Civil War in the leper colony.

Bart Ehrman's book on "Did Jesus Exist?" - which, not to bury the lede, is answered in the affirmative - has kicked off a civil war on the liberal/radical/crazy side of the scholarship/pseudo-scholarship continuum. (This Huffington Post column appears to be the proximate cause of the war.) There are a lot of hurt feelings out there as the "Jesus is a Myth" ("Mythers") go-to guy, Richard Carrier, expresses personal umbrage at the attack on his scholarship. Ehrman has responded in kind. Other folks have weighed in.

Good times, good times.

Apparently, based on his vast knowledge of grasshoppers gleaned from teaching teen-agers at a state school in Morris, Minnesota, P.Z. Myers - best known for using his state-funded gig at the University of Minnisota, Morris to offend Catholics by desecrating the Eucharist - has magisterially weighed in to defend Carrier's scholarly reputation.

This is what Myers has to say:

Jesus is a legend, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or Paul Bunyan. There may have been some individual in the past who inspired the stories, but he’s not part of the historical record, and the tall tales built around him almost certainly bear little resemblance to the long-lost reality. It’s simply bad history to invent rationalizations for an undocumented mystery figure from the distant past.

Well, then, there you go. Case closed. A guy who works for the government in teachign pimple faced teenagers all about animalsin a village of approximately 5,000 souls in western Minnesota has exerised the "magisterium of science" to tell us what's-what about history.

Myers' magisterial pronouncement has resulted in this terrific putdown by R. Joseph Hoffman:

I’ll make a deal with PZ Myers: I don’t try to lecture him on grasshoppers and he doesn’t lecture anybody on Jesus and “bad history.” I can’t quite imagine that the combined religion faculties at Harvard, Claremont and Tuebingen are awaiting further instruction on Bayes Theorem from Richard Carrier or packing up their offices, having been served notice that an associate professor of biology at the Morris campus of the University of Wisconsin has discovered that Jesus is just like Robin Hood—and Paul Bunyan. I know it gives the mythtics a rush to think that the scholarly establishment discourages revolutionary ideas but in fact it is designed to discourage error and non-revolutionary discredited ideas.

And:

The free thought rabble have chosen Carrier as their standard bearer, without any reason to put their trust in his inane conclusions and methods—a man who has never published a significant piece of biblical scholarship, never been peer reviewed (peers?), never been vetted, and never held an academic position. His “reputation” depends on deflecting his mirror image of himself as a misunderstood, self-construed genius onto a few dozen equally maladroit followers. This billboard for poor method, we are now asked to believe by freethought’s bad boy, PZ Myers, has cold-cocked a senior New Testament scholar for saying something as reasonable as “Jesus existed.” Only in the age of instant misinformation and net-attack is this kind of idiocy possible. Only in the atheist universe where the major premise– “religion is a lie so the study of religion is a study of lying”—infects everything is this kind of lunacy possible. Unfortunately, we have Richard Dawkins to thank for the original formulation of that premise.

Let's sit back and enjoy the digital blood-letting.