Relativity and germ theory started off being promoted by polemicists arguing things that conveniently aligned with their ideological preferences?
There was a pre-cursor to relativity but it's really Einstein who defined special and general relativity. Had nothing to do with ideological preferences.
Also, mythicism has remained fringe since the 19th c so it is hardly cutting edge innovation and is not analogous to new theories that need time to become accepted.
Because historians have accepted assumptions that have not panned out when further explored.
Do you think, on balance of probabilities, it’s likely there was a human Jesus behind the myths?
I don't know, but the assumptions are not as strong as originally suggested. His name means servant of Yahweh, dying/rising saviors all go through a death/resurrection, Paul knows nothing about his life on earth?
So? It’s evidence historical holy men may have largely fabricated biographies to align them better with the expected archetype.
That’s a common feature of hagiography.
But not a common feature of mystery religion savior demigods.
You seem not to understand the meaning of convoluted
I don't understand your meaning and I guess maybe you don't either?
Given these terms are highly subjective and contested, stating it is “firmly established” is very much an overstatement.
It is a position that can be reasonably argued, but these are artificial categories created by modern historians and this is not a passive activity, but a creative one.
“Comparativists are welcome to make a statement about how two similar events, words, stories, or settings related in the past; but they must first acknowledge that they first see the similarities and then posit the relation. Whether the relation corresponds to a real connection in the past then becomes a matter for debate. Not everyone sees similarity or sees it in the same way. This is one reason why there are different—sometimes radically different—reconstructions of the past...
Most connections between stories leave no paper trail. Large distances of space and time and moth holes in the historical record make constructing causative relations between texts almost impossible and more often jejune. We need to think of the relations between the gospels and Greek lore more as dynamic cultural interaction: the complex, random, conscious and unconscious events of learning that occur when people interact and engage in practices of socialization...
As Umberto Eco points out, from a certain point of view, almost everything “bears relationships of analogy, contiguity, and similarity to every thing else.”11 The question is, which similarities are significant? The significant similarities are not always the ones that can be explained by means of direct imitation..
If the mythicist databank is world mythology ranging from about 1800 BCE to 100 CE, then any creative mythicist can chalk up a host of parallels to Jesus. It is simply a matter of blasting Jesus’s life into small enough bits that represent single actions or motifs stripped of narrative context. Jesus was born from a virgin, Attis was born from a virgin; Jesus brought baptism of fire, Zoroaster (Zarathustra) brought baptism of fire; Jesus rose from the dead, Osiris rose from the dead; and so on. The gospels do not go back to original, unique experiences, the argument runs, and thus they are not historical.”
How the Gospels Became History
M. David Litwa;
Jesus as a Hellenistic savior deity is firmly established. Nothing you wrote refutes that.
J.Z. Smith, scholar on Hellenism:
This describes the changes from OT to NT perfectly,
Hellenistic religion - Beliefs, practices, and institutions
-the seasonal drama was homologized to a soteriology (salvation concept) concerning the destiny, fortune, and salvation of the individual after death.
-his led to a change from concern for a religion of national prosperity to one for individual salvation, from focus on a particular ethnic group to concern for every human. The prophet or saviour replaced the priest and king as the chief religious figure.
-his process was carried further through the identification of the experiences of the soul that was to be saved with the vicissitudes of a divine but fallen soul, which had to be redeemed by cultic activity and divine intervention. This view is illustrated in the concept of the paradoxical figure of the saved saviour,
salvator salvandus.
-Other deities, who had previously been associated with national destiny (
e.g., Zeus, Yahweh, and Isis), were raised to the status of transcendent, supreme
-The temples and cult institutions of the various Hellenistic religions were repositories of the knowledge and techniques necessary for salvation and were the agents of the public worship of a particular deity. In addition, they served an important sociological role. In the new, cosmopolitan ideology that followed Alexander’s conquests, the old nationalistic and ethnic boundaries had broken down and the problem of religious and social identity had become acute.
-Most of these groups had regular meetings for a communal meal that served the dual role of sacramenta
l participation (referring to the use of material elements believed to convey spiritual benefits among the members and with their deity)
-Hellenistic philosophy (Stoicism, Cynicism, Neo-Aristotelianism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, and Neoplatonism) provided key formulations for Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophy, theology, and mysticism through the 18th century
- The basic forms of worship of both the Jewish and Christian communities were heavily influenced in their formative period by Hellenistic practices, and this remains fundamentally unchanged to the present time. Finally, the central religious literature of both traditions—the Jewish Talmud (an authoritative compendium of law, lore, and interpretation), the New Testamen
t, and the later patristic literature of the early Church Fathers—are characteristic Hellenistic documents both in form and content.
-Other traditions even more radically reinterpreted the ancient figures. The cosmic or seasonal drama was interiorized to refer to the divine soul within man that must be liberated.
-Each persisted in its native land with little perceptible change save for its becoming linked to nationalistic or messianic movements (centring on a deliverer figure)
-and apocalyptic traditions (referring to a belief in the dramatic intervention of a god in human and natural events)
- Particularly noticeable was the success of a variety of prophets, magicians, and healers—
e.g., John the Baptist, Jesus, Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander the Paphlagonian, and the cult of the healer Asclepius—whose preaching corresponded to the activities of various Greek and Roman philosophic missionaries
It's explored in detail in :
The Religious Context of Early Christianity
A Guide to Graeco-Roman Religions
HANS-JOSEF KLAUCK
Professor of New Testament Exegesis, University of Munich, Germany
Even the apologists admit the NT is Greek document, in their own guarded way -
"We must conclude with the following guarded thesis. There is in the circle of ideas in the NT, in addition to what is new, and what is taken over from Judaism, much that is Greek ; but whether this is adopted directly from the Greek or borrowed from the Alexandrians, who indeed aimed at a complete fusion of Hellenism and Judaism, is, in the most important cases, not to be determined ; and primitive Christianity as a whole stands considerably nearer to the Hebrew world than to the Greek.
"
Encyclopaedia Biblica : a critical dictionary of the literary, political, and religious history, the archaeology, geography, and natural history of the Bible
by
Cheyne, T. K. (Thomas Kelly), 1841-1915;
Black, J. Sutherland (John Sutherland), 1846-1923
Another expert is James Tabor, he goes deeper into the details as well. The Gospels contain clues that the writers were using mystery terminology as well. The evidence is very strong here.
