Christ myth theory

For discussion of Jesus in a comparative mythological and religious context, see Jesus in comparative mythology. For the body of myths associated with Christianity, see Christian mythology. For the scholarly study of the life of Jesus, see Historical Jesus. For analysis of information supporting the historical existence of Jesus, see Historicity of Jesus and Sources for the historicity of Jesus. For the debate over the validity of stories in the New Testament, see Historical reliability of the Gospels.

Christ myth theory
The Resurrection of Christ by Carl Heinrich Bloch (1875)—some mythicists see this as a case of a Dying-and-rising deity
Description	The story of Jesus of Nazareth is basically a myth. He never existed as an historical person, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels
Early proponents	Thomas Paine (1737–1809) Charles-François Dupuis (1742–1809) Constantin-François Volney (1757–1820) Richard Carlile (1790–1843) Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) Edwin Johnson (1842–1901) Dutch Radical School (1880–1950) Albert Kalthoff (1850–1906) William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934) John Mackinnon Robertson (1856–1933) Thomas Whittaker (1856–1935) Arthur Drews (1865–1935) Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879–1959) Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880–1963)
Modern proponents	George Albert Wells, Tom Harpur, Michael Martin, Thomas L. Thompson, Thomas L. Brodie, Robert M. Price, Richard Carrier, Earl Doherty, Michel Onfray
Subjects	Historical Jesus, Historical reliability of the Gospels, Historicity of Jesus, History of early Christianity

The Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory, Jesus mythicism, or Jesus ahistoricity theory) is the view that "the story of Jesus is a piece of mythology," possessing no "substantial claims to historical fact." Alternatively, in terms given by Bart Ehrman as per his criticism of mythicism, "the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity."

Regarding the history of Jesus, and the origins of Christianity, three stances can be found among mythicists. According to Wells, among others, there may have been an historical Jesus, who may have lived in a dimly remembered past, and was fused with the mythological Christ of Paul. According to Earl Doherty and Richard Carrier, among others, there never was an historical Jesus, only a mythological character, who was historicised in the Gospels. According to Robert Price, among others, we cannot conclude if there was a historical Jesus. And if there was a historical Jesus, close to nothing can be known about him.

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

The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory, supported by few tenured or emeritus specialists in biblical criticism or cognate disciplines. It deviates from the mainstream historical view, which is that while the gospels include many legendary elements, these are religious elaborations added to the accounts of a historical Jesus who was crucified in the 1st-century Roman province of Judea.

Jesus and the origins of Christianity

See also: Jesus in Christianity, Historicity of Jesus, Sources for the historicity of Jesus, Historical Jesus, Quest for the historical Jesus, and Portraits of the historical Jesus

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

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

Mainstream historical view

See also: Textual criticism, Historical criticism, Biblical hermeneutics, and Quest for the historical Jesus

Jesus is being studied by a number of scholarly disciplines, using a variety of textual critical methods. These critical methods, and the quest for the historical Jesus, have led to a demythologization of Jesus, and the mainstream historical view is that while the gospels include mythical or legendary elements, these are religious interpretations of the life and death of a historical Jesus who did live in 1st-century Roman Palestine. While scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts of Jesus, the baptism and the crucifixion are two events in the life of Jesus which are subject to "almost universal assent". According to historian Alanna Nobbs,

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

New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman states that Jesus "certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees," and also states that the existence of Jesus and his crucifixion by the Romans is attested to by a wide range of sources including Josephus and Tacitus.

While there is widespread scholarly agreement on the existence of Jesus as a historical figure, the portraits of Jesus have often differed from each other and from the image portrayed in the gospel accounts.

Traditional and modern Christian views

See also: Christology, Christian apologetics, Christian fundamentalism, Biblical literalism, Evangelicalism, and Liberal theology

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

Christ myth theorists

Most mythicists, like mainstream scholarship, note that Christianity developed within Hellenistic Judaism, which was influenced by Hellenism. Early Christianity, and the accounts of Jesus are to be understood in this context. Departing from mainstream scholarship, mythicists argue that the accounts of Jesus are mostly, or completely, of a mythical nature, questioning the mainstream paradigm of a historical Jesus in the beginning of the 1st century who was deified.

