Jesus-Mythos

The Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory and the nonexistence hypothesis) is the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was not a historical person, but is a fictional or mythological character created by the early Christian community. Some proponents argue that events or sayings associated with the figure of Jesus in the New Testament may have been drawn from one or more individuals who actually existed, but that those individuals were not in any sense the founder of Christianity.

The history of the theory can be traced to the French Enlightenment thinkers Constantin-François Volney and Charles François Dupuis in the 1790s. Notable proponents include Bruno Bauer in the 19th century, Arthur Drews and John M. Allegro in the 20th century, and more recently G.A. Wells, Alvar Ellegård, and Robert M. Price.

Arguments in support of the theory emphasize the absence of extant reference to Jesus during his lifetime and the scarcity of non-Christian reference to him in the first century. Some proponents contend that Christianity emerged organically from Hellenistic Judaism, and draw on perceived parallels between the biography of Jesus and those of Greek, Egyptian, and other gods.

The vast majority of scholars who specialize in the study of biblical history reject the theory and believe the existence of Jesus can be established using documentary and other evidence. Swedish author Alvar Ellegård, a proponent of the theory, argued in 2008 that theologians had failed to question Jesus's existence because of a lack of communication between them and other scholars, causing some of the basic assumptions of Christianity to remain insulated from general scholarly debate. The theory has recently been popularized in the work of New Atheist writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Context

Jesus

"Cristo crucificado" by Diego Velázquez (c. 1632). Jesus is said to have been crucified around 30 CE.

Vorlage:See Those who argue that Jesus existed say he was born a Jew between 7 and 4 BCE—according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, he was born during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in March 4 BCE—and died around 30 CE, during the first few years of the administration of Pontius Pilate, the Roman government of Judea.

Biblical scholar L. Michael White, not himself a Christ-myth theorist, writes that, so far as is known, Jesus did not write anything, nor did anyone who had personal knowledge of him. There is no archeological evidence of his existence. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life or death: no eyewitness accounts, or any other kind of first-hand record. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades or centuries later; the gospels themselves all come from later times, though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions. White writes that the earliest writings that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus, and they were written 20–30 years after the dates given for Jesus's death. Paul was not a companion of Jesus; nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus.

Definition of the theory

Vorlage:See Philosopher George Walsh writes that Christianity can be regarded as originating in a myth later dressed up as history, or with an historical being who was later mythologized into a supernatural one. The theory that it began as a myth is known as the Christ myth theory; the second as the historical Jesus theory.

However, biblical scholar I. Howard Marshall writes that there are "two views of the historical Jesus which stand at the opposite ends of a spectrum of opinion about him." At one extreme is the view that Jesus never existed, and that the gospels describe an essentially fictional person. At the other extreme is the view that the gospels portray events exactly as they happened, and each event depicted in the New Testament is the literal truth.

Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd break this spectrum into four categories that they note are "admittedly over simplistic", "ideal-typical", and a "useful heuristic". They group the first three positions into what they call a "legendary-Jesus thesis," namely the thesis that the picture of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are substantially, if not entirely, legendary or historically inaccurate.

• The Christ myth theory: the gospels describe a virtually, and perhaps entirely, fictitious person. There are no grounds for supposing that any aspect of the Jesus narrative is rooted in history, a view represented by writers such as Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, and G.A. Wells. Boyd and Eddy say that the NewTestament scholar Robert Price can be included in this category as an example of Jesus agnosticism, which says we simply lack sufficient information to be able to say whether Jesus existed, though Price himself argues that it is quite likely that Jesus did not exist.
• We have enough evidence to conclude that Jesus existed, but the reports are so unreliable that very little can be said about him with confidence. This position is represented by Rudolf Bultmann and Burton Mack.
• Historical research can indeed reveal a core of historical facts about Jesus, but he is very different from the Jesus of the New Testament. The claims made by Jesus and the miracles he performed are myths. Robert Funk and J. D. Crossan are representatives of this view, one that Eddy and Boyd write is increasingly common among New Testament scholars.
• Finally, there is the position that the gospels are reliable historical sources. The supernatural claims may be mythical, but critical historiography should not rule out the possibility of this kind of occurrence. This view is represented by John Meier and N.T. Wright.

Historian Michael Grant argues that Jesus skepticism reached its culmination in the position known as docetism (seeming), which maintained that Jesus never came into the world "in the flesh," but only seemed to. Price argues that early Christians may have had a historical Jesus in mind, but only in the sense that the average Greek thought Hercules and Achilles were real. He writes that the Christ myth theory is based on three pillars:

• There no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources;
• The Pauline epistles, earlier than the gospels, do not provide evidence of a recent historical Jesus;
• The story of Jesus shows strong parallels to Middle Eastern religions about dying and rising gods, symbolizing the rebirth of the individual as a rite of passage. He writes that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels.

