Bart Ehrman "jesus Existed!"

[mcdaddy]

Y'all, we should really get together some time over coffee and talk about whether Jesus existed or not. You know? We haven't addressed the topic very much and I want to hear everyone's opinions, as I don't know where everyone stands. I'm saddened this topic rarely gets discussed.

[Antlerman]

I say I would fall somewhere between 2 and 3 above, probably closer to 2. But that is what I've been saying all along. What is said at the opening is how I too am defining the 'historical Jesus' with the "mythicist postion". Because I fall on 2 or 3, that makes me the historical Jesus position, right?

You're actually in near agreement with Ehrman (after reading his book and, trying, to have this discussion here with you). You, in the past at least, tend to think that this historical Jesus was the cynic sage as opposed to the apocalyptic. But overall I think you would feel right at home with this book.

I do still lean more to the cynic-sage than an apocalyptic preacher. The work with Kloppenburg's Q translation has the apocalyptic preacher Jesus in the latter Q2 stage. Personally, I see him more as cynic-sage in the earliest form. It makes more sense to me. If not that, then something else rather than the apocalyptic Jesus.

 

Anyhow, the first position is different from how you're presenting it in that you're trying to say "whole cloth from other religions," which I take to mean that it's a type of "cut and paste" from pagan religions (maybe D.M. Murdock or something along those lines?). That *is* a mythicist position but just one of many.

In these discussions on ExC, that is the position most presented, and what I recoil against. When I said what was said at first I was not referring to point 1 of 4, rather this quote from above, "Philosopher George Walsh argues that Christianity can be seen as originating in a myth dressed up as history, or with a historical being mythologized into a supernatural one: he calls the former the Christ myth theory, and the latter the historical Jesus theory".

 

Consider mythicists to be like early xians. There are a number and no one monolithic position at the moment (nearly as many theories as mythicists it seems). It makes us a bit difficult to deal with as a result. I'm a mythicist and don't agree with everything the others say. Historical and divine Jesus is easy by way of comparison.

I think the thing that bothers me the most is the religious nature of insisting that some variant of that view has to be right versus anything that smacks of an actual person who may have existed. That's what I rebuff against. I remember as moderators we have on occasion had to boot these ArchyaS fans because they were like Jesus is the Messiah to overthrow Rome zealots of the Bible. Utterly irrational, utterly convinced it's all a big conspiracy to conceal the truth! My god....

 

If I'm reading Ehrman right, I think he's just annoyed by what some call Internet Junkies, over actual scholarly debate. What I hear here is that he is taken aback a bit but the so-called 'skeptics' and atheist crowd who insert him into their arguments, whereas to him these were really no-questions, or at least not meriting enough reason for serious attention. For right or for wrong, it was not coming from the academic community, but popular atheism trying to make him side with their popular opinions on the subject. That's how I hear what he's saying.

That's part of the larger issue he's going on about. It would basically be questions from people like us, at this site, reading his books and posting in these forums and sending him an email asking him this most basic question: "Dear Bart, Did Jesus really exist? It's not seriously addressed by anyone anywhere. It's just assumed. Help. Signed, Ex-C." It's absolutely reasonable to want to know the answer and he sees it as superfluous, practically common sense. Anyhow, the reason I posted it was to say that there is no scholarly debate on this issue so you're going to be waiting a very long time unless things change (and it doesn't appear they're going to any time soon).

 

mwc

Well it raises the question actually just how serious is this all to be considered? And that comes back to what I was getting at originally. Just because it is popular amongst amateurs doesn't mean it merits serious consideration amongst experts, like who knows what sort of paranormal things people feel scientists should consider and then criticize them for not! Maybe it has some merit, and maybe there is some bias amongst the 'good 'ole boy's club' folk. Or maybe in fact its just crap?

 

What I'm struck by again, is how adamant ExC'ers and the so-called "skeptic" community is that Jesus never existed. That is what I'm focused on, much less than the particulars of the debate.

[Ouroboros]

I remember as moderators we have on occasion had to boot these ArchyaS fans because they were like Jesus is the Messiah to overthrow Rome zealots of the Bible. Utterly irrational, utterly convinced it's all a big conspiracy to conceal the truth! My god....

I heard recently that they don't exist either. They're a myth as well... oh, damn. I fear the day I'm a myth too...

[Antlerman]

I remember as moderators we have on occasion had to boot these ArchyaS fans because they were like Jesus is the Messiah to overthrow Rome zealots of the Bible. Utterly irrational, utterly convinced it's all a big conspiracy to conceal the truth! My god....

I heard recently that they don't exist either. They're a myth as well... oh, damn. I fear the day I'm a myth too...

The Zealots? Yes, everyone of the Real Experts™ on the Internet know that the Zealots were patterned after the mythical peoples of Atlantis, who themselves are a myth patterned after the greys of Area 51. In fact Jerusalem is a myth too, as was Rome, as was the whole earth. We are all just a dream in the eye of a giant asleep on a lotus blossom, in a galaxy far, far away.

[Joshpantera]

Oh... so you're saying a real person may have existed now? First steps are the hardest.....

 

I have been saying this all along. Any one of a number of 1st Century cult leaders may have inspired the Christian Myth. My favorite is the Samaritan "Jesus", The Tahib. Does that make him the Historical Jesus? Or maybe it was one of a hundred other 1st Century "Jesuses". We don't know. I do know that if he existed at all, he was not born of a Virgin, performed no Miracles, and stayed dead. It is only the Gospel "Jesus" that absolutely never existed.

Agree. The specific Gospel Jesus didn't exist.

 

But I do think we have to separate the questions of "did a person or more exist that contributed to some core parts of the story" and the issue of "who was this person if he existed."

 

On the question "was there a person or more that parts of the story could have been built upon", I think the answer is more of "probably yes" rather then "probably no." The simple reason being there were enough of them (Jesuses) to fill a village. I think one of them at least could have inspired some small parts of the stories.

 

On the question, "who was it", there's not enough evidence to tell.

This is mythicist talk you're giving us through and through Ouroboros. You're actually well into the mix with the views you're expressing but may not recognize yourself as such.

 

Like I've said before even DM Murdock who most people like to claim promotes the "invented whole cloth Jesus" position, doesn't actually promote that. If you ask her she'll tell you that the Jesus of the gospels is a composition character made up of various historical people used to give the prophet angle to the myth along with Hellenized Judaism drawing from Egypto-Greco-Roman mythological motifs. We've discussed this many times. And to be honest your post and some of the posts I've received from her are nearly identical in content. Especially your closing statement which perfectly summarizes her book "Who Was Jesus: fingerprints of the Christ" It's a CSI type investigation into the question who the "Real Jesus" might have been.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj0T_0o_8_o

[Ouroboros]

This is mythicist talk you're giving us through and through Ouroboros. You're actually well into the mix with the views you're expressing but may not recognize yourself as such.

No one said I didn't recognize myself as a mythicist, but there are different kinds of and levels of mysticists, as I've learned over the years here.

 

Thanks for your input JP, btw.

[Antlerman]

What I'm still disturbed by is the whole dismissal of educated people because someone prefers their views, or the views of popular names because it suits their fancy over actual scholarship. A Princeton scholar is dismissed as no better than some shlep armed with Google. Just call me old fashioned, but there is a difference between information and knowledge. Let's hear it Tom Waits!

 

[Antlerman]

BTW, with this "soft" definition of mythicist now being offered, Bart Ehrman himself is also a mythicist. Why not just say anything shy of conservative literalism is mythicist? Better still, just call it "liberal scholarship" and be done with it.

[Joshpantera]

This is mythicist talk you're giving us through and through Ouroboros. You're actually well into the mix with the views you're expressing but may not recognize yourself as such.

No one said I didn't recognize myself as a mythicist, but there are different kinds of and levels of mysticists, as I've learned over the years here.

 

Thanks for your input JP, btw.

I just assumed that you were trying to counter mythicism by the tone you've taken in so many threads. But I stand corrected. This soft definition of mythicism is basically the only reason I'm willing to claim it. No different than the soft definition of atheism which is the traditional view and of which I find myself in accord along with my philosophical pantheist leaning.

 

Even Gerald Massey lectured on the historical Jesus and the mythical Christ: http://gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/dpr_01_historical_jesus.htm

[Joshpantera]

BTW, with this "soft" definition of mythicist now being offered, Bart Ehrman himself is also a mythicist. Why not just say anything shy of conservative literalism is mythicist? Better still, just call it "liberal scholarship" and be done with it.

No, he actually isn't. He's a firm evemerist. The difference is that we see the gospel Jesus as an amalgation of different biographies rolled into one that amounts to no particular person when peeled away. Ehrman, as you ought to know, thinks that the layer addressed to the failed dooms day prophet is the core of it all, instead of just another layer of the myth. And you're cynic sage idea suffers the same fate. Many of these layers are in conflict with one another and contradictory because they've all been tossed in together as if it's coming from one fixed person. The gentile Jesus is suddenly turning families against one another and the prophet of peace abruptly about faces into scolding that he does not come to bring peace but a sword, etc., etc. Close examination reveals a lot of layers, none of which boil down to one fixed core. Evermists are into the one fixed core reasoning and arguing among themselves as to which of these contradictory layers can be asserted as the real core and all others as mere layers.

 

We pretty much know that his argument fails and much of the details from the Jesus story that he uses to assert historicity, like coming from Nazareth for instance, are actually the mythological parts of the story and not the history parts. There's not much of a Nazareth at the time of the early first century to come from (refer to Rene Salm), and the Nazorite / Nazarene thing seems to be midrash in order to align the character with the sect that Samson belonged to. Makes no sense to use Nazareth as a foundation for historical claims when you have already established that the writers were using midrash and quote mining the OT for references to use in their myth making. It's the same as going into Isaiah and trying to pull the 'young woman' reference as a born of a virgin reference and force fit it out of context to try and apply to the story line hero. They were obviously into the Samson myth in likewise fashion and trying to align the hero with the Nazorite sect for the illusion of prophetic reasons.

