User:Joshua Jonathan/List of Christ myth proponents

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The Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory, Jesus mythicism, mythicism, or Jesus ahistoricity theory) is the proposition that "the historical Jesus of Nazareth did not exist, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity." According to mythologists "Jesus was originally a [deity] who was later historicized" in the Gospels, which are "essentially allegory and fiction."

Arguments
The main arguments from the mythicists are the lack of biographical information on Jesus from the early Christian sources, the socalled argument from silence, and the mythical and allegorical nature of the Christ of Paul and the Jesus of the Gospels. Most Christ mythicists agree that the evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus Christ is weak at best, pointing at a series of perceived peculiarities in the sources which they regard as unthrustworthy for a historical account, and noting the similarities of early Christianity and the Christ figure with contemporary mystery religions:
 * The Pauline epistles are dismissed because, aside from a few passages which may have been interpolations, they contain no references to an earthly Jesus who lived in the flesh. There is a complete absence of any detailed biographical information such as might be expected if Jesus had been a contemporary of Paul, and he may as well be writing about a mythical Jesus, a celestial deity or "a savior figure patterned after similar figures within ancient mystery religions" named Jesus.
 * The Gospels are no historical records, but theological writings, which are based on a variety of sources and influences, including Old Testamentical writings, Greek stoic philosophy, and the exegetical methods of Philo. The Gospels weave together various Jesus-traditions, and may be regarded as myth or legendary fiction which have imposed "a fictitious historical narrative" on this "mythical cosmic savior figure."
 * Christianity arose in the Greco-Roman world of the first and second century CE, synthesizing Jewish and Greek philosophy. Early Christianity shared common philosophical and religious ideas with other religions of the time,  including the ideas of personified aspects of God, and of a dying-and-arising savior deity.
 * No independent eyewitness accounts survive, in spite of the fact that many authors were writing at that time. Early second-century Roman accounts contain very little evidence, and may depend on Christian sources.

Some mythicists hold — in terms given by Robert M. Price — the "Jesus agnosticism" viewpoint, while others go further and hold the "Jesus atheism" viewpoint. Some scholars have made the case that there are a number of plausible "Jesuses" that could have existed, but that there can be no certainty as to which Jesus was the historical Jesus. Others have said that Jesus may have lived far earlier, in a dimly remembered remote past. A number of writers adduce various arguments to show that Christianity has syncretistic or mythical roots. As such, the historical Jesus should not be regarded as the founder of the religion, even if he did exist.

In modern scholarship, the Christ Myth Theory is a fringe theory, and is accepted by only a small number of academics. The Christ myth theory contradicts the mainstream historical view, which is that while the gospels include many mythical or legendary elements, these are religious elaborations added to the biography of a historical Jesus who did live in 1st-century Roman Palestine,      was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.

18–19th centuries proponents
The beginnings of the formal denial of the existence of Jesus can be traced to late 18th-century France, and the works of Constantin François Chassebœuf de Volney and Charles-François Dupuis. Volney and Dupuis argued that Christianity was an amalgamation of various ancient mythologies and that Jesus was a totally mythical character.

Radical Dutch school and others
In the 1870s and 1880s, a group of scholars associated with the University of Amsterdam, 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. Abraham Dirk Loman argued in 1881 that all New Testament writings belonged to the 2nd century, and doubted that Jesus was a historical figure, but later said the core of the gospels was genuine.

Additional early Christ myth proponents included Swiss skeptic Rudolf Steck, English historian Edwin Johnson, English radical Rev. Robert Taylor, and his associate Richard Carlile.

Early 20th century proponents
During the early 20th century, several writers published arguments against Jesus' historicity, often drawing on the work of liberal theologians, who tended to deny any value to sources for Jesus outside the New Testament, and limited their attention to Mark and the hypothetical Q source. They also made use of the growing field of religious history which found sources for Christian ideas in Greek and Oriental mystery cults, rather than Judaism. Joseph Klausner wrote that biblical scholars "tried their hardest to find in the historic Jesus something which is not Judaism; but in his actual history they have found nothing of this whatever, since this history is reduced almost to zero. It is therefore no wonder that at the beginning of this century there has been a revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth century view that Jesus never existed."

George Albert Wells
English professor of German George Albert Wells (1926-2017) had a profound impact on the Christ myth theory, according to New Testament scholar Graham Stanton. British theologian Kenneth Grayston advised Christians to acknowledge the difficulties raised by Wells.

In his early work, including Did Jesus Exist? (1975), Wells argued that the Gospels were written decades after Jesus's death by Christians who were theologically motivated, but had no personal knowledge of him. Therefore, he concluded that a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed. Atheist philosopher and scholar Michael Martin supported his thesis, claiming: "Jesus is not placed in a historical context and the biographical details of his life are left unsuspected...a strong prima facie case challenging the historicity of Jesus can be constructed". He adds, in his book 'The Case Against Christianity' "Well's argument against the historicity [of Jesus] is sound".

Later, Wells admitted that a historical Jesus figure did exist. His Jesus was a Galilean preacher, whose teachings were preserved in the Q document, a hypothetical common source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke. However, he continued to insist that Biblical Jesus did not exist. He argued that stories such as the virgin birth, the crucifixion around A.D. 30 under Pilate, and the resurrection, should be regarded as legendary.

Biblical scholar Robert Van Voorst said that with this argument Wells had performed an about-face. However, scholars such as Earl Doherty, Richard Carrier, Paul Eddy, and Gregory Boyd continue to regard Wells as a Christ myth theorist. In his 2013 book Cutting Jesus Down to Size, Wells clarified that he believes the Gospels represent the fusion of two originally independent streams: a Galilean preaching tradition, and the supernatural personage of Paul's early epistles. However, he says that both figures owe much of their substance to ideas from the Jewish wisdom literature.

Earl Doherty
Canadian writer Earl Doherty (b.1941) was introduced to the Christ myth theme by a lecture by Wells in the 1970s. Doherty follows the lead of Wells, but disagrees on the historicity of Jesus, arguing that "everything in Paul points to a belief in an entirely divine Son who "lived" and acted in the spiritual realm, in the same myhtical setting in which all the other savior deities of the day were seen to operate." According to Doherty Paul's Christ originated as a myth derived from Middle Platonism with some influence from Jewish mysticism, and belief in a historical Jesus emerged only among Christian communities in the 2nd century. Paul and other writers of the earliest existing proto-Christian documents did not believe in Jesus as a person who was incarnated on Earth in an historical setting; rather, they believed in Jesus as a heavenly being who suffered his sacrificial death in the lower spheres of heaven, where he was crucified by demons and then was subsequently resurrected by God. This mythological Jesus was not based on a historical Jesus, but rather on an exegesis of the Old Testament in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism, and what the early authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus.

According to Doherty, the nucleus of the "historical Jesus" of the Gospels can be found in the Jesus-movement which wrote the Q source. According to Doherty the Q-authors may have regarded themselves as "spokespersons for the Wisdom of God," with Jesus being the embodiment of this Wisdom, who was added in the latest phase of the development of Q. Q then started to take the form of a "foundation document," in response to a concurring sect who saw John the Baptist as its founder. Eventually, Q's Jesus and Paul's Christ were combined in the Gospel of Mark by a predominantly gentile community. In time, the gospel-narrative of this embodiment of Wisdom became interpreted as the literal history of the life of Jesus.

Robert M. Price


American New Testament scholar and former Baptist pastor Robert McNair Price (b.1954) was a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of writers and scholars who study the historicity of Jesus and who argue that the Christian image of Christ is a theological construct into which traces of Jesus of Nazareth have been woven. He was also a member of the Jesus Project. Price believes that Christianity is a historicized synthesis of mainly Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek mythologies.

Price questioned the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), Jesus Is Dead (2007), and The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (2012), as well as in contributions to The Historical Jesus: Five Views (2009), in which he acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.

In Deconstructing Jesus Price points out, "(w)hat one Jesus reconstruction leaves aside, the next one takes up and makes its cornerstone. Jesus simply wears too many hats in the Gospels—exorcist, healer, king, prophet, sage, rabbi, demigod, and so on. The Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure (...) The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time." Price also states "I am not trying to say that there was a single origin of the Christian savior Jesus Christ, and that origin is pure myth; rather, I am saying that there may indeed have been such a myth, and that if so, it eventually flowed together with other Jesus images, some one of which may have been based on a historical Jesus the Nazorean." But Price admits uncertainty in this regard. He writes in conclusion, "There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure."

Citing accounts that have Jesus being crucified under Alexander Jannaeus (83 BCE) or in his 50s by Herod Agrippa I under the rule of Claudius Caesar (41–54 CE). Price argues that these "varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history."

