Jesus as myth
Encyclopedia
The term Jesus myth theory (also known as the Christ myth theory, Jesus Myth, and Christ Myth) in its broadest context refers to the idea that the person named Jesus referred in the Gospels is a myth.
However, there is ambiguity in the meaning of the words:
Thus, there is a large variance regarding how the Gospel Jesus is a myth; for instance:
Some scholars argue that the Gospel account of Jesus is so full of myth and legend that determining the historical accuracy of anything reasonably close to the man described is impossible.
Supporters of the various Jesus myth theories point to the lack of any known written references to Jesus during his lifetime and the relative scarcity and disputed veracity of non-Christian references to him in the 1st century.
Nearly all Bible scholars
involved with historical Jesus
research maintain that the existence of the New Testament Jesus can be established using documentary and other evidence, although they differ on the degree to which material about him in the New Testament should be taken at face value.
and Robin Hood
. "Myth" has also been used to in reference to stories of the Spanish Inquisition
using torture devices such as the Iron maiden and Choke pear
and the power it supposedly had in medieval Spain.
In his 1909 book, The Christ the religious skeptic John Eleazer Remsburg
made a clear distinction between a possible Jesus of history (Jesus of Nazareth) and the Jesus of the New Testament and Christianity (Jesus of Bethlehem) saying that the latter was a mythical character who did not exist.
Remsburg then when further using David Strauss
and John Fiske to explain that there were three kinds of myths: Historical, Philosophical, and Poetical.
Remsburg stated that "(i)t is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish a historical from a philosophical myth. Hence the non-agreement of Freethinkers in regard to the nature of the Christ myth. Is Christ a historical or a philosophical myth? Does an analysis of his alleged history disclose the deification of a man, or merely the personification of an idea?" Remsburg pointed to Strauss' "Leben Jesu" as an example of the historical myth and the ideas of Thaddeus B. Wakeman as an example of philosophical myth regarding Jesus.
Remsburg concluded the chapter by saying while all Freethinkers could agree that the Christ of the New Testament was a myth there was disagreement regarding whether there was an actual man behind that myth and as to how much of the myth was actual history.
In 1946 Archibald Robertson published Jesus: Myth or History?. There he defined mythicist as simply being "the upholder of the theory that Jesus is a myth" and acknowledged that in his 1900 Christianity and mythology the mythicist "(John M.) Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus perhaps more than one having contributed something to the Gospel story."
In 1989 the then senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine Gorden Stein wrote "Not all mythicists agree with each other about what they view as the correct explanation of the origin of Christianity and of the Jesus myth. (...) The mythicist denies the supernatural aspect of Jesus. He may also deny the "great moral teacher" aspect of Jesus. Some mythicists would also try to deny that even an ordinary man (a traveling magician, perhaps) existed and served as a basis for the myth that predated him and grew around him. Other mythicists would claim that whether a mere man named Jesus ever existed at the time then the Christian era began is an impossible thing to either prove of disprove today"
wrote that there are "two views of the historical Jesus which stand at the opposite ends of a spectrum of opinion about him." At one extreme is the view that Jesus never existed, and that the gospels describe an essentially fictional person. At the other extreme is the view that the gospels portray events exactly as they happened, and each event depicted in the New Testament is the literal truth. Furthermore, Marshall maintains that the term "historical Jesus" has two meanings: that Jesus existed, rather than being a totally fictional creation like King Lear or Dr. Who or that the Gospels accounts give a reasonable account of historical events, rather than being unverifiable legends such as those surrounding King Arthur.
Because of this slipperiness in the meaning of "historical Jesus", Marshall states, "We shall land in considerable confusion if we embark on an inquiry about the historical Jesus if we do not pause to ask ourselves exactly what we are talking about." This echoed Remsburg's range of historical myth going from a 'slightly colored but essentially true narrative' to a 'narrative so distorted by legend as to be essentially false'.
Biblical scholar L. Michael White
(not himself a Jesus-myth theorist) writes that the usual date given for Jesus's birth is between 7 and 4 BCE. This is based on the gospels of Matthew
and Luke
, which say he was born a Jew during the reign of Herod the Great
, who died in March 4 BCE. According to White, his death is typically placed around 30 CE, during the reign of Pontius Pilate
, the Roman governor of Judea
from 26 to 36 CE.
White writes that, so far as we know, Jesus did not write anything, nor did anyone who had personal knowledge of him. There is no archeological evidence of his existence. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life or death: no eyewitness accounts, or any other kind of first-hand record. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades or centuries later; the gospels themselves all come from later times, though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions. The earliest writings that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus
, written 20–30 years after the dates given for Jesus's death. Paul was not a companion of Jesus, White writes, nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus before his death.
, who argues it is quite likely there never was an historical Jesus in the sense that the Gospel version is in essence a composite character
and therefore unable to be reasonably verified as a single historical person, writes that the Jesus myth theory is based on three pillars:
Price writes that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels. In Deconstructing Jesus, Price argues that, unlike Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus, and King Arthur, Jesus has no residue that does not fit the myth cycle nor is he intricately woven into the history of the time. Price concludes that "Jesus must be categorized with other legendary founder figures including the Buddha, Krishna, and Lao-tzu. There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure.”
Docetism
Docetism is the belief that Jesus physical existence was an illusion holding that he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die.
In 1977, Classicist Michael Grant
seemed to make a connection between the various versions of the Christ myth theory and docetism
:
Theodosius I's declaration of a particular form of Christianity being the official religion of Rome and the outlawing of both paganism and heretical versions followed by the collapse of the Western Empire resulted in the Europeanization of Jesus and intermixing of local pagan traditions into Christianity resulting in a Jesus of Faith and a lack of any further analysis of the Gospel account for centuries.
Dupuis rejected the historicity of Jesus entirely, explaining a reference to Jesus by the Roman historian Tacitus
(56–117)—in around 116, Tacitus mentioned one Chrestus, who had been convicted by Pontius Pilate, as nothing but an echo of the inaccurate beliefs of Christians at the time. In Origine de tous les cultes (1795), he identified pre-Christian rituals in Greater Syria, Ancient Egypt and Persia that he believed represented the birth of a god to a virgin mother at the winter solstice
, and argued that these rituals were based upon the winter rising of the constellation Virgo. He believed that these and other annual occurrences were allegorized as the histories of solar deities
, such as Sol Invictus
. He argued that Jewish and Christian scriptures could be interpreted according to the solar pattern: the Fall of Man in Genesis was an allegory of the hardship caused by winter, and the resurrection of Jesus
represented the growth of the sun's strength in the sign of Aries at the spring equinox
.
Volney, who published before Dupuis but made use of a draft version of Dupuis' work, followed much of his argument. In his Les Ruines, Volney differed in thinking that the gospel story was not intentionally created as an extended allegory grounded in solar myths, but was compiled organically when simple allegorical statements like "the virgin has brought forth" were misunderstood as history. Volney further parted company from Dupuis by allowing that confused memories of an obscure historical figure may have contributed to Christianity when they were integrated with the solar mythology. The works of Volney and Dupuis moved rapidly through numerous editions, allowing the thesis to circulate widely. Napoleon
, who knew Volney personally, was probably basing his opinion on Volney's work when he stated privately in October 1808 that the existence of Jesus was an open question. Later critics argued that Volney and Dupuis had based their views on limited historical data.
German theologian David Strauss
(1808–1874) caused a scandal in Europe with the publication of his Das Leben Jesu (1835)—published in English as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1860)—in which he argued that some stories about Jesus appeared to be mythical, concluding that early Christian communities had fabricated material based on Old Testament stories and concepts. Theologian Thomas L. Thompson
writes that Strauss saw the development of the myth not as fraudulent invention, but as the product of a community's imagination, ideas represented as stories. Thompson writes that Strauss's influence on biblical studies was far-reaching. James Beilby and Paul Eddy write that Strauss did not argue that Jesus was entirely invented, but that historically there was only a small core of facts that could be asserted about him.
The German historian Bruno Bauer
(1809–1882) took Strauss's arguments and carried them to their furthest point, arguing that Jesus had been entirely fabricated. He thereby became a leading proponent of the Jesus myth theory. Writing while he taught at the University of Bonn from 1839 to 1842, Bauer argued that the Gospel of John was not an historical narrative, but an adaptation of the traditional Jewish religious and political idea of the Messiah
to Philo
's philosophical concept of the logos
. Turning to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Bauer followed earlier critics in regarding them as dependent on Mark's narrative, while rejecting the view that they also drew upon a common tradition apart from Mark that scholars argue is lost — a hypothetical source called the Q document. For Bauer, this latter possibility was ruled out by the incompatible stories of Jesus' nativity
found in Matthew and Luke, as well as the manner in which the non-Markan material found in these documents still appeared to develop Markan ideas. Bauer concluded that Matthew depended on Luke for the content found only in those two gospels. Thus, having traced the entire gospel tradition to a single author (Mark), Bauer felt that the hypothesis of outright invention became possible. He further believed there was no expectation of a Messiah among Jews in the time of Tiberius
(ruled 14 AD to 37 AD), and that Mark's portrayal of Jesus as the Messiah must therefore be a retrojection of later Christian beliefs and practices—an interpretation Bauer extended to many of the specific stories recounted in the gospels. While Bauer initially left open the question of whether an historical Jesus existed at all, his published views were sufficiently unorthodox that in 1842 they cost him his lectureship at Bonn.
In A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin, published in 1850–1851, Bauer argued that Jesus had not, in fact, existed. Bauer's own explanation of Christian origins appeared in 1877 in Christ and the Caesars. He proposed the religion as a synthesis of the Stoicism
of Seneca the Younger
and of the Jewish theology of Philo as developed by pro-Roman Jews such as Josephus
. While subsequent arguments against an historical Jesus did not directly depend on Bauer's work, they usually echoed it on several points: that New Testament references to Jesus lacked historical value; that both the absence of reference to Jesus within his lifetime, and the lack of non-Christian references to him in the 1st century, provided evidence against his existence; and that Christianity originated through syncretism
.
, the leader of the movement, S. Hoekstra, and Samuel Adrian Naber. A. D. Loman argued in 1881 that all New Testament writings belonged to the 2nd century, and doubted that Jesus was an historical figure, but later said the core of the gospels was genuine.
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, although he himself did not share that view but had enough people claim he did that in the 1913 expanded edition of The Golden Bough
he expressly stated that his theory assumed a historical Jesus. However, after this some people (like Schweitzer) still classified Frazer's ideas as belonging to the same class as those of John M. Robertson, William Benjamin Smith, and Arthur Drews.
, rather than in the life of Jesus and Palestinian Judaism. 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."
(1856–1933), a Scottish journalist who became a Liberal
MP, argued in 1900 that belief in a slain Messiah arose before the New Testament period within sects later known as Ebionites
or Nazarenes
, and that these groups would have expected a Messiah named Jesus, a hope based on a divinity of that name in the biblical Joshua
. In his view, an additional but less significant basis for early Christian belief may have been the executed Jesus Pandira
, placed by the Talmud
in about 100 BC.
Robertson wrote that while the letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings, they were primarily concerned with theology and morality, largely glossing over the life of Jesus. Once references to the twelve apostles and Jesus's institution of the Eucharist
are rejected as interpolations
, Robertson argued that the Jesus of the Pauline epistles is reduced to a crucified savior who "counts for absolutely nothing as a teacher or even as a wonder-worker." As a result, he concluded that those elements of the gospels that attribute such characteristics to Jesus must have developed later, probably among gentile believers who were converted by Jewish evangelists like Paul. This gentile party may have represented Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection in mystery plays in which, wishing to disassociate the cult from Judaism, they attributed his execution to the Jewish authorities and his betrayal to a Jew (Ioudaios, misunderstood as Judas
). According to Robertson, such plays would have evolved over time into the gospels. Christianity would have sought to further enhance its appeal to gentiles by adopting myths from pagan cults with some Judaic input— e.g., Jesus' healings came from Asclepius
, feeding of multitudes from Dionysus
, the Eucharist from the worship of Dionysus
and Mithras, and walking on water from Poseidon
, but his descent from David
and his raising of a widow's son from the dead were in deference to Jewish messianic expectations. And while John's portrayal of Jesus as the logos
was ostensibly Jewish, Robertson argued that the underlying concept derived from the function of Mithras, Thoth
, and Hermes
as representatives of a supreme god.
In his 1946 book Jesus: Myth Or History Archibald Robertson stated
(1850–1934), a professor of mathematics at Tulane University in New Orleans, argued in a series of books that the earliest Christian sources, particularly the Pauline epistles, stress Christ's divinity at the expense of any human personality, and that this would have been implausible if there had been a human Jesus. Smith believed that Christianity's origins lay in a pre-Christian Jesus cult—that is, in a Jewish sect that had worshipped a divine being named Jesus in the centuries before the human Jesus was supposedly born. Smith argued that evidence for this cult was found in Hippolytus's mention of the Naassenes and Epiphanius
's report of a Nazaraean or Nazorean sect that existed before Jesus. On this view, the seemingly historical details in the New Testament were built by the early Christian community around narratives of the pre-Christian Jesus. Smith also argued against the historical value of non-Christian writers regarding Jesus, particularly Josephus and Tacitus.
(1865–1935), professor of philosophy at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Germany, brought together the scholarship of the day in defense of the idea that Christianity had been a Jewish Gnostic cult that spread by appropriating aspects of Greek philosophy and life-death-rebirth deities. Drews wrote that his purpose was to show that everything about the historical Jesus had a mythical character, and there was no reason to suppose that such a figure had existed. Nikolai Berdyaev
observed that Drews, "in his capacity as a religious anti-Semite", argued against the historical existence of Jesus "for the religious life of Aryanism."
