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For the body of myths associated with Christianity, see Christian mythology and Jesus in comparative mythology. For the scholarly study of the historical Jesus, see Historicity of Jesus, Historical Jesus, and Quest for the historical Jesus. For sources on Jesus, see Sources for the historicity of Jesus and Historical reliability of the Gospels.
Christ myth theory
The Resurrection of Christ by Carl Heinrich Bloch (1875)—some mythicists see this as a case of a dying-and-rising deity
DescriptionThe story of Jesus of Nazareth is basically a myth. He never existed as an historical person, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels.
Early proponentsThomas Paine (1737–1809)
Charles-François Dupuis (1742–1809)
Constantin-François Volney (1757–1820)
Richard Carlile (1790–1843)
Bruno Bauer (1809–1882)
Edwin Johnson (1842–1901)
Dutch Radical School (1880–1950)
Albert Kalthoff (1850–1906)
William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934)
John Mackinnon Robertson (1856–1933)
Thomas Whittaker (1856–1935)
Arthur Drews (1865–1935)
Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879–1959)
Later proponentsAlvin Boyd Kuhn (1880–1963)
George Albert Wells (1926-2017)
Tom Harpur (1929-2017)
Michael Martin (1932-2015)
Living proponentsThomas L. Thompson, Thomas L. Brodie, Robert M. Price, Richard Carrier, Earl Doherty, Michel Onfray, Frank Zindler
SubjectsHistorical Jesus, Historical reliability of the Gospels, Historicity of Jesus, History of early Christianity
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The Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory, Jesus mythicism, or Jesus ahistoricity theory)[1] is the view that 'the story of Jesus is a piece of mythology', possessing no 'substantial claims to historical fact'.[2] Alternatively, in terms given by Bart Ehrman paraphrasing Earl Doherty, 'the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity.'[q 1]

There are three strands of mythicism, including the view that there may have been a historical Jesus, who lived in a dimly remembered past, and was fused with the mythological Christ of Paul. A second stance is that there was never a historical Jesus, only a mythological character, later historicized in the Gospels. A third view is that no conclusion can be made about a historical Jesus, and if there was one, nothing can be known about him.

Most Christ mythicists follow a threefold argument:[3] they question the reliability of the Pauline epistles and the Gospels to establish the historicity of Jesus; they note the lack of information on Jesus in non-Christian sources from the first and early second centuries; and they argue that early Christianity had syncretistic and mythological origins, as reflected in both the Pauline epistles and the gospels. Therefore, Christianity was not founded on the shared memories of a man, but rather a shared mytheme.

The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory, supported by few tenured or emeritus specialists in biblical criticism or cognate disciplines.[4][5][6][q 2] It is criticised for its outdated reliance on comparisons between mythologies,[7] and deviates from the mainstream historical view. According to this mainstream view, Paul's letters and the gospels are religious documents which present the early Christian understanding of the life and death of a historical Jesus, who was crucified in the 1st-century Roman province of Judea and subsequently deified,[8][9] after his early followers had visionary experiences of Jesus' presence,[10][11][12][13][14][15] from which they concluded that he had risen from the dead and was exalted to heaven.[16]

  • 1Jesus and the origins of Christianity
    • 1.2Mainstream historical-critical view
  • 2Arguments
    • 2.2Lack of detailed biographical information in Pauline epistles
      • 2.2.3Lack of biographical information
      • 2.2.4Earlier dating
      • 2.2.5Jesus may have lived in a dimly remembered past
    • 2.3The Gospels are not historical records
    • 2.4No independent eyewitness accounts
      • 2.4.1Lack of surviving historic records
      • 2.4.2Josephus and Tacitus
      • 2.4.3Other sources
    • 2.5Syncretistic and mythological from the beginning
      • 2.5.1Syncretism and diversity
      • 2.5.2Paul's Jesus is a celestial being
      • 2.5.3Parallels with other religions
  • 4Revival (1970s - present)
    • 4.1Revival of the Christ myth theory
    • 4.2Theologians
  • 5Reception
    • 5.2Scholarly reception
  • 11Sources

Jesus and the origins of Christianity[edit]

Main articles: Origins of Christianity and History of Christianity

The origins and rapid rise of Christianity, as well as the historical Jesus and the historicity of Jesus, are a matter of longstanding debate in theological and historical research. While Christianity may have started with an early nucleus of followers of Jesus,[17] within a few years after the presumed death of Jesus in c. AD 33, at the time Paul started preaching, a number of 'Jesus-movements' seem to have been in existence, which propagated divergent interpretations of Jesus' teachings.[18][19] A central question is how these communities developed and what their original convictions were,[18][20] as a wide range of beliefs and ideas can be found in early Christianity, including adoptionism and docetism,[web 1] and also Gnostic traditions which used Christian imagery,[21][22] which were all deemed heretical by proto-orthodox Christianity.[23][24]

Traditional Christian theology and dogmas view Jesus as the incarnation of God/Christ on Earth, whereas mainstream scholarship views Jesus as a real person who was subsequently deified.[8][9] Mythicists take yet another approach, presuming a widespread set of Jewish ideas on personified aspects of God, which were subsequently historicised when proto-Christianity spread among non-Jewish converts.

Traditional and modern Christian views[edit]

See also: Jesus in Christianity, Christology, Christian apologetics, Christian fundamentalism, Biblical hermeneutics, Biblical literalism, Evangelicalism, and Liberal theology

Traditional Christian theology and dogmas view Jesus as the incarnation of God/Christ on Earth and as the Messiah, whose death was a sacrifice that procured atonement for all who believe Jesus to be the Christ. According to Christian traditions, the Gospels and the Pauline epistles are inspired writings,[25] which tell us about the birth and the life of Jesus, his ministry and sayings, and his crucifixion and resurrection, according to God's plan.

Mainstream historical-critical view[edit]

Jesus is being studied by a number of scholarly disciplines, using a variety of textual critical methods.

Quest for the historical Jesus[edit]

Nigel
Main articles: Quest for the historical Jesus, Textual criticism, and Historical criticism

A first quest for the historical Jesus took place in the 19th century, when hundreds of Lives of Jesus were being written. David Strauss (1808–1874) pioneered the search for the 'Historical Jesus' by rejecting all supernatural events as mythical elaborations. His 1835 work, Life of Jesus,[26] was one of the first and most influential systematic analyses of the life story of Jesus, aiming to base it on unbiased historical research.[27][28] The Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, starting in the 1890s, used the methodologies of higher criticism,[web 2] a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand 'the world behind the text.'[29] It compared Christianity to other religions, regarding it as one religion among others and rejecting its claims to absolute truth, and demonstrating that it shares characteristics with other religions.[web 2] It argued that Christianity was not simply the continuation of the Old Testament, but syncretistic, and was rooted in and influenced by Hellenistic Judaism (Philo) and Hellenistic religions like the mystery cults and Gnosticism.[web 3]Martin Kähler questioned the usefulness of the search for the historical Jesus, making the famous distinction between the 'Jesus of history' and the 'Christ of faith,' arguing that faith is more important than exact historical knowledge.[30][31]Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), who was related to the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule,[web 3] emphasized theology, and in 1926 had argued that historical Jesus research was both futile and unnecessary; although Bultmann slightly modified that position in a later book.[32][33]

This first quest ended with Albert Schweitzer's 1906 critical review of the history of the search for Jesus's life in The Quest of the Historical Jesus – From Reimarus to Wrede. Already in the 19th and early 20th century, this quest was challenged by authors who denied the historicity of Jesus, notably Bauer and Drews.

The second quest started in 1953, in a departure from Bultmann.[32][33] Several criteria, the criterion of dissimilarity and the criterion of embarrassment, were introduced to analyze and evaluate New Testament narratives. This second quest faded away in the 1970s,[28][34] due to the diminishing influence of Bultmann,[28] and co-inciding with the first publications of Wells, which marks the onset of the revival of Christ myth theories. According to Paul Zahl, while the second quest made significant contributions at the time, its results are now mostly forgotten, although not disproven.[35]

The third quest started in the 1980s, and introduced new criteria.[36][37] Primary among these are[37][38] the criterion of historical plausibility,[36] the criterion of rejection and execution,[36] and the criterion of congruence (also called cumulative circumstantial evidence), a special case of the older criterion of coherence.[39] The third quest is interdisciplinary and global,[40] carried out by scholars from multiple disciplines[40] and incorporating the results of archeological research.[41]

The third quest yielded new insights into Jesus' Palestinian and Jewish context, and not so much on the person of Jesus himself.[42][43][44] It also has made clear that all material on Jesus has been handed down by the emerging Church, raising questions about the criterion of dissimilarity, and the possibility of ascribing material solely to Jesus, and not to the emerging Church.[45]

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A historical Jesus existed[edit]

