| Jesus myth theory | |
|---|---|
The Resurrection of Christ by Noel Coypel (1700). Jesus myth theorists see this as one of a number of stories about dying and rising gods. |
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| Description | The New Testament account of the life of Jesus is a myth ranging from historical to so filled with myth and legend as well as internal contradictions and historical irregularities that at best no meaningful verification regarding Jesus of Nazareth (including his very existence) can be extracted from them. |
| Early proponents | Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809) Constantin-François Volney (1757–1820) Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) Arthur Drews (1865–1935) |
| Modern proponents | G.A. Wells, Alvar Ellegård, Robert M. Price |
| Subject | Ancient history |
The term Jesus myth theory (also known as the Christ myth theory, Jesus Myth, and Christ Myth) in its broadest context refers to the idea that the person named Jesus referred in the Gospels is a myth.[1]
However, there is ambiguity in the meaning of the words:
Thus, there is a large variance regarding how the Gospel Jesus is a myth; for instance:
Supporters of the various Jesus myth theories point to the lack of any known written references to Jesus during his lifetime and the relative scarcity and disputed veracity of non-Christian references to him in the 1st century.
Nearly all Bible scholars involved with historical Jesus research maintain that the existence of the New Testament Jesus can be established using documentary and other evidence, although they differ on the degree to which material about him in the New Testament should be taken at face value.[16]
Contents |
The main problem with getting a definitive definition for Jesus myth theory is there is ambiguity in the meaning of "myth" (and "mythicist"), "historical", and "fiction".
Folklorists define myths as "tales believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds or parts of the world, and with extra-human, inhuman, or heroic characters".[17] However, other fields sometimes use the term "myth" otherwise.[18] For example, the Oedipus story is often called a myth even though for folkorists it falls into the category of folktale.[18] "Myth" and "legend" have been used as synonyms, as with the stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood. "Myth" has also been used to in reference to stories of the Spanish Inquisition using torture devices such as the Iron maiden and Choke pear and the power it supposedly had in medieval Spain.[19]
In his 1909 book, The Christ the religious skeptic John Eleazer Remsburg made a clear distinction between a possible Jesus of history (Jesus of Nazareth) and the Jesus of the New Testament and Christianity (Jesus of Bethlehem) saying that the latter was a mythical character who did not exist.[20]
Remsburg then went further using David Strauss and John Fiske to explain that there were three kinds of myths: Historical, Philosophical, and Poetical.
Remsburg stated that "(i)t is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish a historical from a philosophical myth. Hence the non-agreement of Freethinkers in regard to the nature of the Christ myth. Is Christ a historical or a philosophical myth? Does an analysis of his alleged history disclose the deification of a man, or merely the personification of an idea?" Remsburg pointed to Strauss' "Leben Jesu" as an example of the historical myth and the ideas of Thaddeus B. Wakeman as an example of philosophical myth regarding Jesus.
Remsburg concluded the chapter by saying while all Freethinkers could agree that the Christ of the New Testament was a myth there was disagreement regarding whether there was an actual man behind that myth and as to how much of the myth was actual history.[21]
In 1946 Archibald Robertson published Jesus: Myth or History?.[22] There he defined mythicist as simply being "the upholder of the theory that Jesus is a myth" and acknowledged that in his 1900 Christianity and mythology the mythicist "(John M.) Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus perhaps more than one having contributed something to the Gospel story."[7]
In 1989 the then senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine Gorden Stein[23] wrote "Not all mythicists agree with each other about what they view as the correct explanation of the origin of Christianity and of the Jesus myth. (...) The mythicist denies the supernatural aspect of Jesus. He may also deny the "great moral teacher" aspect of Jesus. Some mythicists would also try to deny that even an ordinary man (a traveling magician, perhaps) existed and served as a basis for the myth that predated him and grew around him. Other mythicists would claim that whether a mere man named Jesus ever existed at the time then the Christian era began is an impossible thing to either prove of disprove today"[24]
Biblical scholar I. Howard Marshall wrote that there are "two views of the historical Jesus which stand at the opposite ends of a spectrum of opinion about him." At one extreme is the view that Jesus never existed, and that the gospels describe an essentially fictional person. At the other extreme is the view that the gospels portray events exactly as they happened, and each event depicted in the New Testament is the literal truth.[25] Furthermore, Marshall maintains that the term "historical Jesus" has two meanings: that Jesus existed, rather than being a totally fictional creation like King Lear or Dr. Who or that the Gospels accounts give a reasonable account of historical events, rather than being unverifiable legends such as those surrounding King Arthur.