Development of the theory

18th and 19th centuries

Volney and Dupuis

French philosopher Constantin-François Chassebœuf (known as Volney) argued that Jesus was based on an obscure historical figure and solar mythology.

Serious doubt about the historical existence of Jesus emerged when critical study of the gospels developed during the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The primary forerunners of the Christ myth theory are identified as two French philosophers, Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809) and Constantin-François Chassebœuf (1757–1820), the latter known as Volney.

Napoleon Bonaparte may have echoed Volney when he privately questioned the existence of Jesus.

Dupuis identified pre-Christian rituals in Syria, Egypt and Persia, that he believed represented the birth of a god to a virgin mother at the winter solstice, and argued that these rituals were based upon the winter rising of the constellation Virgo. He believed that these and other annual occurrences were allegorized as the life-histories of solar deities (such as Sol Invictus), who passed their childhoods in obscurity (low elevation of the sun after the solstice), died (winter) and were resurrected (spring). Dupuis argued that Jewish and Christian scriptures could also be interpreted according to the solar pattern: the Fall of Man in Genesis was an allegory of the hardship caused by winter, and the resurrection of Christ as the "paschal lamb" at Easter represented the growth of the Sun's strength in the sign of Aries at the spring equinox. Drawing on this conceptual foundation, Dupuis rejected the historicity of Jesus entirely, explaining Tacitus' reference to Jesus as nothing more than an echo of the inaccurate beliefs of Christians in Tacitus' own day.

Volney, who published before Dupuis but made use of a draft version of Dupuis' work, followed much of his argument. Volney differed in thinking that the gospel story was not intentionally created as an extended allegory grounded in solar myths, but was compiled organically when simple allegorical statements like "the virgin has brought forth" were misunderstood as history. Volney further parted company from Dupuis by allowing that confused memories of an obscure historical figure may have contributed to Christianity when they were integrated with the solar mythology. The works of Volney and Dupuis moved rapidly through numerous editions, allowing the thesis to circulate widely. Napoleon may have been basing his opinion on Volney's work when he stated privately that the existence of Jesus was an open question. Later critics argued that Volney and Dupois had based their views on limited historical data.

David Strauss

David Strauss argued that only a small core of bare facts could be known about Jesus, and that the rest was myth.

Vorlage:See German theologian David Strauss (1808–1874) caused a scandal in Europe with the publication of his Das Leben Jesu (1835)—published in English as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1860)—in which he argued that some stories about Jesus appeared to be mythical, concluding that early Christian communities had fabricated material based on Old Testament stories and concepts. Theologian Thomas L. Thompson writes that Strauss saw the development of the myth not as fraudulent invention, but as the product of a community's imagination, ideas represented as stories.

James Beilby and Paul Eddy write that Strauss did not argue that Jesus was entirely invented, but that historically there was only a small core of facts that could be asserted about him. Thompson writes that Strauss's influence on biblical studies was far-reaching, though also highly controversial, conservative critics him Strauss as the anti-Christ.

Bruno Bauer

Bruno Bauer's views were sufficiently unorthodox that in 1842 they cost him his lectureship at the University of Bonn.

The German historian Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) took Strauss's arguments and carried them to their furthest point, arguing that Jesus had been entirely fabricated. He thereby became a leading proponent of the Christ myth theory.

Writing while he was teaching at the University of Bonn from 1839 to 1842, Bauer argued that the Gospel of John was not a historical narrative, but an adaptation of the traditional Jewish religious and political idea of the Messiah to Philo's philosophical concept of the logos. Turning to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Bauer followed earlier critics in regarding them as dependent on Mark's narrative, while rejecting the view that they also drew upon a common tradition apart from Mark that scholars argue is lost—a hypothetical source called the Q document. For Bauer, this latter possibility was ruled out by the incompatible stories of Jesus' nativity found in Matthew and Luke, as well as the manner in which the non-Markan material found in these documents still appeared to develop Markan ideas. Bauer concluded that Matthew depended on Luke for the content found only in those two gospels. Thus, since in his view the entire gospel tradition could be traced to a single author (Mark), Bauer felt that the hypothesis of outright invention became possible. He further believed there was no expectation of a Messiah among Jews in the time of Tiberius, and that Mark's portrayal of Jesus as the Messiah must therefore be a retrojection of later Christian beliefs and practices—an interpretation Bauer extended to many of the specific stories recounted in the gospels. While Bauer initially left open the question of whether a historical Jesus existed at all, his published views were sufficiently unorthodox that in 1842 they cost him his lectureship at Bonn.

In A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin, published in 1850–1851, Bauer argued that Jesus had not, in fact, existed. Bauer's own comprehensive explanation of Christian origins appeared in 1877 in Christ and the Caesars. He proposed that the religion was a synthesis of the Stoicism of Seneca the Younger, whom Bauer believed had planned to create a new Roman state based on his philosophy, and the Jewish theology of Philo as developed by pro-Roman Jews such as Josephus. Bauer concluded that the origins of Christianity were not Jewish, and that the Christian movement originated in Rome and Alexandria, not Palestine.