[Antlerman]

BTW, with this "soft" definition of mythicist now being offered, Bart Ehrman himself is also a mythicist. Why not just say anything shy of conservative literalism is mythicist? Better still, just call it "liberal scholarship" and be done with it.

No, he actually isn't. He's a firm evemerist.

I wonder if that's a term he accepts for himself, or this is a term assigned to him by those trying to frame the debate? Personally, I had to look up the use of that term in this debate and that term in fact using this "soft" definition of mythicist applies to them as well. The 'soft' definition has an actual person in there somewhere too, right?

 

I side with Burton Mack mostly myself who recognizes all the active mythmaking that was occurring, yet he himself says there was a small kernel of a movement that began surrounding what appears to be a cynic-sage style teacher. It is not as you suggest that the "historical Jesus" position necessarily means that that one individual inspired all these myths about them. I don't believe that myself. Here's what Mack says, whom you by your definitions would likewise have to call an evemerist:

 

“A second criticism is that none of the profiles proposed for the historical Jesus can account for all of the movements, ideologies, and mythic figures of Jesus that dot the early Christian social-scape. We now have the Jesuses of Q1 (a Cynic-like sage), Q2 (a prophet of apocalyptic judgment), Thomas (a gnostic spirit), the parables (a spinner of tales), the pre-Markan sets of pronouncement stories (an exorcist and healer), Paul (a martyred messiah and cosmic lord), Mark (the son of God who appeared as messiah, was crucified, and will return as the son of man), John (the reflection of God in creation and history), Matthew (a legislator of divine law), Hebrews (a cosmic high priest presiding over his own death as a sacrifice for sins), Luke (a perfect example of the righteous man), and many more. Not only are these ways of imagining Jesus incompatible with one another,

they cannot be accounted for as the embellishments of the memories of a single historical person no matter how influential

.”

 

(the Christian Myth, pgs 35, 36)

 

[emphasis mine]

 

This however is not the 'mythicist' position, and if so in the 'soft' sense, than he also is an evemerist since he believes the original Jesus was that of the Q1 layer. His position, which resonates the most with me, is that a small community of students were formed around these teachings. It was not really a religious community, but rather a sort of counter-culture group, like the hippies you could say I suppose. Their ideas and community caught on as a social movement. As it spread and encountered various social circumstances they 'added' to the "Jesus says" teaching through a common practice of attribution, where a student emulates the teacher and says what that teacher would say, embodying that teacher in themselves and demonstrating they understood the essence of their master. The Q2 layer is the apocalyptic layer and shows a markedly different tone, Q3 likewise its own tone, and then all the many other layers of miracles stories, prophet like unto Moses layers, Cosmic Christ layers, etc, are all expression of the various communities that sprung out of this social movement, all taking the teachings of the movements and adding stories to them embedding themselves into the dialogs of their communities using the languages of the local areas social psyche to speak of Jesus through them to validate themselves in the eyes of that community, in other words to legitimize themselves, to make themselves relevant, pertinent, able to translate the core essence of the movement's teachings to their respective communities.

 

This makes a great deal of sense to me, and for the most part how I see things happened. But I will not agree with this definition of the mythicist position I found here on some "freethinkers" site:

 

The Evemerist Position:

 

"Evemerism represents the perspective that many of the gods and goddesses of antiquity had been real people, such as kings, queens and other heroes and legendary figures, to whose biographies were later added extraordinary and/or supernatural attributes."

 

vs.

 

The Mythicist Position:

 

"Mythicism represents the perspective that many gods, goddesses and other heroes and legendary figures said to possess extraordinary and/or supernatural attributes are not "real people" but are in fact mythological characters. Along with this view comes the recognition that many of these figures personify or symbolize natural phenomena, such as the sun, moon, stars, planets, constellations, etc., constituting what is called "astrotheology." As a major example of the mythicist position, various biblical characters such as Adam and Eve, Satan, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, King David, Solomon & Jesus Christ, among other figures, in reality represent mythological characters along the same lines as the Egyptian, Sumerian, Phoenician, Indian, Greek, Roman and other godmen, who are all presently accepted as myths, rather than historical figures."

 

- Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection page 11-12

 

That's not what I see at all, that the 12 apostles are astrological symbols, etc, etc. This is a whole-cloth definition that I reject.

 

Do you see why I'm saying that the 'soft' definition of mythicist is really no different than the so-called 'evemerist' postition attributed to these scholars like Mack who like Ehrman see there was some actual core person? Where do you draw this line?

 

And you're cynic sage idea suffers the same fate.

Does it? According to how you define these things, I'm a mythicist and an evemerist. I believe there was someone who was the spark to the kindling, but the shape the flames took is what became "Jesus" to the world. Like the title of the PBS special I enjoyed, "From Jesus to Christ". That says it all.

 

 

(I think the mythicists are becoming confused about who they are as they continue to look at this. )

[qadeshet]

That doesn't defend your position though. Or are you saying that a "Bible Scholar" is a definition or label of a specific profession, a person who works at only certain kinds of Universities? Or are you saying that the label "Biblical Scholar" is by definition someone who says that Jesus existed, and as soon as they don't, they stop being a Biblical Scholar somehow?

 

I'd like to know what your definition of "Biblical Scholar" is.

 

Most Bible Scholars teach at Bible Colleges or Universities associated with various Christian denominations, such as SMU, TCU, Notre Dame, and many others. A resent Scholar's job was threatened because he wrote an article pointing out that the Bible treats women harshly. Even suggesting that Jesus might not have existed is a good way to lose tenure. Bible Scholars are specialists in the Bible, so yes, I do consider this a specific profession.

 

 

As good a defination as any: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_studies

 

Biblical studies is the academic application of a set of diverse disciplines to the study of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the Bible.^[1][2] For its theory and methods, the field draws on disciplines ranging from archaeology, literary criticism, history, philology, and social sciences.^[1]

Many secular as well as religious universities and colleges offer courses in biblical studies, usually in departments of religious studies, theology, Judaic studies, history, or comparative literature. Biblical scholars do not necessarily have a faith commitment to the texts they study, but many do.

[Antlerman]

Translation: "They can't be *real* scholars because they have some agenda of protecting their beliefs/jobs. Therefore we can't take what they say as sound research".

 

Comparison: "Evolutionists have to protect their status as atheist-scientists, so naturally they only look at things that support those bias/job positions. We need to 'teach the controversy', and let the public decide what is good science or not".

[qadeshet]

If Mythicists claim that no possible "Jesus" existed in the 1st Century, and no one could possibly have inspired the Gospel accounts, then I know of few if any actual Mythicists. Every Mythicist I am aware of happily admit that many Jesuses may have contributed to the Christ Myth. Rene Salm has a new article that may help clarify things.

 

WHAT IS MYTHICISM?

Semi-mythicism and euhemerism

A mythicist is one who concludes that Jesus of Nazareth never existed and also that no human prophet lay at the origin of Christianity.

That is how I define a “mythicist.” The definition has two components. For those who, like myself, embrace only the first part but not the second, I use a different term: “semi-mythicist.” I personally have concluded that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, yet I also suspect that a human prophet (the Teacher of Righteousness? John the Baptist?) lay at the root of the Christian religion. Of course, I am quite convinced that the biography of Jesus of Nazareth was invented out of whole cloth. So in my view the following sequence obtains:

(1) a prophet –>

(2) a false biography (Jesus of Nazareth) –>

(3) the second member of the divine Christian trinity.

The above makes me a euhemerist, and so we see that there is no conflict between euhemerism and mythicism. Anyone who thinks that a human lies at the root of Christianity (even if that human was not Jesus of Nazareth) is a euhemerist—for that human was eventually deified. The Christians get around this by saying that Jesus was God from the start. I happen to be an atheist and don’t buy into that doctrine nor deification—nor into the false biography of Jesus. But I am still both a euhemerist and a semi-mythicist. This is altogether too nuanced for most people and so, in casual parlance, I am simply a “mythicist”—one who denies the existence of Jesus of Nazareth (the “common” definition of mythicism).

 

I agree With Salm.

 

What I'm still disturbed by is the whole dismissal of educated people because someone prefers their views, or the views of popular names because it suits their fancy over actual scholarship. A Princeton scholar is dismissed as no better than some shlep armed with Google. Just call me old fashioned, but there is a difference between information and knowledge. Let's hear it Tom Waits!

 

Bart Ehrman is my favorite Bible Scholar. He has a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary. We all agree he is an expert on the Bible. That does not make him an expert Historian. Nor do I want him changing the oil in my car. As long as he sticks to his normal area of expertise, he's the best. Too bad he didn't make a better case for the Historical Jesus. I'm just not sure if any other Bible Scholar can make a better case.

[qadeshet]

Translation: "They can't be *real* scholars because they have some agenda of protecting their beliefs/jobs. Therefore we can't take what they say as sound research".

 

Comparison: "Evolutionists have to protect their status as atheist-scientists, so naturally they only look at things that support those bias/job positions. We need to 'teach the controversy', and let the public decide what is good science or not".

 

Bible Scholars have been defending Christianity for 2000 years. That is their job. This doesn't mean they aren't Scholars, it means they are not unbiased.

[mwc]

I do still lean more to the cynic-sage than an apocalyptic preacher. The work with Kloppenburg's Q translation has the apocalyptic preacher Jesus in the latter Q2 stage. Personally, I see him more as cynic-sage in the earliest form. It makes more sense to me. If not that, then something else rather than the apocalyptic Jesus.

I don't buy into Q. But to be honest I don't have a firm position in the Synoptic Problem (for anyone unfamiliar). I tend to waffle. I just have a problem with creating a hypothetical document and then studying it as-if it's a real historical document (same with L and M). I don't have a problem with isolating the content as a way of gaining a level of understanding but this goes beyond that in my opinion (ie. the idea being we could well pull a "Q" from the sand one day).

 

I am glad my memory was working well enough that I didn't get your Jesus-type wrong.

