Christ myth theory

Christ myth theory
The Resurrection of Christ by Noel Coypel (1700). Many Christ myth theorists see this as one of a number of stories about dying and rising gods.
Description	Jesus Christ never existed as a physical historical figure, but is a myth or incorporeal character created by the early Christian community.
Early proponents	Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809) Constantin-François Volney (1757–1820) Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) Albert Kalthoff (1850–1906) William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934) J. M. Robertson (1856–1933) Thomas Whittaker (1856–1935) Arthur Drews (1865–1935)
Modern proponents	G. A. Wells, Alvar Ellegård, Robert M. Price, Richard Carrier, Earl Doherty
Subjects	Historical Jesus, Early Christianity, Ancient history

The Christ myth theory (also known as Jesus mythicism, the Jesus myth theory and the nonexistence hypothesis) is the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was not a physical historical person, but is a fictional, mythological or solely incorporeal character created by the early Christian community. Some proponents also argue that events or sayings associated with the figure of Jesus in the New Testament may have been drawn from one or more individuals who actually existed, but that none of them were in any sense the founder of Christianity. During the early twentieth century, R. H. Charles (archdeacon of Westminster from 1919 until his death in 1931) showed that some sayings of Jesus were borrowed from the literature of intertestamental pseudopigrapha and produced parallels.

Both conservative Christian scholar Graham Stanton and agnostic Bible scholar Bart Ehrman have asserted that virtually all scholars involved with historical Jesus research believe his existence can be established using documentary and other evidence; however, scholars such as Paula Fredriksen, Robert Funk and E. P. Sanders hold that much of the material about him in the New Testament should not be taken at face value as it is driven by theological agendas. Critics skeptical of the existence of a historical Jesus believe that Christian influence and bias (conscious or unconscious) has extended far outside the walls of formal Christianity. For example, atheist activist and Bible scholar Hector Avalos speaks of an "ecclesiastical-academic complex" which he believes has widely contaminated scholarship even in non-Christian academic institutions which nonetheless have a culturally Christian background or roots in religious institutions.

The history of the Christ myth theory can be traced to the French Enlightenment thinkers Constantin-François Volney and Charles François Dupuis in the 1790s. Notable proponents include Bruno Bauer; William Benjamin Smith; John Mackinnon Robertson; Arthur Drews; Paul-Louis Couchoud in the 20th century.

The Christ-myth theory was refuted in the second edition of Albert Schweitzer's book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. The first edition of this book was primarily devoted to establishing that Jesus had apocalyptic beliefs, anticipating an imminent cataclysmic end of the world. This understanding of Jesus was noted for being equally as embarrassing to liberal Christianity as to traditional Christianity. The second edition (not translated into English until 2001) offered a strong refutation of the Christ-myth theory.

The best-known recent proponents of mythicism are Bible scholar Robert Price, German historian George Wells (who slightly retracted his position late in life), mythicist-popularizer Earl Doherty, and historian Richard Carrier.

The idea has come to modern public attention through the work of many writers associated with skepticism and secularism although not all are overt proponents of the theory. Richard Dawkins states that the case for a purely mythical Christ should be aired more widely than it has, though he is not fully convinced of the theory. French atheist philosopher Michel Onfray argues for a wholly fictional Jesus in The Atheist Manifesto. On the other hand, Michael Shermer's Skeptic magazine has run a few articles by Tim Callahan arguing for the historicity of Jesus.

Arguments used to support the theory emphasize the absence of extant reference to Jesus during his lifetime and the scarcity of non-Christian reference to him in the 1st century. Special attention has been drawn to the absence of any mention of Jesus in Philo's historical writings about Israel.

Some proponents contend that Christianity emerged organically from Hellenistic Judaism and draws on perceived parallels between the biography of Jesus and those of Greek, Egyptian, and other gods, especially those figuring in myths about dying and rising deities. Attention to such parallels was heavily influenced by James Frazer's multi-volume work The Golden Bough; the parallels have even been acknowledged by Christian apologists such as C. S. Lewis. The strength of these parallels has been recently challenged by other religion scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith, a scholar of comparative religion, and Dag Øistein Endsjø.

