A philosopher is anyone who publishes work in philosophy; a professional philosopher is anyone who publishes peer reviewed work in philosophy. Lots of philosophers are mathematicians, scientists, historians, et al. That isn’t a relevant distinction here. If you mean to articulate some way in which Lindsay should not be called a philosopher because his advanced degrees are in math and physics, you’ll have to make your case here. Because I’m not grasping it.

Please note there is a difference between being a philosopher, and being a good or a bad one; a bad philosopher is still a philosopher. I would acknowledge a category of pseudophilosopher, someone who pretends at being a philosopher but is mostly just running a con or employing no actual pertinent skills defining a philosopher (e.g. Deepak Chopra). But someone with an extensive peer reviewed publication history in philosophy is not likely to be even a pseudophilosopher, much less not a philosopher at all. So I do not yet comprehend your point here.

the man behind the myth might as well not exist, for practical purposes.

That doesn’t answer the question whether the Jesus spoken of in the Epistles existed. Because that does matter for practical purposes. It is fundamental to any attempt to explain how Christianity began.

Defining the historical Jesus is hard.

I did not find it to be. See chapter 2 of OHJ. Which is all about that.

However…

…the dividing lines between these stances are nowhere as strong as commonly believed…

That’s arguably true. That is, I think Philip Davies was right when he argued “a recognition that [Jesus’s] existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability.”

Oh wait, haven’t Monty Python already gone there?

Personally, the “They Should Have Noticed” argument was what swayed me initially, long before I discovered Richard Carrier, but now I find this point to be much more socially relevant.

Defining the historical Jesus is hard. There were so many people around in the relevant time period and region who bore significant similarities to the Jesus of the Gospels, even counting only those known to us, that the minimalist historicist-consensus Jesus is simply too generic to be useful. Even with a time machine the issue would be unsolvable. We would end up with dozens, if not hundreds, of plausible candidates for being the inspiration behind Gospel Jesus. I call it the “Would the Real Historical Jesus Please Stand Up?” problem.

And that’s why I think that moderate historicism, minimalism, agnosticism and mythicism are far closer than people realise and the dividing lines between these stances are nowhere as strong as commonly believed.

If we cannot find out anything about what Jesus truly believed (or at least preached), and thus what True Christianity™ is, however, that’s a powerful argument against Christianity, and ultimately against religion in general, at least as far as it relies on the ever fallacious appeal to authority. Because if believers create God, Jesus, the Bible, and their analogues in other religions, in their own image, in order to make it less obvious that they’re simply trying to pass off their own opinions as more authoritative than they truly are, that is very revealing. And of course what critics of religion have always been saying.

Instead of “What Would Jesus Do?” ask yourself “What Would I Do if I Were a Good Person?”

Ultimately, Christianity has, in practice, never really quite stopped being a hodgepodge of influences that the individual believer happens to agree with – especially in America, where it’s easy to switch sect denomination as you please. Christianity has ALWAYS been Cafeteria Christianity – or, actually, Cafeteria New Age Judaism. The resemblance to modern New Age believers (and conspiracy theorists) eclectically assembling bits and pieces of pop philosophy and pop science into a more or less coherent outlook is striking. Neopagans tend to do something similar, but they also tend to be more honest about it. (And Unitarian Universalists, of course.)

Turns out that “Truth” is quite a moving target, for believers even more so than for scientists.

But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. –Matthew 5:44-45

I will, Lord…

Sorry, I don’t have time to pursue all these sorts of things. I appreciate your taking the time to, though.

Take a min and go look at this. It is a discussion with fellow “historicity” author Robert Clifton Robinson. I proved him to be a lying slimy bastard. Feel free to correct my mistakes as I’m obviously not as smart or educated as others. I doubt he leaves the comments up but he and I have a back and forth discussion where he proceeds to lie to me after writing an article about Robin Williams and Atheists that was nothing but subterfuge and mischaracterzation.

http://robertcliftonrobinson.com/2014/08/12/robin-williams-life-is-not-a-joke/comment-page-1/#comment-112

Which is a result of his posts here: http://hollowverse.com/robin-williams/?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150851591901478_10152255362271478_10152255362271478#f3cbe4c272003cc

This is what passes for a Christian apologist now. A lying, slimy, book shilling tool. Can you comment on his work about historicity? I haven’t read it and would like your take. Thanks for your time.

In my opinion, historicity matters for the sake of understanding history and the historical origins of foundational western beliefs. I do not think there should be a motive implied in attempting to uncover Christian origins (such as “it is all a big lie”). Motives bring in bias and we have to be careful of that. I was fascinated at a young age (sometime in high school) by the idea that a major world movement could be inspired by the martyrdom of a single man. The question of how that could occur caused me, on and off, to delve into what is known about the origins of christianity. The fact is though that there was always a black hole right where we want data: the whole life and ministry of jesus went unnoticed by contemporary historians,looking for hints in Paul turns out to be disappointing, the Gospels are myth, and even later extra-biblical sources are all fraught with flaws. In the end, I still have trouble understanding how followers of an actually crucified, little known, Jewish man/teacher could have turned their failure into a massive movement (even before Paul, it seems). Mythicism offers a much more satisfying solution: Christianity evolved out of beliefs current in first century Judaism, no “great man” is needed to explain where it came from.

The field debates the extent and nature of influence, not its existence. And some die-hards try to argue it all comes from Paul and thus can’t explain the origins of Christianity (an argument a great many scholars have dismantled, per the elements you mention, in On the Historicity of Jesus, chapter 5, for those unaware of the reference).

Also, the path of influence is debated, and on that I concur: it is inaccurate to say it’s just ‘Platonism’. Philosophy under the Roman Empire was actually eclectic, that is, committing to a single sect or being influenced by a single sect was actually unusual, most people studied and were influenced by them all and assembled a personal philosophy that was an amalgam, possibly trending more toward one than another, but still a mixed bag. This was especially the case in ‘pop theology’ such as we see in Paul: that was not ‘Platonism’, it was a stew of ideas that filtered down to the masses from several schools of thought, those ideas that resonated most with popular religious and other beliefs, becoming its own congeries, and no longer any one type of philosophy. Thus we see in Paul (and other Christian writers) elements of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. What was most rejected by the religious public was atomism (e.g. Epicureanism). Over the centuries Christianity became increasingly enamored with Platonism (as it started actually studying the schools and realizing how unacceptable the others were to the needs of dogma) and thus over time shifted its ideas more in line with it, but even by then the Platonism they adopted had already been eclectically influenced by other schools of thought. And again, Platonism was already part of the stew of ideas influencing the origin of the sect.

Most experts who have actually studied this question concur or mostly concur. A lot of experts who haven’t actually researched it but spew opinions from the armchair might say different things, but the opinions that count are people who have really done the research, or are summarizing those who have. (And, of course, we should discount all fundamentalists; they cannot be trusted to be honest even with themselves, much less us.)