New testament scholar Dennis Macdonald and Jacob Berman debate Aaron Adair and Godless Engineer on the Mythicism (Link). Sayanore historicity. While I figured they would emphasize those uncommon ”problem passages” in Paul and Hebrews and so on (it comes up occasionally, but not much) they instead opt to support the tenuous with the even more tenuous, by using debatable interpretations of passages in the gospel of Thomas (!) and questionable inferences from a hypothetical document. Q, for instance was challenged by many scholars but on top of that, granting that it existed, Q has been used by Earl Doherty to argue his own position. Correct me if I am wrong, but the Q document is basically just sayings, sayings that might have originated in dreams, vision or as simply the kinds of things Jesus would command (and other possibilities) and seems not to allow us to distinguish the speaker as a human who once lived on Earth. Most astonishingly, MacDonald comes perilously close to conceding mythicism when he says Paul’s Jesus is a mythical Jesus.
