Talk:Christ myth theory/Sandbox

The Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory and nonexistence hypothesis) is the argument that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist as a historical figure, and that the Jesus of early Christianity was the personification of an ideal savior to whom a number of stories were later attached.

The history of the idea can be traced to the French Enlightenment thinkers Constantin-François Volney and Charles François Dupuis in the 1790s. More recent academic advocates include the 19th-century theologian Bruno Bauer and the 20th-century philosopher Arthur Drews. Writers such as G.A. Wells, Robert M. Price, and Earl Doherty have re-popularized the idea in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The hypothesis has at times attracted scholarly attention, but remains essentially without support among biblical scholars and classical historians. Ancient Historian Michael Grant writes that "In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' -- or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." The biblical scholar Graham Stanton writes that nearly all historians today accept that Jesus existed, and that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John contain valuable evidence about him.

Proponents 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. They give priority to the epistles over the gospels in determining the views of the earliest Christians, and draw on perceived parallels between the biography of Jesus and those of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman gods. They argue that, while some gospel material may have been drawn from one or more preachers who actually existed, these individuals were not in any sense the founder of Christianity; rather, they contend that Christianity emerged organically from Hellenistic Judaism. Arguing against the theory, the New Testament scholar James Dunn writes of the improbability that a figure would be invented who had lived within the generation of the inventors, or that such an elaborate myth would have been imposed upon a minor figure from Galilee who had no significant influence. This, he writes, is the fatal flaw of the Christ myth theory.

Background and definition
Those who argue that Jesus did exist as an historical figure estimate his date of birth as between 7 and 4 BCE and his death around 30 CE. Biblical scholar L. Michael White, not himself a Christ-myth theorist, writes that there are no extent writings from Jesus himself. So far as is known, Jesus never wrote anything, nor did anyone who had personal knowledge of him. There are no court records, diaries, unvarnished eyewitness accounts, or any other kind of first-hand record. The gospels themselves, even though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions, all come from later times. 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 follower of Jesus; nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus.

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

Volney and Dupuis
Serious doubt about the historical existence of Jesus first emerged when critical study of the Gospels developed in the 18th century, and some English deists towards the end of that century are said to have believed that no historical Jesus existed.

The primary forerunners of the nonhistoricity hypothesis are usually identified as two thinkers of the French Enlightenment, Constantin-François Chassebœuf, known as Volney, and Charles François Dupuis. In works published in the 1790s, both argued that numerous ancient myths, including the life of Jesus, were based on the movement of the sun through the zodiac.

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, though, 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. However, their influence even within France did not outlast the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as later critics argued that they had based their views on limited historical data, by demonstrating, for example, that the birth of Jesus was not placed in December until the 4th century.

Bruno Bauer
In a series of studies produced while he was teaching at the University of Bonn (1839–1842), the German historian Bruno Bauer followed D. F. Strauss in disputing the historical value of the New Testament gospels. In Bauer's view, 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 which is now lost—a source scholars call the Q document, Q source, or just Q. 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 instead 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 that 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 concluded that Jesus had not, in fact, existed. Bauer's own comprehensive explanation of Christian origins appeared in 1877 in Christ and the Caesars. He argued 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 argued that Mark was an Italian who had been influenced by Seneca's Stoic philosophy, 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.

Early 20th century
By the early 20th century several writers had published arguments against Jesus' historicity, ranging from the scholarly to the highly fanciful. In an example of the latter, the English historian Edwin Johnson denied not only a historical Jesus but much of recorded history prior to the 16th century AD as well. Despite their unevenness, these treatments were sufficiently influential to merit several book-length responses by historians and New Testament scholars. Proponents of the Christ myth theory increasingly 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 within the canon to Mark and the hypothetical Q document. Thus when the Zurich professor Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel identified just nine "pillar passages" in the gospels which he thought early Christians could not have invented, they proved to be tempting targets for Christ myth theorists—despite Schmiedel's intention that these passages serve as the foundation for a fuller reconstruction of Jesus' life.

