Christ Myth Theory

"[Bruno Bauer] promoted the view that Christianity was syncretistic and mythical at its beginnings."

"Christianity and its Christ, [Bruno] Bauer argued, were born in Rome and Alexandria when adherents of Roman Stoicism, Greek Neo-Platonism and Judaism combined to form a new religion that needed a founder."

"[G. A.] Wells argues that the Gospels contain much that is demonstrably legendary, and they are directed by theological (not historical) purposes."

"[G. A.] Wells explains Jesus as a mythical figure arising from Paul's mysticism, for whom other late first-century Christians had to fabricate a life story [when the Gospels were written]."

"[Bruno Bauer] denied the value of the New Testament, especially the Gospels and Paul’s letters, in establishing the existence of Jesus."

"[Per] The Jesus Myth (1999), [G. A.] Wells ...now accepts that there is some historical basis for the existence of Jesus, derived from the lost early “gospel” “Q” (the hypothetical source used by Matthew and Luke). Wells believes that it is early and reliable enough to show that Jesus probably did exist, although this Jesus was not the Christ that the later canonical Gospels portray."

"Those who, over the last two hundred years, have doubted the existence of Jesus have argued that the lack of contemporary corroboration of Jesus by classical authors is a main indication that he did not exist. (See, e.g., The Existence of Christ Disproved (London: Heatherington, 1841) 214. More recently, see Michael Martin, The Evidence against Christianity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1991).)"

"[Bruno Bauer] argued that the lack of mention of Jesus in non-Christian writings of the first century shows that Jesus did not exist. Neither do the few mentions of Jesus by Roman writers in the early second century establish his existence."

"A penultimate conclusion relates to those who still argue that Jesus never existed. Since the classical writers contain no certainly independent witnesses to Jesus, by the strictest standards of historical evidence we cannot use them to demonstrate the existence of Jesus."

"[Per Jesus, G. A.] Wells argues, we need independent corroboration from other, “objective” sources to affirm his existence. He [Wells] minutely examines these proposed other sources, from Tacitus to Talmud, and finds that they contain no independent traditions about Jesus. Therefore, they are not admissible [evidence]."

"My present opinion is that, in the case of Jesus, we simply do not know for certain anything about his biography, not even that he existed."

"[W]e have to explain the origin of Christianity, and in so doing we have to choose between two alternatives. One alternative is to say that it originated in a myth which was later dressed up as history. The other is to say that it originated with one historical individual who was later mythologized into a supernatural being. The theory that Jesus was originally a myth is called the Christ-myth theory, and the theory that he was an historical individual is called the historical Jesus theory."

"In the late nineteenth century some very skeptical historians proposed that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. He was a myth, based on the Egyptian sun god and other pagan myths. No one takes these arguments seriously anymore. There is virtually universal agreement that there was such a person as Jesus."

"I think that there are hardly any historians today, in fact I don't know of any historians today, who doubt the existence of Jesus... So I think that question can be put to rest."

"Anyone who talks about "reasonable faith" must say what he thinks about Jesus. And that would still be so even if, with one or two cranks, he believed that He never existed."

"From time to time people try to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, but virtually all historians of whatever background now agree that he did, and most agree that he did and said a significant amount at least of what the four gospels say he did and said."

"In the last analysis, the whole Christ-myth theorizing is a glaring example of obscurantism, if the sin of obscurantism consists in the acceptance of bare possibilities in place of actual probabilities, and of pure surmise in defiance of existing evidence. Those who have not entered far into the laborious inquiry may pretend that the historicity of Jesus is an open question. For me to adopt such a pretence would be sheer intellectual dishonesty. I know I must, as an honest man, reckon with Jesus as a factor in history... This dialectic process whereby the Christ-myth theory discredits itself rests on the simple fact that you cannot attempt to prove the theory without mishandling the evidence."

"A phone call from the BBC’s flagship Today programme: would I go on air on Good Friday morning to debate with the aurthors of a new book, The Jesus Mysteries? The book claims (or so they told me) that everything in the Gospels reflects, because it was in fact borrowed from, much older pagan myths; that Jesus never existed; that the early church knew it was propagating a new version of an old myth, and that the developed church covered this up in the interests of its own power and control. The producer was friendly, and took my point when I said that this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese."

"The views that Dr. Conybeare here investigates are ...those of the extreme left wing who flatly deny the historical existence even of the Jesus of the Gospels. These champions of the Christ-myth theory contend that the Jesus-figure is that of a syncretic god subsequently humanised by the invention of a pseudo-history."

"The sociological fashion reflected in the rise of Formgeschichte lends colour to Christ-myth theories and indeed to all theories which regard Jesus as an historical but insignificant figure."

"Belief in Christ is no more or less rational than belief in John Frum."