 

In these discussions on ExC, that is the position most presented, and what I recoil against. When I said what was said at first I was not referring to point 1 of 4, rather this quote from above, "Philosopher George Walsh argues that Christianity can be seen as originating in a myth dressed up as history, or with a historical being mythologized into a supernatural one: he calls the former the Christ myth theory, and the latter the historical Jesus theory".

When you noted that you were around 2 or 3 on that list I focused on the list instead of the surrounding information. I didn't catch that I was supposed to look at this bit.

 

I think the thing that bothers me the most is the religious nature of insisting that some variant of that view has to be right versus anything that smacks of an actual person who may have existed. That's what I rebuff against. I remember as moderators we have on occasion had to boot these ArchyaS fans because they were like Jesus is the Messiah to overthrow Rome zealots of the Bible. Utterly irrational, utterly convinced it's all a big conspiracy to conceal the truth! My god....

I've seen the Zeitgeist videos. Have you? They are conspiracies. I do know that Murdock has tried to revise her work as a result of all the flak taken over this but I don't know what it's like now or if it's made any difference in substance. I thought the videos were entertaining for what they were but never bought in any more than that so I really have no real knowledge of what's in her written work. I just assumed it was more of the same and since the videos were so flawed I saw no reason to follow-up.

 

But I would think that if there is no human Jesus at the heart of movement and you are looking for a compromise position that says there *may* be a human Jesus at the heart of movement then I think you're in for disappointment. It's impossible. You cannot have a human Jesus if he's entirely made-up. You ask too much. You believe that there is a human Jesus. If you firmly believe this then could you compromise to there *may* be absolutely *no* human Jesus at the heart of Christianity? That he was totally made-up? I'm not asking for sake of argument but for you to actually concede it. If you firmly believe there is a human there then saying there is now not a human is rather contradictory to your position. If you don't care either way then it's easy to switch. Sure, Jesus, no Jesus, whatever.

 

Late Edit: I just came across a thread over in Rants with "Thor." I only skimmed part of the first page or two. I think this is may be what you're talking about and so what I wrote above may not apply but I'm leaving it nonetheless.

 

Well it raises the question actually just how serious is this all to be considered? And that comes back to what I was getting at originally. Just because it is popular amongst amateurs doesn't mean it merits serious consideration amongst experts, like who knows what sort of paranormal things people feel scientists should consider and then criticize them for not! Maybe it has some merit, and maybe there is some bias amongst the 'good 'ole boy's club' folk. Or maybe in fact its just crap?

 

What I'm struck by again, is how adamant ExC'ers and the so-called "skeptic" community is that Jesus never existed. That is what I'm focused on, much less than the particulars of the debate.

I don't know how to answer this exactly. I think it might be an "eye of the beholder" type question.

 

I am on an Ancient Near East mailing list. It gets low traffic, in part because it's highly moderated and to post you have to have credentials (I cannot post). Biblical topics are rarely allowed. Anyhow, recently the topic came up of whether Troy was historical. You would think that with the literature combined with the dig site that this would be a done deal but it's apparently not. So they argued a bit and, as you might imagine, left it unsettled.

 

Now it started out because someone simply asked if anyone knew of any comprehensive writing(s) against the historicity of Troy (I'm simplifying). And others responded with that information. Why is this almost a taboo when it comes to Jesus and his life? The city of Troy sparks controversy but the one-horse town of Nazareth is a slam-dunk? All biblical scholars seem to be able to come to consensus on these sparse details but these Homeric researchers can't do likewise? It boggles my mind. I don't know about others. It makes me think there are different rules being applied when I read these different groups work.

 

mwc

[Ouroboros]

A mythicist is one who concludes that Jesus of Nazareth never existed and also that no human prophet lay at the origin of Christianity.

 

This is why I find it so frustrating to discuss this topic. My impression from Joshpantera is that this is not the official stance of "mysticists" at all.

 

Can someone resolve this conflict of definitions?

 

Forget it. I get it now.

 

Loose definition of mythicist = semi-mythicist.

[Antlerman]

A mythicist is one who concludes that Jesus of Nazareth never existed and also that no human prophet lay at the origin of Christianity.

 

This is why I find it so frustrating to discuss this topic. My impression from Joshpantera is that this is not the official stance of "mysticists" at all.

 

Can someone resolve this conflict of definitions?

As I said earlier... "I think the mythicists are becoming confused about who they are as they continue to look at this." Who is making up these definitions here? Will the real mythicists please stand up?

[Joshpantera]

BTW, with this "soft" definition of mythicist now being offered, Bart Ehrman himself is also a mythicist. Why not just say anything shy of conservative literalism is mythicist? Better still, just call it "liberal scholarship" and be done with it.

No, he actually isn't. He's a firm evemerist.

I wonder if that's a term he accepts for himself, or this is a term assigned to him by those trying to frame the debate? Personally, I had to look up the use of that term in this debate and that term in fact using this "soft" definition of mythicist applies to them as well. The 'soft' definition has an actual person in there somewhere too, right?

 

I side with Burton Mack mostly myself who recognizes all the active mythmaking that was occurring, yet he himself says there was a small kernel of a movement that began surrounding what appears to be a cynic-sage style teacher. It is not as you suggest that the "historical Jesus" position necessarily means that that one individual inspired all these myths about them. I don't believe that myself. Here's what Mack says, whom you by your definitions would likewise have to call an evemerist:

 

 

 

 

“A second criticism is that none of the profiles proposed for the historical Jesus can account for all of the movements, ideologies, and mythic figures of Jesus that dot the early Christian social-scape. We now have the Jesuses of Q1 (a Cynic-like sage), Q2 (a prophet of apocalyptic judgment), Thomas (a gnostic spirit), the parables (a spinner of tales), the pre-Markan sets of pronouncement stories (an exorcist and healer), Paul (a martyred messiah and cosmic lord), Mark (the son of God who appeared as messiah, was crucified, and will return as the son of man), John (the reflection of God in creation and history), Matthew (a legislator of divine law), Hebrews (a cosmic high priest presiding over his own death as a sacrifice for sins), Luke (a perfect example of the righteous man), and many more. Not only are these ways of imagining Jesus incompatible with one another,

they cannot be accounted for as the embellishments of the memories of a single historical person no matter how influential

.”

 

(the Christian Myth, pgs 35, 36)

 

[emphasis mine]

 

This however is not the 'mythicist' position, and if so in the 'soft' sense, than he also is an evemerist since he believes the original Jesus was that of the Q1 layer. His position, which resonates the most with me, is that a small community of students were formed around these teachings. It was not really a religious community, but rather a sort of counter-culture group, like the hippies you could say I suppose. Their ideas and community caught on as a social movement. As it spread and encountered various social circumstances they 'added' to the "Jesus says" teaching through a common practice of attribution, where a student emulates the teacher and says what that teacher would say, embodying that teacher in themselves and demonstrating they understood the essence of their master. The Q2 layer is the apocalyptic layer and shows a markedly different tone, Q3 likewise its own tone, and then all the many other layers of miracles stories, prophet like unto Moses layers, Cosmic Christ layers, etc, are all expression of the various communities that sprung out of this social movement, all taking the teachings of the movements and adding stories to them embedding themselves into the dialogs of their communities using the languages of the local areas social psyche to speak of Jesus through them to validate themselves in the eyes of that community, in other words to legitimize themselves, to make themselves relevant, pertinent, able to translate the core essence of the movement's teachings to their respective communities.

 

This makes a great deal of sense to me, and for the most part how I see things happened. But I will not agree with this definition of the mythicist position I found here on some "freethinkers" site:

 

The Evemerist Position:

 

"Evemerism represents the perspective that many of the gods and goddesses of antiquity had been real people, such as kings, queens and other heroes and legendary figures, to whose biographies were later added extraordinary and/or supernatural attributes."

 

vs.

 

The Mythicist Position:

 

"Mythicism represents the perspective that many gods, goddesses and other heroes and legendary figures said to possess extraordinary and/or supernatural attributes are not "real people" but are in fact mythological characters. Along with this view comes the recognition that many of these figures personify or symbolize natural phenomena, such as the sun, moon, stars, planets, constellations, etc., constituting what is called "astrotheology." As a major example of the mythicist position, various biblical characters such as Adam and Eve, Satan, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, King David, Solomon & Jesus Christ, among other figures, in reality represent mythological characters along the same lines as the Egyptian, Sumerian, Phoenician, Indian, Greek, Roman and other godmen, who are all presently accepted as myths, rather than historical figures."

 

- Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection page 11-12

 

That's not what I see at all, that the 12 apostles are astrological symbols, etc, etc. This is a whole-cloth definition that I reject.

 

Do you see why I'm saying that the 'soft' definition of mythicist is really no different than the so-called 'evemerist' postition attributed to these scholars like Mack who like Ehrman see there was some actual core person? Where do you draw this line?

 

And you're cynic sage idea suffers the same fate.

Does it? According to how you define these things, I'm a mythicist and an evemerist. I believe there was someone who was the spark to the kindling, but the shape the flames took is what became "Jesus" to the world. Like the title of the PBS special I enjoyed, "From Jesus to Christ". That says it all.

 

 

(I think the mythicists are becoming confused about who they are as they continue to look at this. )

 

If you read through the history of mythicism you'll find that semi-mythicists and general skeptics have been involved every step of the way right up until present. This is nothing new or strange. Rene Salm is a semi-mythicist and you may be as well judging by your post. It's about as wide open as atheism in that sense. The only common thing holding everyone together is the opinion that the Gospel character "Jesus of Nazareth" is a mythological construct.

 

I'm not aware of any mythicists who rule out the various historical influences on the myth, it's just that the semi-mythicists and evemerists see a fixed core whereas the full mythicists see the myth as starting out with mystical ideas about heavenly beings including a Son of God up in the upper spheres of heaven (multi-layered universe ideas) which were later historicized into the gosepl tales which drew from the available literature and used many different savior and prophet type figures from Jewish lore to give the story some historical sounding depth. Philo's non-historical being "logos" concept was certainly used and brought down to an historical angle.