Since the publication of the 2nd edition of Schweitzer's Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1926, virtually no major New Testament scholar has offered a refutation of the Christ-myth hypothesis until the publication in 2012 of Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth which generated a flurry of online responses. Several of Ehrman's earlier books had been very popular in humanist and secularist circles, but as Ehrman predicted this book was criticized by both atheists and fundamentalist Christians, most notably by Richard Carrier on his blog.

Context

Jesus

"Cristo crucificado" by Diego Velázquez (c. 1632). Tradition dates the crucifixion of Jesus to around 30 CE.

Further information: Chronology of Jesus, Jesus and history, and Origins of Christianity

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 administration 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 surviving Christian writings, the letters of Paul of Tarsus, date from 20 to 30 years after the dates given for the death of Jesus. Paul was not a companion of Jesus, White writes, nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus before his death. Although internal evidence shows that Paul existed and wrote his letters during the first century, the earliest surviving extant manuscripts of his letters date from the late-second century.

Jesus incorporeal within early Christianity

During the first three centuries some Christian sects claimed Jesus Christ did not exist as a physical being and was considered to be incorporeal. Docetists held the view that Jesus Christ only seemed to exist (their name was derived from the Greek word dokes, meaning "to seem"). To the Docetists Jesus existed as an incorporeal phantasm, a pure spirit and hence could not physically die.

Marcion of Sinope (c.100-c.160) promoted the doctrine that "Jesus did not really take human flesh. He was not even born, but simply appeared on earth during the reign of Tiberius. He was a celestial being with the appearance of a human body." To Marcion there was a contrast between Yahweh, the Evil God of the Old Testament and the Good God of the New Testament who sent his son Jesus to redeem mankind. Marcion believed that matter was evil and spirit was good and that was why he rejected the physical substance of Christ.

Because Jesus was considered to be incorporeal by some Christian groups, Basilides promoted the idea that Simon of Cyrene substituted Jesus at the crucifixion, and that Jesus himself took the form of Simon, and stood by and laughed at them.

Definition of the theory

Further information: Jesus Christ in comparative mythology

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. Biblical scholars Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd break the spectrum of opinion into four positions; they call the first three the "legendary-Jesus thesis," namely that the picture of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is mostly or entirely historically inaccurate. Mythicists do not agree on a single theory of the actual origins of Christianity.

1. 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 Bultmann and Burton Mack.

Pauline epistles

Paul, 1410s (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

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 allegedly 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.

Argument from silence

Proponents of the Christ myth theory often argue that if the Gospel account was historically accurate then there should be non-Christian sources that corroborate the events of Jesus' life. However, as Biblical scholar L. Michael White writes, 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 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, thought to have been 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.

Several non-Christian writers are often brought forward as evidence: Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Thallus, and Pliny the Younger. Christ Myth theory supporters point out that all these sources are written decades after the supposed events. Only Josephus and Tacitus appear to have any clear reference to the Gospel Jesus, and only Josephus used the name "Jesus" rather than the title "Christ" and was actually written in the 1st century CE.

Josephus

Further information: Josephus on Jesus

Louis Feldman argues that the writings of the 1st century Romano-Jewish historian Josephus (37 – c.100) contain two references to Jesus. 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; however several scholars have pointed out the end of the passage seems to identify this Jesus as the son of Damneus and that he was made high priest. It has also been pointed out this account dates the event to c.64 CE while the accounts regarding the death of James given by Hegesippus, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Early Christian tradition all date the event to c70 CE.

Two manuscripts located in the Bibliothèque nationale de France by John of Damascus entitled "On the Orthodox Faith" contain references to Josephus describing the appearance of Jesus: "...since also Josephus the Jew, as some say... records in the same way that the Lord appeared with joined eyebrows, beautiful eyes, a long aspect [or face], both humped over and well grown."; this passage is no longer included in current translations of John of Damascus. Andrew of Crete added that Josephus "also describes the appearance of the Mother of God", , showing that Christian interpolations existed within the manuscripts of Josephus prior to the eleventh century.

During the seventeenth century it was "alleged that Thomas Gale of Cambridge had large Greek fragments of Josephus not in the textus receptus: we do not know what became of them, and we are left to wonder whether their suppression was not deliberate."

The fuller reference to Jesus contained in our existing manuscripts, the famous and disputed passage known as the Testimonium Flavianum, considered by many specialists to contain later interpolations, is nevertheless believed by some scholars to preserve an original comment regarding Jesus as well, although there has been no consensus on which portions of it have been altered, or to what degree, with different scholars presenting their own independent versions of the Testimonium.