While subsequent arguments against a historical Jesus were not directly dependent on Bauer's work, they usually echoed it on several general points: that New Testament references to Jesus lacked historical value; that both the absence of reference to Jesus within his lifetime, and the lack of non-Christian references to him in the 1st century, provided evidence against his existence; and that Christianity originated through syncretism.

Radical Dutch school

In the 1870s and 1880s, a group of scholars associated with the University of Amsterdam, who were known in German scholarship as the "Radical Dutch school", followed Bauer in rejecting the authenticity of the Pauline epistles and took a generally negative view of the Bible's historical value. Within this group, the existence of Jesus was rejected by Allard Pierson, S. Hoekstra and Samuel Adrian Naber, while others came close to that position but concluded that the gospels contained a core of historical fact.

20th century

During the early 20th century, several writers published arguments against Jesus' historicity, ranging from the scholarly to the fanciful. Proponents of the theory drew on the work of liberal theologians, who tended to deny any value to sources for Jesus outside the New Testament, and to limit their attention to Mark and the hypothetical Q document. They also made use of the growing field of Religionsgeschichte—the history of religion—which found sources for Christian ideas in Greek and Oriental mystery cults, rather than in the life of Jesus and Palestinian Judaism. Joseph Klausner wrote that biblical scholars "tried their hardest to find in the historic Jesus something which is not Judaism; but in his actual history they have found nothing of this whatever, since this history is reduced almost to zero. It is therefore no wonder that at the beginning of this century there has been a revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth century view that Jesus never existed."

J. M. Robertson

J. M. Robertson (1856–1933), a Scottish journalist who became a Liberal MP, argued in 1900 that belief in a slain Messiah arose before the New Testament period within sects later known as Ebionites or Nazarenes, and that these groups would have expected a Messiah named Jesus, a hope based on a divinity of that name in the biblical Joshua. In his view, an additional but less significant basis for early Christian belief may have been the executed Jesus Pandira, placed by the Talmud in about 100 BC.

Robertson wrote that while the letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings, they were primarily concerned with theology and morality, largely glossing over the life of Jesus. Once references to "the twelve" and to Jesus' institution of the Eucharist are rejected as interpolations, Robertson argued that the Jesus of the Pauline epistles is reduced to a crucified savior who "counts for absolutely nothing as a teacher or even as a wonder-worker". As a result, he concluded that those elements of the gospels that attribute such characteristics to Jesus must have developed later, probably among gentile believers who were converted by Jewish evangelists like Paul.

This gentile party may have represented Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection in mystery plays in which, wishing to disassociate the cult from Judaism, they attributed his execution to the Jewish authorities and his betrayal to a Jew (Ioudaios, misunderstood as Judas). According to Robertson, such plays would have evolved over time into the gospels. Christianity would have sought to further enhance its appeal to gentiles by adopting myths from pagan cults with some Judaic input— e.g., Jesus' healings came from Asclepius, feeding of multitudes from Dionysus, the Eucharist from the worship of Dionysus and Mithras, and walking on water from Poseidon, but his descent from David and his raising of a widow's son from the dead were in deference to Jewish messianic expectations. And while John's portrayal of Jesus as the logos was ostensibly Jewish, Robertson argued that the underlying concept derived from the function of Mithras, Thoth, and Hermes as representatives of a supreme god.

William Benjamin Smith

At around the same time William Benjamin Smith (1850-1934), a professor of mathematics at Tulane University, argued in a series of books that the earliest Christian sources, particularly the Pauline epistles, stress Christ's divinity at the expense of any human personality, and that this would have been implausible if there had been a human Jesus. Smith therefore believed that Christianity's origins lay in a pre-Christian Jesus cult—that is, in a Jewish sect that had worshiped a divine being named Jesus in the centuries before the human Jesus was supposedly born. Smith argued that evidence for this cult was found in Hippolytus' mention of the Naassenes and Epiphanius' report of a Nazaraean or Nazorean sect that existed before Christ. On this view the seemingly historical details in the New Testament were built by the early Christian community around narratives of the pre-Christian Jesus. Smith also argued against the historical value of non-Christian writers regarding Jesus, particularly Josephus and Tacitus.

Arthur Drews

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

The Christ Myth (Die Christusmythe), first published in 1909 by Arthur Drews (1865–1935), professor of philosophy at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, brought together the scholarship of the day in defense of the idea that Christianity had been a Jewish Gnostic cult that spread by appropriating aspects of Greek philosophy and Frazerian death-rebirth deities. Drews wrote that his purpose was to show that everything about the historical Jesus had a mythical character, and there was no reason to suppose that such a figure had existed. The focus on a historical Jesus conflicted with both Drews' philosophical outlook, a form of monistic pantheism—he was involved with the German Faith Movement— and his belief that ethnic Germans should observe their ancestral forms of spirituality and not religions derived from a Semitic source—a source which Drews considered depraved.

