User:Jbolden1517/CM/Aug 11 2009

Reflects John Carter's version which had consensus

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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 is a personification of an ideal saviour or mythical being to whom earthly events were later attached.

Proponents of a mythical origin of Christianity allow that some gospel material may have been drawn from a historical preacher or preachers, but they hold that these preachers were not in any sense "the founder of Christianity"; rather they contend that Christianity emerged organically from Hellenistic Judaism, the epistles and Gospels largely chronicle a mythical non-historical Jesus. The proponents of the theory trace the evolution of the religion through the evolution of the literature and thus give primacy to the epistles over the gospels in determining the views of the earliest Christians.

Those who have proposed one form or another of the theory have documented the similarities between stories of Jesus and those of Krishna, Adonis, Osiris, Mithraism, and a pre-Christian cult of Jesus (Joshua) within Judaism. Some authors attribute the beginning of Christianity to a historical founder who predates the time Jesus is said to have lived.

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. Proponents such as Arthur Drews were influential in biblical studies during the early 20th century. Authors such as Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, and George Albert Wells have recently re-popularised the theory. Many biblical historians and scholars are dismissive of the theory.

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. However, the "great forerunners" of the nonhistoricity hypothesis 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 as representing the birth of a god to a virgin 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 (see for example Sol Invictus), who passed their childhoods in obscurity (low elevation of the sun after the solstice), died (winter) and were resurrected (spring equinox). Jewish and Christian myth 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. Dupuis rejected the historicity of Jesus entirely, explaining the 2nd-century Roman historian Tacitus' reference to his execution under Pontius Pilate as based only on the inaccurate Christian beliefs of Tacitus' own day.

Volney, who published before Dupuis but made use of a draft version of his work, followed much of his argument. His differing in thinking that solar myths, rather than being deliberate extended allegories, were compiled when simple allegorical statements like "the virgin has brought forth" were misunderstood as history. Unlike Dupuis, Volney believed that confused memories of a historical but obscure Messianic claimant could have contributed to Christianity when they become linked with solar mythology.

The works of Volney and Dupuis went 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 composed not as a historical narrative but to adapt the idea of the Jewish Messiah to the philosopher Philo's concept of the "logos". Turning to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, he followed earlier critics in regarding them as based on Mark's narrative, but rejected the standard view that they also drew upon a common tradition apart from Mark. For Bauer, this was ruled out by the incompatible stories of Jesus' nativity which Matthew and Luke presented, as well as by the way their material which was not taken directly from Mark still appeared to be developing Markan ideas. Bauer instead concluded that Matthew depended on Luke for the content found only in those two Gospels. Now that the entire Gospel tradition could be traced through a single author (Mark), the hypothesis of outright invention became credible. Bauer believed that there was no expectation of a Messiah among Jews in the time of Tiberius, and that Mark's portrayal of Jesus being recognised as the Messiah must therefore be a retrojection of later Christian ideas. He also argued that many details in the Gospels which seemed implausible as historical deeds or sayings of Jesus could be explained instead as reflections on the life of the Christian community. Bauer also concluded "that the Alexandrian Jew Philo, who was still living about A.D. 40 but was already very old, was the real father of Christianity, and that the Roman stoic Seneca was, so to speak, its uncle."

Bauer left open the question of whether a historical Jesus existed at all, pending a study of the Pauline epistles, but his published views were sufficiently unorthodox that in 1842 they cost him his lectureship. In a revised edition of his work on the Gospels, published in 1850–1851, Bauer favoured a 2nd-century date for all the epistles and concluded that Jesus had not existed. Bauer's own explanation of Christian origins appeared in 1877: the religion was a synthesis of the Stoicism of Seneca the Younger, whom Bauer viewed as having 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. Mark, according to Bauer, was an Italian, influenced by Seneca's Stoic philosophy. The movement developed in Rome and Alexandria, and was not attested until Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan in the 110s, but over the following fifty years Mark and his successors developed the myth of a much earlier foundation.

Later arguments against a historical Jesus were not all directly dependent on Bauer's work, but 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", rejected 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.