His work proved popular enough that prominent theologians and historians addressed his arguments in several leading journals of religion. In response, Drews took part in a series of public debates, the best known of which took place in 1910 on January 31 and February 1 at the Berlin Zoological Garden against Hermann von Soden of the Berlin University, where he appeared on behalf of the League of Monists. Attended by 2,000 people, including the country's most eminent theologians, the meetings went on until three in the morning. The New York Times called it one of the most remarkable theological discussions since the days of Martin Luther
, reporting that Drews caused a sensation by plastering the town's billboards with posters asking, "Did Jesus Christ ever live?" According to the newspaper his arguments were so graphic that several women had to be carried from the hall screaming hysterically, while one woman stood on a chair and invited God to strike him down.
Drew's work found fertile soil in the Soviet Union. Lenin (1870–1924) Soviet leader from 1917 until his death, argued that it was imperative in the struggle against religious obscurantists to form a union with people like Drews. Several editions of Drews's The Christ Myth were published in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onwards, and his arguments were included in school and university textbooks. Public meetings asking "Did Christ live?" were organized, during which party operatives debated with clergymen.
(1879–1959) was a French doctor of medicine turned man of letters and poet. He developed his idea of Jesus as myth in a series of essays and books, including Enigma of Jesus (1924), followed by The Mystery of Jesus (1925), Jesus the God Made Man (1937), The Creation of Christ (1939), Story of Jesus (1944), and The God Jesus (1951). Theologian Walter P. Weaver writes that Couchoud dismissed material from Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, and Suetonius as evidence. Turning to the New Testament, he argued that Paul had had nothing to do with Jesus, and that Mark was the source for Luke and John. He argued that Mark was not an historical text but a commentary on early Christian stories and memories. He further argued that Paul's affirmation of the divinity of Jesus alongside Yahweh
(God), suggested that Jesus was not real, because no Jew would have done that. For Couchoud, Jesus was a figment of Paul's imagination, the result of a new interpretation of ancient texts and a representation of the highest aspiration of the human soul.
(1863–1933), a member of the Theosophical Society
, wrote in Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? (1903) that Jesus was an historical figure but that the Talmud
points to him being crucified c100 BCE, meaning that the Gospel version was a mythical construct. Harry Elmer Barnes in his 1929 The Twilight of Christianity and Tom Harpur in his 2006 "Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?" have said Mead along with Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, and John M. Robertson as being among the "eminent scholars and critics who have contended that Jesus was not historical" Robert Price cites Mead as one of several examples of alternative traditions that place Jesus in a different time period than the Gospel account, and wrote that the "varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an original mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history."
G. J. P. J. Bolland
(1854–1922) argued in 1907 that Christianity evolved from Gnosticism, and that Jesus was simply a symbolic figure representing Gnostic ideas about God.
John Eleazer Remsburg
(1848–1919), an ardent religious skeptic in 1909 put out a book called The Christ which explored the range and possible origins of the "Christ Myth". While The Christ along with The Bible and Six Historic Americans is regarded as an important freethought book, Remsburg felt the evidence supported the existence of a 1st century Jesus though also feeling that the Gospel version provided little to no information on the man. Despite Remsburg's support of a historical 1st century Jesus, the list of names from the "Silence of Contemporary Writers" chapter of The Christ (sometimes called the Remsburg|Remsberg list) has appeared in a handful of self published books regarding the nonhistoricity hypothesis by authors such as James Patrick Holding, Hilton Hotema, Jawara D. King, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and Asher Norman.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970) famously announced in his 1927 lecture, "Why I Am Not a Christian
"—delivered to the National Secular Society in Battersea Town Hall, London—that historically it is quite doubtful that Jesus existed, and if he did we know nothing about him, though Russell did nothing to develop the idea.
Dead Sea Scrolls
scholar John M. Allegro (1923–1988) argued in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979) that Christianity began as a shamanic
cult centering around the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and that the New Testament was a coded record of a clandestine cult. Mark Hall writes that Allegro suggested the scrolls all but proved that an historical Jesus never existed. Philip Jenkins writes that Allegro was an eccentric scholar who relied on texts that did not exist in quite the form he was citing them, and calls the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross "possibly the single most ludicrous book on Jesus scholarship by a qualified academic." Allegro was forced to resign his academic post.
Philosopher George Walsh argues that Christianity can be seen as originating in a myth dressed up as history, or with a historical being mythologized into a supernatural one: he calls the former the Christ myth theory, and the latter the historical Jesus theory. Walsh also states "My present opinion is that, in the case of Jesus, we simply do not know for certain anything about his biography, not even that he existed."
(1975), The Jesus Legend (1996), The Jesus Myth (1999), Can We Trust the New Testament? (2004), and Cutting Jesus Down to Size (2009). British theologian Kenneth Grayston
advised Christians to acknowledge the difficulties raised by Wells, but Alvar Ellegård writes that his views remain largely undiscussed by theologians.
Wells bases his arguments on the views of New Testament scholars who acknowledge that the gospels are sources written decades after Jesus's death by people who had no personal knowledge of him. In addition, Wells writes, the texts are exclusively Christian and theologically motivated, and therefore a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed. Wells also 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. There is no information in them about Jesus's parents, place of birth, teachings, trial, or crucifixion. For Wells, the Jesus of earliest Christianity was a pure myth, derived from mystical speculations stemming from the Jewish Wisdom tradition. According to this view, 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".
In The Jesus Myth, Wells argues that two Jesus narratives fused into one: Paul's mythical Jesus and a minimally historical Jesus whose teachings were preserved in the Q document, a hypothetical common source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Biblical scholar Robert Van Voorst said that with this argument Wells had performed an about-face while Doherty presented it as another example of the Gospel Jesus did not exist, Carrier classifying it (along with Wells' later Can we trust the new Testament?) as a book Defending ahistoricity in his May 30 2006 Stanford University presentation, and Eddy-Boyd presenting it as an example of a Jesus myth theory book.
Wells writes that he belongs in the category of those who argue that Jesus did exist, but that reports about him are so unreliable that we can know little or nothing about him. He argues, for example, that the story of the execution of Jesus
under Pilate is not an historical account. He wrote in 2000: "[J. D. G. Dunn] objected [in 1985] that, in my work as then published, I had, implausibly, to assume that, within 30 years from Paul, there had evolved "such a ... complex of traditions about a non-existent figure as we have in the sources of the gospels" (The Evidence for Jesus, p. 29). My present standpoint is: this complex is not all post-Pauline (Q in its earliest form may well be as early as ca. AD. 40), and it is not all mythical. The essential point, as I see it, is that what is authentic in this material refers to a personage who is not to be identified with the dying and rising Christ of the early epistles."
was to show that the Day of Judgment was imminent, messianiac views that were common among Jews at the time. When it became clear decades later that the Day of Judgment was not upon them, Paul's audience wanted to know more about Jesus, and because there was little to guide them, the gospels emerged to complete a picture, using passages from the Old Testament that messianic Jews had long interpreted as heralding the messiah.
Ellegård writes that his position differs from that of Drews and Couchoud. Like G.A. Wells, he believes that Paul's letters show Paul and his audience believed Paul's visions had been about a real person. Ellegård develops arguments proposed by André Dupont-Sommer
and John Allegro, and identifies Paul's Jesus as the "Essene Teacher of Righteousness" revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls
, but he argues that this was not Jesus of the gospels.
For Ellegård, the figure Paul had in mind was the founder of the Essene, or para-Essene, congregations Paul was addressing, someone who had probably lived in the 2nd or early 1st century BCE, though Ellegard acknowledges there is no evidence of a Jesus who would fit this description, or evidence that the Teacher of Righteousness was crucified. He accuses modern theologians of failing to live up to their responsibilities as scholars. He argues that their position is dogmatic, often concealed "under a cover of mystifying language," that they often have ties to Christian churches, and that there has been a failure of communication between them and scholars in other fields, leading to an insulation of theological research from scholarly debate elsewhere. He dismisses as an ad hominem argument the criticism of himself and Wells as non-specialists.
questions the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), and Jesus is Dead (2007), as well as in contributions to The Historical Jesus: Five Views (2009). Price is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar
, a group of writers and scholars who study the historicity of Jesus, arguing that the Christian image of Christ is a theological construct into which traces of Jesus of Nazareth have been woven. A former Baptist pastor, Price writes that he was originally an apologist on the historical-Jesus question but became disillusioned with the arguments. As the years went on, he found it increasingly difficult to poke holes in the position that questioned Jesus's existence entirely. Despite this, he still took part in the Eucharist
every week for several years, seeing the Christ of faith as all the more important because, he argued, there was probably never any other.
Price believes that Christianity is a historicized synthesis of mainly Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek mythologies. He writes that everyone who espouses the Jesus myth theory bases their arguments on three key points:
Price argues that "the varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history" citing accounts that have Jesus being crucified under Alexander Jannaeus
(83 BCE) or in his 50s by Herod Agrippa I under the rule of Claudius Caesar
(41-54 CE)
Price acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.
, retired professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, argues in The Messiah Myth (2005) that the Jesus of the gospels did not exist, and that stories about him are a combination of Near Eastern myths and stories about kingship and divinity. He argues that the contemporaneous audience of the gospels would have understood this, that the stories were not intended as history.
Canadian writer Earl Doherty
argues in The Jesus Puzzle (2005) and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man—The Case for a Mythical Jesus (2009) argues that Jesus originated as a myth derived from Middle Platonism
with some influence from Jewish mysticism, and that belief in a historical Jesus emerged only among Christian communities in the 2nd century. He writes that none of the major apologists before the year 180, except for Justin
and Aristides of Athens, included an account of a historical Jesus in their defences of Christianity. Instead the early Christian writers describe a Christian movement grounded in Platonic philosophy and Hellenistic Judaism, preaching the worship of a monotheistic Jewish god and what he calls a "logos-type Son." Doherty argues that Theophilus of Antioch
(c. 163–182), Athenagoras of Athens
(c. 133–190), Tatian
the Assyrian (c. 120–180), and Marcus Minucius Felix (writing around 150–270) offer no indication that they believed in a historical figure crucified and resurrected, and that the name Jesus does not appear in any of them.
Acharya S maintains the position that the canonical gospels represent a middle to late 2nd-century creation utilizing Old Testament "prophetic" scriptures as a blueprint, in combination with a collage of other, older Pagan and Jewish concepts, and that Christianity was thereby fabricated in order to compete with the other popular religions of the time.
In the 2000s, a number of books and films associated with the New Atheism
movement questioned whether Jesus existed. The books included The God Delusion
(2006) by Richard Dawkins, the former professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University; God:The Failed Hypothesis (2007) by the American physicist Victor Stenger; and God Is Not Great
(2007) by British writer Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins, citing G.A. Wells, sees the gospels as rehashed versions of the Hebrew Bible, and writes that it is probable Jesus existed, but that a serious argument can be mounted against it, though not a widely supported one. Stenger's position is that the gospel writers borrowed from several Middle Eastern cults. Hitchens argues that there is little or no evidence for the life of Jesus, unlike for the prophet Muhammad
. Films that refer to the issue are The God Who Wasn't There
(2005), Zeitgeist
(2007), and Religulous
(2008).
, announced the Jesus Project
at a conference in the University of California Davis in December 2007. The Project envisaged that a group of 20 scholars from relevant disciplines—historians, archeologists, philosophers—should meet every nine months for five years, with no preconceived ideas, to examine the evidence for Jesus's existence. Joseph Hoffmann
of CSER was the project's director. The project was temporarily halted in June 2009 when its funding was suspended, and shortly thereafter Hoffmann resigned, which effectively brought it to an end. He wrote that he no longer believed it was possible to answer the historicity question, because of the extent to which history, myth, and religious belief are intertwined. He argues that the New Testament documents were written at a time when the line between natural and supernatural was not clearly drawn. He concludes: "No quantum of material discovered since the 1940's, in the absence of canonical material, would support the existence of an historical founder. No material regarded as canonical and no church doctrine built upon it in the history of the church would cause us to deny it. Whether the New Testament runs from Christ to Jesus or Jesus to Christ is not a question we can answer."
Hoffmann said there were problems with the media and blogs sensationalizing stories about the project, with the only possible newsworthy outcome being the conclusion that Jesus had not existed, a conclusion which (he writes) the majority of participants would not have reached. When one Jesus-myth supporter asked that the project set up a section devoted to members committed to the non-existence thesis—with Hoffmann describing the "mythers" as people out to prove through consensus what they cannot establish through evidence—he interpreted it as a sign of trouble ahead, a lack of the kind of skepticism he argues the Jesus myth theory itself invites.
, a private Christian university, found that one percent of Americans in general, and 13.7 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans, believe that Jesus is a fictional character. Comparable figures for Britain in 2008 say 13 percent of the general population, and 40 percent of atheists, do not believe that Jesus existed. However, in his A Credible Christianity: Saving Jesus from the Church former University Pastor and Director of a United Campus Ministry at Michigan State University Walter Kania was highly critical of the study saying "the statistics and conclusions in the book were made of fundamentalist concoctions and cooked statistics."
In Italy in 2006, Luigi Cascioli, the atheist author of The Fable of Christ and a former trainee priest, sued Father Enrico Righi for having written in a church newsletter that Jesus was born in Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph and that he lived in Nazareth. Cascioli said the statement was an "abuse of popular belief," and brought the lawsuit against Righi under an Italian anti-fraud law. The case was thrown out. The case was then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights as Cascioli v Italy case # 14910/06 but the file was closed due to the time requires to file necessary documentation.
and Jean-Baptiste Pérès
—entitled "Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte" (1819) and "Grand Erratum" (1827)—who argued against the existence of Napoleon, even during the emperor's lifetime. In 1914, Fred C. Conybeare
published The Historical Christ, in which he argued against J.M. Robertson, Arthur Drews, and William Benjamin Smith. He was followed by the French biblical scholar Maurice Goguel, who published Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or History? in 1926. Goguel argued that prima facie evidence for a historical Jesus came from the agreement on his existence between ancient orthodox Christians, Docetists
, and opponents of Christianity. Goguel proceeded to examine the theology of the Pauline epistles
, the other New Testament epistles, the gospels, and the Book of Revelation
, as well as belief in Jesus' resurrection and divinity, arguing in each case that early Christian views were best explained by a tradition stemming from a recent historical Jesus.