Quotes on the historicity of Jesus
Christ myth theorists
  • [T]he view that there was no historical Jesus, that his earthly existence is a fiction of earliest Christianity—a fiction only later made concrete by setting his life in the first century—is today almost totally rejected.
G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1988) p. 218
  • It is customary today to dismiss with amused contempt the suggestion that Jesus never existed.
G. A. Wells, 'The Historicity of Jesus,' in Jesus and History and Myth, ed. R. Joseph Hoffman (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986) p. 27
  • 'New Testament criticism treated the Christ Myth Theory with universal disdain'
Robert M. Price, The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-Four Formative Texts (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2006) p. 1179
  • 'Van Voorst is quite right in saying that 'mainstream scholarship today finds it unimportant' [to engage the Christ myth theory seriously]. Most of their comment (such as those quoted by Michael Grant) are limited to expressions of contempt.'
Earl Doherty, 'Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case: Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism, Part Three', The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus?
Jesus existed
  • Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher.
Graham Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus (2nd ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. xxiii
  • It is certain, however, that Jesus was arrested while in Jerusalem for the Passover, probably in the year 30, and that he was executed..it cannot be doubted that Peter was a personal disciple of Jesus..
Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, 2 (2nd ed.) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000) pp. 80 & 166
  • Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate, and continued to have followers after his death.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1996) p. 121
  • [T]here is substantial evidence that a person by the name of Jesus once existed.
Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millenium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997) p. 33
  • There are no substantial doubts about the general course of Jesus’ life: when and where he lived, approximately when and where he died, and the sort of thing that he did during his public activity.
E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 1993) p. 10
  • Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ - the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.
Graeme Clarke, quoted by John Dickson in 'Facts and friction of Easter', The Sydney Morning Herald, March 21, 2008
  • In the academic mind, there can be no more doubt whatsoever that Jesus existed than did Augustus and Tiberius, the emperors of his lifetime. Even if we assume for a moment that the accounts of non-biblical authors who mention him - Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and others - had not survived, the outstanding quality of the Gospels, Paul's letters and other New Testament writings is more than good enough for the historian.
Carsten Peter Thiede, Jesus, Man or Myth? (Oxford: Lion, 2005) p. 23
Rejection of CMT - early 20th century (first wave of CMT)
  • The defectiveness of [the Christ myth theory's] treatment of the traditional evidence is perhaps not so patent in the case of the gospels as it is in the case of the Pauline epistles. Yet fundamentally it is the same. There is the same easy dismissal of all external testimony, the same disdain for the saner conclusions of modern criticism, the same inclination to attach most value to extremes of criticism, the same neglect of all the personal and natural features of the narrative, the same disposition to put skepticism forward in the garb of valid demonstration, and the same ever present predisposition against recognizing any evidence for Jesus' actual existence.. The New Testament data are perfectly clear in their testimony to the reality of Jesus' earthly career and they come from a time when the possibility that the early framers of tradition should have been deceived upon this point is out of the question.
Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity Of Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912) pp. 76-77 & 269
  • I feel that I ought almost to apologize to my readers for investigating at such length the hypothesis of a pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical Mary, and for exhibiting over so many pages its fantastic, baseless, and absurd character.. We must [, according to Christ myth advocates,] perforce suppose that the Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of Pagan mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. If we adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing else. Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At one end of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of Christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only hope the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their Scriptures are a thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal inspiration is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with mythico-symbolism. Verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind, you rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a 'Christist' to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the Bacon-Shakespeareans we have seen nothing like it.
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare,The Historical Christ, or an Investigation of the Views of J. M. Robertson, A. Drews and W. B. Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2009/1914) pp. 42 & 95
  • The historical reality both of Buddha and of Christ has sometimes been doubted or denied. It would be just as reasonable to question the historical existence of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne on account of the legends which have gathered round them.. The attempt to explain history without the influence of great men may flatter the vanity of the vulgar, but it will find no favour with the philosophic historian.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 7 (3rd ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1919) p. 311
  • There is, lastly, a group of writers who endeavor to prove that Jesus never lived--that the story of his life is made up by mingling myths of heathen gods, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, etc. No real scholar regards the work of these men seriously. They lack the most elementary knowledge of historical research. Some of them are eminent scholars in other subjects, such as Assyriology and mathematics, but their writings about the life of Jesus have no more claim to be regarded as historical than Alice in Wonderland or the Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
George Aaron Barton, Jesus of Nazareth: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1922) p. x
  • In the last analysis, the whole Christ-myth theorizing is a glaring example of obscurantism, if the sin of obscurantism consists in the acceptance of bare possibilities in place of actual probabilities, and of pure surmise in defiance of existing evidence. Those who have not entered far into the laborious inquiry may pretend that the historicity of Jesus is an open question. For me to adopt such a pretence would be sheer intellectual dishonesty. I know I must, as an honest man, reckon with Jesus as a factor in history.. This dialectic process whereby the Christ-myth theory discredits itself rests on the simple fact that you cannot attempt to prove the theory without mishandling the evidence.
Herbert George Wood, Christianity and the Nature of History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934) pp. xxxiii & 54
  • I.e. if we leave out of account the Christ-myth theories, which are hardly to be reckoned as within the range of serious criticism.
Alexander Roper Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934) p. 253
  • Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical movement whose first distinct stage is represented by the oldest Palestinian community.
Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Scribner, 1958) p. introduction
  • Such Christ-myth theories are not now advanced by serious opponents of Christianity—they have long been exploded ..'
Gilbert Cope, Symbolism in the Bible and the Church (London: SCM, 1959) p. 14
  • By no means are we at the mercy of those who doubt or deny that Jesus ever lived.
Rudolf Bultmann, 'The Study of the Synoptic Gospels', Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, Rudolf Bultmann & Karl Kundsin; translated by Frederick C. Grant (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962) p. 62
  • In the 1910's a few scholars did argue that Jesus never existed and was simply the figment of speculative imagination. This denial of the historicity of Jesus does not commend itself to scholars, moderates or extremists, any more. .. The 'Christ-myth' theories are not accepted or even discussed by scholars today.
Samuel Sandmel, A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament‎ (New York: Ktav, 1974) p. 196
  • In the early years of this century, various theses were propounded which all assert that Jesus never lived, and that the story of Jesus is a myth or legend. These claims have long since been exposed as historical nonsense. There can be no reasonable doubt that Jesus of Nazareth lived in Palestine in the first three decades of our era, probably from 6-7 BC to 30 AD. That is a fact.
Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1976) p. 65
Rejection of CMT - late 20th and early 21st century (revival of CMT)
  • If one were able to survey the members of the major learned societies dealing with antiquity, it would be difficult to find more than a handful who believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not walk the dusty roads of Palestine in the first three decades of the Common Era. Evidence for Jesus as a historical personage is incontrovertible.
W. Ward Gasque, 'The Leading Religion Writer in Canada.. Does He Know What He's Talking About?', George Mason University's History News Network, 2004
  • [The non-Christian references to Jesus from the first two centuries] render highly implausible any farfetched theories that even Jesus' very existence was a Christian invention. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate (for whatever reason) and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be the part of the bedrock of historical tradition. If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score.
Christopher M. Tuckett, 'Sources and Methods' in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 124
  • [A]n attempt to show that Jesus never existed has been made in recent years by G. A. Wells, a Professor of German who has ventured into New Testament study and presents a case that the origins of Christianity can be explained without assuming that Jesus really lived. Earlier presentations of similar views at the turn of the century failed to make any impression on scholarly opinion, and it is certain that this latest presentation of the case will not fare any better. For of course the evidence is not confined to Tacitus; there are the New Testament documents themselves, nearly all of which must be dated in the first century, and behind which there lies a period of transmission of the story of Jesus which can be traced backwards to a date not far from that when Jesus is supposed to have lived. To explain the rise of this tradition without the hypothesis of Jesus is impossible.
I. Howard Marshall, I Believe in the Historical Jesus (rev. ed.) (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004) pp. 15–16
  • A phone call from the BBC’s flagship Today programme: would I go on air on Good Friday morning to debate with the aurthors of a new book, The Jesus Mysteries? The book claims (or so they told me) that everything in the Gospels reflects, because it was in fact borrowed from, much older pagan myths; that Jesus never existed; that the early church knew it was propagating a new version of an old myth, and that the developed church covered this up in the interests of its own power and control. The producer was friendly, and took my point when I said that this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese.
N. T. Wright, 'Jesus' Self Understanding', in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, Gerald O’Collins, The Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 48
  • A school of thought popular with cranks on the Internet holds that Jesus didn’t actually exist.
Tom Breen, The Messiah Formerly Known as Jesus: Dispatches from the Intersection of Christianity and Pop Culture (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008) p. 138
  • Today only an eccentric would claim that Jesus never existed.
Leander Keck, Who Is Jesus?: History in Perfect Tense (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000) p. 13
  • While The Christ Myth alarmed many who were innocent of learning, it evoked only Olympian scorn from the historical establishment, who were confident that Jesus had existed.. The Christ-myth theory, then, won little support from the historical specialists. In their judgement, it sought to demonstrate a perverse thesis, and it preceded by drawing the most far-fetched, even bizarre connection between mythologies of very diverse origin. The importance of the theory lay, not in its persuasiveness to the historians (since it had none), but in the fact that it invited theologians to renewed reflection on the questions of faith and history.
Brian A. Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004) pp. 231 & 233
  • We do not need to take seriously those writers who occasionally claim that Jesus never existed at all, for we have clear evidence to the contrary from a number of Jewish, Latin, and Islamic sources.
John Drane, 'Introduction', in John Drane, The Great Sayings of Jesus: Proverbs, Parables and Prayers (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 1999) p. 23
  • It is the nature of historical work that we are always involved in probability judgments. Granted, some judgments are so probable as to be certain; for example, Jesus really existed and really was crucified, just as Julius Caeser really existed and was assassinated.
Marcus Borg, 'A Vision of the Christian Life', The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, Marcus Borg & N. T. Wright (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007) p. 236
  • To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus'—or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.
Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (New York: Scribner, 1995) p. 200
  • I think that there are hardly any historians today, in fact I don't know of any historians today, who doubt the existence of Jesus.. So I think that question can be put to rest.
N. T. Wright, 'The Self-Revelation of God in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus with N. T. Wright', in Antony Flew & Roy Abraham Vargese, There is a God (New York: HarperOne, 2007) p. 188
  • We can be certain that Jesus really existed (despite a few highly motivated skeptics who refuse to be convinced), that he was a Jewish teacher in Galilee, and that he was crucified by the Roman government around 30 CE.
Robert J. Miller, The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 1999) p. 38
  • Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel.
Will Durant, Christ and Caesar, The Story of Civilization, 3 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972) p. 557
  • There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.
Richard A. Burridge, Jesus Now and Then (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) p. 34
  • Although Wells has been probably the most able advocate of the nonhistoricity theory, he has not been persuasive and is now almost a lone voice for it. The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question.. The nonhistoricity thesis has always been controversial, and it has consistently failed to convince scholars of many disciplines and religious creeds.. Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted.
Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000) pp. 14 & 16
  • No reputable scholar today questions that a Jew named Jesus son of Joseph lived; most readily admit that we now know a considerable amount about his actions and his basic teachings.
James H. Charlesworth, 'Preface', in James H. Charlesworth, Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) pp. xxi–xxv
  • [Robert] Price thinks the evidence is so weak for the historical Jesus that we cannot know anything certain or meaningful about him. He is even willing to entertain the possibility that there never was a historical Jesus. Is the evidence of Jesus really that thin? Virtually no scholar trained in history will agree with Price's negative conclusions.. In my view Price's work in the gospels is overpowered by a philosophical mindset that is at odds with historical research—of any kind.. What we see in Price is what we have seen before: a flight from fundamentalism.
Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008) p. 25
  • The scholarly mainstream, in contrast to Bauer and company, never doubted the existence of Jesus or his relevance for the founding of the Church.
Craig A. Evans, 'Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology', Theological Studies 54, 1993, p. 8
  • There's no serious question for historians that Jesus actually lived. There’s real issues about whether he is really the way the Bible described him. There’s real issues about particular incidents in his life. But no serious ancient historian doubts that Jesus was a real person, really living in Galilee in the first century.
Chris Forbes, interview with John Dickson, 'Zeitgeist: Time to Discard the Christian Story?', Center for Public Christianity, 2009
  • I don't think there's any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus. There are a lot of people who want to write sensational books and make a lot of money who say Jesus didn't exist. But I don't know any serious scholar who doubts the existence of Jesus.
Bart Ehrman, interview with Reginald V. Finley Sr., 'Who Changed The New Testament and Why', The Infidel Guy Show, 2008
  • What about those writers like Acharya S (The Christ Conspiracy) and Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy (The Jesus Mysteries), who say that Jesus never existed, and that Christianity was an invented religion, the Jewish equivalent of the Greek mystery religions? This is an old argument, even though it shows up every 10 years or so. This current craze that Christianity was a mystery religion like these other mystery religions-the people who are saying this are almost always people who know nothing about the mystery religions; they've read a few popular books, but they're not scholars of mystery religions. The reality is, we know very little about mystery religions-the whole point of mystery religions is that they're secret! So I think it's crazy to build on ignorance in order to make a claim like this. I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.
Bart Ehrman, interview with David V. Barrett, 'The Gospel According to Bart', Fortean Times (221), 2007
  • Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn’t even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.
William Lane Craig, 'Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?', debate with Richard Carrier, 2009
  • The alternative thesis.. that within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible. It involves too many complex and speculative hypotheses, in contrast to the much simpler explanation that there was a Jesus who said and did more or less what the first three Gospels attribute to him.
James D. G. Dunn, The Evidence for Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985) p. 29
  • This is always the fatal flaw of the 'Jesus myth' thesis: the improbability of the total invention of a figure who had purportedly lived within the generation of the inventors, or the imposition of such an elaborate myth on some minor figure from Galilee. [Robert] Price is content with the explanation that it all began 'with a more or less vague savior myth.' Sad, really.
James D. G. Dunn, 'Response to Robert M. Price', in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy, The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009) p. 98
  • Since the Enlightenment, the Gospel stories about the life of Jesus have been in doubt. Intellectuals then as now asked: 'What makes the stories of the New Testament any more historically probable than Aesop's fables or Grimm's fairy tales?' The critics can be answered satisfactorily..For all the rigor of the standard it sets, the criterion [of embarrassment] demonstrates that Jesus existed.
Alan F. Segal, 'Believe Only the Embarrassing', Slate, 2005
  • Some writers may toy with the fancy of a 'Christ-myth,' but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the 'Christ-myth' theories.
F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (6th ed.) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) p. 123
  • Jesus is in no danger of suffering Catherine [of Alexandria]'s fate as an unhistorical myth..
Dale Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) p. 37
  • An examination of the claims for and against the historicity of Jesus thus reveals that the difficulties faced by those undertaking to prove that he is not historical, in the fields both of the history of religion and the history of doctrine, and not least in the interpretation of the earliest tradition are far more numerous and profound than those which face their opponents. Seen in their totality, they must be considered as having no possible solution. Added to this, all hypotheses which have so far been put forward to the effect that Jesus never lived are in the strangest opposition to each other, both in their method of working and their interpretation of the Gospel reports, and thus merely cancel each other out. Hence we must conclude that the supposition that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely. This does not mean that the latter will not be proposed again from time to time, just as the romantic view of the life of Jesus is also destined for immortality. It is even able to dress itself up with certain scholarly technique, and with a little skillful manipulation can have much influence on the mass of people. But as soon as it does more than engage in noisy polemics with 'theology' and hazards an attempt to produce real evidence, it immediately reveals itself to be an implausible hypothesis.
Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by John Bowden et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) pp. 435–436
  • In fact, there is more evidence that Jesus of Nazareth certainly lived than for most famous figures of the ancient past. This evidence is of two kinds: internal and external, or, if you will, sacred and secular. In both cases, the total evidence is so overpowering, so absolute that only the shallowest of intellects would dare to deny Jesus' existence. And yet this pathetic denial is still parroted by 'the village atheist,' bloggers on the internet, or such organizations as the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
Paul L. Maier, 'Did Jesus Really Exist?', 4Truth.net, 2007
  • If I understand what Earl Doherty is arguing, Neil, it is that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as an historical person, or, at least that historians, like myself, presume that he did and act on that fatally flawed presumption. I am not sure, as I said earlier, that one can persuade people that Jesus did exist as long as they are ready to explain the entire phenomenon of historical Jesus and earliest Christianity either as an evil trick or a holy parable. I had a friend in Ireland who did not believe that Americans had landed on the moon but that they had created the entire thing to bolster their cold-war image against the communists. I got nowhere with him. So I am not at all certain that I can prove that the historical Jesus existed against such an hypothesis and probably, to be honest, I am not even interested in trying.
John Dominic Crossan, 'Historical Jesus: Materials and Methodology', XTalk, 2000
  • When they say that Christian beliefs about Jesus are derived from pagan mythology, I think you should laugh. Then look at them wide-eyed and with a big grin, and exclaim, 'Do you really believe that?' Act as though you've just met a flat earther or Roswell conspirator.
William Lane Craig, 'Question 90: Jesus and Pagan Mythology', Reasonable Faith, 2009
  • An extreme instance of pseudo-history of this kind is the “explanation” of the whole story of Jesus as a myth.
Emil Brunner, The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2002) p. 164
  • An extreme view along these lines is one which denies even the historical existence of Jesus Christ—a view which, one must admit, has not managed to establish itself among the educated, outside a little circle of amateurs and cranks, or to rise above the dignity of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare.
Edwyn Robert Bevan, Hellenism And Christianity (2nd ed.) (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1930) p. 256
  • When all the evidence brought against Jesus' historicity is surveyed it is not found to contain any elements of strength.
Shirley Jackson Case, 'The Historicity of Jesus: An Estimate of the Negative Argument', The American Journal of Theology, 1911, 15 (1)
  • It would be easy to show how much there enters of the conjectural, of superficial resemblances, of debatable interpretation into the systems of the Drews, the Robertsons, the W. B. Smiths, the Couchouds, or the Stahls.. The historical reality of the personality of Jesus alone enables us to understand the birth and development of Christianity, which otherwise would remain an enigma, and in the proper sense of the word, a miracle.
Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926) pp. 30 & 244
  • Anyone who talks about 'reasonable faith' must say what he thinks about Jesus. And that would still be so even if, with one or two cranks, he believed that He never existed.
John W. C. Wand, The Old Faith and the New Age‎ (London: Skeffington & Son, 1933) p. 31
  • That both in the case of the Christians, and in the case of those who worshipped Zagreus or Osiris or Attis, the Divine Being was believed to have died and returned to life, would be a depreciation of Christianity only if it could be shown that the Christian belief was derived from the pagan one. But that can be supposed only by cranks for whom historical evidence is nothing.
Edwyn R. Bevan, in Thomas Samuel Kepler, Contemporary Thinking about Paul: An Anthology (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950) p. 44
  • The pseudoscholarship of the early twentieth century calling in question the historical reality of Jesus was an ingenuous attempt to argue a preconceived position.
Gerard Stephen Sloyan, The Crucifixion of Jesus: History, Myth, Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) p. 9
  • Whatever else Jesus may or may not have done, he unquestionably* started the process that became Christianity…
UNQUESTIONABLY: The proposition has been questioned, but the alternative explanations proposed—the theories of the “Christ myth school,” etc.—have been thoroughly discredited.
Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) pp. 5 & 166
  • One category of mythicists, like young-earth creationists, have no hesitation about offering their own explanation of who made up Christianity.. Other mythicists, perhaps because they are aware that such a scenario makes little historical sense and yet have nothing better to offer in its place, resemble proponents of Intelligent Design who will say 'the evidence points to this organism having been designed by an intelligence' and then insist that it would be inappropriate to discuss further who the designer might be or anything else other than the mere 'fact' of design itself. They claim that the story of Jesus was invented, but do not ask the obvious historical questions of 'when, where, and by whom' even though the stories are set in the authors' recent past and not in time immemorial, in which cases such questions obviously become meaningless.. Thus far, I've only encountered two sorts of mythicism.'
James F. McGrath, 'Intelligently-Designed Narratives: Mythicism as History-Stopper', Exploring Our Matrix, 2010
  • To describe Jesus' non-existence as 'not widely supported' is an understatement. It would be akin to me saying, 'It is possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, scientific case that the 1969 lunar landing never happened.' There are fringe conspiracy theorists who believe such things - but no expert does. Likewise with the Jesus question: his non-existence is not regarded even as a possibility in historical scholarship. Dismissing him from the ancient record would amount to a wholesale abandonment of the historical method.
John Dickson, Jesus: A Short Life (Oxford: Lion, 2008) 22-23.
  • When Professor Wells advances such an explanation of the gospel stories [i.e. the Christ myth theory] he presents us with a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the gospels.
Morton Smith, in R. Joseph Hoffman, Jesus in History and Myth (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1986) p. 48
  • Of course, there can be no toleration whatever of the idea that Jesus never existed and is only a concoction from these pagan stories about a god who was slain and rose again.
Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul (New York: Menorah, 1943) p. 107
  • Virtually all biblical scholars acknowledge that there is enough information from ancient non-Christian sources to give the lie to the myth (still, however, widely believed in popular circles and by some scholars in other fields--see esp. G. A. Wells) which claims that Jesus never existed.
Craig L. Blomberg, 'Gospels (Historical Reliability)', in Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight & I. Howard Marshall, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992) p. 292
  • Dr. Wells was there [I.e. a symposium at the University of Michigan] and he presened his radical thesis that maybe Jesus never existed. Virtually nobody holds this position today. It was reported that Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University, even though he is a skeptic himself, responded that Dr. Wells's view was 'absurd'.
Gary Habermas, in Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989) p. 45
  • The data we have are certainly adequate to confute the view that Jesus never lived, a view that no one holds in any case
Charles E. Carlston, in Bruce Chilton & Craig A. Evans (eds.) Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research (Leiden: Brill, 1998) p. 3
  • Although it is held by Marxist propaganda writers that Jesus never lived and that the Gospels are pure creations of the imagination, this is not the view of even the most radical Gospel critics.
Bernard L. Ramm, An Evangelical Christology: Ecumenic and Historic (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1999) p. 159
Comparison with Holocaust-deniers
  • The very logic that tells us there was no Jesus is the same logic that pleads that there was no Holocaust. On such logic, history is no longer possible. It is no surprise then that there is no New Testament scholar drawing pay from a post who doubts the existence of Jesus. I know not one. His birth, life, and death in first-century Palestine have never been subject to serious question and, in all likelihood, never will be among those who are experts in the field. The existence of Jesus is a given.
Nicholas Perrin, Lost in Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) p. 32
  • While we do not have the fullness of biographical detail and the wealth of firsthand accounts that are available for recent public figures, such as Winston Churchill or Mother Teresa, we nonetheless have much more data on Jesus than we do for such ancient figures as Alexander the Great.. Along with the scholarly and popular works, there is a good deal of pseudoscholarship on Jesus that finds its way into print. During the last two centuries more than a hundred books and articles have denied the historical existence of Jesus. Today innumerable websites carry the same message.. Most scholars regard the arguments for Jesus' non-existence as unworthy of any response—on a par with claims that the Jewish Holocaust never occurred or that the Apollo moon landing took place in a Hollywood studio.
Michael James McClymond, Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) pp. 8 & 23–24
  • You know that you can try to minimize your biases, but you can't eliminate them. That's why you have to put certain checks and balances in place… Under this approach, we only consider facts that meet two criteria. First, there must be very strong historical evidence supporting them. And secondly, the evidence must be so strong that the vast majority of today's scholars on the subject—including skeptical ones—accept these as historical facts. You're never going to get everyone to agree. There are always people who deny the Holocaust or question whether Jesus ever existed, but they're on the fringe.
Michael R. Licona, in Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007) p. 112
  • A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical person Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today—in the academic world at least—gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.
Mark Allan Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998) p. 168
  • Finley: There are some people in the chat room disagreeing, of course, but they’re saying that there really isn’t any hardcore evidence, though, that… I mean… but there isn’t any… any evidence, really, that Jesus did exist except what people were saying about him. But… Ehrman: I think… I disagree with that. Finley: Really? Ehrman: I mean, what hardcore evidence is there that Julius Caesar existed? Finley: Well, this is… this is the same kind of argument that apologists use, by the way, for the existence of Jesus, by the way. They like to say the same thing you said just then about, well, what kind of evidence do you have for Jul… Ehrman: Well, I mean, it’s… but it’s just a typical… it’s just… It’s a historical point; I mean, how do you establish the historical existence of an individual from the past? Finley: I guess… I guess it depends on the claims… Right, it depends on the claims that people have made during that particular time about a particular person and their influence on society.. Ehrman: It’s not just the claims. There are… One has to look at historical evidence. And if you… If you say that historical evidence doesn’t count, then I think you get into huge trouble. Because then, how do… I mean… then why not just deny the Holocaust?
Bart Ehrman, interview with Reginald V. Finley Sr., 'Who Changed The New Testament and Why', The Infidel Guy Show, 2008
  • The denial that Christ was crucified is like the denial of the Holocaust. For some it's simply too horrific to affirm. For others it's an elaborate conspiracy to coerce religious sympathy. But the deniers live in a historical dreamworld.
John Piper, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006) pp. 14-15
  • I just finished reading, The Historical Jesus: Five Views. The first view was given by Robert Price, a leading Jesus myth proponent… The title of Price’s chapter is 'Jesus at the Vanishing Point.' I am convinced that if Price's total skepticism were applied fairly and consistently to other figures in ancient history (Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Nero, etc.), they would all be reduced to 'the vanishing point.' Price's chapter is a perfect example of how someone can always, always find excuses to not believe something they don't want to believe, whether that be the existence of Jesus or the existence of the holocaust.
Dennis Ingolfsland, 'Five views of the historical Jesus', The Recliner Commentaries, 2009
  • The Jesus mythers will continue to advance their thesis and complain of being kept outside of the arena of serious academic discussion. They carry their signs, 'Jesus Never Existed!' 'They won’t listen to me!' and label those inside the arena as 'Anti-Intellectuals,' 'Fundamentalists,' 'Misguided Liberals,' and 'Flat-Earthers.' Doherty & Associates are baffled that all but a few naïve onlookers pass them by quickly, wagging their heads and rolling their eyes. They never see that they have a fellow picketer less than a hundred yards away, a distinguished looking man from Iran. He too is frustrated and carries a sign that says 'The Holocaust Never Happened!'
Michael R. Licona, 'Licona Replies to Doherty's Rebuttal', Answering Infidels, 2005
Main articles: Historicity of Jesus, Historical Jesus, and Sources for the historicity of Jesus

These critical methods have led to a demythologization of Jesus. The mainstream scholarly view is that the Pauline epistles and the gospels describe the Christ of faith, presenting a religious narrative which replaced the historical Jesus who did live in 1st-century Roman Palestine.[46][47][9][48][note 1] Yet, that there was a historical Jesus is not in doubt. New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman states that Jesus 'certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.'[50][51]

