User:Bill the Cat 7/Christ Myth

The Christ myth theory (sometimes called the Christ myth, Jesus myth, or nonexistence hypothesis) is the contention that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist as a historical person, that the Jesus of early Christianity was a personification of an ideal saviour or mythical being, similar in some respects to Krishna, Adonis, Osiris, and Mithra, to whom earthly events were later attached. Proponents of a mythical origin of Christianity sometimes allow that some gospel material may have been drawn from a historical preacher or preachers, but that these individuals were not in any sense "the founder of Christianity"; rather they contend that Christianity emerged organically from Hellenistic Judaism. The proponents of the theory trace the evolution of Christianity through a conjectural understanding of the evolution of the New Testament literature and thus give primacy to the epistles over the gospels in determining the views of the earliest Christians.

The antecedents of the theory can be traced to the French Enlightenment thinkers Constantin-François Volney and Charles François Dupuis in the 1790s. The first academic advocate was the 19th century historian and theologian Bruno Bauer and proponents such as Arthur Drews were notable in biblical studies during the early 20th century. Authors such as Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, Tom Harpur, and George Albert Wells have recently re-popularised the theory among lay audiences.

The Christ-Myth theory is essentially without supporters in modern academic circles, biblical scholars and historians being highly dismissive of it, viewing it as pseudo-scholarship, with some going so far as to compare the theory's advocates with Holocaust deniers, flat-earthers, and people who believe the moon landing was faked.

Early proponents
Doubt about the historical existence of Jesus 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.

Constantin-François Volney and Charles François Dupuis
The "great forerunners" of the nonhistoricity hypothesis, though, are usually identified as two thinkers of the French Enlightenment, Constantin-François 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 which he believed represented the birth of a god to a virgin mother at the winter solstice and connected this to the winter rising of the constellation of Virgo. He believed that this and other annual occurrences were allegorised as the life-histories of solar deities (e.g. Sol Invictus), who passed their childhoods in obscurity (low elevation of the sun after the solstice), died (winter) and were resurrected (spring equinox). 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 the "paschal lamb" at Easter represented the growth of the Sun's strength in the sign of Aries at the spring solstice. 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 current 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 a conscientious extended allegory grounded in solar-myths but was compiled organically-accidentally even-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, and 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 in France did not outlast the first quarter of the nineteenth century; they had based their views on limited historical data and later critics showed, for example, that the birth of Jesus was not placed in December until the 4th century.

Bruno Bauer


Scholarly attention to the possibility of Jesus' non-existence began with the 19th-century German historian Bruno Bauer. In a series of studies produced while he was teaching at the University of Bonn (1839–1842), Bauer disputed the historical value of the New Testament Gospels. In his view, the Gospel of John was not a historical narrative but an adaptation of the traditional Jewish religio-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, but he rejected the standard view that they also drew upon a common tradition apart from Mark which is now lost—a source scholars generally call "Q". For Bauer, this latter possibility was ruled out by the incompatible stories of Jesus' nativity found in Matthew and Luke, as well as by the way 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, and now that the entire Gospel tradition could be traced to a single author (Mark), Bauer felt that the hypothesis of outright invention became credible. 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 Baur 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. And in a revised edition of his work on the Gospels, published in 1850–1851, Bauer dated all the New Testament epistles to the late 2nd century and concluded that Jesus had not existed. Bauer's own comprehensive explanation of Christian origins appeared in 1877: 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, with the Jewish theology of Philo as developed politically by pro-Roman Jews such as Josephus. In accordance with this view, Bauer held that Mark was an Italian whom had been influenced by Seneca's Stoic philosophy, and that the Christian movement originated in Rome and Alexandria.