 

I posted a link to Massey's lecture about Joshua Ben Pandira from around 100 BCE who's story seemed to have been used for certain areas of the Christ myth. But that doesn't make him the real Jesus, the core of the onion, only something used as a tool when spinning this myth. So the pure myth perspective includes diverse appeals to historical persons added to the esoteric mythology of a heavenly being as it was gradually re-worked more exoterically and back dated as a pre-Temple destruction prophet angle and finally became the orthodox tradition with time.

 

Mythicism = Mythological (astro-mythological) tales gradually historicized and brought down to an earth setting by making use of various biographical information about rebels and messiahs to give the story more historical sounding depth.

[Joshpantera]

Here's a convenient timeline of books by skeptics and mythicists:

1663

• (Skep) BARUCH SPINOZA Ethica. Considered an atheist, Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism because he opposed all dogma and advocated the application of unfettered historical method to the interpretation of the biblical sources. Spinoza explained miracles as natural events misinterpreted and emphasized for their moral effect. Contemporaries condemned his strident rationalism and his work as “forged in hell by a renegade Jew and the devil.”

1761

• (Skep) BARON d’HOLBACH. Christianity unveiled: being an examination of the principles and effects of the Christian religion. The book attacked Christianity and religion in general as an impediment to the moral advancement of mankind. Holbach was a wealthy atheist and wrote voluminously against religion, though the authorship of these works was not known until well after his death. Holbach’s Parisian salon was an important meeting place for the contributors to the progressive Encyclopédie.

1768

• (Skep) HERMANN SAMUEL REIMARUS completes his “Apology or Essay in Defense of the Veneration of God through Reason” for private circulation. He finds deceit and trickery behind scripture, accusing Jesus of having fraudulently started a plot to make himself known as the Messiah in future times, using his disciples as agents of the plot. Reimarus questions the post-Easter Jesus, suggesting that the body was stolen by the disciples who then invented the resurrection and ascension. For Reimarus, the Church is based on superstition.

1770

• Baron d’Holbach , Histoire critique de Jésus-Christ, ou Analyse raisonnée des évangiles. The first critical life of Jesus.

• Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature, his most famous book. Holbach denies the existence of a deity and sees the universe as nothing more than matter in motion, bound by inexorable laws of cause and effect. The Catholic Church threatened the French crown with withdrawal of financial support over this book, and numerous famous dignitaries wrote refutations. Holbach’s materialism influenced many, including Karl Marx.

1791

• (Semi-Myth) COMPTE DE VOLNEY, Les Ruines. Volney argued that the gospel story was compiled organically when simple allegorical statements like “the virgin has brought forth” were misunderstood as history. Volney parted company with Dupuis by allowing that confused memories of an obscure historical figure may have contributed to Christianity when they were integrated with solar mythology. He predicted the final union of all religions and the recognition of a common truth underlying them all.

1792

• (Myth) CHARLES-FRANÇOIS DUPUIS. French astromythicist publishes The Origin of all Religious Worship. Dupuis’ knowledge of mythology led him to propose that the ancient divinities were none other than constellations, the names of gods being those of planets whose vicissitudes were simply movements in the heavens anciently expressed in metaphorical language. He sought to find the unity of religions in astronomical observations common to Egyptians, Greeks, and even Chinese. Dupuis considered Christianity “a fable with the same foundation as all the other solar religions.”

1835

• (Skep) DAVID F. STRAUSS. The Life of Jesus scandalized Europe by introducing New Testament “demythology” and denial of Jesus’ divinity. “Shows the purely mythic character of all gospel narratives. The best book on the gospels ever written, even today!” (R. Price)

1838

• (Myth) BRUNO BAUER. Often considered the first academic mythicist. His Kritische Darstellung der Religion des Alten Testaments is a rationalist critique of the Hebrew Bible which was poorly received by the Christian theologians. Bauer was Karl Marx’s sympathetic doctoral advisor in Berlin. Schweitzer devotes Chp. 11 of his Quest (1906) to Bauer’s thought.

1841

• (Skep) LUDWIG FEUERBACH, a student of Hegel, publishes Das Wesen des Christentums (“The Essence of Christianity”). He urged that all religions be eliminated, along with their deceptive tools used to instill fear and invoke the mystical powers of God. Feuerbach believed that ‘God’ is merely the outward projection of man’s inward nature which is infinite. His thought influenced Karl Marx, David F. Strauss, and Bruno Bauer.

• Bruno Bauer publishes a pamphlet, “The trumpet of the last judgment on Hegel” in which he defends atheism and denies that Jesus was an historical figure.

In July Bauer and his protegé Karl Marx scandalized Bonn residents by public drunkenness, laughing uproariously in church, and galloping through the streets on donkeys in imitation of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem.

1842

• Bruno Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker und des Johannes (3 vol). Bauer argued that the gospels were purely literary, with no historically authentic material. The third volume denied the historicity of Christ. Subsequently, Bauer was dismissed from the university faculty by a direct order from the King of Prussia and never taught again.

• (Skep) KARL MARX, increasingly estranged from his mentor Bruno Bauer, writes: “religion in itself is without content. It owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself.”

1845

• (Skep) FERDINAND C. BAUR. Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, sein Leben und Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre. Contends that only four of the pauline epistles are authentic, and that the Paul of Acts is a different person from the author of the epistles.

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Co. by his pupils, Marx and Engels (350 pp). “The Holy Family” are a reference to the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer among the Young Hegelians. The book caused a sensation. It called for revolt and for the creation of a socialist, even communist, state.

1851

• Bruno Bauer, Kritik der paulinischen Briefe (“Critique of the Pauline Letters”). Bauer declared all of Paul’s epistles to be 2nd century forgeries.

• Bruno Bauer, Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs, 3 vol. (“Critique of the Gospels and History of their Origins”), 4th vol. under the title Die theologische Erklärung der Evangelien (“Theological Interpretation of the Gospels”).

1856

• (Gen) CHWOLSOHN, DANIIL. Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus (rpt. Elibron 2005). A four volume magnum opus which extends to almost 2,000 pages. (The last two volumes are on GoogleBooks). Chwolsohn explores heterodox gnosticism and equates a proto-gnostic religion with the Mandeans, whose adherents survived in the irrepressibly non-conformist city of Harran in northern Mesopotamia.

1863

• (Skep) ERNEST RENAN, Life of Jesus (“Vie de Jesus”), the first of his eight volume magnum opus, Histoire des Origines du Christianisme. Renan scandalized Protestants and Catholics alike with this work which openly questioned the divinity of Christ. Renan had a mistrust of intuition or the poetic soul that purported to have a vision of truth discovered through inspiration. He subjected the Old and New Testaments to the same critical scrutiny given to other pieces of historical evidence, concluding that the sacred texts were an entirely human product whose characteristics were relative to time and place.

[Dedicated onsite page.]

1864

• (Skep) DANIEL SCHENKEL, Das Charakterbild Jesu strips away all supernatural elements while generally following the traditional outline of events. He sees Jesus as a perfect moral human being whose standards and teachings are to be followed.

1871

• (Semi-myth) SYTZE HOEKSTRA, De Christologie van het kanonische Marcus-Evangelie (Dutch). One of the first Dutch Radicals, Hoekstra considered Mark’s gospel worthless as a biography of Jesus. For him, the synoptics are symbolic poetry.

1878

• (Myth) ALLARD PIERSON. Recognized as the founder of the Dutch Radical School. His De Bergrede en andere synoptische Fragmenten (“The Sermon on the Mount and other Synoptic Fragments”) argued that the Sermon on the Mount is a post-70 product, a collection of aphorisms of Jewish wisdom placed into the mouth of the semi-god Jesus. For Pierson, non-Christian witnesses are worthless, especially Tacitus; the Galatians epistle is not genuine (contrary to F.C. Baur and the Tübingen School); and the non-historicity of Jesus is patent.

While other continental scholars ignored Bruno Bauer’s work, the Dutch Radical School paid great attention to his ideas and incorporated them into their own exegesis. Because they wrote in Dutch, however, they had minimal international impact.

1879

• Bruno Bauer, Christ and the Caesars: The Origin of Christianity from Romanized Greek Culture. 359 pp. (Trans. 1999, Charleston House Pub.) Paul wrote none of the ‘Pauline’ epistles. The most important individual catalyst for Christian emergence was not Jesus (whom Mark created) but Seneca, many of whose maxims and ideals appear unaltered at the heart of the New Testament. Bauer was the ideological founder of the Dutch Radical School. (Dr. Price’s review).

1882

• Friedrich Engels, Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity, an homage published on the death of Bauer. Engels wrote: “Official theologians, including Renan, wrote [bruno Bauer] off and therefore maintained a deadening silence (Totschweigen) concerning him. Yet Bauer was worth more than them all and did more than all of them regarding a question which interests us Socialists: the historical origin of Christianity… It is clear that if spontaneously arising religions… come into being without deception playing any part, deception by the priests soon becomes inevitable in their further development. But, in spite of all sincere fanaticism, artificial religions cannot, even at their foundation, do without deception and falsification of history. Christianity, too, has pretty achievements of which to boast in this respect from the very beginning, as Bauer shows in his criticism of the New Testament… And, if almost nothing from the whole content of the Gospels turns out to be historically provable—so that even the historical existence of a Jesus Christ can be questioned—Bauer has, thereby, only cleared the ground for the solution of the question… Bauer also gives very valuable data on the causes which helped Christianity triumph and attain world domination. But here the German philosopher is prevented by his idealism from seeing clearly and formulating precisely…”

1886

• (Semi-Myth) ABRAHAM DIRK LOMAN. Quaestiones Paulinae (“Questions on the Paulines”) contends that not only Galatians, but all of Paul’s Epistles are (following Bruno Bauer) 2nd century forgeries. Loman finds no evidence of the Paulinae before Marcion and considers the epistles to be Gnostic treatises. For him, Jesus is a 2nd century fiction though ‘some’ Jesus may have existed, quite buried in history. The Jesus of Christianity is an ideal symbol, a non-historical construction.