Following the criteria of authenticity-approach, scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts of Jesus,[52] but the baptism and the crucifixion are two events in the life of Jesus which are subject to 'almost universal assent'.[note 2] According to historian Alanna Nobbs,

While historical and theological debates remain about the actions and significance of this figure, his fame as a teacher, and his crucifixion under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, may be described as historically certain.[53]

The portraits of Jesus have often differed from each other and from the image portrayed in the gospel accounts.[51][54][55][note 3] The primary portraits of Jesus resulting from the Third Quest are: apocalyptic prophet; charismatic healer; cynic philosopher; Jewish Messiah; and prophet of social change.[56][57] According to Ehrman, the most widely held view is that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet,[58] who was subsequently deified.[8]

According to James Dunn it is not possible 'to construct (from the available data) a Jesus who will be the real Jesus.'[59][60] According to Philip R. Davies, a Biblical minimalist, 'what is being affirmed as the Jesus of history is a cipher, not a rounded personality.'[web 5] According to Ehrman, 'the real problem with Jesus' is not the mythicist stance that he is 'a myth invented by Christians,' but that he was 'far too historical,' that is, a first-century Palestine Jew, who was not like the Jesus preached and proclaimed today.[61] According to Ehrman, 'Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.'[62]

Demise of authenticity and call for memory studies[edit]

See also: Criticism of Historical Jesus research and Memory studies

Since the late 2000s, concerns have been growing about the usefulness of the criteria of authenticity.[63][64][65][web 6][web 7] According to Keith, the criteria are literary tools, indebted to form criticism, not historiographic tools.[66] They were meant to discern pre-Gospel traditions, not to identify historical facts,[66] but have 'substituted the pre-literary tradition with that of the historical Jesus.'[67] According to Le Donne, the usage of such criteria is a form of 'positivist historiography.'[68]

Chris Keith, Le Donne, and others[note 4] argue for a 'social memory' approach, which states that memories are shaped by the needs of the present. Instead of searching for a historical Jesus, scholarship should investiage how the memories of Jesus where shaped, and how they were reshaped 'with the aim of cohesion and the self-understanding (identity) of groups.'[67]

James D. G. Dunn's 2003 study, Jesus Remembered, was the onset for this 'increased [..] interest in memory theory and eyewitness testimony.'[web 8][web 9] Dunn argues that '[t]he only realistic objective for any 'quest of the historical Jesus' is Jesus remembered.'[69] Dunn argues that Christianity started with the impact Jesus himself had on his followers, who passed on and shaped their memories of him in an oral tradition. According to Dunn, to understand who Jesus was, and what his impact was, scholars have to look at 'the broad picture, focusing on the characteristic motifs and emphases of the Jesus tradition, rather than making findings overly dependent on individual items of the tradition.'[69]

Anthony le Donne elaborated on Dunn's thesis, basing 'his historiography squarely on Dunn’s thesis that the historical Jesus is the memory of Jesus recalled by the earliest disciples.'[web 8] According to Le Donne, memories are refactored, and not an exact recalling of the past.[web 8] Le Donne argues that the remembrance of events is facilitated by relating it to a common story or 'type.' The type shapes the way the memories are retained, c.q. narrated. This means that the Jesus-tradition is not a theological invention of the early Church, but is shaped and refracted by the restraints that the type puts on the narrated memories, due to the mold of the type.[web 8]

According to Chris Keith, an alternative to the search for a historical Jesus 'posits a historical Jesus who is ultimately unattainable, but can be hypothesized on the basis of the interpretations of the early Christians, and as part of a larger process of accounting for how and why early Christians came to view Jesus in the ways that they did.' According to Keith, 'these two models are methodologically and epistemologically incompatible,' calling into question the methods and aim of the first model.[70]

Christ myth theorists[edit]

Departing from mainstream scholarship, mythicists argue that the accounts of Jesus are mostly, or completely, of a mythical nature, questioning the mainstream paradigm of a historical Jesus in the beginning of the 1st century who was deified. Most mythicists, like mainstream scholarship, note that Christianity developed within Hellenistic Judaism, which was influenced by Hellenism. Early Christianity, and the accounts of Jesus are to be understood in this context. Yet, where contemporary New Testament scholarship has introduced several criteria to evaluate the historicity of New Testament passages and sayings, most Christ myth theorists have relied on comparisons of Christian mythemes with contemporary religious traditions, emphasizing the mythological nature of the Bible accounts.[71][note 5]

Some moderate authors, most notably Wells, have argued that there may have been a historical Jesus, but that this historical Jesus was fused with another Jesus-tradition, namely the mythological Christ of Paul.[73][74][q 3] Others, most notably the early Wells and Alvar Ellegård, have argued that Paul's Jesus may have lived far earlier, in a dimly remembered remote past.[75][76][77]

The most radical mythicists hold, in terms given by Price, the 'Jesus atheism' viewpoint, that is, there never was a historical Jesus, only a mythological character, and the mytheme of his incarnation, death, and exaltation. This character developed out of a syncretistic fusion of Jewish, Hellenistic and Middle Eastern religious thought; was put forward by Paul; and historicised in the Gospels, which are also syncretistic. Notable 'atheists' are Paul-Louis Couchoud, Earl Doherty,[q 1] Thomas L. Brodie, and Richard Carrier.[q 4][q 5]

Some other authors argue for the Jesus agnosticism viewpoint. That is, we cannot conclude if there was a historical Jesus. And if there was a historical Jesus, close to nothing can be known about him.[78] Notable 'agnosticists' are Robert Price and Thomas L. Thompson.[79][80] According to Thompson, the question of the historicity of Jesus also isn't relevant for the understanding of the meaning and function of the Biblical texts in their own times.[79][80]

Arguments[edit]

Overview of main arguments[edit]

According to New Testament scholar Robert Van Voorst, most Christ mythicists follow a threefold argument first set forward by German historian Bruno Bauer in the 1800s: they question the reliability of the Pauline epistles and the Gospels to postulate a historically existing Jesus; they note the lack of information on Jesus in non-Christian sources from the first and early second century; and they argue that early Christianity had syncretistic and mythological origins.[81] More specifically,

  • Paul's epistles lack detailed biographical information – most mythicists argue that the Pauline epistles are older than the gospels but, aside from a few passages which may have been interpolations, there is a complete absence of any detailed biographical information such as might be expected if Jesus had been a contemporary of Paul,[82] nor do they cite any sayings from Jesus, the so-called argument from silence.[83][84][85][q 6] Some mythicists have argued that the Pauline Epistles are from a later date than usually assumed, and therefore not a reliable source on the life of Jesus. And some mythicists have argued that Paul may refer to a historical person who may have lived in a dim past, long before the beginnings of the Common Era.[75][76][77]
  • The Gospels are not historical records, but a fictitious historical narrative – mythicists argue that although the Gospels seem to present an historical framework, they are not historical records, but theological writings,[86][87] myth or legendary fiction resembling the Hero archetype.[88][89] They impose 'a fictitious historical narrative' on a 'mythical cosmic savior figure,'[90][84] weaving together various pseudo-historical Jesus traditions,[91][92] though there may have been a real historical person, of whom close to nothing can be known.[93]
  • There are no independent eyewitness accounts – No independent eyewitness accounts survive, in spite of the fact that many authors were writing at that time.[94][90] Early second-century Roman accounts contain very little evidence[3][95] and may depend on Christian sources.[96][97][86][98]
  • Christianity had syncretistic and mythological origins – early Christianity was widely diverse and syncretistic, sharing common philosophical and religious ideas with other religions of the time.[99] It arose in the Greco-Roman world of the first and second century AD, synthesizing Greek Stoicism and Neoplatonism with Jewish Old Testament writings[100][101][80] and the exegetical methods of Philo,[3][99][102] creating the mythological figure of Jesus. Paul refers to Jesus as an exalted being, and is probably writing about either a mythical[84] or supernatural entity,[q 3] a celestial deity,[q 7] 'a savior figure patterned after similar figures within ancient mystery religions.'[q 8][q 9] named Jesus.[103][104][105][web 10] Parallels with other religions include the ideas of personified aspects of God, proto-Gnostic ideas,[106][107] and salvation figures featured in mystery religions,[108] which were often (but not always) a dying-and-rising god.[2][109][110]

Lack of detailed biographical information in Pauline epistles[edit]

Mainstream view[edit]

The mainstream view is that the seven undisputed Pauline epistles considered by scholarly consensus to be genuine epistles are generally dated to AD 50–60 and are the earliest surviving Christian texts that include information about Jesus.[111][q 10] Most scholars view the Pauline letters as essential elements in the study of the historical Jesus,[111][112][113][114] and the development of early Christianity.[18] Yet, scholars have also argued that Paul was a 'mythmaker,'[115] who gave his own divergent interpretation of the meaning of Jesus,[18] building a bridge between the Jewish and Hellenistic world,[18] thereby creating the faith that became Christianity.[115]

Mythicist view[edit]

Mythicists agree on the importance of the Pauline epistles, agreeing with this early dating, and taking the Pauline Epistles as their point of departure from mainstream scholarship.[84] Departing from mainstream scholarship, mythicists argue that those letters actually point solely into the direction of a celestial or mythical being, or contain no definitive information on an historical Jesus.

Lack of biographical information[edit]

Mainstream view[edit]

According to Eddy and Boyd, modern biblical scholarship notes that 'Paul has relatively little to say on the biographical information of Jesus,' viewing Jesus as 'a recent contemporary.'[116][117] Yet, according to Christopher Tuckett, '[e]ven if we had no other sources, we could still infer some things about Jesus from Paul’s letters.'[118][note 2]

Mythicist view[edit]

Wells, a 'minimal mythicist', criticized the infrequency of the reference to Jesus in the Pauline letters and has said there is no information in them about Jesus' parents, place of birth, teachings, trial nor crucifixion.[119] Robert Price says that Paul does not refer to Jesus' earthly life, also not when that life might have provided convenient examples and justifications for Paul's teachings. Instead, revelation seems to have been a prominent source for Paul's knowledge about Jesus.[72]

Wells says that the Pauline epistles do not make reference to Jesus' sayings, or only in a vague and general sense. According to Wells, as referred to by Price in his own words, the writers of the New Testament 'must surely have cited them when the same subjects came up in the situations they addressed.'[120]

Earlier dating[edit]

Mythicist view[edit]

Some mythicists, though, have questioned the early dating of the epistles, raising the possibility that they represent a later, more developed strand of early Christian thought.

Theologian Willem Christiaan van Manen of the Dutch school of radical criticism noted various anachronisms in the Pauline Epistles. Van Manen claimed that they could not have been written in their final form earlier than the 2nd century. He also noted that the Marcionite school was the first to publish the epistles, and that Marcion (c. 85 – c. 160) used them as justification for his gnostic and docetic views that Jesus' incarnation was not in a physical body. Van Manen also studied Marcion's version of Galatians in contrast to the canonical version, and argued that the canonical version was a later revision which de-emphasized the Gnostic aspects.[121]

Price also argues for a later dating of the epistles, and sees them as a compilation of fragments (possibly with a Gnostic core),[122] contending that Marcion was responsible for much of the Pauline corpus or even wrote the letters himself. Price criticizes his fellow Christ myth theorists for holding the mid-first-century dating of the epistles for their own apologetical reasons.[123][124][note 6]

Jesus may have lived in a dimly remembered past[edit]

Mythicist view[edit]

The early Wells, and Alvar Ellegård, have argued that Paul's Jesus may have lived far earlier, in a dimly remembered remote past.[75][76][77] Wells argues that Paul and the other epistle writers—the earliest Christian writers—do not provide any support for the idea that Jesus lived early in the 1st century and that—for Paul—Jesus may have existed many decades, if not centuries, before.[119][126] According to Wells, the earliest strata of the New Testament literature presented Jesus as 'a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past'.[127]

According to Price, the Toledot Yeshu places Jesus 'about 100 BCE,' while Epiphanius of Salamis and the Talmud make references to 'Jewish and Jewish-Christian belief' that Jesus lived about a century earlier than usually assumed. According to Price, this implies that 'perhaps the Jesus figure was at first an ahistorical myth and various attempts were made to place him in a plausible historical context, just as Herodotus and others tried to figure out when Hercules 'must have' lived.'[128][note 8]

Mainstream criticism[edit]

Theologian Gregory A. Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy, Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Bethel University,[132] criticise the idea that 'Paul viewed Jesus as a cosmic savior who lived in the past,' referring to various passages in the Pauline epistles which seem to contradict this idea. In Galatians 1:19, Paul says he met with James, the 'Lord's brother'; 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 refers to people to whom Jesus' had appeared, and who were Paul's contemporaries; and in 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 Paul refers to the Jews 'who both killed the Lord Jesus' and 'drove out us' as the same people, indicating that the death of Jesus was within the same time frame as the persecution of Paul.[133]

The Gospels are not historical records[edit]

Mainstream view[edit]

Among contemporary scholars, there is consensus that the gospels are a type of ancient biography,[134][135][136][137][138][note 9] a genre which was concerned with providing examples for readers to emulate while preserving and promoting the subject's reputation and memory, as well as including propaganda and kerygma (preaching) in their works.[139][note 10]

Biblical scholarship regards the Gospels to be the literary manifestation of oral traditions which go back to the life of a historical Jesus. According to Dunn, these oral traditions defined and expressed the identity of the Jesus-tradition, preserving the eschatological and liberating message of Jesus, and the example he gave with his life, as remembered by his followers. Dunn emphasizes that the formation of these oral traditions goes back to Jesus himself, whose life and personality had a profound impact on his followers.[143]

Mythicist view[edit]

Mythicists argue that in the gospels 'a fictitious historical narrative' was imposed on the 'mythical cosmic savior figure' created by Paul.[90] According to Robert Price, the Gospels 'smack of fictional composition,'[web 11] arguing that the Gospels are a type of legendary fiction[88] and that the story of Jesus portrayed in the Gospels fits the mythic hero archetype.[89] Some myth proponents suggest that some parts of the New Testament were meant to appeal to Gentiles as familiar allegories rather than history.[144] According to Earl Doherty, the gospels are 'essentially allegory and fiction'.[145]

According to Wells, a minimally historical Jesus existed, whose teachings were preserved in the Q document.[146] According to Wells, the Gospels weave together two Jesus narratives, namely this Galilean preacher of the Q document, and Paul's mythical Jesus.[146] Doherty disagrees with Wells regarding this teacher of the Q-document, arguing that he was an allegoral character who personified Wisdom and came to be regarded as the founder of the Q-community.[91][147] According to Doherty, Q's Jesus and Paul's Christ were combined in the Gospel of Mark by a predominantly Gentile community.[91]

No independent eyewitness accounts[edit]

Lack of surviving historic records[edit]

Mythicist view[edit]

Myth proponents claim there is significance in the lack of surviving historic records about Jesus of Nazareth from any non-Jewish author until the second century,[148][149][q 11] adding that Jesus left no writings or other archaeological evidence.[150] Using the argument from silence, they note that Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria did not mention Jesus when he wrote about the cruelty of Pontius Pilate around 40 AD.[151]

Mainstream criticism[edit]

Mainstream biblical scholars point out that much of the writings of antiquity have been lost[152] and that there was little written about any Jew or Christian in this period.[153][154] Ehrman points out that we do not have archaeological or textual evidence for the existence of most people in the ancient world, even famous people like Pontius Pilate, whom the myth theorists agree to have existed.[153]Robert Hutchinson notes that this is also true of Josephus, despite the fact that he was 'a personal favorite of the Roman Emperor Vespasian'.[155] Hutchinson quotes Ehrman, who notes that Josephus is never mentioned in 1st century Greek and Roman sources, despite being 'a personal friend of the emperor'.[155] According to Classical historian and popular author Michael Grant, if the same criterion is applied to others: 'We can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned'.[156]

Josephus and Tacitus[edit]

Main articles: Josephus on Jesus and Tacitus on Christ

There are three non-Christian sources which are typically used to study and establish the historicity of Jesus, namely two mentions in Josephus, and one mention in the Roman source Tacitus.[157][158][159][160][161]

Mainstream view[edit]

Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, written around 93–94 AD, includes two references to the biblical Jesus in Books 18 and 20. The general scholarly view is that while the longer passage in book 18, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, is most likely not authentic in its entirety, it originally consisted of an authentic nucleus, which was then subject to Christian interpolation or forgery.[162][163][164] According to Josephus scholar Louis H. Feldman, 'few have doubted the genuineness' of Josephus' reference to Jesus in Antiquities 20, 9, 1 ('the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James') and it is only disputed by a small number of scholars.[165][166][167][168]

Myth proponents argue that the Testimonium Flavianum may have been a partial interpolation or forgery by Christian apologist Eusebius in the 4th century or by others.[169][170][note 11] Richard Carrier further argues that the original text of Antiquities 20 referred to a brother of the high priest Jesus son of Damneus, named James, and not to Jesus Christ.[175] Carrier further argues that the words 'the one called Christ' likely resulted from the accidental insertion of a marginal note added by some unknown reader.[175]

Roman historian Tacitus referred to 'Christus' and his execution by Pontius Pilate in his Annals (written c. AD 116), book 15, chapter 44[176][note 12] The very negative tone of Tacitus' comments on Christians make most experts believe that the passage is extremely unlikely to have been forged by a Christian scribe.[160] The Tacitus reference is now widely accepted as an independent confirmation of Christ's crucifixion,[178] although some scholars question the historical value of the passage on various grounds.[179][180]

Mythicist view[edit]

Christ myth theory supporters such as G. A. Wells and Carrier contend that sources such as Tacitus and others, which were written decades after the supposed events, include no independent traditions that relate to Jesus, and hence can provide no confirmation of historical facts about him.[96][97][86][98]

Other sources[edit]

Mainstream view[edit]

In Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000), mainstream scholar Van Voorst considers references to Jesus in classical writings, Jewish writings, hypothetical sources of the canonical Gospels, and extant Christian writings outside the New Testament. Van Voorst concludes that non-Christian sources provide 'a small but certain corroboration of certain New Testament historical traditions on the family background, time of life, ministry, and death of Jesus', as well as 'evidence of the content of Christian preaching that is independent of the New Testament', while extra-biblical Christian sources give access to 'some important information about the earliest traditions on Jesus'. However, New Testament sources remain central for 'both the main lines and the details about Jesus' life and teaching'.[181]

Syncretistic and mythological from the beginning[edit]

Syncretism and diversity[edit]

Mainstream view[edit]

Early Christianity was very diverse, with proto-orthodoxy and 'heretical' views like gnosticism alongside each other.[182][23] According to Mack, various 'Jesus movements' existed, whose ideas converged in an early proto-orthodoxy.[18]

Mythicist view[edit]

In Christ and the Caesars (1877), philosopher Bruno Bauer suggested that Christianity was a synthesis of the Stoicism of Seneca the Younger, Greek Neoplatonism, and the Jewish theology of Philo as developed by pro-Roman Jews such as Josephus. This new religion was in need of a founder and created its Christ.[183][3] In a review of Bauer's work, Robert Price notes that Bauer's basic stance regarding the Stoic tone and the fictional nature of the Gospels are still repeated in contemporary scholarship.[web 11]

Doherty notes that, with the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Greek culture and language spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean world, influencing the already existing cultures there.[99] The Roman conquest of this area added to the cultural diversity, but also to a sense of alienation and pessimism.[99] A rich diversity of religious and philosophical ideas was available and Judaism was held in high regard by non-Jews for its monotheistic ideas and its high moral standards.[99] Yet monotheism was also offered by Greek philosophy, especially Platonism, with its high God and the intermediary Logos.[99] According to Doherty, 'Out of this rich soil of ideas arose Christianity, a product of both Jewish and Greek philosophy',[99] echoing Bruno Bauer, who argued that Christianity was a synthesis of Stoicism, Greek Neoplatonism and Jewish thought.[3]

Robert Price notes that Christianity started among Hellenized Jews, who mixed allegorical interpretations of Jewish traditions with Jewish Gnostic, Zoroastrian, and Mystery Cults elements.[184][107][q 12] Some myth proponents note that some stories in the New Testament seem to try to reinforce Old Testament prophecies[144] and repeat stories about figures like Elijah, Elisha,[185]Moses and Joshua in order to appeal to Jewish converts.[186] Price notes that almost all the Gospel-stories have parallels in Old Testamentical and other traditions, concluding that the Gospels are no independent sources for a historical Jesus, but 'legend and myth, fiction and redaction'.[187]

According to Doherty, the rapid growth of early Christian communities and the great variety of ideas cannot be explained by a single missionary effort, but points to parallel developments, which arose at various places and competed for support. Paul's arguments against rival apostles also point to this diversity.[99] Doherty further notes that Yeshua (Jesus) is a generic name, meaning 'Yahweh saves' and refers to the concept of divine salvation, which could apply to any kind of saving entity or Wisdom.[99]

Paul's Jesus is a celestial being[edit]

A 3rd-century fragment of Paul's letter to the Romans
Mainstream view[edit]

The Pauline letters incorporate creeds, or confessions of faith, that predate Paul, and give essential information on the faith of the early Jerusalem community around James, 'the brother of Jesus'.[188][189][190][18] These pre-Pauline creeds date to within a few years of Jesus' death and developed within the Christian community in Jerusalem.[191] The First Epistle to the Corinthians contains one of the earliest Christian creeds[192] expressing belief in the risen Jesus, namely 1 Corinthians 15:3–41:[193][194]

[3] For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,[note 13] [4] and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,[note 14] [5] and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. [6] Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. [7] Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. [8] Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.[199]

New Testament scholar James Dunn states that in 1 Corinthians 15:3 Paul 'recites the foundational belief,' namely 'that Christ died.' According to Dunn, 'Paul was told about a Jesus who had died two years earlier or so.'[200]1 Corinthians 15:11 also refers to others before Paul who preached the creed.[190]

The appearances of Jesus are often explained as visionary experiences, in which the presence of Jesus was felt.[10][11][12][13][14][15] According to Ehrman, the visions of Jesus and the subsequent belief in Jesus' resurrection radically changed the perceptions of his early followers, concluding from his absence that he must have been exalted to heaven, by God himself, exalting him to an unprecented status and authority.[16] According to Hurtado, the resurrection experiences were religious experiences which 'seem to have included visions of (and/or ascents to) God's heaven, in which the glorified Christ was seen in an exalted position.'[201] These visions may mostly have appeared during corporate worship.[13] Johan Leman contends that the communal meals provided a context in which participants entered a state of mind in which the presence of Jesus was felt.[14]

The Pauline creeds contain elements of a Christ myth and its cultus,[202] such as the Christ hymn of Philippians 2:6–11,[note 15] which portrays Jesus as an incarnated and subsequently exalted heavenly being.[104][note 16] Scholars view these as indications that the incarnation and exaltation of Jesus was part of Christian tradition a few years after his death and over a decade before the writing of the Pauline epistles.[47][204][note 17]

Recent scholarship places the exaltation and devotion of Christ firmly in a Jewish context. Andrew Chester argues that 'for Paul, Jesus is clearly a figure of the heavenly world, and thus fits a messianic category already developed within Judaism, where the Messiah is a human or angelic figure belonging [..] in the heavenly world, a figure who ath the same time has had s specific, limited role on earth.'[208] According to Ehrman, Paul regarded Jesus to be an angel, who was incarnated on earth.[47][note 18][note 19] According to James Waddell, Paul's concpetion of Jesus as a heavenly figure was infleunced by the Book of Henoch and it's conception of the Messiah.[212][web 14][note 20]

Mythicist views[edit]

Nigel Jackson Basketball

Christ myth theorists generally reject the idea that Paul's epistles refer to a real person.[note 21][119] According to Doherty, the Jesus of Paul was a divine Son of God, existing in a spiritual realm[84] where he was crucified and resurrected.[214] This mythological Jesus was based on exegesis of the Old Testament and mystical visions of a risen Jesus.[214]

According to Carrier, the genuine Pauline epistles show that the Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul believed in a visionary or dream Jesus, based on a pesher of Septuagint verses Zechariah 6 and 3, Daniel 9 and Isaiah 52–53.[215] Carrier notes that there is little if any concrete information about Christ's earthly life in the Pauline epistles, even though Jesus is mentioned over three hundred times.[216] According to Carrier, originally 'Jesus was the name of a celestial being, subordinate to God,'[217] arguing that '[t]his 'Jesus' would most likely have been the same archangel identified by Philo of Alexandria as already extant in Jewish theology,'[218] which Philo knew by all of the attributes Paul also knew Jesus by.[note 22] According to Carrier, Philo says this being was identified as the figure named Jesus in the Book of Zechariah, implying that 'already before Christianity there were Jews aware of a celestial being named Jesus who had all of the attributes the earliest Christians were associating with their celestial being named Jesus.'[web 10]

Mainstream criticism[edit]

Simon Gathercole at Cambridge also evaluated the mythicist arguments for the claim that Paul believed in a heavenly, celestial Jesus who was never on Earth. Gathercole concludes that Carrier's arguments, and more broadly, the mythicist positions on different aspects of Paul's letters are contradicted by the historical data, and that Paul says a number of things regarding Jesus' life on Earth, his personality, family, etc.[219]

Parallels with other religions[edit]

See also: Comparative mythology, Religious syncretism, and Mytheme
Mainstream view[edit]

Jesus has to be understood in the Palestinian and Jewish context of the first century CE.[42][43][44] Most of the themes, epithets, and expectations formulated in the New Testamentical literature have Jewish origins, and are elaborations of these themes.

Mythicist view[edit]

According to Wells, Doherty, and Carrier, the mythical Jesus was derived from Wisdom traditions, the personification of an eternal aspect of God, who came to visit human beings.[220][221][222][web 16] Wells 'regards this Jewish Wisdom literature as of great importance for the earliest Christian ideas about Jesus.'[220] Doherty notes that the concept of a spiritual Christ was the result of common philosophical and religious ideas of the first and second century AD in which the idea of an intermediary force between God and the world were common.[84]

According to Doherty, the Christ of Paul shares similarities with the Greco-Roman mystery cults.[84] Authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy explicitly argue that Jesus was a deity, akin to the mystery cults,[223] while Dorothy Murdock argues that the Christ myth draws heavily on the Egyptian story of Osiris and Horus.[224] According to Robert Price, the story of Jesus portrayed in the Gospels is akin to the mythic hero archetype.[88][89] The mythic hero archetype is present in many cultures who often have miraculous conceptions or virgin births heralded by wise men and marked by a star, are tempted by or fight evil forces, die on a hill, appear after death and then ascend to heaven.[225] According to Carrier, early Christianity was but one of several mystery cults which developed out of Hellenistic influences on local cults and religions.[217]

Mainstream criticism[edit]

Mainstream scholarship disagrees with these interpretations, and regards them as outdated applications of ideas and methodologies from the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Boyd and Eddy doubt that Paul viewed Jesus similar to the savior deities found in ancient mystery religions.[226] Many mainstream biblical scholars respond that most of these parallels are either coincidences or without historical basis and/or that these parallels do not prove that a Jesus figure did not live.[227][note 23] According to Philip Davies, the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed 'composed of stock motifs (and mythic types) drawn from all over the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.' Yet, this does not mean that Jesus was 'invented'; according to Davies, 'the existence of a guru of some kind is more plausible and economical than any other explanation.'[web 5]

Christian theologians have cited the mythic hero archetype as a defense of Christian teaching while completely affirming a historical Jesus.[232][233] Secular academics Kendrick and McFarland have also pointed out that the teachings of Jesus marked 'a radical departure from all the conventions by which heroes had been defined.'[234] Ehrman states that mythicists make too much of the perceived parallels with pagan religions and mythologies. According to Ehrman, critical-historical research has clearly shown the Jewish roots and influences of Christianity.[8]

Late 18th- to early 20th-century[edit]

French historian Constantin-François Volney, one of the earliest myth theorists

According to Van Voorst, 'The argument that Jesus never existed, but was invented by the Christian movement around the year 100, goes back to Enlightenment times, when the historical-critical study of the past was born,' and may have originated with Lord Bolingbroke, an English deist.[235]

According to Weaver and Schneider, the beginnings of the formal denial of the existence of Jesus can be traced to late 18th-century France with the works of Constantin François Chassebœuf de Volney and Charles-François Dupuis.[236][237] Volney and Dupuis argued that Christianity was an amalgamation of various ancient mythologies and that Jesus was a totally mythical character.[236][238] Dupuis argued that ancient rituals in Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and India had influenced the Christian story which was allegorized as the histories of solar deities, such as Sol Invictus.[239] Dupuis also said that the resurrection of Jesus was an allegory for the growth of the sun's strength in the sign of Aries at the spring equinox.[239] Volney argued that Abraham and Sarah were derived from Brahma and his wife Saraswati, whereas Christ was related to Krishna.[240][241]Denon avr 900 manual download. Volney made use of a draft version of Dupuis' work and at times differed from him, e.g. in arguing that the gospel stories were not intentionally created, but were compiled organically.[239] Volney's perspective became associated with the ideas of the French Revolution, which hindered the acceptance of these views in England.[242] Despite this, his work gathered significant following among British and American radical thinkers during the 19th century.[242]

German Professor David Strauss

In 1835, German theologian David Friedrich Strauss published his extremely controversial The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (Das Leben Jesu). While not denying that Jesus existed, he did argue that the miracles in the New Testament were mythical additions with little basis in actual fact.[243][244][245] According to Strauss, the early church developed these stories in order to present Jesus as the Messiah of the Jewish prophecies. This perspective was in opposition to the prevailing views of Strauss' time: rationalism, which explained the miracles as misinterpretations of non-supernatural events, and the supernaturalist view that the biblical accounts were entirely accurate. Strauss's third way, in which the miracles are explained as myths developed by early Christians to support their evolving conception of Jesus, heralded a new epoch in the textual and historical treatment of the rise of Christianity.[243][244][245]

German Professor Bruno Bauer

German Bruno Bauer, who taught at the University of Bonn, took Strauss' arguments further and became the first author to systematically argue that Jesus did not exist.[246][247] Beginning in 1841 with his Criticism of the Gospel History of the Synoptics, Bauer argued that Jesus was primarily a literary figure, but left open the question of whether a historical Jesus existed at all. Then in his Criticism of the Pauline Epistles (1850–1852) and in A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin (1850–1851), Bauer argued that Jesus had not existed.[248] Bauer's work was heavily criticized at the time, as in 1839 he was removed from his position at the University of Bonn and his work did not have much impact on future myth theorists.[246][249]

In his two-volume, 867-page book Anacalypsis (1836), English gentleman Godfrey Higgins said that 'the mythos of the Hindus, the mythos of the Jews and the mythos of the Greeks are all at bottom the same; and are contrivances under the appearance of histories to perpetuate doctrines'[250] and that Christian editors “either from roguery or folly, corrupted them all”.[251] In his 1875 book The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, American Kersey Graves said that many demigods from different countries shared similar stories, traits or quotes as Jesus and he used Higgins as the main source for his arguments. The validity of the claims in the book have been greatly criticized by Christ myth proponents like Richard Carrier and largely dismissed by biblical scholars.[252]

Starting in the 1870s, English poet and author Gerald Massey became interested in Egyptology and reportedly taught himself Egyptian hieroglyphics at the British Museum.[253] In 1883, Massey published The Natural Genesis where he asserted parallels between Jesus and the Egyptian god Horus. His other major work, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World, was published shortly before his death in 1907. His assertions have influenced various later writers such as Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Tom Harpur.[254]

In the 1870s and 1880s, a group of scholars associated with the University of Amsterdam, known in German scholarship as the Radical Dutch school, rejected the authenticity of the Pauline epistles and took a generally negative view of the Bible's historical value.[255]Abraham Dirk Loman argued in 1881 that all New Testament writings belonged to the 2nd century and doubted that Jesus was a historical figure, but later said the core of the gospels was genuine.[256]

Additional early Christ myth proponents included Swiss skeptic Rudolf Steck,[257] English historian Edwin Johnson,[258] English radical Reverend Robert Taylor and his associate Richard Carlile.[259][260]

During the early 20th century, several writers published arguments against Jesus' historicity, often drawing on the work of liberal theologians, who tended to deny any value to sources for Jesus outside the New Testament and limited their attention to Mark and the hypothetical Q source.[256] They also made use of the growing field of religious history which found sources for Christian ideas in Greek and Oriental mystery cults, rather than Judaism.[261][note 24]

The work of social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer has had an influence on various myth theorists, although Frazer himself believed that Jesus existed.[263] In 1890, Frazer published the first edition of The Golden Bough which attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief. This work became the basis of many later authors who argued that the story of Jesus was a fiction created by Christians. After a number of people claimed that he was a myth theorist, in the 1913 expanded edition of The Golden Bough he expressly stated that his theory assumed a historical Jesus.[264]

In 1900, Scottish Member of Parliament John Mackinnon Robertson argued that Jesus never existed, but was an invention by a first-century messianic cult of Joshua, whom he identifies as a solar deity.[265][266][265][266] The English school master George Robert Stowe Mead argued in 1903 that Jesus had existed, but that he had lived in 100 BC.[267][268] Mead based his argument on the Talmud, which pointed to Jesus being crucified c. 100 BC. In Mead's view, this would mean that the Christian gospels are mythical.[269]

In 1909, school teacher John Eleazer Remsburg published The Christ, which made a distinction between a possible historical Jesus (Jesus of Nazareth) and the Jesus of the Gospels (Jesus of Bethlehem). Remsburg thought that there was good reason to believe that the historical Jesus existed, but that the 'Christ of Christianity' was a mythological creation.[270] Remsburg compiled a list of 42 names of 'writers who lived and wrote during the time, or within a century after the time' who Remsburg felt should have written about Jesus if the Gospels account was reasonably accurate, but who did not.[271]

German Professor Arthur Drews

Also in 1909, German philosophy Professor Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews wrote The Christ Myth to argue that Christianity had been a Jewish Gnostic cult that spread by appropriating aspects of Greek philosophy and life-death-rebirth deities.[272] In his later books The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912) and The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present (1926), Drews reviewed the biblical scholarship of his time as well as the work of other myth theorists, attempting to show that everything reported about the historical Jesus had a mythical character.[273][note 25]

Revival (1970s - present)[edit]

Beginning in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the second quest for the historical Jesus, interest in the Christ myth theory was revived by George Albert Wells, who's ideas were elaborated by Earl Doherty. With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, their ideas gained popular interest, giving way to a multitude of publications and websites aimed at a popular audience, most notably Richard Carrier, often taking a polemical stance toward Christianity. Their ideas are supported by Robert Price, an academic theologian, while somewhat different stances on the mythological origins are offered by Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas L. Brodie, both also accomplished scholars in theology.

Revival of the Christ myth theory[edit]

Paul-Louis Couchoud[edit]

The French philosopher Paul-Louis Couchoud,[278] published in the 1920s and 1930s, was a predecessor for contemporary mythicists. According to Couchoud, Christianity started not with a biography of Jesus but 'a collective mystical experience, sustaining a divine history mystically revealed.'[279] Couchaud's Jesus is not a 'myth', but a 'religious conception'.[280]

Robert Price mentions Couchoud's comment on the Christ Hymn, one of the relics of the Christ cults to which Paul converted. Couchoud noted that in this hymn the name Jesus was given to the Christ after his torturous death, implying that there cannot have been a ministry by a teacher called Jesus.