John Remsburg in his 1909 book The Christ presents many notable scholars of his day such as Rev. Dr. Giles, Rev. S. Baring-Gould, Dr. Chalmers, Dean Milman, Canon Farrar, Theodor Keim, Adolph Hausrath, Rev. Dr. Hooykaas, and Alexander Campbell, who rejected the Testimonium Flavianum in whole or in part. Of the phrase "who was called the Christ" he says: "(n)early all the authorities that I have quoted reject it" and claims "(t)o identify the James of Josephus with James the Just, the brother of Jesus, is to reject the accepted history of the primitive church which declares that James the Just died in 69 A.D., seven years after the James of Josephus was condemned to death by the Sanhedrin." Remsburg then states "The fact that the early fathers, who were acquainted with Josephus, and who would have hailed with joy even this evidence of Christ's existence, do not cite it, while Origen expressly declares that Josephus has not mentioned Christ, is conclusive proof that it did not exist until the middle of the third century or later."

Similarly in The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912) Arthur Drews stated: "(i)n the edition of Origen published by the Benedictines it is said that there was no mention of Jesus at all in Josephus before the time of Eusebius (about 300 A.D., Ecclesiast. Hist., 1, 11). Moreover, in the sixteenth century Vossius had a manuscript of the text of Josephus in which there was not a word about Jesus" as proof that both the "who was called Christ" phrase and the Testimonium Flavianum were interpolations.

Several scholars have pointed out that even if the "who was called Christ" phrase was genuine there are still many interpretations that make it useless as evidence. Drews in The Witness to the Historicity of Jesus says "brother" could have just mean the James referred to here belonged to a sect that venerated a Messiah called Jesus. Similarly Mason in Josephus and the New Testament admits that Christ simply means "wetted" or anointed, and this was the practice by which kings and high priests of Israel were installed (per Exodus 29:9 and 1 Samuel 10:1), and this could have simply been a nickname rather than a title. Logically this means that the "who was called Christ" could refer to Jesus son of Damneus and have no connection to the Jesus of the Bible.

G. A. Wells has noted that the Testimonium was unknown to Origen, stating "Origen could not have known it because in his polemic against Celsus he professes admiration for Josephus 'although he did not believe in Jesus as Christ', whereas in the interpolated passage [the Testimonium] Josephus is made expressly to say of Jesus 'he was the Christ'." Wells further observed that "Origen's comments on Josephus' mention of James do not square with the passage on James from the Antiquities of the Jews," adding "the passage about James that is in the extant manuscripts of Josephus does not link his murder with the siege of Jerusalem."

Contemporary Biblical scholars like John P. Meier argue part of the reason why the passages about Christianity in Josephus are authentic is because they exist in all relevant manuscripts – Clare K. Rothschild (Associate Professor of Theology at Lewis University) has censured this argument on the basis that "the earliest manuscript dates from the eleventh century", the Ambrosianus 370 (F 128) being the earliest; preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Clare Rothschild has also cited the account by J. Spencer Kennard, who wrote "that Thomas Gale of Cambridge had large Greek fragments of Josephus not in the textus receptus: we do not know what became of them, and we are left to wonder whether their suppression was not deliberate."

Philo of Alexandria

Further information: Philo

Just as apologists have their list of sources, Mythicists have their list of sources which, if one assumes the Gospels' account is reasonably accurate, should have recorded information about Jesus but didn't. This list is often a variant of the list produced by John Remsburg in 1909. One source on this list is Philo of Alexandria, about whom Remsburg writes:

Philo was born before the beginning of the Christian era, and lived until long after the reputed death of Christ. He wrote an account of the Jews covering the entire time that Christ is said to have existed on earth. He was living in or near Jerusalem when Christ's miraculous birth and the Herodian massacre occurred. He was there when Christ made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He was there when the crucifixion with its attendant earthquake, supernatural darkness and resurrection of the dead took place——when Christ himself rose from the dead and in the presence of many witnesses ascended into heaven. These marvelous events which must have filled the world with amazement, had they really occurred, were unknown to him. It was Philo who developed the doctrine of the Logos, or Word, and although this Word incarnate dwelt in that very land and in the presence of multitudes revealed himself and demonstrated his divine powers, Philo saw it not.