His work proved popular enough that prominent theologians and historians addressed his arguments in the Hibbert Journal, the American Journal of Theology, and other leading journals of religion. In response, Drews took part in a series of public debates, the best known of which took place in 1910 on January 31 and again on February 1 at the Berlin Zoological Garden against Hermann von Soden of the Berlin University, where he appeared on behalf of the League of Monists. Attended by 2,000 people, including the country's most eminent theologians, the meetings went on until three in the morning. The New York Times called it one of the most remarkable theological discussions since the days of Martin Luther, reporting that Drews caused a sensation by plastering the town's billboards with posters asking, "Did Jesus Christ ever live?" According to the newspaper his arguments were so graphic that several women had to be carried from the hall screaming hysterically, while one woman stood on a chair and invited God to strike him down.

B.B. Warfield wrote in 1913 that Drews's work was a reminder that the historical Jesus was either the "Divine-human Jesus or nothing". He argued that Drews not only succeeded in exposing the liberal reconstructions of the historical Jesus as impossible, but that his work also necessitated orthodox Christian belief. J. Gresham Machen argued in 1915 that the Christ myth theory was the unavoidable result of rationalistic biblical criticism taken to its logical conclusion. He concluded, "Jesus was divine, or else we have no certain proof that He ever lived. I am glad to accept the alternative."

Paul-Louis Couchoud

Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879–1959) was a French doctor of medicine turned man of letters and poet. He developed his idea of Jesus as myth in a series of essays and books, including Enigma of Jesus (1924)—which had an introduction by J.G. Frazer, who did not himself subscribe to the Christ myth theory—followed by The Mystery of Jesus (1925), Jesus the God Made Man (1937), The Creation of Christ (1939), Story of Jesus (1944), and The God Jesus (1951).

Theologian Walter P. Weaver writes that Couchoud dismissed the evidence of Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Turning to the New Testament gospels, he argued that Paul had had nothing to do with Jesus, and that Mark was the source for Luke and John. He argued that Mark was not a historical text, but a commentary on early Christian stories and memories. He further argued that Paul's affirmation of the divinity of Jesus alongside Yahweh (God), suggested that Jesus was not real, because no Jew would have done that. For Couchoud, Jesus was a figment of Paul's imagination, the result of a new interpretation of ancient texts and a representation of the highest aspiration of the human soul.

Other 20-century writers

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John M. Allegro (1923–1988) argued in two books—The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979)—that Christianity began as a shamanic cult centering around the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and that the New Testament was a coded record of a clandestine cult. In a forward to The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, Mark Hall writes that Allegro suggested the scrolls all but proved that a historical Jesus never existed. Philip Jenkins writes that Allegro was an eccentric scholar who relied on texts that did not exist in quite the form he was citing them, and calls the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross possibly the most single ludicrous book on Jesus scholarship by a qualified academic. Allegro was forced to resign his academic post.

A. D. Loman wrote that episodes such as the Sermon on the Mount were fictions written to justify compilations of pre-existing liberal Jewish sayings. G. J. P. J. Bolland argued that Christianity evolved from Gnosticism and that Jesus was merely a symbolic figure representing Gnostic ideas about God. Albert Kalthoff wrote that Jesus was an idealized personification created by a proto-communist community and that incidents in the gospels were adapted from first-to-third century Roman history. Peter Jensen saw Jesus as a Jewish adaptation of Gilgamesh whom Jensen regarded as a solar deity. Joseph Wheless wrote that there was an active conspiracy among Christians, going back as far as the second century, to forge documents to make a mythical Jesus seem historical.

21st century

G. A. Wells

Graham Stanton wrote in 2002 that the most thoroughgoing and sophisticated of the proponents' arguments were set out by G. A. Wells, emeritus professor of German at Birkbeck College, London, and author of Did Jesus Exist? (1975), The Jesus Legend (1996), The Jesus Myth (1999), Can We Trust the New Testament? (2004), and Cutting Jesus Down to Size (2009). British theologian Kenneth Grayston advised Christians to acknowledge the difficulties raised by Wells, but Alvar Ellegård writes that his views remain largely undiscussed by theologians.

Wells bases his arguments on the views of New Testament scholars who acknowledge that the gospels were written decades after Jesus's death by sources who had no personal knowledge of him. In addition, Wells writes, the texts are exclusively Christian and theologically motivated, and therefore a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed. Wells also argues that Paul and the other epistle writers—the earliest Christian writers—do not provide any support for the idea that Jesus lived early in the first century. There is no information in them about Jesus's parents, place of birth, teachings, trial, or crucifixion. For Wells, the Jesus of earliest Christianity was a pure myth, derived from mystical speculations stemming from the Jewish Wisdom tradition. According to this view, the earliest strata of the New Testament literature presented Jesus as "a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past".