"[In Did Jesus Exist] I agued that Paul sincerely believed that the evidence (not restricted to the Wisdom Literature) pointed to a historical Jesus who had lived well before his own day; and I leave open the question as to whether such a person had in fact existed and lived the obscure live that Paul supposed of him. (There is no means of deciding this issue.)"

"I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion. [...] The Jewish literature describes Wisdom as God's chief agent, a member of his divine council, etc., and this implies supernatural, but not, I agree, divine status."

"That Jewish Wisdom ideas influenced early Christian writings is undeniable, for Jewish statements made about Wisdom are there made of Jesus. Christ is called “the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24); in him are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Cols. 2:3). Like Wisdom, Christ assisted God in the creation of all things (1 Cor. 8:6)—an idea spelled out in the Christological hymn of Colossians 1:15-20. And like the Jewish Wisdom figure, Jesus sought acceptance on earth but was rejected and returned to heaven. Furthermore, in the Wisdom of Solomon, the righteous man, Wisdom’s ideal representative (no particular person is meant), is persecuted but vindicated post mortem. His enemies have condemned him to “a shameful death” (2:20), but he then confronts them as their judge in heaven, where he is “counted among the sons of God" (5:5)."

"Jesus is nowhere in the Talmud said to have been executed by the Romans; his death is represented as solely the work of the Jews: and nowhere is his alleged Messiahship mentioned, not even as a reason for putting him to death."

"Paul sincerely believed that the evidence (not restricted to the Wisdom literature) pointed to a historical Jesus who had lived well before his own day; and I leave open the question as to whether such a person had in fact existed and lived the obscure life that Paul supposed of him. (There is no means of deciding this issue.)"

"The Q material—whether or not it suffices as evidence of Jesus's historicity—refers to a [human] personage who is not to be identified with the [mythical] dying and rising Christ of the early epistles."

"In my earlier book, The Jesus of the Early Christians (which I shall call JEC), my purpose was to show the difficulties and problems which arise when the gospels are interpreted as historical records, and how Christianity could have arisen even had there been no historical Jesus. Some theological reviewers (e.g. Professors Grayston and Simon, 183 and 372) admitted that I had stated serious ‘difficulties’ to which a satisfactory solution has not yet been found. (183 Grayston, K. (Prof. of NT, Bristol), review of JEC in Methodist Recorder, 16 December, 1971.)"

"[Per Wells on his sources] What I actually did was to draw extensively (not 'chiefly') from certain articles in Cheyne and Black's Encyclopaedia Biblica—articles written with commendable candour by theologians who believed that they were serving Christianity by clearing away what the evidence had shown to be indefensible positions. [..] [And referenced by] Professor Kenneth Grayston's good-natured quip in his generous review of JEC in The Methodist Recorder: "The Encyclopaedia Biblica rides again""

"From the mid-1990s I became persuaded that many of the gospel traditions are too specific in their references to time, place, and circumstances to have developed in such a short time from no other basis, and are better understood as traceable to the activity of a Galilean preacher of the early first century, the personage represented in Q... This is the position I have argued in my books of 1996, 1999, and 2004, although the titles of the first two of these—The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth—may mislead potential readers into supposing that I still denied the historicity of the gospel Jesus. These titles were chosen because I regarded (and still do regard) [the following stories;] the virgin birth, much in the Galilean ministry, the crucifixion around A.D. 30 under Pilate, and the resurrection—as legendary."

"The most striking feature of the early documents is that they do not set Jesus’s life in a specific historical situation. [...] In Paul, for instance, there is no cleansing of the temple (which, according to Mark and Luke, was the event that triggered the resolve of the chief priests and scribes to kill Jesus), no conflict with the authorities, no Gethsemane scene, no thieves crucified with Jesus, no weeping women, no word about the place or time, and no mention of Judas or Pilate. Paul’s colorless references to the crucifixion might be accepted as unproblematic if it were unimportant for him. But he himself declares it to be the very substance of his preaching (1 Cor. 1:23 and 2:2). Yet he lived as a Christian for three years before even briefly visiting Jerusalem (Gal. 1:17f.), and says nothing that would indicate that he took interest in, or even had awareness of, holy places there."

"[T]he view that there was no historical Jesus, that his earthly existence is a fiction of earliest Christianity—a fiction only later made concrete by setting his life in the first century—is today almost totally rejected."

"[Per] the gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel? Attaining essentially its final form probably as late as 90 CE but containing core material dating possibly as early as 70 CE, it omits, as we have seen, almost the entire traditional biography of Jesus, beginning the story with John the Baptist giving Jesus a bath, and ending – in the oldest manuscripts – with women running frightened from the empty tomb."

"[A]ccording to Epiphanius, before Christians were called Christianoi, they were called Iessaioi—Jessaeans."

"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."

"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."