You’ve doubled down on your genetic fallacy and personal attacks of Carrier. You don’t think William Craig gets paid to defend Christianity? Does that mean his arguments are weak or bogus? I mean, they are, but not because he’s a paid ideologue. Again, the reason this is fallacious is that it presumes the one follows the other, whereas it could be the other way around. Maybe Craig and Carrier are paid because they’re good at what they do. Which is the case shouldn’t be prejudged.

You’re telling me Carrier is a mythicist like I don’t already know that. I was reading Carrier in the 1990s when he (and I) were writing for infidels.org. Where does Carrier say Jesus is a “racist womanizer”? Sounds like Christian slander to me. You say it’s “preposterous” that Jesus never lived as a historical person, but do you believe any of the New Testament miracles happened? The fact that you think Jesus mythicism is preposterous shows that you don’t appreciate how poor the quality of evidence is with respect to Christian origins.

You say women usually hang around tombs to tend to dead bodies. In the dying-and-rising god myths, mourning women are also the ones to collect the dead body to help resurrect it. So who says Christianity wasn’t revolutionary? What was especially revolutionary was the syncretizing of Judaism and Greco-Roman religions. This was best represented by the Gospel of Mark, which combined the Q tradition of Cynical wisdom sayings; the Jewish idea of the scapegoat, based on the Jewish experience of suffering as a righteous, chosen people oppressed by amoral empires; and the largely pagan myth of the dying and rising god.

You say the word of women carried no weight at that time and place. Actually, women were allowed to testify if there were no male witnesses present. But that Evangelical talking point is empty, because if Mark were interested in proving anything in a legal sense, why does he specifically say the women gave no testimony? He says they told no one, so he wasn’t making any point of historical fact that, as it happened, women saw the body even though their word carries no weight. Mark wasn’t trying to prove the empty tomb or record what actually happened. He was trying to teach certain Jews or early Christians how they should live after the loss of Jerusalem. The women were literary symbols that functioned as propaganda, conveying a Christian message, as I explained in the article.

In the article’s last section, I sketched an explanation of how early Christianity sustained itself without a miraculous resurrection. Christianity resonated because it combined traditions that attracted different kinds of people. That’s how syncretism works. What was most powerful wasn’t the sacrifice of any one man on the cross, but the sacrifice of the Jewish people as a whole on the cross of ancient imperial history.