Later editions of Albert Schweitzer
's The Quest of the Historical Jesus
contained a lengthy section on the Jesus myth theory, concluding "that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely." However these later editions also grouped Sir James George Frazer (who had stated in 1913 that "My theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth" ) with John M. Robertson, William Benjamin Smith, and Arthur Drew as those "who contested the historical existence of Jesus", a point reinforced by Schweitzer himself in his 1931 autobiography Out of My Life and Thought
Further refutations were produced throughout the 20th century, including R. T. France
's The Evidence for Jesus (1986), Robert Van Voorst's Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000), and The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (2007), coauthored by Paul Eddy and Greg Boyd. Professor of Divinity
James Dunn
describes the mythical Jesus theory as a "thoroughly dead thesis." Classicist Michael Grant
wrote in 1977 that standard historical criteria prevent the rejection of an historical Jesus:
However it should also be noted in the same work in this very section Michael Grant also seems to make a connection between the Christ myth theory and docetism
:
, postulates that the Synoptic gospels are based on at least two independent sources (Mark and "Q"), and potentially as many as four (Mark, "Q", "M", and "L").
The composition of the letters of Paul of Tarsus is generally dated between 49 and 64 CE, some two to three decades after the conventional date given for Jesus's death. Paul did not know the historical Jesus. He only claims he had known him, 'as of one born out of due time', i.e., as the 'risen' Jesus.
Many biblical scholars turn to Paul's letters (epistles) to support their arguments for a historical Jesus. Theologian James D.G. Dunn argues that Robert Price ignores what everyone else in the field regards as primary data. Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce
(1910–1990) writes that, according to Paul's letters, Jesus was an Israelite, descended from Abraham (Gal 3:16) and David (Rom. 1:3); who lived under Jewish law (Gal. 4:4); who was betrayed, and on the night of his betrayal instituted a memorial meal of bread and wine (I Cor. 11:23ff); who endured the Roman penalty of crucifixion (I Cor. 1:23; Gal. 3:1, 13, 6:14, etc.), although Jewish authorities were somehow involved in his death (I Thess. 2:15); who was buried, rose the third day and was thereafter seen alive
, including on one occasion by over 500, of whom the majority were alive 25 years later (I Cor. 15:4ff). The letters say that Paul knew of and had met important figures in Jesus's ministry, including the apostles
Peter and John, as well as James the brother of Jesus, who is also mentioned in Josephus. In the letters, Paul on occasion alludes to and quotes the teachings of Jesus
, and in 1 Corinthians 11 recounts the Last Supper
.
argues that the writings of the 1st century Jewish historian Josephus (37 – c.100) contain two references to the Jesus character. One of them, Josephus' allusion in The Antiquities of the Jews (c. 94) to the death of James, describes James as "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ", provides alleged attestation independent of the early Christian community. Josephus' fuller reference to Jesus, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, while considered by many specialists to contain later interpolations, is nevertheless believed by some scholars to preserve an original comment regarding Jesus as well.
has applied the criterion of embarrassment
to the question of Jesus' existence. He argues that if the gospels were entirely imaginary, certain issues might not have been included, such as the competition of the apostles for high places in the kingdom of God, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Jesus to work miracles in Galilee, the references to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, and his despairing cry on the cross. Durant argues that an invented narrative might have presented Jesus in strict conformity with messianic expectations.
, for example, writes that no serious work places Jesus outside the backdrop of 1st century Palestinian Judaism. Biblical scholarship also generally rejects the concept of homogenous dying and rising gods
, the validity of which is often presupposed by advocates of the Jesus myth theory, such as New Testament scholar Robert Price. Tryggve Mettinger, former professor of Hebrew bible at Lund University, is one of the academics who supports the "dying and rising gods" construct, but he argues that Jesus does not fit the wider pattern.
Christian apologist Edwin Yamauchi argues that past attempts to equate elements of Jesus' biography with those of mythological figures have not sufficiently taken into account the dates and provenance of their sources. Edwyn R. Bevan and Chris Forbes argue that proponents of the theory have even invented elements of pagan myths to support their assertion of parallelism between the life of Jesus and the lives of pagan mythological characters. For example, David Ulansey argues that the purported equivalence of Jesus' virgin birth with Mithras' origin fails because Mithras emerged fully grown, partially clothed, and armed from a rock, possibly after it had been inseminated. S. G. F. Brandon
and others argue that the very idea that early Christians would consciously incorporate pagan myths into their religion is "intrinsically most improbable," as evidenced by the strenuous opposition that Paul encountered from other Christians for even his minor concessions to Gentile believers. However Marvin Meyer, Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University, identifies a number of similarities, and says that the resemblance between Christianity and Mithraism is close enough to make Christian apologists scramble to invent creative theological explanations to account for the similarities.
has argued that since most biblical scholars are Christians, a certain bias is inevitable, but he does not see this as a major problem. Donald Akenson
, Professor of Irish Studies in the department of history at Queen's University has argued that, with very few exceptions, the historians of Yeshua have not followed sound historical practices. He has stated that there is an unhealthy reliance on consensus, for propositions, which should otherwise be based on primary sources, or rigorous interpretation. He also holds that some of the criteria being used are faulty. He says that, the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars are employed in institutions whose roots are in religious beliefs. Because of this, more than any other group in present day academia, biblical historians are under immense pressure to theologize their historical work. It is only through considerable individual heroism, that many biblical historians have managed to maintain the scholarly integrity of their work. John Meier
, Professor of theology at University of Notre Dame
, has said "...people claim they are doing a quest for the historical Jesus when de facto they’re doing theology, albeit a theology that is indeed historically informed..." Dale Allison
, Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
, too says, "...We wield our criteria to get what we want...We all see what we expect to see and what we want to see...." However, the Old Testament scholar Bertil Albrektson has stated that a great many biblical scholars do not accept any creed as the foundation of their work and they do in fact honestly try to investigate scientifically the basic documents of Christianity in the same way as other texts from antiquity.
Debates
Other external links
However, there is ambiguity in the meaning of the words:
- myth
- historical
- fiction
Thus, there is a large variance regarding how the Gospel Jesus is a myth; for instance:
- The Jesus character could be a pure allegoric myth to which historical details (possibly including an actual obscure 1st century teacher of the same name) were added later, forming a composite characterComposite characterA composite character is a character composed of two or more individuals, appearing in a fictional or non-fictional work. Two fictional characters are often combined into one upon adaptation of a work from one medium to another, as in the film adaptation of a novel...
. Some scholars contend that Christianity emerged organically from Hellenistic JudaismHellenistic JudaismHellenistic Judaism was a movement which existed in the Jewish diaspora that sought to establish a Hebraic-Jewish religious tradition within the culture and language of Hellenism...
, drawing on perceived parallels between the early stories of Jesus and the gods of Greek, Egyptian, and other cultures (especially dying and rising deitiesLife-death-rebirth deityA dying god, also known as a dying-and-rising or resurrection deity, is a god who dies and is resurrected or reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Male examples include the ancient Near Eastern and Greek deities Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, as well as...
). - The Jesus character could be a myth that grew up around a historical Jesus who devised the founding tenets of his new religion. Some scholars contend that the Gospel Jesus was a real man who lived around 100 BCE, but who was made to seem of the 1st century CE.
Some scholars argue that the Gospel account of Jesus is so full of myth and legend that determining the historical accuracy of anything reasonably close to the man described is impossible.
Supporters of the various Jesus myth theories point to the lack of any known written references to Jesus during his lifetime and the relative scarcity and disputed veracity of non-Christian references to him in the 1st century.
Nearly all Bible scholars
Biblical studies
Biblical studies is the academic study of the Judeo-Christian Bible and related texts. For Christianity, the Bible traditionally comprises the New Testament and Old Testament, which together are sometimes called the "Scriptures." Judaism recognizes as scripture only the Hebrew Bible, also known as...
involved with historical Jesus
Historical Jesus
The term historical Jesus refers to scholarly reconstructions of the 1st-century figure Jesus of Nazareth. These reconstructions are based upon historical methods including critical analysis of gospel texts as the primary source for his biography, along with consideration of the historical and...
research maintain that the existence of the New Testament Jesus can be established using documentary and other evidence, although they differ on the degree to which material about him in the New Testament should be taken at face value.
Ambiguity in definition
The main problem with getting a definitive definition for Jesus myth theory is there is ambiguity in the meaning of "myth" (and "mythicist"), "historical", and "fiction".Meaning of "myth" and "mythicist"
Folklorists define myths as "tales believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds or parts of the world, and with extra-human, inhuman, or heroic characters". However, other fields sometimes use the term "myth" otherwise. For example, the Oedipus story is often called a myth even though for folkorists it falls into the category of folktale. "Myth" and "legend" have been used as synonyms, as with the stories of King ArthurKing Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
and Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Robin Hood was a heroic outlaw in English folklore. A highly skilled archer and swordsman, he is known for "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor", assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his "Merry Men". Traditionally, Robin Hood and his men are depicted wearing Lincoln green clothes....
. "Myth" has also been used to in reference to stories of the Spanish Inquisition
Spanish Inquisition
The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition , commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition , was a tribunal established in 1480 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms, and to replace the Medieval...
using torture devices such as the Iron maiden and Choke pear
Choke pear (torture)
The choke pear is the modern name for a type of instrument displayed in some museums, consisting of a metal body divided into spoon-like segments that could be spread apart by turning a screw...
and the power it supposedly had in medieval Spain.
In his 1909 book, The Christ the religious skeptic John Eleazer Remsburg
John Remsburg
John Eleazer Remsburg was an ardent religious skeptic in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His name is sometimes spelled Remsberg.-Early life:...
made a clear distinction between a possible Jesus of history (Jesus of Nazareth) and the Jesus of the New Testament and Christianity (Jesus of Bethlehem) saying that the latter was a mythical character who did not exist.
Remsburg then when further using David Strauss
David Strauss
David Friedrich Strauss was a German theologian and writer. He scandalized Christian Europe with his portrayal of the "historical Jesus," whose divine nature he denied...
and John Fiske to explain that there were three kinds of myths: Historical, Philosophical, and Poetical.
- A Historical myth is "a real event colored by the light of antiquity, which confounded the human and divine, the natural and the supernatural. The event may be but slightly colored and the narrative essentially true, or it may be distorted and numberless legends attached until but a small residuum of truth remains and the narrative is essentially false. A large portion of ancient history, including the Biblical narratives, is historical myth. The earliest records of all nations and of all religions are more or less mythical."
- "A Philosophical myth is an idea clothed in the caress of historical narrative. When a mere idea is personified and presented in the form of a man or a god it is called a pure myth. Many of the gods and heroes of antiquity are pure myths."
- "A Poetical myth is a blending of the historical and philosophical, embellished by the creations of the imagination. The poems of Homer and Hesiod, which were the religious text books of the ancient Greeks, and the poetical writings of the Bible, which helped to form and foster the Semitic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, belong to this class."
Remsburg stated that "(i)t is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish a historical from a philosophical myth. Hence the non-agreement of Freethinkers in regard to the nature of the Christ myth. Is Christ a historical or a philosophical myth? Does an analysis of his alleged history disclose the deification of a man, or merely the personification of an idea?" Remsburg pointed to Strauss' "Leben Jesu" as an example of the historical myth and the ideas of Thaddeus B. Wakeman as an example of philosophical myth regarding Jesus.
Remsburg concluded the chapter by saying while all Freethinkers could agree that the Christ of the New Testament was a myth there was disagreement regarding whether there was an actual man behind that myth and as to how much of the myth was actual history.
In 1946 Archibald Robertson published Jesus: Myth or History?. There he defined mythicist as simply being "the upholder of the theory that Jesus is a myth" and acknowledged that in his 1900 Christianity and mythology the mythicist "(John M.) Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus perhaps more than one having contributed something to the Gospel story."
In 1989 the then senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine Gorden Stein wrote "Not all mythicists agree with each other about what they view as the correct explanation of the origin of Christianity and of the Jesus myth. (...) The mythicist denies the supernatural aspect of Jesus. He may also deny the "great moral teacher" aspect of Jesus. Some mythicists would also try to deny that even an ordinary man (a traveling magician, perhaps) existed and served as a basis for the myth that predated him and grew around him. Other mythicists would claim that whether a mere man named Jesus ever existed at the time then the Christian era began is an impossible thing to either prove of disprove today"
Meaning of "historical"
Biblical scholar I. Howard MarshallI. Howard Marshall
Ian Howard Marshall is Professor Emeritus of New Testament Exegesis and honorary research professor at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, specifically in the department of Divinity and Religious Studies...
wrote that there are "two views of the historical Jesus which stand at the opposite ends of a spectrum of opinion about him." At one extreme is the view that Jesus never existed, and that the gospels describe an essentially fictional person. At the other extreme is the view that the gospels portray events exactly as they happened, and each event depicted in the New Testament is the literal truth. Furthermore, Marshall maintains that the term "historical Jesus" has two meanings: that Jesus existed, rather than being a totally fictional creation like King Lear or Dr. Who or that the Gospels accounts give a reasonable account of historical events, rather than being unverifiable legends such as those surrounding King Arthur.
Because of this slipperiness in the meaning of "historical Jesus", Marshall states, "We shall land in considerable confusion if we embark on an inquiry about the historical Jesus if we do not pause to ask ourselves exactly what we are talking about." This echoed Remsburg's range of historical myth going from a 'slightly colored but essentially true narrative' to a 'narrative so distorted by legend as to be essentially false'.
