you may consider me a scholar of the human heart
If you are not aware of your own theoretical framework (or worldview), how thoroughly cognition is linked to culture and language, and rely on faulty mental faculties to make arbitrary judgments based on your preconceptions, biases you may or may not be aware of, then no thanks.
I have a professional-level sense of what drives people
Professional-level. How do you determine this? And level with what profession?
I'm in a much superior position than the average biblical scholar
1) Over thousands of years, we find a vast array of different cultures and that
thought is culture-specific (for example, some languages do not, like English, use speaker-relative positional terms such as left/right, and are better at orientating themselves simply because of the way that their language works).
2) While neither you nor the scholars you say are inferior were alive, they've read extensively what people of that time wrote, studied the architectural remains they left behind, the inscriptions, the art, and what there is we have to understand cultures in e.g., the first century.
3) Over the last several decades, as academic disciplines have become increasingly specialized, interdisciplinary studies have become the norm. So I have, for example, several volumes on biblical studies which have contributions from cognitive linguistics, anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, sociologists, alongside the typical fields. There are many more that I don't have. So for those whose specialty includes the historical Jesus, not only have they studied in depth cultures you cannot, but have also studied the work of those who (like you) have studied how people & social systems operate.
I can be extremely specific about the training and background of scholars, you can give me nothing other than "common sense" and a vague reference to the human psyche?
makes you think that people would NOT find an historical Jesus to be quite exciting?
I gave you some reasons when I asked you questions you didn't answer. When you answer some questions yourself that would help. Also, having read extensively what "the ancients"
did find exciting, I'm not faced with the contradiction of an exciting story that both catches fire and yet takes 3 centuries to become legal (not to mention the records we have of the scorn so many "ancients" had for this story).
you may have spent a bit more time in declension argumentation than you might've
I am not a biblical scholar. I had 2 undergrad majors: one was ancient Greek & Latin and the other was psychology & sociology (joint major). I minored in cognitive science. From there I went into cognitive neuropsychology, the study of the mind both from a psychology/behavioral science perspective as well as a neuroscience perspective. But the projects I worked on often involved other labs, including a social neuroscience lab. So I studied how the human mind classifies and categorizes everything from function and shape to social roles and religious orientation, both in behavioral and fMRI studies (and of course my studying; the above was just the research component of grad work).
by virtue of investing their lives in him
I wasn't aware anybody received PhDs in historical Jesus studies. Perhaps you've ignored the fact that those who have produced scholarship on the historical Jesus have all produced scholarship on much, much, more.
academics tend to be poorly-equipped to understand the thought of average folk
Academics, like everyone else, are subject to cognitive errors we've studied for over 50 years.
the sort of folk who would flock to the idea of an historical godman
Have you heard of the Milgram experiment or the Stanford prison study? How about the study of modern cults, groupthink, modern messiahs from David Koresh to Haile Selassie? What do such cults and movements all have in common? A historical person at the origins.
You're asking me why a guy had an opinion about Jesus once upon a time?
Yes. You said this was such an exciting story, and I'm telling you of an anti-Christian philosopher who said it was old news. You claim we don't have evidence of people saying Jesus didn't exist (apart from your misunderstanding of the Greek and the Docetism context of 2 John).
It took 300 years because it was a new religion and these were primitive times.
Mark started something which caught fire
It was an exciting idea -- to claim that the godman Christ had actually lived on the earth just a few years earlier. I think that the Christ myth would have mostly died out except for someone's idea to claim that he had been historical.
So it was really exciting and caught fire, but also took 300 years before it was legal and people weren't killed for believing in it anymore. Also, the same people who were the majority were all happy to believe in borrowed deities and add to stories about an ancient unknowable past (safe from any scrutiny) and had been for hundreds and hundreds of years. Homer was likely composed around ~800 BCE. The events in the Iliad were supposed to have taken place some few hundred years earlier. Now, here we have the quintessential myth, placed in some distant past where heroes and gods roamed the earth in a way nobody was alive to attest to, and yet about 800 years after this epic was composed, Vergil found it important enough to use to link Roman history to Troy. No historical persons, no recent or verifiable claims, a literary piece that, unlike historiography, was set to verse, and people accepted it widely then as they did with the Iliad centuries earlier. Same with the introduction of Mithras around the end of the first century, the changed cult of Attis (possibly changed because of Christianity; see Bremmer's
Greek Religion), same with the adoption and adaption by Romans of Greek deities and in addition local incorporation of foreign deities and the alterations to native practices.
All without any historically situated godman. Then Mark catches fire so fast that it only takes 300 years before people aren't being killed for believing his exciting story.
Don't let your modern-era biases make you think that it was just as easy back then to accept a new religion as it is now.
It was vastly easier because religion meant something quite different. There wasn't a word for religion as religion, politics, and culture were all the same thing. Caesar doesn't describe the religion of the Celts other than to name their gods and the problematic passage on druids; Herodotus, Plutarch, and other who discuss foreign lands and their "religions" do by naming which gods were worshipped or what practices (which were both civic, political, and religious) were prevalent.
try and put yourself back into the minds of those ancients.
How do you put yourself into the minds of those ancients? How many letters from father to son, husband to wife, of the average person in that time have you read? How many inscriptions? Epitaphs? What do you use to understand "those ancients"?
Here's the problem: Smith was a real person. Any parallel with Jesus would mean a historical Jesus, because we sure as hell didn't find Smith just writing an anonymous document that eventually became the Book of Mormon. We have a leader/figurehead of a movement. Which is how sects, cults, and movements work. In an oral world where even the literate distrusted texts, you claim a work that paled in comparison to the exciting cults and practices spread across the Roman empire started such excitement.
if you won't present any evidence for your opinion
I've told you about the nature of the gospels, the nature of orality, the ways in which your assumptions are wrong, and more, but as I can go on forever talking about the evidence and still be told "think like the ancients" without knowing what you are using as evidence other than vague references, I can't do much other than to ask questions (which you then ignore, or don't answer and say it's me preaching).
And you are helpless to force me into holding hard-and-fast historical opinions.
If you prefer to lie, fine.
Did Paul ever mention Jesus by name?
All the time.
Did Paul write about the earthly life of Jesus
The details I've written about
elsewhere. But Paul speaks of an earthly Jesus who eats with the disciples and was descended from David
kata sarka, and tells us of Jesus' prohibition of divorce
I think you should consider using source material
I have. Which is why I know what Docetism is and how meaningless your statement is.
I'm afraid that trumps anything you can present.
Does that include both the statements of those who held the view that Jesus never appeared in the flesh (but who certainly believed he appeared) as well as those like your quote who argue against them?
Even the Bible admits it.
Unless one is familiar with the views we know from multiple sources including now the Nag Hammadi library on the ways in which gnostics explained that Jesus only appeared to be human, or that he inhabited a human and the cry on the cross of being forsaken was the human calling to Jesus who had left the body, and other explanations which, like all Christologies, attempted to reconcile various views with what the texts said.