George Albert Wells[edit]

George Albert Wells (1926–2017), a professor of German, revived the interest in the Christ myth theory. In his early work,[281] including Did Jesus Exist? (1975), Wells argued that because the Gospels were written decades after Jesus's death by Christians who were theologically motivated but had no personal knowledge of him, a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed.[282] In The Jesus Myth (1999) and later works, Wells argues that two Jesus narratives fused into one, namely Paul's mythical Jesus, and a minimally historical Jesus from a Galilean preaching tradition, whose teachings were preserved in the Q document, a hypothetical common source for the Gospels of Matthewand Luke.[146][283] According to Wells, both figures owe much of their substance to ideas from the Jewish wisdom literature.[284]

In 2000 Van Voorst gave an overview of proponents of the 'Nonexistence Hypothesis' and their arguments, presenting eight arguments against this hypothesis as put forward by Wells and his predecessors.[285][286] According to Maurice Casey, Wells' work repeated the main points of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, which are deemed outdated by mainstream scholarship. His works were not discussed by New Testament scholars, because it was 'not considered to be original, and all his main points were thought to have been refuted long time ago, for reasons which were very well known.'[71]

Earl Doherty[edit]

Canadian writer Earl Doherty (born 1941) was introduced to the Christ myth theme by a lecture by Wells in the 1970s.[84] Doherty follows the lead of Wells, but disagrees on the historicity of Jesus, arguing that 'everything in Paul points to a belief in an entirely divine Son who 'lived' and acted in the spiritual realm, in the same mythical setting in which all the other savior deities of the day were seen to operate'.[84][note 26] According to Doherty, Paul's Christ originated as a myth derived from middle Platonism with some influence from Jewish mysticism and belief in a historical Jesus emerged only among Christian communities in the 2nd century.[145] Doherty agrees with Bauckham that the earliest Christology was already a 'high Christology,' that is, Jesus was an incarnation of the pre-existent Christ, but deems it 'hardly credible' that such a belief could develop in such a short time among Jews.[289][note 17] Therefore, Doherty concludes that Christianity started with the myth of this incarnated Christ, who was subsequently historicised. According to Doherty, the nucleus of this historicised Jesus of the Gospels can be found in the Jesus-movement which wrote the Q source.[91] Eventually, Q's Jesus and Paul's Christ were combined in the Gospel of Mark by a predominantly gentile community.[91] In time, the gospel-narrative of this embodiment of Wisdom became interpreted as the literal history of the life of Jesus.[147]

Eddy & Boyd characterize Doherty's work as appealing to the 'History of Religions School'[290] In a book criticizing the Christ myth theory, New Testament scholar Maurice Casey describes Doherty as 'perhaps the most influential of all the mythicists',[291] but one who is unable to understand the ancient texts he uses in his arguments.[292]

Richard Carrier[edit]

American independent scholar[293]Richard Carrier (born 1969) reviewed Doherty's work on the origination of Jesus[294] and eventually concluded that the evidence favored the core of Doherty's thesis.[295] According to Carrier, following Couchoud and Doherty, Christianity started with the belief in a new deity called Jesus,[q 4] 'a spiritual, mythical figure.'[q 5] According to Carrier, this new deity was fleshed out in the Gospels, which added a narrative framework and Cynic-like teachings, and eventually came to be perceived as a historical biography.[q 4] Carrier argues in his book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt that the Jesus figure was probably originally known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture which were then crafted into a historical figure to communicate the claims of the gospels allegorically. These allegories then started to be believed as fact during the struggle for control of the Christian churches of the first century.[296]

Theologians[edit]

Robert M. Price[edit]

American New Testament scholar Robert M. Price

American New Testament scholar and former Baptist pastor Robert M. Price (born 1954) has questioned the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), Jesus Is Dead (2007) and The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (2011). Price uses critical-historical methods,[297] but also uses 'history-of-religions parallel[s],'[298] or the 'Principle of Aanalogy,'[299] to show similarities between Gospel narratives and non-Christian Middle Eastern myths.[300] Price criticises some of the criteria of critical Bible research, such as the criterion of dissimilarity[301] and the criterion of embarrassment.[302] Price further notes that 'consensus is no criterion' for the historicity of Jesus.[303] According to Price, if critical methodology is applied with ruthless consistency, one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus's historicity.[304][note 27]

In Deconstructing Jesus, Price claims that 'the Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure', out of which a broad variety of historical Jesuses can be reconstructed, any one of which may have been the real Jesus, but not all of them together.[305] According to Price, various Jesus images flowed together at the origin of Christianity, some of them possibly based on myth, some of them possibly based on 'a historical Jesus the Nazorean'.[92] Price admits uncertainty in this regard, writing in conclusion: 'There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure'.[306] In contributions to The Historical Jesus: Five Views (2009), he acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.[307]

Thomas L. Thompson[edit]

Thomas L. Thompson (born 1939), Professor emeritus of theology at the University of Copenhagen, is a leading biblical minimalist of the Old Testament, and supports a mythicist position, according to Ehrman[q 13] and Casey.[q 14] According to Thompson, 'questions of understanding and interpreting biblical texts' are more relevant than 'questions about the historical existence of individuals such as [..] Jesus.'[79] In his 2007 book The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, Thompson argues that the Biblical accounts of both King David and Jesus of Nazareth are not historical accounts, but are mythical in nature and based on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek and Roman literature.[308] Those accounts are based on the Messiah mytheme, a king anointed by God to restore the Divine order at Earth.[80] Thompson also argues that the resurrection of Jesus is taken directly from the story of the dying and rising god, Dionysus.[308] Thompson does not draw a final conclusion on the historicity or ahistoricity of Jesus, but states that 'A negative statement, however, that such a figure did not exist, cannot be reached: only that we have no warrant for making such a figure part of our history.'[80]

Thompson coedited the contributions from a diverse range of scholars in the 2012 book Is This Not the Carpenter?: The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus.[74][309] Writing in the introduction, 'The essays collected in this volume have a modest purpose. Neither establishing the historicity of a historical Jesus nor possessing an adequate warrant for dismissing it, our purpose is to clarify our engagement with critical historical and exegetical methods.'[310]

Ehrman has criticised Thompson, questioning his qualifications and expertise regarding New Testament research.[q 13] In a 2012 online article, Thompson defended his qualifications to address New Testament issues, and objected to Ehrman's statement that '[a] different sort of support for a mythicist position comes in the work of Thomas L. Thompson.'[note 28] According to Thompson, 'Bart Ehrman has attributed to my book arguments and principles which I had never presented, certainly not that Jesus had never existed,' and reiterated his position that the issue of Jesus' existence cannot be determined one way or the other.[80] Thompson further states that Jesus is not to be regarded as 'the notoriously stereotypical figure of [..] (mistaken) eschatological prophet,' as Ehrman does, but is modelled on 'the royal figure of a conquering messiah,' derived from Jewish writings.[80]

Thomas L. Brodie[edit]

In 2012, the Irish Dominican priest and theologian Thomas L. Brodie (born 1943), holding a PhD from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome and a co-founder and former director of the Dominican Biblical Institute in Limerick, published Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery. In this book, Brodie, who previously had published academic works on the Hebrew prophets, argued that the Gospels are essentially a rewriting of the stories of Elijah and Elisha when viewed as a unified account in the Books of Kings. This view lead Brodie to the conclusion that Jesus is mythical.[185] Brodie's argument builds on his previous work, in which he stated that rather than being separate and fragmented, the stories of Elijah and Elisha are united and that 1 Kings 16:29–2 Kings 13:25 is a natural extension of 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 8 which have a coherence not generally observed by other biblical scholars.[311] Brodie then views the Elijah–Elisha story as the underlying model for the gospel narratives.[311]

In response to Brodie's publication of his view that Jesus was mythical, the Dominican order banned him from writing and lecturing, although he was allowed to stay on as a brother of the Irish Province, which continued to care for him.[312] 'There is an unjustifiable jump between methodology and conclusion' in Brodie's book—according to Gerard Norton—and 'are not soundly based on scholarship'. According to Norton, they are 'a memoir of a series of significant moments or events' in Brodie's life that reinforced 'his core conviction' that neither Jesus nor Paul of Tarsus were historical.[313]

Other modern proponents[edit]

British academic John M. Allegro

In his books The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979), the British archaeologist and philologist John M. Allegro advanced the theory that stories of early Christianity originated in a shamanisticEssene clandestine cult centered around the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms.[314][315][316][317] He also argued that the story of Jesus was based on the crucifixion of the Teacher of Righteousness in the Dead Sea Scrolls.[318][319] Allegro's theory was criticised sharply by Welsh historian Philip Jenkins, who wrote that Allegro relied on texts that did not exist in quite the form he was citing them.[320] Based on this and many other negative reactions to the book, Allegro's publisher later apologized for issuing the book and Allegro was forced to resign his academic post.[316][321]

Alvar Ellegård, in The Myth of Jesus (1992), and Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ. A Study in Creative Mythology (1999), argued that Jesus lived 100 years before the accepted dates, and was a teacher of the Essenes. According to Ellegård, Paul was connected with the Essenes, and had a vision of this Jesus.

Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in their 1999 publication The Jesus Mysteries: Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God? propose that Jesus did not literally exist as an historically identifiable individual, but was instead a syncretic re-interpretation of the fundamental pagan 'godman' by the Gnostics, who were the original sect of Christianity. The book has been negatively received by scholars, and also by Christ mythicists.[322][322][323][324]

Canadian author Tom Harpur (photo by Hugh Wesley)

Influenced by Massey and Higgins, Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880–1963), an American Theosophist, argued an Egyptian etymology to the Bible that the gospels were symbolic rather than historic and that church leaders started to misinterpret the New Testament in the third century.[325] Building on Kuhn's work, author and ordained priest Tom Harpur in his 2004 book The Pagan Christ listed similarities among the stories of Jesus, Horus, Mithras, Buddha and others. According to Harpur, in the second or third centuries the early church created the fictional impression of a literal and historic Jesus and then used forgery and violence to cover up the evidence.[253][note 29]

In his 2017 book Décadence, French writer and philosopher Michel Onfray argued for the Christ myth theory and based his hypothesis on the fact that—other than in the New Testament—Jesus is barely mentioned in accounts of the period.[329]

The Christ myth theory enjoyed brief popularity in the Soviet Union, where it was supported by Sergey Kovalev, Alexander Kazhdan, Abram Ranovich, Nikolai Rumyantsev and Robert Vipper.[330] However, several scholars, including Kazhdan, later retracted their views about mythical Jesus and by the end of the 1980s Iosif Kryvelev remained as virtually the only proponent of Christ myth theory in Soviet academia.[331]

Reception[edit]

Popular reception[edit]

In a 2015 poll conducted by the Church of England, 40% of respondents indicated that they did not believe Jesus was a real person.[332]

Ehrman notes that 'the mythicists have become loud, and thanks to the Internet they've attracted more attention'.[333] Within a few years of the inception of the World Wide Web (c. 1990), mythicists such as Earl Doherty began to present their argument to a larger public via the internet.[q 15] Doherty created the website The Jesus Puzzle in 1996,[web 17] while the organization Internet Infidels has featured the works of mythicists on their website[334] and mythicism has been mentioned on several popular news sites.[335]

According to Derek Murphy, the documentaries The God Who Wasn't There (2005) and Zeitgeist (2007) raised interest for the Christ myth theory with a larger audience and gave the topic a large coverage on the Internet.[336] Daniel Gullotta notes the relationship between the organization 'Atheists United' and Carrier's work related to Mythicism, which has increased 'the attention of the public'.[q 16]

According to Ehrman, mythicism has a growing appeal 'because these deniers of Jesus are at the same time denouncers of religion'.[337][q 17] According to Casey, mythicism has a growing appeal because of an aversion toward Christian fundamentalism among American atheists.[71]

Scholarly reception[edit]

In modern scholarship, the Christ myth theory is a fringe theory, which finds virtually no support from scholars,[4][338][5][6][339][q 18] to the point of being irrelevant and almost completely ignored.[340]

Lack of support for mythicsm[edit]