Other writers
Edwin Johnson argued that Christianity emerged from a combination of liberal trends in Judaism and Gnostic mysticism and not from a historical founder in "Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins" (1887, published in London anonymously). If one has approached the literature of the period with the assumption that something definite could be made out respecting the lives of Christ and the apostles independently of the New Testament, one assuredly has been brought, sooner or later, to the consciousness of a complete illusion.... The bare result of the whole examination is, that from some time unknown, the statement that Jesus Christ had been crucified under Pontius Pilate, was repeated as a formula in connection with the rites of Exorcism and Baptism, and that coaeval with this belief, was that in His resurrection, ascension, and second coming. .... There was an intense craving, both in the interests of spiritual satisfaction and in that of controversy, to emerge out of the atmosphere of vague intuition and reminiscence into the daylight of historic portraiture.... ‘La mère, c’est la Tradition meme,’ said the brilliant author of La Bible de l’Humanité. And in the poetical sense it is true that the modern quest of the ‘ancient Mother’ means the renewed study, not so much of the antiquities of this or that people, as of the common heart of Humanity which throbs in all.

Early 20th century
By the early twentieth century a number of writers had published arguments against Jesus' historicity, ranging from the highly speculative to the more scholarly. These treatments were sufficiently influential to merit several book-length responses by historians and New Testament scholars. Proponents of the nonhistoricity hypothesis 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. The Zurich professor Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel identified just nine "pillar passages" in the Gospels which he thought early Christians could not have invented; although he intended these to serve as the foundation for a more detailed account of Jesus' life, they "proved to be a tempting target for the deniers of Jesus' historicity". These authors also made use of the growing field of comparative religion, which seemed to find sources for many Christian ideas in Greek and Oriental mystery cults rather than the life of Jesus.

J. M. Robertson
J. M. Robertson, a British Freethinker and independent scholar, began to promote his account of Christian origins in 1900. In Robertson's view, belief in a slain Messiah Jesus arose before the New Testament period, within one of the sects known in later times as Ebionites or Nazarenes. These would have expected a Messiah named Jesus, a hope possibly based on a divinity of that name reflected in the Biblical Joshua. An additional but less significant basis for their belief may have been the executed Jesus Pandira, placed by the Talmud in about 100 BCE. The "Jesuine" cultists observed a meal at which they commemorated the sacrifice of Jesus or ritually consumed his "body and blood". This was adapted from meals held in honour of gods such as Dionysus and Mithra, a fact which encouraged Jesus' followers to elevate him from a mere "servant" of the Jewish God to a divinity in his own right.

Once references to "the twelve" and to Jesus' institution of the Eucharist are 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". Those components of the Gospel narrative 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 enhanced 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, 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. The Fourth Gospel's portrayal of Jesus as Logos was Jewish but came ultimately from the function of Mithra, Thoth and Hermes as representatives to humanity from the supreme god. Robertson consistently explained the Gospels through comparative mythology, making no use of the symbolic interpretations developed by Bauer.

He argued that the authentic letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings. This remains true to this day and the earliest datable references we have and the earliest manuscripts are from Paul. However epistles discuss theology and morality abstractly while gospels teach metaphorically showing examples from "Jesus' actual life and ministry". Robertson noted that the epistles are silent in areas where they would expect to see events from Jesus's actual life: Allowing for the fact that some are spurious and others contain interpolations, their importance is [the epistles] are ostensibly the oldest documents of the Christian cult. Yet they show little awareness of the teachings and narrative of the gospels. They speak of a crucified Jesus in terms of a slain and resurrected God or demi-god, rather than of the teacher and wonder-worker of the gospels.... The Jesus of the Pauline doctrine was either a mythical construction or a remote figure that had been crucified but no longer traceable in history.

William Benjamin Smith
William Benjamin Smith (1850-1934) was a professor of mathematics at Tulane University. In a series of books, beginning with Ecce Deus: The Pre-Christian Jesus, published in 1894, and ending with The Birth of the Gospel, published posthumously in 1954, Smith argued 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 argued that Christianity's origins lay in a pre-Christian Jesus cult—that is, a Jewish sect had worshipped a divine being Jesus in the centuries before the human Jesus was supposedly born. Evidence for this cult was found in Hippolytus' mention of the Naassenes and Epiphanius' report of a Nazaraean or Nazorean sect that existed before Christ, as well as passages in Acts. The seemingly historical details in the New Testament were built by the early Christian community around narratives of the pre-Christian Jesus.

