Pretty darn convincing from a skeptical viewpoint.
And totally meta.

Is Jesus-mythicist a myth created by Jesus-mythicists to support their arguments that Jesus is only a myth?

Civil War in the leper colony.

Bart Ehrman's book on "Did Jesus Exist?" - which, not to bury the lede, is answered in the affirmative - has kicked off a civil war on the liberal/radical/crazy side of the scholarship/pseudo-scholarship continuum. (This Huffington Post column appears to be the proximate cause of the war.) There are a lot of hurt feelings out there as the "Jesus is a Myth" ("Mythers") go-to guy, Richard Carrier, expresses personal umbrage at the attack on his scholarship. Ehrman has responded in kind. Other folks have weighed in.

Good times, good times.

Apparently, based on his vast knowledge of grasshoppers gleaned from teaching teen-agers at a state school in Morris, Minnesota, P.Z. Myers - best known for using his state-funded gig at the University of Minnisota, Morris to offend Catholics by desecrating the Eucharist - has magisterially weighed in to defend Carrier's scholarly reputation.

This is what Myers has to say:

Jesus is a legend, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or Paul Bunyan. There may have been some individual in the past who inspired the stories, but he’s not part of the historical record, and the tall tales built around him almost certainly bear little resemblance to the long-lost reality. It’s simply bad history to invent rationalizations for an undocumented mystery figure from the distant past.

Well, then, there you go. Case closed. A guy who works for the government in teachign pimple faced teenagers all about animalsin a village of approximately 5,000 souls in western Minnesota has exerised the "magisterium of science" to tell us what's-what about history.

Myers' magisterial pronouncement has resulted in this terrific putdown by R. Joseph Hoffman:

I’ll make a deal with PZ Myers: I don’t try to lecture him on grasshoppers and he doesn’t lecture anybody on Jesus and “bad history.” I can’t quite imagine that the combined religion faculties at Harvard, Claremont and Tuebingen are awaiting further instruction on Bayes Theorem from Richard Carrier or packing up their offices, having been served notice that an associate professor of biology at the Morris campus of the University of Wisconsin has discovered that Jesus is just like Robin Hood—and Paul Bunyan. I know it gives the mythtics a rush to think that the scholarly establishment discourages revolutionary ideas but in fact it is designed to discourage error and non-revolutionary discredited ideas.

And:

The free thought rabble have chosen Carrier as their standard bearer, without any reason to put their trust in his inane conclusions and methods—a man who has never published a significant piece of biblical scholarship, never been peer reviewed (peers?), never been vetted, and never held an academic position. His “reputation” depends on deflecting his mirror image of himself as a misunderstood, self-construed genius onto a few dozen equally maladroit followers. This billboard for poor method, we are now asked to believe by freethought’s bad boy, PZ Myers, has cold-cocked a senior New Testament scholar for saying something as reasonable as “Jesus existed.” Only in the age of instant misinformation and net-attack is this kind of idiocy possible. Only in the atheist universe where the major premise– “religion is a lie so the study of religion is a study of lying”—infects everything is this kind of lunacy possible. Unfortunately, we have Richard Dawkins to thank for the original formulation of that premise.

Let's sit back and enjoy the digital blood-letting.

Jesus is not a Myth...

...but who cares?

CNN apparently had a debate that epitomizes the annual insult offered to Christians by the secular left. It hosted a debate between one side that believed that Jesus was a myth and the other side that believed that Jesus existed but stayed dead:

CNN's annual “Bash Christianity on Easter” story is crazier than usual.

This year, they ran an article entitled The Jesus Debate: Man vs. Myth. On one side were John Dominic Crossan and Bart Ehrman, who deny the physical Resurrection. On the other side, are folks like (self-proclaimed “spiritual pioneer”) Timothy Freke who go even further, and deny that Jesus even existed. They don't just deny Easter, they deny Christmas.

That's right: the Resurrection-denying side was the closest thing to orthodoxy in this debate, at least for the first forty paragraphs (literally). Around the forty-seventh paragraph, they finally quote Prof. Craig A. Evans, who explains that Jesus of Nazareth existed. He is literally the first and only Christian source quoted. And the only thing they use Evans for is to provide some quotes saying that Jesus exists -- you wouldn't be able to tell from the context whether or not Evans even believes in the Resurrection.

So CNN's idea of a balanced article commemorating Easter is to depict the debate as between those who deny the Resurrection and those who deny the entirety of the Gospels. It's hard to know what to describe this as, if not flagrant bias...

