Jesus-Mythos

The Jesus myth hypothesis, also referred to as the Jesus myth theory, the Jesus myth refers to the idea that the mythological aspects of the narrative of Jesus in the gospels indicate that the figure of Jesus is a construct of various forms of ancient mythology, and that there was no historical Jesus. The myth thus parallels the mystery religions of the Roman Empire such as Mithraism and the myths of rebirth deities.

The theory was first proposed by historian Bruno Bauer in the 19th century and was influential in biblical studies during the early 20th century.Vorlage:Fact It has recently been popularized by a number of authors including Earl Doherty, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. However, only very few Biblical scholars and historians of classical antiquity accept this hypothesis.

History of the hypothesis

The term Jesus myth covers a broad range of ideas, but most share the common premise that the narrative of the Gospels portrays a figure who never actually lived. Current theories arose from nineteenth century scholarship on the formation of myth, in the work of writers such as Max Müller and James Frazer. Müller argued that religions originated in mythic stories of the birth, death, and rebirth of the sun. Frazer further attempted to explain the origins of humanity's mythic beliefs in the idea of a "sacrificial king", associated with the sun as a dying and reviving god and its connection to the regeneration of the earth in springtime. Frazer did not doubt the historicity of Jesus, however, stating, "my theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth.... The doubts which have been cast upon the historical reality of Jesus are ... unworthy of serious attention." The later works by George Albert Wells drew on the Pauline Epistles and the lack of early non-Christian documents to argue that the Jesus figure of the Gospels was symbolic, not historical. Earl Doherty proposed that Jewish mysticism influenced the development of a Christ myth, while John M. Allegro proposed that Christianity began as shamanic religion based on the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Most recently Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have popularized the Jesus-myth concept in their book The Jesus Mysteries. Some, including Freke and Gandy, have suggested that the idea that Jesus's existence is legendary is itself as old as the New Testament, pointing to 2 John 1:7, though scholars of the period believe that this passage refers to docetism, the belief that Jesus lacked a genuinely physical body, rather than a belief that Jesus was a completely fabricated figure.

Early proponents

The first scholarly proponent of this theory was probably nineteenth century historian Bruno Bauer, a Hegelian thinker who argued that the true founder of Christianity was an Alexandrian Jew, Philo, who had adapted Judaic ideas to Hellenic philosophy. Bauer's arguments made little impact at the time.Vorlage:Fact Other authors included Edwin Johnson, who argued that Christianity emerged from a combination of liberal trends in Judaism and Gnostic mysticism. Other versions of the theory developed under Bible scholars such as A. D. Loman and G. I. P. Bolland. Loman argued that episodes in Jesus's life, such as the Sermon on the Mount, were fictions written to justify compilations of pre-existing liberal Jewish sayings. Bolland developed the theory that Christianity evolved from Gnosticism and that "Jesus" was a symbolic figure representing Gnostic ideas about God.Vorlage:Fact

By the early twentieth century a number of writers had published arguments in favour of the Jesus-myth theory, ranging from the highly speculative to the more scholarly. These treatments were sufficiently influential to merit several book-length responses by traditional historians and New Testament scholars. The most influential of the books arguing for a mythic Jesus was Arthur Drews's The Christ-Myth (1909) which brought together the scholarship of the day in defence of the idea that Christianity had been a Jewish Gnostic cult that spread by appropriating aspects of Greek philosophy and Frazerian death-rebirth deities. This combination of arguments became the standard form of the mythic Christ theory. In Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), Bertrand Russell stated that even if Jesus existed, which he doubted, the public does not "know anything" about him. Some like Joseph Wheless in his 1930 Forgery In Christianity went even further and claimed there was an active effort to forge documents to make the myth seem historical beginning as early as the 2nd century.

While aspects of the theory were influential, most mainstream scholars at the time rejected the notion that "Jesus" was little more than a fiction, arguing that the Gospels, the Pauline epistles, and the Acts of the Apostles contained some reliable information about the events they describe.