1887

• (Myth) E. JOHNSON. Antiqua Mater: A Study of CHristian Origins.

1888

• (Myth) RUDOLF STECK. Der Galaterbrief nach seiner Echtheit untersucht nebst kritischen Bemerkungen zu den Paulinischen Hauptbriefen (“Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Galatians Epistle, and Critical Remarks on the Chief Paulines”). Steck was a Swiss scholar and ally of the Dutch School. He branded all the Pauline epistles as fakes and supported Pierson and Naber.

1894

— The Dreyfus Affair rocks France. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was accused of high treason on the basis of documents forged by the military. This incident showed that “a reactionary government, in close association with ecclesiastical interests, is fatal to the life of freedom in every area, not least in the religious and educational realms” Loisy (p. vii).

1896

• (Skep) WILLEM CHRISTIAAN VAN MANEN. His multi-volume Paulus was published 1890-1896. The first volume dates the Acts of the Apostles to 125-150 CE and argues that it was dependent on several writings including those of Josephus. The other two volumes were about Romans and 1st–2nd Corinthians. An exception in the Dutch Radical School, van Manen accepted the historicity of Jesus.

1900

• (Myth) JOHN M. ROBERTSON, Christianity and Mythology. Draws extensive parallels between Christ and Krishna.

• (Skep) ADOLF VON HARNACK, Das Wesen des Christentums English. Harnack insisted on absolute freedom in the study of church history and the New Testament and that there be no taboo areas of research. He rejected the historicity of the Fourth Gospel in favor of the synoptic accounts. While Harnack denied the possibility of miracles, he argued that Jesus may well have performed acts of healing that seemed miraculous. Harnack was especially interested in contemporary practical Christianity as a religious life and not a system of theology (the “Social Gospel”).

Harnack sought to show that Christianity, properly understood, is the religion which Jesus taught and practiced. It can be summed up as including the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, and the possibility of living “the eternal life in the midst of time.” The theological interpretation of Jesus as in some profound sense truly, divine as well as human, the existence of the Church as an institution, and the sacramental rites of the Christian community, are to be interpreted (Harnack asserted) as examples of the “acute Hellenization” of the simple gospel which Jesus taught. What we should do, if we wish to be authentic Christians, is return to the simplicities of Jesus’ teaching, for this is essential Christianity. All the rest is addition to, or unnecessary complication of, the essential thing. Loisy and other modernists objected that Christian teaching was never simple, and that from the beginning Christianity saw the presence of God in Jesus.

1901

• (Skep) W. WREDE. The Messianic Secret German edition. Confirmed Bruno Bauer’s claim that Mark was the real creator of Christianity. “Showed how Mark is anything but unvarnished history as Liberals had supposed, but is an elaborate piece of narrative theology trying to harmonize two competing early Christologies.” (R. Price)

1904

• (Skep) ALBERT KALTHOFF. Was wissen wir von Jesus? Also: Die Entstehung des Christentums (transl. “The Rise of Christianity,” 1907). Kalthoff’s thought was much influenced by Bruno Bauer and, in turn, influenced Arthur Drews. Kalthoff saw Christianity as a social psychosis. He criticized the romanticist and sentimental image of Jesus as a Great Personality of history, one developed by German liberal theologians (including Schweitzer). In Kalthoff’s view the early church created the New Testament, not the reverse. The early Jesus movement combined the Jewish apocalyptic belief in a Messiah with the socialist hope for reform and a better world. Arthur Drews accepted Kalthoff’s ideas but insisted that the original Christian socialism was religious, not economic.

• (Gen) DITLEF NIELSEN, The Old Arabian Moon Religion and the Mosaic Tradition. Chps. 1-5 tr. R. Salm

(PDF). Shows the unsuspected gnostic background of Iron Age religion which informed both early Judaism and then Christianity.

1905

— Largely as a result of the Dreyfus Affair (1894, above), the French government instituted the constitutional separation of Church and State. With this change, control of the Sorbonne (Univ. Of Paris) and many other institutions of learning passed out of the hands of conservative interests. Many ‘radical’ and ‘modernist’ scholars were now able to exercise their profession, including Alfred Loisy (to be excommunicated in 1908).

1906

• (Skep) ALBERT SCHWEITZER. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A book beloved by the tradition. While professing skepticism, Schweitzer counters mythicism at every turn. The expanded (and suppressed) 2nd edition came out in 1913.

• (Myth) WILLIAM BENJAMIN SMITH. The Pre-Christian Jesus: Studies of Origins of Primitive Christianity, argued that Christianity’s origins lay in a pre-Christian Jesus cult, a Jewish sect that had worshipped a divine being Jesus in the centuries before the human Jesus was supposedly born. Smith found evidence for this cult in Hippolytus’ mention of the Naasenes and Epiphanius’ report of a Nasarene 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.

1907

— The Catholic Church issues a decree, signed by pope Pius X, entitled Lamentabili Sane Exitu (“A Lamentable Departure Indeed”), which formally condemned sixty-five modernist or relativist propositions regarding the nature of the Church, revelation, biblical interpretation, the sacraments, and the divinity of Christ. This decree was followed by the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”), which characterized Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.” The encyclical (text) remonstrated against those who “assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.”

• (Myth) G.J.P.J. BOLLAND. De Evangelische Jozua. Dutch version. English summary. “Jesus” was derived from the Old Testament figure Joshua, son of Nun. This was accomplished by Alexandrian Jews after 70 CE. For those Hellenized Netsarim (“guarded ones”) a mythical Chrestos figure (meaning “the good”) became “Christus.” They colonized Palestine with their Gospel, not the other way around.

1908

• (Skep) ALFRED FIRMIN LOISY’s Les Évangiles Synoptiques leads directly to his excommunication vitandus, that is, all Catholics were forbidden to communicate with him. As a result, up to the year of his death the elderly Loisy could not even get a haircut in his home village (Loisy, p. viii).

Loisy had been ordained a priest in 1879 but, due to his modernist views he published under a series of pseudonyms. 1901-1903 he had already written several works condemned by the Church. Promptly after his excommunication Loisy was offered the History of Religion chair at the Collège de France (Paris), where he taught for the next twenty-five years. Perhaps Loisy’s most famous observation was that “Jesus came preaching the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church”. He never doubted the existence of Jesus and, in the late 1930s, engaged in an acrid exchange with Couchoud regarding this question. [Dedicated onsite page.]

1909

• (Myth), CHRISTIAN HEINRICH ARTHUR DREWS (pronounced “drefs”), The Christ Myth (Die Christusmythe). This German historian and philosopher demonstrated that no independent evidence for the historical existence of Jesus has ever been found outside the New Testament writings. Drews was a German teacher of philosophy at a Technische Hochschule. He never secured a position as university professor due to his controversial views. For him, Jesus Christ never existed and Christianity was the syncretism of sundry mythologies. Drews was strongly influenced by the Jesus deniers in Germany (Bauer, Kalthoff), Britain (J.M. Robertson, T. Whittaker) and America (W.B. Smith), and in turn Drews influenced P-L. Couchoud, G.A. Wells, and others. He attempted to present Bauer’s ideas in clear and concise language intelligible to the general public, language devoid of Hegelian rhetoric and pedantic profundities—no dialectic, no alienation, no synthesis. He elicited strident mainline opposition in the West (e.g., the N.Y. Times), while his ideas were sympathetically promulgated in the Soviet Union via Marx and Lenin. [Dedicated onsite PDF.]

• (Myth) G. A. BERGH VAN EYSINGA, Indische Einflüsse auf evangelische Erzählungen. Van Eysinga concluded that there was no evidence for the existence of the Pauline writings before Marcion (contra Harnack). Unlike his teacher van Manen, van Eysinga rejected the historicity of Jesus.

• (Skep) M. M. MANGASARIAN, The Truth About Jesus: Is He A Myth?

• (Myth) SALOMON REINACH, Orpheus: A General History of Religions. Reinach pointed to the poverty of documentary evidence regarding Jesus, particularly in the gospels. He endorsed the docetist view of Jesus, basing himself on the Pauline epistles (some of which he accepted as authentic).

1910

• The supporters of Arthur Drews caused a sensation by plastering Berlin’s billboards with posters asking, “Did Jesus Christ ever live?” 2,000 people showed up for the famous debates in the Berlin Zoological Gardens (Jan 31 and Feb. 1).

• A. Drews, The Legend of Peter (tr. 1997 by Frank Zindler). Drews exposes the completely legendary character of the figure of Peter, both in the Gospels and the fantastic history of Peter in Rome.

• Adolf von Harnack proposes very early dates for the synoptic gospels and Acts, thus delivering a counter-argument to the Tübingen school (Strauss, Baur, Zeller, Hilgenfeld).

• (Myth) SAMUEL LUBLINSKI, Die Entstehung des Christentums; Das werdende Dogma vom Leben Jesu; Falsche Beweise für die Existenz des Menschen Jesus. Lublinski questioned the existence of Jesus and argued that Christianity arose out of a syncretism of Judaism, mystery religions, gnosticism, and oriental influences, with the Essenes and Therapeutae as pioneering sects.

• (Myth) ARTHUR HEULHARD, Le mensonge Chretien extends to eleven volumes. Stridently anti-Semitic, Heulhard maintained that it was John the Baptist, not Jesus, who proclaimed himself the Christ, the Son of the Father (Bar Abba in Aramaic), and that “Jesus Christ did not Exist” (one of his subtitles). Furthermore, the Baptist was not decapitated, but Barabbas was the one crucified by Pilate on charges of assassination, theft, and treason. A century later, the evangelists substituted an imaginary and innocent Jesus for Barabbas, in order to set the basis for financial profit from the redemption of sins through baptism.

1911

• A. Drews, The Christ Myth. This book sparked violently negative and critical reactions worldwide. (Main entry for Drews above, year 1909.)

• A. Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus Christ. Drews reviews ancient alleged witnesses to Jesus’ existence.

• William Benjamin Smith, Ecce Deus: Studies Of Primitive Christianity. (Main entry for Smith above, year 1906.)