Nigel jackson books
Quotes on the historicity of Jesus
Christ myth theorists
  • [T]he view that there was no historical Jesus, that his earthly existence is a fiction of earliest Christianity—a fiction only later made concrete by setting his life in the first century—is today almost totally rejected.
G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1988) p. 218
  • It is customary today to dismiss with amused contempt the suggestion that Jesus never existed.
G. A. Wells, 'The Historicity of Jesus,' in Jesus and History and Myth, ed. R. Joseph Hoffman (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986) p. 27
  • 'New Testament criticism treated the Christ Myth Theory with universal disdain'
Robert M. Price, The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-Four Formative Texts (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2006) p. 1179
  • 'Van Voorst is quite right in saying that 'mainstream scholarship today finds it unimportant' [to engage the Christ myth theory seriously]. Most of their comment (such as those quoted by Michael Grant) are limited to expressions of contempt.'
Earl Doherty, 'Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case: Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism, Part Three', The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus?
Jesus existed
  • Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher.
Graham Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus (2nd ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. xxiii
  • It is certain, however, that Jesus was arrested while in Jerusalem for the Passover, probably in the year 30, and that he was executed..it cannot be doubted that Peter was a personal disciple of Jesus..
Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, 2 (2nd ed.) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000) pp. 80 & 166
  • Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate, and continued to have followers after his death.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1996) p. 121
  • [T]here is substantial evidence that a person by the name of Jesus once existed.
Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millenium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997) p. 33
  • There are no substantial doubts about the general course of Jesus’ life: when and where he lived, approximately when and where he died, and the sort of thing that he did during his public activity.
E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 1993) p. 10
  • Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ - the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.
Graeme Clarke, quoted by John Dickson in 'Facts and friction of Easter', The Sydney Morning Herald, March 21, 2008
  • In the academic mind, there can be no more doubt whatsoever that Jesus existed than did Augustus and Tiberius, the emperors of his lifetime. Even if we assume for a moment that the accounts of non-biblical authors who mention him - Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and others - had not survived, the outstanding quality of the Gospels, Paul's letters and other New Testament writings is more than good enough for the historian.
Carsten Peter Thiede, Jesus, Man or Myth? (Oxford: Lion, 2005) p. 23
Rejection of CMT - early 20th century (first wave of CMT)
  • The defectiveness of [the Christ myth theory's] treatment of the traditional evidence is perhaps not so patent in the case of the gospels as it is in the case of the Pauline epistles. Yet fundamentally it is the same. There is the same easy dismissal of all external testimony, the same disdain for the saner conclusions of modern criticism, the same inclination to attach most value to extremes of criticism, the same neglect of all the personal and natural features of the narrative, the same disposition to put skepticism forward in the garb of valid demonstration, and the same ever present predisposition against recognizing any evidence for Jesus' actual existence.. The New Testament data are perfectly clear in their testimony to the reality of Jesus' earthly career and they come from a time when the possibility that the early framers of tradition should have been deceived upon this point is out of the question.
Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity Of Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912) pp. 76-77 & 269
  • I feel that I ought almost to apologize to my readers for investigating at such length the hypothesis of a pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical Mary, and for exhibiting over so many pages its fantastic, baseless, and absurd character.. We must [, according to Christ myth advocates,] perforce suppose that the Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of Pagan mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. If we adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing else. Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At one end of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of Christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only hope the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their Scriptures are a thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal inspiration is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with mythico-symbolism. Verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind, you rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a 'Christist' to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the Bacon-Shakespeareans we have seen nothing like it.
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare,The Historical Christ, or an Investigation of the Views of J. M. Robertson, A. Drews and W. B. Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2009/1914) pp. 42 & 95
  • The historical reality both of Buddha and of Christ has sometimes been doubted or denied. It would be just as reasonable to question the historical existence of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne on account of the legends which have gathered round them.. The attempt to explain history without the influence of great men may flatter the vanity of the vulgar, but it will find no favour with the philosophic historian.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 7 (3rd ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1919) p. 311
  • There is, lastly, a group of writers who endeavor to prove that Jesus never lived--that the story of his life is made up by mingling myths of heathen gods, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, etc. No real scholar regards the work of these men seriously. They lack the most elementary knowledge of historical research. Some of them are eminent scholars in other subjects, such as Assyriology and mathematics, but their writings about the life of Jesus have no more claim to be regarded as historical than Alice in Wonderland or the Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
George Aaron Barton, Jesus of Nazareth: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1922) p. x
  • In the last analysis, the whole Christ-myth theorizing is a glaring example of obscurantism, if the sin of obscurantism consists in the acceptance of bare possibilities in place of actual probabilities, and of pure surmise in defiance of existing evidence. Those who have not entered far into the laborious inquiry may pretend that the historicity of Jesus is an open question. For me to adopt such a pretence would be sheer intellectual dishonesty. I know I must, as an honest man, reckon with Jesus as a factor in history.. This dialectic process whereby the Christ-myth theory discredits itself rests on the simple fact that you cannot attempt to prove the theory without mishandling the evidence.
Herbert George Wood, Christianity and the Nature of History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934) pp. xxxiii & 54
  • I.e. if we leave out of account the Christ-myth theories, which are hardly to be reckoned as within the range of serious criticism.
Alexander Roper Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934) p. 253
  • Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical movement whose first distinct stage is represented by the oldest Palestinian community.
Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Scribner, 1958) p. introduction
  • Such Christ-myth theories are not now advanced by serious opponents of Christianity—they have long been exploded ..'
Gilbert Cope, Symbolism in the Bible and the Church (London: SCM, 1959) p. 14
  • By no means are we at the mercy of those who doubt or deny that Jesus ever lived.
Rudolf Bultmann, 'The Study of the Synoptic Gospels', Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, Rudolf Bultmann & Karl Kundsin; translated by Frederick C. Grant (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962) p. 62
  • In the 1910's a few scholars did argue that Jesus never existed and was simply the figment of speculative imagination. This denial of the historicity of Jesus does not commend itself to scholars, moderates or extremists, any more. .. The 'Christ-myth' theories are not accepted or even discussed by scholars today.
Samuel Sandmel, A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament‎ (New York: Ktav, 1974) p. 196
  • In the early years of this century, various theses were propounded which all assert that Jesus never lived, and that the story of Jesus is a myth or legend. These claims have long since been exposed as historical nonsense. There can be no reasonable doubt that Jesus of Nazareth lived in Palestine in the first three decades of our era, probably from 6-7 BC to 30 AD. That is a fact.
Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1976) p. 65
Rejection of CMT - late 20th and early 21st century (revival of CMT)
  • If one were able to survey the members of the major learned societies dealing with antiquity, it would be difficult to find more than a handful who believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not walk the dusty roads of Palestine in the first three decades of the Common Era. Evidence for Jesus as a historical personage is incontrovertible.
W. Ward Gasque, 'The Leading Religion Writer in Canada.. Does He Know What He's Talking About?', George Mason University's History News Network, 2004
  • [The non-Christian references to Jesus from the first two centuries] render highly implausible any farfetched theories that even Jesus' very existence was a Christian invention. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate (for whatever reason) and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be the part of the bedrock of historical tradition. If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score.
Christopher M. Tuckett, 'Sources and Methods' in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 124
  • [A]n attempt to show that Jesus never existed has been made in recent years by G. A. Wells, a Professor of German who has ventured into New Testament study and presents a case that the origins of Christianity can be explained without assuming that Jesus really lived. Earlier presentations of similar views at the turn of the century failed to make any impression on scholarly opinion, and it is certain that this latest presentation of the case will not fare any better. For of course the evidence is not confined to Tacitus; there are the New Testament documents themselves, nearly all of which must be dated in the first century, and behind which there lies a period of transmission of the story of Jesus which can be traced backwards to a date not far from that when Jesus is supposed to have lived. To explain the rise of this tradition without the hypothesis of Jesus is impossible.
I. Howard Marshall, I Believe in the Historical Jesus (rev. ed.) (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004) pp. 15–16
  • A phone call from the BBC’s flagship Today programme: would I go on air on Good Friday morning to debate with the aurthors of a new book, The Jesus Mysteries? The book claims (or so they told me) that everything in the Gospels reflects, because it was in fact borrowed from, much older pagan myths; that Jesus never existed; that the early church knew it was propagating a new version of an old myth, and that the developed church covered this up in the interests of its own power and control. The producer was friendly, and took my point when I said that this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese.
N. T. Wright, 'Jesus' Self Understanding', in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, Gerald O’Collins, The Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 48
  • A school of thought popular with cranks on the Internet holds that Jesus didn’t actually exist.
Tom Breen, The Messiah Formerly Known as Jesus: Dispatches from the Intersection of Christianity and Pop Culture (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008) p. 138
  • Today only an eccentric would claim that Jesus never existed.
Leander Keck, Who Is Jesus?: History in Perfect Tense (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000) p. 13
  • While The Christ Myth alarmed many who were innocent of learning, it evoked only Olympian scorn from the historical establishment, who were confident that Jesus had existed.. The Christ-myth theory, then, won little support from the historical specialists. In their judgement, it sought to demonstrate a perverse thesis, and it preceded by drawing the most far-fetched, even bizarre connection between mythologies of very diverse origin. The importance of the theory lay, not in its persuasiveness to the historians (since it had none), but in the fact that it invited theologians to renewed reflection on the questions of faith and history.
Brian A. Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004) pp. 231 & 233
  • We do not need to take seriously those writers who occasionally claim that Jesus never existed at all, for we have clear evidence to the contrary from a number of Jewish, Latin, and Islamic sources.
John Drane, 'Introduction', in John Drane, The Great Sayings of Jesus: Proverbs, Parables and Prayers (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 1999) p. 23
  • It is the nature of historical work that we are always involved in probability judgments. Granted, some judgments are so probable as to be certain; for example, Jesus really existed and really was crucified, just as Julius Caeser really existed and was assassinated.
Marcus Borg, 'A Vision of the Christian Life', The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, Marcus Borg & N. T. Wright (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007) p. 236
  • To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus'—or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.
Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (New York: Scribner, 1995) p. 200
  • I think that there are hardly any historians today, in fact I don't know of any historians today, who doubt the existence of Jesus.. So I think that question can be put to rest.
N. T. Wright, 'The Self-Revelation of God in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus with N. T. Wright', in Antony Flew & Roy Abraham Vargese, There is a God (New York: HarperOne, 2007) p. 188
  • We can be certain that Jesus really existed (despite a few highly motivated skeptics who refuse to be convinced), that he was a Jewish teacher in Galilee, and that he was crucified by the Roman government around 30 CE.
Robert J. Miller, The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 1999) p. 38
  • Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel.
Will Durant, Christ and Caesar, The Story of Civilization, 3 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972) p. 557
  • There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.
Richard A. Burridge, Jesus Now and Then (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) p. 34
  • Although Wells has been probably the most able advocate of the nonhistoricity theory, he has not been persuasive and is now almost a lone voice for it. The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question.. The nonhistoricity thesis has always been controversial, and it has consistently failed to convince scholars of many disciplines and religious creeds.. Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted.
Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000) pp. 14 & 16
  • No reputable scholar today questions that a Jew named Jesus son of Joseph lived; most readily admit that we now know a considerable amount about his actions and his basic teachings.
James H. Charlesworth, 'Preface', in James H. Charlesworth, Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) pp. xxi–xxv
  • [Robert] Price thinks the evidence is so weak for the historical Jesus that we cannot know anything certain or meaningful about him. He is even willing to entertain the possibility that there never was a historical Jesus. Is the evidence of Jesus really that thin? Virtually no scholar trained in history will agree with Price's negative conclusions.. In my view Price's work in the gospels is overpowered by a philosophical mindset that is at odds with historical research—of any kind.. What we see in Price is what we have seen before: a flight from fundamentalism.
Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008) p. 25
  • The scholarly mainstream, in contrast to Bauer and company, never doubted the existence of Jesus or his relevance for the founding of the Church.
Craig A. Evans, 'Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology', Theological Studies 54, 1993, p. 8
  • There's no serious question for historians that Jesus actually lived. There’s real issues about whether he is really the way the Bible described him. There’s real issues about particular incidents in his life. But no serious ancient historian doubts that Jesus was a real person, really living in Galilee in the first century.
Chris Forbes, interview with John Dickson, 'Zeitgeist: Time to Discard the Christian Story?', Center for Public Christianity, 2009
  • I don't think there's any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus. There are a lot of people who want to write sensational books and make a lot of money who say Jesus didn't exist. But I don't know any serious scholar who doubts the existence of Jesus.
Bart Ehrman, interview with Reginald V. Finley Sr., 'Who Changed The New Testament and Why', The Infidel Guy Show, 2008
  • What about those writers like Acharya S (The Christ Conspiracy) and Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy (The Jesus Mysteries), who say that Jesus never existed, and that Christianity was an invented religion, the Jewish equivalent of the Greek mystery religions? This is an old argument, even though it shows up every 10 years or so. This current craze that Christianity was a mystery religion like these other mystery religions-the people who are saying this are almost always people who know nothing about the mystery religions; they've read a few popular books, but they're not scholars of mystery religions. The reality is, we know very little about mystery religions-the whole point of mystery religions is that they're secret! So I think it's crazy to build on ignorance in order to make a claim like this. I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.
Bart Ehrman, interview with David V. Barrett, 'The Gospel According to Bart', Fortean Times (221), 2007
  • Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn’t even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.
William Lane Craig, 'Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?', debate with Richard Carrier, 2009
  • The alternative thesis.. that within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible. It involves too many complex and speculative hypotheses, in contrast to the much simpler explanation that there was a Jesus who said and did more or less what the first three Gospels attribute to him.
James D. G. Dunn, The Evidence for Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985) p. 29
  • This is always the fatal flaw of the 'Jesus myth' thesis: the improbability of the total invention of a figure who had purportedly lived within the generation of the inventors, or the imposition of such an elaborate myth on some minor figure from Galilee. [Robert] Price is content with the explanation that it all began 'with a more or less vague savior myth.' Sad, really.
James D. G. Dunn, 'Response to Robert M. Price', in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy, The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009) p. 98
  • Since the Enlightenment, the Gospel stories about the life of Jesus have been in doubt. Intellectuals then as now asked: 'What makes the stories of the New Testament any more historically probable than Aesop's fables or Grimm's fairy tales?' The critics can be answered satisfactorily..For all the rigor of the standard it sets, the criterion [of embarrassment] demonstrates that Jesus existed.
Alan F. Segal, 'Believe Only the Embarrassing', Slate, 2005
  • Some writers may toy with the fancy of a 'Christ-myth,' but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the 'Christ-myth' theories.
F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (6th ed.) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) p. 123
  • Jesus is in no danger of suffering Catherine [of Alexandria]'s fate as an unhistorical myth..
Dale Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) p. 37
  • An examination of the claims for and against the historicity of Jesus thus reveals that the difficulties faced by those undertaking to prove that he is not historical, in the fields both of the history of religion and the history of doctrine, and not least in the interpretation of the earliest tradition are far more numerous and profound than those which face their opponents. Seen in their totality, they must be considered as having no possible solution. Added to this, all hypotheses which have so far been put forward to the effect that Jesus never lived are in the strangest opposition to each other, both in their method of working and their interpretation of the Gospel reports, and thus merely cancel each other out. Hence we must conclude that the supposition that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely. This does not mean that the latter will not be proposed again from time to time, just as the romantic view of the life of Jesus is also destined for immortality. It is even able to dress itself up with certain scholarly technique, and with a little skillful manipulation can have much influence on the mass of people. But as soon as it does more than engage in noisy polemics with 'theology' and hazards an attempt to produce real evidence, it immediately reveals itself to be an implausible hypothesis.
Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by John Bowden et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) pp. 435–436
  • In fact, there is more evidence that Jesus of Nazareth certainly lived than for most famous figures of the ancient past. This evidence is of two kinds: internal and external, or, if you will, sacred and secular. In both cases, the total evidence is so overpowering, so absolute that only the shallowest of intellects would dare to deny Jesus' existence. And yet this pathetic denial is still parroted by 'the village atheist,' bloggers on the internet, or such organizations as the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
Paul L. Maier, 'Did Jesus Really Exist?', 4Truth.net, 2007
  • If I understand what Earl Doherty is arguing, Neil, it is that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as an historical person, or, at least that historians, like myself, presume that he did and act on that fatally flawed presumption. I am not sure, as I said earlier, that one can persuade people that Jesus did exist as long as they are ready to explain the entire phenomenon of historical Jesus and earliest Christianity either as an evil trick or a holy parable. I had a friend in Ireland who did not believe that Americans had landed on the moon but that they had created the entire thing to bolster their cold-war image against the communists. I got nowhere with him. So I am not at all certain that I can prove that the historical Jesus existed against such an hypothesis and probably, to be honest, I am not even interested in trying.
John Dominic Crossan, 'Historical Jesus: Materials and Methodology', XTalk, 2000
  • When they say that Christian beliefs about Jesus are derived from pagan mythology, I think you should laugh. Then look at them wide-eyed and with a big grin, and exclaim, 'Do you really believe that?' Act as though you've just met a flat earther or Roswell conspirator.
William Lane Craig, 'Question 90: Jesus and Pagan Mythology', Reasonable Faith, 2009
  • An extreme instance of pseudo-history of this kind is the “explanation” of the whole story of Jesus as a myth.
Emil Brunner, The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2002) p. 164
  • An extreme view along these lines is one which denies even the historical existence of Jesus Christ—a view which, one must admit, has not managed to establish itself among the educated, outside a little circle of amateurs and cranks, or to rise above the dignity of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare.
Edwyn Robert Bevan, Hellenism And Christianity (2nd ed.) (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1930) p. 256
  • When all the evidence brought against Jesus' historicity is surveyed it is not found to contain any elements of strength.
Shirley Jackson Case, 'The Historicity of Jesus: An Estimate of the Negative Argument', The American Journal of Theology, 1911, 15 (1)
  • It would be easy to show how much there enters of the conjectural, of superficial resemblances, of debatable interpretation into the systems of the Drews, the Robertsons, the W. B. Smiths, the Couchouds, or the Stahls.. The historical reality of the personality of Jesus alone enables us to understand the birth and development of Christianity, which otherwise would remain an enigma, and in the proper sense of the word, a miracle.
Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926) pp. 30 & 244
  • Anyone who talks about 'reasonable faith' must say what he thinks about Jesus. And that would still be so even if, with one or two cranks, he believed that He never existed.
John W. C. Wand, The Old Faith and the New Age‎ (London: Skeffington & Son, 1933) p. 31
  • That both in the case of the Christians, and in the case of those who worshipped Zagreus or Osiris or Attis, the Divine Being was believed to have died and returned to life, would be a depreciation of Christianity only if it could be shown that the Christian belief was derived from the pagan one. But that can be supposed only by cranks for whom historical evidence is nothing.
Edwyn R. Bevan, in Thomas Samuel Kepler, Contemporary Thinking about Paul: An Anthology (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950) p. 44
  • The pseudoscholarship of the early twentieth century calling in question the historical reality of Jesus was an ingenuous attempt to argue a preconceived position.
Gerard Stephen Sloyan, The Crucifixion of Jesus: History, Myth, Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) p. 9
  • Whatever else Jesus may or may not have done, he unquestionably* started the process that became Christianity…
UNQUESTIONABLY: The proposition has been questioned, but the alternative explanations proposed—the theories of the “Christ myth school,” etc.—have been thoroughly discredited.
Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) pp. 5 & 166
  • One category of mythicists, like young-earth creationists, have no hesitation about offering their own explanation of who made up Christianity.. Other mythicists, perhaps because they are aware that such a scenario makes little historical sense and yet have nothing better to offer in its place, resemble proponents of Intelligent Design who will say 'the evidence points to this organism having been designed by an intelligence' and then insist that it would be inappropriate to discuss further who the designer might be or anything else other than the mere 'fact' of design itself. They claim that the story of Jesus was invented, but do not ask the obvious historical questions of 'when, where, and by whom' even though the stories are set in the authors' recent past and not in time immemorial, in which cases such questions obviously become meaningless.. Thus far, I've only encountered two sorts of mythicism.'
James F. McGrath, 'Intelligently-Designed Narratives: Mythicism as History-Stopper', Exploring Our Matrix, 2010
  • To describe Jesus' non-existence as 'not widely supported' is an understatement. It would be akin to me saying, 'It is possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, scientific case that the 1969 lunar landing never happened.' There are fringe conspiracy theorists who believe such things - but no expert does. Likewise with the Jesus question: his non-existence is not regarded even as a possibility in historical scholarship. Dismissing him from the ancient record would amount to a wholesale abandonment of the historical method.
John Dickson, Jesus: A Short Life (Oxford: Lion, 2008) 22-23.
  • When Professor Wells advances such an explanation of the gospel stories [i.e. the Christ myth theory] he presents us with a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the gospels.
Morton Smith, in R. Joseph Hoffman, Jesus in History and Myth (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1986) p. 48
  • Of course, there can be no toleration whatever of the idea that Jesus never existed and is only a concoction from these pagan stories about a god who was slain and rose again.
Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul (New York: Menorah, 1943) p. 107
  • Virtually all biblical scholars acknowledge that there is enough information from ancient non-Christian sources to give the lie to the myth (still, however, widely believed in popular circles and by some scholars in other fields--see esp. G. A. Wells) which claims that Jesus never existed.
Craig L. Blomberg, 'Gospels (Historical Reliability)', in Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight & I. Howard Marshall, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992) p. 292
  • Dr. Wells was there [I.e. a symposium at the University of Michigan] and he presened his radical thesis that maybe Jesus never existed. Virtually nobody holds this position today. It was reported that Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University, even though he is a skeptic himself, responded that Dr. Wells's view was 'absurd'.
Gary Habermas, in Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989) p. 45
  • The data we have are certainly adequate to confute the view that Jesus never lived, a view that no one holds in any case
Charles E. Carlston, in Bruce Chilton & Craig A. Evans (eds.) Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research (Leiden: Brill, 1998) p. 3
  • Although it is held by Marxist propaganda writers that Jesus never lived and that the Gospels are pure creations of the imagination, this is not the view of even the most radical Gospel critics.
Bernard L. Ramm, An Evangelical Christology: Ecumenic and Historic (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1999) p. 159
Comparison with Holocaust-deniers
  • The very logic that tells us there was no Jesus is the same logic that pleads that there was no Holocaust. On such logic, history is no longer possible. It is no surprise then that there is no New Testament scholar drawing pay from a post who doubts the existence of Jesus. I know not one. His birth, life, and death in first-century Palestine have never been subject to serious question and, in all likelihood, never will be among those who are experts in the field. The existence of Jesus is a given.
Nicholas Perrin, Lost in Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) p. 32
  • While we do not have the fullness of biographical detail and the wealth of firsthand accounts that are available for recent public figures, such as Winston Churchill or Mother Teresa, we nonetheless have much more data on Jesus than we do for such ancient figures as Alexander the Great.. Along with the scholarly and popular works, there is a good deal of pseudoscholarship on Jesus that finds its way into print. During the last two centuries more than a hundred books and articles have denied the historical existence of Jesus. Today innumerable websites carry the same message.. Most scholars regard the arguments for Jesus' non-existence as unworthy of any response—on a par with claims that the Jewish Holocaust never occurred or that the Apollo moon landing took place in a Hollywood studio.
Michael James McClymond, Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) pp. 8 & 23–24
  • You know that you can try to minimize your biases, but you can't eliminate them. That's why you have to put certain checks and balances in place… Under this approach, we only consider facts that meet two criteria. First, there must be very strong historical evidence supporting them. And secondly, the evidence must be so strong that the vast majority of today's scholars on the subject—including skeptical ones—accept these as historical facts. You're never going to get everyone to agree. There are always people who deny the Holocaust or question whether Jesus ever existed, but they're on the fringe.
Michael R. Licona, in Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007) p. 112
  • A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical person Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today—in the academic world at least—gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.
Mark Allan Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998) p. 168
  • Finley: There are some people in the chat room disagreeing, of course, but they’re saying that there really isn’t any hardcore evidence, though, that… I mean… but there isn’t any… any evidence, really, that Jesus did exist except what people were saying about him. But… Ehrman: I think… I disagree with that. Finley: Really? Ehrman: I mean, what hardcore evidence is there that Julius Caesar existed? Finley: Well, this is… this is the same kind of argument that apologists use, by the way, for the existence of Jesus, by the way. They like to say the same thing you said just then about, well, what kind of evidence do you have for Jul… Ehrman: Well, I mean, it’s… but it’s just a typical… it’s just… It’s a historical point; I mean, how do you establish the historical existence of an individual from the past? Finley: I guess… I guess it depends on the claims… Right, it depends on the claims that people have made during that particular time about a particular person and their influence on society.. Ehrman: It’s not just the claims. There are… One has to look at historical evidence. And if you… If you say that historical evidence doesn’t count, then I think you get into huge trouble. Because then, how do… I mean… then why not just deny the Holocaust?
Bart Ehrman, interview with Reginald V. Finley Sr., 'Who Changed The New Testament and Why', The Infidel Guy Show, 2008
  • The denial that Christ was crucified is like the denial of the Holocaust. For some it's simply too horrific to affirm. For others it's an elaborate conspiracy to coerce religious sympathy. But the deniers live in a historical dreamworld.
John Piper, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006) pp. 14-15
  • I just finished reading, The Historical Jesus: Five Views. The first view was given by Robert Price, a leading Jesus myth proponent… The title of Price’s chapter is 'Jesus at the Vanishing Point.' I am convinced that if Price's total skepticism were applied fairly and consistently to other figures in ancient history (Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Nero, etc.), they would all be reduced to 'the vanishing point.' Price's chapter is a perfect example of how someone can always, always find excuses to not believe something they don't want to believe, whether that be the existence of Jesus or the existence of the holocaust.
Dennis Ingolfsland, 'Five views of the historical Jesus', The Recliner Commentaries, 2009
  • The Jesus mythers will continue to advance their thesis and complain of being kept outside of the arena of serious academic discussion. They carry their signs, 'Jesus Never Existed!' 'They won’t listen to me!' and label those inside the arena as 'Anti-Intellectuals,' 'Fundamentalists,' 'Misguided Liberals,' and 'Flat-Earthers.' Doherty & Associates are baffled that all but a few naïve onlookers pass them by quickly, wagging their heads and rolling their eyes. They never see that they have a fellow picketer less than a hundred yards away, a distinguished looking man from Iran. He too is frustrated and carries a sign that says 'The Holocaust Never Happened!'
Michael R. Licona, 'Licona Replies to Doherty's Rebuttal', Answering Infidels, 2005