These authors also made use of the growing field of Religionsgeschichtliche—the "history of religions"—which seemed to find sources for many 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, a Scottish journalist who later 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 possibly based on a conjectured divinity of that name reflected 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 undisputed letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings, these epistles 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, Robertson concluded that those elements of the Gospel narrative which 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, albeit with some "Judaic manipulation"— 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 ultimately derived from the function of Mithras, Thoth, and Hermes as representatives to humanity from the supreme god.

William Benjamin Smith
At around the same time, William Benjamin Smith, 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. Evidence for this cult was supposedly found in Hippolytus' mention of the Naassenes and Epiphanius' report of a Nazaraean or Nazorean sect that existed before Christ. In 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
Die Christusmythe ("The Christ Myth"), first published in 1909 by Arthur Drews, a 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 ever existed.

His work proved popular enough in both his native Germany and abroad that prominent theologians and historians addressed his arguments in the Hibbert Journal, the American Journal of Theology, and other leading journals of religion. At least two monographs on the historicity of Jesus were written partially in refutation of Drews. In response to his critics, Drews participated 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" and "ruthless" that several women had to be carried from the hall screaming hysterically, while one woman stood on a chair and invited God to strike Drews down.

Other writers
Other writers around this period argued along similar lines. 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.

G. R. S. Mead wrote that Jesus was based on an obscure personage recorded in the Talmud who lived around 100 BCE. 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. The philosopher Bertrand Russell said in his 1927 lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian" that historically it is quite doubtful that Christ ever existed at all.

Marx, Lenin, Soviet adoption
Craig A. Evans writes that the theory was picked up by Karl Marx and became the official view of Marxism. Several editions of Drews's The Christ Myth were published in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onwards, and were used in the state's anti-religion campaigns; Lenin argued that it was imperative in the struggle against religious obscurantists to form a union with people like Drews. James Thrower writes that Lenin, who led the Soviet state from 1917 to 1924, approached Drews's account as an established fact in his 1922 essay "On the importance of militant materialism." That year, all religious books were removed from public libraries and bookshops, and Drews's theory was elevated to the rank of objective truth, included in school and university textbooks. Public meetings asking "Did Christ live?" were organized in which the Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky debated with clergymen.

Academics in the USSR continued to promote the theory throughout the state's early history, and although the theory was never discarded, it came to be replaced by the explanation offered by Engels in his 1895 essay, "On the Early History of Christianity." The existence of Jesus was accepted, but the mythological aspects of the narrative were stressed, as was the debt owed to the Jews, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

John M. Allegro
Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John M. Allegro argued in two books&mdash;The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979)&mdash;that Christianity began as a shamanic cult centering around the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and that it had derived its central mythos from Essene sources. 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. "According to Allegro," he wrote, "the Jesus of the gospels is a fictional character in a religious legend, which like many similar tales in circulation at the turn of the era, was merely an amalgamation of Messianic eschatology and garbled historical events".

G.A. Wells
Graham Stanton writes that the most thoroughgoing and sophisticated of the proponents' arguments were set out in several books by G. A. Wells, emeritus professor of German at Birkbeck College, London&mdash;including Did Jesus Exist? (1975), The Jesus Legend (1996), and The Jesus Myth (1999)&mdash;though Stanton argues that Wells's arguments rest on shaky pillars.

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&mdash;the earliest Christian writers&mdash;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:

The Galilean preacher of Q has been given a salvivic death and resurrection, and these have been set not in an unspecified past (as in the Pauline and other early letters), but in a historical context consonant with the date of the Galilean preaching.

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.

Robert M. Price
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). Price was a fellow of the now defunct Jesus Seminar, a group of laymen and scholars studying the historical Jesus.

A former Baptist pastor, Price writes that he was originally opposed to the arguments against the existence of Jesus, but found it increasingly difficult to poke holes them. He now believes that Christianity is an historicized synthesis of mainly Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek mythology.

Price believes that everyone who advocates 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 a recent historical Jesus&mdash;all that can be taken from the epistles, Price 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 contends that if critical methodology is applied with ruthless consistency, one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus' 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, arguing that received opinion or the consensus of scholars may be wrong, and that appealing to it is an abdication of responsibility.