Bauer's views proved to be foundational for much of the Christ-Myth community of later generations. And while subsequent arguments against a historical Jesus were not all directly dependent on Bauer's work, they usually echoed it on several general points: that New Testament references to Jesus lacked historical value, that the lack of 1st-century non-Christian references to Jesus was 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 twentieth century a number of writers had published arguments against Jesus' historicity, ranging from the fairly scholarly to the highly fanciful (e.g Edwin Johnson's denial of not only a historical Jesus but nearly all recorded history prior to the 16th century A.D.). Despite their uneveness, these treatments were sufficiently influential to merit several book-length responses by historians and New Testament scholars. Proponents of the nonhistoricity hypothesis 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 a tempting target for the deniers of Jesus' historicity"—despite Schmiedel's intention that these passage serve as the foundation for a fuller reconstruction of Jesus' life. These authors also made use of the growing field of Religiongeschichte-the "history of religions"-which seemed to find sources for many Christian ideas in Greek and Oriental mystery cults rather than the life of Jesus and Palestinian Judaism.

J. M. Robertson
Against this intellectual backdrop J. M. Robertson, a British freethinker and journalist, began to promote his account of Christian origins in 1900. In Robertson's view, belief in a slain Messiah arose before the New Testament period within sects later known as Ebionites or Nazarenes. Robertson argued 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. He further felt that an additional but less significant basis for early Christian belief may have been the executed Jesus Pandira, placed by the Talmud in about 100 BCE.

Robertson noted that while the authentic letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings, these epistles are primarily concerned with theology and morality and largely gloss over the life of Jesus. Once references to "the twelve" and to Jesus' institution of the Eucharist were rejected as interpolations, Robertson argued 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 felt those elements of the Gospel narrative which attribute such characteristics to Jesus must have developed later, among Gentile believers who were converted by Jewish evangelists like Paul. The Gentile party 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). Such plays evolved over time into Gospels. The religion sought to further enhance its appeal to Gentiles by adopting myths from pagan cults, albeit with some "Judaic manipulation" – thus Jesus' healings came from Asclepius, feeding of multitudes from Dionysus, the Eucharist from the worship of Dionysus and Mithra, 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 the Fourth Gospel's portrayal of Jesus as Logos was ostensibly Jewish, the underlying concept ultimately derived from the function of Mithra, Thoth and Hermes as representatives to humanity from the supreme god.

William Benjamin Smith
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 felt that Christianity's origins lay in a pre-Christian Jesus cult—that is, a Jewish sect had worshipped a divine being named Jesus in the centuries before the human Jesus was supposedly born. Evidence for this cult was postulated in Hippolytus' mention of the Naassenes and Epiphanius' report of a Nazaraean or Nazorean sect that existed before Christ, as well as passages in Acts. 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. In keeping with his theory Smith also argued against the historical value of non-Christian writers regarding Jesus, particularly Josephus and Tacitus.



Arthur Drews
Arthur Drews, a professor of philosophy at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, published Die Christusmythe ("The Christ Myth") in 1909 which 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' claimed that his "purpose was to show that everything about the historical Jesus had a mythical character and thus it was not necessary to presuppose that a historical figure ever existed." His work proved popular enough in both his native Germany and abroad that prominent theologians and historians addressed Drews' arguments, with responses appearing in the Hibbert Journal, the American Journal of Theology, and other leading journals of religion. Further, at least two monographs on the historicity of Jesus were written partially in response to Drews. In response to his detractors, Drews appeared at a series of public debates, of which the most famous occurred on January 31 - February 1, 1910 at the Berlin Zoological Garden against Hermann von Soden.

Other writers
A variety of other less well known authors advocated version of the Christ Myth during this period as well. A. D. Loman argued that episodes in Jesus's life, such as the Sermon on the Mount, were fictions written to justify compilations of pre-existing liberal Jewish sayings. G. I. P. Bolland developed the hypothesis that Christianity evolved from Gnosticism and that Jesus was a symbolic figure representing Gnostic ideas about God. G. R. S. Mead did not explicitly deny the historicity of Jesus but rather argued that he 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. And Joseph Wheless claimed 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.

George Albert Wells
G. A. Wells, emphasizing the New Testament epistles and the paucity of early non-Christian documents attesting to a historical Jesus, once argued that the Jesus of earliest Christianity was a pure myth, derived from mystical speculations stemming from the Jewish Wisdom tradition. On this view, Jesus is presented by the earliest strata of the New Testament as "a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past".

