It still feels like there is room to clarify a few things. With all the pushback on the data points I'd hope we keep in mind that this is all about levels of probability. I don't think we can be certain of any of these things.
Paul is a good example of likelihood we can use. I do hope to get into all the ways Paul puts things that seem more likely to fit a mythicist position than a historicist one. Hopefully I'll compile what i can on the weekend. On Paul, we have 4 passages (Romans 1:3, Galatians 4:4, 1 Cor. 9:5, and Gal. 1:19) in consideration that historicists argue suggests Paul thought Jesus really lived. I'd suggest, and as I've attempted to show, these passages are fairly abmiguous and could fit on mythicism as well as on historicism. But other than the 4 disputed passages? Paul says nothing about Jesus' life. He has no explanation about where he came from. Who he is. What he taught. Who he upset. Paul makes mention of no one whom Paul knows who also claims to have known a human Jesus. This makes it pretty unlikely that Paul thought there was a Jesus who lived on earth in some normal human form. I would also contend that the odd terms Paul uses, like "made" in place of "born", suggests Paul has a different notion for Jesus than normal birth, or normal living on earth. That would tend more towards mythicism.
Also, I think it's worth repeating just so we don't forget it, Jesus myth follows the pattern of previous savior-god myths before him. If we can say, 1. there is a real paucity of evidence that Jesus lived, and 2. the stories told about him appear mythical, and 3. those stories fit with previous mythically devised stories (have common elements) then it seems only reasonable that Jesus too is mythical.
Carrier in
Jesus From Outer Space Ch. 6:
Osiris was a dying-and-rising savior god, who never really existed, but whose public gospels placed him on Earth anyway, as a historical pharaoh. And yet his priesthood secretly taught that he was never such a person, but only ever a celestial being who endured a celestial death at the hands of the Egyptian equivalent of Satan, in outer space below the orbit of the moon, then rose from the dead in a supernatural body to reign from the heavens above. We also saw that Christianity resembles this and other ancient savior cults in countless details and clearly is a Jewish version of them. We’ve since seen there is no good historical evidence that Jesus was ever real, any more than Osiris was, or any of the other savior gods, who likewise were all portrayed as historical, yet none were. But here we’ll see it’s worse than that. Not only is evidence lacking, but evidence is abundant that Jesus was invented using numerous mythical archetypes. If All We Have Is a Gospel … ? I’ve already noted that since the Christian Jesus looks so much like all other mythical savior figures, it would be remarkable if he, alone among them, actually existed. We therefore need some evidence that he is, indeed, the exception to the rule. And that’s precisely the evidence we lack. We can’t point to “the Gospels,” as all other savior gods had “Gospels” like them, placing them in human earth history, in every case mythically. So we can no more use the Gospel of Mark to argue Jesus really existed than we can use Plutarch’s biography of Romulus to argue Romulus really existed. Or Hercules. Or Osiris. Or Bacchus. Or any other savior god. All mythical gods had biographies written about them pretending they were real historical people. So the probability we’d have one for a mythical Jesus is one-hundred percent expected even if he didn’t exist, which is already the highest probability any evidence can have. So merely having a biography of him cannot increase the probability he existed—at all. That would require some evidence that is more likely if he existed than if he didn’t. But as we’ve already seen in previous chapters, we have no such evidence in the Gospels, and we have no such evidence outside the Gospels—other than maybe some vague passages in the authentic Epistles of Paul, which we’ll look at in the closing chapters of this book. But even there, the evidence is weak tea. Which ought to warrant considerable uncertainty—not obsessive certitude.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
