I'd preach the Gospel to them, Brian. Even if I had none of the facts you have conveyed here about the origin of the BatBoy cult, I'd preach the Gospel to them.
Brian has taken quite a bit of effort and time (which I appreciate, btw) to clarify his position on what it means when he says that Jesus is "similar to" previous religious figures and characters, but as evidence the assertion that A is "similar to" B is circumstantial at best. It is meaningless in defining the origin or objective (which is to say, where it started and where it was intended to go) of any piece of literature.
But I am puzzled by the fact that when there is one particular set of literature that has a meaningful cause-effect relationship to the NT, this relationship is not reviewed at all. I am thinking of the relationship between the NT and the Jewish Torah and Tanach. I am sure Brian finds his suggestion that the Midrash tradition covers this similarity sufficiently, but problematically the methodology of Midrash exposition is not the spinning of a new fictional historical account in order to provide a context for interpreting the Torah or Tanach. There is a great primer for what the Midrash writings were and were not here, and a sampling of some of them here, by which the reader can decide for himself to what degree these writings bear any resemblance to the NT writings.
But there is no doubt: the NT looks like the Torah and the Tanach. It clearly uses these books as source material and cites them constantly. Some sections of the NT look suspiciously like sections of the OT. For example, as Brian has pointed out, the murder of the innocents in Exodus has a parallel structure to the murder of the innocents in Matthew. If we are honest, many of the miracles Jesus performs in the NT look like the miracles the OT prophets performed -- like the feeding of 500, and the healing of lepers, and the ability to control or command the weather.
So in that, the question lies: what do we make of this clear use of an ancient source in creating the more recent source? My suggestion, as I will expand on below, is "preach the Gospel".
In Brian's view, we simply have to say, "ancient people had religious fanatics who made things up, and nobody back then was smart enough to know the difference between religious fanaticism and historical reports." And, given the atheist assumption that modern man must be smarter and less superstitious than ancient man, that seems to work out pretty good.
Unfortunately, Brian's view of ancient culture -- especially culture under Roman occupation, and especially religious culture -- is not very well documented or supported. For example, gullibility regarding the supernatural in the contemporary consensus is that people of the first century were significantly skeptical concerning claims for the miraculous. There is also the problem of genre and purpose in religious literature within 100 years of 1 AD, and one should fully contrast this view of Roman religious expression against this book, which plainly outlines the problematic view that the Gospels in particular are "like" other religious writings rather than "like" biographies and other historical writings.
In that, what we are left this relationship between NT and OT, and in that, they both indicate we ought to read them as discussing one event: the salvation that God has promised. Now, seriously: nobody believes everything they read. Anyone who does, well, winds up like Brian does here -- believing guys like Earl Doherty who has been shopping his theory on the transcendental/supernatural Jesus of Paul for almost 2 decades in spite of something akin to a century of skeptical scholarship which cannot bring itself to conclude that there was no historical person Jesus of Nazareth.
The worst case of the 66 books Christians call the Bible is that there is one tradition of religious expression which began in the composition of the Torah, was carried on in the Tanach, and was fulfilled -- one way or the other -- in the composition of the Gospels and the other NT works. In that, the tradition of the purpose and work of the Messiah which the Jews looked forward to and some found in this Jesus outstrips a hypothetical cult of BatBoy as one of the great literary traditions of the world.
But what is expressed in that tradition is something we, at the end of that tradition, call "the Gospel". Those of us who have received it take it as historical fact -- and have been substantiated on that matter time and time again. It is in that confidence -- that the Bible is not just a historical artifact but is itself a record of historical artifacts -- which we present our message that God is at work in history, and that work is culminated and set forth in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. See: we believe that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scripture, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scripture.
That's what I'd tell them, Brian. Something like that, anyway.
This is centuri0n, aka Frank Turk, who has been an internet apologist for about 10 years and has never really gained anything for himself through it but a handful of friends and a lot of ill-will. Most people, honestly, do not like to argue with him because he doesn't know how to let it go. He's a blogger of some minor note, and he's a "calvinist".
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