• (Trad) SHIRLEY JACKSON CASE, The Historicity of Jesus: a Criticism of the Contention that Jesus Never Lived, a Statement of the Evidence for His Existence, an Estimate of His Relation to Christianity.

• G. A. van Eysinga, “Radical views about the New Testament.” (Open Court, 124 pp.) German translation.

1913

• Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung), being the second edition of his Quest of the Historical Jesus. It is characteristic that for almost a century the first edition appeared in numerous English printings, while the more complete second edition (with the important chapters 22 and 23 on Jesus mythicism) was universally overlooked, until it finally became available to the English reader from Fortress Press (2000, ed. by John Bowden). In any event, Schweitzer hardly offers an impartial assessment of the mythicist thesis but launches into extended philosophical digressions and consistently sides with the tradition while, at the same time, admitting that the tradition has nothing firm upon which to stand.

1914

• (Semi-Myth) FREDERICK C. CONYBEARE, The historical Christ, or, An investigation of the views of Mr. J.M. Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W.B. Smith. Conybeare was an Orientalist and Professor of Theology at Oxford. For him, the texts show a gradual deification of an existing human source.

1916

• John Robertson, The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions.

1917

• John Robertson, The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory.

1918

• G. A. van Eysinga, Voorchristelijk Christendom; de voorbereiding van het evangelie in de Hellenistische wereld.

1921

• A. Von Harnack Reconstructs Marcion’s Apostolicon.

• Arthur Drews, The Gospel of Mark as Witness against the Historicity of Jesus (Das Markusevangelium als Zeugnis gegen die Geschichtlichkeit Jesu). GMk is a poetic retelling of the astral mythical journey of the sun god dressed in Tanakh robes… The order of the tales strictly follows the astral-mythical cycle. Mark’s gospel is of astral-Gnostic origin and dates to the middle of the second century CE.

1923

• Arthur Drews, The Starry Sky in the Poetry and Religion of Ancient Peoples and Christianity: An Introduction to Astral Mythology (“Der Sternhimmel in der Dichtung und Religion der alten Völker und des Christentums: Eine Einführung in die Astralmythologie”).

1924

• (Myth) PAUL-LOUIS COUCHOUD. The Enigma of Jesus (intro. by James Frazer). This is only the first step in Couchoud’s exegesis, as his most important works appeared after 1926. Couchoud received degrees both in medicine and in philosophy. Between 1925 and 1939 he was the de facto leader of the French rationalist school as regards the history of religion. Couchoud was influenced by Arthur Drews and accepted the genuineness of the Pauline letters, “at least in their shorter, Marcionite editions.” Couchoud argued that Marcion penned 2 Thessalonians and Ephesians (known originally as Laodiceans), that he also wrote the first gospel after the Bar Kochba revolt (133 CE), and that Marcion lived to see other gospels expand upon his own. [Dedicated onsite page.]

• Arthur Drews, The Origin of Christianity in Gnosticism. For Drews, Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian and has both Jewish and gentile roots. The Wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels: God is no longer the Lord of righteous deeds but becomes the Good One. A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul, who is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read into it any elements of a historical Jesus. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a pure forgery inspired by various Tanakh passages. The pauline epistles are from the pens of Christian mystics dating to the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis. GJohn’s Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics—the canonization of the Fourth Gospel proves that even the Church was not concerned with historical facts at all. (Main Drews entry above, year 1909.]

1926

• (Skep) MAURICE GOGUEL, Jesus The Nazarene, Myth Or History? Son of a Lutheran pastor, Goguel became a Professor of History of Early Christianity in Paris. For him, the religion started as a mystery cult, with a hero of a recent date, a Jewish faith-healer who came to believe he was the Messiah and was executed by Pilate. Paul’s works are a confusing patchwork of ideas and remain unexplained.

• Arthur Drews, The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present (Klaus Schilling’s English summary). A historical review of some 35 major deniers of Jesus’ historicity, covering the period 1780-1926. This is Drews’ response to Schweitzer’s 1908 Quest.

• P.-L. Couchoud, Le Mystère de Jésus..

1927

• (Skep) JOSEPH TURMEL, Les Lettres d’Ignace d’Antioche. This overlooked thinker has been called “the greatest historian of Christian dogma.” Turmel showed that the letters of Ignatius must be dated much later than is customary. Their earliest redaction is by Marcion and can be no earlier than 135 CE, while their revisions date to 190-211 CE. It follows that the works cited by Pseudo-Ignatius could have been edited late and, finally, that the bodily existence of Jesus was unknown in the second century of our era—at least among some Christians.

Turmel was ordained priest in 1882 and soon appointed professor of dogmatic theology at the Seminary of Rennes. His keen intellect and independent outlook led, however, to his secret existence as a non-believer while still in the cloth. Eventually the Church found him out and burned his manuscripts. Turmel continued to write in private and some of his work came to the attention of A. Loisy, who was instrumental in having Turmel’s works published under no less than fourteen pseudonyms from 1909 to 1930, at which time Turmel was finally excommunicated.

Turmel also illuminated Marcion’s role in relation to the Fourth Gospel, where a spiritual Christ opposes a physical one. He likewise made valuable observations regarding the Pauline literature, in which he was able to distinguish three stages: (1) short letters attributable to Paul; (2) Marcionite revisions; and (3) Catholic additions. [Dedicated onsite page.]

• (Trad) HENRY J. CADBURY, The Making of Luke-Acts. A staple of all Lucan studies.

1928

• Arthur Drews, Die Marienmythe (“The Myth of Mary”). All the characters in Jesus’ family and entourage are as imaginary and fantastic as Jesus himself. Drews finds it mind-boggling that theologians have believed such patched-up constructions for centuries.

• P.-L. Couchoud, The First Edition of the Paulina (trans. P.-L. Fabry). Concludes that Marcion’s version of Paul (the Apostolicon) was first, and that Harnack had unknowingly but correctly reconstructed it. The New Testament version of the Pauline epistles is late.

1930

• (Myth) G. A. BERGH VAN EYSINGA, “Does Jesus Live, or Has He Only Lived? A Study of the Doctrine of Historicity.” (Perhaps better translated: “Does Jesus Still Live, or Did he Ever Live?”) Van Eysinga endorses the view that the epistles of Clement and Ignatius of Antioch are not genuine. There is no evidence of the Pauline epistles before Marcion, and all were produced by the Marcionite circle. Paul’s epistles are full of incongruities and he does not sound Jewish (in opposition to Harnack). No evidence is found in them for the existence of Jesus the Messiah.

• (Semi-myth) DANIEL MASSÉ, The Enigma of Jesus Christ. Massé believed that Jesus was in fact John of Gamala, the son of Judas of Gamala. The true Nazareth was Gamala, where Jesus bar Judah was born. Massé viewed the gospels as deliberate efforts on the part of the Church to falsify history. For him, exegesis is a way in which ecclesiastics propagandize the masses.

• P.-L. Couchoud, L’Apocalypse. (“The Book of Revelation: A key to Christian origins.”)

1932

• (Myth) PROSPER ALFARIC, The Problem of Jesus and Christian Origins written together with P.-L. Couchoud and A. Bayet. Alfaric grew up Catholic and was ordained priest in 1899, thereafter teaching philosophy in French seminaries. He gradually lost faith on intellectual grounds and sought out Alfred Loisy. Alfaric abandoned the priesthood in 1909 and resumed the study of the history of religions, receiving his doctorate (1919) and becoming chair of history of religions at the University of Strasbourg. His 1932 book led to his excommunication. Despite the erudition of Alfaric’s work, his mythicist theories are to be found only in the Bulletin of the Cercle Ernest Renan (which Alfaric co-founded in 1949), and in the Cahiers Rationalistes, the periodical of the Union Rationaliste. [Dedicated onsite page.]

1933

• (Skep) CHARLES GUIGNEBERT, Jésus,. G. studied under Ernest Renan, doing his thesis on Tertullian. 1919-37 he chaired the History of Christianity faculty at the Sorbonne. “The gospels are texts of propaganda,” he wrote, “…to conform to the mythology of the era.” Yet G. did not deny the historicity of Jesus and even wrote against the mythicists of his day.

• A. Loisy, The Birth of the Christian Religion.

• A. Loisy, The Origins of the New Testament.

1935

• Arthur Drews, Deutsche Religion: Grundzüge eines Gottesglaubens im Geiste des deutschen Idealismus, (“German religion: Principles of a Belief in God in the Spirit of German Idealism.” This was Drews’ last book, published the year he died at the age of 70.

1937

• P.-L. Couchoud, The Creation of Christ (Jèsus le Dieu fait Homme”). A landmark study. An extensive series of commentaries by Neil Godfrey is here. (Main entry for Couchoud, year 1924.)

1938

• (Myth) ÉDOUARD DUJARDIN, Ancient History Of The God Jesus in four volumes. Dujardin was regarded as “a partisan, along with Couchoud and Alfaric, of the non-historicity of Jesus.”

1940’s

— The term mythicist for “one who denies the existence of Jesus” is first used by both A. D. Howell Smith and Archibald Robertson.

1946

• (Skep) ARCHIBALD ROBERTSON (not to be confused with John Robertson, above year 1900), Jesus: Myth or History? Robertson’s father (same name) was Principal of King’s College, London and Bishop of Exeter. Robertson finds a middle ground between traditionalism and mythicism.

1950

• G. A. van Eysinga, Das Christentum als Mysterienreligion (“Christianity as a Mystery Religion”). Argues that the Jesus movement started as a mystery cult.

1953

• (Trad) C. H. DODD, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. “Wonderful tracing through of themes in the gospel, plus comprehensive introductions to Hermetic, Gnostic, Philonic, Qumran, and other influence-paradigms” (R. Price).

1957

• (Semi-Myth) JOHN MARCO ALLEGRO, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of Christianity. Prof. Allegro, one of the original DSS team, had the courage to buck his teammates. Prescient in many ways, Allegro’s provocative proposals may not be all correct but they nevertheless attest to a remarkable scholar.