According to New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, most people who study the historical period of Jesus believe that he did exist and do not write in support of the Christ myth theory.[341]Maurice Casey, theologian and scholar of New Testament and early Christianity, stated that the belief among professors that Jesus existed is generally completely certain. According to Casey, the view that Jesus did not exist is 'the view of extremists', 'demonstrably false' and 'professional scholars generally regard it as having been settled in serious scholarship long ago'.[342]

In 1977, classical historian and popular author Michael Grant in his book Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels, concluded that 'modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory'.[343] In support of this, Grant quoted Roderic Dunkerley's 1957 opinion that the Christ myth theory has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'.[344] At the same time, he also quoted Otto Betz's 1968 opinion that in recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus—or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary'.[345] In the same book, he also wrote:

If we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.[346]

Graeme Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Classical Ancient History and Archaeology at Australian National University[347] stated in 2008: 'Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ—the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming'.[348] R. Joseph Hoffmann, who had created the Jesus Project, which included both mythicists and historicists to investigate the historicity of Jesus, wrote that an adherent to the Christ myth theory asked to set up a separate section of the project for those committed to the theory. Hoffmann felt that to be committed to mythicism signaled a lack of necessary skepticism and he noted that most members of the project did not reach the mythicist conclusion.[349]

Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, has written 'What you can’t do, though, without venturing into the far swamps of extreme crankery, is to argue that Jesus never existed. The “Christ-Myth Hypothesis” is not scholarship, and is not taken seriously in respectable academic debate. The grounds advanced for the “hypothesis” are worthless. The authors proposing such opinions might be competent, decent, honest individuals, but the views they present are demonstrably wrong..Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity.'[350]

Questioning the competence of proponents[edit]

Critics of the Christ myth theory question the competence of its supporters.[q 14] According to Ehrman:

Few of these mythicists are actually scholars trained in ancient history, religion, biblical studies or any cognate field, let alone in the ancient languages generally thought to matter for those who want to say something with any degree of authority about a Jewish teacher who (allegedly) lived in first-century Palestine.[337]

Maurice Casey has criticized the mythicists, pointing out their complete ignorance of how modern critical scholarship actually works. He also criticizes mythicists for their frequent assumption that all modern scholars of religion are Protestant fundamentalists of the American variety, insisting that this assumption is not only totally inaccurate, but also exemplary of the mythicists' misconceptions about the ideas and attitudes of mainstream scholars.[351]

Questioning the mainstream view appears to have consequences for one's job perspectives.[352] According to Casey, Thompson's early work, which 'successfully refuted the attempts of Albright and others to defend the historicity of the most ancient parts of biblical literature history', has 'negatively affected his future job prospects'.[q 14] Ehrman also notes that mythicist views would prevent one from getting employment in a religious studies department:

These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.[337]

Other criticisms[edit]

Few scholars have bothered to criticise Christ myth theories. Robert Van Voorst has written 'Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed (Christ myth) arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely [..] The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question.'[340]Paul L. Maier, former Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University and current professor emeritus in the Department of History there has stated 'Anyone who uses the argument that Jesus never existed is simply flaunting his ignorance.'[353] Among notable scholars who have directly addressed the Christ myth are Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey and Philip Jenkins.

In 2000 Van Voorst gave an overview of proponents of the 'Nonexistence Hypothesis' and their arguments, presenting eight arguments against this hypothesis as put forward by Wells and his predecessors.[285][286]

  1. The 'argument of silence' is to be rejected, because 'it is wrong to suppose that what is unmentioned or undetailed did not exist.' Van Voorst further argues that the early Christian literature was not written for historical purposes.
  2. Dating the 'invention' of Jesus around 100 CE is too late; Mark was written earlier, and contains abundant historical details which are correct.
  3. The argument that the development of the Gospel traditions shows that there was no historical Jesus is incorrect; 'development does not prove wholesale invention, and difficulties do not prove invention.'
  4. Wells cannot explain why 'no pagans and Jews who opposed Christianity denied Jesus' historicity or even questioned it.'
  5. The rejection of Tacitus and Josephus ignores the scholarly consensus.
  6. Proponents of the 'Nonexistence Hypothesis' are not driven by scholarly interests, but by anti-Christian sentiments.
  7. Wells and others do not offer alternative 'other, credible hypotheses' for the origins of Christianity.
  8. Wells himself accepted the existence of a minimal historical Jesus, thereby effectively leaving the 'Nonexistence Hypothesis.'

In his book Did Jesus Exist?, Bart Ehrman surveys the arguments 'mythicists' have made against the existence of Jesus since the idea was first mooted at the end of the 18th century. As for the lack of contemporaneous records for Jesus, Ehrman notes no comparable Jewish figure is mentioned in contemporary records either and there are mentions of Christ in several Roman works of history from only decades after the death of Jesus.[354] The author states that the authentic letters of the apostle Paul in the New Testament were likely written within a few years of Jesus' death and that Paul likely personally knew James, the brother of Jesus. Although the gospel accounts of Jesus' life may be biased and unreliable in many respects, Ehrman writes, they and the sources behind them which scholars have discerned still contain some accurate historical information.[354] So many independent attestations of Jesus' existence, Ehrman says, are actually 'astounding for an ancient figure of any kind'.[337] Ehrman dismisses the idea that the story of Jesus is an invention based on pagan myths of dying-and-rising gods, maintaining that the early Christians were primarily influenced by Jewish ideas, not Greek or Roman ones,[354][337] and repeatedly insisting that the idea that there was never such a person as Jesus is not seriously considered by historians or experts in the field at all.[354]

Traditional and Evangelical Christianity[edit]

Alexander Lucie-Smith, Catholic priest and doctor of moral theology, states that 'People who think Jesus didn’t exist are seriously confused,' but also notes that 'the Church needs to reflect on its failure. If 40 per cent believe in the Jesus myth, this is a sign that the Church has failed to communicate with the general public.'[355]

Stanley E. Porter, president and dean of McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, and Stephen J. Bedard, a Baptist minister and graduate of McMaster Divinity, respond to Harpur's ideas from an evangelical standpoint in Unmasking the Pagan Christ: An Evangelical Response to the Cosmic Christ Idea, challenging the key ideas lying at the foundation of Harpur's thesis. Porter and Bedard conclude that there is sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus and assert that Harpur is motivated to promote 'universalistic spirituality'.[356][note 30]

Documentaries[edit]

Since 2005, several English-language documentaries have focused—at least in part—on the Christ myth theory:

  • The God Who Wasn't There directed by Brian Flemming and featuring Richard Carrier and Robert M. Price (2005)
  • The Pagan Christ produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and featuring Tom Harpur (2007)
  • Zeitgeist: The Movie directed by Peter Joseph (2007)
  • The Hidden Story of Jesus produced by Channel 4 and featuring Robert Beckford (2007)
  • Religulous directed by Larry Charles and featuring Bill Maher (2008)
  • Caesar's Messiah by Joseph Atwill (2013)

See also[edit]

Christian

Notes[edit]

Nigel Jackson Books

  1. ^Vermes: 'By the end of the first century Christianity had lost sight of the real Jesus and of the original meaning of his message. Paul, John and their churches replaced him by the otherworldy Christ of faith.'[49]
  2. ^ abThe basic facts of Jesus' life according to scholars:
    • James D. G. Dunn (2003): '[these] two facts [of baptism and crucifixion] in the life of Jesus command almost universal assent.'[357]
    • John Dominic Crossan: 'That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus..agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.'[358]
    • According to Herzog, Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, preached about the coming Kingdom of God, attracted numerous followers including the twelve disciples, and was subsequently crucified by the order of the Roman prefectPontius Pilate, which eventually led to his immediate followers continuing his movement which soon became known as Christianity.[359]
    • E. P. Sanders, in 'Jesus and Judaism' (1985), says there are eight facts that can be discerned about the historical Jesus: his Baptism, that he was a Galilean itinerant preacher who was reputed to do healings and other 'miracles', he called disciples and spoke of there being 12, that he confined his activity to Israel, that he engaged in controversy over the Temple, that he was crucified outside of Jerusalem by the Romans, that those disciples continued as a movement after his death. In his 1993 work, 'The Historical figure of Jesus' he added six more: that Jesus was likely born in 4–6 BC under Herod the Great (the Gregorian calendar is wrong), Jesus grew up in Nazareth, Jesus taught in small villages and towns and seemed to avoid cities, Jesus ate a final meal with his disciples, he was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities apparently at the instigation of the high priest, his disciples abandoned him at his death, later believed they saw him and thereafter believed Jesus would return.
    • Christopher Tuckett summarizes the view of mainstream historians regarding what Paul records regarding the historical Jesus: 'Even if we had no other sources, we could still infer some things about Jesus from Paul’s letters. Paul clearly implies that Jesus existed as a human being (‘born of a woman’ Gal 4.4), was born a Jew (‘born under the Law’ Gal 4.4; cf. Rom 1.3) and had brothers (1 Cor 9.5; Gal 1.19). Paul also claims possible character traits for Jesus (cf. ‘meekness and gentleness’ 2 Cor 10.1; Jesus ‘did not please himself’ Rom 15.3) and he refers to the tradition of the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper (1 Cor 11.23–25), taking place ‘at night’ (1 Cor 11.23). Above all, he refers very frequently to the fact that Jesus was crucified (1 Cor 1.23; 2.2; Gal 3.1 etc.), and at one point ascribes prime responsibility for Jesus’ death to (some) Jews (1 Thess 2.15). He also occasionally explicitly refers to Jesus’ teaching, e.g. on divorce (1 Cor 7.10–11) and on Christian preachers or missionaries claiming support (1 Cor 9.14).'[360]
  3. ^According to Lataster, a Christ mythicist, 'the only thing New Testament scholars seem to agree on is Jesus' historical existence'.[web 4]
  4. ^Crook 2013; Foster 2012, 2013; Keith 2011; 2012a, 2012b; Rodríguez 2012, 2013); Le Donne (2011; 2012a; 2012b); Schröter (1996; 2012; 2013)[67]
  5. ^A notable exception is Robert Price, who's used those same criteria to dissect the Jesus to the 'vanishing point.'[72]
  6. ^Price argues that passages such as Galatians 1:18–20, Galatians 4:4 and 1 Corinthians 15:3–11 are late Catholic interpolations and that 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 was unlikely to have been written by a Jew.[125]
  7. ^Panarion 29.5.6
  8. ^According to Epiphanius in his Panarion,[note 7] the 4th century Jewish-Christian Nazarenes (Ναζωραιοι) were originally Jewish converts of the Apostles.[129] Richard Carrier contends that 'Epiphanius, in Panarion 29, says there was a sect of still-Torah-observant Christians who taught that Jesus lived and died in the time of Jannaeus, and all the Jewish sources on Christianity that we have (from the Talmud to the Toledot Yeshu) report no other view than that Jesus lived during the time of Jannaeus'.[130][131]
  9. ^See Tekton Apologetics, The Gospels as ancient biography for an explanation of the genre.
  10. ^Michael Vines notes that the gospel of Mark may have aspects similar to a Jewish novel,[140] while some scholars have argued that the Gospels are symbolical representations of the Torah, which were written in response to the Roman occupation and the suppression of Jewish religiosity.[141][142]
  11. ^No one seemed to notice this passage until the 4th century, not even Origen who quotes Josephus extensively in his works,[171] thus leading mythicists to think that the Testimonium Flavianum is a forgery of the 4th century, perhaps written by Eusebius[172] in order to provide an outside Jewish authority for the life of Jesus.[173][174]
  12. ^Tacitus: '..a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.'[177]
  13. ^The kerygma from 1:Cor.15:3-5 refers to two mythologies: the greek myth of the noble dead, to which the Maccabean notion of martyrdom and dying for ones people is related; and the Jewish myth of the persecuted sage or righteous man, c.q. the 'story of the child of wisdom.'[195][196] The notion of 'dying for' refers to this martyrdom and persecution.[197]
    James F. McGrath refers to 4 Maccabees 6, 'which presents a martyr praying “Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs” (4 Maccabees 6:28-29). Clearly there were ideas that existed in the Judaism of the time that helped make sense of the death of the righteous in terms of atonement.'[web 12]
    See also Herald Gandi (2018), The Resurrection: “According to the Scriptures”?, referring to Isaiah 53, among others:
    '[4] Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. [5] But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed [..] [10] Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. [11] Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.'
  14. ^See Why was Resurrection on “the Third Day”? Two Insights for explanations on the phrase 'third day.' According to Pinchas Lapide, 'third day' may refer to Hosea 6:1-2:
    'Come, let us return to the Lord;
    for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
    he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.
    After two days he will revive us;
    on the third day he will raise us up,
    that we may live before him.'
    See also 2 Kings 20:8: 'Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “What shall be the sign that the Lord will heal me, and that I shall go up to the house of the Lord on the third day?”'
    According to Sheehan, Paul's reference to Jesus having risen 'on the third day [..] simply expresses the belief that Jesus was rescued from the fate of utter absence from God (death) and was admitted to the saving presence of God (the eschatological future).'[198]
  15. ^See Philippians#2:6–11 for full text:
    5 Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
    6 who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped,
    7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men;
    8 and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient [even] unto death, yea, the death of the cross.
    9 Wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name;
    10 that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of [things] in heaven and [things] on earth and [things] under the earth,
    11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
  16. ^The New Testament writings contain both an exaltation and an incarnation Christology, that is, the view that Jesus became Christ when he was resurrected and taken up to Heaven, and the view that Jesus was a heavenly being who was incarnated on earth.[203] According to Ehrman, the synoptic Gospels reflect exaltation Christologies, which present different views on the exaltation, from the resurrection to the moment of his baptism, and still earlier to his conception; whereas Paul and the Gospel of John reflect incarnation theologies.[203]
  17. ^ abThe development of the early Christian views on Jesus' divinity is a matter of debate within contemporary scholarship. According to a longstanding consensus, the oldest Christology was an 'exaltation Christology,' according to which Jesus was subsequently 'raised to divine status.'[205] This 'exaltation Christology' may have developed over time,[18][23][206] as witnessed in the Gospels,[47] with the earliest Christians believing that Jesus became divine when he was resurrected.[206][207] Later beliefs shifted the exaltation to his baptism, birth, and subsequently to the idea of his eternal existence, as witnessed in the Gospel of John.[206] This 'High Christology' is 'the view that Jesus was a pre-existent divine being who became a human, did the Father’s will on earth, and then was taken back up into heaven whence he had originally come.'[205][47] Yet, as Ehrman notes, this subsequent 'incarnation Christology' was also preached by Paul, and even predates him.[47] According to the 'Early High Christology Club,' which includes Martin Hengel, Larry Hurtado, and Richard Bauckham,[204] this 'incarnation Christology' or 'high Christology' did not evolve over a longer time, but was a 'big bang' which arose in the first few decades of the church, as witnessed in the writings of Paul.[204][47]
  18. ^Ehrman-blog, Paul’s View of Jesus as an Angel: 'Paul understood Christ to be an angel who became a human.' See also Paul’s View of Jesus as an Angel, Christ as an Angel in Paul (10 April 2014), Christ as an Angel in Paul (7 juni 2014); and Carrier's response at Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God.
  19. ^Mainstream scholars have noted the extent and significance of Jewish belief in a chief angel acting as a heavenly mediator during the Second Temple period,[209][210][web 13] as well as the similarities between Jesus and this chief celestial angel.[211]
  20. ^The Book of Enoch (3rd-1st century BCE) is the first text to contain the idea of a preexistent heavenly Messiah, called the 'Son of Man.'[web 15] He is described as an angelic being,[web 15][213] who 'was chosen and hidden with God before the world was created, and will remain in His presence forevermore.'[web 15] He is the embodiment of justice and Wisdom, seated on a throne in Heaven, who will be revealed to the world at the end of times, when he will judge all beings.[web 15][213]
  21. ^(Price 2009):
    * See p. 55 for his argument that it is quite likely Jesus did not exist.
    * See pp. 62–64, 75 for the three pillars
  22. ^The firstborn son of God (Epistle to the Romans 8:29), the celestial image of God (Second Epistle to the Corinthians 4:4) and God's agent of creation (First Epistle to the Corinthians 8:6). He was also God's celestial high priest (Hebrews 2:17, 4:14, etc.) and God's Logos.[218][web 10]
  23. ^In particular, the transformations faced by deities have distinct differences from the resurrection of Jesus. Osiris regains consciousness as king of the underworld, rather than being 'transformed into an eschatological new creation' as Craig S. Keener writes.[228] While Jesus was born from a human woman (traditionally a virgin) and accompanied by shepherds, Mitra is born (unaccompanied by shepherds) from the goddess Aditi (to whom the word 'virgin' is only rarely, loosely, and indirectly applied in a highly poetic sense), while Mithras (granted, accompanied by shepherds later) emerges full-grown from a rock.[229] The rebirth of many of these deities was a clear metaphor for the renewal of spring that repeated the death every year, rather than a historic event meant to proclaim the god's cancellation of death. Some of these parallels appear after Christianity (e.g. the earliest references to Adonis rising from the dead is in the second century AD, Attis a century later), and are often only known through later Christian sources. Most other and later parallels were made in the works of James George Frazer,[228] or may be guilty of parallelomania[230] and even misrepresentation of religious (both Christian and non-Christian) and linguistic sources[228][231] (for example, ignoring the false cognate relationship between Christ and Krishna).[231]
  24. ^Joseph Klausner wrote that biblical scholars 'tried their hardest to find in the historic Jesus something which is not Judaism; but in his actual history they have found nothing of this whatever, since this history is reduced almost to zero. It is therefore no wonder that at the beginning of this century there has been a revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth century view that Jesus never existed'.[262]
  25. ^Drews' work found fertile soil in the Soviet Union, where Marxist–Leninist atheism was the official doctrine of the state. Soviet leader Lenin argued that it was imperative in the struggle against religious obscurantists to form a union with people like Drews.[274][275] Several editions of Drews' The Christ Myth were published in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onwards and his arguments were included in school and university textbooks.[276] Public meetings asking 'Did Christ live?' were organized, during which party operatives debated with clergymen.[277]
  26. ^According to Doherty, it was Paul's view that Jesus' death took place in the spiritual not the earthly realm.[287] According to Ehrman, not only is there 'no evidence to support Doherty's assertion of what Paul's view of Jesus was', but there are also 'a host of reasons for calling Doherty's view into serious question.'[288]
  27. ^Price: 'One wonders if all these scholars came to a certain point and stopped, their assumption being 'If Jesus was a historical figure, he must have done and said something!' But their own criteria and critical tools, which we have sought to apply here with ruthless consistency, ought to have left them with complete agnosticism.[304]
  28. ^Ehrman (2012), Did Jesus Exist? 336-37[80]
  29. ^Harpur's book received a great deal of criticism, including a response book, Unmasking the Pagan Christ: An Evangelical Response to the Cosmic Christ Idea.[326] Fellow mythicist Robert M. Price also wrote a negative review, saying that he did not agree that the Egyptian parallels were as forceful as Harpur thought.[327] In 2007, Harpur published a sequel, Water Into Wine.[328]
  30. ^See also Stephen J. Bedard, Jesus Myth Theory, for an overview of blogs by Bedard on the Jesus Myth Theory.

