Biblical Criticism

"[Per Paul-Louis Couchoud] The salient fact about Jesus ...is that he is a God. Paul, the earliest extant Christian author (eight of whose reputed epistles Couchoud regards as basically genuine, though much edited and interpolated), treats Jesus as God."

"We know next to nothing about this Jesus. He is not the founder of anything that we can recognize as Christianity. He is a mere postulate of historical criticism—a dead leader of a lost cause, to whom sayings could be credited and round whom a legend could be written."

"The myth theory as stated by J. M. Robertson does not exclude the possibility of an historical Jesus. “A teacher or teachers named Jesus” may have uttered some of the Gospel sayings “at various periods.” The Jesus ben-Pandera of the Talmud may have led a movement round which the survivals of an ancient solar or other cult gradually clustered. It is even “not very unlikely that there were several Jesuses who claimed to be Messiahs.” The founder of the movement may have met his death by preaching a subversive political doctrine, and the facts may have been suppressed by later writers. A Galilean faith-healer named Jesus may have been offered as a human sacrifice by fanatical peasants at some time of social tumult."

"Whatever else Jesus may or may not have done, he unquestionably* started the process that became Christianity…"

"Since the Enlightenment, the Gospel stories about the life of Jesus have been in doubt. Intellectuals then as now asked: 'What makes the stories of the New Testament any more historically probable than Aesop's fables or Grimm's fairy tales?' The critics can be answered satisfactorily...For all the rigor of the standard it sets, the criterion [of embarrassment] demonstrates that Jesus existed."

"Some nineteenth-century rationaists maintained that he never existed, that the gospels portrayed an ideal Jew who never was. A clutch of German and British writers was capable of that historical nonsense, some of which has resurfaced. It would be easier to establish that there never was an emperor Nerva, a name invented to fill the gap of ignorance of the years between Domitian and Trajan."

"Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher."

"Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly life of Jesus was regarded by primitive Christianity."

"As Morton Smith remarks, [G. A.] Wells’s argument is mainly based on the argument from silence ...arguing for “unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified”."

"His published work on the Synoptic Problem had already contributed towards exploding the theory of the “Christ-myth”—that Jesus as a historical person never existed—by providing the two oldest records of His life to be genuine historical documents.""

"The writing of biographies of Jesus is of doubtful critical value. Legend has coloured the historic data too much, and outside corroborative testimony is too slender..."

"Not all mythicists agree with each other about what they view as the correct explanation of the origin of Christianity and of the Jesus myth. [...] [Some mythicists] claim that whether a mere man named Jesus ever existed at the time when the Christian era began is an impossible thing to either prove of disprove today."

"Except for the references among the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, the extra-biblical sources are very late. All these sources demonstrate some element of fraud or ambiguity, and generally do not tell us any more about Jesus than what is already known from the Gospels. None of the sources stem from Jesus’ own time. None of the sources come from proven eyewitnesses. These issues allow significant justifiable doubt on what Jesus said, what he did, who he really was, and if he even existed at all. There should be no issue, then, in noting that Jesus’ ahistoricity is an epistemic possibility, and therefore expressing some reservations over his historicity is reasonable."

"There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses, most of whom are obviously biased."

"Only Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey have thoroughly attempted to prove Jesus’ historical existence in recent times. Their most decisive point? The Gospels can generally be trusted – after we ignore the many, many bits that are untrustworthy – because of the hypothetical (i.e. non-existent) sources behind them. [...] Given the poor state of the existing sources, and the atrocious methods used by mainstream Biblical historians, the matter will likely never be resolved. In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable."

"[Per the case for "Historical Jesus" agnosticism] ...the justification of agnosticism is already made obvious by consulting the people arguing for Jesus’ historical certainty. ...Simply peruse the sources for yourself. Do that, and also hear from the historicists how they 'prove' Jesus’ existence. ...If the case for Jesus is unconvincing, then agnosticism is already justified."

"The recent defences of Jesus’ historicity by Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey lack lucid and competent methodologies, rely on highly questionable documents, and further make use of sources that no longer exist, if they ever did.[...] If the consensus view that a historical Jesus certainly existed is based on such tenuous methodology, it would seem reasonable that the consensus view should be reviewed, while not necessarily immediately rejected as false. Let us end this section with a mainstream scholar’s admission that such methods — like the earlier and often mentioned appeal to imaginary sources — are idiosyncratic; that they are unique to historians who specialise in the New Testament texts"

"[Richard Carrier's hypothesis of ‘minimal mythicism’], highly influenced by the work of Earl Doherty, states that Jesus was initially believed to be a celestial figure, who came to be historicised over time."

"[R. M.] Price speculates that the sources should point historical Jesus scholars in the direction of “complete agnosticism”."

"We can be certain that Jesus really existed (despite a few highly motivated skeptics who refuse to be convinced), that he was a Jewish teacher in Galilee, and that he was crucified by the Roman government around 30 CE."

