I think this has moved on a little from when I last posted, but I just want to point out a few things in fewer words than I have been.
Analytics, I think I was not making my point as clear as I would have liked. First, let me say that since mythic presentation were such a pervasive mode of constructing any message (ideological, religious, political, historical, moral, etc.), the mere presence of mythic in one part of an ancient narrative is by no means grounds for rejecting the historicity of the narrative as a whole. It's a pretty useless criterion for determing whether there was a historical Jesus.
I am not saying, as you seemed to think, that because the Gospels have a historical detail (namely, Pilate), that therefore the historicity of Jesus as settled. What I am saying is subtler than that. The analogy to Forrest Gump made me laugh before it made me cry: if that's the logic I wrote, it's not the logic in my head. Actually, someone like Pilate would be analogous not to a US president in the 60s but to the attorney general of Alabama in the 60s: Pilate would have been relatively unknown to overwhelming majority of Greek-readers in the empire in 70, probably not too well known even in Judea, since Pilate hadn't been there in more than a generation and was never a very significant presence when he was there, since the Herodian dynasty still basicaly administered Judea. Pilate was an agent of Augustus looking out for the emperor's interests, not a military commander in charge of an occupation force. He was rarely in Jerusalem, headquartered at Caesarea on the sea, and was largely concerned to make sure that local dynasts and discontents didn't affect Augustus's foreign policy with Persia by playing one side against the other (which in fact had happened, or was alleged to have happened, at least).
The way I see it, someone has to put that detail in there, which suggests either 1) it was passed down as part of the stories about Jesus or 2) it was inserted deliberately. The second seems highly unlikely for the basic reason I have stated over and over again, namely that invented stories about non-existent people don't work on that level of specificity and accuracy in antiquity. That's the sort of thing that a modern reader would be alert to, especially a modern novelist, but not ancient one. I therefore think 1) more likely. I don't see it as really a problem, from a historicist point of view, that Pilate's role is not portrayed with full accuracy in the gospels, but it is also telling that whoever wrote them understood the ambiguous nature of the Roman presence in Judea and felt it was worth capturing.
On the point of allegory, I would suggest reading some ancient allegories. You probably know Plato's story of Er in Book 10 of the Republic. I think that has some typical features of allegory: it is self-consciously and explicitly allegorical (i.e. there is no chance you could confuse this as history), and the historical details it does give are general rather than particular (e.g. Er is Pamphylian and dies in battle, but which and when is not given). Jesus's parables themselves are allegories, and, like the story of Er, are particular in the moral truths they are used to illustrate, but very non-specific in circumstantial details. The gospels on the other are very particular in their details, even if those details are not always right. So we do not have a parallel to the mythicist position in any ancient allegories with stories that are explicitly invented for the purpose of moral or philosophical or theological instruction.
Likewise, you might read Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, another miracle-working moral teacher (of sorts). Even in antiquity he and Jesus were points of comparison, but the reason I mention here is because it will give you a parallel to the historicist position: a wandering Syrian spreads his teaching while wonder-working on the side and is later executed and ascends to the heavens. We have a historical person here around whom miraculous stories accrued. He was even worshiped by a Roman emperor a hundred years before Constantine. So we have a parallel. Yes, it's later, but unlikely to be influenced by Christianity.
The gospels read like an ancient attempt at biography among some Greek-speakers of moderate education. At least one of them was Jewish (Matthew), one probably not (Luke), and two definitely not (Mark and John). Why you think the gospels read as allegory from throughout is beyond me. They are primarily Jesus going from place to place saying X, Y, and Z, and occasionally performing some miracles. Just like Apollonius. Three of the gospels have him come back from the dead. The earliest does not have that (textual critics have established that the ending was added later; originally it ended with just his empty tomb but is actually ambiguous about what that means). Since we have ancient allegory, since we have ancient allegorizations of the Christian gospels (e.g. Gnostic texts like the Apocryphon of John), and since we even have theories of allegory among ancient writers, we know what allegory was thought to be. The gospels don't line up. I find your presentation of Carrier's thesis to be an implausible one; I find the historicist position eminently plausible.
And, yes, we need to ask how the mechanics of the mythicist position really could have worked. That is the basic task of any historian advancing a thesis, and if they can't show how their explanation actually worked, then it's not much of an explanation. Kish's question above distilled this problem perfectly. Otherwise, we're just doing what apologists do with the Book of Abraham and Book of Mormon: presenting a cluster of impressionistic resemblances and passing them off as if they constituted a body of evidence, then assuming that, since a body of evidence exists for the apologists position, it is as plausible as any other.
Analytics wrote:
Do you need a specific convincing answer, or merely some plausible possibilities? I would think some plausible answers are all that are needed.
If they can't show how this actually worked or can't point to any examples, then it's not plausible. Find me the allegory cast as a biography (so that no one can really tell it's an allegory) that goes out of its way to situate the allegorized god in a human context where god can never be humanized (first century Judaism) in very specific geographical, cultural, and political stages, and of course set in only the last thirty or forty years, and you might have an example which would establish at least that this kind of thing happened. But there is no example. That is only one reason why the mythicist position seems implausible. I have given others.
Analytics wrote:Addressing your question, the deity that Jesus "is supposed to have been before he was biographized" was the deity that went by the name Jesus Christ. The oldest parts of The Ascent of Isaiah paint a picture of the mystic God called Jesus Christ. Granted, this was probably written after the gospels, but it theoretically indicates what Christianity may have looked like before the gospel story was invented.
It just shows what an allegorized deity actually looks like. It also shows what in fact was a general trend: historical intepretations come first, allegorized interpretations only later. Homer was believed to be historical long before the allegorists got to work on him in Alexandria, and long before Christian bishops anxious about their Hellenic heritage followed suit.
Analytics wrote:I personally find the related questions under the historicity hypothesis more troubling: did Jesus really have 12 disciples that followed him around while he was alive? Did 11 of those 12 really claim to see him after he was crucified? Why did they stop preaching almost everything that Jesus allegedly taught while he was alive, and replace it with the salvation-through-faith-in-Jesus-who-was-crucified-and-resurrected gospel, which is so consistently taught in the epistles but not in the gospels? And why didn't they ever talk about anything that Jesus allegedly did or said before the crucifixion? And then why did they suddenly become interested in his life 30+ years after he was dead?
Key questions. There are 150 years worth of scholarly labor that have provided some pretty good answers to these questions. Obviously I can't summarize all of them in a small space, but I have found persuasive E. P. Sanders on Paul, and John Meier, E. P. Sanders, and Paula Frederiksen on Jesus (especially "From Jesus to Christ"). Given that these are some of the most influential scholars in the field, I am puzzled that they receive such little mention on these sorts of threads.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie