The Christ Myth Theory: Hoax Or Plausible Theory?

[Storm]

So I have been pondering the whole idea of Jesus Christ and whether or not I believe that he actually existed. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to decide right now, I think I would lean toward the side of him having existed.

 

I cannot say I have done any exhaustive research on this, but I have read several articles and I have listened to a lecture by Richard Carrier and also a podcast of Robert Price. I have to say that the more I think and ponder this Myth Theory, the more I find that I am believing its got some merit.

 

The questions that are asked in this theory, such as, "why are there no contemporary sources mentioning Jesus?" among other questions really, to me, have merit. But then I read stuff by Tim O'Neill and other individuals and they easily dismiss these questions as hogwash and that most historians don't even have any reason to think that Jesus didn't exist. I once read that since so many people subscribe to the Christian faith that to dissent to the majority regarding his existence is to somewhat commit "professional sabotage".  

 

I have read several articles and blog posts regarding the mentioning of Josephus and the other historians(Tacitus, Seutonius among others) whose mentions of Jesus are contested. Is there any type of legitimate scholarly consensus that verifies their being legit or forgeries.

 

So, I would like to discuss this a bit if anyone is interested. What do you think about this Theory? Do you have any good evidence or do you have any questions that are tough for the "existers" to explain? I would love to hear them. I would like to have a better understanding of this whole thing if possible.

Thanks

 

 

[mymistake]

My understanding of it is that this flows from textual criticism and dating the New Testament.  The authentic Pauline letters are the oldest books in the New Testament.  The oldest gospel, Mark, came along over a generation later and was a retelling of Homer's Odyssey.  Homer's story is what any Greek student would have studied at the time so following it so closely gives away that Mark is a novel.  Mathew and Luke are slight alterations of Mark with some new material added.  They also came along at least a generation after Mark and several generations after Paul.  The Gospel of John was written in the early second century and reflects how much Christian religion had changed by then.  If that timeline is correct then nobody heard of Jesus Christ before Paul started preaching.

 

 

Edit:

Here is a review on Homer and Mark.

 

http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/homerandmark.html

[Geezer]

Dr Robert M Price is a good source of information for this topic. "The Jesus Puzzle" addresses this topic too. It was online but I haven't looked it up for awhile now, but I'm sure it can be found on Amazon. Amazon will reference other authors who have written about this topic too.

 

I've read a number of books & articles about this question that convinced me Jesus was a fictional character in a fictional story, as were his disciples, etc.

[Mythra]

Your opening question is flawed.  There is no single christ myth theory.  There are lots and lots of them. Most are bunk and easily shown to be someone's fantastic idea.  I've studied it a lot over the years, and I am indeed someone who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth never existed.  But there's only one hypothesis that I find credible.  The one expounded first (that I'm aware of ) by Earl Doherty (the Jesus Puzzle) and more recently by Richard Carrier (On the Historicity of Jesus)

 

While it's true that most historians don't doubt the historicity of Jesus, Richard Carrier does.  And most would consider him a respected scholar of ancient history.

 

Most historians say that Jesus was a man who became mythologized and legendary after his death.  

 

There's a pretty plausible theory that says Jesus was first worshipped as the son of god who's sacrifice took place in the spiritual dimension. And the earliest of christians developed these ideas because of the way they interpreted the scriptures.  Passages from Isaiah, Daniel, Zechariah, and the Wisdom of Solomon were used (through midrash and pesher both) to develop the idea that the Messiah had come.  Even the dead sea scrolls and Philo's writings support the idea that these were all concepts that were present and being developed during this time.

 

And so, the earliest writings in the New Testament are the Pauline Epistles.  And Paul makes no mention at all of an earthly Jesus. No mention at all of any of the teachings of Jesus.  Even when those teachings would have supported a point that Paul was trying to make.

 

The gospel according to Mark hit the scene perhaps 30  years after Paul wrote his epistles.  Mark used OT prophecies as well as the Homeric writings(such as the Iliad)  to pattern his Jesus.  

 

Matthew and Luke follow Mark's lead, with some revisions and some additions.  The gospel of John is a departure of course, and not many scholars accept the gospel of John as anything other than a theological treatise.

 

So, that's the nutshell version from the top of my head.  Here is a review of Carrier's book that gives a much fuller explanation

: http://www.nobeliefs.com/Carrier.htm

[Mythra]

If you prefer, you can accept the "Jesus was a solar deity" theory.  But then you also have to accept that the pyramids were built by aliens. 

[Mythra]

Storm said:  I have read several articles and blog posts regarding the mentioning of Josephus and the other historians(Tacitus, Seutonius among others) whose mentions of Jesus are contested.

 

Very few scholars accept the "Testimonium Flavianum" (Josephus) as anything other than a christian interpolation.  The text just doesn't make sense any other way.

 

Tacitus and Seutonius just show that there were Christians in the second century.  And no one disputes that.

[Mythra]

Now, if you want to know what I consider to be a weakness in this (Christ Myth) theory,(from my perspective from when I was a Christian)  it's the silence of Paul regarding Jesus the man. 

 

Of course Paul wouldn't want to talk about Jesus the man.  He never met him.  And Paul was a proud guy who didn't want to make himself look inferior to the true disciples of Jesus who were there and saw Jesus and heard him speak and witnessed the miracles.  So Paul only talked about things he learned from his revelations of the risen christ.

 

But this argument has to start with the supposition that the gospels are true.  And they are filled with so many contradictions and absurdities, that's a hard pill to swallow.

[Mythra]

Since deconverting, I didn't always subscribe to the Christ Myth theory.  I even had a thread on this site years ago where I supported a historicist position based on a book I read by Burton Mack (another respected biblical scholar) the book was "Who Wrote the New Testament"  "the making of the christian myth"

 

This is a really good book which supports the historicist position, but not from a religionist/supernaturalist/magicalist/gullibilist position.

[Storm]

Fair point you have made, Mythra, regarding my Christ Myth Theory statement being flawed. I would say that I am privy to the theories espoused by Price and Carrier predominately, as they are the ones where I have listened to interviews and lectures. The articles I have read were very general in nature and I cannot say with any certainty that they mentioned one particular theory, although Price and Carrier were mentioned in many of them.

 

One thing that gives me trouble is that there are two types of scholars that relate to this and it appears that they would be at odds. We have the biblical scholars who are, for lack of a better description, blatantly Christian and, in this regard, highly biased and rest their cases on presuppositions that need to be mentioned but not hashed out. Then we have the other scholars who are likely university professors of religion and history and literature, etc. They are not necessarily Christian, but likely not so due to their unique understanding of the subject matter at hand.  In my feeble mind, I think that this disparity between scholars creates a problem in its own right. So in one corner we have Professor A who has a list of legitimate, distinguished credentials who says "this" and then we have Professor B who also has a list of different credentials from a different field who says "that". Can the fields not agree? Can you have a legitimate literature position, but not a legitimate historical position? These are things that make me wonder.

 

I remember Tim O'Neil making a statement about parsimony and Occams razor fitting in with all of this. I like that standard, but sometimes I am not sure how it all fits. In spite of the evidence in writings and history, there is still the human element. As a behavioral therapist, my understanding of why people believe the things they do and what drives their actions also plays a part in the determination of history. This clouds my ability to accept the existence of Jesus because I understand how the human mind can interpret what it believes to be reality. In my opinion, this is relevant to the bible and why the authors wrote what they did. It just gives me more reason to not view the bible as a reliable source of factual information.

[mymistake]

Well we run into the same problem when asking "Was there a historical Robin Hood" or "Was there a historical King Aurthor".  The difference is that nobody is demanding that people join a tax free organization and then build their lives around a cult that worships Robin Hood.  So even if there was a homeless, insane, Jewish preacher who was executed in the first century then Christ is still a myth because that isn't what we mean when we say "Christ".  If a string of ordinary bandits who did ordinary bandit things were all called Robin Hood then they have nothing to do with the story we associate with the name.

[Shinzon]

I started to loss interest in historical Jesus studies after it started to seem like a rosbach test (ya know the one with the black blobs). But I found in general that Christ myth theory is reading more then I would like in between the lines and that is why I am not sold on the Christ myth theory.

[Storm]

Well we run into the same problem when asking "Was there a historical Robin Hood" or "Was there a historical King Aurthor".  The difference is that nobody is demanding that people join a tax free organization and then build their live around a cult that worships Robin Hood.  So even if there was a homeless, insane, Jewish preacher who was executed in the first century then Christ is still a myth because that isn't what we mean when we say "Christ".  If a string of ordinary bandits who did ordinary bandit things were all called Robin Hood then they have nothing to do with the story we associate with the name.

I think you raise a valid point. I would say that, in spite of the harm religion can do to people, Religion serves an productive human purpose. Some would even argue that religion serves an evolutionary purpose as well. Christianity happens to be the prominent religion in our neck of the world, so it receives the bulk of scrutiny in our information saturated age now. I suspect that we are not only challenging our supernatural belief system, but we are also challenging our cultural system. That brings an entirely different paradigm into this whole thing.

[Mythra]

I know exactly what you mean.  Why can't the experts and the scholars agree?

 

I think the answer lies in the fog.  There are too many unknowns.   What things were written back then and were later destroyed in a deliberate action?

What things were written and just forgotten about and lost?  What texts were altered? What things were completely fabricated, just as a novel is written in our time?

Did the people of that time even utilize their brains in the same way that we do?  

 

Because of these questions and many others like them, there can be no definitive answer.  Only hypotheses that follow the trails we have available to us.

 

No one can say for sure that Jesus existed as a man. (Well, they can say it, and they do say it, but they can't support the statement with evidence)

 

No one can say for sure that he didn't.   And it will probably always be that way.

[Mythra]

Even among the things that are known, there's no consensus on when it was written. The gospels for instance. It makes a huge difference whether the gospel according to Mark was writtten in 50 ce or 80 or even 90 ce.  The only thing we know for sure is that the first mention of the four gospels by name (that we KNOW of)  did not occur until around 180 ce. by Irenaeus.

[Mythra]

When I was a christian, I used to dismiss the scholars.  Because the first thing they do when studying the bible is dismiss the supernatural.  They take it for granted that nothing miraculous ever really happened.  They attribute hearing the voice of god to a mental condition.

 

Now, I do all those things. 

[Mythra]

I like reading Robert M. Price as well.  "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man" was one of the first things I read after escaping the clutches of the LORD.

 

Price is certainly a more entertaining writer than Carrier, since Price includes humor in his books.

 

But, unless he's changed his position in recent years, Price is kind of ambiguous in his stance on history/myth.

[wellnamed]

I don't think the Christ Myth theories deserve to be called "hoaxes", or are entirely implausible, but I think Carrier's arguments are flawed and as far as I know he is the most vocal and recent advocate of a myth theory. I can't find all of the mathematical critiques I've read of On the Historicity of Jesus but here's one in two parts:

 

https://legiononomamoi.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/dr-richard-carriers-hypotheses-on-the-historicity-of-jesus/

https://legiononomamoi.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/carriers-historiography-why-we-may-have-reason-to-doubt-its-utilitity/

 

The in-a-nutshell criticism is that Carrier's use of a Bayesian framework doesn't really have any other effect except to codify highly subjective opinions in a more formal way. He then mistakes the formality of the presentation for an argument, when really the conclusions that come out of the model depend entirely on the subjectively determined prior probabilities put into it.

 

Essentially, given the vagueness of our understanding of what constitutes reasonable evidence of either historicity or mythicization in general, the mathematical model doesn't really add any rigor to the process.

 

As far as legitimate consensus among historians, to the best of my knowledge a majority believes in some historical Jesus, who of course probably bears little resemblance to the Jesus of the gospels. Bart Ehrman wrote a book arguing for this, for example. I think the truth is that it's not really possible to reach conclusions with iron-clad certainty here. Many historians accept the idea of some historical Jesus because they think that, given the way they normally approach such historical questions, there is enough evidence to think it more likely than not that there was. That shouldn't be mistaken for an argument that the gospels are true in some theological sense. There are also reasonable arguments in favor of mythicism, even if Carrier doesn't "prove" that it's the more likely conclusion the way he wants to.

[Shinzon]

When I was a christian, I used to dismiss the scholars.  Because the first thing they do when studying the bible is dismiss the supernatural.  They take it for granted that nothing miraculous ever really happened.  They attribute hearing the voice of god to a mental condition.

 

Now, I do all those things. 

methodological naturalism is useful its why we don't all believe aliens built the pyramids.

[VacuumFlux]

I tend to lean towards mythical, mostly because we've seen in play out in recorded history with the cargo cults:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum

 

In that one, there was a small basis in reality, but there wasn't even a single person that the myth was based it. It was just a class of people (US soldiers), and they built an entire religion about the 2nd coming of a guy who never existed. In early New Testament times, there were a lot of itinerant Jewish preachers, and much of the teachings of Jesus sound similar to those of the Essenes. So I think it's a good possibility that the Jesus myth is based on the (real, historical) category of Jewish apocalyptic preachers, but all the particulars are myths.

[Mythra]

 

The in-a-nutshell criticism is that Carrier's use of a Bayesian framework doesn't really have any other effect except to codify highly subjective opinions in a more formal way. He then mistakes the formality of the presentation for an argument, when really the conclusions that come out of the model depend entirely on the subjectively determined prior probabilities put into it.

 

Now this agree with.  I didn't care for the Bayesian equations and reasoning.  It seemed a little strained and pseudo-scientific.  I tended to go really quickly through the parts of the book that were calculating numerical probabilities.

 

I guess I would say the Bayesian equations thing seemed unbecoming compared to the staggering amount of work that must have gone into researching the book.  

 

Glad my initial impression wasn't totally off-base.

[Shinzon]

I have seen Bayes theorem used to defend the resurrection as well. The reasoning once you grant prior probability a certain way is scary solid. The weakness is crap goes in crap comes out. You make any case seem solid( even cases that arnt solid at all),which is why Im shocked its used for historical events at all.

[♦ ficino ♦]

And so, the earliest writings in the New Testament are the Pauline Epistles.  And Paul makes no mention at all of an earthly Jesus. No mention at all of any of the teachings of Jesus.  Even when those teachings would have supported a point that Paul was trying to make.

 

Hi Mythra, one of my problems with even Carrier-style mythicism is passages where Paul speaks as though Jesus lived on earth:

"born of woman, born under the law"

"died and was buried" (ἐτάφη)

"seed of David"

 

It seems you need many auxiliary assumptions to justify a claim that such verses refer to events in the heavens between the moon and earth, because normally we take such language to refer to earthly events.

 

Then, wouldn't Paul's argument for the resurrection of the dead in I Corinthians be weakened if Jesus was not a real man who died and rose? If he was a god the whole time, what's the tie-in to my future resurrection?  I can see ways to pull the resurrection of the dead out of a mythicist construction, but a human dead and risen Jesus seems to give Paul more of what he needs for his argument.

 

Carrier has been accused of reading things into the Ascension of Isaiah that are not there. I can't comment on that.

[Storm]

In that one, there was a small basis in reality, but there wasn't even a single person that the myth was based it. It was just a class of people (US soldiers), and they built an entire religion about the 2nd coming of a guy who never existed. In early New Testament times, there were a lot of itinerant Jewish preachers, and much of the teachings of Jesus sound similar to those of the Essenes. So I think it's a good possibility that the Jesus myth is based on the (real, historical) category of Jewish apocalyptic preachers, but all the particulars are myths.

I definitely find this plausible.

 

 

As far as legitimate consensus among historians, to the best of my knowledge a majority believes in some historical Jesus, who of course probably bears little resemblance to the Jesus of the gospels. Bart Ehrman wrote a book arguing for this, for example. I think the truth is that it's not really possible to reach conclusions with iron-clad certainty here. Many historians accept the idea of some historical Jesus because they think that, given the way they normally approach such historical questions, there is enough evidence to think it more likely than not that there was. That shouldn't be mistaken for an argument that the gospels are true in some theological sense. There are also reasonable arguments in favor of mythicism, even if Carrier doesn't "prove" that it's the more likely conclusion the way he wants to.

 

Carrier makes the following statement: "History concerns not what scholars subjectively think 'must' have happened, but what the evidence allows us all to claim actually did happen". I think this is a valid statement and, despite the fact that parsimony and Occam's Razor hold good logical validities, I think that sometimes the conclusions we draw based on the simplest form of an idea lead to the "must have" conclusions rather than the real conclusions. This is where I think human behavior and thinking processes come into play. This is also why the context and historical background also are important. This goes back to why I think its important that conclusions are reached across different disciplines. Sure the history book says that "x" happened and that Person "y" may have existed because of it. But then upon examining the thinking and behaviors of humans and religion and social norms and culture, etc. we then get the whole picture. Someone writing this stuff after the fact and not as an eyewitness certainly should bring these factors into our conclusions. History is just a part of the bigger picture, if that makes any sense.

 

 

edited for clarification.

[Mythra]

 

 

Hi Mythra, one of my problems with even Carrier-style mythicism is passages where Paul speaks as though Jesus lived on earth:

"born of woman, born under the law"

"died and was buried" (ἐτάφη)

"seed of David"

 

Hey Ficino.  I know that Carrier and Doherty both address those passages, but off the top of my head I don't recall their explanation.  Hopefully they don't just say they are interpolations. I'll do a little digging and see.

[amateur]

Vacuum Flux, I read the Wikipedia article about John Frum, and that's fascinating!  I never knew about that.  You can see the connection between John Frum and Jesus:  both mythical individuals who will give great rewards to believers.