And my point is that no one with any credibility is going to consider the possibility that Jesus might really be a god any more than they would consider that Zeus might really be a god. What's being discussed is Jesus as a person or myth. Carrier's use of the Rank-Raglan scale is to examine these historical/mythical figures along this axis only.Flann 5 wrote:There are a number of problems here . . . Of course there are pagan gods and myths but my point is that if Jesus actually was the divine son of God,performing miracles etc he would automatically score high on the scale relative to mythical gods and heroes being part of the benchmark.
How much time does Carrier actually spend talking about the Rank-Raglan scale in his book? I suspect it takes up only a few pages in an entire book. I can grant you the argument that Carrier tweaks the Rank-Raglan to better fit his argument, but it still leaves the rest of the book you need to address. And you haven't read the book.
And, even more important, the argument is not Jesus was definitely a myth. The argument is Jesus was probably a myth. Carrier, if anything, is painstaking in framing his arguments in terms of probability. This is the basis of his Bayesian logic. In SENSE AND SENSIBILITY WITHOUT GOD, Carrier lays out the criteria for historical evidence and there is not a single item of the listed categories of evidence for Jesus. We can only lay down an argument from probability. There are very few certainties in history. For example, we can have reasonable confidence that Julius Caesar actually existed. With Jesus, the picture is far murkier.
Flann, as much as you like to think of the two sides as equal, they are anything but. The naturalistic worldview is supported only by evidence. In the whole history of science, we have never once concluded a supernatural explanation. So the naturalistic worldview is abundantly justified whole your beliefs in an inerrant Bible and in Jesus as a deity may be personally meaningful to you, but are not justified by any objective means, and are not even addressed by mythicists or historians. I don't think you are capable of seeing your beliefs critically or objectively. They are too near and dear to you.Flann 5 wrote:The argument that miracles make it myth not history is just an assertion of a naturalistic philosophical worldview. Both atheistic and theistic worldviews need to be justified, not assumed.