Meaning of "fiction"
In the Jesus: Fact or Fiction? debate between Dr. Robert Price and Rev. John Rankin, Price states "there are four senses in which Jesus Christ may be said to be a 'fiction:'"- "the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual", i.e. the Gospel is little more than "a synthetic constructComposite characterA composite character is a character composed of two or more individuals, appearing in a fictional or non-fictional work. Two fictional characters are often combined into one upon adaptation of a work from one medium to another, as in the film adaptation of a novel...
of theologians, a symbolic 'Uncle Sam' figure." - "the "historical Jesus" reconstructed by New Testament scholars is always a reflection of the individual scholars who reconstruct him" to the point that "even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn't one any more."
- "Jesus as the personal savior, with whom people claim, as I used to, to have a 'personal relationship' is in the nature of the case a fiction, essentially a psychological projection, an 'imaginary playmate.'"
- "Christ is a fiction in that Christ functions, in an unnoticed and equivocal way, as shorthand for a vast system of beliefs and institutions on whose behalf he is invoked."
Jesus
L. Michael White
L. Michael White is an American Biblical scholar. He is Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins, and director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins, at the University of Texas at Austin...
(not himself a Jesus-myth theorist) writes that the usual date given for Jesus's birth is between 7 and 4 BCE. This is based on the gospels of Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
and Luke
Gospel of Luke
The Gospel According to Luke , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Luke or simply Luke, is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension.The...
, which say he was born a Jew during the reign of Herod the Great
Herod the Great
Herod , also known as Herod the Great , was a Roman client king of Judea. His epithet of "the Great" is widely disputed as he is described as "a madman who murdered his own family and a great many rabbis." He is also known for his colossal building projects in Jerusalem and elsewhere, including his...
, who died in March 4 BCE. According to White, his death is typically placed around 30 CE, during the reign of Pontius Pilate
Pontius Pilate
Pontius Pilatus , known in the English-speaking world as Pontius Pilate , was the fifth Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, from AD 26–36. He is best known as the judge at Jesus' trial and the man who authorized the crucifixion of Jesus...
, the Roman governor of Judea
Iudaea Province
Judaea or Iudaea are terms used by historians to refer to the Roman province that extended over parts of the former regions of the Hasmonean and Herodian kingdoms of Israel...
from 26 to 36 CE.
White writes that, so far as we know, Jesus did not write anything, nor did anyone who had personal knowledge of him. There is no archeological evidence of his existence. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life or death: no eyewitness accounts, or any other kind of first-hand record. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades or centuries later; the gospels themselves all come from later times, though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions. The earliest writings that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus
Pauline epistles
The Pauline epistles, Epistles of Paul, or Letters of Paul, are the thirteen New Testament books which have the name Paul as the first word, hence claiming authorship by Paul the Apostle. Among these letters are some of the earliest extant Christian documents...
, written 20–30 years after the dates given for Jesus's death. Paul was not a companion of Jesus, White writes, nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus before his death.
Definitions of the theory
- John Dominic CrossanJohn Dominic CrossanJohn Dominic Crossan is an Irish-American religious scholar and former Catholic priest known for co-founding the Jesus Seminar. Crossan is a major figure in the fields of biblical archaeology, anthropology and New Testament textual and higher criticism. He is also a lecturer who has appeared in...
, a religious scholar and former Catholic priest, prefers to call the Jesus myth theory the "Jesus-parable", because the argument is that we have a purely parabolicParableA parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...
Jesus, not an historical one. - Biblical scholars Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd break the spectrum of opinion into four ideal-typical positions as a useful heuristic
.jpg)
HeuristicHeuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...
; they call the first three the "legendary-Jesus thesis," namely that the picture of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and LukeSynoptic GospelsThe gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the Synoptic Gospels because they include many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and sometimes exactly the same wording. This degree of parallelism in content, narrative arrangement, language, and sentence structures can only be...
is mostly or entirely historically inaccurate.- The Jesus myth theory: the gospels describe a virtually, and perhaps entirely, fictitious person or the Gospel accounts are so filled with legend, myth, and contradictions there is no reliable way to show that any of it including the very existence of the man described is rooted in history. This view is represented to varying degrees by Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, G.A. Wells, and Robert Price.
- There is enough evidence to conclude that Jesus existed, but the reports are so unreliable that very little can be said about him with confidence. This view is represented by Rudolf BultmannRudolf BultmannRudolf Karl Bultmann was a German theologian of Lutheran background, who was for three decades professor of New Testament studies at the University of Marburg...
and Burton Mack. - Historical research can reveal a core of historical facts about Jesus, but he is very different from the Jesus of the New Testament. His sayings and miracles are myths. Robert FunkRobert W. FunkRobert W. Funk , an American biblical scholar, was co-founder of the controversial Jesus Seminar and the nonprofit Westar Institute in Santa Rosa, California....
and Crossan represent this view, one that Eddy and Boyd write is increasingly common among New Testament scholars. - The gospels are reliable historical sources, and critical historiography should not rule out the possibility of supernatural occurrence, a view represented by John P. MeierJohn P. MeierJohn Paul Meier is a Biblical scholar and Catholic priest. He attended St. Joseph's Seminary and College , Gregorian University [Rome] , and the Biblical Institute [Rome]...
and N.T. Wright.
Three pillars of the theory
New Testament scholar Robert M. PriceRobert M. Price
Robert McNair Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, including...
, who argues it is quite likely there never was an historical Jesus in the sense that the Gospel version is in essence a composite character
Composite character
A composite character is a character composed of two or more individuals, appearing in a fictional or non-fictional work. Two fictional characters are often combined into one upon adaptation of a work from one medium to another, as in the film adaptation of a novel...
and therefore unable to be reasonably verified as a single historical person, writes that the Jesus myth theory is based on three pillars:
- There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources.
- The Pauline epistlesPauline epistlesThe Pauline epistles, Epistles of Paul, or Letters of Paul, are the thirteen New Testament books which have the name Paul as the first word, hence claiming authorship by Paul the Apostle. Among these letters are some of the earliest extant Christian documents...
, earlier than the gospels, do not provide evidence of a recent historical Jesus. - The story of Jesus shows strong parallels to Middle Eastern religions about dying and rising godsLife-death-rebirth deityA dying god, also known as a dying-and-rising or resurrection deity, is a god who dies and is resurrected or reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Male examples include the ancient Near Eastern and Greek deities Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, as well as...
, symbolizing the rebirth of the individual as a rite of passage.
Price writes that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels. In Deconstructing Jesus, Price argues that, unlike Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus, and King Arthur, Jesus has no residue that does not fit the myth cycle nor is he intricately woven into the history of the time. Price concludes that "Jesus must be categorized with other legendary founder figures including the Buddha, Krishna, and Lao-tzu. There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure.”
DocetismDocetismIn Christianity, docetism is the belief that Jesus' physical body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion; that is, Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and to physically die, but in reality he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die...
Docetism is the belief that Jesus physical existence was an illusion holding that he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die.In 1977, Classicist Michael Grant
Michael Grant (author)
Michael Grant was an English classicist, numismatist, and author of numerous popular books on ancient history. His 1956 translation of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome remains a standard of the work. Having studied and held a number of academic posts in the United Kingdom and the Middle East, he...
seemed to make a connection between the various versions of the Christ myth theory and docetism
Docetism
In Christianity, docetism is the belief that Jesus' physical body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion; that is, Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and to physically die, but in reality he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die...
:
"This skeptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth. In ancient times, this extreme view was named the heresy of docetism (seeming) because it maintained that Jesus never came into the world "in the flesh", but only seemed to; (I John 4:2) and it was given some encouragement by Paul's lack of interest in his fleshly existence. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that Jesus did not even "seem" to exist, and that all tales of his appearance upon the earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was compared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods.
Celsus (c180 CE)
One of the earlier statements to the idea that nearly the entire Jesus story was a myth is attributed to Celsus (c180 CE) who is said to have argued that Jesus was bastard son of Mary and a Roman soldier named Panthera, used magic to deceive people into believing he was the son of a god, and there was no real difference between Christianity and many of the mystery religions existing at that time and some of the elements (such as the resurrection and virgin birth) could be found in older myths.Paganism and Christianity
Persecuted due to their conflict with Roman society Christianity picked up various Pagan elements regarding Jesus that were not in the writing about him that would cause confusion centuries later. The biggest of these was the December 25 birth date. To compete with the Sol Invictus cult that had been made the official religion of Rome by Aurelian in 274 CE, Jesus' birth date (debated to be anywhere between March to September) was decreed to be December 25 some 60 years later. The situation that resulted was such that Pope Leo I in the 5th century would try to explain why many Christians revered both Jesus and Sol Invictus together on December 25 adding to the confusion seen in the quest for the historical Jesus centuries later.Theodosius I's declaration of a particular form of Christianity being the official religion of Rome and the outlawing of both paganism and heretical versions followed by the collapse of the Western Empire resulted in the Europeanization of Jesus and intermixing of local pagan traditions into Christianity resulting in a Jesus of Faith and a lack of any further analysis of the Gospel account for centuries.
Volney and Dupuis
Serious doubt about the historical existence of Jesus emerged when critical study of the gospels developed during the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The primary forerunners of the Jesus myth theory are identified as two French philosophers, Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809) and Constantin-François Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney (1757–1820).Dupuis rejected the historicity of Jesus entirely, explaining a reference to Jesus by the Roman historian Tacitus
Tacitus
Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors...
(56–117)—in around 116, Tacitus mentioned one Chrestus, who had been convicted by Pontius Pilate, as nothing but an echo of the inaccurate beliefs of Christians at the time. In Origine de tous les cultes (1795), he identified pre-Christian rituals in Greater Syria, Ancient Egypt and Persia that he believed represented the birth of a god to a virgin mother at the winter solstice
Winter solstice
Winter solstice may refer to:* Winter solstice, astronomical event* Winter Solstice , former band* Winter Solstice: North , seasonal songs* Winter Solstice , 2005 American film...
, and argued that these rituals were based upon the winter rising of the constellation Virgo. He believed that these and other annual occurrences were allegorized as the histories of solar deities
Solar deity
A solar deity is a sky deity who represents the Sun, or an aspect of it, usually by its perceived power and strength. Solar deities and sun worship can be found throughout most of recorded history in various forms...
, such as Sol Invictus
Sol Invictus
Sol Invictus was the official sun god of the later Roman empire. In 274 Aurelian made it an official cult alongside the traditional Roman cults. Scholars disagree whether the new deity was a refoundation of the ancient Latin cult of Sol, a revival of the cult of Elagabalus or completely new...
. He argued that Jewish and Christian scriptures could be interpreted according to the solar pattern: the Fall of Man in Genesis was an allegory of the hardship caused by winter, and the resurrection of Jesus
Resurrection of Jesus
The Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus states that Jesus returned to bodily life on the third day following his death by crucifixion. It is a key element of Christian faith and theology and part of the Nicene Creed: "On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures"...
represented the growth of the sun's strength in the sign of Aries at the spring equinox
Equinox
An equinox occurs twice a year, when the tilt of the Earth's axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun, the center of the Sun being in the same plane as the Earth's equator...
.
Volney, who published before Dupuis but made use of a draft version of Dupuis' work, followed much of his argument. In his Les Ruines, Volney differed in thinking that the gospel story was not intentionally created as an extended allegory grounded in solar myths, but was compiled organically when simple allegorical statements like "the virgin has brought forth" were misunderstood as history. Volney further parted company from Dupuis by allowing that confused memories of an obscure historical figure may have contributed to Christianity when they were integrated with the solar mythology. The works of Volney and Dupuis moved rapidly through numerous editions, allowing the thesis to circulate widely. Napoleon
Napoleon I of France
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
, who knew Volney personally, was probably basing his opinion on Volney's work when he stated privately in October 1808 that the existence of Jesus was an open question. Later critics argued that Volney and Dupuis had based their views on limited historical data.
David Strauss
David Strauss
David Friedrich Strauss was a German theologian and writer. He scandalized Christian Europe with his portrayal of the "historical Jesus," whose divine nature he denied...
(1808–1874) caused a scandal in Europe with the publication of his Das Leben Jesu (1835)—published in English as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1860)—in which he argued that some stories about Jesus appeared to be mythical, concluding that early Christian communities had fabricated material based on Old Testament stories and concepts. Theologian Thomas L. Thompson
Thomas L. Thompson
Thomas L. Thompson is a biblical theologian associated with the movement known as the Copenhagen School. He was professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993–2009, lives in Denmark and is now a Danish citizen.-Background:Thompson obtained a B.A...
writes that Strauss saw the development of the myth not as fraudulent invention, but as the product of a community's imagination, ideas represented as stories. Thompson writes that Strauss's influence on biblical studies was far-reaching. James Beilby and Paul Eddy write that Strauss did not argue that Jesus was entirely invented, but that historically there was only a small core of facts that could be asserted about him.
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and historian. As a student of GWF Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism...
(1809–1882) took Strauss's arguments and carried them to their furthest point, arguing that Jesus had been entirely fabricated. He thereby became a leading proponent of the Jesus myth theory. Writing while he taught at the University of Bonn from 1839 to 1842, Bauer argued that the Gospel of John was not an historical narrative, but an adaptation of the traditional Jewish religious and political idea of the Messiah
Messiah
A messiah is a redeemer figure expected or foretold in one form or another by a religion. Slightly more widely, a messiah is any redeemer figure. Messianic beliefs or theories generally relate to eschatological improvement of the state of humanity or the world, in other words the World to...
to Philo
Philo
Philo , known also as Philo of Alexandria , Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew, was a Hellenistic Jewish Biblical philosopher born in Alexandria....
's philosophical concept of the logos
Logos
' is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason," it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus ' is an important term in...