In The Jesus Myth, Wells argues that two Jesus narratives fused into one: Paul's mythical Jesus and a minimally historical Jesus whose teachings were preserved in the Q document, a hypothetical common source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Biblical scholar Robert Van Voorst said that with this argument Wells had performed an about-face, while Robert M. Price said that Wells had abandoned the pure Christ Myth theory for which he is famous. Wells wrote in 2000:

Now that I have allowed this in my two most recent relevant books ... [The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth], it will not do to dub me a "mythicist" tout court. Moreover, my revised standpoint obviates the criticism ... which J. D. G Dunn levelled at me in 1985. He objected that, in my work as then published, I had, implausibly, to assume that, within thirty years from Paul, there had evolved "such a ... complex of traditions about a non-existent figure as we have in the sources of the gospels" (The Evidence for Jesus, p. 29). My present standpoint is: this complex is not all post-Pauline (Q in its earliest form may well be as early as ca. A.D. 40), and it is not all mythical. The essential point, as I see it, is that what is authentic in this material refers to a personage who is not to be identified with the dying and rising Christ of the early epistles.

Alvar Ellegård

Alvar Ellegård (1919–2008), a professor of English at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, developed the ideas of Well and Couchoud, arguing in several articles and books, including Myten om Jesus (1992), that the Jesus of the gospels is essentially a myth and the gospels largely fiction.

He wrote in 2008 that the gospels were created to give substance to the idea of a Jesus as messiah—an idea taken from the Old Testament or Tanakh—who had appeared to Paul and the apostles around the year 30 CE as ecstatic visions. He argues that the point of Paul's letters about Jesus to the Jewish diaspora was to show that Jesus had risen from the dead, that he was the messiah, and that the Day of Judgment was imminent, at which point Jesus would save the faithful. Such messianiac views were common among Jews at the time, he writes. When it became clear decades later that the Day of Judgment was not upon them, Paul's audience wanted to know more about Jesus and his teaching, and because there was little in Paul's writing to guide them, the gospels emerged to complete a picture, using passages from the Old Testament that messianic Jews had long interpreted as heralding the messiah. Ellegård argues that because Paul and the apostles had had their visions of Jesus risen from the dead around 30 CE, a myth evolved that placed a crucifixion around that time at the hands of Pontius Pilate.

Ellegård writes that his position differs from that of Drews and Couchoud. Like G.A. Wells, he believes that Paul's letters show Paul and his audience believed Paul's visions had been about a real person, though possibly someone from the distant past. Ellegård develops arguments put forward by A. Dupont-Sommer and John Allegro, and identifies Paul's conception of Jesus as the "Essene Teacher of Righteousness" revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but he argues that this was not Jesus of the gospels. For Ellegård, the figure Paul had in mind was the founder of the Essene, or para-Essene, congregations Paul was addressing, someone who had probably lived in the second or early first century BCE. Ellegård therefore regards the gospels as entirely fictional in their account of a preacher accompanied by 12 disciples.

Although the view of Jesus as myth was popular among philosophers during the Enlightenment, modern theologians do not acknowledge that the question of Jesus's existence is an open one, and Ellegård accuses them of failing to live up to their responsibilities as scholars. He argues that their position is one of dogmatism, often concealed "under a cover of mystifying language." Ellegård argues that theologians often have ties to Christian churches, and that the accepted wisdom is that the gospels and Acts provide the framework for historical study. To remove the historical Jesus would be a paradigm shift in New Testament studies.

Although Kenneth Grayston, a theologian and Methodist minister, in reviewing G.A. Well's work, advised Christians to acknowledge the difficulties it raised, Ellegård writes that the latter remains largely undiscussed, and when he is, he is linked to non-scholarly works on the Christ myth theory, some of which are rightly dismissed. Ellegård argues that there has been a failure of communication between theologians and scholars in other fields, leading to an insulation of theological research from scholarly debate elsewhere. He dismisses the criticism brought against himself and Wells as non-specialists as an ad hominem argument, and argues that the reaction of theologians suggests they feel their religion is threatened by the theory, since its acceptance would mean a "collapse" of Christian faith.

Thomas L. Thompson

Thomas L. Thompson, a former professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, argues in The Messiah Myth (2005) that the Jesus of the gospels did not exist, and that stories about him are a combination of Near Eastern myths and stories about kingship and divinity. He argues that the contemporaneous audience of the gospels would have understood this, that the stories were not intended as history.