In The Jesus Myth (1999), however, Wells drastically altered his position, contending that there were two distinct figures of Jesus: the mythic Jesus of Paul and a minimally historical Jesus found in the Gospels. He spells out his position in Can We Trust the New Testament? (2003): "This Galilean Jesus [behind the gospels] was not crucified and was not believed to have been resurrected after his death. The dying and rising Christ — devoid of time and place - of the early epistles is a quite different figure, and must have a different origin." Robert Van Voorst has described this change of mind as an "about-face" and a rejection of the Christ Myth, a sentiment shared by some within the Christ Myth community itself.

Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy

 * Main article: The Jesus Mysteries and Neoplatonism and Gnosticism

In recent years, the Christ myth theory has also been advocated by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, who are both popular writers on mysticism, in their books  The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus and the Lost Goddess (ISBN 1400045940). They suggested that the idea that Jesus's existence is legendary is itself as old as the New Testament, pointing to 2 John 1:7, though scholars of the period believe that this passage refers to docetism, the belief that Jesus lacked a genuinely physical body, and not the belief that Jesus was a completely fabricated figure.

They are applying ideas of many authors from mainstream classical studies with a specialization in Gnosticism. The last generation has seen a wealth of new material on gnosticism. In 1898 Moritz Friedländer introduced the hypothesis that Gnosticism was not an aberrant form of Christianity but rather had emerged originally from Judaism. Kurt Rudolph provided the best analysis of this point. Walter Bauer continued this theme, "heresy is the original manifestation of Christianity".

The modern form of the case came from Birger A. Pearson an explicit continuation of Moritz Friedländer's "Gnosticism serves as the medium by which Judaism should become a world religion". Pearson's analysis in the text starts with Friedländer Revisted Alexandrian Judaism and Gnostic Origins, which concludes with "Although much of Friedländer's argument is open to question, he has been vindicated in his basic contention, that Gnosticism is a pre-Christian phenomenon that developed on Jewish soil." In particular he held elsewhere in the text:
 * the essential building blocks of the basic Gnostic myth constitute a (revolutionary) borrowing and reinterpretation of Jewish scriptures and traditions.... an attempt on the part of the Gnostics to gain entry into Christian communities, or to gain Christian adherents to their communities by means of equating their own gnosis with alleged secret teaching of Jesus Christ.... Non-Christian (pre-Christian?) varieties of Gnosticism had other reveler figures to whom to attribute their mythology, the most important of which seemed to have been Seth, son of Adam.  Of course later "Christianized" Sethian Gnostics could then equate Seth with Jesus Christ, and regard the latter as an incarnation or avatar of the former.

John D Turner analysis of the Sethian development yielded an end to end case study. What they both saw was an incorporation of Jewish wisdom literature into a middle platonic system. Groups of proto-gnostics (example Ophites) existed believing in a logos and a personified wisdom (Sophia) outside of history. They evolved into gnostic Christians, within two generations seeing the wisdom literature transformed into "teachings" of Jesus, an example of a Christianity evolving without any input from historical events.

The focus of Freke and Gandy's books are to explain this academic literature and weave it into a cohesive whole.

Critics of Bauer's ideas would assert that the first known explicitly Gnostic texts are from the middle of the second century, and the date of a fully developed Gnosticism is not attested to earlier than this. They may grant that fully formed Gnosticism may have had its origins in the first century or earlier. Gnosticism and Christianity developed around the same time period but from different roots. The one pre-Christian Gnostic contribution claimed to have influenced Christian thinking is the "redeemer myth" but no pre-Christian document exists with this myth. Other scholars question gnosticism as a category at all separate from Hellenistic Judaism and so for them the idea that Gnosticism impacted the New Testament in this area is rejected.