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

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

Some other authors argue for the Jesus agnosticism viewpoint. That is, we cannot conclude if there was a historical Jesus. And if there was a historical Jesus, close to nothing can be known about him. Notable "agnosticists" are Robert Price and Thomas L. Thompson.

Arguments

Overview of main arguments

According to New Testament scholar Robert Van Voorst, most Christ mythicists follow a threefold argument: they question the reliability of the Pauline epistles and the Gospels regarding the historicity of Jesus; they note the lack of information on Jesus in non-Christian sources from the first and early second century; and they argue that early Christianity was syncretistic and mythological from the beginning. More specifically,

• Paul's Jesus is a celestial being, not a historical person, or may have lived in a dimly remembered past – some myhthicists have argued that the Pauline Epistles are from a alter date than usually assumed, and therefore not a reliable source on the life of Jesus. Most mythicists argue that the Pauline epistles are older than the gospels but, aside from a few passages which may have been interpolations, there is a complete absence of any detailed biographical information such as might be expected if Jesus had been a contemporary of Paul, nor do they cite any sayings from Jesus, the so-called argument from silence. Instead, Paul refers to Jesus as an exalted being. Therefore, Paul is probably writing about either a mythical or supernatural entity, a celestial deity, "a savior figure patterned after similar figures within ancient mystery religions" named Jesus; or a historical person who may have lived in a dim past, long before the beginnings of the Common Era.
• The Gospels are not historical records – mythicists argue that although the Gospels seem to present an historical framework, they are not historical records, but theological writings, myth or legendary fiction resembling the Hero archetype. They are based on a variety of sources and influences, including Old Testament writings, Greek Stoic philosophy and the exegetical methods of Philo, and impose "a fictitious historical narrative" on a "mythical cosmic savior figure," weaving together various pseudo-historical Jesus traditions, though there may have been a real historical person, of whom close to nothing can be known.
• No independent eyewitness accounts – No independent eyewitness accounts survive, in spite of the fact that many authors were writing at that time. Early second-century Roman accounts contain very little evidence and may depend on Christian sources.
• Diversity in early Christianity, and parallels with other religions – early Christianity was widely diverse and syncretistic, sharing common philosophical and religious ideas with other religions of the time. Its origins cannot be traced to a single founding group, but must have been rooted in a wider religious movement. It arose in the Greco-Roman world of the first and second century AD, synthesizing Greek and Jewish philosophy of the Second Temple period. Parallels with other religions include the ideas of personified aspects of God, proto-Gnostic ideas, and salvation figures featured in mystery religions, which were often (but not always) a dying-and-rising god.

Pauline epistles

Most scholars view the Pauline letters as essential elements in the study of the historical Jesus, and the development of early Christianity. Yet, scholars have also argued that Paul was a "mythmaker," who gave his own divergent interpretation of the meaning of Jesus, building a bridge between the Jewish and Hellenistic world, thereby creating the faith that became Christianity.

Myhticists agree on the importance of the Pasuline epistles, but argue that those letters actually point into the direction of a celestial or mythical being, or contain no definitive information on an historical Jesus.

Dating

The mainstream view is that the seven undisputed Pauline epistles considered by scholarly consensus to be genuine epistles are generally dated to AD 50–60 and are the earliest surviving Christian texts that include information about Jesus.

Most mythicists agree with this early dating, taking the Pauline Epistles as their point of departure from mainstream scholarship. Some mythicists, though, have questioned the early dating of the epistles, raising the possibility that they represent a later, more developed strand of early Christian thought.

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

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

Lack of biographical information

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

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

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

Celestial being

A 3rd-century fragment of Paul's letter to the Romans

Mainstream view

The Pauline letters incorporate creeds, or confessions of faith, that predate Paul, and give essential information on the faith of the early Jerusalem community around James, 'the brother of Jesus'. New Testament scholar James Dunn states that in 1 Corinthians 15:3 Paul "recites the foundational belief," namely "that Christ died." According to Dunn, "Paul was told about a Jesus who had died two years earlier or so." 1 Corinthians 15:11 also refers to others before Paul who preached the creed.