Robert M. Price

American theologian Robert M. Price argues that we will never know whether Jesus existed, unless someone discovers his diary or skeleton.ref name=PriceJacoby/>

American theologian Robert M. Price questions the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), and Jesus is Dead (2007), as well as in contributions to The Historical Jesus: Five Views (2009). Price is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of writers and scholars who study the historicity of Jesus, arguing that the Christian image of Christ is a theological construct into which traces of Jesus of Nazareth have been woven. A former Baptist pastor, Price was originally opposed to the arguments against the existence of Jesus, but found it increasingly difficult to poke holes in them. He now believes that Christianity is an historicized synthesis of mainly Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek mythology.

Price writes that everyone who espouses the Christ-myth theory bases their arguments on three key points. First, they ask why there is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources. Secondly, they argue that the epistles, written earlier than the gospels, provide no evidence of a recent historical Jesus—all that can be taken from the epistles, he argues, is that a Jesus Christ, son of God, came into the world to die as a sacrifice for human sin and was raised by God and enthroned in heaven. The third pillar is that the Jesus narrative is paralleled in Middle Eastern myths about dying and rising gods, symbolizing the rebirth of the individual as a rite of passage. He names Baal, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and Dumuzi/ Tammuz as examples, all of which, he writes, survived into the Hellenistic and Roman periods and thereby influenced early Christianity. He writes that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels.

Price's position is that if critical methodology is applied with ruthless consistency, one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus's historicity, and that unless someone discovers Jesus's diary or skeleton, we'll never know. He writes: "Is it ... possible that beneath and behind the stained-glass curtain of Christian legend stands the dim figure of a historical founder of Christianity? Yes, it is possible, perhaps just a tad more likely than that there was a historical Moses, about as likely as there having been a historical Apollonius of Tyana. But it becomes almost arbitrary to think so." While recognizing that he stands against the majority view of scholars, he cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.

Earl Doherty

Canadian writer Earl Doherty argues in The Jesus Puzzle (2005) and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man—The Case for a Mythical Jesus (2009) that no historical Jesus stands behind even the most primitive hypothetical sources of the New Testament. His view is that that Jesus originated as a myth derived from Middle Platonism with some influence from Jewish mysticism, and that belief in an historical Jesus emerged only among Christian communities in the second century. He writes that none of the major apologists before the year 180, except for Justin and Aristides of Athens, included an account of an historical Jesus in their defences of Christianity. Instead the early Christian writers describe a Christian movement grounded in Platonic philosophy and Hellenistic Judaism, preaching the worship of a monotheistic Jewish god and what he calls a "logos-type Son." Doherty argues that Theophilus of Antioch (c. 163–182), Athenagoras of Athens (c. 133–190), Tatian the Assyrian (c. 120–180), and Marcus Minucius Felix (writing around 150–270) offer no indication that they believed in a historical figure crucified and resurrected, and that the name Jesus does not appear in any of them.

Other 21st-century writers

Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, British authors specializing in mysticism, have advanced the Christ myth theory in The Jesus Mysteries (1999), Jesus and the Lost Goddess (2002), and The Laughing Jesus (2005). They maintain that a Gnostic belief in a purely mythical Jesus was the original form of Christianity and that the first Christians created Jesus as a Judaized version of an amalgam of dying and rising gods, an amalgam the authors refer to as "Osiris-Dionysus." Freke and Gandy further believe that the original (Gnostic) form of Christianity was supplanted then suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church, which they describe as "the greatest cover-up in history." D. M. Murdock argues that virtually all the New Testament documents are forgeries, with the gospels (all composed in the late second century) misrepresenting as historical a Jesus who was initially understood as a solar myth. Tom Harpur propounds the view that Jesus is merely the historization of Egyptian religious beliefs.

Counter-arguments

Vorlage:Jesus The Christ myth theory has never achieved acceptance among biblical scholars. Some of the earliest arguments against the theory included satirical treatments by Richard Whately and Jean-Baptiste Pérès—entitled "Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte" (1819) and "Grand Erratum" (1827)—who argued against the existence of Napoleon, including while he was still alive.

In 1914, Fred C. Conybeare published The Historical Christ, in which he argued against Robertson, Drews, and Smith. He was followed by the French biblical scholar Maurice Goguel, who published Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or History? in 1926. Goguel rejected arguments for a "pre-Christianity" and argued that prima facie evidence for a historical Jesus came from the agreement on his existence between ancient orthodox Christians, Docetists, and opponents of Christianity. Goguel proceeded to examine the theology of the Pauline epistles, the other New Testament epistles, the gospels, and the Book of Revelation, as well as belief in Jesus' resurrection and divinity, arguing in each case that early Christian views were best explained by a tradition stemming from a recent historical Jesus.

Later editions of Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus likewise contained a lengthy section on the Christ myth theory, ultimately concluding, "... that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely." Further refutations were produced in response to novel articulations of the theory throughout the 20th century, including R. T. France's The Evidence for Jesus (1986), Robert Van Voorst's Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000), and The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (2007), coauthored by Paul Eddy and Greg Boyd.