. Turning to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Bauer followed earlier critics in regarding them as dependent on Mark's narrative, while rejecting the view that they also drew upon a common tradition apart from Mark that scholars argue is lost — a hypothetical source called the Q document. For Bauer, this latter possibility was ruled out by the incompatible stories of Jesus' nativity
Nativity of Jesus
The Nativity of Jesus, or simply The Nativity, refers to the accounts of the birth of Jesus in two of the Canonical gospels and in various apocryphal texts....
found in Matthew and Luke, as well as the manner in which the non-Markan material found in these documents still appeared to develop Markan ideas. Bauer concluded that Matthew depended on Luke for the content found only in those two gospels. Thus, having traced the entire gospel tradition to a single author (Mark), Bauer felt that the hypothesis of outright invention became possible. He further believed there was no expectation of a Messiah among Jews in the time of Tiberius
Tiberius
Tiberius , was Roman Emperor from 14 AD to 37 AD. Tiberius was by birth a Claudian, son of Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla. His mother divorced Nero and married Augustus in 39 BC, making him a step-son of Octavian...
(ruled 14 AD to 37 AD), and that Mark's portrayal of Jesus as the Messiah must therefore be a retrojection of later Christian beliefs and practices—an interpretation Bauer extended to many of the specific stories recounted in the gospels. While Bauer initially left open the question of whether an historical Jesus existed at all, his published views were sufficiently unorthodox that in 1842 they cost him his lectureship at Bonn.
In A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin, published in 1850–1851, Bauer argued that Jesus had not, in fact, existed. Bauer's own explanation of Christian origins appeared in 1877 in Christ and the Caesars. He proposed the religion as a synthesis of the Stoicism
Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early . The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.Stoics were concerned...
of Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...
and of the Jewish theology of Philo as developed by pro-Roman Jews such as Josephus
Josephus
Titus Flavius Josephus , also called Joseph ben Matityahu , was a 1st-century Romano-Jewish historian and hagiographer of priestly and royal ancestry who recorded Jewish history, with special emphasis on the 1st century AD and the First Jewish–Roman War, which resulted in the Destruction of...
. While subsequent arguments against an historical Jesus did not directly depend on Bauer's work, they usually echoed it on several points: that New Testament references to Jesus lacked historical value; that both the absence of reference to Jesus within his lifetime, and the lack of non-Christian references to him in the 1st century, provided evidence against his existence; and that Christianity originated through syncretism
Syncretism
Syncretism is the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term means "combining", but see below for the origin of the word...
.
Radical Dutch school
In the 1870s and 1880s, a group of scholars associated with the University of Amsterdam, known in German scholarship as the radical Dutch school, followed Bauer by rejecting the authenticity of the Pauline epistles, and took a generally negative view of the Bible's historical value. Within this group, the existence of Jesus was rejected by Allard PiersonAllard Pierson
Allard Pierson was a Dutch theologian, historian, and art historian. He was a leading proponent of radical criticism in the Netherlands.-Life:Pierson's father was a merchant in Amsterdam, his mother an author of pietist works...
, the leader of the movement, S. Hoekstra, and Samuel Adrian Naber. A. D. Loman argued in 1881 that all New Testament writings belonged to the 2nd century, and doubted that Jesus was an historical figure, but later said the core of the gospels was genuine.
James George Frazer
In 1890 the social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) published the first edition The Golden BoughThe Golden Bough
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer . It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes...
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, although he himself did not share that view but had enough people claim he did that in the 1913 expanded edition of The Golden Bough
The Golden Bough
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer . It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes...
he expressly stated that his theory assumed a historical Jesus. However, after this some people (like Schweitzer) still classified Frazer's ideas as belonging to the same class as those of John M. Robertson, William Benjamin Smith, and Arthur Drews.
20th century
During the early 20th century, several writers published arguments against Jesus' historicity. Proponents of the theory drew on the work of liberal theologians, who tended to deny any value to sources for Jesus outside the New Testament, and to limit their attention to Mark and the hypothetical Q document. They also made use of the growing field of Religionsgeschichte—the history of religion—which found sources for Christian ideas in Greek and Oriental mystery cultsGreco-Roman mysteries
Mystery religions, sacred Mysteries or simply mysteries, were religious cults of the Greco-Roman world, participation in which was reserved to initiates....
, rather than in the life of Jesus and Palestinian Judaism. Joseph Klausner
Joseph Klausner
Joseph Gedaliah Klausner , , was a Jewish historian and professor of Hebrew Literature. He was the chief redactor of The Hebrew Encyclopedia...
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."
J. M. Robertson
J. M. RobertsonJ. M. Robertson
John Mackinnon Robertson was a prolific journalist, advocate of rationalism and secularism, and Liberal Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom for Tyneside from 1906 to 1918.- Biography :...
(1856–1933), a Scottish journalist who became a Liberal
Liberal Party (UK)
The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...
MP, argued in 1900 that belief in a slain Messiah arose before the New Testament period within sects later known as Ebionites
Ebionites
Ebionites, or Ebionaioi, , is a patristic term referring to a Jewish Christian sect or sects that existed during the first centuries of the Christian Era. They regarded Jesus as the Messiah and insisted on the necessity of following Jewish religious law and rites...
or Nazarenes
Nazarene (sect)
The Nazarene sect is used in two contexts:* Firstly of the New Testament early church where in Acts 24:5 Paul is accused before Felix at Caesarea by Tertullus of being "a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes."...
, and that these groups would have expected a Messiah named Jesus, a hope based on a divinity of that name in the biblical Joshua
Joshua
Joshua , is a minor figure in the Torah, being one of the spies for Israel and in few passages as Moses's assistant. He turns to be the central character in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Joshua...
. In his view, an additional but less significant basis for early Christian belief may have been the executed Jesus Pandira
Yeshu
Yeshu is the name of an individual or individuals mentioned in Rabbinic literature. The oldest works in which references to Yeshu occur are the Tosefta and the Talmud, although some scholars consider the references to Yeshu to be post-Talmudic additions....
, placed by the Talmud
Talmud
The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
in about 100 BC.
Robertson wrote that while the letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings, they were primarily concerned with theology and morality, largely glossing over the life of Jesus. Once references to the twelve apostles and Jesus's institution of the Eucharist
Eucharist
The Eucharist , also called Holy Communion, the Sacrament of the Altar, the Blessed Sacrament, the Lord's Supper, and other names, is a Christian sacrament or ordinance...
are rejected as interpolations
Interpolation (manuscripts)
An interpolation, in relation to literature and especially ancient manuscripts, is an entry or passage in a text that was not written by the original author...
, Robertson argued that the Jesus of the Pauline epistles is reduced to a crucified savior who "counts for absolutely nothing as a teacher or even as a wonder-worker." As a result, he concluded that those elements of the gospels that attribute such characteristics to Jesus must have developed later, probably among gentile believers who were converted by Jewish evangelists like Paul. This gentile party may have represented Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection in mystery plays in which, wishing to disassociate the cult from Judaism, they attributed his execution to the Jewish authorities and his betrayal to a Jew (Ioudaios, misunderstood as Judas
Judas Iscariot
Judas Iscariot was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. He is best known for his betrayal of Jesus to the hands of the chief priests for 30 pieces of silver.-Etymology:...
). According to Robertson, such plays would have evolved over time into the gospels. Christianity would have sought to further enhance its appeal to gentiles by adopting myths from pagan cults with some Judaic input— e.g., Jesus' healings came from Asclepius
Asclepius
Asclepius is the God of Medicine and Healing in ancient Greek religion. Asclepius represents the healing aspect of the medical arts; his daughters are Hygieia , Iaso , Aceso , Aglæa/Ægle , and Panacea...
, feeding of multitudes from Dionysus
Dionysus
Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
, the Eucharist from the worship of Dionysus
Dionysus
Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
and Mithras, and walking on water from Poseidon
Poseidon
Poseidon was the god of the sea, and, as "Earth-Shaker," of the earthquakes in Greek mythology. The name of the sea-god Nethuns in Etruscan was adopted in Latin for Neptune in Roman mythology: both were sea gods analogous to Poseidon...
, but his descent from David
David
David was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel according to the Hebrew Bible and, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, an ancestor of Jesus Christ through both Saint Joseph and Mary...
and his raising of a widow's son from the dead were in deference to Jewish messianic expectations. And while John's portrayal of Jesus as the logos
Logos
' is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason," it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus ' is an important term in...
was ostensibly Jewish, Robertson argued that the underlying concept derived from the function of Mithras, Thoth
Thoth
Thoth was considered one of the more important deities of the Egyptian pantheon. In art, he was often depicted as a man with the head of an ibis or a baboon, animals sacred to him. His feminine counterpart was Seshat...
, and Hermes
Hermes
Hermes is the great messenger of the gods in Greek mythology and a guide to the Underworld. Hermes was born on Mount Kyllini in Arcadia. An Olympian god, he is also the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of the cunning of thieves, of orators and...
as representatives of a supreme god.
In his 1946 book Jesus: Myth Or History Archibald Robertson stated
-
- (John) Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus perhaps more than one having contributed something to the Gospel story. "A teacher or teachers named Jesus, or several differently named teachers called Messiahs " (of whom many are on record) may have uttered some of the sayings in the Gospels.
-
- 1 The Jesus of the Talmud, who was stoned and hanged over a century before the traditional date of the crucifixion, may really have existed and have contributed something to the tradition.
-
- 2 An historical Jesus may have "preached a political doctrine subversive of the Roman rule, and . . . thereby met his death " ; and Christian writers concerned to conciliate the Romans may have suppressed the facts.
-
- 3 Or a Galilean faith-healer with a local reputation may have been slain as a human sacrifice at some time of social tumult ; and his story may have got mixed up with the myth.
-
- 4 The myth theory is not concerned to deny such a possibility. What the myth theory denies is that Christianity can be traced to a personal founder who taught as reported in the Gospels and was put to death in the circumstances there recorded.
William Benjamin Smith
At around the same time William Benjamin SmithWilliam Benjamin Smith
William Benjamin Smith was a professor of mathematics at Tulane University. In a series of books, beginning with Ecce Deus: The Pre-Christian Jesus, published in 1894, and ending with The Birth of the Gospel, published posthumously in 1954, Smith argued that the earliest Christian sources,...
(1850–1934), a professor of mathematics at Tulane University in New Orleans, argued in a series of books that the earliest Christian sources, particularly the Pauline epistles, stress Christ's divinity at the expense of any human personality, and that this would have been implausible if there had been a human Jesus. Smith believed that Christianity's origins lay in a pre-Christian Jesus cult—that is, in a Jewish sect that had worshipped a divine being named Jesus in the centuries before the human Jesus was supposedly born. Smith argued that evidence for this cult was found in Hippolytus's mention of the Naassenes and Epiphanius
Epiphanius of Salamis
Epiphanius of Salamis was bishop of Salamis at the end of the 4th century. He is considered a saint and a Church Father by both the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches. He gained a reputation as a strong defender of orthodoxy...
's report of a Nazaraean or Nazorean sect that existed before Jesus. On this view, the seemingly historical details in the New Testament were built by the early Christian community around narratives of the pre-Christian Jesus. Smith also argued against the historical value of non-Christian writers regarding Jesus, particularly Josephus and Tacitus.
Arthur Drews
The Christ Myth (Die Christusmythe), first published in 1909 by Arthur DrewsArthur Drews
Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews [pronounced "drefs"] was a German philosopher, writer, and important representative of German Monist thought. He was born in Uetersen, Holstein, present day Germany....
(1865–1935), professor of philosophy at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Germany, brought together the scholarship of the day in defense of the idea that Christianity had been a Jewish Gnostic cult that spread by appropriating aspects of Greek philosophy and life-death-rebirth deities. Drews wrote that his purpose was to show that everything about the historical Jesus had a mythical character, and there was no reason to suppose that such a figure had existed. Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian religious and political philosopher.-Early life and education:Berdyaev was born in Kiev into an aristocratic military family. He spent a solitary childhood at home, where his father's library allowed him to read widely...
observed that Drews, "in his capacity as a religious anti-Semite", argued against the historical existence of Jesus "for the religious life of Aryanism."
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...
, reporting that Drews caused a sensation by plastering the town's billboards with posters asking, "Did Jesus Christ ever live?" According to the newspaper his arguments were so graphic that several women had to be carried from the hall screaming hysterically, while one woman stood on a chair and invited God to strike him down.
Drew's work found fertile soil in the Soviet Union. Lenin (1870–1924) Soviet leader from 1917 until his death, argued that it was imperative in the struggle against religious obscurantists to form a union with people like Drews. Several editions of Drews's The Christ Myth were published in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onwards, and his arguments were included in school and university textbooks. Public meetings asking "Did Christ live?" were organized, during which party operatives debated with clergymen.
Paul-Louis Couchoud
Paul-Louis CouchoudPaul-Louis Couchoud
Paul-Louis Couchoud was a French author and poet. He was also a former scholar of the École Normale, as well as a professor of philosophy and doctor of medicine.-References:...
(1879–1959) was a French doctor of medicine turned man of letters and poet. He developed his idea of Jesus as myth in a series of essays and books, including Enigma of Jesus (1924), followed by The Mystery of Jesus (1925), Jesus the God Made Man (1937), The Creation of Christ (1939), Story of Jesus (1944), and The God Jesus (1951). Theologian Walter P. Weaver writes that Couchoud dismissed material from Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, and Suetonius as evidence. Turning to the New Testament, he argued that Paul had had nothing to do with Jesus, and that Mark was the source for Luke and John. He argued that Mark was not an historical text but a commentary on early Christian stories and memories. He further argued that Paul's affirmation of the divinity of Jesus alongside Yahweh
Yahweh
Yahweh is the name of God in the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jews and Christians.The word Yahweh is a modern scholarly convention for the Hebrew , transcribed into Roman letters as YHWH and known as the Tetragrammaton, for which the original pronunciation is unknown...
(God), suggested that Jesus was not real, because no Jew would have done that. For Couchoud, Jesus was a figment of Paul's imagination, the result of a new interpretation of ancient texts and a representation of the highest aspiration of the human soul.
Other 20th-century writers
G. R. S. MeadG. R. S. Mead
George Robert Stowe Mead was an author, editor, translator, and an influential member of the Theosophical Society as well as the founder of the Quest Society.-Birth and family:...