Because of this slipperiness in the meaning of "historical Jesus", Marshall states, "We shall land in considerable confusion if we embark on an inquiry about the historical Jesus if we do not pause to ask ourselves exactly what we are talking about."[3] This echoed Remsburg's range of historical myth going from a 'slightly colored but essentially true narrative' to a 'narrative so distorted by legend as to be essentially false'. For example, Herbert George Wood in his University Press book Christianity and the nature of history classifies Christ-myth theory as being among the "theories which regard Jesus as an historical but insignificant figure."[26]
In the Jesus: Fact or Fiction? debate between Dr. Robert Price and Rev. John Rankin, Price states "there are four senses in which Jesus Christ may be said to be a 'fiction:'"
Even sources that try to actually define the entire term "Christ Myth theory" and "Jesus Myth Theory" only add to the confusion.
For example, the 1988 edition of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia defines Christ Myth Theory as "(the) view states that the story of Jesus is a piece of mythology, possessing no more substantial claims to historical fact than the old Greek or Norse stories of gods and heroes,..." [27].
Here you have two problems. The first problem here is that you can have a story of a historical person that is entirely mythological (George Washington chopping down the cherry tree) and still have that person existing. The second problem is as Remsburg and others have pointed out is mythology covers a large range--the stories of Hades and Persephone, Heracles, and the Trojan War are all part of Greek mythology but they have different claims to historical fact. Norse mythology similarly contains what is known as legendary sagas such as the Yngvars saga víðförla which are now known to be historical myth ie myths based on actual historical events.
Similarly Herbert George Wood in the University Press book 1934 Christianity and the nature of history groups Christ-myth theories with "theories that regard Jesus as an historical but insignificant figure." [28]
Biblical scholar L. Michael White (not himself a Jesus-myth theorist) writes that the usual date given for Jesus's birth is between 7 and 4 BCE. This is based on the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which say he was born a Jew during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in March 4 BCE.[29] According to White, his death is typically placed around 30 CE, during the reign of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea from 26 to 36 CE.[30]
White writes that, so far as we know, Jesus did not write anything, nor did anyone who had personal knowledge of him. There is no archeological evidence of his existence. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life or death: no eyewitness accounts, or any other kind of first-hand record. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades or centuries later; the gospels themselves all come from later times, though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions. The earliest writings that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus, written 20–30 years after the dates given for Jesus's death. Paul was not a companion of Jesus, White writes, nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus before his death.[31]
New Testament scholar Robert M. Price, who argues it is quite likely there never was an historical Jesus in the sense that the Gospel version is in essence a composite character and therefore unable to be reasonably verified as a single historical person,[34] writes that the Jesus myth theory is based on three pillars:
Price writes that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels.[35] In Deconstructing Jesus, Price argues that, unlike Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus, and King Arthur, Jesus has no residue that does not fit the myth cycle nor is he intricately woven into the history of the time. Price concludes that "Jesus must be categorized with other legendary founder figures including the Buddha, Krishna, and Lao-tzu. There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure.”[36]
Docetism is the belief that Jesus physical existence was an illusion holding that he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die.
In 1977, Classicist Michael Grant seemed to make a connection between the various versions of the Christ myth theory and docetism:
"This skeptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth. In ancient times, this extreme view was named the heresy of docetism (seeming) because it maintained that Jesus never came into the world "in the flesh", but only seemed to; (I John 4:2) and it was given some encouragement by Paul's lack of interest in his fleshly existence. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that Jesus did not even "seem" to exist, and that all tales of his appearance upon the earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was compared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods.[37]
One of the earlier statements to the idea that nearly the entire Jesus story was a myth is attributed to Celsus (c180 CE) who is said to have argued that Jesus was the bastard son of Mary and a Roman soldier named Panthera, used magic to deceive people into believing he was the son of a god, and there was no real difference between Christianity and many of the mystery religions existing at that time and some of the elements (such as the resurrection and virgin birth) could be found in older myths.[38]
Persecuted due to their conflict with Roman society Christianity picked up various Pagan elements regarding Jesus that were not in the writing about him that would cause confusion centuries later. The biggest of these was the December 25 birth date. To compete with the Sol Invictus cult that had been made the official religion of Rome by Aurelian in 274 CE, Jesus' birth date (debated to be anywhere between March to September) was decreed to be December 25 some 60 years later. The situation that resulted was such that Pope Leo I in the 5th century would try to explain why many Christians revered both Jesus and Sol Invictus together on December 25 adding to the confusion seen in the quest for the historical Jesus centuries later.