Multiple attestation

In contrast to Bruno Bauer's view, modern scholars believe that Mark is not the only source behind the synoptic gospels. The current predominant view within the field, the Two-Source hypothesis, postulates that the Synoptic gospels are based on at least two independent sources (Mark and "Q"), and potentially as many as four (Mark, "Q", "M", and "L"). Additionally, biblical scholars believes that relatively early material regarding the historical Jesus is found in the Gospel According to John.

Pauline epistles

Paul, 1410s (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

Biblical scholar L. Michael White, not a Christ-myth theorist, writes that the earliest writings mentioning Jesus that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus, written 20–30 years after the dates given for Jesus's death. Paul did not know Jesus, and does not claim ever to have seen him.

Many biblical scholars nevertheless turn to Paul's letters (epistles) to support their arguments for a historical Jesus. Theologian James D.G. Dunn argues that Robert Price ignores what everyone else in the business regards as primary data. Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce (1910–1990) writes that, according to Paul's letters, Jesus was an Israelite, descended from Abraham (Gal 3:16) and David (Rom. 1:3); who lived under Jewish law (Gal. 4:4); who was betrayed, and on the night of his betrayal instituted a memorial meal of bread and wine (I Cor. 11:23ff); who endured the Roman penalty of crucifixion (I Cor. 1:23; Gal. 3:1, 13, 6:14, etc.), although Jewish authorities were somehow involved in his death (I Thess. 2:15); who was buried, rose the third day and was thereafter seen alive, including on one occasion by over 500, of whom the majority were alive 25 years later (I Cor. 15:4ff). The letters say that Paul knew of and had met important figures in Jesus's ministry, including the apostles Peter and John, as well as James the brother of Jesus, who is also mentioned in Josephus. In the letters, Paul on occasion alludes to and quotes the teachings of Jesus, and in 1 Corinthians 11 recounts the Last Supper.

Josephus

Vorlage:See Louis Feldman argues that the writings of the first century Jewish historian Josephus contain two authentic references to Jesus. One of them, Josephus' allusion in The Antiquities of the Jews to the death of James, describes James as "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ," and is seen as providing attestation independent of the early Christian community. Josephus' fuller reference to Jesus, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, while considered by specialists to contain later interpolations, is nevertheless believed by some scholars to preserve an original comment regarding Jesus as well.

Principle of embarrassment

American philosopher Will Durant has applied the criterion of embarrassment to the question of Jesus' existence. He argues that if the gospels were entirely imaginary, certain issues might not have been included, such as the competition of the apostles for high places in the kingdom of God, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Jesus to work miracles in Galilee, the references to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, and his despairing cry on the cross. Durant argues that an invented narrative might have presented Jesus in strict conformity with messianic expectations.

Rejection of mythological parallels

Biblical scholars argue against the idea that early material related to Jesus can be explained with reference to pagan mythological parallels. Paula Fredriksen, for example, writes that no serious work places Jesus outside the backdrop of first century Palestinian Judaism. Biblical scholarship also generally rejects the concept of homogenous dying and rising gods, the validity of which is often presupposed by advocates of the Christ myth theory, such as New Testament scholar Robert Price. Tryggve Mettinger, former professor of Hebrew bible at Lund Unversity, is one of the academics who supports the "dying and rising gods" construct, but he argues that Jesus does not fit the wider pattern.

Edwin Yamauchi argues that past attempts to equate elements of Jesus' biography with those of mythological figures have not sufficiently taken into account the dates and provenance of their sources. Edwyn R. Bevan and Chris Forbes argue that proponents of the theory have even invented elements of pagan myths to support their assertion of parallelism between the life of Jesus and the lives of pagan mythological characters. For example, David Ulansey shows that the purported equivalence of Jesus' virgin birth with Mithras' origin fails because Mithras emerged fully grown, partially clothed, and armed from a rock, possibly after it had been inseminated. S. G. F. Brandon and others argue that the very idea that early Christians would consciously incorporate pagan myths into their religion is "intrinsically most improbable," given their cultural background, as evidenced by the strenuous opposition that Paul encountered from other Christians for even his minor concessions to Gentile believers.

Public reception

portrait photograph of Valdimir Lenin

Lenin accepted Arthur Drews's arguments.

photograph

Bertrand Russell doubted that Jesus existed.

Soviet Union

The theory was promoted in both Soviet and Maoist literature. Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924)—followed by Stalin and Khruschev—accepted Arthur Drews' theories as fact and argued that it was imperative in the struggle against religious obscurantists to form a union with people like Drews. Several editions of his The Christ Myth were published in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onwards, and included in textbooks. Public meetings asking "Did Christ live?" were organized in which various party operatives, including the Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, debated with clergymen.