Recent proponents

In recent years, the Jesus-myth hypothesis has had few scholarly proponents in the fields of biblical scholarship or historical studies. It had been advanced by George Albert Wells, Emeritus Professor of German, in The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth. In his latest works, Wells has somewhat moderated his views, allowing for the possibility that certain elements of the Gospel traditions might be based on a historical figure from the first-century Palestine.

The hypothesis has also been advocated by the writers Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, who are both popular writers on mysticism, with Gandy having an MA in ancient pagan mystery religions, in their books The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus and the Lost Goddess. Another proponent is Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle), who has a degree in Ancient History and Classical Languages.

There are many different views regarding the nature of the early texts. Doherty suggests that Jesus is a historicised mythic figure created out of the Old Testament, whom the early Christians experienced in visions. Joseph Atwill, on the other hand, argues that Jesus is the deliberate and malefic creation of powerful Romans of the family of Vespasian, who sought to divide and destroy Judaism. In Atwill's view the historical person behind Jesus is Vespasian's son Titus, and the gospels are a complex allegory of his conquest of Judea.

Advocates of the Jesus-myth theory do not agree on the dating and meaning of the early Christian texts, with advocates like Doherty holding to traditional scholarly dating that puts the gospels toward the end of the first century, and others, like Hermann Detering (The Fabricated Paul), arguing that the early Christian texts are largely forgeries and products of the middle to late second century.

Presently, New Testament scholars and historians consider the question as resolved in favour of Jesus' historicity, that is, that the weight of historical evidence suggests that Jesus of Nazareth was an actual person rather than a composite of more than one person or a completely made-up myth.

Specific arguments of the hypothesis

Early non-Christian references to Jesus

Three early writers are typically cited in support of the actual existence of Jesus: Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius. Proponents of the view of Jesus as myth typically dispute the accuracy of one or more of these sources. Many proponents of the Jesus-myth hypothesis highlight the lack of documents, other than Christian documents, that make reference to Jesus until the end of the first century and note the survival of writings by a number of Roman and Jewish commentators and historians who wrote in the first century but which lack mention of events described in the Gospels, taking this as evidence that Jesus was invented later. Opponents of the hypothesis argue that arguments from silence are unreliable and point to the existing historical sources, both Christian and non-Christian alike.

Earliest recorded references

The earliest references to Jesus are by Christian writers (in the New Testament and its Apocrypha). Of the few references outside of Christian documents:

• The Antiquities of Josephus (37 CE - c. 100 CE), written in 93 CE contain two references to Jesus. The text comprising the first reference, the Testimonium Flavianum, states that Jesus was the founder of a sect, but the authenticity of the passage is disputed. Grammatical analysis indicates significant differences with the passages that come before and after it, while some phrases would be inconsistent with a non-Christian author like Josephus. This leads most scholars to believe the Jesus reference was either altered or added by persons other than Josephus. However, several scholars have proposed that the core witness to a Jesus as a leader of a sect is reliable. The second reference states that in the year 62 CE, the newly appointed high priest "convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought them a man called James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned. The fact Josephus describes John the Baptist in clear, unsensational terms, in a passage that is not usually disputed, but, arguably, does not make clear mention of Jesus, is also seen by some people as evidence he was not aware of Jesus, at least as a figure of any striking importance.
• Tacitus in the context of the Great Fire of Rome refers to "some people, known as Christians, whose disgraceful activities were notorious. The originator of that name, Christus, had been executed when Tiberius was emperor by the order of Pontius Pilate. But this deadly cult, though checked for a time, was now breaking out again."
• Suetonius, who wrote in the second century, made reference to unrest among the Jews of Rome in 41 AD caused by "Chrestus". This has been commonly identified with Jesus Christ, though in this case it must refer to indirect posthumous effects and gives no biographical information.
• There are references to Christians in the letters of Pliny the Younger, but they give no specific biographical information about Jesus. However the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan demonstrates that by about 110 CE there were significant numbers of people who would not recant their faith in Christ even under torture or the threat of death, that this was a significant problem for the Imperial authorities, and that neither Pliny nor Trajan suggest that Jesus was not a real historical figure, even though they were keen to stop this "perverse religious cult, carried to extremes."
• The Babylonian Talmud contains several references that have been traditionally identified with Jesus of Nazareth. However, whether these Talmudic verses actually refer to Jesus of Nazareth or to various other persons that were only later identified with Jesus and with each other remains controversial. If the identification is accepted, Jesus is described as a heretic ("min") but nowhere in the Rabbinic literature is it suggested that he was not a historical figure.

