE ever speaks or writes that he or she had ever met or known Jesus or knew any historical biographical details prior to the Gospels! I’ve emphasized that over and over again, yet by reading your replies, it seems as if you’ve never read my arguments on that point. It is not just Paul who never knew the man, it is everyone who wrote prior to the first Gospel. Must I repeat my previous posts several times? Or will you take the time to try harder to grasp my arguments? For you are misrepresenting them quite severely.
Now you’re assassinating Paul’s character! I must have evidence for your calumnies. What documentary evidence do you have to support that claim?
And all you have to do to support your assertion is to cite Josephus’ describing him. Please do so or admit you can’t. Scholars have been scouring Josephus for millennia without success. What do you know that they don’t?
Let me see if I have this right: You’re saying that Josephus would have had to have been a historian to have known of someone who died before he was born? Well, you sure got me there!