Who Do I Need to Read to Understand the Flaws in Mythicism?

I am often told that the reason I don't understand why New Testament scholars are so convinced of the historicity of Jesus is because I have not been steeped in the scholarship the way they are. One of the people who has told me this is a protege of Maurice Casey, so I was rather interested in a comment Jim West quoted from Casey's latest book, Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths.

Casey then makes mention of [Emmanuel] Pfoh’s rather playful if not sardonic remark (in his essay in the Thompson/ Verenna ‘Is This Not the Carpenter’s Son’ volume) that he has never ‘read NT Wright’. At this point I think Casey has simply exaggerated the importance of that toss off remark. Casey writes that this remark ‘… puts the determined ignorance of mythicists in a nutshell‘ (emphasis Casey’s).

West disagreed with Casey's allegation that Pfoh is a mythicist, but I was more interested in Casey's apparent endorsement of N.T. Wright.

The only things I have read by N.T. Wright are arguments for the historicity of the resurrection, which make me wonder why he should be taken seriously as a historian at all.  I know that he is seen as a great expert on Paul, but I can't see why I should expect his conclusions there to be any less driven by his apologetic agenda.   I have very little interest in reading anything else by him.

If Casey is saying that one cannot be adequately informed about the question of Jesus' historicity without reading Wright (and I realize that I don't have enough context to be sure that this is what Casey is saying), it might be like someone saying that it would be impossible to understand World War II without reading the work of a Holocaust denier.  It is not that I think that there is the slightest moral equivalency between affirming the resurrection and denying the Holocaust, but as a matter of responsible historiography, both positions are pretty far out there.

From what I know of Casey, I wouldn't expect him to  find Wright's arguments on the resurrection any more persuasive than I do, but I still feel like there is something wrong in a field where the works of such an unabashed apologist can be considered essential reading.

N.T. Wright's Personal Incredulity

I guess I am not amazed at how often Christian apologists resort to arguments based on personal incredulity, i.e., "I just can't believe that Christianity could have caught on so quickly unless everything in the Bible really truly happened." After all, what else have they got? On the other hand, I am amazed (or saddened) by how often otherwise seemingly rational people fall for such crap.

Recently, a Christian pointed me to N.T. Wright's "refutation" of the hypothesis that that the first appearances of the risen Jesus were visionary or hallucinatory experiences:

My response to this proposal is (a) that it requires enormous credulity to suppose that, even allowing Peter and Paul to have had such fantasies or hallucinations they would have generated more than a passing comment of sympathy among their colleagues or contemporaries; (b) that psychological theories of this sort—about people two thousand years ago in a different culture—are at best unprovable and at worst wildly fantastic. But, and most important, (c) the proposal simply does not make sense within the world or first-century Judaism.

Let's just think about this:

(1) It is an established historical fact that large numbers of nineteenth century Americans abandoned their homes in upstate New York for an arduous trek to Navoo, Illinois, followed by an even more arduous trek to Salt Lake City based on Joseph Smith's claim that he had looked into a hat and used magic seer stones to translate golden plates whose location had been revealed to him by a native american angel. Nevertheless, it somehow strains Wright's credulity to think that first century Jews and pagans might have been taken in by claims that a man had risen from the dead.

(2) Wright believes in the literal truth of every supernatural story in the Bible up to and including the zombie saints of Matthew Matt 28:53. Still, he insists that the possibility that Paul and Peter had a hallucination borders on the "wildly fantastic."

(3) Wright sneers at the notion of proposing psychological theories about people living two thousand year ago in a different culture. Nevertheless, he claims to understand first century Jewish thinking so well that he can confidently dismiss the possibility that they might be as gullible and uncritical as the nineteenth century followers of Joseph Smith, the sixteenth century followers of Sabbati Zevi, and the twelfth century followers of Francis of Assisi who all believed that God had acted miraculously through their leaders.

Is there anything in there that withstands thirty seconds reflection?