(1863–1933), a member of the Theosophical Society
Theosophical Society
The Theosophical Society is an organization formed in 1875 to advance the spiritual principles and search for Truth known as Theosophy. The original organization, after splits and realignments has several successors...
, wrote in Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? (1903) that Jesus was an historical figure but that the Talmud
Talmud
The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
points to him being crucified c100 BCE, meaning that the Gospel version was a mythical construct. Harry Elmer Barnes in his 1929 The Twilight of Christianity and Tom Harpur in his 2006 "Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?" have said Mead along with Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, and John M. Robertson as being among the "eminent scholars and critics who have contended that Jesus was not historical" Robert Price cites Mead as one of several examples of alternative traditions that place Jesus in a different time period than the Gospel account, and wrote that the "varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an original mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history."
G. J. P. J. Bolland
Gerardus Johannes Petrus Josephus Bolland
Gerardus Johannes Petrus Josephus Bolland , also known as G.J.P.J. Bolland, was a Dutch autodidact , linguist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and lecturer...
(1854–1922) argued in 1907 that Christianity evolved from Gnosticism, and that Jesus was simply a symbolic figure representing Gnostic ideas about God.
John Eleazer Remsburg
John Remsburg
John Eleazer Remsburg was an ardent religious skeptic in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His name is sometimes spelled Remsberg.-Early life:...
(1848–1919), an ardent religious skeptic in 1909 put out a book called The Christ which explored the range and possible origins of the "Christ Myth". While The Christ along with The Bible and Six Historic Americans is regarded as an important freethought book, Remsburg felt the evidence supported the existence of a 1st century Jesus though also feeling that the Gospel version provided little to no information on the man. Despite Remsburg's support of a historical 1st century Jesus, the list of names from the "Silence of Contemporary Writers" chapter of The Christ (sometimes called the Remsburg|Remsberg list) has appeared in a handful of self published books regarding the nonhistoricity hypothesis by authors such as James Patrick Holding, Hilton Hotema, Jawara D. King, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and Asher Norman.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
(1872–1970) famously announced in his 1927 lecture, "Why I Am Not a Christian
Why I Am Not a Christian
Why I Am Not a Christian is a 1927 essay by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell hailed by The Independent as "devastating in its use of cold logic", and listed in the New York Public Library's list of the most influential books of the 20th century....
"—delivered to the National Secular Society in Battersea Town Hall, London—that historically it is quite doubtful that Jesus existed, and if he did we know nothing about him, though Russell did nothing to develop the idea.
Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...
scholar John M. Allegro (1923–1988) argued in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979) that Christianity began as a shamanic
Shamanism
Shamanism is an anthropological term referencing a range of beliefs and practices regarding communication with the spiritual world. To quote Eliade: "A first definition of this complex phenomenon, and perhaps the least hazardous, will be: shamanism = technique of ecstasy." Shamanism encompasses the...
cult centering around the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and that the New Testament was a coded record of a clandestine cult. Mark Hall writes that Allegro suggested the scrolls all but proved that an historical Jesus never existed. Philip Jenkins writes that Allegro was an eccentric scholar who relied on texts that did not exist in quite the form he was citing them, and calls the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross "possibly the single most ludicrous book on Jesus scholarship by a qualified academic." Allegro was forced to resign his academic post.
Philosopher George Walsh argues that Christianity can be seen as originating in a myth dressed up as history, or with a historical being mythologized into a supernatural one: he calls the former the Christ myth theory, and the latter the historical Jesus theory. Walsh also states "My present opinion is that, in the case of Jesus, we simply do not know for certain anything about his biography, not even that he existed."
G. A. Wells
Graham Stanton wrote in 2002 that the most thoroughgoing and sophisticated of the proponents' arguments were set out by G. A. Wells, emeritus professor of German at Birkbeck College, London, and author of Did Jesus Exist?Did Jesus Exist?
Did Jesus Exist? is a 1975 book written by the modern German historian George Albert Wells who speculated on the evidence of Jesus Christ. Wells argues there was no historical evidence of Jesus existing. A revised second edition was published in 1986. Wells' views were criticized by the James...
(1975), The Jesus Legend (1996), The Jesus Myth (1999), Can We Trust the New Testament? (2004), and Cutting Jesus Down to Size (2009). British theologian Kenneth Grayston
Kenneth Grayston
Kenneth Grayston was a British theologian. He is the author of Dying, We Live. A New Inquiry into the Death of Christ in the New Testament ....
advised Christians to acknowledge the difficulties raised by Wells, but Alvar Ellegård writes that his views remain largely undiscussed by theologians.
Wells bases his arguments on the views of New Testament scholars who acknowledge that the gospels are sources written decades after Jesus's death by people who had no personal knowledge of him. In addition, Wells writes, the texts are exclusively Christian and theologically motivated, and therefore a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed. Wells also 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. There is no information in them about Jesus's parents, place of birth, teachings, trial, or crucifixion. For Wells, the Jesus of earliest Christianity was a pure myth, derived from mystical speculations stemming from the Jewish Wisdom tradition. According to this view, 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".
In The Jesus Myth, Wells argues that two Jesus narratives fused into one: Paul's mythical Jesus and a minimally historical Jesus whose teachings were preserved in the Q document, a hypothetical common source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Biblical scholar Robert Van Voorst said that with this argument Wells had performed an about-face while Doherty presented it as another example of the Gospel Jesus did not exist, Carrier classifying it (along with Wells' later Can we trust the new Testament?) as a book Defending ahistoricity in his May 30 2006 Stanford University presentation, and Eddy-Boyd presenting it as an example of a Jesus myth theory book.
Wells writes that he belongs in the category of those who argue that Jesus did exist, but that reports about him are so unreliable that we can know little or nothing about him. He argues, for example, that the story of the execution of Jesus
Passion (Christianity)
The Passion is the Christian theological term used for the events and suffering – physical, spiritual, and mental – of Jesus in the hours before and including his trial and execution by crucifixion...
under Pilate is not an historical account. He wrote in 2000: "[J. D. G. Dunn] objected [in 1985] that, in my work as then published, I had, implausibly, to assume that, within 30 years from Paul, there had evolved "such a ... complex of traditions about a non-existent figure as we have in the sources of the gospels" (The Evidence for Jesus, p. 29). My present standpoint is: this complex is not all post-Pauline (Q in its earliest form may well be as early as ca. AD. 40), and it is not all mythical. The essential point, as I see it, is that what is authentic in this material refers to a personage who is not to be identified with the dying and rising Christ of the early epistles."
Alvar Ellegård
Alvar Ellegård (1919–2008), a professor of English at the University of Gothenburg, developed the ideas of Wells and Couchoud in his Myten om Jesus (1992), arguing that Jesus is essentially a myth and the gospels largely fiction, created to give substance to the ecstatic visions of Paul and the apostles, in which Jesus appeared as the messiah. He argues that the point of Paul's letters to the Jewish diasporaJewish diaspora
The Jewish diaspora is the English term used to describe the Galut גלות , or 'exile', of the Jews from the region of the Kingdom of Judah and Roman Iudaea and later emigration from wider Eretz Israel....
was to show that the Day of Judgment was imminent, messianiac views that were common among Jews at the time. When it became clear decades later that the Day of Judgment was not upon them, Paul's audience wanted to know more about Jesus, and because there was little to guide them, the gospels emerged to complete a picture, using passages from the Old Testament that messianic Jews had long interpreted as heralding the messiah.
Ellegård writes that his position differs from that of Drews and Couchoud. Like G.A. Wells, he believes that Paul's letters show Paul and his audience believed Paul's visions had been about a real person. Ellegård develops arguments proposed by André Dupont-Sommer
André Dupont-Sommer
André Dupont-Sommer was a French semitologist.He specialized in the history of Judaism around the beginning of the Common Era, and especially the Dead Sea Scrolls...
and John Allegro, and identifies Paul's Jesus as the "Essene Teacher of Righteousness" revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...
, but he argues that this was not Jesus of the gospels.
For Ellegård, the figure Paul had in mind was the founder of the Essene, or para-Essene, congregations Paul was addressing, someone who had probably lived in the 2nd or early 1st century BCE, though Ellegard acknowledges there is no evidence of a Jesus who would fit this description, or evidence that the Teacher of Righteousness was crucified. He accuses modern theologians of failing to live up to their responsibilities as scholars. He argues that their position is dogmatic, often concealed "under a cover of mystifying language," that they often have ties to Christian churches, and that there has been a failure of communication between them and scholars in other fields, leading to an insulation of theological research from scholarly debate elsewhere. He dismisses as an ad hominem argument the criticism of himself and Wells as non-specialists.
Robert M. Price
American New Testament scholar Robert M. PriceRobert M. Price
Robert McNair Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, including...
questions the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), and Jesus is Dead (2007), as well as in contributions to The Historical Jesus: Five Views (2009). Price is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar
Jesus Seminar
The Jesus Seminar is a group of about 150 critical scholars and laymen founded in 1985 by Robert Funk under the auspices of the Westar Institute....
, a group of writers and scholars who study the historicity of Jesus, arguing that the Christian image of Christ is a theological construct into which traces of Jesus of Nazareth have been woven. A former Baptist pastor, Price writes that he was originally an apologist on the historical-Jesus question but became disillusioned with the arguments. As the years went on, he found it increasingly difficult to poke holes in the position that questioned Jesus's existence entirely. Despite this, he still took part in the Eucharist
Eucharist
The Eucharist , also called Holy Communion, the Sacrament of the Altar, the Blessed Sacrament, the Lord's Supper, and other names, is a Christian sacrament or ordinance...
every week for several years, seeing the Christ of faith as all the more important because, he argued, there was probably never any other.
Price believes that Christianity is a historicized synthesis of mainly Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek mythologies. He writes that everyone who espouses the Jesus myth theory bases their arguments on three key points:
- There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources.
- The epistles, written earlier than the gospels, provide no evidence of a recent historical Jesus; all that can be taken from the epistles, he argues, is that a Jesus Christ, son of God, came into the world to die as a sacrifice for human sin and was raised by God and enthroned in heaven.
- The Jesus narrative is paralleled in Middle Eastern myths about dying and rising gods; Price names Baal, OsirisOsirisOsiris is an Egyptian god, usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead. He is classically depicted as a green-skinned man with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive crown with two large ostrich feathers at either side, and...
, AttisAttisAttis was the consort of Cybele in Phrygian and Greek mythology. His priests were eunuchs, as explained by origin myths pertaining to Attis and castration...
, AdonisAdonisAdonis , in Greek mythology, the god of beauty and desire, is a figure with Northwest Semitic antecedents, where he is a central figure in various mystery religions. The Greek , Adōnis is a variation of the Semitic word Adonai, "lord", which is also one of the names used to refer to God in the Old...
, and Dumuzi/ Tammuz as examples, all of which, he writes, survived into the Hellenistic and Roman periods and thereby influenced early Christianity. Price alleges that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels. He argues that if critical methodology is applied with ruthless consistency, one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus's historicity.
Price argues that "the varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history" citing accounts that have Jesus being crucified under Alexander Jannaeus
Alexander Jannaeus
Alexander Jannaeus was king of Judea from 103 BC to 76 BC. The son of John Hyrcanus, he inherited the throne from his brother Aristobulus I, and appears to have married his brother's widow, Shlomtzion or "Shelomit", also known as Salome Alexandra, according to the Biblical law of Yibbum...
(83 BCE) or in his 50s by Herod Agrippa I under the rule of Claudius Caesar
Claudius
Claudius , was Roman Emperor from 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, he was the son of Drusus and Antonia Minor. He was born at Lugdunum in Gaul and was the first Roman Emperor to be born outside Italy...
(41-54 CE)
Price acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.
Other 21st-century writers
Thomas L. ThompsonThomas L. Thompson
Thomas L. Thompson is a biblical theologian associated with the movement known as the Copenhagen School. He was professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993–2009, lives in Denmark and is now a Danish citizen.-Background:Thompson obtained a B.A...
, retired professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, argues in The Messiah Myth (2005) that the Jesus of the gospels did not exist, and that stories about him are a combination of Near Eastern myths and stories about kingship and divinity. He argues that the contemporaneous audience of the gospels would have understood this, that the stories were not intended as history.
Earl Doherty
Earl J. Doherty is a Canadian author of Challenging the Verdict , The Jesus Puzzle and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man...
argues in The Jesus Puzzle (2005) and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man—The Case for a Mythical Jesus (2009) argues that Jesus originated as a myth derived from Middle Platonism
Middle Platonism
Middle Platonism is the modern name given to a stage in the development of Plato's philosophy, lasting from about 90 BC, when Antiochus of Ascalon rejected the scepticism of the New Academy, until the development of Neoplatonism under Plotinus in the 3rd century. Middle Platonism absorbed many...
with some influence from Jewish mysticism, and that belief in a historical Jesus emerged only among Christian communities in the 2nd century. He writes that none of the major apologists before the year 180, except for Justin
Justin Martyr
Justin Martyr, also known as just Saint Justin , was an early Christian apologist. Most of his works are lost, but two apologies and a dialogue survive. He is considered a saint by the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church....
and Aristides of Athens, included an account of a historical Jesus in their defences of Christianity. Instead the early Christian writers describe a Christian movement grounded in Platonic philosophy and Hellenistic Judaism, preaching the worship of a monotheistic Jewish god and what he calls a "logos-type Son." Doherty argues that Theophilus of Antioch
Theophilus of Antioch
Theophilus, Patriarch of Antioch, succeeded Eros c. 169, and was succeeded by Maximus I c.183, according to Henry Fynes Clinton, but these dates are only approximations...
(c. 163–182), Athenagoras of Athens
Athenagoras of Athens
Athenagoras was a Father of the Church, a Proto-orthodox Christian apologist who lived during the second half of the 2nd century of whom little is known for certain, besides that he was Athenian , a philosopher, and a convert to Christianity. In his writings he styles himself as "Athenagoras, the...
