Remember, support does not mean proof. Just, support. As in: the thesis gets more probable when that is admitted than when it is not; but not necessarily more probable than alternatives (like historicist incarnationism, by far the most plausible alternative to cosmic mythicism). 10% is ten times more likely than 1%. But still nine times less likely than 90%. The probability of mythicism overall only comes from a congeries of evidence, not some single smoking gun.

But this is why it mattered that Ehrman used to deny my established background information (in chs. 4–6, and esp. Element 10) that the first Christians believed Jesus was a preexistent being made incarnate. The function of denying that is to make it less probable that Christians would ever at first think that, and therefore reduce the probability that they could conceive of a cosmically incarnated Christ at all.

This is basically a “they couldn’t have thought of that without a historical man” apologetic—similar to “they couldn’t imagine a crucified angel, so there had to be a guy,” which is untrue, because the ancients could imagine a crucified incarnated angel, and the location is then irrelevant; crucified is crucified, it matters not where; and same here, as to incarnated angel altogether: see Can Paul’s Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus? which is all about McGrath trying to use Ehrman’s previous (and now abandoned) argument to argue against mythicism in exactly this way (just as Ehrman did).

A similar use of this false datum is to argue “no Jew would believe a man was literally God, therefore Jesus had to have existed,” which is refuted by admitting that this is not what preexistent incarnationism holds (as it always maintains their belief is that he is a created agent of God, and not literally God, thus eliminating the objection). Hence my words: “This is exactly what I argued in Not the Impossible Faith, and which Ehrman once denounced as misinformed (DJE, p. 167). Yet now he admits I was entirely correct.”

But now that Ehrman has changed tunes (and without apology), agreeing with my already-well-evidenced background information that they imagined this all along, the argument above goes away. They could imagine it, and right away. The very people who even supposedly walked the Earth with him. Yet if even they could imagine him an incarnated space angel, then even more could anyone told this in revelations (whether dreams or visions) or finding it hidden in scripture. Ehrman is thus abandoning an argument against mythicism (it was never a good argument, but still).

So the probability of mythicism goes up now, by exactly the amount it would have gone down had that argument been sound and valid instead. I already factored this in in my study, so its probabilities are already there. They don’t increase. But that is because I disproved Ehrman’s argument with facts already. The only thing that has changed is that Ehrman now agrees that his argument has been disproved. This must logically then have the corresponding effect on anyone who had previously bought it.

re: “admitting the first Christians regarded Jesus to be a preexistent divine archangel lends unexpected support to mythicism.”

How does admitting that the first Christians regarded Jesus to be a preexistent divine archangel – AFTER his resurrection – lend unexpected support to mythicism?

Ehrman plainly says “AFTER Jesus’ death, the BELIEF IN HIS RESURRECTION led some of his followers to say he was God”.

This is a far cry different than saying there was some cult that ALREADY believed in a Celestial Jesus who had been crucified by demons, and later they learned, through some kind of “revelation” (hallucination? dream? “inspired” re-thinking of OT scriptures) had been “raised from the dead”. This “cult” believed, even before the “resurrection revelation”, that Jesus was a Celestial Being.

But, for someone to conclude AFTER a dead Jesus was “raised from the dead”, that the “risen Jesus” must have been pre-existent, maybe from the very beginning, and then “sent by God” to earth — that’s just a matter of trying to comprehend who this “Jesus”, who got raised from the dead, really was in the Big Picture.

Heck, I’m nowhere near being a Mythicist, but, I’ve long believed that “Christ” – “the Messiah” – was existent before the creation of the universe. But, that hardly means anything in favor of Mythicism.

Am I missing something here?

As I point out in this review, Ehrman devotes a whole chapter on that question in this very book. The TL;DR is that it was ultimately a political committee decision and not anything to do with real religious concerns. Most Christians were not advocating Trinitarianism; it was a fabrication of the Nicene council.

What one means by “only one divine being” is really just semantic. For example, Judaism and Christianity both still believe in many divine beings (angels, demons, Satan; Saints, the Virgin Mary), and most actual Christians hold what are “officially” heretical views (e.g. countless Christians actually think of Jesus as a man whose body was possessed by God, or by the Holy Spirit acting as an agent of God, or as a subordinate created by God and sent to fulfill God’s will, or else don’t have any coherent notion of the matter at all but merely repeat vacuous shibboleths according to what they believe they are “required” to do). So there never really has been the kind of insistence on “one divine being” as Christian intellectual rhetoric has long obsessed over. It really has just come down to honor terminology (e.g. what divine beings “get” to be assigned the specific name “God,” which in such a role acts more as an honorific than an actual classifier).