Theodosius I's declaration of a particular form of Christianity being the official religion of Rome and the outlawing of both paganism and heretical versions followed by the collapse of the Western Empire resulted in the Europeanization of Jesus and intermixing of local pagan traditions into Christianity resulting in a Jesus of Faith and a lack of any further analysis of the Gospel account for centuries.[39]
Serious doubt about the historical existence of Jesus emerged when critical study of the gospels developed during the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The primary forerunners of the Jesus myth theory are identified as two French philosophers, Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809) and Constantin-François Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney (1757–1820).[40]
Dupuis rejected the historicity of Jesus entirely, explaining a reference to Jesus by the Roman historian Tacitus (56–117)—in around 116, Tacitus mentioned one Chrestus, who had been convicted by Pontius Pilate, as nothing but an echo of the inaccurate beliefs of Christians at the time. In Origine de tous les cultes (1795), he identified pre-Christian rituals in Greater Syria, Ancient Egypt and Persia that he believed represented the birth of a god to a virgin mother at the winter solstice, and argued that these rituals were based upon the winter rising of the constellation Virgo. He believed that these and other annual occurrences were allegorized as the histories of solar deities, such as Sol Invictus. He argued that Jewish and Christian scriptures could be interpreted according to the solar pattern: the Fall of Man in Genesis was an allegory of the hardship caused by winter, and the resurrection of Jesus represented the growth of the sun's strength in the sign of Aries at the spring equinox.[41]
Volney, who published before Dupuis but made use of a draft version of Dupuis' work, followed much of his argument. In his Les Ruines, Volney differed in thinking that the gospel story was not intentionally created as an extended allegory grounded in solar myths, but was compiled organically when simple allegorical statements like "the virgin has brought forth" were misunderstood as history. Volney further parted company from Dupuis by allowing that confused memories of an obscure historical figure may have contributed to Christianity when they were integrated with the solar mythology.[41] The works of Volney and Dupuis moved rapidly through numerous editions, allowing the thesis to circulate widely.[42] Napoleon, who knew Volney personally, was probably basing his opinion on Volney's work when he stated privately in October 1808 that the existence of Jesus was an open question.[40] Later critics argued that Volney and Dupuis had based their views on limited historical data.[43]
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.[45] Thompson writes that Strauss's influence on biblical studies was far-reaching.[45] 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.[44]
The German historian Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) took Strauss's arguments and carried them to their furthest point, arguing that Jesus had been entirely fabricated. He thereby became a leading proponent of the Jesus myth theory.[44] Writing while he taught at the University of Bonn from 1839 to 1842, Bauer argued that the Gospel of John was not an historical narrative, but an adaptation of the traditional Jewish religious and political idea of the Messiah to Philo's philosophical concept of the logos. Turning to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Bauer followed earlier critics in regarding them as dependent on Mark's narrative, while rejecting the view that they also drew upon a common tradition apart from Mark that scholars argue is lost — a hypothetical source called the Q document. For Bauer, this latter possibility was ruled out by the incompatible stories of Jesus' nativity found in Matthew and Luke, as well as the manner in which the non-Markan material found in these documents still appeared to develop Markan ideas. Bauer concluded that Matthew depended on Luke for the content found only in those two gospels. Thus, having traced the entire gospel tradition to a single author (Mark), Bauer felt that the hypothesis of outright invention became possible. He further believed there was no expectation of a Messiah among Jews in the time of Tiberius (ruled 14 AD to 37 AD), and that Mark's portrayal of Jesus as the Messiah must therefore be a retrojection of later Christian beliefs and practices—an interpretation Bauer extended to many of the specific stories recounted in the gospels. While Bauer initially left open the question of whether an historical Jesus existed at all, his published views were sufficiently unorthodox that in 1842 they cost him his lectureship at Bonn.[46]
In A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin, published in 1850–1851, Bauer argued that Jesus had not, in fact, existed. Bauer's own explanation of Christian origins appeared in 1877 in Christ and the Caesars. He proposed the religion as a synthesis of the Stoicism of Seneca the Younger and of the Jewish theology of Philo as developed by pro-Roman Jews such as Josephus.[47] While subsequent arguments against an historical Jesus did not directly depend on Bauer's work, they usually echoed it on several points: that New Testament references to Jesus lacked historical value; that both the absence of reference to Jesus within his lifetime, and the lack of non-Christian references to him in the 1st century, provided evidence against his existence; and that Christianity originated through syncretism.[48]