(c. 133–190), Tatian
Tatian
Tatian the Assyrian was an Assyrian early Christian writer and theologian of the 2nd century.Tatian's most influential work is the Diatessaron, a Biblical paraphrase, or "harmony", of the four gospels that became the standard text of the four gospels in the Syriac-speaking churches until the...
the Assyrian (c. 120–180), and Marcus Minucius Felix (writing around 150–270) offer no indication that they believed in a historical figure crucified and resurrected, and that the name Jesus does not appear in any of them.
Acharya S maintains the position that the canonical gospels represent a middle to late 2nd-century creation utilizing Old Testament "prophetic" scriptures as a blueprint, in combination with a collage of other, older Pagan and Jewish concepts, and that Christianity was thereby fabricated in order to compete with the other popular religions of the time.
In the 2000s, a number of books and films associated with the New Atheism
New Atheism
New Atheism is the name given to a movement among some early-21st-century atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises." New atheists argue that recent...
movement questioned whether Jesus existed. The books included The God Delusion
The God Delusion
The God Delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by British biologist Richard Dawkins, professorial fellow of New College, Oxford, and inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that...
(2006) by Richard Dawkins, the former professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University; God:The Failed Hypothesis (2007) by the American physicist Victor Stenger; and God Is Not Great
God Is Not Great
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is a book by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens criticising religion. It was published in the United Kingdom as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion....
(2007) by British writer Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins, citing G.A. Wells, sees the gospels as rehashed versions of the Hebrew Bible, and writes that it is probable Jesus existed, but that a serious argument can be mounted against it, though not a widely supported one. Stenger's position is that the gospel writers borrowed from several Middle Eastern cults. Hitchens argues that there is little or no evidence for the life of Jesus, unlike for the prophet Muhammad
Muhammad
Muhammad |ligature]] at U+FDF4 ;Arabic pronunciation varies regionally; the first vowel ranges from ~~; the second and the last vowel: ~~~. There are dialects which have no stress. In Egypt, it is pronounced not in religious contexts...
. Films that refer to the issue are The God Who Wasn't There
The God Who Wasn't There
The God Who Wasn't There is a 2005 independent documentary written and directed by Brian Flemming. The documentary questions the existence of Jesus, examining evidence that supports the Christ myth theory against the existence of a historical Jesus, as well as other aspects of Christianity.- Jesus...
(2005), Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist, the Movie
Zeitgeist: The Movie is a 2007 documentary film by Peter Joseph. It asserts a number of conspiracy theory-based ideas, including the Christ myth theory, alternative theories for the parties responsible for the September 11 attacks in 2001 and that bankers manipulate the international monetary...
(2007), and Religulous
Religulous
Religulous is a 2008 American comic documentary film written by and starring comedian Bill Maher and directed by Larry Charles. The title of the film is a portmanteau derived from the words "religion" and "ridiculous"; the documentary examines and mocks organized religion and religious...
(2008).
The Jesus Project
The Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), part of the Center for InquiryCenter for Inquiry
The Center for Inquiry is a non-profit educational organization with headquarters in the United States whose primary mission is to encourage evidence-based inquiry into paranormal and fringe science claims, alternative medicine and mental health practices, religion, secular ethics, and society...
, announced the Jesus Project
Jesus Project
The Jesus Project, announced in December 2007, was intended as a five-year investigation to examine whether Jesus existed as an historical figure...
at a conference in the University of California Davis in December 2007. The Project envisaged that a group of 20 scholars from relevant disciplines—historians, archeologists, philosophers—should meet every nine months for five years, with no preconceived ideas, to examine the evidence for Jesus's existence. Joseph Hoffmann
R. Joseph Hoffmann
R. Joseph Hoffmann is a historian of religion, and was chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, Associate Editor of the journal Free Inquiry from 2003-2009. He was founding editor of CSER's Review, CAESAR: A Journal of Religion and Human Values...
of CSER was the project's director. The project was temporarily halted in June 2009 when its funding was suspended, and shortly thereafter Hoffmann resigned, which effectively brought it to an end. He wrote that he no longer believed it was possible to answer the historicity question, because of the extent to which history, myth, and religious belief are intertwined. He argues that the New Testament documents were written at a time when the line between natural and supernatural was not clearly drawn. He concludes: "No quantum of material discovered since the 1940's, in the absence of canonical material, would support the existence of an historical founder. No material regarded as canonical and no church doctrine built upon it in the history of the church would cause us to deny it. Whether the New Testament runs from Christ to Jesus or Jesus to Christ is not a question we can answer."
Hoffmann said there were problems with the media and blogs sensationalizing stories about the project, with the only possible newsworthy outcome being the conclusion that Jesus had not existed, a conclusion which (he writes) the majority of participants would not have reached. When one Jesus-myth supporter asked that the project set up a section devoted to members committed to the non-existence thesis—with Hoffmann describing the "mythers" as people out to prove through consensus what they cannot establish through evidence—he interpreted it as a sign of trouble ahead, a lack of the kind of skepticism he argues the Jesus myth theory itself invites.
Contemporary public response
A 2005 study conducted by Baylor UniversityBaylor University
Baylor University is a private, Christian university located in Waco, Texas. Founded in 1845, Baylor is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.-History:...
, a private Christian university, found that one percent of Americans in general, and 13.7 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans, believe that Jesus is a fictional character. Comparable figures for Britain in 2008 say 13 percent of the general population, and 40 percent of atheists, do not believe that Jesus existed. However, in his A Credible Christianity: Saving Jesus from the Church former University Pastor and Director of a United Campus Ministry at Michigan State University Walter Kania was highly critical of the study saying "the statistics and conclusions in the book were made of fundamentalist concoctions and cooked statistics."
In Italy in 2006, Luigi Cascioli, the atheist author of The Fable of Christ and a former trainee priest, sued Father Enrico Righi for having written in a church newsletter that Jesus was born in Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph and that he lived in Nazareth. Cascioli said the statement was an "abuse of popular belief," and brought the lawsuit against Righi under an Italian anti-fraud law. The case was thrown out. The case was then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights as Cascioli v Italy case # 14910/06 but the file was closed due to the time requires to file necessary documentation.
Counter-arguments
Some of the earliest arguments against the philosophical myth part of the Jesus myth theory included satirical treatments by Richard WhatelyRichard Whately
Richard Whately was an English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian who also served as the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.-Life and times:...
and Jean-Baptiste Pérès
Jean-Baptiste Pérès
Jean-Baptiste Pérès was a French physicist best known for his 1827 pamphlet Grand Erratum - a polemical satire, translated into many European languages, that attempted "in the interest of conservative theology, to reduce to an absurdity the purely negative tendencies of the rationalistic...
—entitled "Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte" (1819) and "Grand Erratum" (1827)—who argued against the existence of Napoleon, even during the emperor's lifetime. In 1914, Fred C. Conybeare
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare was a British orientalist, Fellow of University College, Oxford, and Professor of Theology at the University of Oxford.-Biography:...
published The Historical Christ, in which he argued against J.M. Robertson, Arthur Drews, and William Benjamin Smith. He was followed by the French biblical scholar Maurice Goguel, who published Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or History? in 1926. Goguel argued that prima facie evidence for a historical Jesus came from the agreement on his existence between ancient orthodox Christians, Docetists
Docetism
In Christianity, docetism is the belief that Jesus' physical body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion; that is, Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and to physically die, but in reality he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die...
, and opponents of Christianity. Goguel proceeded to examine the theology of the Pauline epistles
Pauline epistles
The Pauline epistles, Epistles of Paul, or Letters of Paul, are the thirteen New Testament books which have the name Paul as the first word, hence claiming authorship by Paul the Apostle. Among these letters are some of the earliest extant Christian documents...
, the other New Testament epistles, the gospels, and the Book of Revelation
Book of Revelation
The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalupsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation"...
, as well as belief in Jesus' resurrection and divinity, arguing in each case that early Christian views were best explained by a tradition stemming from a recent historical Jesus.
Later editions of Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer OM was a German theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary. He was born in Kaysersberg in the province of Alsace-Lorraine, at that time part of the German Empire...
's The Quest of the Historical Jesus
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
The Quest of the Historical Jesus is a 1906 work of Biblical historical criticism written by Albert Schweitzer during the previous year, before he began to study for a medical degree....
contained a lengthy section on the Jesus myth theory, concluding "that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely." However these later editions also grouped Sir James George Frazer (who had stated in 1913 that "My theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth" ) with John M. Robertson, William Benjamin Smith, and Arthur Drew as those "who contested the historical existence of Jesus", a point reinforced by Schweitzer himself in his 1931 autobiography Out of My Life and Thought
Further refutations were produced throughout the 20th century, including R. T. France
R. T. France
Richard Thomas France is a New Testament scholar and Anglican cleric. He was Principal of Wycliffe Hall Oxford from 1989 to 1995. He has also worked for the London School of Theology.-Biography:...
's The Evidence for Jesus (1986), Robert Van Voorst's Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000), and The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (2007), coauthored by Paul Eddy and Greg Boyd. Professor of Divinity
Lightfoot Professor of Divinity
The Lightfoot Professor of Divinity is a professorship or chair in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. The chair is named after the former Bishop of Durham Joseph Barber Lightfoot. The current holder is Professor John Barclay....
James Dunn
James Dunn (theologian)
James D. G. Dunn was for many years the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham. Since his retirement he has been made Emeritus Lightfoot Professor. He is a leading British New Testament scholar, broadly in the Protestant tradition. Dunn is...
describes the mythical Jesus theory as a "thoroughly dead thesis." Classicist Michael Grant
Michael Grant (author)
Michael Grant was an English classicist, numismatist, and author of numerous popular books on ancient history. His 1956 translation of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome remains a standard of the work. Having studied and held a number of academic posts in the United Kingdom and the Middle East, he...
wrote in 1977 that standard historical criteria prevent the rejection of an historical Jesus:
…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… 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.
However it should also be noted in the same work in this very section Michael Grant also seems to make a connection between the Christ myth theory and docetism
Docetism
In Christianity, docetism is the belief that Jesus' physical body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion; that is, Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and to physically die, but in reality he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die...
:
"This skeptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth. In ancient times, this extreme view was named the heresy of docetism (seeming) because it maintained that Jesus never came into the world "in the flesh", but only seemed to; (I John 4:2) and it was given some encouragement by Paul's lack of interest in his fleshly existence. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that Jesus did not even "seem" to exist, and that all tales of his appearance upon the earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was compared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods.
Multiple attestation
In contrast to Bruno Bauer's view, modern scholars believe that Mark is not the only source behind the synoptic gospels. The current predominant view within the field, the Two-Source hypothesisTwo-source hypothesis
The Two-Source Hypothesis is an explanation for the synoptic problem, the pattern of similarities and differences between the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It posits that the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke were based on the Gospel of Mark and a lost, hypothetical sayings...
, postulates that the Synoptic gospels are based on at least two independent sources (Mark and "Q"), and potentially as many as four (Mark, "Q", "M", and "L").
Pauline epistles
Many biblical scholars turn to Paul's letters (epistles) to support their arguments for a historical Jesus. Theologian James D.G. Dunn argues that Robert Price ignores what everyone else in the field regards as primary data. Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce
F. F. Bruce
Frederick Fyvie Bruce was a Biblical scholar and one of the founders of the modern evangelical understanding of the Bible...
(1910–1990) writes that, according to Paul's letters, Jesus was an Israelite, descended from Abraham (Gal 3:16) and David (Rom. 1:3); who lived under Jewish law (Gal. 4:4); who was betrayed, and on the night of his betrayal instituted a memorial meal of bread and wine (I Cor. 11:23ff); who endured the Roman penalty of crucifixion (I Cor. 1:23; Gal. 3:1, 13, 6:14, etc.), although Jewish authorities were somehow involved in his death (I Thess. 2:15); who was buried, rose the third day and was thereafter seen alive
Resurrection appearances of Jesus
The major Resurrection appearances of Jesus in the Canonical gospels are reported to have occurred after his death, burial and resurrection, but prior to his Ascension. Among these primary sources, most scholars believe First Corinthians was written first, authored by Paul of Tarsus along with...
, including on one occasion by over 500, of whom the majority were alive 25 years later (I Cor. 15:4ff). The letters say that Paul knew of and had met important figures in Jesus's ministry, including the apostles
Apostle (Christian)
The term apostle is derived from Classical Greek ἀπόστολος , meaning one who is sent away, from στέλλω + από . The literal meaning in English is therefore an "emissary", from the Latin mitto + ex...
Peter and John, as well as James the brother of Jesus, who is also mentioned in Josephus. In the letters, Paul on occasion alludes to and quotes the teachings of Jesus
Ministry of Jesus
In the Christian gospels, the Ministry of Jesus begins with his Baptism in the countryside of Judea, near the River Jordan and ends in Jerusalem, following the Last Supper with his disciples. The Gospel of Luke states that Jesus was "about 30 years of age" at the start of his ministry...
, and in 1 Corinthians 11 recounts the Last Supper
Last Supper
The Last Supper is the final meal that, according to Christian belief, Jesus shared with his Twelve Apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. The Last Supper provides the scriptural basis for the Eucharist, also known as "communion" or "the Lord's Supper".The First Epistle to the Corinthians is...
.
Josephus
Louis FeldmanLouis Feldman
Louis Harry Feldman is an American professor of classics and literature. He is Abraham Wouk Family Professor of Classics and Literature at Yeshiva University, the institution at which he has taught since 1956...
argues that the writings of the 1st century Jewish historian Josephus (37 – c.100) contain two references to the Jesus character. One of them, Josephus' allusion in The Antiquities of the Jews (c. 94) to the death of James, describes James as "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ", provides alleged attestation independent of the early Christian community. Josephus' fuller reference to Jesus, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, while considered by many specialists to contain later interpolations, is nevertheless believed by some scholars to preserve an original comment regarding Jesus as well.