Apologists who acknowledge the issue with Philo point out that he lived in Alexandria, and the actual Jesus may have been so minor at that time that Philo simply missed him. Some Christ Myth supporters point out that in Philo's Embassy to Gaius (c. 40 CE), in addition to claiming that he was part of an embassy sent by the Alexandrian Jews to Emperor Caligula regarding his plans to erect a statue of himself in the temple of Jerusalem (showing that he and other Alexandrians were aware of major events in both Rome and Jerusalem), he writes about the cruel and poor leadership of Pontius Pilate for a full chapter and yet there is not one mention of Jesus. They also point out that his On Providence seems to indicate that Philo did personally visit Jerusalem near the end of his life.

Other Christ mythers point out that in Flaccus IV (c39 CE) Philo talks about Carabbas whose treatment by his tormentors eerily mirrors that of Jesus in Matthew:

Flaccus IV; Philo

Gospel of Matthew

(36) There was a certain madman named Carabbas ... this man spent all his days and nights naked in the roads, minding neither cold nor heat, the sport of idle children and wanton youths; (37) and they, driving the poor wretch as far as the public gymnasium, and setting him up there on high that he might be seen by everybody, flattened out a leaf of papyrus and put it on his head instead of a diadem, and clothed the rest of his body with a common door mat instead of a cloak and instead of a scepter they put in his hand a small stick of the native papyrus which they found lying by the way side and gave to him; (38) and when, like actors in theatrical spectacles, he had received all the insignia of royal authority, and had been dressed and adorned like a king, the young men bearing sticks on their shoulders stood on each side of him instead of spear-bearers, in imitation of the bodyguards of the king, and then others came up, some as if to salute him, and others making as though they wished to plead their causes before him, and others pretending to wish to consult with him about the affairs of the state. (39) Then from the multitude of those who were standing around there arose a wonderful shout of men calling out Maris!; and this is the name by which it is said that they call the kings among the Syrians; for they knew that Agrippa [King Herod of the Jews] was by birth a Syrian, and also that he was possessed of a great district of Syria of which he was the sovereign;

27:26 Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified. 27:27 Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers. 27:28 And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe. 27:29 And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!

Mythological parallels

While the idea that the story of Jesus had mythological parallels can be traced as far back as Celsus (c. 180 CE) actual modern scholarship on the idea goes only back to Volney and Dupuis. However, due to the quality of the material then available various parallels to dying and rising gods were made that later scholarship showed didn't exist.

However, in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell advanced the theory that a single myth stood behind the stories of Krishna, Buddha, Apollonius of Tyana, Jesus and other hero stories. In his later The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology Campbell stated "(i)t is clear that, whether accurate or not as to biographical detail, the moving legend of the Crucified and Risen Christ was fit to bring a new warmth, immediacy, and humanity, to the old motifs of the beloved Tammuz, Adonis, and Osiris cycles."

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.

Some biblical scholars argue against the idea that early material related to Jesus can be explained with reference to pagan mythological parallels. Paula Fredriksen, 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 Christ 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.

The solar deity connection

Volney and Dupuis were the first modern scholars to claim a connection between Jesus and previous solar deities. However, later scholarship showed that various details required for these connections were flawed due to the lack of available accurate information on which to base the theories. In particular, the December 25 date for Jesus' birth was found to have not been part of the original oral tradition but rather an imperial decree made in 334 CE.

In fact, before this decree there was a great deal of debate regarding exactly when Jesus had been born. Some held it was January 6 (the actual birthday of Osiris), while others using Luke's reference to shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night stated that meant that it had to be somewhere between March and November. Tertullian and Hippolytus of Rome held for March 25, while Clement of Alexandria argued for May 20.

However, despite the evidence of the December 25 date being added several centuries after external evidence for the Gospel birth story of Jesus existing (c. 180), this, along with other controversial and debated claims (such as the conception of Horus as outlined in the Myth of Osiris and Isis), is still presented by some supporters of the Christ Myth theory as valid evidence such as demonstrated by the works of Acharya S and the movie Zeitgeist (2007).