So really the question is, “Why obsess over this semantic game?” One can only speculate, as delusional people are never honest even with themselves about their actual motives for such bizarre behavior, so we can’t “ask” them. My top speculation is that allowing anything else to be called God or believed as independently powerful and important as God opens the door to religious multiculturalism, i.e. it allows other religions a claim to possibly being “true.” Whereas if there is only “one” supreme God, the debate is entirely reframed as over whether you are worshiping the real one or not.

I concurred with all your points then, and now even more so on subsequent reflection. Ehrman is under pressure from his family, from his colleagues, from his career, and even his own risk of self-embarrassment, to avoid “teetering” where the evidence actually leads. But that all only piles on top of a more universal problem facing scholars in Jesus studies.

All scholars, in all fields, but especially the humanities (where evidence and conclusions are much more subjective and squishy, and methodology much less well-vetted or spelled-out) have a tendency (per Kuhn) to resist anything that challenges their wisdom, their colleagues, their entire publication history, and the core assumptions of their field, even their reason for getting into it. They will rationalize their way out of the ensuing cognitive dissonance with every irrational and unscholarly device, leading to an entire backwash of refusals to even read the evidence and arguments they are supposed to be addressing and yet concluding they’ve dispatched them.

For example, Fernando Bermejo-Rubio (whose views I have addressed here but even more head-on now in Jesus from Outer Space) is so invested in his own fringe theory that Jesus was a militaristic zealot, that he only rationalizes his way to that conclusion, he never does anything consisting of logically sound scholarship to prove it (which would lead to discovering his thesis is untenable even if Jesus existed). This is what most historicists are doing: they have their own pet theories they are obsessed with and have staked their careers on; and those theories require Jesus to have existed (as per the recent example of Dennis MacDonald; and of course the whole parallel example of the zombie Q-source theory). Ergo, they rationalize; they construct apologetics; they don’t do history like the rest of historians in other academic fields do.

Meanwhile, the other two thirds of scholars in Jesus studies have to defend the historicity of Jesus for the survival of their very faith. Indeed, half or more have signed contracts that would immediately result in their being fired if they were to concede even an inch on this point (the fates of Thompson, Brodie, Lüdemann, even Licona, for daring to cross that faith line even an inch keeps that lesson eternally salient: see the survey of examples in Fitzgerald’s Mything in Action). They need Jesus to be real for the most existentially urgent of reasons. Their academic freedom is nil; professionally and psychologically. By contrasts, atheists have no need of Jesus to be wholly a myth; we’re quite content with the standard mainstream thesis that he was just an ordinary guy later mythologized.

Alas I rarely use print media anymore, so I can’t give you precise page numbers. I’m going off kindle, and had to check pagination using the Amazon website, which is sometimes off from the print edition by a page either direction.

Also, I can’t tell which sentences in your comment are questions. So if I don’t answer a question you intended here, please re-ask it in follow-up.

Working backward:

Your query about point 12: “scholars have mounted formidable arguments” loc. 1413, Ch. 3.

Your query about point 11: “the emperor and Jesus—were the only two figures” loc. 5296, Epilogue.

Your query about points 6 and 8: you’ll have to search Amazon LookInside to get the page numbers. Point 8, search for “no respect for Jewish sensitivities” (loc. 2405). Point 6, search for “it is widely thought, for example, that the Gospel of John” (loc. 1413).

Correct. Paul also describes the apocalypse as being taught by Jesus in 1 Thess. 4:15-16, “we say unto you by the word of the Lord…” He just doesn’t say when that “word of the Lord” came to anyone…was it after Jesus died and “appeared” in visions to the Apostles? Paul only ever seems to know about the latter; never in his epistles does Paul ever mention Jesus ever saying anything to anyone before he died (not even in 1 Cor. 11:23, where Jesus is revealing a pre-death event in his life: it’s still being revealed in a post-death revelation). And that there was no distinction being made (between what he taught in life, and in visions after death) is highly peculiar…unless Jesus did not preach anything when alive. Which supports the notion that he wasn’t an earthly person at all, but only known through visions. But even a historicist has to admit, there is no evidence in Paul that whatever Jesus preached to the Apostles before he died, it had anything to do with the apocalypse. Paul seems to mean, they got his apocalyptic preaching only in visions after his death; just as we see happening still in Revelation (an entire apocalyptic preaching of Jesus…invented after he died, and portrayed as only being taught by him after he died).

So, really, the apocalyptic prophet thesis is really no better grounded than the Zealot thesis: both require “excusing away” passages to the contrary and cherry picking evidence and backfilling the thesis with a whole lot of suppositions not specifically in evidence.

Since this didn’t appear in your book, would it be worth writing an academic article in which you show how this research on Gal 4:14 is additional evidence for mythicism?