Earl Doherty
Earl Doherty promotes the theory in his book The Jesus Puzzle, where he utilizes the  earliest descriptions of Christian beliefs, the earliest epistles as  proposed that Christ is a myth derived from Middle Platonism with some influence from Jewish mysticism, in the spirit of Bruno Bauer above. He essentially agreed with Wells with the key exception, that he held that these early authors did not believe that Jesus had been on Earth at all. He argues that the earliest Christians, like Philo, acceptance of a Platonic cosmology distinguished a "higher" spiritual world from the Earthly world of matter, and that they viewed Jesus as having descended only into the "lower reaches of the spiritual world". Doherty also suggests that this view was accepted by the authors of the Pastoral epistles, 2 Peter, and various second-century Christian writings outside the New Testament. Doherty contends that apparent references in these writings to events on earth, and a physical historic Jesus, should in fact be regarded as allegorical metaphors. He believes that the writer of the Gospel of Mark was the first to place Jesus Christ in a specific historical context, and that the actual view of Jesus of the early follower are best found the earliest descriptions of Christian beliefs, the earliest epistles. Opponents regard such interpretations as forced and erroneous. Doherty advanced the case through the creation of an exhaustive list of silences and the connection to Marcus Minucius Felix.

We can best see Doherty's expansion of Wells' ideas by examining a time line. For both, without a belief in a founding figure, an alternate theory of Christian development begins to emerge. The core idea is that the proto-Christian or Christian religion being practiced at any time is likely consistent with the type of literature being produced at that time. The standard historical methods are used to determine dates. From there etc...
 * If people are datable and known to have written something the book was written during their lives (though it may involve earlier tradition)
 * If work A depends on work B then A preceded B

The time line that emerges would be common to both for the first 3 lines while the last 3 are more explicitly Doherty:

Other writers
Revilo P. Oliver, a noted white nationalist and holocaust denier, argued that the Jesus of the New Testament was a composite of multiple Jesuses active in Palestine in and around the first century structured along mythical lines derived from Indian sources.

John M. Allegro proposed that Christianity began as shamanic religion based on the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Upon the publication of Allegro's relevant work, his "thesis was dismissed by fifteen experts in Semetic languages and related fields who lodged their protest in a letter that was published in the May 26, 1970 issue of The Times...They judged that Allegro's views were 'not based on any philological or other evidence that they can regard as scholarly.'" Further, John A. T. Robinson has stated that if Allegro's style of reasoning appeared in other academic disciplines it "would be laughed out of court."

Robert M. Price does not consider himself as a proponent of the theory, but argues that if one applies critical methodology with "ruthless consistency" then one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus' historicity, and that the burden of proof is on those holding to Jesus's historicity. In his Deconstructing Jesus, Price argues that when even liberal Protestant scholars produce reconstructions of the "historical Jesus" they are, as Albert Schweitzer pointed out long ago, creating their own Jesus icons to authorize a religious agenda. To Price this is no surprise, since he views the Jesus Christ of the gospels as very likely a fictional amalgam of several first-century prophets and messiahs, as well as of purely mythic Mystery Cult redeemers and Gnostic Aions. To demonstrate his point, Price follows Burton Mack's outline of a range of "Jesus movements" and "Christ cults," showing the origins of each one's Jesus figures and how they may have finally merged into the patchwork savior of Christian dogma. Finally, Price argues that there is good reason to believe that Jesus never existed as a historical figure, and that responsible historians must remain agnostic about a "historical Jesus" and what he stood for. Price's views have received harsh criticism by a range of scholars including James D.G. Dunn, Luke Timothy Johnson, Darrell Bock and John Dominic Crossan. Tony Costa in a 2009 review of Jesus is Dead appearing in the  Society of Biblical Literature's Review of Biblical Literature describing his work as "not a serious discussion of the issues" so much as "an extremely bitter rant."

D. M. Murdock (publishing in part pseudonymously as Acharya S) has written five books in support of the Christ myth theory. She argues that the canonical gospels represent a middle to late 2nd-century CE 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.

The Jesus Project
The Jesus Project is an ongoing inquiry into the historical existence of Jesus. Initiated by R. Joseph Hoffmann, the project is a follow-up to the Jesus Seminar that regards the existence of Jesus as a "testable hypothesis."

