You mean as opposed to "full speed ahead and pull out the 20 pounder to make things fit" mythicism, which is a fringe theory recognized as such by majority scholarship.
"Mythicism: A Story of Bias, Incompetence and Falsehood".
https://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/the-jesus-process-maurice-casey/
"He (Luke) did not read about ‘wise men’ being ‘Gentiles’ at the birth of Jesus. He read about ‘magoi from the East’ (Mt. 2.1). From his point of view they were something like magicians or astrologers, and the notion that ‘we saw his star in the East’ (Mt. 2.2) probably seemed silly enough, before he got to ‘Behold, the star which they saw in the East, went before them, until it came and stood over the place where the child was’ (Mt. 2.9). "
Any actual evidence for this Ad hoc song and dance? Of course there isn't is as that is the very meaning of ad hoc. Commenter stevenbollinger sums up the rambling mess that is this piece well:
"And speaking of authority, I don’t know of another area of inquiry than that of the historical Jesus where non-academics are so frequently attacked for being non-academics.
If someone’s arguments are unsound, fine, attack her arguments. But to disparage her lack of a PhD before even addressing her arguments makes one guilty of the fallacy of appeal to authority. You don’t need a PhD to know that.
You don’t necessarily even need to take an introductory course in formal logic to know that.
(...)
For my own part, I am not at all impressed when someone goes on at such length about their opponents’ lack of Doctorates.
Address what your opponents actually say. And if there is something to these allegations of systemic bias, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if there are people with open minds on one side, and with thorough training on the other, and relatively few with both.
(...)
And by the way, Casey does not even mention G A Wells, who has addressed those early-twentieth-century works by Smith et al which, according to academic orthodoxy, laid the whole matter to rest."
--
Wells is anotehr example of the gay abandon the historical Jesus crowd throws around "mythist" even if it is in reference the idea the
Gospel Jesus is a myth rather than there not being a man behind that stories.
The rationalwiki article
Christ myth theory goes into a sampling of the various definitions thrown around.
Heck, the pro historical Jesus supporters were such a group of Know Nothings that poor Sir James George Frazer had bluntly state "My theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth" and even though he did so you still got nonsense like this:
"I especially wanted to explain late Jewish eschatology more thoroughly and to discuss the works of John M. Robertson, William Benjamin Smith,
James George Frazer, Arthur Drews, and others, who
contested the historical existence of Jesus. It is not difficult to pretend that Jesus never lived. The attempt to prove it, however, invariably produces the opposite conclusion." - Albert Schweitzer in
Out of My Life and Thought (1931)
G.a Wells was in the same boat about a century later. Some old misrepressive BS:
Wells accepted that there was a 1st century Jesus in both Jesus Myth (
1996) and Jesus Legend (
1999)--
yet these books were labeled as examples of the Mythical Jesus Thesis, defined as the idea of "Jesus tradition is virtually--perhaps entirely--fictional in nature" (sic) in Eddy and Boyd's 2007 The Jesus Legend Baker Academic on pp. 24.
And while we are at it let's look at what Arthur Drews actually said:
"In wide circles the doubt grows as to the historical character
of the picture of Christ given in the Gospels. [...] If in spite of this any one thinks that besides the latter a Jesus also cannot be dispensed with; but we know nothing of Jesus. Even in the representations of historical theology, he is scarcely more than the shadow of a shadow.
Consequently it is self-deceit to make the figure of this 'unique' and 'mighty' personality, to which a man may believe he must on historical grounds hold fast, the central point of religious consciousness." (Drews, Arthur (1910) The Christ Myth)
And here is a summation of John M. Robertson:
"[John] Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus, perhaps more than one, having contributed something to the Gospel story. "A teacher or teachers named Jesus, or several differently named teachers called Messiahs" (of whom many are on record) may have uttered some of the sayings in the Gospels.
1) The Jesus of the Talmud, who was stoned and hanged over a century before the traditional date of the crucifixion, may really have existed and have contributed something to the tradition.
2) An historical Jesus may have "preached a political doctrine subversive of the Roman rule, and thereby met his death"; and Christian writers concerned to conciliate the Romans may have suppressed the facts.
3) Or a Galilean faith-healer with a local reputation may have been slain as a human sacrifice at some time of social tumult; and his story may have got mixed up with the myth.
The myth theory is not concerned to deny such a possibility (that Jesus existed as a human being).
What the myth theory denies is that Christianity can be traced to a personal founder who taught as reported in the Gospels and was put to death in the circumstances there recorded"
I might add that Carrier had a
field day tearing Maurice Casey's Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? new one which came out two years after the article presented and "The best way to describe this book is to imagine a rambling weirdo running into a grove of orange trees with a hammer and in a random frenzy smacking half the low hanging fruit, and then beating his chest and declaring proudly how the trees are now barren."
Heck even the somewhat rambly
Evidence for the historical existence of Jesus Christ is more coherent than that.
"The flaws in the book render it pretty much useless. You won’t ever know if Casey is honestly representing his opponents or even correctly describing what they’ve said (without just reading his opponents directly, which you can do more ably without his book). You often won’t know if something he is claiming is actually the mainstream consensus or a fringe view or still widely debated. You won’t find any refutations of the best mythicist arguments for any point. And you’ll get a headache trying to endure its tedious, rambling, child-like writing style, splattered with repetitious bouts of emotionally bitter pomposity" The article is more or less the same.
For all its flaws (like having issue in keeping what it means by mythical Jesus straight) Eddy and Boyd's 2007
The Jesus Legend Baker Academic is at least readable and has good counter arguments to Carrier's later work (though it tends to overplay the evidence at times). Casey article's has neither of those.
"More importantly,
Casey goes against nearly the entire mainstream consensus in the field by insisting the Gospels are bizarrely early, Mark being written in the 40s and Matthew in the 50s." Saying Mark is no earlier than 101 CE (as some mythists admittedly do) is silly but to say it was written before
Paul is just stark raving bonkers.
(In case you don't get I am being sarcastic as all get out here)
p) and comes up with an overly complicated explanation to effectively ignore this evidence of a Christian group because he presupposed the idea the group didn't exist before Jesus - it is the issue James Burke was on about in Connections that you have to make assumptions in evaluating your data.