The Pauline epistles contain elements of a Christ myth and its cultus, such as the Christ hymn of Philippians 2:6–11, which portray Jesus as an incarnated and subsequently exalted heavenly being. These pre-Pauline creeds date to within a few years of Jesus' death and developed within the Christian community in Jerusalem. Scholars view these as indications that the incarnation and exaltation of Jesus was part of Christian tradition a few years after his death and over a decade before the writing of the Pauline epistles.

Mainstream scholars have noted the extent and significance of Jewish belief in a chief angel acting as a heavenly mediator during the Second Temple period, as well as the similarities between Jesus and this chief celestial angel. Ehrman has even gone so far as to argue that Paul regarded Jesus to be an angel, who was incarnated on earth.

Mythicist views

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

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

Jesus lived in a dimly remembered past

Mythicists views

The early Wells, and Alvar Ellegård, have argued that Paul's Jesus may have lived far earlier, in a dimly remembered remote past.

Wells argues that Paul and the other epistle writers—the earliest Christian writers—do not provide any support for the idea that Jesus lived early in the 1st century and that—for Paul—Jesus may have existed many decades, if not centuries, before. According to Wells, the earliest strata of the New Testament literature presented Jesus as "a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past".

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

According to Epiphanius in his Panarion, the 4th century Jewish-Christian Nazarenes (Ναζωραιοι) were originally Jewish converts of the Apostles. Richard Carrier contends that "Epiphanius, in Panarion 29, says there was a sect of still-Torah-observant Christians who taught that Jesus lived and died in the time of Jannaeus, and all the Jewish sources on Christianity that we have (from the Talmud to the Toledot Yeshu) report no other view than that Jesus lived during the time of Jannaeus".

Mainstream criticism

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

The Gospels are not historical records

Main article: The Gospels

Genre

Among contemporary scholars, there is consensus that the gospels are a type of ancient biography, Michael Vines notes that the gospel of Mark may have aspects similar to a Jewish novel, while some scholars have argued that the Gospels are symbolical representations of the Torah, which were written in response to the Roman occupation and the suppression of Jewish religiosity.

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

Hebrew Bible parallels

Some myth proponents note that some stories in the New Testament seem to try to reinforce Old Testament prophecies and repeat stories about figures like Elijah, Elisha, Moses and Joshua in order to appeal to Jewish converts. Price notes that almost all the Gospel-stories have parallels in Old Testamentical and other traditions, concluding that the Gospels are no independent sources for a historical Jesus, but "legend and myth, fiction and redaction".

Greek influences

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

Weaving together various traditions

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

No independent eyewitness accounts

Lack of surviving historic records

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

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

Josephus and Tacitus

Main articles: Josephus on Jesus and Tacitus on Christ

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

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

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

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

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

Other sources

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

Diversity and parallels

See also: Origins of Christianity and Gnosticism

Early Christian diversity points to multiple roots

Early Christianity was wildly diverse, with proto-orthodoxy and "heretical" views like gnosticism alongside each other. According to Mack, various "Jesus movements" existed, whose ideas converged in an early proto-orthodoxy.

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

Robert Price notes that Christianity started among Hellenized Jews, who mixed allegorical interpretations of Jewish traditions with Jewish Gnostic, Zoroastrian, and Mystery Cults elements.

Parallels with other religions

See also: Religious syncretism and Mytheme

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

According to Wells, Doherty, and Carrier, the mythical Jesus was derived from Wisdom traditions, the personification of an eternal aspect of God, who came to visit human beings. Doherty notes that the concept of a spiritual Christ was the result of common philosophical and religious ideas of the first and second century AD, in which the idea of an intermediary force between God and the world were common.

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

Mainstream scholarship disagrees with these interpretations. Many mainstream biblical scholars respond that most of these parallels are either coincidences or without historical basis and/or that these parallels do not prove that a Jesus figure did not live. Christian theologians have cited the mythic hero archetype as a defense of Christian teaching while completely affirming a historical Jesus. Secular academics Kendrick and McFarland have also pointed out that the teachings of Jesus marked "a radical departure from all the conventions by which heroes had been defined".

