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My friend Kevin Rosero has posted an excellent Amazon review of Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle. He focuses on the argument from silence that is the pink elephant in the Jesus Myth room. No, not Paul's supposed failure to refer to things he may or may not have had reason to. Rather, Kevin points out the simple but devastating fact that Earl Doherty believes there were "Christians" in the first and second centuries proclaiming the fact that Jesus never existed on earth, but we have no record of any "orthodox Christians" mentioning this particular perspective.
It is not as if the "orthodox" were quiet about sects with whom they disagreed. Indeed, they wrote at length to combat heresy after heresy. The goal was to refute, not ignore, perceived heretics. The offended "orthodox" assailed "lesser" heresies that claimed that although Jesus existed on this earth, he was not really human. How much more response would claims that Jesus never existed on earth in any form have garnered? As Kevin puts it:
It is hard to believe that Christian institutions and individual writers were silent about what would have been the most radical and provocative of all the heresies -- silent about an idea that, per Doherty's central thesis about how religions work, would have threatened the Church's power to a greater degree than any of the other heresies, some of which were already regarded by Church Fathers as mortally dangerous to the Church.Read the whole thing and give him a helpful vote on the way out.