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Vladimir_M comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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One marker to watch out for is a kind of selection effect.
In some fields, only 'true believers' have any motivation to spend their entire careers studying the subject in the first place, and so the 'mainstream' in that field is absolutely nutty.
Case examples include philosophy of religion, New Testament studies, Historical Jesus studies, and Quranic studies. These fields differ from, say, cryptozoology in that the biggest names in the field, and the biggest papers, are published by very smart people in leading journals and look all very normal and impressive but those entire fields are so incredibly screwed by the selection effect that it's only "radicals" who say things like, "Um, you realize that the 'gospel of Mark' is written in the genre of fiction, right?"
I agree about the historical Jesus studies. At one point, I got intensely interested in this topic and read a dozen or so books about it by various authors (mostly on the skeptical end). My conclusion is that this is possibly the ultimate example of an area where the questions are tantalizingly interesting, but making any reliable conclusions from the available evidence is basically impossible. At the end, as you say, we get a lot of well written and impressively researched books whose content is however just a rationalization for the authors' opinions held for altogether different reasons.
On the other hand, I'm not sure if you're expressing support for the radical mythicist position, but if you do, I disagree. As much as Christian apologists tend to stretch the evidence in their favor, it seems to me like radical mythicists are biased in the other direction. (It's telling that the doyen of contemporary mythicism, G.A. Wells, who certainly has no inclination towards Christian apologetics, has moderated his position significantly in recent years.)
No, I have yet to hear a great case for mythicism, though Richard Carrier may be in the process of writing the first. But I do think that we know almost nothing about Jesus with any confidence. Basically, there was probably some Jewish prophet who was baptized by John the Baptist and killed by the Romans, and that's about all we know with any confidence.
I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know if you get around to assessing this. My belief (i.e., Jesus probably existed) is currently the same as yours and Vladimir_M's but I believe muflax finds Carrier persuasive.
Well, it would certainly go too far to give mythicism an overwhelming probability. It may go too far to say that Occam's Razor unambiguously favors mythicism.
But the second claim, if we agree that Paul had an unusual experience of some kind which changed his behavior, would require only that people in Paul's time spoke of a nameless Essene Teacher of Righteousness dying on a cross. (And of course other, less likely discoveries would make the case just as well.)