Christianity

"[R. M.] Price thinks the evidence is so weak for the historical Jesus that we cannot know anything certain or meaningful about him. He is even willing to entertain the possibility that there never was a historical Jesus."

"No serious historian of any religious or nonreligious stripe doubts that Jesus of Nazareth really lived in the first century and was executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea and Samaria. Though this may be common knowledge among scholars, the public may well not be aware of this."

"The scholarly mainstream, in contrast to Bauer and company, never doubted the existence of Jesus or his relevance for the founding of the Church."

"It is fair to say that most present-day theologians also accept that large parts of the Gospel stories are, if not fictional, at least not to be taken at face value as historical accounts. On the other hand, no theologian seems to be able to bring himself to admit that the question of the historicity of Jesus must be judged to be an open one. It appears to me that the theologians are not living up to their responsibility as scholars when they refuse to discuss the possibility that even the existence of the Jesus of the Gospels can be legitimately called into question."

"[Birger] Olsson devotes ...half his [commentary] space to a quite fair summary of my hypothesis [per Myten om Jesus (1992)]. (Reply by Alvar Ellegård, p. 199)"

"[S]everal reviewers of Wells concede that the questions he has raised are indeed pertinent. For instance, Professor Kenneth Grayston (Methodist Recorder, 16th Nov., 1971) writes: “instructed Christians … /should/ admit the difficulties collected by Professor Wells, and construct a better solution.” Grayston repeats this judgment in reviewing Wells’s second book."

"Price uncritically embraces the dubious methods and results of the Jesus Seminar, adopts much of the (discredited) Christ-Myth theory from the nineteenth century (in which it was argued that Jesus never lived), and so on."

"[The Mythical Jesus viewpoint holds] that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction."

"[Per] a shift to a concern with the heavenly world and God’s activities within it, a focus which was continued and enlarged on in much of the Jewish intertestamental writings. [...] The Pauline corpus’ obsession with the threat of dark cosmic powers who inhabit the heavens, the period’s fixation on the threat from the demons, has little precedent in the Hebrew bible and marks a new development in Jewish thought, as it did in Hellenistic outlook generally. And inasmuch as Gnosticism is now seen as having had at least a partial origin within radical Jewish circles preceding Christianity, with its center of attention on a heavenly world and the workings of the Godhead, we can see an era-wide development in an interest in the Platonic view of an upper part of the cosmos where divine activities took place. Even Philo, with his focus on the Logos as emanation of God, as well as his “Heavenly Man” concept—another fixation in the period’s picture of divine realities which shows up in Paul’s concept of Christ as “anthrōpos”—demonstrates the saturation of earthly thought with heavenly imaginings."

"Christ is a divine presence in [early] Christian communities, bestowing revelation and guidance, a channel to God and to knowledge of spiritual truths. [...] Paul's system and that of early Christianity generally is permeated with the concept of evil spirit forces acting malevolently on the world and dividing earth from heaven. ...[This] illuminates the proto-gnostic atmosphere he [Paul] moved and even shared in..."

"Philo of Alexandria (c25BCE to c50CE) is the foremost example of the input of Greek ideas into Jewish thought, a phenomenon which produced an important type of philosophy and culture during this period, called "Hellenistic Judaism." [...] Charles H. Talbert ("The Myth of a Descending-Ascending Redeemer in Mediterranean Antiquity," New Testament Studies 22 [1975], p.418-439) regards Philo as a witness to an existing myth in which Wisdom-Logos was treated as a heavenly personal being and a redeemer figure—through bestowing knowledge of God. This myth is reflected in the Alexandrian document, the Wisdom of Solomon..."

"Hellenistic Jews like Philo and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews adopted Logos ideas to create a melding of Hebrew and Greek. But more mainstream Judaism had its own intermediary figure [Personified Wisdom] going back centuries, certainly as old as Plato. [...] In the Wisdom of Solomon, perhaps the most important surviving piece of Hellenistic-Jewish writing, we can see a clear and exotic blending of Wisdom with the Logos."

"In the formative period of the 1st century CE, when no historical Jesus had yet set foot on the scene, a rich panoply of Son/Christ/Savior belief was thriving across the eastern half of the Roman empire, expressions of the new intermediary Son philosophy, conceiving of different routes to salvation through him."

"[Per the descending Redeemer of gnostic-style myth] Price sees the Pauline Christ in this same category... Inherent in such a (proto-) gnostic type of outlook is the idea that Christ inhabits the believer, and the apostle who preaches him possesses a highly developed sense of the Christ/Redeemer within himself. Paul, with his "Christ in you" and "all are members of the body of Christ," falls into that line of thinking."

"[The Mythical Jesus viewpoint holds] that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure."

"[Per Philo] The Logos was God’s mediator [...] Philo sees the Logos as “a continual supplicant to the immortal God on behalf of mortal man” (Divine Matters, 205)."

