I have three more articles coming out in this series. The third one deals with Ehrman and the appeal to the authority of historians. But there's no need for me to respond to Ehrman. Carrier and other mythicists have already done so, and Ehrman's book hasn't come off well.

The question isn't whether many historians that don't specialize in Jesus or the NT are actually Christ mythicists, since of course most of them haven't heard of this theory or are unaware of the evidence for and against Jesus's historicity. The question is what they'd think if they were made so aware.

Your article says, "most historians of religion, historians of the ancient Near East, and anthropologists reject the view." What is that statement based on? (And did you revise that statement after it was published? I remember it being even more general.)

In any case, the appeal to the consensus of historians here is so lame. The question of whether Jesus existed isn't even really a matter for historians to decide. It's a philosophical one because it takes into consideration the criteria that historians presuppose to decide such questions.

Historians aren't so interested in whether their accounts are True in some absolute sense. They're happy to compromise to get past the uncertainty that often arises when the evidence from the past is ambiguous and scarce. Doubts and agnosticism might be justified, for philosophical purposes, but for historical purposes, historians may be happy to entertain a charitable answer to some historical question, just to keep the discussion and the historical enterprise going.

The Christ myth theory raises a philosophical question about the adequacy of those historical procedures. The question is whether we truly know that Jesus was a real figure, given not just historians' operational standards but the philosophy of epistemology.

And of course, it turns out that the evidence that Christians and historians trot out is quite problematic and not nearly as decisive as Church tradition would have had us believe.

So when you appeal to this consensus, it looks more like you're distracting from the ambiguity and scarcity of the actual evidence that's supposed to support that consensus.