18th- and 19th-century proponents and influences

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

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

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

German Professor David Strauss

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

German Professor Bruno Bauer

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

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

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

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

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

Early-20th-century proponents

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

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

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

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

German Professor Arthur Drews

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

In 1927, British philosopher Bertrand Russell stated in his lecture Why I Am Not a Christian 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 further develop the idea.

Modern proponents

Paul-Louis Couchoud

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

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

George Albert Wells

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

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

Earl Doherty

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

In a book criticizing the Christ myth theory, New Testament scholar Maurice Casey describes Doherty as "perhaps the most influential of all the mythicists", but one who is unable to understand the ancient texts he uses in his arguments.

Robert M. Price

American New Testament scholar Robert M. Price

American New Testament scholar and former Baptist pastor Robert M. Price (born 1954) has questioned the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), Jesus Is Dead (2007) and The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (2011). In Deconstructing Jesus, Price claims that "the Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure", out of which a broad variety of historical Jesuses can be reconstructed, any one of which may have been the real Jesus, but not all of them together. According to Price, various Jesus images flowed together at the origin of Christianity, some of them possibly based on myth, some of them possibly based on "a historical Jesus the Nazorean". Price admits uncertainty in this regard, writing in conclusion: "There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure". In contributions to The Historical Jesus: Five Views (2009), he acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority. Price notes that "consensus is no criterion" for the historicity of Jesus.

Thomas L. Thompson

Thomas L. Thompson (born 1939), Professor emeritus of theology at the University of Copenhagen, is a leading biblical minimalist of the Old Testament, and regarded as a myrhicist by several authors. In his 2007 book The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, Thompson argues that "the quest for the historical Jesus is besides the point, since the Jesus of the Gospels never existed." According to Thompson, the biblical accounts of both King David and Jesus of Nazareth are not historical accounts, but are mythical in nature and based on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek and Roman literature. Thompson does not draw a final conclusion on the historicity or ahistoricity of Jesus, but notes that New Testament scholars hold that an historical Jesus would be very different from the Christ (or Messiah) with whom Jesus is identified in the Gospel of Mark.

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

Ehrman has criticised Thompson, questioning his qualifications and expertise regarding New Testament research. In a 2012 online article, Thompson defended his qualifications to address New Testament issues. According to Thompson, Jesus is not to be regarded as "the notoriously stereotypical figure of [...] (mistaken) eschatological prophet," as Ehrman does, but is modelled on "the royal figure of a conquering messiah," derived from Jewish writings. Thompson rejected the label of "mythicist," and reiterated his position that the issue of Jesus' existence cannot be determined one way or the other. Thompson disagrees with "the present state of New Testament scholarship [which] is such that an established scholar should present his Life of Jesus, without considering whether this figure, in fact, lived as a historical person." According to Thompson, such assumptions "reflect a serious problem regarding the historical quality of scholarship in biblical studies".

Thomas L. Brodie

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

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

Richard Carrier

Richard Carrier

American independent scholar Richard Carrier (born 1969) reviewed Doherty's work on the origination of Jesus and eventually concluded that the evidence favored the core of Doherty's thesis.Lataster (2014b), p. 614-616 According to Carrier, following Couchoud and Doherty, Christianity started with the belief in a new deity called Jesus, "a spiritual, mythical figure." According to Carrier, this new deity was fleshed out in the Gospels, which added a narrative framework and Cynic-like teachings, and eventually came to be perceived as a historical biography. According to Carrier, for such a person to be considered "the historical Jesus in any pertinent sense", such a person must comply with his definition of a minimal historical Jesus. Carrier argues in his book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt that there is insufficient Bayesian probability, that is evidence, to believe in the existence of Jesus. Furthermore, Carrier argues that the Jesus figure was probably originally known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture which were then crafted into a historical figure to communicate the claims of the gospels allegorically. These allegories then started to be believed as fact during the struggle for control of the Christian churches of the first century. He argues that the probability of Jesus' existence is somewhere in the range from 1/3 to 1/12000 depending on the estimates used for the computation.