"[In the Gospels] many elements of the Jesus story [depend] on passages and motifs from the Jewish scriptures. [...] John Shelby Spong (in his Liberating the Gospels) regards the Synoptic Gospels as midrashic fiction in virtually every detail, though he believes it was based on an historical man."

"[The Epistle to the Hebrews chapter 8, verse 4] contains a grammatically ambiguous statement in the Greek: it says either that “If Jesus were on earth [meaning now], he would not be a priest” or “If Jesus had been on earth, he would not have been a priest.” [...] What my analysis does is show that, within the context of the passage and through deductive reasoning, the present sense, allotting the statement to the present time, cannot be supported; in fact, it can be shown that the author can only be applying it to the past."

"[Per writings earlier than Mark] the object of Christian faith [Jesus] is never spoken of as a human man who had recently lived, taught, performed miracles, suffered and died at the hands of human authorities, or rose from a tomb outside Jerusalem. There is no sign in the epistles of Mary or Joseph, Judas or John the Baptist, no birth story, teaching or appointment of apostles by Jesus, no mention of holy places or sites of Jesus’ career, not even the hill of Calvary or the empty tomb. This silence is so pervasive and so perplexing that attempted explanations for it have proven inadequate."

"[The Mythical Jesus viewpoint is] the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction..."

"[Per] Richard Bauckham: "The earliest Christology was already the highest Christology." [] This is very true, and among Jews and with such speed it is hardly credible. Yet rather than appeal to the actual divinity and resurrection of a human Jesus as thereby proven, it is observations like these which should indicate that the christology was high at the beginning of the movement because the Christ of whom it spoke was nothing but a divinity."

"[Noting that some mythicist positions accept the historical existence of a human being who called himself Jesus] ...a religion may be based upon, the teachings of a sage or holy man, without any especial reference to the events of his life [...] in the period to which the origins of Christianity are to be assigned, ...were groups which had relations with the Jewish religion, and some of these last came to identify their Saviour-god with the Jewish Messiah, and created for him a mythical embodiment in a figure bearing the cult-name 'Jesus', derived from a Hebrew word meaning 'salvation'. Or alternatively, they seized upon the report of an obscure Jewish holy-man bearing this name, and arbitrarily attached the 'cult-myth' to him."

"Dr. [H. G.] Wood ...selects for special study the Christ-myth theory, of which there are many variants, all of which go back in substance to the writings of the late J. M. Robertson. According to this theory the gospels are symbolic and arose out of a Palestinian mystery cult."

"[Thomas L.] Brodie’s book doesn’t have to convince everyone. What it does accomplish is help establish that a serious scholar can indeed take a mythicist position. It helps show that mythicism is an intellectually viable position even if not universally convincing."

"As for the question of whether Jesus existed, the best answer is that any attempt to find a historical Jesus is a waste of time. It can’t be done, it explains nothing, and it proves nothing."

"Mythicists have discovered problems in the supposed common-sense of historical Jesus theories that deserve to be taken seriously."

"The rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth should be tested to see what weight it can bear [...] I don’t think, however, that in another 20 years there will be a consensus that Jesus did not exist [the "Jesus atheism" viewpoint], or even possibly didn’t exist [the "Jesus agnosticism" viewpoint], but a recognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability."

"Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed. [...] John Frum, if he existed at all, did so within living memory. Yet, even for so recent a possibility, it is not certain whether he lived at all."

"It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all, as has been done by, among others, Professor G. A. Wells of the University of London."

"In summary, it is clear that there are many contradictions between one gospel and another, many dubious statements of history, many suspicious resemblances to the legends told of pagan gods, many incidents apparently designed to prove the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, many passages possibly aiming to establish a historical basis for some later doctrine or ritual of the Church. The evangelists shared with Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus the conception of history as a vehicle for moral ideas. And presumably the conversations and speeches reported in the Gospels were subject to the frailties of illiterate memories, and the errors or emendations of copyists."

"To describe Jesus' non-existence as "not widely supported" is an understatement. It would be akin to me saying, "It is possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, scientific case that the 1969 lunar landing never happened." There are fringe conspiracy theorists who believe such things - but no expert does. Likewise with the Jesus question: his non-existence is not regarded even as a possibility in historical scholarship. Dismissing him from the ancient record would amount to a wholesale abandonment of the historical method."

"This is always the fatal flaw of the 'Jesus myth' thesis: the improbability of the total invention of a figure who had purportedly lived within the generation of the inventors, or the imposition of such an elaborate myth on some minor figure from Galilee. [Robert] Price is content with the explanation that it all began 'with a more or less vague savior myth.' Sad, really.""

"We do not need to take seriously those writers who occasionally claim that Jesus never existed at all, for we have clear evidence to the contrary from a number of Jewish, Latin, and Islamic sources."

"The alternative thesis... that within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible. It involves too many complex and speculative hypotheses, in contrast to the much simpler explanation that there was a Jesus who said and did more or less what the first three Gospels attribute to him."

"Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel."

"I believe there is ample reason to conclude that the consensus is not reliable in the study of the historical Jesus and therefore cannot be appealed to as evidence for a conclusion. [...] [However] the prima facie evidence for a historical Jesus, which constitutes all the valid evidence the consensus could ever appeal to, still cannot be ignored. But it should be examined anew (a task I'll undertake in the next volume [i.e. On the Historicity of Jesus (2014)])."

"[Per attempts to ascertain the “real” historical Jesus] The growing consensus now is that this entire quest for criteria has failed. The entire field of Jesus studies has thus been left without any valid method."

"[T]he 'real' Jesus may have been executed by Herod Antipas (as the Gospel of Peter in fact claims) or by Roman authorities in an earlier or later decade then Pilate (as some early Christians really did think) Some scholars even argue for an earlier century (and have some real evidence to cite)..."

"For all the evidence anyone has ever adduced from the Epistles (once we exclude those known to be forged): it is ambiguous as to whether an earthly or celestial Jesus is being referred to. The Gospels I found wholly symbolically fictional and not even interested in actual history. And the Jesus in them I found to be so very like other mythical persons of the period. And then I found that no other evidence can be shown to be independent of the Gospels. At the very least, putting all of that together should make agnosticism about the historicity of Jesus a credible conclusion."

"Jesus was probably not originally a Nazarene (Greek nazarênos), but a Nazorian (Greek nazôraios), based on a now-lost scripture (Matthew 2:23). This was actually one of the original names for the Christian movement (Acts 24:5) and remained the name of the original Torah-observant Christian sect (Epihanius, Panarion 9). [Proving History, pp. 142-145]"

"There is no independent evidence of Jesus’s existence outside the New Testament. All external evidence for his existence, even if it were fully authentic (though much of it isn’t), cannot be shown to be independent of the Gospels, or Christian informants relying on the Gospels. None of it can be shown to independently corroborate the Gospels as to the historicity of Jesus. Not one single item of evidence. Regardless of why no independent evidence survives (it does not matter the reason), no such evidence survives."

"[Per the Logos] Philo in fact says this “heavenly man” is the first created being and viceroy of God, the “image” of God, God’s “firstborn son,” high priest of God’s celestial temple, the supreme archangel, whom God tasked with the rest of creation, and who governs the universe on God’s behalf. Philo says this Being is the Logos. [...] Bart Ehrman “also now agrees that Philo attests a Jewish theology in which the Logos is the firstborn Son of God and the eternal Image of God, the same being Jesus was identified with” in Paul (cf. How Jesus Became God, p. 75)."

"I think it is more likely that Jesus began in the Christian mind as a celestial being (like an archangel), believed or claimed to be revealing divine truths through revelations (and, by bending the ear of prophets in previous eras, through hidden messages planted in scripture)."

"At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other. [...] Like many other celestial deities, this Jesus 'communicated' with his subjects only through dreams, visions and other forms of divine inspi­ration (such as prophecy, past and present)."

"I am currently the world’s leading expert on the specific, hyper-narrow question of the arguments for and against the historicity of Jesus. [...] Every historian in this field [of early Christianity] is more knowledgeable than me on something, if not indeed most things, that aren’t directly on the question of historicity. Indeed even most of what I base my own case on, comes from the greater expertise of other published authors, on other hyper-narrow questions that are not directly about that single question [of the arguments for and against the historicity of Jesus]..."

"Carrier's Minimal Mythical Jesus:"

"Carrier's Minimal Historical Jesus:"

"Despite countless variations (including a still-rampant obsession with indemonstrable astrological theories of Gospel interpretations that you won't find much sympathy for here), the basic thesis of every competent mythologist, then and now, has always been that Jesus was originally a god just like any other god (properly speaking, a demigod in pagan terms; an archangel in Jewish terms; in either sense, a deity), who was later historicized, just as many other gods where..."

"I feel that I ought almost to apologize to my readers for investigating at such length the hypothesis of a pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical Mary, and for exhibiting over so many pages its fantastic, baseless, and absurd character... We must [, according to Christ myth advocates,] perforce suppose that the Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of Pagan mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. If we adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing else. Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At one end of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of Christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only hope the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their Scriptures are a thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal inspiration is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with mythico-symbolism. Verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind, you rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a "Christist" to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the Bacon-Shakespeareans we have seen nothing like it."

"Philo extensively discusses a figure in pre-Christian Jewish angelology, a cosmic archangel who has all the same peculiar properties as the Jesus of the Epistles: the Image of God, God’s agent of creation, the high priest of God’s celestial temple, a pre-existent angel of God, and the firstborn Son of God, the sole being to whom God assigned Lordship over the universe, and whom we should emulate in ourselves. And the fact, also, that Philo identifies this angel with the figure in Zechariah 6 who happens to be named there Jesus the Son of God. Which establishes that Paul’s Jesus was already a figure of pre-Christian Jewish angelology."