Perhaps I phrased that wrong. To be clear: if the mythicists are right, then the Church Fathers seemed to have chosen to value mythicists' texts that eventually form the bulk of the New Testament canon.MrMacSon wrote: ↑Mon Nov 09, 2020 4:58 pmWhich Church Fathers are you referring to (as choosing the texts that became the bulk of the NT canon)?GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Mon Nov 09, 2020 12:55 pm ... the Church Fathers seemed to have chosen mythicists' texts to form what will eventually become the bulk of the New Testament canon, according to mythicists.
Depending on the mythicist, most of the books in the NT are from ahistoricist sources. Using Dr Carrier and Doherty:
| Text | Comment |
| 4 Canonical Gospels | Mark is mythicist, others unclear |
| Romans | Mythicist |
| First Corinthians | Mythicist |
| Second Corinthians | Mythicist |
| Galatians | Mythicist |
| Ephesians | Mythicist |
| Philippians | Mythicist |
| Colossians | Mythicist |
| First Thessalonians | Mythicist |
| Second Thessalonians | Historicist |
| First Timothy | Historicist passage, though may be interpolation into mythicist text |
| Second Timothy | Unclear |
| Titus | Unclear |
| Philemon | Mythicist |
| Hebrews | Mythicist |
| Acts | Historicist |
| James | Possibly mythicist (Doherty) |
| First Peter | Unclear |
| Second Peter | Forged historicist letter (Carrier) |
| First John | Forged historicist letter (Carrier) |
| Second John | Unclear |
| Third John | Unclear |
| Book of Revelation | Mythicist |
"Unclear" means not really enough evidence either way, or the mythicist author doesn't evaluate the book either way.
On the NT books generally, Doherty writes in his "Jesus: Neither God Nor Man", from page 17:
So let's begin. From the record of what the New Testament epistles do not say, we will look at a puzzle piece that may be called "The Missing Equation."
Those 22 documents in the latter part of the New Testament contain almost 100,000 words. They are the product of about a dozen different writers, Paul being the most prominent. In them, one encounters over 500 references to the object of all these writers' faith: "Jesus" or "Christ" or a combination of these names, or "the Son," plus a few to "the Lord" meaning Christ.
Even if these writings are "occasional"—and some of them are more than that—is it feasible that in all this discussion and defense of their faith, nowhere would anyone, by choice, accident or necessity, happen to use words which would identify the divine Son and Christ they are all talking about with his recent incarnation: whether this be the man Jesus of Nazareth known to us from the Gospels, born of Mary and died under Pilate, or some other 'genuine Jesus' unearthed by modern critical scholarship? As astonishing as such a silence may seem, an equation such as "Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and Messiah" is missing from all the early Christian correspondence. The Jesus of the epistles is not spoken of as a man who had recently lived.
There are two passages in the epistles which present apparent exceptions to what has just been said, plus a third which could be claimed to fall into such a category, and they will be addressed immediately so as not to compromise the argument.
Those 22 documents in the latter part of the New Testament contain almost 100,000 words. They are the product of about a dozen different writers, Paul being the most prominent. In them, one encounters over 500 references to the object of all these writers' faith: "Jesus" or "Christ" or a combination of these names, or "the Son," plus a few to "the Lord" meaning Christ.
Even if these writings are "occasional"—and some of them are more than that—is it feasible that in all this discussion and defense of their faith, nowhere would anyone, by choice, accident or necessity, happen to use words which would identify the divine Son and Christ they are all talking about with his recent incarnation: whether this be the man Jesus of Nazareth known to us from the Gospels, born of Mary and died under Pilate, or some other 'genuine Jesus' unearthed by modern critical scholarship? As astonishing as such a silence may seem, an equation such as "Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and Messiah" is missing from all the early Christian correspondence. The Jesus of the epistles is not spoken of as a man who had recently lived.
There are two passages in the epistles which present apparent exceptions to what has just been said, plus a third which could be claimed to fall into such a category, and they will be addressed immediately so as not to compromise the argument.
Doherty then gives and analyses those three examples: 1 Thess 2:15-16, 1 Tim 6:13 and 1 Cor 11:23-26. He continues:
Thus, we are left with an entire corpus of early Christian correspondence which gives us no indication that the divine Christ these writers look to for salvation is to be identified with the man Jesus of Nazareth whom the Gospels place in the early 1 st century—or, indeed, with any man in their recent past.
To me, assuming the mythicist theory is correct, it is odd that so many ahistoricist texts were valued by historicists. There are quite a few more Second Century texts that, according to Doherty, were also the products of ahistoricist Christians. As Doherty writes:
As one can see by this survey, if one leaves aside Justin Martyr there is a silence in the 2nd Century apologists on the subject of the historical Jesus which is virtually equal of that found in the 1st century epistle writers. (Page 485)