1958

— The Library of the Late… G. A. Van Den Bergh Van Eysinga, a Collection of Modern Literature and Books on Various Subjects. [Auction at Utrecht, J. L. Beijers, on the 28th of January 1958.] Published by J.L. Beijiers, 53 pp.

• (Myth) GEORGES LAS VERGNAS, Did Jesus Christ Exist? (Jésus Christ a-t-il Existé?) Las Vergnas argues that the central figure of Christianity had no historical existence, not even as prophet or revolutionary.

1968

• (Myth) GEORGES ORY, Le Christ et Jésus. Reviews the mythicist case and concludes that “Jesus Christ is a composite god.” Ory claimed that Jesus was the product of repeated fusions and contacts or borrowings from local religious sects, from which he never ceased to gain in both richness and complexity” (p. 251). Pp. 29-38 on the separate backgrounds of the names “Jesus” and “Christ” are available in translation here.

Ory studied in Paris where he received diplomas in liberal studies, political science, and a license to practice law. Active as a Freemason, Ory was also an active member of the Parti Radical (a centrist party despite its name). In 1949, together with Prosper Alfaric, Ory co-founded the Cercle Ernest Renan in Paris, which has been at the cutting edge of French Jesus-mythicism for over half a century and continues to publish quarterly Cahiers and to offer monthly lectures in Paris. Ory was also the principal religion contributor for the Dictionnaire Rationaliste (1964), an indispensable resource for liberal French trends in religion. Ory identified John the Baptist as the original Christian messiah. He further identified this figure with the Samaritan heresiarch Dositheus. Ory refused to identify the Essenes with the Dead Sea Sect. He supposed that Marcion had a disciple, Lucanus, who was ultimately responsible for the third gospel and who succeeded Marcion at the latter’s death. Lucanus led the Marcionite community in Rome and considered Christ a heavenly being. “Jesus” was a composite. [Dedicated onsite page.]

1971

• (Trad) J. M. ROBINSON and H. KOESTER, Trajectories Through Early Christianity. “An amazing reshuffling of the NT puzzle pieces by following ‘heretical’ currents of Nag Hammadi back through the NT canon.” (R. Price)

• (Trad) RUDOLF BULTMANN, The Gospel of John: A Commentary.” “Amazing intuitive insight into John’s religious existentialism. Disengages Ecclesiastical Redactor’s padding from original Gnostic gospel. The greatest!” (R. Price)

1974

• (Skep) THOMAS L. THOMPSON, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives. The author concludes that there simply is no historicity to those narratives.

1975

• (Semi-Myth) GEORGE A. WELLS, Did Jesus Exist? Greatly influenced by Arthur Drews, Wells is a prolific writer and arguably the foremost mythicist representative in Europe today. Wells may be best characterized as a semi-mythicist, for he does not exclude the possibility that a prophet lay at the origins of Christianity, yet one with little in common with Jesus of Nazareth. Wells is a former Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association, with degrees in German, Philosophy, and natural science.

• (Trad) WALTER SCHMITHALS, The Apocalyptic Movement: Introduction and Interpretation. “Shows the kinship between Apocalypticism and Gnosticism as two moments along the same conceptual continuum. He demonstrates a Jewish, pre-Christian stage of Gnosticism” (R. Price).

1977

• (Trad) KURT RUDOLPH, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism<. “Able exposition and defense of traditional (correct!) view of Gnosticism as a pre-Christian Jewish-syncretistic baptizing mysticism. Before ludicrous attempts of recent scholars to dismantle Gnosticism” (R. Price).

1979

• J. M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. This is perhaps Allegro’s most important book. He draws not merely parallels but “actual identity of origin” between the Dead Sea Sect and Christianity(front flap). Allegro also identifies “Eastern Galilee”with the area around Qumran. (Initial entry for Allegro: 1957.)

• (Skep) THEODORE WEEDEN, Mark: Traditions in Conflict. “Important scrutiny of Mark as virtually Marcionite in his treatment of the twelve.” (R. Price)

1984

• (Skep) R. JOSEPH HOFFMANN’S doctoral thesis, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity. Hoffmann has recently adopted a vocal and ascerbic anti-mythicist position on the internet. “Despite the energy of the myth school,” he writes, “it remains a quaint, curious, interesting but finally unimpressive assessment of the evidence… an agenda-driven waste of time… a quicksand of denial and half-cooked conspiracy theories that take skepticism and suspicion to a new low.”

1985

• (Trad) ROBERT FUNK forms The Jesus Seminar, a consortium of 150 scholars.

1988

• G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus.

• (Trad) PETER BROWN, The Body and Society. “Absorbingly interesting recounting and explanation of early Christian sexual asceticism. Wider repercussions [than you’d have] ever guess” (R. Price).

1989

• (Skep) RANDEL HELMS, Gospel Fictions. Argues that the main gospel narrative source is the Septuagint.

1997

• (Skep) ROBERT EISENMAN, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. A mammoth, labyrinthine book which places the Essenes, Jewish Christianity, and Pauline Christianity in controversial contexts based on Eisenman’s own primary research into the Dead Sea scrolls. Armed with a hermeneutic of suspicion, Eisenman shows us how to crack the codes of theological disinformation. Dr. Price’s review.

1998

• (Skep) BURTON MACK, “A myth of Innocence.” Mark as largely fictional and anachronistic.

1999

• (Myth) EARL DOHERTY, The Jesus Puzzle. Details the thesis that Jesus was an immaterial being executed in the spiritual realm. This book was subsequently greatly expanded (see 2009). “Doherty argues that Paul and other writers of the earliest existing proto-Christian Gnostic documents did not believe in Jesus as a person who 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 in the hands of the demon spirits, and was subsequently resurrected by God. This Christ myth was not based on a tradition reaching back to a historical Jesus, but on the Old Testament exegesis in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism heavily influenced by Middle Platonism, and what the authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus” (Wikipedia).

• George A. Wells. The Jesus Myth.

• (Semi-myth) ALVAR ELLEGARD. Jesus—One Hundred Years Before Christ: A Study In Creative Mythology. Ellegard argues that Jesus is to be identified with the Essene Teacher of Righteousness and actually lived a century before the common era, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus.

• (Myth) T. FREKE and P. GANDY, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? A demonstration that there was very likely no historical Jesus, but that the character was based on a sectarian Jewish adaptation of pagan god-men such as Dionysus, Osiris, and Attis. Jesus began as an allegorization of the OT Joshua (himself perhaps a mythic version of King Josiah).

• (Skep) GERD LÜDEMANN, The Great Deception: And What Jesus Really Said and Did. Argues that only about five per cent of the sayings attributed to Jesus are genuine and the historical evidence does not support the claims of traditional Christianity. ‘The person of Jesus himself becomes insufficient as a foundation of faith once most of the New Testament statements about him have proved to be later interpretations by the community.’ As a result of this book Lüdemann’s research funding was cut and his teaching was no longer part of the Göttingen university curriculum.

2001

• ROBERT M. FOWLER, Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark. “The scales will fall from your eyes! Fowler unlocks Mark’s rhetorical technique of talking over the heads of his characters to his readers!” (R. Price)

2002

• Gerd Lüdemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity. Rejects the chronological sequence for Paul’s activities narrated in the Acts of the Apostles, which Lüdemann considers sheer fiction and heavily propagandistic in nature. Dr. Price’s review.

2003

• (Myth) ROBERT M. PRICE. The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?”. With doctorates in theology and New Testament, Dr. Price is arguably the dean of contemporary American mythicists. He is formerly a Baptist minister in New Jersey but now describes himself as a religious skeptic and occasionally as a ‘Christian atheist.’ Price’s vast erudition, engaging personality, and prolific pen continue to buttress the scholarly argument against the historicity of Jesus.

Price challenges biblical literalism and argues for a more skeptical and humanistic approach to Christianity… Price supports a version of the Jesus myth hypothesis, suggesting that the early Christians adopted the model for the figure of Jesus from the popular Mediterranean dying-rising saviour myths of the time, such as that of Dionsus… Price suggests that Christianity simply adopted themes from the dying-rising god stories of the day and supplemented them with themes (escaping crosses, empty tombs, children being persecuted by tyrants, etc.) from the popular stories of the day in order to come up with the narratives about Christ. He has argued that there was an almost complete fleshing out of the details of the gospels by a Midrash (haggadah) rewriting of the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Josephus” (Wikipedia).

• (Myth) FRANK ZINDLER, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew. An exhaustive resumé and discussion of ancient Jewish records, none of which attest to a historical Jesus who was born about the turn of the era. Zindler has been Editor of American Atheists magazine, and also interim president of that organization. He works as a linguist and has been a biology, psychobiology, and geology professor. Zindler has edited and translated numerous books. In addition, he has written, spoken, and debated extensively on Biblical history, creationism and evolution, and the historicity of Jesus. Now in his seventies, he continues active as translator, writer, and editor.

2004

• (Myth) TOM HARPUR, The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. Canadian New Testament scholar and ex-Anglican priest re-states the ideas of Kuhn, Higgins and Massey. Jesus is a myth and all of the essential ideas of Christianity originated in Egypt. Dr. Price’s review.

2006

• Robert Eisenman (prior entry: 1997). The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ. A difficult, massive, but ultimately rewarding read. Eisenman maintains that the Dead Sea Scrolls clearly stem from the mid to late first century CE. Price writes: “Teicher was right. Eisenman is right. The Scrolls are the legacy of the Jerusalem Christians led by the Heirs of Jesus: James the Just, Simeon bar Cleophas, and Judas Thomas. The Teacher of Righteous was James the Just (though Arthur E. Palumbo, Jr., The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Personages of Earliest Christianity, 2004, may be right: as per Barbara Thiering, John the Baptist may have been the first to hold that office, with James as his successor). The Spouter of Lies who ‘repudiated the Torah in the midst of the congregation’ was Paul. It was he who ‘founded a congregation on lies,’ namely the tragically misled ‘Simple of Ephraim,’ converts from among the Gentile God-fearers who knew no better. The Wicked Priest was Ananus ben Ananus, whom Josephus credits with lynching James on the Day of Atonement… Eisenman’s monumental work stands as a new milestone in the progress of New Testament research.” Dr. Price’s review.