Principle of embarrassment
American philosopher Will DurantWill Durant
William James Durant was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for The Story of Civilization, 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975...
has applied the criterion of embarrassment
Criterion of embarrassment
The criterion of embarrassment, also known as criterion of dissimilarity, is a critical analysis of historical accounts in which accounts embarrassing to the author are presumed to be true because the author would have no reason to invent an embarrassing account about himself...
to the question of Jesus' existence. He argues that if the gospels were entirely imaginary, certain issues might not have been included, such as the competition of the apostles for high places in the kingdom of God, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Jesus to work miracles in Galilee, the references to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, and his despairing cry on the cross. Durant argues that an invented narrative might have presented Jesus in strict conformity with messianic expectations.
Rejection of mythological parallels
Some biblical scholars argue against the idea that early material related to Jesus can be explained with reference to pagan mythological parallels. Paula FredriksenPaula Fredriksen
Paula Fredriksen is a historian and a scholar of religious studies. She held the position of William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University through 2010 and is now the William Goodwin Aurelio Chair Emerita of the Appreciation of Scripture.She earned a Ph.D...
, for example, writes that no serious work places Jesus outside the backdrop of 1st century Palestinian Judaism. Biblical scholarship also generally rejects the concept of homogenous dying and rising gods
Life-death-rebirth deity
A dying god, also known as a dying-and-rising or resurrection deity, is a god who dies and is resurrected or reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Male examples include the ancient Near Eastern and Greek deities Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, as well as...
, the validity of which is often presupposed by advocates of the Jesus myth theory, such as New Testament scholar Robert Price. Tryggve Mettinger, former professor of Hebrew bible at Lund University, is one of the academics who supports the "dying and rising gods" construct, but he argues that Jesus does not fit the wider pattern.
Christian apologist Edwin Yamauchi argues that past attempts to equate elements of Jesus' biography with those of mythological figures have not sufficiently taken into account the dates and provenance of their sources. Edwyn R. Bevan and Chris Forbes argue that proponents of the theory have even invented elements of pagan myths to support their assertion of parallelism between the life of Jesus and the lives of pagan mythological characters. For example, David Ulansey argues that the purported equivalence of Jesus' virgin birth with Mithras' origin fails because Mithras emerged fully grown, partially clothed, and armed from a rock, possibly after it had been inseminated. S. G. F. Brandon
S. G. F. Brandon
Samuel George Frederick Brandon was a British priest and scholar of comparative religion. He became professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester in 1951.-Biography:Brandon was a graduate of the University of Leeds...
and others argue that the very idea that early Christians would consciously incorporate pagan myths into their religion is "intrinsically most improbable," as evidenced by the strenuous opposition that Paul encountered from other Christians for even his minor concessions to Gentile believers. However Marvin Meyer, Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University, identifies a number of similarities, and says that the resemblance between Christianity and Mithraism is close enough to make Christian apologists scramble to invent creative theological explanations to account for the similarities.
Further information
Although virtually all biblical scholars agree that Jesus did exist, Joseph Hoffmann has stated that the issue of historicity of Jesus has been long ignored due to theological interests. The New Testament scholar Nicholas PerrinNicholas Perrin
Nicholas Perrin is a scholar of New Testament and early Christianity. He is currently Associate Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, Illinois...
has argued that since most biblical scholars are Christians, a certain bias is inevitable, but he does not see this as a major problem. Donald Akenson
Donald Akenson
Donald Harman Akenson is a historian and author.Akenson received his B.A. from Yale University and his doctorate from Harvard University. He is Professor of History at Queen's University and Beamish Research Professor at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, and Senior Editor...
, Professor of Irish Studies in the department of history at Queen's University has argued that, with very few exceptions, the historians of Yeshua have not followed sound historical practices. He has stated that there is an unhealthy reliance on consensus, for propositions, which should otherwise be based on primary sources, or rigorous interpretation. He also holds that some of the criteria being used are faulty. He says that, the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars are employed in institutions whose roots are in religious beliefs. Because of this, more than any other group in present day academia, biblical historians are under immense pressure to theologize their historical work. It is only through considerable individual heroism, that many biblical historians have managed to maintain the scholarly integrity of their work. John Meier
John P. Meier
John Paul Meier is a Biblical scholar and Catholic priest. He attended St. Joseph's Seminary and College , Gregorian University [Rome] , and the Biblical Institute [Rome]...
, Professor of theology at University of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame du Lac is a Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, an unincorporated community north of the city of South Bend, in St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States...
, has said "...people claim they are doing a quest for the historical Jesus when de facto they’re doing theology, albeit a theology that is indeed historically informed..." Dale Allison
Dale Allison
Dale C. Allison is a Christian theologian who currently serves as Errett M. Grable Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Prior to joining Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1997, Allison served on the faculties of Texas Christian University...
, Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, founded in 1794, is a graduate theological institution associated with the Presbyterian Church USA. It is located in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and houses one of the largest theological libraries in the nation...
, too says, "...We wield our criteria to get what we want...We all see what we expect to see and what we want to see...." However, the Old Testament scholar Bertil Albrektson has stated that a great many biblical scholars do not accept any creed as the foundation of their work and they do in fact honestly try to investigate scientifically the basic documents of Christianity in the same way as other texts from antiquity.
See also
- Jesus Christ in comparative mythologyJesus Christ in comparative mythologyThe study of Jesus from a mythographical perspective is the examination of the narrative of Jesus, the Christ of the gospels, Christian theology and folk Christianity as a central part of Christian mythology....
- Bible conspiracy theoryBible conspiracy theoryA Bible conspiracy theory is any conspiracy theory that posits that much of what is known about the Bible is a deception created to suppress some secret, ancient truth...
- Biblical criticismBiblical criticismBiblical criticism is the scholarly "study and investigation of Biblical writings that seeks to make discerning judgments about these writings." It asks when and where a particular text originated; how, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances it was produced; what influences were at work...
- Christian mythologyChristian mythologyChristian mythology is the body of myths associated with Christianity. In the study of mythology, the term "myth" refers to a traditional story, often one which is regarded as sacred and which explains how the world and its inhabitants came to have their present form.Classicist G.S. Kirk defines a...
- PanbabylonismPanbabylonismPanbabylonism is a school of thought within Assyriology and Religious Studies that considers the Hebrew Bible and Judaism as directly derived from Babylonian culture and mythology...
- The Bible and historyThe Bible and historyThe Bible from a historical perspective, includes numerous fields of study, ranging from archeology and astronomy to linguistics and methods of comparative literature. The Bible may provide insight into pursuits, including but not limited to; our understanding of ancient and modern culture,...
- The God Who Wasn't ThereThe God Who Wasn't ThereThe God Who Wasn't There is a 2005 independent documentary written and directed by Brian Flemming. The documentary questions the existence of Jesus, examining evidence that supports the Christ myth theory against the existence of a historical Jesus, as well as other aspects of Christianity.- Jesus...
- Positive ChristianityPositive ChristianityPositive Christianity was a slogan of Nazi propaganda adopted at the NSDAP congress 1920 to express a worldview which is Christian, non-confessional, vigorously opposed to the spirit of "Jewish Materialism", and oriented to the principle of voluntary association of those with a common...
- Race of JesusRace of JesusThe race and appearance of Jesus have been discussed on a number of grounds since early Christianity, although the New Testament includes no description of the physical appearance of Jesus before his death and its narrative is generally indifferent to racial appearances.Despite the lack of direct...
- Acharya S
Further reading
Books and papers- Brunner, ConstantinConstantin BrunnerConstantin Brunner was the pen-name of the German Jewish philosopher Arjeh Yehuda Wertheimer . He was born in Altona . He came from a prominent Jewish family that had lived in the vicinity of Hamburg for generations; his grandfather, Akiba Wertheimer, was chief Rabbi of Altona and Schleswig-Holstein...
. "Criticism", appendix to Our Christ: the revolt of the mystical genius, accessed August 5, 2010. - Case, Shirley Jackson. "The Historicity of Jesus: An Estimate of the Negative Argument", The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1911, pp. 20–42.
- Case, Shirley Jackson. "Jesus' Historicity: A Statement of the Problem", The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1911, pp. 626–628.
- Case, Shirley Jackson. "Recent books on the question of Jesus' existence", The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 15, No. 4, October 1911, pp. 626–628.
- Clemen, Carl. Der geschichtliche Jesus: Eine allgemeinverständliche Untersuchung der Frage: Hat Jesus gelebt, und was wollte er?. Töpelmann, 1911.
- Evans, Elizabeth Edson Gibson. The Christ Myth: A Study, Book Tree 2000; first published 1900.
- Habermas, Gary R.Gary HabermasGary Robert Habermas is an American evangelical Christian apologist, historian, and philosopher of religion. He is a prolific author, lecturer, and debater on the topic of the Resurrection of Jesus...
The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ. College Press, 1996. - Fau, Guy. La fable de Jésus-Christ. Éditions de l'Union rationaliste, 1964.
- Mangasarian, Managasar Mugwiditch. The truth about Jesus. Is he a myth?. Princeton Theological Seminary Library, 1909.
- Alfaric, Prosper. Jésus a-t-il existé?. Coda Publishing 2005; first published 1932.
- Prosper, Alfaric. Le problème de Jésus. Cercle Ernest-Renan, 1954.
- Robertson, John Mackinnon. The Jesus problem; a restatement of the myth theory, 1917.
- Rossington, Herbert J. Did Jesus really live? a reply to The Christ myth, 1911.
- Taylor, RobertRobert Taylor (Radical)Reverend Robert Taylor , was an early 19th century Radical, a clergyman turned freethinker whose "Infidel home missionary tour" was a dramatic incident in Charles Darwin's education, subsequently leaving Charles Darwin with a horrifying memory of "the Devil's Chaplain" as a warning of the dangers...
. Syntagma of the Evidences of the Christian Religion. London 1828. - Taylor, RobertRobert Taylor (Radical)Reverend Robert Taylor , was an early 19th century Radical, a clergyman turned freethinker whose "Infidel home missionary tour" was a dramatic incident in Charles Darwin's education, subsequently leaving Charles Darwin with a horrifying memory of "the Devil's Chaplain" as a warning of the dangers...
. The Diegesis: Being a Discovery of the Origin, Evidences, and Early History of Christianity. A. Kneeland 1834; composed while Taylor was in Oakham Goal after being convicted of blasphemy, 1829. - Telford, John and Barber, Benjamin Aquila. The London quarterly review, volume 4, 1912, p. 191.
- Troeltsch, ErnstErnst TroeltschErnst Troeltsch was a German Protestant theologian and writer on philosophy of religion and philosophy of history, and an influential figure in German thought before 1914...
. Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu für den Glauben. Mohr, 1911. - Zindler, Frank R. The Jesus the Jews Never Knew. American Atheist Press, 2003.
Debates
- Australian Broadcasting Company (2005–2006). Jesus–History or Myth?, debate organized by ABC between David H. Lewis—drawing on the work of G.A. Wells—and William LoaderBill LoaderWilliam Ronald George "Bill" Loader is a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia and a professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia....
, December 2005–May 2006, accessed June 18, 2010. - Humphreys, Kenneth and Holding, J. P.J. P. HoldingJames Patrick Holding is a Christian apologist best known for Tekton Education and Apologetics Ministry, a website cataloguing Holding's articles addressing current apologetical issues...
"Did Jesus Exist?", Premier Christian RadioPremier Christian RadioPremier Christian Radio is a British Christian radio station wholly owned by the charity Premier Christian Media Trust.Premier Christian Radio broadcasts Christian programming including news, debate, teachings and Christian music to London and the surrounding areas.It operates on three frequencies...
, a live radio debate, accessed June 18, 2010. - Barker, DanDan BarkerDan Barker is a prominent American atheist activist who served as a Christian preacher and musician for 19 years but left Christianity in 1984.-Biography:...
and Forbes, Chris. "Jesus: Man or Messiah?", a moderated live debate, accessed June 18, 2010. - Price, Robert M.Robert M. PriceRobert McNair Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, including...
and Boyd, Greg. "Jesus: Legend, Teacher, Critic, or Son of God?", a moderated live debate, accessed June 18, 2010.
Other external links
- Barker, Dan. "Debunking the Historical Jesus", Freedom from Religion Foundation, January 30, 2006, accessed August 5, 2010.
- Carrier, RichardRichard CarrierRichard Cevantis Carrier is an American historian. He is best known for his writings on Internet Infidels, otherwise known as the Secular Web, where he served as Editor-in-Chief for several years....
. "Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity", infidels.org, accessed August 5, 2010. - Carrier, RichardRichard CarrierRichard Cevantis Carrier is an American historian. He is best known for his writings on Internet Infidels, otherwise known as the Secular Web, where he served as Editor-in-Chief for several years....
. Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels (1997) accessed May 21, 2011 - Carrier, RichardRichard CarrierRichard Cevantis Carrier is an American historian. He is best known for his writings on Internet Infidels, otherwise known as the Secular Web, where he served as Editor-in-Chief for several years....
. The Formation of the New Testament Canon (2000) accessed May 21, 2011 - Carrier, RichardRichard CarrierRichard Cevantis Carrier is an American historian. He is best known for his writings on Internet Infidels, otherwise known as the Secular Web, where he served as Editor-in-Chief for several years....
. "The Date of the Nativity in Luke" (5th ed., 2006) accessed May 21, 2011 - Craig, William LaneWilliam Lane CraigWilliam Lane Craig is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion, specifically the existence of God and the defense of Christian theism...
. "The Evidence For Jesus", leaderu.com. accessed June 18, 2010. - Habermas, GaryGary HabermasGary Robert Habermas is an American evangelical Christian apologist, historian, and philosopher of religion. He is a prolific author, lecturer, and debater on the topic of the Resurrection of Jesus...
. The Historical Jesus", garyhabermas.com, accessed August 5, 2010. - Holding, James Patrick. "Did Jesus exist?", tektonics.com, accessed June 18, 2010.
- Murphy, Derek. "Crash Course on the Literary Jesus", Holy Blasphemy, accessed March 2, 2011.