It never will have a ‘last, great hope‘ because it never had a first great hope, or any hope at all really. The whole idea that Jesus was invented and that Christianity is laid upon an unhistorical foundation is just so absurd on the face of it that very few scholars have bothered with it. And those that have assumed it as their default position do so because they’re acting out an anti-Christian agenda. That is, their assumptions are so completely hostile to Christianity that they simply wish to erase it from history, like the Pharaohs of old, stripping the landscape of every vestige of reminders of their adversaries.
Mythicism isn’t taken seriously by historians because it is an unsupportable thesis. And, if I may, a forthcoming volume by a widely known and very well respected agnostic (!) New Testament scholar will put it to bed for good (except for the aluminum hat wearing crowd. For that lot nothing will satisfy except a wholesale denial of the facts).
The whoredom of the Mythtic Dickery, Tomfoolery, Rich Neilism (sic)… Carrier’s essay in Sources of the Jesus Tradition is deeply flawed, yet he bitches about Hoffmann when it has nothing at all to do with what Joe wrote. Carrier’s essay is deeply flawed for the common reason that there is a massive gap between his maths and historical evidence. For example, he proposes to decide whether Jerusalem had a public library with a syllogism:
Major Premise 1a: All major cities in antiquity had public libraries
Minor Premise 1b: Jerusalem was a major city in antiquity.
Conclusion: Therefore, Jerusalem had a public library.
It would be much better to use literary and archaeological evidence to establish this or otherwise. In any given case, we may have to conclude that we do not know. Carrier does not explain how he could establish Major Premise 1a without literary and archaeological evidence about all major cities in the ancient world, including Jerusalem. In the next three pages he shows how unsound his method is, without apparently realising this. The subsequent pages do not solve the basic dichotomy between historical methodology and mathematical probability, which has always been the problem of applying anything other than historical methods to historical problems. That New Testament scholars have not been very good at historical research is of course true, but Carrier pours nothing more substantial than scorn on Theissen and Winter, and omits all the most promising recent work. He represents the major flaw of applying non historical methods to historical research. And Professor Maurice Casey’s Mythtic refutation is becoming overwhelmingly heavy.