Mythicism: a fringe view that deserves to be fringe

Prof. James McGrath has been posting recently on Jesus-mythicism. His opening salvo is one of the most concise yet effective rebuttals of the Jesus-myth I have ever seen. He has continued his criticism in a series of posts, and has attracted quite a firestorm of comments, which are interesting both for what the commentators say and what the comments say about them. I think McGrath is a little too liberal in some areas, but he is for the most part an honest, rigorous scholar, and he rightly takes mythicists to task for so casually dismissing the scholarly mainstream. Check out his posts and see what you think:

Mythicist Misunderstanding
Mythicism: Microexistence vs. Macroexistence?
Accusations and Assumptions: Another Mythicist-Creationist Parallel
More Mythicist-Creationist Parallels

Comments

JD those are good interesting articles. The mythicist thing goes much deeper than that. It's a real fissure in modern thought, it's symptomatic of the epistemological crisis and the atheist ideology.

the epistemological crisis, I mean by that the whole spectrum of things that challenge our fundamental knowledge, from cryptozoology to creationism.
Jason Pratt said…
I sure don't envy him having to deal with those comments. {wry g}

JRP
Actually most of the comments in that first one are pretty positive.
Anonymous said…
Is there any chance you are going through one or more Vridar-entries on this topic?
Layman said…
Matthew,

I don't know what JD has planned, but is there any particular point that you think Vidar makes well?
Anonymous said…
[...]is there any particular point that you think Vidar makes well?

No.
Virdar is p-ed off because of McGrath's comparison between creationist and Mythers.

I made a comment on his blog about it. It's foolish because it is an apt comparision.

here

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