Yes, I do concur with all your points here.

I have wondered if the hysteria about mythicism is related to the fact that Christians still have a lot of influence in US academia (and in turn on the ways of thinking of academics trained by Christian) and society generally, whereas in Europe, it’s much less common, most European countries, apart from maybe Poland and Hungary, haven’t been majority Christian for decades.

To me, the biggest pieces of evidence that there needs to be a paradigm shift, is the way Dennis Macdonald’s work has been treated, the way your and Lataster’s work has been treated and the way Brodie was treated. It’s the same kind of dismissiveness and vindictiveness over the idea that the “guild” could actually be wrong.

I think a good illustration is this debate between Goodacre and Ehrman on whether the Gospel of John used the Synoptics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REXnpEy8T_I). Ehrman does a lot of rhetorical tricks, i.e he tries to minimise the evidence from agreement between Mark and the Gospels (he knows perfectly well Goodacre´s case is way stronger than a couple of words here or there).

It also shows very well the dreaded “appeal to oral lore”, Ehrman makes a big fallacy at the start by saying “well, if you have two students that have similar texts in structure, argument and word choice, then it’s clearly a case of copying, but if you have the odd sentence structure here or there but they are substantially different, you wouldn´t conclude there was copying”. It’s not an apt comparison for a few reasons, for starters there are significant similarities, i.e the passion narrative and the other gospels all have it, the fact that there are differences doesn’t rule out influence at all. Secondly, we don’t know that much about the oral lore that may or may not have existed about Jesus, but we certainly do know the Gospels existed and have elements in common, so it’s more probable that John is getting any similarities from the Gospels themselves.

I think academic fields go wrong when they care more about defending assumptions and people’s reputations (wrongly imo, someone like Ehrman would still be considered an important scholar even if mythicism was discovered to be true) above anything else.

Good idea!