Some scholars have noted the similarity between the name Jesus and the British solar deity, Hesus (also known as Esus, Eisu or Iesu) known from a relief of 75 AD, inscriptions and altars where he is depicted as a woodcutter. It was claimed that he was worshiped by druids through human sacrifice of hanging people on trees. Richard Williams Morgan suggested that the Britons only ever worshiped one God, and the Hesus was an aspect of the druidic trinity as described by Procopius as "Hesus, Taranis, Belinus unus tantummodo Deus Unum Deum Dominum universi Druides Solum agnoscunt." It is more likely that the concept of a trinity developed after the entry of Christianity into Britain.

Varieties of Jesus myth theories

Amongst those who maintain that Jesus is essentially a fictional construct, there are a variety of proposed ideas as to the origin of Christian thinking. In an early book Deconstructing Jesus, Robert Price suggests Jesus may be a composite construct based on multiple real people. Many mythicists suggest that Christianity had origins in pagan myths of a dying and rising God.

In particular Earl Doherty in The Jesus Puzzle maintains that Paul did not originally think of Christ as a earthly being at all but as a demi-God who wrestled with demonic powers in a higher realm below the moon but above the clouds. For Doherty, early Christians relied entirely on ecstatic revelations rather than any direct experience of an earthly Jesus. In contrast George Wells suggests Paul may have thought of Jesus as someone who lived nearly a century earlier rather than recently and that the sources for the Christ-myth are largely in Jewish Wisdom-literature rather than in pagan mythology.

History of the concept

18th and 19th centuries

Volney and Dupuis

French philosopher Constantin-François Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney, argued that Jesus was based on an obscure historical figure and solar mythology.

Reexamination of the idea that Jesus was a myth emerged when critical study of the gospels developed during the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The primary forerunners of the Christ myth theory are identified as two French philosophers, Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809) and Constantin-François Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney (1757–1820). [[File:Gros - First Consul Bonaparte (Detail).png|left|thumb|130px|Napoleon Bonaparte may have echoed Volney when he privately questioned the existence of Jesus.

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. 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.

David Strauss

[[File:David Friedrich Strauss 1.jpg|thumb|left|130px|alt=portrait|David Strauss argued that only a small core of bare facts could be known about Jesus, and that the rest was myth. Thompson writes that Strauss's influence on biblical studies was far-reaching;

Bruno Bauer

In 1842 Bruno Bauer's unorthodox views cost him his lectureship at the University of Bonn

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 Christ 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.

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 hypothesis, 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").

Radical Dutch school

Main articles: Radical Criticism and Authorship of the Pauline epistles

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 Pierson, 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 Bough which attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief. This work became the basis of many later authors who argued that the story of Jesus was a fiction created by Christians. Though Frazer himself did not share that view, enough people claimed that 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.

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. 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."

J. M. Robertson

J. M. Robertson (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 BCE.

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

(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 Smith (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.

Arthur Drews

Arthur Drews's public debates were regarded by The New York Times as one of the most remarkable theological discussions since the days of Martin Luther.

The Christ Myth (Die Christusmythe), first published in 1909 by Arthur Drews (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 focused on the question of evidence in The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912), a seminal classic in which Drews laid out the complete review of all the major points discussed in biblical scholarship concerning the Jewish Witnesses (Philo, Justus, Josephus, Talmud); the Roman Witnesses (Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus, "Lucus a non Lucendo"); the Witness of Paul (showing that Paul is no Witness to the historicity, and raising the question of the authenticity of Paul himself); and the Witness of the Gospels.

Drews established the list of the major Christ Myth advocates in another classic, The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present (1926), from the French Volney and Dupuis (18th century) to the Dane Georg Brandes (1925). Drews saw this book as a pendant on the "non-historicity" side to what Albert Schweitzer's Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906) had been for the historicist side.

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, a Marxist Christian exiled by the Bolsheviks, asserted that Drews, "in his capacity as a religious anti-Semite", argued against the historical existence of Jesus "for the religious life of Aryanism."

Lenin accepted Drews's arguments.

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.

Drew's work found fertile soil in the Soviet Union, where Marxist–Leninist atheism was the official doctrine of the state. 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 Couchoud (1879–1959) was four years younger than Albert Schweitzer (b. 1875), and a close contemporary. An expert linguist in classics (Latin and Greek), Couchoud first got a graduate degree in philosophy from the top French elite school Ecole Normale Supérieure of rue d'Ulm (the same one which later produced world-renowned philosophers Henri Bergson and Jean-Paul Sartre).