Apparent omissions in early records

Justus of Tiberias wrote at the end of the first century a history of Jewish kings, with whom the gospels state Jesus had interacted. Justus' history does not survive, but Photius, who read it in the 9th century, stated that it did not mention "the coming of Christ, the events of His life, or the miracles performed by Him." The Jewish historian Philo, who lived in the first half of the 1st century also fails to mention Jesus,as do dozens of other major contemporary writers who might have been expected to refer to someone who is meant to have attracted such devotion and perfomed such extraordinary acts.

The New Testament epistles

It is widely held that the authentic letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings. However the epistles ascribed to Paul do not discuss Jesus' actual life and ministry in much detail, unlike the Gospels. There are a variety of explanations for this among those who believe in a historical Jesus, while proponents of the Jesus-myth theory regard it as evidence to support their position.

G. A. Wells suggests that the level of discussion of the historical Jesus in the Pauline epistles, except for the Pastorals, as well as in Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, the Johannine epistles and Revelation supports his position. In these works, Wells conjectures, references to Jesus is presented as "a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past". Wells considers this to be the original Christian view of Jesus, based not on the life of a historical figure but on the personified figure of Wisdom as portrayed in Jewish wisdom literature.

A more radical position is taken by Earl Doherty, who holds that these early authors did not believe that Jesus had been on Earth at all. He argues that the earliest Christians accepted a Platonic cosmology that distinguished a "higher" spiritual world from the Earthly world of matter, and that they viewed Jesus as having descended only into the "lower reaches of the spiritual world". Doherty also suggests that this view was accepted by the authors of the Pastoral epistles, 2 Peter, and various second-century Christian writings outside the New Testament. Doherty contends that apparent references in these writings to events on earth, and a physical historic Jesus, should in fact be regarded as allegorical metaphors. Opponents regard such interpretations as forced and erroneous.

The influence of the Old Testament

A majority of scholarsVorlage:Who explain the similarities between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke using the two-source hypothesis, according to which, Matthew and Luke derived most of their content from Mark and from a lost collection of Jesus' sayings known as the Q document. In the small amount of additional material unique to Matthew, Jesus is presented with strong parallels to Old Testament figures, most noticeably Moses.Vorlage:Fact Matthew appears to have used Moses' birth narrative and sojourn in the wilderness as the basis for the narrative of Jesus.Vorlage:Fact

It is widely acceptedVorlage:Who that the Gospel accounts were influenced by the Old Testament. Advocates of the Jesus-myth believe that the gospels are not history but a type of midrash: creative narratives based on the stories, prophecies, and quotes in the Hebrew Bible. Some advocatesVorlage:Who argue that there is no reason to assume that the sayings attributed to Q originated with Jesus. Advocates of the Jesus-myth theory claim that when the midrashic elements are removed, little to no content remains that could be used to demonstrate the existence of an historical Jesus. However, work done by prominent Q scholars such as John Kloppenborg identifies Q's genre as ancient Near-Eastern "instruction", which consistently attributes its wisdom to a human figure and not the personified Wisdom that one finds in the biblical book of Proverbs.

Though believing that the gospels may contain some creativity and midrash, opponents of the Jesus-myth theory argue that the gospels are more akin to ancient Greco-Roman biographies.Vorlage:Fact Such works attempted to impart historical information about historical figures but were not comprehensive and could include legendary developments.