Other modern proponents

British academic John M. Allegro

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

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

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

Canadian author Tom Harpur (photo by Hugh Wesley)

Influenced by Massey and Higgins, Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880–1963) argued an Egyptian etymology to the Bible that the gospels were symbolic rather than historic and that church leaders started to misinterpret the New Testament in the third century. Author and ordained priest Tom Harpur dedicated his 2004 book The Pagan Christ to Kuhn, suggesting that Kuhn has not received the attention he deserves since many of his works were self-published. Building on Kuhn's work, Harpur listed similarities among the stories of Jesus, Horus, Mithras, Buddha and others. According to Harpur, in the second or third centuries the early church created the fictional impression of a literal and historic Jesus and then used forgery and violence to cover up the evidence. Harpur's book received a great deal of criticism, including a response book, Unmasking the Pagan Christ: An Evangelical Response to the Cosmic Christ Idea. Fellow mythicist Robert M. Price also wrote a negative review, saying that he did not agree that the Egyptian parallels were as forceful as Harpur thought. In 2007, Harpur published a sequel, Water Into Wine.

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

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

Reception

Popular reception

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

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

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

According to Ehrman, mythicism has a growing appeal "because these deniers of Jesus are at the same time denouncers of religion". According to Casey, mythicism has a growing appeal because of an aversion toward Christian fundamentalism among American atheists.

Scholarly reception

In modern scholarship, the Christ myth theory is a fringe theory and finds virtually no support from scholars.

Lack of support for mythicsm

According to New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, most people who study the historical period of Jesus believe that he did exist and do not write in support of the Christ myth theory. Maurice Casey, theologian and scholar of New Testament and early Christianity, stated that the belief among professors that Jesus existed is generally completely certain. According to Casey, the view that Jesus did not exist is "the view of extremists", "demonstrably false" and "professional scholars generally regard it as having been settled in serious scholarship long ago". In his 1977 book Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels, classical historian and popular author Michael Grant concluded that "modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory". In support of this, Grant quoted Roderic Dunkerley's 1957 opinion that the Christ myth theory has "again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars". At the same time, he also quoted Otto Betz's 1968 opinion that in recent years "no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus—or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary". In the same book, he also wrote:

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

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

Questioning the competence of proponents

Critics of the Christ myth theory question the competence of its supporters. According to Ehrman:

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

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

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

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

Other criticisms

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

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

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

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

Traditional and Evangelical Christianity

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

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

Documentaries

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

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

See also

Christian

• Bible conspiracy theory
• Christian mythology
• Christology
• Criticism of the Bible
• Criticism of Christianity
• Criticism of Jesus
• Gnosticism
• Historical background of the New Testament
• Historical reliability of the Gospels
• Historicity of the Bible
• Jesus in comparative mythology
• John of Gamala
• Josephus on Jesus
• List of Christ myth theory proponents
• List of messiah claimants
• Origins of Christianity
• Quest for the historical Jesus
• Rank-Raglan mythotype
• Sources for the historicity of Jesus
• Tacitus on Christ

