You don’t seem to know what “overdetermined” means. When I said monotheistic religions’ atrocities are overdetermined, I was granting that they have political causes. The point is that they also have religious causes because of the exclusivist nature of monotheism. None of this implies that there are no secular atrocities, so that’s a red herring.
I have three more articles coming out in this series on the Christ myth theory. One of them (the third and likely last one) deals at length with the appeal to the consensus of historians and to the epistemological issues. When you talk about “parallels,” that was covered in an earlier article in the series, as I told you. I dismiss the talk of “parallels” as a gambit of distraction.
The appeal to the consensus of historians looks like a smokescreen because it stands in for laying out the case for Jesus’s historicity. The case itself is weak. If that entails that the case for the historicity of other figures from the ancient past is weak, that’s a problem with the historian’s standards. And that problem raises a philosophical question of epistemology.
As I said, we shouldn’t expect historians to be engaged in much philosophical reflection. They presuppose the validity of their standards, which in most cases would likely lead them to err on the side of conceding something’s historicity. The burden of proof would be on the doubter, and that may well be unproblematic for most mundane reports of ancient events or persons, especially if there’s corroborating evidence.
The burden of proof shifts, however, when the reports aren’t at all mundane but are tainted by wild background supernaturalism that’s been decisively refuted by centuries of naturalistic science. These are just some philosophical considerations that historians likely ignore when deciding on historicity (because they’re historians rather than philosophers).
As for the scholars who focus on the NT and who thus have taken the time to investigate the issue, most of them are and have always been Christians so they have a clear conflict of interest. That’s just a fact. It doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re talking about. What it means is that the appeal to their consensus as a separate argument against Jesus mythicists is weakened.
I dismiss your ad hominem in (3) as claptrap.
I don’t dismiss the work of historians, contrary to what you said. I dismiss the appeal to their consensus since that appeal mistakes history for science. When there are no scientific methods on hand, appealing to consensus may be just a fallacious appeal to popularity. How do you know the consensus isn’t based on a fad, on groupthink, or on religious faith? It’s the scientific method that eliminates those subjective factors. Alas, they’re pretty much absent in historical inquiry.
Instead of appealing to historians’ consensus, I’d be happy to examine the arguments that individual historians make, whether they’re Christians or atheists. And it’s the argument for Jesus’s historicity that’s weak. That argument doesn’t gain in strength, no matter how many times it’s multiplied.
You ask, “Do you consider yourself to be a neutral observer or do you also have conflicts of interest on the topic?”
I’m more neutral on it than are the Christian historians and the atheists who use Jesus mythicism to attack Christianity and who insist that Jesus probably didn’t exist. As I explained in my first couple of articles on the Christ myth theory (links below), and as I say again in an upcoming article in this series, I don’t think we can know with much probability one way or the other whether Jesus existed, given the paucity and ambiguity of the evidence.
For atheistic purposes, I genuinely don’t care whether Jesus existed. There are perfectly devastating arguments against Christian theism, regardless of whether the NT’s Jesus figure was based on an historical person. I’m interested in the historicity question only as a curiosity, and as an excuse to learn about the ancient past. I don’t hang my worldview on the mythicist issue, and I don’t even personally defend mythicism against historicity. I’m analyzing the mythicist position, in reaction against the apologetical strawman formulations of the theory (e.g. the talk of “parallels” or of “copycat” religions).
