I’m curious where you’re getting these estimates of “small minority” from? Did you actually do a survey of the field? How do you know? You’ve repeated this claim multiple times in this thread, but I haven’t seen you discuss the views of any scholar in detail. Rather, your statements are all very general.
Also it’s odd to see you compare people like Richard Bauckham, Craig Keener, Larry Hurtado, Peter Williams, N. T. Wright, F. F. Bruce, Craig Blomberg, and Craig Evans to Jesus mythicists.* All of the former are scholars respected in their field not only by other conservative scholars but also liberal ones. Hurtado, for example, is prof emeritus at Edinburgh. Wright is professor at St Andrews, and respected for his work in many other areas (e.g. the New Perspective on Paul) - a giant in the field of NT studies.
In contrast, as far as I know, the only scholars who are Jesus mythicists are Robert Price and Richard Carrier, both whose views are acknowledged as fringe. (Carrier doesn’t even have an academic position.) The other advocates of Jesus mythicism are all people who are not considered serious scholars, not even by Bart Ehrman. They are properly called amateurs. @Freakazoid, who is an actual graduate student in NT studies, can corroborate all of this, and possibly add more names. (Please don’t keep bringing up the J. Warner Wallace example, that’s a red herring and distraction. I think Matt, Josh, and I all agree that Wallace is more of an apologist than professional scholar.)
The second issue is that it seems you are not fully understanding the argument being made. It’s not that we’re claiming there is a consensus among historians that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Neither is there a consensus among historians that the Gospels are inerrant. (I’ve seen the word “reliable” used a lot here without a clear definition.) Some scholars (like Ehrman and Dale Allison, if I remember correctly), might affirm various historical facts about Jesus, but think that history can’t prove supernatural events. Still, there’s a difference between that and thinking that the Gospels are completely untrustworthy in anything they say.
Rather, the argument is that if we can establish the historicity of several key events relevant to Christianity, such as
- Jesus died via crucifixion.
- Jesus was buried in a tomb which was found empty later.
- The disciples experienced multiple post-mortem appearances of Jesus.
- The belief in Jesus’ resurrection was established early in the Church and became the basis for spreading the new faith.
then one can make a philosophical argument that these facts point to resurrection being a pretty good theory that fits the facts and explained what happened. Do you understand? It’s a two-step argument. The first step is gathering the pieces of the evidence reinforced by scholarly work. The second step is where the argument for Resurrection actually happens.
The question then turns on how much evidence do you need before you can be convinced that something supernatural did actually happen. For some people, that is a crazily high bar, so they will never be convinced by this argument. Maybe for you, even if there is good evidence that points 1-4 are true and you allow that they are not easily explained by any known naturalistic theory, the Resurrection is still too improbable to have occurred. That’s OK! At least be honest about it. There’s no need to pretend that Wright is in the same class as a Jesus mythicist.
Still, this makes me baffled to see statements like this:
Science only concludes that resurrections generally don’t happen. It’s an extremely improbable event to occur by natural causes. (I don’t think science can claim that it is literally impossible. I’m sure you know that science doesn’t deal with absolute proof.) Christians aren’t claiming that the resurrection happened naturally. As you said, if it happened naturally, then it wouldn’t be a miracle. Rather, Christians are claiming that it happened supernaturally.
It seems that for you, a resurrection is improbable, but even if there was a mountain of evidence that it did happen, that would prove it to be a naturalistic event. In either case, atheism is true. Of course, this is a heads I win, tails you lose kind of scenario.
*And these are just the more famous names; in fact I deliberately excluded people who might be more known for their apologetics work such as WLC, Habermas, and Licona, although these three are also people with legitimate scholarly work, far more than someone like Wallace.