Couchoud then went to Japan on a scholarship, where he developed a taste for Japanese haiku. At the same time as Albert Schweitzer switched from theology to medicine, Couchoud embarked on medical studies in Paris, to qualify as a French medical doctor. He became the friend of some of the top writers in France, such as Anatole France. He remained active as a man of letters.

Strongly influenced by Arthur Drews's theory of the non-historicity of Jesus, Couchoud developed his idea of Jesus as myth in a series of essays and books, including The Enigma of Jesus (1924) for which anthropologist James Frazer wrote an introduction, followed by The Mystery of Jesus (1925), The First Edition of the Paulina [i.e. Paul's epistles] (1928), The Gospel of Mark Was Written in Latin (1930), Jesus the God Made Man (1937), The Creation of Christ (1939), The Story of Jesus (1944), and The God Jesus (1951). This embroiled him in public controversies with Protestant theologian Maurice Goguel, Catholic theologian Alfred Loisy, and secular (but historicist) historian Charles Guignebert.

Theologian Walter P. Weaver writes that Couchoud rejected as evidence the classically contested passages from Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Turning to the New Testament, Couchoud argued that Paul had had nothing to do with Jesus, and that Mark was the source for Luke and John. Couchoud was one of the first to argue that Mark was originally written in Latin, not in Greek, and that his Gospel was not an historical text but a commentary on early Christian stories and memories. Couchoud further argued that Paul's affirmation of the divinity of Jesus alongside Yahweh (God), suggested that Jesus was not a historical man, as no Jew could have accepted that relationship. For Couchoud, Jesus was a figment of Paul's imagination, the result of a new interpretation of ancient Hebrew texts and a representation of the highest aspiration of the human soul. 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 that Mead, along with Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, and John M. Robertson, was 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 made the distinction between a possible Jesus of history ("Jesus of Nazareth") and the Jesus of the Gospels ("Jesus of Bethlehem") saying that while there was good reason to believe the former existed the latter was most definitely a mythological creation. Regarding Jesus of Nazareth Remsburg stated in the "Silence of Contemporary Writers" chapter that he may have existed but we know nothing about him, and provided a list of over 40 names of "writers who lived and wrote during the time, or within a century after the time" who he felt should have written about Jesus if the Gospels account was reasonably accurate but who did not. This 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 do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one", 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. Recent studies of Allegro's work have given new supporting linguistic evidence and led to calls for his theories to be re-evaluated by the mainstream. In November 2009 The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was reprinted in a 40th anniversary edition with a preface by Jan Irvin, a foreword by Judith Anne Brown, and a 30-page addendum by Prof. Carl A. P. Ruck of Boston University.

21st century

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? (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 and the Gospels to be works of historical fiction. 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 view that 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 Christ 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."

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 diaspora was to show that the Day of Judgment was imminent, messianic 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. 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. 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 Christ 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, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, 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.

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 points out "(w)hat one Jesus reconstruction leaves aside, the next one takes up and makes its cornerstone. Jesus simply wears too many hats in the Gospels – exorcist, healer, king, prophet, sage, rabbi, demigod, and so on. The Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure (...) The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time."

Later on Price states "I am not trying to say that there was a single origin of the Christian savior Jesus Christ, and that origin is pure myth; rather, I am saying that there may indeed have been such a myth, and that if so, it eventually flowed together with other Jesus images, some one of which may have been based on a historical Jesus the Nazorean."

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. Thompson, 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.

Richard Dawkins writes that a serious case can be made that Jesus never existed and it should be more widely discussed, but his own opinion is that Jesus probably existed. D. M. Murdock known as Acharya S (also a B.A. in Classics) revives the early 19th-century theories of Godfrey Higgins and Robert Taylor, and maintains 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. Her views have been challenged by other mythicists such as Richard Carrier. 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. Victor 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. Using the modern John Frum cargo cult as an example Dawkins states

"Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed. (...) John Frum, if he existed at all, did so within living memory. Yet, even for so recent a possibility, it is not certain whether he lived at all."

Films that refer to the issue are The God Who Wasn't There (2005) and Zeitgeist (2007).

The Jesus Project

Further information: Jesus Project

The Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), part of the Center for Inquiry, 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 Christ myth theory itself invites. 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 required to file necessary documentation.

Historical Jesus research and the problem of bias

Although most 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 Perrin 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.