Arguments
The arguments for the Christ myth theory center on the idea that the figure of Jesus was a fabrication of early Christians, and proponents point to a lack of reliability of historical accounts in first- and second-century CE documents traditionally held as evidence for the historical existence of Jesus:

New Testament epistles
The letters of Paul of Tarsus are among the earliest surviving Christian writings, probably predating all the gospels. For the Christ myth theory it is of importance that the epistles do not mention details of Jesus' life and ministry, though there are several passages that are traditionally interpreted to refer to his time on earth; for instance, "... concerning his Son who was a descendant of David with reference to the flesh.." (Romans 1:3), "... By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh ..." (Romans 8:3) or "Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.."(Galatians 3:1). In his book Jesus and the Logic of History, Paul Barnett lists 15 such details gleaned from Paul's letters. R. T. France, in his book, also argues that the Apostle Paul spoke of Jesus as a physical being and that there are several references to historical facts about Jesus' life in Paul's letters.

The absence of references to Jesus' teachings and acts has been interpreted by a number of scholars and authors to indicate that the early Christians who wrote the epistles were not aware of a/the historical Jesus or at least of his life's details. For example, Earl Doherty holds that these early authors did not believe that Jesus had been on Earth at all. He argues that the earliest Christians accepted a Platonic cosmology that distinguished a "higher" spiritual world from the Earthly world of matter, and that they viewed Jesus as having descended only into the "lower reaches of the spiritual world". Doherty also suggests that this view was accepted by the authors of the Pastoral epistles, 2 Peter, and various second-century Christian writings outside the New Testament. Doherty contends that apparent references in these writings to events on earth, and a physical historic Jesus, should in fact be regarded as allegorical metaphors.

Opponents regard such interpretations as forced and argue that they are mostly based on arguments from silence, which are by themselves unpersuasive.

Apostolic Fathers
In the letter called 1 Clement, written "sometime during the last two decades of the first century" the author speaks of Jesus as someone who was physically present eg 1 Clement 16 (quoting Is.53:1-12).

In the Letters of Ignatius written around c.110, Ignatius speaks of Jesus as someone of whom we should "be fully convinced about the birth and the suffering and the resurrection that took place during the time of the governorship of Pontius Pilate" (Ignatius to the Magnesians, ch.11). In his Letter to the Trallians (ch.9) he writes about Jesus "who was of the family of David, who was the son of Mary; who really was born, who both ate and drank; who really was persecuted under Pontius Pilate, who really was crucified and died ... who, moreover, really was raised from the dead ..."

Similarly Polycarp in his Letter to the Philippians (ch.7), written c.110, writes "... that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh ..." .

Early non-Christian references to Jesus
Four early writers are typically cited in support of the actual existence of Jesus: Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger. Many challengers to their usefulness point out that each of these writers have problems.


 * The two references to Jesus in the Antiquities of Josephus (written 93 CE) are contested on different grounds. The first reference Testimonium Flavianum is challenged on the grounds that the passage is known to have been tampered with based on comments by Origen and that it seems to break the flow of the passage it appears in.  The challenge to the second passage is due the "Jesus, the son of Damneus" near the end; this is used to argue that this is a different Jesus whose brother was called James and therefore either the "who is called the Christ" part is an insertion or that this is another person given the title Christ.
 * The passage by Tacitus (circa 117) is challenged based on the fact he did not state his reference material and could have just been repeating what the Christians of the time were saying. The article Tacitus on Christ has an extended discussion, and the  Tacitus section of Historicity of Jesus also has additional information.
 * Suetonius is challenged on the fact his reference to "Chrestus" is so vague as to be nearly useless. See Suetonius section of Historicity of Jesus for greater details.
 * There are references to Christians in the letters of Pliny the Younger, but they give no specific information about the founder of this movement.

The Babylonian Talmud contains several references to the name Yeshu that have been traditionally identified with Jesus of Nazareth. However, these same passages have been used to show that the biblical Jesus is based upon an earlier figure who lived about 100 BCE. Furthermore, tradition has the Babylonian Talmud being compiled in the late third to early fourth century CE, limiting its value to determining events of the 1st century CE.