Smith also argued against the historical value of non-Christian writers regarding Jesus, particularly Josephus and Tacitus.

Arthur Drews
Arthur Drews (1865-1935) was the most prominent advocate of a "Christ-myth" theory in the early twentieth century. A professor of philosophy at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, Drew's 1909 Die Christusmythe ("The Christ Myth") became greatly popular in Germany, and was available in French and English translations in 1910. Prominent German theologians and historians addressed Drews' work, and a few wrote monographs refuting his arguments; 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, Freiherr von Soden. In England and the United States, Drews' views also aroused controversy, with responses appearing 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 response to Drews.

Drews 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.

The first and second editions of Die Christusmythe have prefaces written by Drews himself that stated that Drews' "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,"

Other writers
Other versions of the argument developed under Bible scholars such as A. D. Loman and G. I. P. Bolland (1907). 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. 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's 1903 Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? book did not say Jesus was an entirely fictional person but rather that based on the Talmud the historical Jesus lived around 100 BCE. The main criticism of Mead's position is "authorities are agreed that most of this Talmudic material derives from the period from 200 to 500 A.D., and represents Jewish attempts to deal with the growing strength of Christianity. It makes no attempt to be historically accurate and, in fact, is of no use in determining if Jesus was a historical person." Alvar Ellegård explored a similar theme a century later in Jesus – One Hundred Years Before Christ: A Study In Creative Mythology.

Albert Kalthoff believed that Christianity began as a communist community that developed in response to oppression of the proletariat of the Roman empire; this was not specifically Jewish but adopted features of Jewish apocalypticism. Jesus was a personification created by this community, wrote Kalthoff, who argued that no man without superhuman elements could be discovered from the sources and that incidents in the Gospels were adapted from first-to-third century Roman history. Peter Jensen viewed Jesus as based on the Epic of Gilgamesh and primarily on the character Gilgamesh himself, whom Jensen regarded as a solar deity.

John Remsburg's The Christ along with The Bible and Six Historic Americans is regarded as an important freethought book rather than a major contribution to the Christ Myth hypothesis despite references to the "Silence of Contemporary Writers" chapter by self-published authors like James Patrick Holding, Hilton Hotema , Jawara D. King , Madalyn Murray O'Hair , and Asher Norman and the 200 some blogs using the list or the book's recent retitling as The Christ Myth.

A book-length response to such authors, 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.

Joseph Wheless in his 1930 Forgery In Christianity claimed there was an active effort to forge documents to make the myth seem historical beginning as early as the 2nd century.

George Albert Wells
G. A. Wells believed that the Jesus of these earliest Christians is not based on a historical character, but a pure myth, derived from the mystical speculations based on the Jewish Wisdom tradition. The earlier works by George Albert Wells drew on the Pauline Epistles and the lack of early non-Christian documents to argue that the Jesus figure of the Gospels was symbolic, not historical. G. A. Wells suggests that the level of discussion of the historical Jesus in the Pauline epistles, except for the Pastorals, as well as in Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, the Johannine epistles and Revelation supports his position. In these works, Wells argues, Jesus is presented as "a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past". Wells considers this to be the original Christian view of Jesus, based not on the life of a historical figure but on the personified figure of Wisdom as portrayed in Jewish wisdom literature.

In The Jesus Myth (1999), Wells altered his position, contending that there were two distinct figures of Jesus: the mythic Jesus of Paul and a historicized Jesus found in the Gospels. He spells out his position in Can We Trust the New Testament? (2003): "This Galilean Jesus 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 describes this an "about-face" and an acceptance of a historical Jesus.

Freke and 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
John M. Allegro proposed that Christianity began as shamanic religion based on the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Advocates of the theory do not agree on the dating and meaning of the early Christian texts, with advocates like Doherty holding to traditional scholarly dating that puts the gospels toward the end of the first century, and others, like Hermann Detering (The Fabricated Paul), arguing that the early Christian texts are largely forgeries and products of the middle to late second century. In The Synoptic Apocalypse he shows how chapter 13 of Mark includes materials from a pamphlet written in 136 CE.

