Tuesday, November 04, 2014

McGrath on mythicism and space Jesus

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Did Jesus Die in Outer Space? (James McGrath in Bible and Interpretation).

Okay, the subtitle is "Evaluating a Key Claim in Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus," which does nuance the title a bit. Here's the opening summary:
The attempt to use later sources, interpreted in ways that are at best open to dispute, in an attempt to argue against what generations of skeptical scholars have concluded to be likely with respect to the early Christian sources, is never going to make mythicism seem more probable than the hard-earned and intensely-researched consensus of historians and scholars, namely that there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth.
Also, Old Testament pseudepigrapha are involved.