Although there are many types of midrash, the Toledot Yeshu jumps out as being the most similar to the proposal that characters and situations were invented wholesale according to religious dogma and Old Testament prophecy. However, opponents of the Jesus-myth theory have argued that the closest parallels to potential Moses-based embellishment do not apply to that of the Jesus narrative.Vorlage:Fact Moreover, there are many examples of ancient Jewish and Christian literature that shaped their stories and accounts according to Old Testament influence, but nevertheless provided some historical accounts; for example, in 1 Maccabees, Judas and his battles are described in terms which parallel those of Saul's and David's battles against the Philistines in 1 and 2 Samuel, but nevertheless 1 Maccabees has a degree of respect amongst historians as having a reasonable degree of historical reliability.

Parallels with Mediterranean mystery religions

Some advocates of the Jesus Myth theory have argued that many aspects of the Gospel stories of Jesus have remarkable parallels with life-death-rebirth gods in the widespread mystery religions prevalent in the hellenic culture amongst which Christianty was born. The central figure of one of the most widespread, Osiris-Dionysus, was consistently localised and deliberately merged with local deities in each area, since it was the mysteries which were imparted that were regarded as important, not the method by which they were taught. In the view of some advocates of the Jesus Myth theory, most prominently Freke and Gandy in The Jesus Mysteries, Jewish mystics adapted their form of Osiris-Dionysus to match prior Jewish heroes like Moses and Joshua, hence creating Jesus.

Several parallels are frequently cited by these advocates, and often appear, mixed with other parallels, on internet sites. The most prominently cited parallels are with Horus and Mithras. Horus was one of the life-death-rebirth deities, and was connected and involved in the resurrection of Osiris, whose Egyptian name (Asar) is very similar to the root of Lazarus.

In Egyptian myth, Horus gained his authority by being anointed by Anubis, who had his own cult, and was regarded as the main anointer; the anointing made Horus into Horus karast (a religious epithet written in Egyptian documents as HR KRST) - embalmed/anointed Horus - in parallel to Jesus becoming Christ by being baptised by John, who had his own followers, and was especially regarded as a baptiser. Worship of Isis, Horus' mother, was a prominent cult, and the proposal that this is the basis of veneration of Mary, and more particularly Marian Iconography, has some merit.

The suggestion of parallels with such myths, however, has gained little traction in the academic community. Advocates of the Jesus Myth theory citing the parallels are frequently discovered to be citing dubious sources, and are accused of presenting implausible parallels, advocating particular theologies to replace Christianity, and using non standard terms (e.g. anup the baptiser rather than Anubis the anointer/embalmer) which others fail to recognize. In 1962, Judaism scholar Samuel Sandmel cautioned against this practice and adapted the term 'Parallelomania' to describe it. "We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying a literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction.".

Opponents of the Jesus Myth theory regularly accuse those who advocate the existence of such parallels of confusing the issue of who was borrowing from whom, a charge which was also made in ancient times by prominent early Christians.. More recently in the book Reinventing Jesus, the authors put forth the position that "Only after 100 A.D. did the mysteries begin to look very much like Christianity, precisely because their existence was threatened by this new religion. They had to compete to survive.".

However, some prominent early Christians, e.g. Irenaeus, actually acknowledged the existence of many parallels, complaining that the earlier religions had copied Christian religion and practices, before Jesus was even born, as some form of diabolically inspired pre-cognitive mockery. Additionally, elements from Mystery Religions are absent from some very early Christian texts.Vorlage:Fact

The worship of Mithras was widespread in much of the Roman Empire from the mid-2nd century CE, and mainstream historians regard it as possible that many Christian practices derived originally from Mithraism through a process known as christianization, including 25th December being Jesus' birth-date, and Sunday being the dedicated day of worship. Mithras was a solar deity, and so was seen as being born just after the winter solstice, and the day each week officially dedicated to him by the Roman empire was later renamed the day of the invincible sun, in English later becoming the word Sunday.Vorlage:Fact Parallels between Mithras and the birth-narrative of Luke are also proposed by some advocates of the Jesus myth, since Mithras, as a sun god, was born under the zodiac sign that at that time was known as the stable of Augeas, though these latter parallels are not so supported in the academic community. It is however, agreed that according to inscriprions at the Seleucid temple at Kangavar in western Iran which is dated around 200 B.C.E., contains passage that state its dedication to "Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras".Vorlage:Citequote