Sources

Printed sources

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• Carrier, Richard (2015). "§. Forward §. Afterward". In Lataster, Raphael (ed.). Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists. CreateSpace. pp. iii–xii, 417–422. ISBN 978-1-5148-1442-0. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Couchoud, Paul Louis (1939). The Creation of Christ: An Outline of the Beginnings of Christianity ; Tr. by C. Bradlaugh Bonner. Vol. 1 (original French edition: Jésus, Le Dieu fait Homme, 1937 ed.). London: Watts & Co. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Cross, Frank L.; Livingstone, Elizabeth A., eds. (2005). "Historical Jesus, Quest of the". The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3 ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 779–780. ISBN 978-0-19-280290-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Crossan, John Dominic (1995). Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. HarperOne. ISBN 978-0-06-061662-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Cutner, Herbert Jesus – God, Man or Myth: An Examination of the Evidence. Book Tree, 2000, first published 1950.
• Dawkins, Richard (2006). The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Dickson, John. Jesus: A Short Life. Lion Hudson, 2008.
• Dickson, John. "Facts and friction of Easter", The Sydney Morning Herald, March 21, 2008.
• Doherty, Earl (1995a). "The Jesus Puzzle. Main Articles: Preamble".
• Doherty, Earl (1995c). "The Jesus Puzzle. Main Articles: Part Two: Who was Christ Jesus?".
• Doherty, Earl (1995d). "The Jesus Puzzle. Main Articles: Part Three: The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth".
• Doherty, Earl (1996). "Supplementary Article No. 1: Apollos of Alexandria and the Early Christian Apostolate". The Jesus Puzzle. Archived from the original on November 27, 1999. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• Doherty, Earl (1997). "The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins". Journal of Higher Criticism. 4 (2): 68–102. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Doherty, Earl (1999a). "Was There No Historical Jesus?". The Monthly Newsletter of the Internet Infidels. 4 (4). Feature. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Doherty, Earl (1999b). The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? – Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus. Canadian Humanist Publications. ISBN 978-0-9686014-0-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Doherty, Earl (2000). "The Higher Critical Review: Robert M. Price, Deconstructing Jesus". Journal of Higher Criticism. 7 (1): 126–140. Retrieved October 5, 2017. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Doherty, Earl (2009). Jesus: Neither God Nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus (New edition, Revised and Expanded, Originally published under the title: The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? – Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus ed.). Ottawa: Age of Reason Publications. ISBN 978-0-9689259-2-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Doherty, Earl (2012). The End of an Illusion: How Bart Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" Has Laid the Case for an Historical Jesus to Rest (1st ed.). Age of Reason Publications. ASIN B00A2XN7EQ, Online, Kindle. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link) "New edition with minor revisions of a series hosted on the Vridar blog". March–August 2012. Originally titled: Earl Doherty's Response to Bart Ehrman's Case Against Mythicism.
• Drews, Arthur. Die Christusmythe. Eugen Diederichs, 1910, published in English as The Christ Myth, Prometheus, 1910.
• Dunn, James D. G. "Myth" in Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, & I. Howard Marshall (ed.) Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. InterVarsity, 1992.
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• Dunn, James D. G. (2003), Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, ISBN 978-0-8028-3931-2
• Dunn, James D. G. "Response to Robert M. Price" in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy. The Historical Jesus: Five Views. InterVarsity, 2009.
• Dupuis, Charles François. The Origin of All Religious Worship. Kessinger, 2007, first published 1794.
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• Ehrman, Bart D. (1999). The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ISBN 978-0-19-512639-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ehrman, Bart D. (2003). Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-972712-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ehrman, Bart D. (2005) [2003]. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-518249-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ehrman, Bart D. (2007). Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ehrman, Bart D. (2010). Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them). {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ehrman, Bart D. (2011). Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. HarperOne. ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ehrman, Bart D (2012). Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperOne. ISBN 9780062206442. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ehrman, Bart (2014). How Jesus became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Harper Collins. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ellegård, Alvar (1993). "Theologians as historians". Scandia: Tidskrift för Historisk Forskning (59): 169–204. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Engels, Friedrich. "Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity", Der Sozialdemokrat, May 1882.
• Evans, Craig A. "Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology", Theological Studies, volume 54, 1993.
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• Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Macmillan, 1919.
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• Gerrish, Brian A. "Jesus, Myth, and History: Troeltsch's Stand in the 'Christ-Myth' Debate", The Journal of Religion, volume 55, issue 1, 1975.
• Goguel, Maurice (1926). Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? Translated by Frederick Stephens. New York: D. Appleton & Co. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) (Originally published as Jésus de Nazareth: Mythe ou Histoire (in French). Paris: Payot. 1925.)
• Goguel, Maurice. "Recent French Discussion of the Historical Existence of Jesus Christ," Harvard Theological Review, volume 19, issue 2, 1926, pp. 115–142.
• Graham, Lloyd M., Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, Citadel Press, 1975.
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• Grant, Michael (2004) [1977]. Jesus. Orion. ISBN 978-1-898799-88-7. Reprint of Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (1977) {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Haber, Edyth C. "The Mythic Bulgakov: 'The Master and Margarita' and Arthur Drews's 'The Christ Myth'", Slavic & East European Journal, volume 43, issue 2, 1999.
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• Harpur, Tom (2004). The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers. ISBN 978-0-88762-145-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. W. W. Norton, 2005.
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• King, Karen L. (2011). "Factions, Variety, Diversity, Multiplicity: Representing Early Christian Differences for the 21st Century" (PDF). Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. 23 (3–4): 216–237. doi:10.1163/157006811X608368. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Klausner, Joseph. Jesus of Nazareth. Bloch, 1989; first published 1925.
