Historical Jesus, Biblical Jesus

[mordant]

That's your first mistake. You've bunched 'the HJ crowd' all together as if they think and move as one.

Nope, you've missed the point, Eider.  The HJ crowd looks at these stories and tries, desperately, to find some evidence of historicity of an actual person in it.  The fact that they cannot agree among themselves suggests that "historicity" is in the eye of the beholder.  The reason for this is actually quite simple.  They have given up on the BJ - the miracle-working son-of-god who came back to life after being crucified and flew up to heaven.  In that they are intellectually honest.  That is just a silly story as Mythicist scholars began pointing out centuries ago.  The HJ crowd is looking for evidence that there was a real, living, breathing, human who served as a model for those stories as if that matters to the original dispute.  I suppose they feel that if they can find or at least interpret something which substantiates the idea that there was a real jesus (no matter how lowly) that they can then take all the rampant speculation they indulge in and say that "it could have happened."  The problem is that as soon as they do that they pull a sleight of hand and change that to "it must have happened," which is the point that I lose all patience with them.

And no, if you look closely at my arguments with Free, you will see that we are disputing the quality of the evidence that he uses to pump life into whatever vision he has of this jesus guy. 

But whatever they come up with they will never convince the BJ fundies that jesus was just some asshole who got himself killed.

Don't forget the words of Robert Cardinal Bellarmine:

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin".

Bellarmine asserts the BJ position with that comment.

A mythicist would say :  "That is a load of shit."

An HJist would say :  "That is a load of shit..... but he was born to someone."


That is the nature of the dispute.

Great post; it sums it up about as well as anything here.