Added Appendix: Response to Richard Carrier’s Review (2024) to Jesus Mythicism: Moral Influence vs. Vicarious Atonement—and Other Problems (2022) by John MacDonald in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
In this Appendix update John MacDonald responds to Richard Carrier’s assessment and evaluation of his 2022 essay by surveying some of the most recent historical Jesus scholarship to show that mythicism simply isn’t a good fit to this new evidence, two examples of which are Bart Ehrman’s pre-cross Jesus and Benjamin White’s argument for the authenticity of Paul’s 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. Mythicism flourished at a time when historical Jesus studies were in methodological disarray, but the investigators working within the new ‘next quest for the historical Jesus’ learned from the mistakes of the previous quests and are now beginning to produce reliable information about the historical Jesus.