In the 1870s and 1880s, a group of scholars associated with the University of Amsterdam, known in German scholarship as the radical Dutch school, followed Bauer by rejecting the authenticity of the Pauline epistles, and took a generally negative view of the Bible's historical value. Within this group, the existence of Jesus was rejected by Allard Pierson, the leader of the movement, S. Hoekstra, and Samuel Adrian Naber. A. D. Loman argued in 1881 that all New Testament writings belonged to the 2nd century, and doubted that Jesus was an historical figure, but later said the core of the gospels was genuine.[49]
In 1890 the social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941) published the first edition The Golden Bough which attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief. This work became the basis of many later authors who argued that the story of Jesus was a fiction created by Christians, although he himself did not share that view but had enough people claim he did that in the 1913 expanded edition of The Golden Bough he expressly stated that his theory assumed a historical Jesus.[9][50] However, after this some people (like Schweitzer) still classified Frazer's ideas as belonging to the same class as those of John M. Robertson, William Benjamin Smith, and Arthur Drews.[9][51]
During the early 20th century, several writers published arguments against Jesus' historicity. Proponents of the theory drew on the work of liberal theologians, who tended to deny any value to sources for Jesus outside the New Testament, and to limit their attention to Mark and the hypothetical Q document.[49] 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.[52] 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."[53]
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.[54]
Robertson wrote that while the letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings, they were primarily concerned with theology and morality, largely glossing over the life of Jesus. Once references to the twelve apostles and Jesus's institution of the Eucharist are rejected as interpolations, Robertson argued that the Jesus of the Pauline epistles is reduced to a crucified savior who "counts for absolutely nothing as a teacher or even as a wonder-worker."[55] 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.[56] 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.[57]
In his 1946 book Jesus: Myth Or History Archibald Robertson stated
At around the same time William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934), a professor of mathematics at Tulane University in New Orleans, argued in a series of books that the earliest Christian sources, particularly the Pauline epistles, stress Christ's divinity at the expense of any human personality, and that this would have been implausible if there had been a human Jesus.[58] Smith believed that Christianity's origins lay in a pre-Christian Jesus cult—that is, in a Jewish sect that had worshipped a divine being named Jesus in the centuries before the human Jesus was supposedly born.[59] Smith argued that evidence for this cult was found in Hippolytus's mention of the Naassenes and Epiphanius's report of a Nazaraean or Nazorean sect that existed before Jesus. On this view, the seemingly historical details in the New Testament were built by the early Christian community around narratives of the pre-Christian Jesus.[60] Smith also argued against the historical value of non-Christian writers regarding Jesus, particularly Josephus and Tacitus.[61]
The Christ Myth (Die Christusmythe), first published in 1909 by Arthur Drews (1865–1935), professor of philosophy at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Germany, brought together the scholarship of the day in defense of the idea that Christianity had been a Jewish Gnostic cult that spread by appropriating aspects of Greek philosophy and life-death-rebirth deities. Drews 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.[62] Nikolai Berdyaev observed that Drews, "in his capacity as a religious anti-Semite", argued against the historical existence of Jesus "for the religious life of Aryanism."[63]
His work proved popular enough that prominent theologians and historians addressed his arguments in several leading journals of religion.[64] In response, Drews took part in a series of public debates, the best known of which took place in 1910 on January 31 and February 1 at the Berlin Zoological Garden against Hermann von Soden of the Berlin University, where he appeared on behalf of the League of Monists. Attended by 2,000 people, including the country's most eminent theologians, the meetings went on until three in the morning.[65] 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.[65]
Drew's work found fertile soil in the Soviet Union. Lenin (1870–1924) Soviet leader from 1917 until his death, argued that it was imperative in the struggle against religious obscurantists to form a union with people like Drews.[66] Several editions of Drews's The Christ Myth were published in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onwards, and his arguments were included in school and university textbooks.[67] Public meetings asking "Did Christ live?" were organized, during which party operatives debated with clergymen.[68]
Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879–1959) was a French doctor of medicine turned man of letters and poet.[69] He developed his idea of Jesus as myth in a series of essays and books, including Enigma of Jesus (1924), followed by The Mystery of Jesus (1925), Jesus the God Made Man (1937), The Creation of Christ (1939), Story of Jesus (1944), and The God Jesus (1951).[70] Theologian Walter P. Weaver writes that Couchoud dismissed material from Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, and Suetonius as evidence. Turning to the New Testament, he argued that Paul had had nothing to do with Jesus, and that Mark was the source for Luke and John. He argued that Mark was not an historical text but a commentary on early Christian stories and memories. He further argued that Paul's affirmation of the divinity of Jesus alongside Yahweh (God), suggested that Jesus was not real, because no Jew would have done that. For Couchoud, Jesus was a figment of Paul's imagination, the result of a new interpretation of ancient texts and a representation of the highest aspiration of the human soul.[69]
G. R. S. Mead (1863–1933), a member of the Theosophical Society, wrote in Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? (1903) that Jesus was an historical figure but that the Talmud points to him being crucified c100 BCE, meaning that the Gospel version was a mythical construct.[13] Harry Elmer Barnes in his 1929 The Twilight of Christianity and Tom Harpur in his 2006 "Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?" have said Mead along with Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, and John M. Robertson as being among the "eminent scholars and critics who have contended that Jesus was not historical"[71][72] Robert Price cites Mead as one of several examples of alternative traditions that place Jesus in a different time period than the Gospel account, and wrote that the "varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an original mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history."[73]
G. J. P. J. Bolland (1854–1922) argued in 1907 that Christianity evolved from Gnosticism, and that Jesus was simply a symbolic figure representing Gnostic ideas about God.[74]
John Eleazer Remsburg (1848–1919), an ardent religious skeptic in 1909 put out a book called The Christ which explored the range and possible origins of the "Christ Myth". While The Christ along with The Bible and Six Historic Americans is regarded as an important freethought book,[75] Remsburg felt the evidence supported the existence of a 1st century Jesus though also feeling that the Gospel version provided little to no information on the man. Despite Remsburg's support of a historical 1st century Jesus, the list of names from the "Silence of Contemporary Writers" chapter of The Christ (sometimes called the Remsburg|Remsberg list) has appeared in a handful of self published books regarding the nonhistoricity hypothesis by authors such as James Patrick Holding,[76] Hilton Hotema,[77] Jawara D. King,[78] Madalyn Murray O'Hair,[79] and Asher Norman.[80]
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) famously announced in his 1927 lecture, "Why I Am Not a Christian"—delivered to the National Secular Society in Battersea Town Hall, London—that historically it is quite doubtful that Jesus existed, and if he did we know nothing about him, though Russell did nothing to develop the idea.[81]
Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John M. Allegro (1923–1988) argued in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979) that Christianity began as a shamanic cult centering around the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and that the New Testament was a coded record of a clandestine cult. Mark Hall writes that Allegro suggested the scrolls all but proved that an historical Jesus never existed.[82] Philip Jenkins writes that Allegro was an eccentric scholar who relied on texts that did not exist in quite the form he was citing them, and calls the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross "possibly the single most ludicrous book on Jesus scholarship by a qualified academic."[83] Allegro was forced to resign his academic post.[84]
Philosopher George Walsh argues that Christianity can be seen as originating in a myth dressed up as history, or with a historical being mythologized into a supernatural one: he calls the former the Christ myth theory, and the latter the historical Jesus theory. Walsh also states "My present opinion is that, in the case of Jesus, we simply do not know for certain anything about his biography, not even that he existed." [85]
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).[86] 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.[87]
Wells bases his arguments on the views of New Testament scholars who acknowledge that the gospels are sources written decades after Jesus's death by people who had no personal knowledge of him. In addition, Wells writes, the texts are exclusively Christian and theologically motivated, and therefore a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed. Wells also argues that Paul and the other epistle writers—the earliest Christian writers—do not provide any support for the idea that Jesus lived early in the 1st century. There is no information in them about Jesus's parents, place of birth, teachings, trial, or crucifixion.[88] 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".[8]
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.[89] Biblical scholar Robert Van Voorst said that with this argument Wells had performed an about-face[90] while Doherty presented it as another example of the Gospel Jesus did not exist,[91] Carrier classifying it (along with Wells' later Can we trust the new Testament?) as a book Defending ahistoricity in his May 30, 2006 Stanford University presentation,[92] and Eddy-Boyd presenting it as an example of a Jesus myth theory book.[93]