Earl Doherty
Canadian writer Earl Doherty argues in The Jesus Puzzle (2005) and a number to self-published works that no historical Jesus stands behind even the most primitive hypothetical sources of the New Testament. He argues that Jesus was originally 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.

Doherty further argues 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, he states, 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 writers
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy write that the gospels maintain that a Gnostic belief in a purely mythical Jesus was the original form of Christianity, which was supplanted then suppressed by the Catholic Church. D. M. Murdock argues that virtually all the New Testament documents are "forgeries," with the gospels misrepresenting as historical a Jesus who was initially understood as a solar myth.

Scarcity and unreliability of extra-biblical sources
Christ myth theorists often cite the lack of contemporaneous non-Christian sources that mention Jesus. The few non-Christian sources that do refer to Jesus are rejected as corrupt (such as the remarks of Josephus) or viewed as dependent on the beliefs of later Christians (such as Tacitus’s passing reference to a Christ), and thus provide no independent corroboration.

Advocates also sometimes reject the testimony of the Apostolic Fathers such as Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, which indicate an early belief in a historical Jesus. Their writings are either dismissed as forgeries, or the most pertinent passages in their works are bracketed as later interpolations.

Evolution of New Testament literature
Proponents of the Christ myth theory note that among the New Testament documents, the epistles—specifically the undisputed epistles of Paul—constitute the oldest sources related to Jesus. Advocates also note that within this earliest stratum of Christian literature, references to biographical details and teachings associated with Jesus are relatively rare. Further, the fuller depictions of Jesus’ life and ministry found in the gospels demonstrate a textual interdependence which Christ myth theory advocates argue undermines the notion that multiple independent sources stand behind the accounts. On this basis, proponents often theorize that the epistles present an early belief in a purely mythical savior-figure who was subsequently historicized (perhaps in a conscientiously allegorical fashion) by the Gospel According to Mark, with Matthew, Luke, and John further imaginatively embellishing Mark’s narrative in their own derivative gospels.

Mythological parallels
An argument commonly presented in connection with the Christ myth theory is that the biblical material related to the life of Jesus bears allegedly striking similarities to both Jewish and pagan stories which preceded it. Parallels are often cited between Jesus and Old Testament figures such as Moses, Joseph, and Elisha and a wide range of pagan mythological personages. For example, proponents have claimed that, according to classical mythological sources, Mithras was born to a virgin mother, Horus had twelve disciples, Attis was crucified, and Osiris was resurrected from the dead. Sometimes appeal is made to broader anthropological understandings of religion and ritual patterns of human behavior as postulated by James Frazer and others in such works as The Golden Bough. Christ myth advocates believe that the parallels demonstrate borrowing, with the early Christian community adapting existing mythologies to their particular socio-religious tastes. These parallels are further thought to extend to every identifiable element of Jesus' biography, rendering the biblical portrait of Jesus entirely explicable by reference to literary antecedents and thus making a historical figure superfluous.

Historical responses
The Christ myth theory has never achieved mainstream academic acceptance. From its very inception it provoked scholarly refutations, often of rather dismissive sorts. The earliest of these were satirical treatments by Richard Whately and Jean-Baptiste Pérès entitled "Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte" (1819) and "Grand Erratum" (1827) respectively. These works utilized the skepticism of Dupuis and others in a tongue-in-cheek fashion to argue against the historical existence of Napoleon Bonaparte—who was still alive at the time Whately published.

In 1914, Fred C. Conybeare published The Historical Christ, in which he argued against Robertson, Drews, and Smith in favor of Jesus' historical existence. Conybeare was followed by the French biblical scholar Maurice Goguel, who published Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or History? in 1926. In this text, described by R. Joseph Hoffmann as "perhaps the best of its kind", 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. Responses to particular exponents of the theory have also been offered. Of the theory's more recent advocates, John Allegro, G. A. Wells, Robert Price, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, D. M. Murdock, and Earl Doherty have each been the subject of such critical commentary.