Some scholars doubt that these sources refute the Jesus-myth theory. Charles Guignebert, Professor of the History Of Christianity at the Sorbonne, who does believe that Jesus of the Gospels existed and lived in Galilee during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, discounts the worth of all the non-Christian sources as proof of the existence of Jesus. Thus "all the pagan and Jewish testimonies, so-called, afford us no information of any value about the life of Jesus, nor even any assurance that he ever lived..."

Robert M. Price says that these non-Christian references, even if taken as genuine, merely amount to an account of what the ancient Christians of the time were saying about Jesus, not that the writers were claiming Jesus as a contemporary.

Omissions in early records
Many proponents of the Christ myth theory point out that there is a complete lack of non-Christian documents that make reference to Jesus before the end of the first century, and note the survival of writings by a number of Roman and Jewish commentators and historians who wrote in the first century but which lack mention of events described in the Gospels, taking this as evidence that Jesus was invented later. Opponents of the theory argue that arguments from silence are unreliable.

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

In response to Jesus myth proponents who argue the lack of early non-Christian sources, or question their authenticity, R. T. France counters that "even the great histories of Tacitus have survived in only two manuscripts, which together contain scarcely half of what he is believed to have written, the rest is lost" and that the life of Jesus, from a Roman point of view, was not a major event.

R.T. France states that Christianity was actively opposed by both the Roman Empire and the Jewish authorities, and would have been utterly discredited if Jesus had been shown as a non-historical figure. He argues that there is evidence in Pliny, Josephus and other sources of the Roman and Jewish approaches at the time, and none of them involved this suggestion.

Influenced by the Old Testament
Advocates of the Jesus-myth believe that the gospels are not history but a type of midrash: creative narratives based on the stories, prophecies, and quotes in the Hebrew Bible. Doherty has argued that when the midrashic elements are removed, little to no content remains that could be used to demonstrate the existence of a historical Jesus.

A majority of scholars explain the similarities between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke using the two-source hypothesis, according to which, Matthew and Luke derived most of their content from Mark and from a lost collection of Jesus' sayings known as the Q document. In the small amount of additional material unique to Matthew, Jesus is presented with strong parallels to Old Testament figures, most noticeably Moses. Early Doherty argues therefore there is no reason to assume that the sayings attributed to a postulated Q document originated with Jesus.

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

Comparisons with Mediterranean mystery religions
Some proponents of the Christ myth theory have argued that many aspects of the Gospel stories of Jesus have remarkable parallels with life-death-rebirth gods in the widespread mystery religions prevalent in the Hellenistic culture in which Christianity was born. Some prominent early Christians, such as Irenaeus and Justin Martyr, recognized some of these parallels; Justin specifically used several to attempt to prove that Christianity was not a new cult, but that it was rooted in ancient prophecy which had been "diabolically imitated."

The central figure of one of the most widespread, Osiris-Dionysus, was consistently localised and deliberately merged with local deities in each area, since it was the mysteries which were imparted that were regarded as important, not the method by which they were taught. In the view of some advocates of the Jesus Myth, most prominently Freke and Gandy in The Jesus Mysteries, Jewish mystics adapted their form of Osiris-Dionysus to match prior Jewish heroes like Moses and Joshua, hence creating Jesus.

Several parallels are frequently cited by these advocates, and often appear, mixed with other parallels, on internet sites. The most prominently cited parallels are with Horus and Mithras. Horus was one of the life-death-rebirth deities, and was connected and involved with those of Osiris.

Michael Grant does not see the similarities between Christianity and pagan religions to be significant. Grant states that "Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of the deaths and rebirths, of mythical gods seemed so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit."

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

A similar tack works from the claim that the dates in canonical and non-canonical sources do not match up. For example it is stated in the Toldoth Yeshu that one Yeshu, identified with Jesus was killed under Salome Alexandra, and Luke and Matthew have different birth dates that are nearly a decade apart.

