Ok, first let me say that the question I asked was genuinely a question and that I'm curious about what people in this forum think on the issue. It wasn't a set-up for me to launch my own pet theory. Not that I'm above doing that--I'm just not doing it this time. Thanks to everyone who responded. I hope there will be more.Ken, can I know your present opinions about historicity ?
I am personally not a mythicist if that means thinking there never was a man named Jesus who was a/the founder of a religious movement that developed into Christianity. I think it more likely than not that there was. I might perhaps best be described as a minimalist. That said, I don't have a knockdown argument against mythicism, and I don't think mythicists have a knockdown argument either. So mythicism remains a possibility. I don't think mythicists are crazy. Well, actually I think some of them may be, but that's not by virtue of their being mythicists.
I do think modern historical Jesus scholarship is vastly overoptimistic and there are several areas where I agree more with the mythicists than with the HJ scholars, such as: (1) the non-Christian evidence for the historical Jesus is unhelpful and (2) the criterion of multiple independent attestation as employed by Ehrman and others does not work because it presupposes source-critical judgments that I think are mistaken (e.g. Matthew and Luke are mutually independent, John is independent of the synoptics, etc.).
I think the mythicists are correct in thinking the early Christians used a lot of creativity in developing the Jesus tradition recorded in the New Testament and particularly in the gospels, but I have problems with Doherty and Carrier's reading of Paul. I would grant that the "rulers of this age" in 1 Cor. 2:8 may well refer to supernatural beings (as a good many NT scholars think) and the "brother" in Gal. 1.19 may refer to a fictive kinship relationship (as the other uses of the word in Paul do). I am much more skeptical about Rom. 1:3 and Gal. 4:4 referring to events taking place in the celestial realm. It seems to me Paul is talking about an earthly man. The argument that he is referring to events in the celestial realm seems too strong. Works don't normally contain explicit statements saying they refer to events on earth rather than in the celestial realm.
I've used a lot of "I think" and "it seems" here, so I'm not claiming I can prove any of this. Most of my work has focused on attempting to establish my points (1) and (2) above, on non-Christian and Christian sources, as the least unlikely hypotheses. I hope I haven't derailed my own thread here by introducing the topic of what I think about mythicism.
Best,
Ken