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• Lataster, Raphael (2014b). "Richard Carrier: On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014; pp. xiv + 696". Journal of Religious History. 38 (4): 614–616. doi:10.1111/1467-9809.12219. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lataster, Raphael (2015a). "Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories – A Brief Pseudo-Bayesian Metacritique of the Sources". Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies. 6 (1): 63–96. ISSN 2155-1723. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lataster, Raphael (2015b). Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists. CreateSpace. ISBN 978-1-5148-1442-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lataster, Raphael (2016). "Review Essay: Bart Ehrman and the Elusive Historical Jesus". Literature & Aesthetics. 26 (1): 181–192. ISSN 2200-0437. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lataster, Raphael (2016a). "It's Official: We Can Now Doubt Jesus' Historical Existence". Think. 15 (43): 65–79. doi:10.1017/s1477175616000117. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Machen, John Gresham. "History and Faith", The Princeton Theological Review, volume 13, issue 3, 1915.
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• Mack, Burton L. (1995). Who wrote the New Testament? The making of the Christian myth. HarperSan Francisco. ISBN 978-0-06-065517-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mack, Burton L. (1997) [1995]. Wie schreven het Nieuwe Testament werkelijk? Feiten, mythen en motieven (in Dutch). Uitgeverij Ankh-Hermes. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Macquarrie, John. The Scope of Demythologizing: Bultmann and His Critics. SCM, 1960.
• Mangasarian, Mangasar Magurditch The Truth About Jesus – Is He a Myth? Chicago: Independent Religious Society, 1909.
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• McClymond, Michael James. Familiar Stranger. Eerdmans, 2004.
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• Metzger, Bruce M. Historical and Literary Studies, Pagan, Jewish, and Christian. Brill 1968.
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• Nikiforov, Vladimir. "Russian Christianity" in James Leslie Houlden (ed.) Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2003.
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• Pérès, Jean-Baptiste. "Grand Erratum: The Non-Existence of Napoleon Proved" in Henry Ridgely Evans. The Napoleon Myth. Open Court, 1827.
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• Price, Robert M. (1999). "Of Myth and Men: A Closer Look at the Originators of the Major Religions – What Did They Really Say and Do?". Free Inquiry. Vol. 20, no. 1. pp. 24–36. {{cite magazine}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Price, Robert M. and Craig, William Lane. "The Craig-Price Debate: Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?", at Ohio State University, The Veritas Forum, 1999.
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• Price, Robert M. (2002). "Christianity, Diaspora Judaism, and Roman Crisis". Review of Rabbinic Judaism. 5 (3): 316–331. doi:10.1163/15700700260430988. ISSN 1568-4857. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Price, Robert M. (2003). The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?. Prometheus Books. ISBN 9781591021216. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Price, Robert M. (2005). "New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash". In Neusner, Jacob; Avery-Peck, Alan J. (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Midrash: Biblical Interpretation in Formative Judaism. Vol. 1. Leiden: Brill. pp. 534–573. ISBN 9789004141667. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Price, Robert M. (2006). The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-four Formative Texts. Signature Books. ISBN 978-1-56085-194-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Price, Robert M. (2010). Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost Gospel Novels. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 978-1-6109-7075-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Price, Robert M. (2011). The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems. American Atheist Press. ISBN 978-1-5788-4017-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Robertson, John M. (1902). A Short History of Christianity. London: Watts & Co. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) (Reprinted (2004) Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing ISBN 0766189090)
• Robertson, John M. Pagan Christs. Watts, 1903.
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• Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. Touchstone, 1967.
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• Solmsen, Friedrich. "George A. Wells on Christmas in Early New Testament Criticism", Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 31, issue 2, 1970.
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• Stanton, Graham (2002) [1989]. The Gospels and Jesus (2 ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199246168. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Stark, Rodney (1997). The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Princeton University Press & Harper. ISBN 978-0060677015. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Taylor, Robert Syntagma of the Evidences of the Christian Religion. Richard Carlile, 1828.
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• Wells, G. A. (1996). The Jesus Legend. Open Court Publishing. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wells, G. A. (1999). The Jesus Myth. Open Court Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8126-9392-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wells, G. A. (1999b). "Earliest Christianity". Secular Web. Internet Infidels. Retrieved October 7, 2017. This article was originally published in The New Humanist Vol. 114, No. 3. Sept 1999, pp. 13–18. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wells, G. A. (2000). "A Reply to J. P. Holding's 'Shattering' of My Views on Jesus and an Examination of the Early Pagan and Jewish References to Jesus". The Secular Web. Internet Infidels. Retrieved August 3, 2010. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wells, G. A. (2004). Can We Trust the New Testament?: Thoughts on the Reliability of Early Christian Testimony. Open Court Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8126-9567-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wells, G. A. (2007). "Jesus, Historicity of". In T. Flynn (ed.). The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Prometheus. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wells, G. A. (2009). Cutting Jesus Down to Size: What Higher Criticism Has Achieved and where it Leaves Christianity. Open Court Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8126-9656-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wells, George A. (August 12, 2011). "Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?". Free Inquiry. Vol. 31, no. 5. {{cite magazine}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wells, George A. (May 24, 2012). "Ehrman on the Historicity of Jesus and Early Christian Thinking". Free Inquiry. Vol. 32, no. 4. {{cite magazine}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Whately, Richard. Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte, Warren F. Draper, 1874; first published 1819.
• Wheless, Joseph. Forgery In Christianity. Knopf, 1930.
• White, L. Michael. From Jesus to Christianity. HarperCollins, 2004.
• Wood, Herbert George. Christianity and the Nature of History. Cambridge University Press, 1934.
• Wright, N. T. "Jesus' Self Understanding," in Davies, Stephen T. et al. The Incarnation. Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Yamauchi, Edwin M. "Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History?", Christianity Today, March 15 and 29, 1974.
• Young, Frances M. (2006). "Prelude: Jesus Christ, foundation of Christianity". In Mitchell, Margaret M.; Young, Frances M (eds.). Origins to Constantine. Vol. Cambridge History of Christianity: 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–34. ISBN 978-0-521-81239-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Zwartz, Barney. "Australians not so sceptical about Jesus, survey finds", The Age, April 7, 2009.