This criticism has frequently been answered by the observation: "The fact of Christianity's beginnings and the character of its earliest traditions is such that we could only deny the existence of Jesus by hypothesizing the existence of some other figure who was a sufficient cause of Christianity's beginnings - another figure who on careful reflection would probably come out very like Jesus!"

Scholarly reception
A book-length response to early advocates of the Christ Myth, described by R. Joseph Hoffmann as "perhaps the best of its kind", came from the French Biblical scholar Maurice Goguel in 1925. Goguel rejected arguments for a "pre-Christianity", and argued that "preliminary" 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. He argued in each case that Christian beliefs were best explained by a tradition stemming from a recent historical Jesus.

Scholars further argue that while a number of versions of the Christ myth theory presuppose that Christianity had obscure beginnings, they fail to notice that the early Christians appealed to historical events already known by the general public. "For the king knows about these matters, and I speak to him also with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner.” Acts 26:26, and “For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.” 2 Peter 1:16. The early Christians appealed to real historical events to advance their faith and they opposed speculative and mythical notions by appealing to eyewitness accounts.

A number of writers have stated that the theory has limited acceptance in the relevant scholarly circles today. Richard Burridge and Graham Gould (2004: References below) state that the questioning of Jesus' existence is not accepted by mainstream critical scholarship. Michael Grant believes that the Christ myth theory fails to satisfy modern critical methodology, and is rejected by all but a few modern scholars, stating,

"...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.'"

Likewise Graham N. Stanton writes,

"Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first- or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher.'"

James Charlesworth writes that "No reputable scholar today questions that a Jew named Jesus son of Joseph lived; most readily admit that we now know a considerable amount about his actions and basic teachings ..." a conclusion shared by Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright.

Robert E. Van Voorst has stated that biblical scholars and historians regard the Jesus never existed thesis as "effectively refuted", with contemporary New Testament scholars typically viewing the Jesus-mythers arguments "as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely..."

Jesus myth proponent Earl Doherty responds to Van Voorst's claim, stating "after a survey of the history of research into the historical Jesus, Van Voorst tackles 'the noisy side current' of Jesus mythicism. He notes that over one hundred books and essays during the last two centuries have denied the existence of Jesus. Their arguments, he says, are dismissed as 'weak and bizarre' by contemporary New Testament scholars. Van Voorst is quite right in saying that 'mainstream scholarship today finds it unimportant.' Most of their comment (such as those quoted by Michael Grant) are limited to expressions of contempt." However, he insists that the "contempt" in which the theory is held "is not to be mistaken for refutation," arguing that mainstream scholars have failed to keep up with the details of the modern Jesus myth.

Chart
The chart below describes the Christ myth theory and contrasts it with conservative Christianity and mainstream academic scholarship to help clarify the points of dispute. All 3 columns represent broad positions, generalizations and averages, and there are exceptions to each point for virtually every author. "Conservative Christianity" here is being used to represent the positions of scholars whose views are consistent with, and explained in, the article Christian views of Jesus, as well as the Christianity article. "Mainstream Scholarship" here is being used to represent the general consensus of interdisciplinary academic research, including historical theology, secular and biblical archaeology, and the majority of biblical scholars utilizing both lower criticism and higher criticism. Those views are detailed in Historical Jesus. Christ Myth theory refers to the current position of the proponents of Christ Myth theory. These theories lack mainstream scholarly support for some of the reasons discussed below.

Websites arguing for the Jesus myth

 * "The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus?" by Earl Doherty
 * "Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity" by Richard Carrier
 * Debunking the Historical Jesus by Dan Barker, Freedom from Religion Foundation
 * Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ by R. G. Price, rationalrevolution.net
 * Jesus Never Existed.com
 * Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth by Greg Kane

Websites arguing for a historical Jesus

 * The Historical Jesus - Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ by Gary R. Habermas
 * The Evidence For Jesus by Dr. William Lane Craig
 * On "Criticism". Appendix to Our Christ: the revolt of the mystical genius by Constantin Brunner.
 * Did Jesus exist? by James Patrick Holding, author of Shattering the Christ Myth

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