Price maintains that there are three key points for the traditional Christ myth theory:
 * There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources.
 * The epistles, written earlier than the gospels, provide no evidence of a recent historical Jesus; all that can be taken from the epistles, Price argues, is that a Jesus Christ, son of God, lived in a heavenly realm, there died as a sacrifice for human sin, was raised by God and enthroned in heaven.
 * The Jesus narrative is paralleled in Middle Eastern myths about dying and rising gods; Price names Baal, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and Dumuzi/Tammuz as examples, all of which, he writes, survived into the Hellenistic and Roman periods and thereby influenced early Christianity. Price alleges that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels.

Thomas L. Thompson
Thomas L. Thompson (b.1939), Professor emeritus of theology at the University of Copenhagen, is a leading biblical minimalist of the Old Testament. In his 2007 book The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, Thompson argues that the biblical accounts of both King David and Jesus of Nazareth are mythical in nature and based on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek and Roman literature. For example, he argues that the resurrection of Jesus is taken directly from the story of the dying and rising god, Dionysus. Thompson however, does not draw a final conclusion on the historicity or ahistoricity of Jesus, but argued that any historical person would be very different from the Christ (or messiah) identified in the Gospel of Mark.

Thompson coedited the contributions from a diverse range of scholars in the 2012 book Is This Not the Carpenter?: The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. Writing in the introduction, "The essays collected in this volume have a modest purpose. Neither establishing the historicity of an historical Jesus nor possessing an adequate warrant for dismissing it, our purpose is to clarify our engagement with critical historical and exegetical methods."

In a 2012 online article, Thompson defended his qualifications to address New Testament issues. He rejected the label of "mythicist", and reiterated his position that the issue of Jesus' existence cannot be determined one way or the other.

Thomas L. Brodie
In 2012, the Irish Dominican priest and theologian Thomas L. Brodie (b.1943,) holding a PhD from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome and a co-founder and former director of the Dominican Biblical Institute in Limerick, published Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery. In this book, Brodie, who previously had published academic works on the Hebrew prophets, argued that the gospels are essentially a rewriting of the stories of Elijah and Elisha when viewed as a unified account in the Books of Kings. This view lead Brodie to the conclusion that Jesus is mythical. Brodie's argument builds on his previous work, in which he stated that rather than being separate and fragmented, the stories of Elijah and Elisha are united and that 1 Kings 16:29–2 Kings 13:25 is a natural extension of 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 8 which have a coherence not generally observed by other biblical scholars. Brodie then views the Elijah–Elisha story as the underlying model for the gospel narratives.

In response to Brodie's publication of his view that Jesus was mythical, the Dominican order banned him from writing and lecturing, although he was allowed to stay on as a brother of the Irish Province, which continued to care for him. "There is an unjustifiable jump between methodology and conclusion" in Brodie's book, according to Gerard Norton, and "are not soundly based on scholarship." They are, according to Norton, "a memoir of a series of significant moments or events" in Brodie's life that reinforced "his core conviction" that neither Jesus nor Paul of Tarsus were historical.

Richard Carrier


Atheist activist Richard Carrier (b.1969) reviewed Earl Doherty's work on the origination of Jesus, and eventually concluded that the evidence actually favored the core Doherty thesis. Carrier argues in his book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, that there is insufficient Bayesian probability, that is evidence, to believe in the existence of Jesus. Furthermore, he argues that the Jesus figure was probably originally known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture which were then crafted into a historical figure, to communicate the claims of the gospels allegorically. These allegories then started to be believed as fact during the struggle for control of the Christian churches of the first century. He argues that the probability of Jesus' existence is somewhere in the range from 1/3 to 1/12000 depending on the estimates used for the computation.

His methodology was reviewed by Aviezer Tucker, a prior advocate of using Bayesian techniques in history. Tucker expressed some sympathy for Carrier's view of the Gospels, stating: "The problem with the Synoptic Gospels as evidence for a historical Jesus from a Bayesian perspective is that the evidence that coheres does not seem to be independent, whereas the evidence that is independent does not seem to cohere." However, Tucker argued that historians have been able to use theories about the transmission and preservation of information to identify reliable parts of the Gospels. He said that "Carrier is too dismissive of such methods because he is focused on hypotheses about the historical Jesus rather than on the best explanations of the evidence."