Robert M. Price, a biblical scholar, does not style himself as a proponent of the theory, but tries to demonstrate that if we apply the critical methodology (which has been developed in the area) with "ruthless consistency" then we should come to complete agnosticism regarding Jesus' historicity, and that the burden of proof is on those holding to Jesus's historicity. In his Deconstructing Jesus ( (ISBN 1573927589)), Price argues that liberal Protestant scholars who produce reconstructions of the "historical Jesus" are, as Albert Schweitzer pointed out long ago, creating their own Jesus icons to authorize a liberal religious agenda. Christian faith, whether fundamentalist or theologically liberal, invariably tends to produce a Jesus capable of playing the role of a religious figurehead. In this way, "Jesus Christ" functions as a symbolic cloak for several hidden agendas. 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 the 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. .

Joseph Hoffman makes a similar point, that there is no other historical figure whose core nature is so radically disputed, In the past generation, the 'real' Jesus has been variously a magician (Smith), a Galilean rabbi (Chilton), a marginal Jew (Meier), a bastard (Schaberg), a cipher (Thiering), a Qumran dissident (Allegro et al.), a gnosticisng Jew (Koester), a dissdent Jew (Vermes) a happily married man and father of son (Sprong), a bandit (Horsley) an enthusiastic (possibly Zealot?) opponent of the Temple cult (Sanders)

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.

Robert Eisenman in James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code hypothesizes that Christianity was originally led by James, Jesus' role was always minor and his crucifixion had no particular importance. The teachings of Jesus are mostly James' and an amalgamation of other teachers. Paul's focus on Jesus came from a desire to undermine the political aspects, "Paul’s mission is to redirect Jewish messianism, its violent, anti-Roman, nationalistic, xenophobic ideology represented, and led, by James, into a peaceful, spiritual messianic religion presided over by a Christ-figure".

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, Bishop 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.

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 "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 pagan 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 pagan 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. Thus 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 Talmud that one Yeshu was killed under Alexander Jannaeus, and Luke and Matthew have different birth dates that are nearly a decade apart. However it has been argued that the value of using the Talmud, which was written between the 3rd and 6th century, as a reliable witness in this matter is both highly questionable and inconsistent if one questions the validity of works whose dating range put them as close as being written within 20 years of Jesus's supposed death.

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!"

Criticism
Richard Burridge and Graham Gould (2004: References below) state that the questioning of Jesus' existence is not accepted by mainstream critical scholarship. Robert E. Van Voorst has stated that biblical scholars and historians regard the Jesus never existed thesis as "effectively refuted". 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 "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 ..." Michael Grant believes that the Christ myth theory fails to satisfy modern critical methodology, and is rejected by all but a few modern scholars.

However, the question of Jesus' historical existence is an ongoing inquiry, with initiatives such as the Jesus Project actively investigating the available evidence. Earl Doherty states "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."

Referring to an early article (Challenging Doherty: Critiquing the Mythicist Case) Doherty states that mainstream scholarship is guilty of a "notable lack of proper understanding of the mythicist case and effective arguments to be brought against it."

"'The issue of credibility is a subjective one. Quite apart from a disposition to examine, or refuse to examine, an alternative scenario, one must be able and willing to think outside the box before alternatives can impress themselves upon one. There are those, scholars and laypeople alike, who regularly assume that something 'big' and unique, some powerful figure, had to be responsible for the Christian movement. But if one has consistently misread that movement, failed to recognize its antecedents, the steps of its development, imposed preconceptions upon it, they will be forever forced to make the same erroneous assumption, and alternatives will not commend themselves.'"

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 who are members of the Christian right, their 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 have a natural affinity to the modern methods of comparative religion and anthropology, but 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
 * "The Jesus Mysteries" by Freke/Gandy
 * 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
 * "Constantine Invented Christianity" - in the fourth century
 * Chapter Summaries of The Jesus Mysteries summary of Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.
 * Christianity Revealed -- Collection of articles by various proponents of the Jesus myth

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.

Mite de Jesús Mito de Jesús Thèse mythiste 신화적 예수론 Mito di Gesù Jezusmythe キリスト神話説 Christ myth theory Jesusmyten