About this book, I read from books.google :
The idea prima facie that I have done is that Hurtado is criticized firstly because his model does not give entirely reason for any logical connection between the life of Jesus of Nazareth and his rapid deification post-mortem (as seen in Paul's letters).I simply make the point to illustrate the fact that for Hurtado the words ”Jesus” and ”Christ” in ‘Lord Jesus Christ” lack specific content; they do not have a particular historical life of Jesus of Nazareth in view, nor a particular understanding of what it would mean for that life to be messianic.
(p. 79)
Assuming in the visions of the Risen Jesus the real source of the earliest high Christology (that we observe in Paul), the historicist Larry Hurtado makes almost useless a historical Jesus because of centrality taken by those visions, giving indirectly a plus to mythicism.
Frankly, I would be disappointed to know that the Fletcher-Louis’s ”solution” to the problem of the silence on Jesus in Paul’s letters is a historical Jesus who claimed to be strictu sensu God himself.
It would be interesting to know precisely who, between Fletcher-Louis and Hurtado, supports indirectly better the mythicist point in Doherty/Carrier model about a Paul being ignorant about a HJ.
I dont’ have read all the book, but it seems like an extreme, desperate apologetic attempt to back through the window what scholars have already kicked out the door: the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel that comes in and says ’I am God: believe, or die'.
If historicizing the Gospel Jesus of John represents the only solution to explain a ''Christ Jesus'' in Paul so rapidly and vertiginously divinized, then the mythicism wins on historicity 10000-0.