2007

• Robert Price. Jesus Is Dead. This is a provocative collection “of some of my best writing and thinking on the resurrection (and in a couple of cases, closely related issues).”

2008

• (Semi-Myth) RENÉ SALM. The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus. Presents an exhaustive review of the primary archaeological evidence from the Nazareth basin and concludes that the town came into existence between the two Jewish revolts. Salm received undergraduate degrees in Music and German, and was active as a composer and keyboardist for a number of years. Interest in religion began in early adulthood and led to independent study of Buddhism and then Christianity, including occasional post-graduate coursework. Salm considers himself an Atheist, a Buddhist, and (in an ethical rather than doctrinal sense) a Christian . He is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and maintains several websites. He is pursuaded that Jesus of Nazareth is a pure invention as regards all biographical particulars, but suspects that a prophet may have lived several generations before the turn of the era, one who inspired the gnostic religion known as Mandeism and (though considerable perversion) Pauline Christianity.

2009

• Earl Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus. This is a greatly expanded revision of the author’s 1999 book (see above). “…[O]ffers an increased depth of evidence and argumentation in virtually every area of my original case as presented in The Jesus Puzzle, published ten years ago this week (October 1999). There are whole chapters devoted to specific topics, such as Galatians 4:4’s ‘born of woman,’ the usages and meanings of phrases involving the term ‘flesh’ (as in kata sarka), the Epistle to the Hebrews and its statement that Jesus had never been on earth, many facets of ancient salvation mythology and views of the spiritual world both Hellenistic and Jewish, Gnosticism, the existence of Q, the Gospels as midrash and allegory” (from Doherty’s website).

• George A. Wells. Cutting Jesus Down to Size: What Higher Criticism Has Achieved and Where It Leaves Christianity.

2010

• R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed. Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth.

2011

• Robert Price. The Christ Myth Theory and its Problems.

- A Mythicist Timeline

[Ouroboros]

If Mythicists claim that no possible "Jesus" existed in the 1st Century, and no one could possibly have inspired the Gospel accounts, then I know of few if any actual Mythicists. Every Mythicist I am aware of happily admit that many Jesuses may have contributed to the Christ Myth. Rene Salm has a new article that may help clarify things.

 

WHAT IS MYTHICISM?

Semi-mythicism and euhemerism

A mythicist is one who concludes that Jesus of Nazareth never existed and also that no human prophet lay at the origin of Christianity.

That is how I define a “mythicist.” The definition has two components. For those who, like myself, embrace only the first part but not the second, I use a different term: “semi-mythicist.” I personally have concluded that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, yet I also suspect that a human prophet (the Teacher of Righteousness? John the Baptist?) lay at the root of the Christian religion. Of course, I am quite convinced that the biography of Jesus of Nazareth was invented out of whole cloth. So in my view the following sequence obtains:

(1) a prophet –>

(2) a false biography (Jesus of Nazareth) –>

(3) the second member of the divine Christian trinity.

The above makes me a euhemerist, and so we see that there is no conflict between euhemerism and mythicism. Anyone who thinks that a human lies at the root of Christianity (even if that human was not Jesus of Nazareth) is a euhemerist—for that human was eventually deified. The Christians get around this by saying that Jesus was God from the start. I happen to be an atheist and don’t buy into that doctrine nor deification—nor into the false biography of Jesus. But I am still both a euhemerist and a semi-mythicist. This is altogether too nuanced for most people and so, in casual parlance, I am simply a “mythicist”—one who denies the existence of Jesus of Nazareth (the “common” definition of mythicism).

 

I agree With Salm.

Oh, and btw, I like Salm's viewpoint too.

 

I'm also a "mythicist" in a loose definition (semi-myth, myth-evemerist, pseudo-euhemerist, ...). Strict mythicism is borderline "religious" unfortunately. And that's what tends to bug me. (Like Thor we had in the past. He was a nutcase disciple for Acharya S. I'm glad we have someone more levelheaded now with Joshp. )

[Antlerman]

If you read through the history of mythicism you'll find that semi-mythicists and general skeptics have been involved every step of the way right up until present. This is nothing new or strange. Rene Salm is a semi-mythicist and you may be as well judging by your post. It's about as wide open as atheism in that sense. The only common thing holding everyone together is the opinion that the Gospel character "Jesus of Nazareth" is a mythological construct.

But back to applying the term "firm evemerist" to Ehrman. Does he accept that term, or is that what someone has labeled him? If the common thing is that the Gospel character "Jesus of Nazareth" is a mythological construct, then that applies to Ehrman as well. He accepts the layers of myth heaped upon this character, as far as I know. If he didn't, it's strange he'd call himself an agnostic.

 

I don't know, I'll process all this "labeling" of positions, but to me it boils down to a divide of conservative, literalistic scholarship, and liberal scholarship. Anything on the latter side accepts myths being added in the telling, to one extent or another. To me to label oneself a mythicist is to distinguish yourself as the extreme end of that side. And personally, I think its that extreme that mainline, liberal scholarship finds, well, extreme.

 

Why is it the 'mythicist' would balk at Ehrman if the only qualification to be a mythicist is believing that Gospel Jesus is not an accurate representation of actual history and has layers of later myth added to it? Why complain? That strikes me as a complaint about one thing. They don't want there to have been any actual person in history, and "damn you Ehrman for saying otherwise! We thought you were on our side!".

 

And yes, it is beginning to become about as meaningless as the term atheist, apparently. I asked one member at a meetup group I attend for former fundis when he referred to the "atheist worldview", what exactly that was. He stumbled about and couldn't come up with anything. It has no vision of itself, nor can it as it isn't a vision of anything. Same with with mythicism. So what if you see myth added to Jesus. Join the club of all Biblical scholars outside of conservative fundamentalists. Right?

[qadeshet]

 

As I said earlier... "I think the mythicists are becoming confused about who they are as they continue to look at this." Who is making up these definitions here? Will the real mythicists please stand up?

 

Even Christians are confused about who or what Jesus was. Scholars have their own ideas. Mythists are only united in the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth is a Myth.

 

Apocalyptic Prophet: Albert Schweitzer and Bart Ehrman

Cynic philosopher: Burton Mack, John Dominic Crossan, Gerald Downing

Liberal Pharisee: historian Harvey Falk

Charismatic Hasid: Dead Sea Scroll authority Geza Vermes

Violent Zealot Revolutionary: Robert Eisler, S. G. F. Brandon, Hugh J. Schonfield, Hyam Maccoby, and Robert Eisenman

Radical Social Reformer: John Dominic Crossan and Richard Horsley

Magician/Exorcist/Faith Healer: Morton Smith

Conservative Rabbi

Antinomian Iconoclast

Nonviolent Pacificist Resister

Early Feminist

[Antlerman]

As I said earlier... "I think the mythicists are becoming confused about who they are as they continue to look at this." Who is making up these definitions here? Will the real mythicists please stand up?

 

Even Christians are confused about who or what Jesus was. Scholars have their own ideas. Mythists are only united in the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth is a Myth.

 

Apocalyptic Prophet: Albert Schweitzer and Bart Ehrman

Cynic philosopher: Burton Mack, John Dominic Crossan, Gerald Downing

Liberal Pharisee: historian Harvey Falk

Charismatic Hasid: Dead Sea Scroll authority Geza Vermes

Violent Zealot Revolutionary: Robert Eisler, S. G. F. Brandon, Hugh J. Schonfield, Hyam Maccoby, and Robert Eisenman

Radical Social Reformer: John Dominic Crossan and Richard Horsley

Magician/Exorcist/Faith Healer: Morton Smith

Conservative Rabbi

Antinomian Iconoclast

Nonviolent Pacificist Resister

Early Feminist

 

Please read my post previous to this one.

 

P.S. I think you are confused what Christians believe. Many of these names here are Christians, and believe what you see in the Gospels portraying Jesus is in fact myth. I've gone out to coffee with one of the Jesus Seminar scholars. She understands the mythological elements quite clearly.

[Joshpantera]

I'd say that yes, mythicism is like every other variety of position in the world. There's all variety of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindu's, Buddhists within those general titles and a wide range of disagreement created all of the sub-sects addressed to each main category.

 

Freethought seems very similar. There's all variety of atheists, agnostics, pantheists, deists, etc. It's just that there's something in the way of a common idea that keeps people to a certain heading or combining main headings.

 

As you can see by the mythicist and semi-mysticist timelime, all of the mythicists tend to see mythology gradually historicized over time and the use of various biographies lump together during the historicizing effort to make the myth seem more historical. We tend to understand that religion is set up two ways - esoteric for the intiated and exoteric for the masses. So there's reasons why the ancient would take fiction and present it with a pseudo-historical surface story line that displays symbolism and allegory throughout, for the deeper level of contemplating the myth. That's the general trend of pure mythicist writers - the idea of esoteric myth gradually historicized over time as it appeals to the greater masses. The details in the pure mythicist writers theories tend to vary because we're dealing with speculation and theorizing about Christian origins through and through. It's not a concrete, certain, or absolute oriented way of thinking. It's more or less a truth seeking adventure that continues to unfold with deeper analysis of the myths.

 

The semi-mythicists like Rene Salm and others see a historical origin in one particular person, though this person is thought to be unknown and possibly unknowable, and then the celestial mythos and all of the other mythologial trappings come as later edition and attached to the original founder as it spreads through the empire. And that does make them semi-evemerist too.

 

Evemerists like Bart Ehrman differ only in that they tend to think that Jesus of Nazareth was really a prophet from the town of Nazareth as described in the NT. They take Jesus and Nazareth as real history, whereas Rene Salm does not. That tends to make Rene Salm a semi-mythicist distinct from the evemerism of Ehrman and also distinct from pure mythicism of Doherty.

 

Hopefully this cuts through a bit more of the confusion surrounding these positions.