Atheism movement

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) famously announced in his 1927 lecture, "Why I Am Not a Christian"—delivered to the National Secular Society in Battersea Town Hall, London—that historically it is quite doubtful that Jesus existed, and if he did we know nothing about him.

In the 2000s, a number of books associated with the New Atheism movement—such as Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis (2007), Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great (2007), and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006)—have made reference to it. Both the founding president of American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and the current president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Dan Barker, have alluded to it. The theory has also been advanced by anti-religious movies such as The God Who Wasn't There (2005), Zeitgeist (2007), and Religulous (2008).

Opinion polls

A 2005 study conducted by Baylor University, a private Christian university, found that one percent of Americans in general, and 13.7 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans, believe that Jesus is a fictional character. Comparable figures for Britain in 2008 say 13 percent of the general population, and 40 percent of atheists, do not believe that Jesus existed. A 2009 study found that 11 percent of Australians doubt that Jesus was a historical figure.

See also

• Bible conspiracy theory
• Biblical criticism
• Christian mythology
• Panbabylonism
• The Bible and history

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Further reading

Books and papers

• Case, Shirley Jackson (1911). "The Historicity of Jesus: An Estimate of the Negative Argument", The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1911, pp. 20–42.
• Case, Shirley Jackson (1911). "Jesus' Historicity: A Statement of the Problem", The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1911, pp. 626–628.
• Case, Shirley Jackson (1911). "Recent books on the question of Jesus' existence", The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 15, No. 4, October 1911, pp. 626–628.
• Conybeare, F. C. (Frederick Cornwallis) (1914) "The historical Christ, or, An investigation of the views of Mr. J.M. Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W.B. Smith", Watts & Co.
• Clemen, Carl (1911). Der geschichtliche Jesus: Eine allgemeinverständliche Untersuchung der Frage: Hat Jesus gelebt, und was wollte er?. Töpelmann.
• Drews, Arthur (1909). The Christ Myth. T.F. Unwin.
• Evans, Elizabeth Edson Gibson (1900). The Christ Myth: A Study. Book Tree 2000.
• Fau, Guy (1964). La fable de Jésus-Christ. Éditions de l'Union rationaliste.
• Gerrish, B. A. (1975) "Jesus Myth and history: Troeltsch's Stand in the “Christ-Myth” Debate." Journal of Religion, vol. 55 No. 1 reprinted in Old Protestantism and the New (2004) By Brian Gerrish
• Mangasarian, Managasar Mugwiditch (1909). The truth about Jesus. Is he a myth?. Princeton Theological Seminary Library.
• Alfaric, Prosper (1932). Jésus a-t-il existé?. Coda Publishing 2005.
• Prosper, Alfaric (1954). Le problème de Jésus. Cercle Ernest-Renan.
• Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon) (1917). The Jesus problem; a restatement of the myth theory.
• Rossington, Herbert J (1911). Did Jesus really live? a reply to The Christ myth.
• Smith, William Benjamin. (1906). Der vorchristliche Jesu. Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2010.
• Smith, William Benjamin (1894). Ecce Deus: Die urchristliche Lehre des reingöttlichen Jesu. Diederichs, 1911.
• Smith, William Benjamin (1911). The Birth of the Gospel.
• Taylor, Robert (1829). The Diegesis. A. Kneeland 1834; composed while Taylor was in Oakham Goal after being convicted of blasphemy.
• Troeltsch, Ernst (1911). Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu für den Glauben. Mohr.
• Zindler, Frank R. (2003). The Jesus the Jews Never Knew. American Atheist Press.

Debates

• Australian Broadcasting Company (2005–2006). Jesus–History or Myth?, debate organized by ABC between David H. Lewis—drawing on the work of G.A. Wells—and William Loader, December 2005–May 2006, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Humphreys, Kenneth and Holding, J. P. "Did Jesus Exist?", Premier Christian Radio, a live radio debate, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Barker, Dan and Forbes, Chris. "Jesus: Man or Messiah?", a moderated live debate, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Price, Robert M. and Boyd, Greg. "Jesus: Legend, Teacher, Critic, or Son of God?", a moderated live debate, accessed June 18, 2010.

Other external links

• Barker, Dan. Debunking the Historical Jesus, Freedom from Religion Foundation, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Brunner, Constantin. On "Criticism", appendix to Our Christ: the revolt of the mystical genius, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Carrier, Richard. "Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity", infidels.org, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Craig, William Lane. The Evidence For Jesus, leaderu.com. accessed June 18, 2010.
• Doherty, Earl. "The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus?", jesuspuzzle.com, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Habermas, Gary. The Historical Jesus - Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ, garyhabermas.com, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Holding, James Patrick. Did Jesus exist?, author of Shattering the Christ Myth, tektonics.com, accessed June 18, 2010.
• Humphreys, Kenneth. Jesus Never Existed, jesusneverexisted.com, accessed June 11, 2010.
• Kane, Greg. Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth, pocm.info, accessed June 11, 2010.