Kishkumen, I agree with your view that Stem is very genuine and sincere. I feel that even when I find his interpretation at such odds with what I see that I struggle with maybe thinking him also stubborn, idiosyncratic , almost perverse. I find it difficult to relate to his dismissal of Ehrman but I do not doubt that it is genuine.
i wonder,I could be wrong, that Stem sees enough wrong with Christianity that he wishes a complete reboot dismissing all the past assumptions. A reboot could present a hope for escape from the entanglements of past conflict and oppression. I do not think it hard to understand a wish to escape the past understanding of things.There is hope that things do not have to be as they were in the past , the future is new.
Stem feels strongly that our assumptions must be challenged. I mostly agree with him. The question is: what degree of skepticism is warranted? In the end, I think extreme skepticism may prove more useful in some areas than others. In religious history it is a lot more useful than in politics and science. What are the stakes in religious history? Will people en masse lose their religion because of mythicism?
Hardly.
So, bring it on, I say. It is good to see just how tenuous historical knowledge of past eras is. Hopefully this will lead to greater reasonableness in pressing historical claims. I find it equally annoying when Christian apologists try to place the evidence for the historical Jesus on par with evidence for Alexander the Great or Augustus. That is so laughably false it beggars belief that any educated person could say that with a straight face.
And yet very smart, educated people do say it.
The truth is that history was never necessary to uphold religion in general or Christianity in particular. Human beings tell stories and think about their meanings. They experience uncanny things, wonder why, and try to explain them. Religion is going nowhere. It may take many new and different forms, but mythicism is no challenge to it. Mythicism is just one tool for thinking about how religion works.
Mythicism is only a threat to brittle fundamentalism.
As a historian, I only find it counterproductive and annoying when it distorts perceptions of history.
"Great power connected with ambition, luxury and flattery, will as readily produce a Caesar, Caligula, Nero and Domitian in America, as the same causes did in the Roman Empire." ~Cato, New York Journal