Supporters of Jesus' historicity acknowledge that the public celebration of Jesus' birth may have been adopted from the date of the festival of Sol Invictus, and that this has no bearing on the reliability of the Gospels, since they make no claims about the date. In fact, references in Luke and Matthew point to Jesus being more likely to have been born in April or September. Neither do any Christian churches claim that the date for the celebration is anything other than symbolic.

Historiography and methodology

Earl Doherty argues that the gospels are inconsistent concerning "such things as the baptism and nativity stories, the finding of the empty tomb and Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances" and contain numerous "contradictions and disagreements in the accounts of Jesus' words and deeds". He concludes that the evangelists freely altered their sources and invented material, and therefore could not have been concerned to preserve historical information.

Although seldom remarked on by New Testament scholars, some advocates of the Jesus Myth theory argue that historians lack any reliable and widely accepted methodology for determining what is historical and what is not. As J. D. Crossan, a well respected scholar of early Christianity, comments, "I do not think, after two hundred years of experimentation, that there is any way acceptable in public discourse or scholarly debate, by which you can go directly into the great mound of the Jesus tradition and separate out the historical Jesus layer from all later strata".Vorlage:Citequote While this is not an argument that Jesus did not exist any more than it is an argument that the Paul described in Acts, or even Napoleon, did not exist, advocates of the Jesus Myth theory believe it does call into question the results of historical inquiry into Jesus of Nazareth.Vorlage:Fact

A similar tack (seen in works like God Who wasn't There) works from the fact that the dates in both canonal and non-canonal sources do not match up. For example it is stated in the Talmud that Jesus was killed under Alexander Jannaeus , but the Gospel of Peter has him being killed under Herod the Great, and Luke and Matthew have different birth dates that are nearly a decade apart.

Opponents of the theory, including skeptical commentators such as the Jesus Seminar, argue that some reliable information can be extracted from the Gospels if consistent critical methodology is used.

Mainstream scholarly reception

The idea of Jesus as a myth is rejected by the majority of biblical scholars and historians. Pastor-scholar Robert E Van Voorst writes,

The nonhistoricity thesis has always been controversial, and it has consistently failed to convince scholars of many disciplines and religious creeds. ... Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted.

The atheist historian Michael Grant writes:

This sceptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth.... But above all, 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. Certainly, there are all those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event ever took place just because some pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms.... To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serous 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.

The points below highlight some of these criticisms.

• Some scholars, like Michael Grant, do not see significant similarity between the pagan myths and Christianity. Grant states that "Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of the deaths and rebirths, of mythical gods seemed so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit."
• Christianity was actively opposed by both the Roman Empire and the Jewish authorities, and would have been utterly discredited if Jesus had been shown as a non-historical figure. There is good early evidence in Pliny, Josephus and other sources of the Roman and Jewish approaches at the time, and none of them involved this suggestion.
• In response to Jesus-myth proponents who argue the lack of early non-Christian sources, or question their authenticity, R. T. France, for example, points out that "even the great histories of Tacitus have survived in only two manuscripts, which together contain scarcely half of what he is believed to have written, the rest is lost" and that the life of Jesus, from a Roman point of view, was not a major event.
• Parallels between Christianity and Mystery Religions are not considered compelling evidence by some scholars. Vorlage:Fact
• Through cultural diffusion it would have been natural for Jesus and/or his followers within a Hellenized Judea to incorporate the philosophy and sentiment of Epicureanism, Stoicism, Platonism/proto-Gnosticism, and mystery cults. The ideas that these belief systems brought concerning the afterlife, presence of the divine, and wisdom were incorporated into Judaism for several centuries before Jesus and can be found in the Old Testament and Apocrypha.Vorlage:Fact
• Those who do not hold to the Jesus-Myth disagree with the notion that the Apostle Paul did not speak of Jesus as a physical being. They argue that arguments from silence are unreliable and that there are several references to historical facts about Jesus's life in Paul's letters, such as that Jesus "descended from David according to the flesh", that "God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law" and that "the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being." Paul clearly states that in "taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, And being found in human form, he [Jesus] humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross." Furthermore, he invokes the "command," "charge," or "word" of Jesus four times in the Epistles.
• The Epistle to the Hebrews is debatably an early source, which some, but not all, scholars put before 70 CE. Their reasoning is that the Epistle makes mention of animal sacrifice, which was a practice that fell out of favor in Judaism after the destruction of the temple. In Hebrews, Jesus is mentioned several times as having physical form and even speaks.