See also

* Criticism of Jesus * Jesus Christ in comparative mythology * Bible conspiracy theory * Biblical criticism * Christian mythology * Panbabylonism * The Bible and history * The God Who Wasn't There - Film documentary arguing mythicism

;Prominent Mythicist Writers (Historicity Deniers) * Charles-François Dupuis * Constantin-François de Volney * Godfrey Higgins * Robert Taylor * Bruno Bauer * Edwin Johnson * Thomas Whittaker * Willem C. Van Manen * G.J.P.J. Bolland * G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga * Elizabeth Edson Evans * Albert Kalthoff * John MacKinnon Robertson * William Benjamin Smith * M. M. Mangasarian * Arthur Drews * Alfred Jeremias * Paul-Louis Couchoud * L. Gordon Rylands * Edouard Dujardin * Joseph Wheless * Alvin Boyd Kuhn * George Albert Wells * Alvar Ellegård * Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy * Thomas L. Thompson * Robert Price * Frank Zindler * Tom Harpur * Earl Doherty * Richard Carrier * Rene Salm ;Prominent Advocates of Historicity of Jesus * [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Reimarus Hermann O. Reimarus

• Thomas Paine
• David Strauss
• Ferdinand Christian Baur
• Ernest Renan
• Robert Ingersoll
• William Wrede
• G.R.S. Mead
• Paul W. Schmiedel
• Albert Schweitzer
• Joseph McCabe
• Shirley Jackson Case
• Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare
• Thomas Kelly Cheyne
• Maurice Goguel
• Claude G. Montefiore
• Alfred Loisy
• Charles Guignebert
• Joseph Klausner
• Robert Eisler
• A.D. Howell Smith
• Archibald Robertson
• Will Durant
• Rudolf Bultmann
• Robert Eisenman
• John Spong
• Hyam Maccoby
• Geza Vermes
• Walter Schmithals
• Gerd Lüdemann
• Bart Ehrman
• R. Joseph Hoffmann

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Further reading

Books and papers

• Brunner, Constantin. "Criticism", appendix to Our Christ: the revolt of the mystical genius, Retrieved 2010-08-05.
• 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. 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, Robert. Syntagma of the Evidences of the Christian Religion. London 1828.
• Taylor, Robert. 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, Ernst. 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 Loader, December 2005–May 2006, Retrieved 2010-06-18.
• Humphreys, Kenneth and Holding, J. P. "Did Jesus Exist?", Premier Christian Radio, a live radio debate, Retrieved 2010-06-18.
• Barker, Dan and Forbes, Chris. "Jesus: Man or Messiah?", a moderated live debate, Retrieved 2010-06-18.
• Price, Robert M. and Boyd, Greg. "Jesus: Legend, Teacher, Critic, or Son of God?", a moderated live debate, Retrieved 2010-06-18.

Other external links

• Barker, Dan. "Debunking the Historical Jesus", Freedom from Religion Foundation, January 30, 2006, Retrieved 2010-08-05.
• Carrier, Richard. "Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity", infidels.org, Retrieved 2010-08-05.
• Carrier, Richard. Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels (1997) Retrieved 2011-05-21
• Carrier, Richard. The Formation of the New Testament Canon (2000) Retrieved 2011-05-21
• Carrier, Richard. "The Date of the Nativity in Luke" (5th ed., 2006) Retrieved 2011-05-21
• Craig, William Lane. "The Evidence For Jesus", leaderu.com. Retrieved 2010-06-18.
• Habermas, Gary. The Historical Jesus", garyhabermas.com, Retrieved 2010-08-05.
• Holding, James Patrick. "Did Jesus exist?", tektonics.com, Retrieved 2010-06-18.
• Murphy, Derek. "Crash Course on the Literary Jesus", Holy Blasphemy, Retrieved 2011-03-02.

External links

• "jesus never existed" Website dedicated to espousing the point of view that Jesus never existed
• Rational Revolution Robert Price's case against historical Jesus
• Religious Tolerance General outline of range of views on Jesus from classical Christian to Jesus a mere man and Jesus entirely mythical
• Washington Post article Ex-Christian Bart Ehrman's defense of Jesus' existence in Washington Post
• Video of Christopher Hitchens discussing "true core" of Jesus myth. Part of debate with Dinesh D'Souza. Discussion of Jesus' historicity begins at 2:45.