"...on the one hand, literal acceptance of everything in the New Testament as the veridical record of what happened, and, on the other, some form of Christ-myth theory which denies that there ever was a Jesus."

"There have even been learned and intelligent men who have denied that Jesus ever existed: the so-called "Christ-myth" theory."

"If this account of the matter is correct, one can also see why it is that the 'Christ-myth' theory, to the effect that there was no historical Jesus at all, has seemed so plausible to many..."

"To accept the historicity of Jesus one must have independent historical evidence, but this evidence is not forthcoming."

"Paul was converted to a Hellenized form of some Jesus movement that had already developed into a Christ cult. [...] Thus his letters serve as documentation for the Christ cult as well."

"The evidence from Paul’s letters is that the congregations of the Christ were attractive associations and that their emerging mythology was found to be exciting. A spirited cult formed on the model of the mystery religions..."

"But in contrast to the Christ-myth theories which proliferated at an earlier time, it would seem that today almost all reputable scholars do accept that Jesus existed and that the basic facts about him are well established."

"[A]n attempt to show that Jesus never existed has been made in recent years by G. A. Wells, a Professor of German who has ventured into New Testament study and presents a case that the origins of Christianity can be explained without assuming that Jesus really lived. Earlier presentations of similar views at the turn of the century failed to make any impression on scholarly opinion, and it is certain that this latest presentation of the case will not fare any better. For of course the evidence is not confined to Tacitus; there are the New Testament documents themselves, nearly all of which must be dated in the first century, and behind which there lies a period of transmission of the story of Jesus which can be traced backwards to a date not far from that when Jesus is supposed to have lived. To explain the rise of this tradition without the hypothesis of Jesus is impossible."

"Along with the scholarly and popular works, there is a good deal of pseudoscholarship on Jesus that finds its way into print. During the last two centuries more than a hundred books and articles have denied the historical existence of Jesus. Today innumerable websites carry the same message... Most scholars regard the arguments for Jesus' non-existence as unworthy of any response—on a par with claims that the Jewish Holocaust never occurred or that the Apollo moon landing took place in a Hollywood studio."

"This skeptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth. In ancient times, this extreme view was named the heresy of docetism (seeming) because it maintained that Jesus never came into the world "in the flesh", but only seemed to; (I John 4:2) and it was given some encouragement by Paul's lack of interest in his fleshly existence. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that Jesus did not even "seem" to exist, and that all tales of his appearance upon the earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was compared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods. (paragraph break) Some of the lines of thinking employed to disprove the Christ-myth theory have been somewhat injudicious."

"Many (including the present writer) are content to infer broadly, from the scanty reliable evidence and the religious developments of the first century, that probably some Jew named Jesus adopted the Persian belief [see Avesta] in the end of the world and, thinking that it was near, left his Essenian monastery [see Essenes] to warn his fellows, and was put to death. They feel that the question of historicity has little importance [...] the very scanty biographical details even as given in the Gospels [see Mark] do not justify the claim of a "unique personality,"..."

"My thesis is that any quest for a historical Jesus is irrelevant to an understanding of the earliest social movements that evolved into the religion now called Christianity. This is the case even if a historical Jesus existed and made an effort to found a movement of some kind. [...] Jesus was functionally irrelevant to the earliest stages of what contemporary researchers call the Jesus movement, or the Christ cult, or the Jesus-confessing communities (and that I will call early Christianity)."

"A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical person Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today—in the academic world at least—gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat."

"The denial that Christ was crucified is like the denial of the Holocaust. For some it's simply too horrific to affirm. For others it's an elaborate conspiracy to coerce religious sympathy. But the deniers live in a historical dreamworld."

"The main reason for holding to the historicity of the figure of Jesus ...resides not primarily in historical evidence but derives instead from a modern theological necessity."

"According to the Christ-Myth theorists, Jesus had first been regarded in the manner of an ancient Olympian god; he had supposedly once visited the earth and died and been raised from the dead, like Hercules and Asclepios [...] It was only subsequently, says the Christ-Myth theory, that the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus was rendered historical, datable, a piece of recent worldly history. Christianity, then, would have begun with a “high" Christology, but with no historical grounding (hence one might call it “docetic”), whereas the “adoptionistic” theory of mainstream scholars holds that Christians first held a “low” Christology, placing Jesus on our level, not God’s, only later yielding to a process of mythification of the historical man Jesus of Nazareth. The choice is between a historical Jesus mythicized and a mythic Jesus historicized."

"Alan Dundes has shown, the gospel life of Jesus corresponds in most particulars with the worldwide paradigm of the Mythic Hero Archetype as delineated by Lord Raglan, Otto Rank, and others."

