Yeah, I mean... ugg, come on.
It's always the same old crap. Tim and PZ Meyers must be best buds. They both try to sound soo "rational", and then go about completely distorting the issue in order to to so come off as "serious minded moderates".
But of course they completely fail to address the most serious scholarship and instead go on adn on about the most fringe or extravagant claims.
But in Jesus studies? The two leading hypotheses are:
A) A recently deceased man soon came to be interpreted as a newly revealed god.
B) A newly revealed god soon came to be interpreted as a recently deceased man.
In what sense is the first more or less "complex" than the second?
This is exactly right. And I would argue, simply on the face of it, before even dealing with any serious research, that B is more probable than A. The reason being is that in Christian literature we see that "Jesus" is worshiped as a deity right from the very beginning. And what examples do we have of Jewish people being worshiped as gods? None.
There is in fact no real model for how a human being would come to be worshiped as a deity, the creator of the universe, a figure who would judge the world, a figure who overcame death and rose from the grave, etc.
If we acknowledge that no real human being can rise from the grave, how do we explain the fact that the worship of Jesus clearly rests upon his rising from the grave? The explanations for this have always been extremely weak and based on nothing more than just guesses and rationalizations.
"Maybe he didn't really die, and later came back to life". Total nonsense of course and not supported by any of the literature. People weren't worshiping some person who was running around after a failed execution, they were worshiping a "son of God" in heaven.
"His followers were so grieved that they couldn't believe he really died, and so deified him." Ok, then why didn't they write anything about this actual person and what he did that was so great? (We'll address this more later) Why was there no movement based on the deeds of this person's life, instead only focused on an imagined figure after his death? There were literally thousand upon thousands of people crucified in the first century CE alone. What would make this person's death so special?
All of the early Christian writers tell us exactly why they worshiped "Jesus". Because he fulfilled prophecies, performed miracles, and rose from the dead. None of those things are real. Every single one of those attributes is a supernatural fabrication. What were the underlying characteristics of the real person that led people to attribute these supernatural powers to him? There is no answer. His teachings? Not a single early non-Gospel writer attributes teachings to Jesus or says anything about worshiping him because of teachings. There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that stands out as anything special that hadn't already been said by many other people.
Let's be real, the "case" for historicity rests on tradition and starting assumptions. It has nothing to do with evidence.
Now, when we get to "mythicism", the case is far more plausible.
#1 There appears to be some human figure behind the character of the Gospels. Yes, that's true. That figure is Paul.
The Gospels are best understood, at least in their origination, as allegorical introductions to the Pauline letters. The Gospel story is based thoroughly on two main sources (though there are also others): 1. The Jewish scriptures, 2. The Pauline letters. The Gospels never existed independently from the Pauline letters. The two go hand-in-hand. The story is derived from the letter collection.
There should be no doubt whatsoever that the Jesus figure of the Gospels is not based on the life of any real person, other than Paul. The Gospel stories are not accounts of real events. Virtually every scene in the Gospels can be traced back to either a scriptural or Pauline source. The story is pieced together from other literary sources that have nothing to do with any accounts of a person named Jesus, nor even of any teachings attributed to a Jesus person. To the extent that any "sayings" were ever attributed to "Jesus", these were nothing more than the typical "sayings of the Lord" that we encounter regularly in the Jewish scriptures.
#2 It is beyond evident that the belief that Jesus was a real person stemmed entire from the Gospel stories. Every single source we know of that discusses the humanity of Jesus does so on the basis of the Gospel writings.
#3 The readers of the Gospel writings clearly did not understand their provenance. Modern scholarship is unanimous in rejecting the believed provenance of the Gospel held by the Patristic Fathers. Yet, their flawed understanding of the provenance of these materials was absolutely foundational to their belief that what these writings said was literally true. It was because they believed that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were authentic writings that had been produced by direct and secondary followers of Jesus, which were independently produced, and which corroborated each other on major points, that they held the accounts to be reliable and factual.
Essentially everything about the "nature of Jesus" rested on the reliability of these Gospel accounts. Without them, nothing is known about Jesus the person.
So any defense of the "historicity of Jesus" has to be founded upon a defense of the historical credibility of the Gospel accounts. And I know, factually, that the Gospel shave zero historical credibility. The basis of the Gospels accounts can, and has been, demonstrated. The basis is the Gospel accounts is the Jewish scriptures and the Pauline letters -- nothing more.
Now, when we speak of "parsimony", I would submit that, right or wrong, the model I have put forward to explain the origin and development of Christian writings, and thus "Christianity", is far more parsimonious than those of historicity.
1) At some point from the mid-first century to early second century some group of people worshiped "the Lord" of the Jewish scriptures as a power separate from the "Highest God" of the Jewish scriptures. Mountains of evidence shows that there were many different interpretations of the Jewish scriptures, from which these types of interpretations developed.
2) Someone or some group of people acted as "missionaries" to a network of "God-fearing" assemblies that included Jewish proselytes and the like, who worshiped and interacted with Judaism in a variety of perhaps unconventional ways. Someone or some people produced writings that described the beliefs and administration of these assemblies. These writings were put into a collection at some point, and came to be known as the "Letters of Paul".
3) With a collection of the "Letters of Paul" in hand, someone wrote an allegorical story as an introduction to this Pauline letter collection. This story uses the Jewish scriptures to develop a narrative casts events leading up to the destruction of the "Second Temple" in the setting of the events that led up to the destruction of the "First Temple". The storyline of this narrative follows the narrative of 1 & 2 Kings and various prophets, who supposedly predicted the fall of the First Temple. The narrative of the Gospel story re-creates these narratives and prophecies in a narrative that shows the Jews repeating the errors of their ancestors, leading once again to the fall of the Jewish "House of God" whereby the favor of God then transfers from the Jews to "the nations". The writer incorporates Pauline teachings to show that the errors of the Jews were a result of not following Pauline teachings.
4) This collection, with the "introductory story" to the Pauline letters was received by different Pauline communities who modified and expanded upon it.
5) Various interpretations of these writings developed. The introductory allegory was interpretated literally by many readers, as frequently happened.
And basically the rest develops from there.
This is actually quite simple. Everything stems from the misinterpretation of an allegorical story, which was based on the Pauline writings.
Trying to explain how a real person inspired all of this and how, and why these writings were inspired by the life of a real person, requires far more complexity.