User:Akhilleus/Cmt faq

This is a page in userspace, dealing with some points that come up over and over again at Talk:Christ myth theory.

What is it?
The following passages come from books devote at least a major section to the idea of Jesus' non-historicity.


 * Schweitzer (1913):


 * Alan H. Jones, Independence and Exegesis: The Study of Early Christianity in the Work of Alfred Loisy, Charles Guignebert, and Maurice Goguel (Mohr Siebeck, 1983), p. 47: "In particular these rationalist organisations helped to promulgate the quasi-dogma of the non-historicity of Jesus of Nazareth and thus to foster the 'Christ-myth' school of thought, to be encountered later in this study."


 * Weaver (1999) p. 45: "The debate over the historicity of Jesus became intense in the first decade of the twentieth century and spread from Germany into Holland, England, and America. It peaked around 1910 with a public conference in the Zoological Gardens in Berlin and began to taper off thereafter. It was, in face, an acrimonious debate, with historical and theological issues intertwined, and it was also apparent that the liberals had brought the matter, to their regret apparently, upon themselves. Of course, it is also true that this questioning of the very existence of Jesus as a historical figure was not really new, having gone back as far at least as the eighteenth-century Frenchmen Charles François Dupuis and Constantin François Volney, and wound its way down through Bruno Bauer and Albert Kalthoff, as Schweitzer had originally described and, in his greatly expanded second edition, had more extensively discussed."


 * Van Voorst (2000) pp. 6: "Until recently, the mainstream of New Testament scholarship has not had a large influence on research into Jesus in sources outside the New Testament. However, one long-running and often noisy side current has had such an influence. This is the controversial question, Did Jesus really exist? Some readers may be surprised or shocked that many books and essays--by my count, over one hundred--in the past two hundred years have fervently denied the very existence of Jesus. Contemporary New Testament scholars have typicall viewed their arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely. Thus, students of the New Testament are often unfamiliar with them. In this section, as a special follow-up to our sketch of the history of research, we will examine briefly the history and significance of the theory that Jesus never existed." (A footnote after "ignore them completely" mentions Case 1912, Drews 1926, Goguel 1926 and 1933, and Wood 1938 as treatments of the history of this problem.)


 * Bennett (2001) p. 202 (under the heading "The Jesus-was-a-myth school"): "I turn now to the genre of writers who argue that there never was a Jesus of Nazareth, that he never existed. They also draw on early pagan critique, and suggest that all Paul did (he is often credited with Jesus' invention) was to create a composite character from pre-existing beliefs."

The following passages come from books or articles that mention the idea of Jesus' non-historicity, but don't give substantial discussion to it.


 * William R. Farmer, "A Fresh Approach to Q," in Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults, eds. Jacob Neusner, Morton Smith (Brill, 1975), p. 43: "The radical solution was to deny the possibility of reliable knowledge of Jesus, and out of this developed the Christ myth theory, according to which Jesus never existed as an historical figure and the Christ of the Gospels was a social creation of a messianic community."


 * Geoffrey Bromiley, "Jesus Christ", in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Eerdmans 1982), p. 1034: "Over the last two hundred years or so, some skeptics have sought to explain the NT witness to Jesus and the rise of Christianity in terms of the Christ-myth theory. This 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, and its basis is sought in the parallels, actual or legendary, to the Gospel records concerning Jesus."


 * William Horbury, "The New Testament," A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain (Oxford 2003), p. 55: "Defence of biblical criticism was not helped by revival at this time of the 'Christ-myth' theory, suggesting that Jesus had never existed, a suggestion rebutted in England by the radical but independent F. C. Conybeare."


 * John T. Townsend, "Christianity in Rabbinic Literature," in Biblical Interpretation in Judaism and Christianity, eds. Isaac Kalimi, Peter J. Haas (Continuum International, 2006), p. 150n2: "...For a more recent listing of Jewish references to the person of Jesus, see F. R. Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources (Cranford, N.J.: American Atheist Press, 2003). Note that Zindler is a former professor of biology and geology. Although his listing is quite complete and includes both Rabbinic and non-Rabbinic sources, Zindler depends on secondary works and writes with the aim of proving the Christ-Myth theory, namely, the theory that the Jesus of history never existed..."

Who are the important figures?

 * Schweitzer (1913): Bauer, (Dupuis and Volney as "forerunners"), Kalthoff, some "radical Dutch thinkers", Robertson, Jensen, Niemojewsky, Fuhrmann, Smith, Drews, Bolland, Lublinski
 * Case (1912): Ch. 2 is the relevant section. It mentions Volney/Dupuis among a wider range of forerunners; Bauer is given a few pages; a footnote on p. 39 mentions W.B. Smith, J.M. Robertson, Mead, Whittaker, Bolland, Virolleaud, Bossi, Niemojewski, Kalthoff, Jensen, Drews, Lublinski; the main text continues with Drews, Kalthoff, J. M. Robertson, Jensen, Niemojewski, G. R. S. Mead, W. B. Smith, Bolland, Lublinski, Drews.
 * Goguel (1926b): Drews, Robertson, Smith, Volney, Dupuis, Bauer, "certain critics of the radical Dutch school", (Reinach "does not formally deny the historical existence of Jesus, but suspends his judgment"), Couchoud
 * Weaver (1999): Dupuis, Volney, Bauer, Kalthoff, "a Dutch school", Jensen, Drews, Smith, Robertson, Brandes, Couchoud
 * Van Voorst (2000): "some disciples" of Lord Bolingbroke, Volney, Dupuis, Bauer, "official Soviet literature", anonymous 1841 pamphlets, some of the "Radical Dutch School", Robertson, Smith, Drews, Wells
 * Bennett (2001): Robert Taylor, Bauer, Frazer, Jung and Campbell, J. M. Robertson, Acharya S, Arthur Drews, G. A. Wells, Joseph Wheless, Joseph McCabe, A. N. Wilson, and R. Joseph Hoffman. (Bennett's approach is not strictly chronological, and includes writers who don't deny Jesus historicity, but have been associated with the Christ-myth theory (which Bennett calls the "Jesus-was-a-myth theory").

Fringy?

 * Michael J. McClymond, Familiar Stranger: an Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth (Eerdmans 2004) pp. 23-24: "Along with the scholarly and popular works, there is a good deal of pseudoscholarship on Jesus that finds its way into print. During the last two centuries, more than a hundred books and articles have denied the historical existence of Jesus. Today innumerable websites carry the same message. The idea seems to have originated in the late 1700s...Recently, there has been only one major scholarly defender of the non-existence of Jesus, George A. Wells (1926-), a professor of German in London, and he has softened his earlier position somewhat by admitting that there may be some sort of historical personage behind the New Testament documents. Most scholars regard the arguments for Jesus' non-existence as unworthy of any response--on a par with claims that the Jewish Holocaust never occurred or that the Apollo moon landing took place in a Hollywood studio."