Now, I will grant that the evidence for evolution is much stronger than the evidence for a historical Jesus. But the Creationist -- Mythicist analogy is not based on the strength of the evidence, it is how one side -- the fringe one -- defines "credible evidence" and then claims the other side -- the mainstream academic one -- is too biased to recognise that they aren't using "credible evidence".
In the meantime, I look on many mythicists (though not all) as little better as Creationists in how they define "credible evidence" and their views on the mainstream position as being hopelessly biased.
Very well, in that case - just tell us what this credible evidence is that persuades these academics that Jesus did indeed exist. What is that evidence that they rely on?
Please do not tell me it's the words of the bible.
Because that is most definitely not credible or reliable evidence in any measure at all. For all the same very carefully judged reasons that such evidence would be entirely inadmissible and unfit even to be put before a jury in any legal case.
There is far more similarity here between the HJ case and the creationists claims, than there is between any HJ-sceptics & any creationists. Eg, in the HJ case, it’s proponents cannot produce anything at all as supporting evidence except for the inadmissible and highly unreliable devotional writing in the bible (a book of anonymous hearsay stories filled with certain fiction), and similarly the creationists cannot produce any genuine evidence to cast doubt on the mountain of evolutionary evidence discovered by science. Those two sides are in a very similar position where neither has any credible evidence for what it claims.
Science on the other hand has vast and irrefutable evidence for what it claims about evolution. And as far as the so-called mythicists are concerned (most of whom are in fact only sceptics asking what genuine evidence is claimed for Jesus), they are under no obligation at all to provide evidence showing that any figure (such as Jesus) did
not exist … you cannot produce evidence of things that don’t exist, and the burden of such evidence is most definitely upon the pro-HJ claimants anyway (not upon any sceptics who are merely doubting the case offered by biblical scholars).
But of course there is in fact a huge mass of evidence showing why we should be highly sceptical about the biblical stories of Jesus. Namely -
1. They are written entirely as anonymous hearsay, and only know from Christian devotional copies written centuries later (again from anonymous copyists)
2. It is far from contemporary in time with Jesus.
3. None of it was ever written by anyone who ever claimed to have known Jesus.
4. Iirc, not one single contemporary historian wrote a single word about Jesus during his supposed lifetime.
5. Many of the Jesus stories in the gospels can be shown to have been taken from much earlier writing in the OT. And in fact all the biblical authors make clear that they are taking their beliefs from the OT.
6. The central stories of Jesus in all the gospels are of numerous miracles that, whilst believed at the time as wondrous proof of Jesus, are on the contrary now known to be certain fiction.
7. All throughout history, and certainly in biblical times, countless different religions have all claimed miraculous religious figures who were certainly fictional.
8. Even today, and throughout all of Man’s history, religious people have sworn to witness all manner of miraculous events and all sorts of gods, angels, demons, and other religious figures. Not a single one of which was ever real.
So religious belief has a rather bad record when it comes to truth and accuracy on this sort of thing, to put it mildly.