See also

• Jesus Christ and comparative mythology
• The God Who Wasn't There
• John of Gamala
• Jus Asaf
• Criticism of Jesus

Further reading

• John M. Allegro: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. 2nd rev. ed. Prometheus Books, Buffalo, N.Y. 1992, ISBN 0-87975-757-4. 
• Joseph Atwill: The Roman Origins of Christianity. J. Atwill, 2003, ISBN 0-9740928-0-0. 
• Joseph Atwill: Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus. Ulysses, Berkeley, Calif. 2005, ISBN 1-56975-457-8. 
• Thomas L. Brodie: The Crucial Bridge: The Elijah-Elisha Narrative as an Interpretive Synthesis of Genesis-Kings and a Literary Model for the Gospels. Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minn. 2000, ISBN 0-8146-5942-X. 
• Alvar Ellegård: Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ: A Study in Creative Mythology. Century, London 1999, ISBN 0-7126-7956-1. 
• Timothy Freke, and Peter Gandy: [[The Jesus Mysteries]]: Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God? Thorsons, London 1999, ISBN 0-7225-3676-3. 
• Michael Grant: Jesus. Phoenix, London 1999, ISBN 0-7538-0899-4 ( [1977]). 
• John P Meier: A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 3 vols. Auflage. Doubleday, New York. 
  1. The Roots of the Problem and the Person. 1991, ISBN 0-385-26425-9. 
  2. Mentor, Message, and Miracles. 1994, ISBN 0-385-46992-6. 
  3. Companions and Competitors. 2001, ISBN 0-385-46993-4. 
• Robert M. Price: Deconstructing Jesus. Prometheus Books, Amherst, N.Y. 2000, ISBN 1-57392-758-9. 
• Robert M. Price: The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition? Prometheus Books, Amherst, N.Y. 2003, ISBN 1-59102-121-9. 
• Vorlage:Cite encyclopedia
• E. P. Sanders: The Historical Figure of Jesus. Allen Lane, London 1993, ISBN 0-7139-9059-7. 
• Seznec, Jean. 1972, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691017832
• Gerd Theissen, trans. John Bowden: The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide. Fortress Press, Minneapolis 1998, ISBN 0-8006-3123-4. 
• Thomas L. Thompson: The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David. Basic Books, New York 2005, ISBN 0-465-08577-6. 
• G. A. Wells: The Historical Evidence for Jesus. Prometheus Books, Buffalo, N.Y. 1982, ISBN 0-87975-180-0. 
• G. A. Wells: The Jesus Myth. Open Court, Chicago 1999, ISBN 0-8126-9392-2. 

External links

Supporting a Jesus-Myth theory

• "Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity" by Richard Carrier
• Debunking the Historical Jesus by Dan Barker, Freedom from Religion Foundation
• "The Jesus Mysteries" by Freke/Gandy
• Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ by R. G. Price, rationalrevolution.net
• The "Historical" Jesus? by Acharya S
• The Jesus Myth: Where Faith and Logic Collide (thejesusmyth.com)

Supporting a historical Jesus

• "A History of Scholarly Refutations of the Jesus Myth" by Christopher Price
• "Did Jesus Exist" a page devoted to the issues raised by the Jesus Myth