When I talk to Jesus Mythicists, I hear them tell me that they are just doing good history. The distance between the sources and the events, the presence of supernatural claims and the bias of the New Testament authors make them inadmissible as historical documents. Differences between the Gospels show that they are untrustworthy. The probability of some additions to Josephus means that anything Josephus said about Jesus is suspect.
What if historians in general did agree with this approach? What if historians were convinced that the Jesus Mythicists were doing history the proper way?
Most of our current history books would have to be taken off the shelves. Right now, historians piece together events from texts that often have contradictory but overlapping accounts. Many of the historical sources used are from centuries after the events (not the decades in the New Testament). The ancient world was fully open to the existence of the supernatural.
What’s more, if historians took on the skepticism of the Jesus Mythicists, they would have to admit that we know almost nothing about the past. There is the potential that any sources we have were tampered with at some point. The authors had some sort of bias, whether religious, philosophical or political, and thus are not unbiased history.
Applying JMT skepticism consistently would make us question even fairly modern history. We just don’t know what special interest groups have done with the evidence. What actually happened even one hundred years ago may be much different that what either contemporary accounts or more recent histories claim.
Thankfully, historians do not use the same skeptical standards toward history that Jesus Mythicists do. Most often they read the texts critically but not skeptically. They see textual evidence as valuable unless there is better evidence to the contrary. They read texts in the context of the bias, not rejecting them for having bias.
Perhaps Jesus Mythicists need to relook at how history is done in the real world.