I'm also going to note the Third Century amulet used as evidence to support the Mythicist position in case it shows up in some future context:

But let's look at the specific “evidence” that gets trotted out for the CNN piece. The article opens by talking about how Freke decided Jesus didn't exist after reading an old book with a picture of “a drawing of a third-century amulet” of “Osiris-Dionysus, a pagan god in ancient Mediterranean culture” on a cross in a very Christological manner.

It's hard to know where to begin. First of all, the drawing in question (depicted on the left) doesn't claim to be of “Osiris-Dionysus” but of “Orpheus” and Dionysus (also known as Bacchus). This mistake is embarrassing, since the drawing has ΟΡΦΕΟΣ ΒΑΚΚΙΚΟΣ (Orpheus Bacchus) written on it.

And “Osiris-Dionysus” wasn't “a pagan god in ancient Mediterranean culture.” These were two separate gods from different cultures. Osiris was the Egyptian god of the dead, and Dionysus was the Greek god of wine. And Orpheus wasn't another name for Osiris or Dionysus, or any other god, for that matter. Rather, it's the name of a mythical Greek prophet and storyteller. In Greek mythology, Orpheus was killed by Dionysus. So the idea that Osiris, Orpheus, and Dionysus are all one god is off to a ... rocky start, to say the least.

There's also the fact that the now-lost amulet was almost certainly a forgery. The German epigrapher Otto Kern, who initially promoted the amulet as authentic, recanted in the face of the evidence, a fact that Freke's coauthor Peter Gandy has acknowledged. In Kern's words, the amulet “is almost certainly a fake.” For example, the bent knees in the depiction of the Crucifixion is characteristic of later Medieval art, not art from late antiquity. But since the only evidence of the amulet's existence is the line drawing, it's impossible to know for sure.

Of course, Ehrman is not much better. He regularly cites Third Century stories of Apollonius of Tyana to suggest either (a) that Christians borrowed this story in the First Century to invent stories about Jesus or (b) that because two centuries after the death of Jesus, pagan apologists stole from Christians, that proves that miracle stories by Christians could have developed within a single life-time or (c) both (a) and (b).

Ehrman calls Mythicists lunatics...

...and Mythicists accuse him of betraying their cause.

Bart Ehrman has a "damn by faint praise" essay in the Huffington Post allowing that the bad and biased evidence found in the New Testament and elsewhere establishes that Jesus existed as a matter of history:

Moreover, the claim that Jesus was simply made up falters on every ground. The alleged parallels between Jesus and the "pagan" savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions).

Moreover, aspects of the Jesus story simply would not have been invented by anyone wanting to make up a new Savior. The earliest followers of Jesus declared that he was a crucified messiah. But prior to Christianity, there were no Jews at all, of any kind whatsoever, who thought that there would be a future crucified messiah. The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who overthrew the enemy. Anyone who wanted to make up a messiah would make him like that. Why did the Christians not do so? Because they believed specifically that Jesus was the Messiah. And they knew full well that he was crucified. The Christians did not invent Jesus. They invented the idea that the messiah had to be crucified.

One may well choose to resonate with the concerns of our modern and post-modern cultural despisers of established religion (or not). But surely the best way to promote any such agenda is not to deny what virtually every sane historian on the planet -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, agnostic, atheist, what have you -- has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence.

Whether we like it or not, Jesus certainly existed.

Ehrman has been treading into mythicist waters in his recent debates, particularly where he starts to argue that various stories about Jesus described in the Gospels parallel - according to him - various myths. To make these arguments, Ehrman has to act like a tin-eared mythicist reducing all of the actual detail of various myth into some kind of parallel to Christianity, such as claiming that Mithras was born of a version when there is not a scintilla of evidence for that claim. Likewise, Ehrman has been forced to imply to audiences - without ever saying it and being shown the door to academic disgrace - that Christians borrowed from myths that didn't exist until hundreds of years after Christ's crucifixion.

Ehrman is flogging his new book - Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. Given my distrust for Ehrman's scholarly chops these days, I'm giving it a pass.

Mythicist Richard Carrier, on the other hand, is offended - offended! - at what Ehrman has written and is throwing the book at Carrier's errors. You get the sense that Carrier was looking at Ehrman as an ally and is seeing this as a personal betrayal.

You have to wonder where Ehrman is coming from? Is he selling books where the audience is? Is he burnishing his anti-anti-mythicist credentials so that he can pose as an objective scholar? Is he honestly concerned about the zaniness of the mythicists? But if that was the case, why resort to their lame arguments in debates?