Wells writes that he belongs in the category of those who argue that Jesus did exist, but that reports about him are so unreliable that we can know little or nothing about him.[94] He argues, for example, that the story of the execution of Jesus under Pilate is not an historical account.[95] He wrote in 2000: "[J. D. G. Dunn] objected [in 1985] that, in my work as then published, I had, implausibly, to assume that, within 30 years from Paul, there had evolved "such a ... complex of traditions about a non-existent figure as we have in the sources of the gospels" (The Evidence for Jesus, p. 29). My present standpoint is: this complex is not all post-Pauline (Q in its earliest form may well be as early as ca. AD. 40), and it is not all mythical. The essential point, as I see it, is that what is authentic in this material refers to a personage who is not to be identified with the dying and rising Christ of the early epistles."[8]
Alvar Ellegård (1919–2008), a professor of English at the University of Gothenburg, developed the ideas of Wells and Couchoud in his Myten om Jesus (1992), arguing that Jesus is essentially a myth and the gospels largely fiction, created to give substance to the ecstatic visions of Paul and the apostles, in which Jesus appeared as the messiah. He argues that the point of Paul's letters to the Jewish diaspora was to show that the Day of Judgment was imminent, messianiac views that were common among Jews at the time. When it became clear decades later that the Day of Judgment was not upon them, Paul's audience wanted to know more about Jesus, and because there was little to guide them, the gospels emerged to complete a picture, using passages from the Old Testament that messianic Jews had long interpreted as heralding the messiah.[87]
Ellegård writes that his position differs from that of Drews and Couchoud. Like G.A. Wells, he believes that Paul's letters show Paul and his audience believed Paul's visions had been about a real person. Ellegård develops arguments proposed by André Dupont-Sommer and John Allegro, and identifies Paul's Jesus as the "Essene Teacher of Righteousness" revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but he argues that this was not Jesus of the gospels.
For Ellegård, the figure Paul had in mind was the founder of the Essene, or para-Essene, congregations Paul was addressing, someone who had probably lived in the 2nd or early 1st century BCE, though Ellegard acknowledges there is no evidence of a Jesus who would fit this description, or evidence that the Teacher of Righteousness was crucified. He accuses modern theologians of failing to live up to their responsibilities as scholars. He argues that their position is dogmatic, often concealed "under a cover of mystifying language,"[96] that they often have ties to Christian churches, and that there has been a failure of communication between them and scholars in other fields, leading to an insulation of theological research from scholarly debate elsewhere. He dismisses as an ad hominem argument the criticism of himself and Wells as non-specialists.[87]
American New Testament scholar 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.[98] A former Baptist pastor, Price writes that he was originally an apologist on the historical-Jesus question but became disillusioned with the arguments. As the years went on, he found it increasingly difficult to poke holes in the position that questioned Jesus's existence entirely. Despite this, he still took part in the Eucharist every week for several years, seeing the Christ of faith as all the more important because, he argued, there was probably never any other.[99]
Price believes that Christianity is a historicized synthesis of mainly Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek mythologies.[100] He writes that everyone who espouses the Jesus myth theory bases their arguments on three key points:
Price argues that "the varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history" citing accounts that have Jesus being crucified under Alexander Jannaeus (83 BCE) or in his 50s by Herod Agrippa I under the rule of Claudius Caesar (41-54 CE)[101][102]
Price acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.[103]
Thomas L. Thompson, retired professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, argues in The Messiah Myth (2005) that the Jesus of the gospels did not exist, and that stories about him are a combination of Near Eastern myths and stories about kingship and divinity. He argues that the contemporaneous audience of the gospels would have understood this, that the stories were not intended as history.[104]
Canadian writer Earl Doherty argues in The Jesus Puzzle (2005) and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man—The Case for a Mythical Jesus (2009) argues that Jesus originated as a myth derived from Middle Platonism with some influence from Jewish mysticism, and that belief in a historical Jesus emerged only among Christian communities in the 2nd century. He writes that none of the major apologists before the year 180, except for Justin and Aristides of Athens, included an account of a historical Jesus in their defenses 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.[106]
Acharya S maintains the position that the canonical gospels represent a middle to late 2nd-century creation utilizing Old Testament "prophetic" scriptures as a blueprint, in combination with a collage of other, older Pagan and Jewish concepts, and that Christianity was thereby fabricated in order to compete with the other popular religions of the time.