The church historian Geoffrey Bromiley writes that while many versions of the Christ myth theory assume that Christianity had obscure beginnings, such views fail to notice that early Christians appealed to historical events already known by the general public. Further, early Christians opposed speculative and mythical notions concerning spiritual matters by appealing to eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life.

Multiple attestation, embarrassment
Some commonly accepted critical criteria are used by opponents to support their argument for the historicity of Jesus, including the application of the criterion of multiple attestation and criterion of embarrassment to the New Testament and other early Christian writings.

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"). According to this view, additional corroboration, in relatively early material referencing a historical Jesus, can also be found in the Gospel According to John, and the epistles of Paul.

The American philosopher and historian Will Durant has applied the criterion of embarrassment, writing: "Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them." He argues that if the gospels were entirely imaginative, these and other issues in the life of Christ would probably not exist; a purely creative narrative would likely present Jesus in strict conformity with preexisting messianic expectations. The fact that the New Testament documents record otherwise embarrassing elements therefore strongly indicates their rootedness in historical events.

Josephus
Despite the misgivings of Christ myth theorists, mainstream scholarship believes the writings of Josephus contain two authentic references to Jesus. One of these, Josephus' allusion in The Antiquities of the Jews to the death of James, is almost universally accepted as authentic. The reference, written by the first-century Jewish historianJosephus, describing James as "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ", is seen as providing attestation independent of the early Christian community. Josephus' fuller reference to Jesus, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, while generally considered by scholars to contain later interpolations, is nevertheless believed by several scholars to preserve an original comment regarding Jesus.

Pauline Epistles
Contrary to the claims of advocates, many scholars turn to the epistles of Paul as evidence for a historical Jesus. F.F. Bruce writes that according to the Apostle Paul, Jesus "was an Israelite, he says, descended from Abraham (Gal 3:16) and David (Rom. 1:3); who lived under the 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 His death (I Thess. 2:15); who was buried, rose the third day and was thereafter seen alive by many eyewitnesses on various occasions, including one occasion on which He was so seen by over five hundred at once, of whom the majority were alive twenty-five years later (I Cor. 15:4ff)." In addition, the epistles testify that Paul knew of and had met important figures in Jesus' ministry including the apostle Peter and John as well as James the brother of Jesus, who is also mentioned in Josephus. Within his epistles, Paul on occasion alludes to and quotes the teachings of Jesus, and in 1 Corinthians 11 recounts the Last Supper.

James D.G. Dunn has written that Christ myth theorist Robert Price with regard to the epistles ignores "what everyone else in the business regards as primary data." Dunn writes that Price's interpretation is "a ludicrous claim that simply diminishes the credibility of the arguments used in support."

Rejection of mythological parallels
Mainstream critical scholarship rejects the argument that early material related to Jesus can be explained with reference to pagan mythological parallels. Instead it is believed that Jesus is to be understood against the backdrop of first century Palestinian Judaism. New Testament scholar Ben Witherington writes that an emphasis on broader Hellenistic religious categories has been "largely abandoned."

Edwin Yamauchi argues that 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 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 the rock had been inseminated.

S. G. F. Brandon argues 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.

Methodological concerns
While advocates rely on the absence of contemporaneous reference to Jesus, and the silence of Paul regarding much of Jesus' life, specialist like R. T. France regard such arguments with deep suspicion, arguing that various sources may not mention Jesus for any number of reasons. Further, while many Christ myth theorists draw parallels between early Christianity and Hellenistic mystery religions, relatively little is actually known about the beliefs and practices of the latter. Scholars like Andreas J. Köstenberger and Herbert George Wood have suggested that, given the above issues, the Christ myth theory can only be advocated in defiance of the available evidence. A number of scholars, including Mark Allan Powell, the chairman of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature&mdash;a group of 8500 writers and scholars who study the biblical documents&mdash;classify it as a form of denialism and compare it to a variety of fringe theories.

Public opinion
A 2005 study conducted by Baylor 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 in Britain indicated that 13 percent of the general population and 40 percent of atheists do not believe in the existence of Jesus, according to a 2008 ComRes poll, while a 2009 McCrindle Research study found that 11 percent of Australians doubt that Jesus was a historical figure.