"Why are the gospels filled with rewritten stories of Jonah, David, Moses, Elijah, and Elisha rather than reports of the historical Jesus? Quite likely because the earliest Christians, perhaps Jewish, Samaritan, and Galilean sectarians like the Nasoreans or Essenes, did not understand their savior to have been a figure of mundane history at all, any more than the devotees of the cults of Attis, Hercules, Mithras, and Osiris did. Their gods, too, had died and risen in antiquity."

"We should never guess from the Epistles that Jesus died in any particular historical or political context, only that the fallen angels (Col 2:15), the archons of this age, did him in, little realizing they were sealing their own doom (1 Cor 2:6-8)."

"[Per the name Jesus] Philippians 2:9-11, read without theological embarrassment, seems to intend that it was that name [Jesus], exalted above all other names, that the savior received, not the title kyrios."

"A new wave of critics suggest that the evangelists’ sources were literary sources. Randel Helms, John Dominic Crossan, Earl Doherty, and others have shown the surprising extent to which gospel narrative is simply rewritten Old Testament material. [Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions (Amherst, N .Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989); John Dominic Crossan, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); Thomas L. Brodie, “Luke the Literary Interpreter: Luke-Acts as a Systematic Rewriting and Updating of the Elijah-Elisha Narrative in 1 and 2 Kings” (Ph.D. diss., Pontifical University of Thomas Aquinas, 1981); Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ." (Ottawa: Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999).]"

"For the scriptural roots of all four Gospels and Acts (and in greater detail), see Robert M. Price, “New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash,” in Encyclopedia of Midrash: Biblical Interpretation in Formative Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery Peck (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1:534-73. Besides [John Dominic] Crossan, [Randel] Helms, the Millers [Dale and Patricia] and [Thomas L.] Brodie, I owe a great debt to the work of John Bowman, The Gospel of Mark: The New Christian Jewish Passover Haggadah, Studia Post-Biblica 8 (Leiden: Brill, 1965); J. Duncan M. Derrett, The Making of Mark: The Scriptural Bases of the Earliest Gospel, vols. 1 and 2 (Shipston-on-Stour, U.K.: P. Drinkwater, 1985); Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1977-1978 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Wolfgang Roth, Hebrew Gospel: Cracking the Code of Mark (Oak Park, Ill.: Meyer-Stone Books, 1988); and Rikki E. Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus and Mark, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2, Reihe 88 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997)."

"[The epistles] seem to enshrine a different vein of early Christian faith which lacked an earthly Jesus, a Christianity that understood “Jesus” as an honorific throne-name bestowed on a spiritual savior who had been ambushed and killed by the Archons who rule the universe before he rose triumphant over them."

"Bolland, De Evangelische Jozua; Rylands, The Evolution of Christianity; Rylands, The Beginnings of Gnostic Christianity; Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, 340, and others similarly held that Christianity began variously among Hellenized Jewish settlements throughout the Diaspora, with allegorized Jewish elements being made almost unrecognizable by their intermingling with gnostic mythemes."

"We must keep in mind that consensus is no criterion. The truth may not rest in the middle. The truth may not rest with the majority. Every theory and individual argument must be evaluated on its own. If we appeal instead to “received opinion” or “the consensus of scholars,” we are merely abdicating our own responsibility, as well as committing the fallacy of appeal to the majority."

"We are not here referring to the position that Jesus had no historical existence, which is in itself a perfectly legitimate theory entitled to serious discussion. The paradoxes we have in mind are the extravagant or arbitrary interpretations [that some adherents of the mythological view assert.]"

"Traditional Christianity, and any attempt to trace traditional Christianity to a unique personal founder, alike break down on the evidence. [...] [In] the Aegean cities where the Pauline Epistles took shape, the myth of the incarnate God, and not the career of a historic Jesus, was the basis of the cult from the first [i.e. from the beginning]. Paul knows no more of the Nazoraean Jesus than the Synoptics know of the pre-existent Christ."

"The Christ-Myth theory (that Jesus never lived) had a certain vogue at the beginning of this century but is not supported by contemporary scholarship."

"That a man named Jesus, an obscure religious teacher, the basis of this fabulous Christ, lived in Palestine about nineteen hundred years ago, may be true. But of this man we know nothing. His biography has not been written."

"In an article ('The Historiography of the Pentateuch: 25 Years after Historicity' Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 13, 1999, 258-283) I have discussed why I think it is very difficult to establish the historicity of figures in biblical narrative, as the issue rather relates to the quality of texts one is dealing with. I work further on this issue in my Messiah Myth of 2005. Here I argue that the synoptic gospels can hardly be used to establish the historicity of the figure of Jesus; for both the episodes and sayings with which the figure of Jesus is presented are stereotypical and have a history that reaches centuries earlier. I have hardly shown that Jesus did not exist and did not claim to. Rather, I compared our knowledge about Jesus to our knowledge of figures like Homer. As soon as we try to identify such an historical figure, we find ourselves talking about the thematic elements of stories."