In the 2000s, a number of books and films associated with the New Atheism movement questioned whether Jesus existed. The books included The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins, the former professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University; God:The Failed Hypothesis (2007) by the American physicist Victor Stenger; and God Is Not Great (2007) by late British writer Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins, citing G.A. Wells, sees the gospels as rehashed versions of the Hebrew Bible, and writes that it is probable Jesus existed, but that a serious argument can be mounted against it, though not a widely supported one.[105] Stenger's position is that the gospel writers borrowed from several Middle Eastern cults.[107] Hitchens argues that there is little or no evidence for the life of Jesus, unlike for the prophet Muhammad.[108] Using the modern John Frum cargo cult as an example Dawkins states
"Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed. (...) John Frum, if he existed at all, did so within living memory. Yet, even for so recent a possibility, it is not certain whether he lived at all."[109]
Films that refer to the issue are The God Who Wasn't There (2005), Zeitgeist (2007), and Religulous (2008).[110]
The Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), part of the Center for Inquiry, announced the Jesus Project at a conference in the University of California Davis in December 2007. The Project envisaged that a group of 20 scholars from relevant disciplines—historians, archeologists, philosophers—should meet every nine months for five years, with no preconceived ideas, to examine the evidence for Jesus's existence.[111] Joseph Hoffmann of CSER was the project's director. The project was temporarily halted in June 2009 when its funding was suspended, and shortly thereafter Hoffmann resigned, which effectively brought it to an end. He wrote that he no longer believed it was possible to answer the historicity question, because of the extent to which history, myth, and religious belief are intertwined. He argues that the New Testament documents were written at a time when the line between natural and supernatural was not clearly drawn. He concludes: "No quantum of material discovered since the 1940's, in the absence of canonical material, would support the existence of an historical founder. No material regarded as canonical and no church doctrine built upon it in the history of the church would cause us to deny it. Whether the New Testament runs from Christ to Jesus or Jesus to Christ is not a question we can answer."[112]
Hoffmann said there were problems with the media and blogs sensationalizing stories about the project, with the only possible newsworthy outcome being the conclusion that Jesus had not existed, a conclusion which (he writes) the majority of participants would not have reached. When one Jesus-myth supporter asked that the project set up a section devoted to members committed to the non-existence thesis—with Hoffmann describing the "mythers" as people out to prove through consensus what they cannot establish through evidence—he interpreted it as a sign of trouble ahead, a lack of the kind of skepticism he argues the Jesus myth theory itself invites.[112]
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.[113] Comparable figures for Britain in 2008 say 13 percent of the general population, and 40 percent of atheists, do not believe that Jesus existed.[114] However, in his A Credible Christianity: Saving Jesus from the Church former University Pastor and Director of a United Campus Ministry at Michigan State University Walter Kania[115] was highly critical of the study saying "the statistics and conclusions in the book were made of fundamentalist concoctions and cooked statistics."[116]
In Italy in 2006, Luigi Cascioli, the atheist author of The Fable of Christ and a former trainee priest, sued Father Enrico Righi for having written in a church newsletter that Jesus was born in Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph and that he lived in Nazareth. Cascioli said the statement was an "abuse of popular belief," and brought the lawsuit against Righi under an Italian anti-fraud law. The case was thrown out.[117] The case was then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights as Cascioli v Italy case # 14910/06 but the file was closed due to the time required to file necessary documentation.
The Jesus myth theory has never achieved acceptance among biblical scholars or historians.[118] [119] [120] [121] [122] [123] [124] [125] [126] [127] [128] [129] Some of the earliest arguments against the philosophical myth part of the Jesus myth 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, even during the emperor's lifetime.[130] In 1914, Fred C. Conybeare published The Historical Christ, in which he argued against J.M. Robertson, Arthur Drews, and William Benjamin Smith.[131] He was followed by the French biblical scholar Maurice Goguel, who published Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or History? in 1926. Goguel argued that prima facie evidence for a historical Jesus came from the agreement on his existence between ancient orthodox Christians, Docetists, and opponents of Christianity. Goguel proceeded to examine the theology of the Pauline epistles, the other New Testament epistles, the gospels, and the Book of Revelation, as well as belief in Jesus' resurrection and divinity, arguing in each case that early Christian views were best explained by a tradition stemming from a recent historical Jesus.[132]
Later editions of Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus contained a lengthy section on the Jesus myth theory, concluding "that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely."[133] However these later editions also grouped Sir James George Frazer (who had stated in 1913 that "My theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth" [134]) with John M. Robertson, William Benjamin Smith, and Arthur Drew as those "who contested the historical existence of Jesus", a point reinforced by Schweitzer himself in his 1931 autobiography Out of My Life and Thought
Further refutations were produced throughout the 20th century, including R. T. France's The Evidence for Jesus (1986), Robert Van Voorst's Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000), and The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (2007), coauthored by Paul Eddy and Greg Boyd. Professor of Divinity James Dunn describes the mythical Jesus theory as a "thoroughly dead thesis."[135] Classicist Michael Grant wrote in 1977 that standard historical criteria prevent the rejection of an historical Jesus:
…if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned… To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has "again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars." In recent years, "no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus" or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.[37]
However it should also be noted in the same work in this very section Michael Grant also seems to make a connection between the Christ myth theory and docetism:
"This skeptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth. In ancient times, this extreme view was named the heresy of docetism (seeming) because it maintained that Jesus never came into the world "in the flesh", but only seemed to; (I John 4:2) and it was given some encouragement by Paul's lack of interest in his fleshly existence. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that Jesus did not even "seem" to exist, and that all tales of his appearance upon the earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was compared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods.[37]
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").[136]
The composition of the letters of Paul of Tarsus is generally dated between 49 and 64 CE,[137] some two to three decades after the conventional date given for Jesus's death. Paul did not know the historical Jesus. He only claims he had known him, 'as of one born out of due time', i.e., as the 'risen' Jesus.[138]
Many biblical scholars turn to Paul's letters (epistles) to support their arguments for a historical Jesus.[139] Theologian James D.G. Dunn argues that Robert Price ignores what everyone else in the field regards as primary data.[140] 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).[141] 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.[141]
Louis Feldman argues that the writings of the 1st century Jewish historian Josephus (37 – c.100) contain two references to the Jesus character. One of them, Josephus' allusion in The Antiquities of the Jews (c. 94) to the death of James, describes James as "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ", provides alleged attestation independent of the early Christian community.[142] Josephus' fuller reference to Jesus, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, while considered by many specialists to contain later interpolations, is nevertheless believed by some scholars to preserve an original comment regarding Jesus as well.[143]
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.[144]
Some biblical scholars argue against the idea that early material related to Jesus can be explained with reference to pagan mythological parallels.[145] Paula Fredriksen, for example, writes that no serious work places Jesus outside the backdrop of 1st century Palestinian Judaism.[146] Biblical scholarship also generally rejects the concept of homogenous dying and rising gods, the validity of which is often presupposed by advocates of the Jesus myth theory, such as New Testament scholar Robert Price. Tryggve Mettinger, former professor of Hebrew bible at Lund University, is one of the academics who supports the "dying and rising gods" construct, but he argues that Jesus does not fit the wider pattern.[147]
Christian apologist Edwin Yamauchi argues that past attempts to equate elements of Jesus' biography with those of mythological figures have not sufficiently taken into account the dates and provenance of their sources.[148] 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.[149] For example, David Ulansey argues that the purported equivalence of Jesus' virgin birth with Mithras' origin fails because Mithras emerged fully grown, partially clothed, and armed from a rock,[150] possibly after it had been inseminated.[151] 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,"[152] as evidenced by the strenuous opposition that Paul encountered from other Christians for even his minor concessions to Gentile believers.[153] However Marvin Meyer, Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University, identifies a number of similarities, and says that the resemblance between Christianity and Mithraism is close enough to make Christian apologists scramble to invent creative theological explanations to account for the similarities.[154]
Although many biblical scholars agree that Jesus did exist, Joseph Hoffmann has stated that the issue of historicity of Jesus has been long ignored due to theological interests.[155] The New Testament scholar Nicholas Perrin has argued that since most biblical scholars are Christians, a certain bias is inevitable, but he does not see this as a major problem.[156] Donald Akenson, Professor of Irish Studies in the department of history at Queen's University has argued that, with very few exceptions, the historians of Yeshua have not followed sound historical practices. He has stated that there is an unhealthy reliance on consensus, for propositions, which should otherwise be based on primary sources, or rigorous interpretation. He also holds that some of the criteria being used are faulty. He says that, the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars are employed in institutions whose roots are in religious beliefs. Because of this, more than any other group in present day academia, biblical historians are under immense pressure to theologize their historical work. It is only through considerable individual heroism, that many biblical historians have managed to maintain the scholarly integrity of their work.[157] John Meier, Professor of theology at University of Notre Dame, has said "...people claim they are doing a quest for the historical Jesus when de facto they’re doing theology, albeit a theology that is indeed historically informed..."[158] Dale Allison, Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, too says, "...We wield our criteria to get what we want...We all see what we expect to see and what we want to see...."[159] However, the Old Testament scholar Bertil Albrektson has stated that a great many biblical scholars do not accept any creed as the foundation of their work and they do in fact honestly try to investigate scientifically the basic documents of Christianity in the same way as other texts from antiquity.[160]
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