Schweitzer on Mythicism

Again via James McGrath, Cryptotheology presents this quotation from Quest of the Historical Jesus:

To be in any way scientific, the mythical theory must not only explain his origin, which is difficult enough, but also show how this fictitious non-Jewish figure was introduced into the Judaism of the early Roman Empire – a hopeless undertaking. Why make him a preacher of the coming of the Kingdom of God, moving entirely within the circle of Jewish thought, and secretly holding himself to be the future Messiah? Why attribute to him unfulfilled predictions of impending persecutions and his own immediate coming as Son of Man upon the clouds of heaven? (xiii)

  McGrath seems to agree with the critique, as he says "Much time has passed, but mythicists are doing no better at addressing his concern..."  Since I'm dithering with my brief for the Hannibal v. Jesus proceedings, I'll take a swipe at this thoroughly antiquated view.

  It begins with a classic shifting of the burden of proof, still the first line of argument for the scholar or commentator who wishes to cede no ground to the mythicist approach. "Explain his origin" as a mythical figure, or be dismissed as a crank. That is, make up for every one of the shortcomings of mainstream NT scholarship in satisfactorially explaining the transformation of a humble and unremarked upon Galilean teacher/healer/wonderworker/sage/prophet into the cosmic redeemer of the Pauline corpus, or be denied a place at the table. It's a dodge. Hazily accounting for ultimate origins and much debated tentative explanations abound in the realm of scholarship on earliest Christianity, yet somehow mythicism is the only position that must definitively account for the lack in order to receive even the most prejudiced hearing.
  Next we are charged with integrating a "non-Jewish figure ... into the Judaism of the early Roman Empire". I'm rather surprised this meets with McGrath's approval, as he is usually at pains to emphasize how much our picture of the Judaism(s) of the early Roman Empire have been altered since Shweitzer's time by the manuscript discoveries of the second half of the 20th Century. This charge would also seem, again, to put standard, historicist approaches at odds with the epistolatory literature, where Paul seems clearly to appreciate the difficulties involved with this integration. Put briefly, in the modern view, the figure of Jesus as presented in the gospels is not so "non-Jewish" as he seemed to Schweitzer and his contemporaries, while "the Judaism of the early Roman Empire" is in modern thought considerably less monlithic than was once supposed.
  But Schweitzer elaborates the Herculean task before the plotter of this "hopeless undertaking": why did the authors of the gospels put in the mouth of this ungainly invention an apocalyptic theology replete with failed predictions in the idiom of Jewish national redemption? The subtext here is 'why such a difficult figure? Why not a more palatable lie, if lie indeed the Nazarene was?' Again, in these remarks, we see a perhaps more proscribed circle in Schweiter's age than in our own for this matter of "Jewish thought." There seems on Schweitzer's part here no ability to conceive of the theology of the gospels as a new conception of what the annointed heralding the Kingdom might actually espouse, no ability to see reaction to mainstream modes of the expression of Jewish piety as way to articulate a minority or marginal view. He was not unaware of the device in the 2nd gospel called "Markan irony"; was he incapable of perceiving it on a scale greater than a single pronouncement, was he missing the forest of challenge to prevailing orthodoxy for the isolated fig tree?
  As a whole, this brief treatment commits nearly all of the errors of the modern response to mythicism, so I suppose, in precience as well as in concision, he is to be commended in a way. The first and most overweening of these errors in the assumption of historicity. Schweitzer seems to retroject the difficulties with integrating into Jewish thought the figure of Jesus, as the subject of a literary tradition, onto an imagined role for the figure as if he were a real person whom Paul and the evangelists had to contend with in their various lterary treatments. But it is the very position of the mythicist hypothesis that the full expression of the concepts of the Kingdom and the Son of Man fall into that phase of Jewish thought that was directed outward, toward a universalist, post-Temple orientation and a Hellenized Jewish diaspora that was integrating itself into a wider culture that included the latent yearning for a satisfying theology of the 'godfearing' Gentile. Novelty of conception on this model is expected, indeed inevitable, not some failure to account for the cultural context. Another prominent failure of the mainstream response is the concern with which I began: an unwarranted shift in the burden of proof. If there are troublesome aspects to historicist treatments of such issues as the Synoptic problem and the matter of the use of sources by our earliest writers, the precise nature of the apocalypticism espoused in the different layers of tradition, the earliest known literary expressions partaking of a cosmic, "high Christology" response to a more prosaic figure, and the wealth of diversity of answers to these questions in the mainstream literature suggests strongly that there most certainly are, then why should mythicists have to clear a hurdle that the historicist must admit his answers have not (at least not to the extent of inspiring firm consensus on such matters) in order to be given at least a charitable hearing?
  Much time has passed, indeed, but the smug satisfaction with pat answers based on faulty assumptions that passes for refutation of an unwelcome challenge seems hardly to have changed at all.