Further reading

Proponents

• George Albert Wells (1975), Did Jesus Exist?
• Earl Doherty (1999), The Jesus Puzzle; republished (2009) as Jesus: Neither God nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus; online
• Robert M. Price (2003), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man
• Robert M. Price (2011), The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems
• Price, Robert M. (2018). Bart Ehrman Interpreted. Pitchstone Publishing.
• Thompson, Thomas L.; Verenna, Thomas S., eds. (2012). "Is this Not the Carpenter?": The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. Equinox. ISBN 978-1-84553-986-3.
• Brodie, Thomas L. (2012). Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery. Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN 978-1-9075-3458-4.
• Richard Carrier (2014). On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN 978-1-909697-35-5.

Scholarly critics

• Van Voorst, Robert E. (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-4368-5.
• Ehrman, Bart D. (2012). Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-220460-8.
• Casey, Maurice (2014). Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths?. Bloomsbury T & T Clark. ISBN 978-0-5672-9458-6.

External links

Overview

• Religious Tolerance General outline of range of views on Jesus from classical Christian to Jesus a mere man and Jesus entirely mythical
• Vridar, WHO’s WHO: Mythicists and Mythicist Agnostics
• Demolishing the historicity of Jesus – A History List of Contemporary and Early proponents of Christ Myth Theory.
• A timeline of Jesus mythicism

Proponents

• Richard Carrier (2012), So...if Jesus Didn’t Exist, Where Did He Come from Then?

Evangelic critics

• James Patrick Holding (2008), Shattering the Christ Myth. Did Jesus Not Exist?