Quotes[edit]

  1. ^ ab(Ehrman 2012, pp. 12, 347, n. 1): '[Per] Jesus mythicism, Earl Doherty, defines the view as follows: it is “the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition.” [Earl Doherty (2009), Jesus: Neither God nor Man: The Case for a mythical Jesus (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications), vii–viii.] In simpler terms, the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity.'
  2. ^(Gullotta 2017, p. 312): '[Per Jesus mythicism] Given the fringe status of these theories, the vast majority have remained unnoticed and unaddressed within scholarly circles.'
  3. ^ ab(Wells 1999, pp. 94–111, §. Conclusion: The Origins and Development of Christology)
    • (Wells 1999b). 'The Jewish literature describes Wisdom [personified] as God's chief agent, a member of his divine council, etc., and this implies supernatural, but not, I agree, divine status.'
    • (Wells 2009, p. 328). 'I have always allowed that Paul believed in a Jesus who, fundamentally supernatural, had nevertheless been incarnated on Earth as a man.'
  4. ^ abc(Carrier 2014, p. 52): '[T]he basic thesis of every competent mythologist, then and now, has always been that Jesus was originally a god just like any other god (properly speaking, a demigod in pagan terms; an archangel in Jewish terms; in either sense, a deity), who was later historicized.'
  5. ^ ab(Doherty 2009, pp. vii–viii): '[The Mythical Jesus viewpoint holds] that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure..'
  6. ^Argument from silence:
    • (Ehrman 2012, p. 34): '[The basic mythicist position is] the negative argument, that we have no reliable witness that even mentions a historical Jesus, and the positive one, that his story appears to have been modeled on the accounts told of other divinities..'
    • (Eddy & Boyd 2007, p. 165): '[Some Christ myth theorists] make much of the claim that there is little or no credible information about the historical Jesus to be found in first—and second—century non-Christian sources or in Paul, the earliest Christian source. Surely if a miracle-working prophet like the Jesus of the Gospels actually existed, it is argued, Paul and pagan contemporaries would have mentioned his feats and his teachings. Instead, they argue, we find a virtual silence.'
  7. ^(Carrier 2014, p. 53): 'At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other. [..] Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm [not on Earth].'
  8. ^(Eddy & Boyd 2007, p. 202): 'While New Testament scholars agree that Paul has relatively little to say about the life and ministry of Jesus, most grant that Paul viewed Jesus as a recent contemporary. The most extreme legendary-Jesus theorists, however—particularly the Christ myth theorists—deny this. They argue that nothing in Paul’s letters indicates that he believed Jesus was a contemporary of his. Rather, they contend, the Jesus of Paul’s theology is a savior figure patterned after similar figures within ancient mystery religions. According to the theory, Paul believed that Christ entered the world at some point in the distant past—or that he existed only in a transcendent mythical realm—and died to defeat evil powers and redeem humanity. Only later was Jesus remythologized [i.e. historicized] as a Jewish contemporary.'
  9. ^(Price 2003, p. 350): 'This astonishingly complete absence of reliable gospel material begins to coincide, along its own authentic trajectory ..with another minimalist approach to the historical Jesus, namely, that there never was one. Most of the Dutch Radical scholars, following Bruno Bauer, argued that all of the gospel tradition was fabricated to historicize an originally bare datum of a savior, perhaps derived from the Mystery Religions or Gnosticism or even further afield. The basic argument offered for this position, it seems to me, is that of analogy, the resemblances between Jesus and Gnostic and Mystery Religion saviors being just too numerous and close to dismiss.'
  10. ^(Johnson 2010, p. 241, §. Pauls Ministry and Letters): 'Nearly all critical scholars accept seven letters as written by Paul: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. There is almost equal unanimity in rejecting 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. Serious debate can occasionally be found concerning 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians, but the clear and growing scholarly consensus considers them to be non-Pauline.'
  11. ^Martin, Michael (1993). The Case Against Christianity. Temple University Press. p. 52. ISBN978-1-56639-081-1. [P]agan witnesses indicate that there is no reliable evidence that supports the historicity of Jesus. This is surely surprising given the fact that Jesus was supposed to be a well-known person in the area of the world ruled by Rome. One would surely have supposed that there would have been some surviving records of Jesus if he did exist. Their absence, combined with the absence of Jewish records, suggests that NEP [Negative Evidence Principle] applies and that we are justified in disbelieving that Jesus existed.
  12. ^Price:
    • (Price 2010, p. 103, n. 5): 'Bolland, De Evangelische Jozua; Rylands, The Evolution of Christianity; Rylands, The Beginnings of Gnostic Christianity; Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, 340, and others similarly held that Christianity began variously among Hellenized Jewish settlements throughout the Diaspora, with allegorized Jewish elements being made almost unrecognizable by their intermingling with gnostic mythemes.'
    • (Price 2002, §. Suitors and Seducers): 'The temptations and challenges of the Diaspora only served to increase the diversity of ancient Judaism, a diversity directly reflected in emerging Christianity, which demonstrably partakes of Jewish Gnosticism [Schmithals, 1975; Scholem, 1965], Zoroastrianism [Welburn, 1991], the Mystery Cults, etc.[Walter Schmithals, The Apocalyptic Movement: Introduction and Interpretation. Trans. John E. Steely (NY: Abingdon Press, 1975; Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition. NY: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2nd ed., 1965), esp. chapter IX, 'The Relationship between Gnostic and Jewish Sources,' pp. 65–74.] [Andrew Welburn, The Beginnings of Christianity: Essene Mystery, Gnostic Revelation and the Christian Vision (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1991), pp. 44–51. The identification of the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Adam as Zoroastrian in substance has enormous implications.]'
  13. ^ abEhrman, Bart D. (2012). Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperCollins. pp. 11, 15. ISBN978-0-06-208994-6. [Per 'A Brief History of Mythicism'] ..some of the more influential contemporary representatives who have revitalized the [Mythicism] view in recent years. [..] A different sort of support for a mythicist position comes in the work of Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David. Thompson is trained in biblical studies, but he does not have degrees in New Testament or early Christianity. He is, instead, a Hebrew Bible scholar who teaches at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. In his own field of expertise he is convinced that figures from the Hebrew Bible such as Abraham, Moses, and David never existed. He transfers these views to the New Testament and argues that Jesus too did not exist but was invented by Christians who wanted to create a savior figure out of stories found in the Jewish scriptures.
  14. ^ abcMaurice Casey (2014). Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths?. A&C Black. pp. 10, 24. ISBN978-0-567-59224-8. I introduce here the most influential mythicists who claim to be ‘scholars’, though I would question their competence and qualifications. [..] [Thomas L. Thompson] was Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993–2009. His early work, which is thought to have successfully refuted the attempts of Albright and others to defend the historicity of the most ancient parts of biblical literature history, is said to have negatively affected his future job prospects.
  15. ^Doherty, Earl (Spring 1997). 'A review of a book by Burton L. Mack on the making of the Christian myth'. Humanist in Canada. 120: 12–13. Archived from the original on August 30, 2000. Earl Doherty has published a much expanded version of this review at the following Web site, where he has also reproduced his series 'The Jesus Puzzle,' which appeared in recent issues of Humanist in Canada: http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus.html.
  16. ^Gullotta, Daniel N. (February 2, 2015). 'Why You Should Read Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus'. Archived from the original on February 14, 2015.: 'What is also significant about [Richard] Carrier’s body of work related to Mythicism is that it represents the result of a $20,000 research grant from various supporters and donations overseen by Atheists United, which demonstrates the public’s interest in the subject matter. [..] the academic community committed to the study of the New Testament and Christian origins needs to pay attention to Carrier and engage with his thesis (even if they end up rejecting his conclusions); and if for no other reason than that he has the attention of the public.'
  17. ^(Ehrman 2012, pp. 337–338, §. Conclusion – The Mythicist Agenda): '[Some] mythicists are avidly antireligious. To debunk religion, then, one needs to undermine specifically the Christian form of religion. [..] the mythicists who are so intent on showing that the historical Jesus never existed are not being driven by a historical concern. Their agenda is religious, and they are complicit in a religious ideology. They are not doing history; they are doing theology.'
  18. ^Michael Grant (a classicist) states that 'In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.' in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant 2004 ISBN1898799881 page 200

References[edit]

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  187. ^Price 2003, p. 347.
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  196. ^Finlan 2004, p. 4.
  197. ^Mack 1997, p. 88.
  198. ^Sheehan 1986, p. 112.
  199. ^oremus Bible Browser, 1 Corinthians 15:3–15:41
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  219. ^Gathercole, Simon. 'The Historical and Human Existence of Jesus in Paul’s Letters.' Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 16.2-3 (2018): 183-212.
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  221. ^Wells 1999, p. 97.
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  232. ^What Is Christianity?: An Introduction to the Christian Religion, by Gail Ramshaw, Fortress Press, 2013. pp. 52–54
  233. ^God and Caesar: Troeltsch's Social Teaching as Legitimation, by Constance L. Benson, Transaction Publishers. p. 55
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  236. ^ abWeaver 1999, pp. 45–50.
  237. ^Schweitzer 2001, pp. 355ff.
  238. ^Van Voorst 2000, p. 8.
  239. ^ abcWells 1969.
  240. ^British Romantic Writers and the East by Nigel Leask (2004) ISBN0521604443 Cambridge Univ Press pp. 104–105
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  244. ^ abJames A. Herrick (2003), The Making of the New Spirituality, ISBN0-8308-2398-0 pp. 58–65
  245. ^ abMichael J. McClymond (2004), Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth, ISBN0802826806 p. 82
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Web sources[edit]

  1. ^Ehrman, Bart D. (September 28, 2015). 'Early Christian Docetism'. The Bart Ehrman Blog. Retrieved November 2, 2017.
  2. ^ abDuignan, Brian (2016), Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Encyclopedia Britannica
  3. ^ abKurt Rudolph (1987), Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Encyclopedia of Religion
  4. ^Lataster, Raphael (December 18, 2014). 'Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn't add up'. The Washington Post. WP Company LLC. Retrieved May 2, 2018.
  5. ^ abPhilip Davies, Did Jesus Exist?
  6. ^April DeConinck (2007), The Fourth Quest for the Historical Jesus?
  7. ^Valerie Tarico & David Fitzgerald (2017), Evidence for Jesus is weaker than you might think, RawStory
  8. ^ abcdBenjamin I. Simpson, review of The Historiographical Jesus. Memory, Typology, and the Son of David
  9. ^Anthony le Donne (2012), So What is All of This Business about “Memory” in Jesus Research?
  10. ^ abcCarrier, Richard (2014b). 'Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt: Should We Still Be Looking for a Historical Jesus?'. The Bible and Interpretation. Retrieved October 6, 2017.
  11. ^ abPrice, Robert (2009). 'Bruno Bauer, Christ and the Caesars, reviewed by Robert M. Price'. Retrieved November 19, 2016.
  12. ^James F. McGrath (2007), What’s Wrong With Penal Substitution?
  13. ^Ehrman, Bart D. (June 7, 2014). 'Christ as an Angel in Paul'. The Bart Ehrman Blog. Retrieved May 9, 2017.
  14. ^Bob Foster, The Messiah (Waddell)
  15. ^ abcdJoseph Jacobs, Moses Buttenwieser (1906), Messiah, Jewish Encyclopedia
  16. ^Carrier, Richard (February 13, 2016). 'Can Paul's Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus?'. Richard Carrier Blogs. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
  17. ^Godfrey, Neil (April 2, 2011). 'Interview with Earl Doherty'. Vridar. Retrieved September 15, 2017.

Further reading[edit]

Mainstream methodology

Journals

  • Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, BRILL

Surveys

  • Holmén, Tom; Porter, Stanley E., eds. (2011), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (4 Vols), BRILL
  • Evans, Craig A., ed. (2014), The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus, Routledge

History

  • Weaver, Walter P. (1999), The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century: 1900-1950, A&C Black

Criteria for Authenticity

  • Porter, Stanley E. (2004), Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research, Bloomsbury, ISBN978-0567043603
  • Charlesworth, James H.; Rhea, Brian; Pokorny, Petr, eds. (2014), Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions -- The Second Princeton-Prague Symposium on Jesus Research, Princeton 2007, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Demise of Authenticity and call for Memory Studies

  • Keith, Chris; Le Donne, Anthony, eds. (2012), Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Kirk, Alan (2018), Memory and the Jesus Tradition, Bloomsbury Publishing

Criticism

  • James Dunn (2005), A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed, Baker Academic
Proponents
  • George Albert Wells (1975), Did Jesus Exist?
  • Earl Doherty (1999), The Jesus Puzzle; republished (2009) as Jesus: Neither God nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus; online
  • Robert M. Price (2003), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man
  • Robert M. Price (2011), The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems
  • Price, Robert M. (2018). Bart Ehrman Interpreted. Pitchstone Publishing.
  • Thompson, Thomas L.; Verenna, Thomas S., eds. (2012). 'Is this Not the Carpenter?': The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. Equinox. ISBN978-1-84553-986-3.
  • Brodie, Thomas L. (2012). Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery. Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN978-1-9075-3458-4.
  • Richard Carrier (2014). On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN978-1-909697-35-5.
Scholarly critics
  • Van Voorst, Robert E. (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN978-0-8028-4368-5.
  • Ehrman, Bart D. (2012). Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperCollins. ISBN978-0-06-220460-8.
  • Casey, Maurice (2014). Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths?. Bloomsbury T & T Clark. ISBN978-0-5672-9458-6.

External links[edit]

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Overview
  • Religious Tolerance General outline of range of views on Jesus from classical Christian to Jesus a mere man and Jesus entirely mythical
  • Demolishing the historicity of Jesus – A History List of Contemporary and Early proponents of Christ Myth Theory.
Proponents
  • Richard Carrier (2012), So..if Jesus Didn’t Exist, Where Did He Come from Then?
Evangelic critics
  • James Patrick Holding (2008), Shattering the Christ Myth. Did Jesus Not Exist?
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