Jesus Mythicists, those who deny the historicity of Jesus, use skepticism as their method of historical interpretation. When they look at the historical evidence for Jesus, they begin with a skeptical attitude.
- If the Gospels were written forty years after the events described, details must have been added to the point of losing all historical value.
- If there are supernatural elements included in the narrative, then none of it can be assumed to be historical.
- If the New Testament is the scripture of a religion and religions have demonstrated some irrational elements, the text itself can not be a historical text interpreted by rational means.
- If it is possible that the few mentions of the earthly life of Jesus by Paul were added later on, then they probably were.
- If there is some evidence of Josephus having some Christian interpolation, we should reject all references to Jesus.
- If we can point to other belief systems that include the worship of non-historical figures, we can assume that is likely the case with Christianity.
Basically Jesus Mythicists take the position of assuming the evidence if worthless unless proven valuable, which by their standards is an impossible feat because of the bias toward skepticism. They would reject the idea of assuming the evidence is valuable unless proven false.
But this is not necessarily how they read every text, whether ancient or modern. They may not apply this high level of skepticism to everything they encounter.
There is something about Jesus, perhaps because of a dislike of Christianity, that they see an extra high level of skepticism being warranted.
They may see the idea of a mythical Jesus to be attractive and so raise the bar for evidence to an impossibly high level, while looking at other areas of history which they do not necessarily have a concern about in a more traditional way.
Jesus Mythicists are inconsistent in how they read the evidence. This, of course, does not mean that Christians are therefore consistent. Christians often have issues in how they read the evidence as well. But this is a post for another time.
