I appreciate the effort you took to write a response to my article. You should be advised, though, that I’m currently in the middle of a series on the Christ myth theory. So many of the points you make are effectively dealt with in a subsequent article of mine, in “How Apologists Evade the Christ Myth Theory,” and many more will be dealt with in my next one, which I wrote a couple weeks ago, called “Descent and Ascent in Christianity and the World’s Religions.” Finally, the appeal to the exclusive Jewishness of Christianity will be addressed in another article in the series, which I haven’t yet written.
I’ll just make a few points here. First, as I said at length in my first article on the Christ myth theory (which turned into a trilogy, in response to Graham Pemberton), I’m not a proponent of the Christ myth theory. I argue that we should be agnostic on the question of whether Jesus was historical because the evidence isn’t compelling enough to warrant a confident, rational affirmation either way. Moreover, I said, atheists should be apathetic on the question because it doesn’t matter whether Christianity had a historical founder, given again that we can’t infer much about that founder from the problematic evidence we have available. That article of mine is called “Assessing the Christ Myth Theory,” and see especially the last couple of sections.
Your first section on Frazer just straight-up commits the genetic fallacy. The next section is ad hominem (the “instinctive appeal” of a type of explanation), and the section after that appeals to consensus and to popularity, which is fallacious in the absence of scientific standards to warrant rational deference to the authority of the individuals who comprise the majority.
And you assert that most historians in general think Jesus was historical. How do you know that? Where’s the poll of historians from around the world? And why would we defer to their opinion? History isn’t a science, so there are no universal methods that all historians employ to bypass their cognitive and social biases. Historians just know a lot about some period and place in history. Why should the opinion of an expert on WWII guide our decision on a question of ancient history?
Your next several sections (on the nature of resurrection, etc.) strawman the Christ myth theory in the way I explain in “How Apologists Evade the Christ Myth Theory.” You presuppose that the theory posits “parallels” so that all you need do is point to some differences in detail between the stories. My next article in the series, “Descent and Ascent…” will expose the core of what these myths have in common, and it has little to do with “parallels,” as in a series of copied details.
I’ll just add that the appeal to the Jewishness of Christianity’s origin is no help at all because the Judaism at that time was part of the Hellenistic world. Putting Jews on a pedestal is just as racist as denying that Jews could be responsible for anything as great as Christianity, which was the racist fallacy of the German History of Religions School.
