You did not answer my previous comment. I will re-post it for you.
“I think there is an issue of money today. There are clergy members, who cannot find comparable jobs outside religious institutions and so they will remain closeted in their true opinions. It’s the same with mythicists. Any secular Christian professor who admits to hold a mythical Jesus view will likely lose their job. Historicism just pays better and will, therefore, skew the publicly voiced opinion.”
This is another excuse. Do you seriously think only faith based institutions deal with the historicity of Jesus? There is not one single secular college or university in the world that will end your employment with them if you conclude Jesus didn’'t existed. Once upon a time in our lifetimes, this did in fact happen – G.A. Wells was a professor of German at the University of London (he died this year). He was, in our lifetimes, the only person in the world to hold a position at a college or university somewhat related to history and think Jesus didn’t exist. And he was … never fired. Obviously, you might think to yourself “how on God’s green Earth did a real academic conclude Jesus didn’t exist?” It’s a good question with an obvious solution. After many years, G.A. Wells eventually admitted mythicism doesn’t work after reading one of J.D.G. Dunn’s books. Wells was never fired, nor was his employment ever at risk when he was a mythicist. This clearly shows that this is simply mythicist hysteria and perhaps, another exercise in their genuine lack of understanding at how scholars don’t take them seriously.
“But lets be frank. Bart Erhman does not believe a miracle working Jesus existed and would concede that stories about Jesus, that portray him in a miracle working light, were embellished at best and made up completely at worst.”
I think I simply need to re-quote Ehrman since you’re still trying to twist his position into something that could somehow resemble yours.
“I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it’s silly to talk about him not existing.” -Bart Ehrman
Again, have you read Ehrman’s book Did Jesus Exist? Ehrman thinks there is a LOT of things you can say about the historical Jesus. E.P. Sanders lists the points about Jesus that are shared among all historians, the bedrock of the Jesus tradition, and it’s quite a long one:
“I shall first offer a list of statements about Jesus that meet two standards: they are almost beyond dispute; and they belong to the framework of his life, and especially of his public career… Jesus was born c 4 BCE near the time of the death of Herod the Great; he spent his childhood and early adult years in Nazareth, a Galilean village; he was baptised by John the Baptist; he called disciples; he taught in the towns, villages and countryside of Galilee (apparently not the cities); he preached ‘the kingdom of God’; about the year 30 he went to Jerusalem for Passover; he created a disturbance in the Temple area; he had a final meal with the disciples; he was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities, specifically the high priest; he was executed on the orders of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate.” (quoted in John Dickson, Life of Jesus: Who He Is and Why He Matters pg. 41)
In the last 25 minutes of this lecture by Dale Martin at Yale University (a highly skeptical scholar), Martin explains many of the things we can know about the historical Jesus and why we know they’re true.
The question “which historicist is correct?” is obviously bait, but at the very least we can point towards the common Jesus bedrock that E.P. Sanders has listed in which all ‘historicists’ agree on, which is most definitely correct. Anything that isn’t bedrock is still in the realm of the debate, and the realm of debate is where historians are disagreeing and debating at this point, and where their views begin to diverge.