MODERN SCHOLARS OF THE New Testament are famous—or infamous—for making claims about Jesus that contradict what most people, especially Christians, believe about him. Some scholars have maintained that Jesus was a political revolutionary who wanted to incite the masses in Israel to a violent uprising against their Roman overlords. Others have claimed that he was like an ancient Cynic philosopher who had no real interest in Israel as the people of God or even in the Hebrew Bible (the Jewish scriptures) but was concerned to teach people how to live simply apart from the material trappings of this life. Others have insisted that Jesus was principally interested in the economic plight of his oppressed people and urged socioeconomic reform, as a kind of proto-Marxist. Yet others have asserted that he was chiefly concerned about the oppression of women and was a proto-feminist. Some have said that he was mainly interested in religious issues but that he was a Pharisee, others that he was a member of the Dead Sea Scrolls community, an Essene. Some have said that he taught a completely bourgeois ethic and that he was married with children. Yet others have suggested that he was gay. And these are only some of the more serious proposals.
Despite this enormous range of opinion, there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea. Even though this is the view of nearly every trained scholar on the planet, it is not the view of a group of writers who are usually labeled, and often label themselves, mythicists.
In a recent exhaustive elaboration of the position, one of the leading proponents of Jesus mythicism, Earl Doherty, defines the view as follows: it 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, and that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition.”1 In simpler terms, the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity.
To lend some scholarly cachet to their view, mythicists sometimes quote a passage from one of the greatest works devoted to the study of the historical Jesus in modern times, the justly famous Quest of the Historical Jesus, written by New Testament scholar, theologian, philosopher, concert organist, physician, humanitarian, and Nobel Peace Prize–winning Albert Schweitzer:
There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which come to the surface one after the other.2
Taken out of context, these words may seem to indicate that the great Schweitzer himself did not subscribe to the existence of the historical Jesus. But nothing could be further from the truth. The myth for Schweitzer was the liberal view of Jesus so prominent in his own day, as represented in the sundry books that he incisively summarized and wittily discredited in The Quest. Schweitzer himself knew full well that Jesus actually existed; in his second edition he wrote a devastating critique of the mythicists of his own time, and toward the end of his book he showed who Jesus really was, in his own considered judgment. For Schweitzer, Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who anticipated the imminent end of history as we know it. Jesus thought that he himself would play a key role in the future act of God, in which the forces of evil in control of this world would be overthrown and a new kingdom would appear. For Schweitzer, Jesus was very much mistaken in this understanding of himself and the future course of events. The end, after all, never did come, and Jesus was crucified for his efforts. But he was very much a real person, a Jewish preacher about whom a good deal could be known through a careful examination of the Gospels.
The problem with the historical Jesus for Schweitzer was that he was in fact all too historical. That is, Jesus was so firmly rooted in his own time and place as a first-century Palestinian Jew—with an ancient Jewish understanding of the world, God, and human existence—that he does not translate easily into a modern idiom. The Jesus proclaimed by preachers and theologians today had no existence. That particular Jesus is (or those particular Jesuses are) a myth. But there was a historical Jesus, who was very much a man of his time. And we can know what he was like.
Schweitzer’s view of the historical Jesus happens to be mine as well, at least in rough outline. I agree with Schweitzer and virtually all scholars in the field since his day that Jesus existed, that he was ineluctably Jewish, that there is historical information about him in the Gospels, and that we can therefore know some things about what he said and did. Moreover, I agree with Schweitzer’s overarching view, that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish prophet who anticipated a cataclysmic break in history in the very near future, when God would destroy the forces of evil to bring in his own kingdom here on earth. I will explain at the end of this book why so many scholars who have devoted their lives to exploring our ancient sources for the historical Jesus have found this understanding so persuasive. For now I want to stress the most foundational point of all: even though some views of Jesus could loosely be labeled myths (in the sense that mythicists use the term: these views are not history but imaginative creation), Jesus himself was not a myth. He really existed.
Before giving evidence for this scholarly consensus, I will set the stage by tracing, very briefly, a history of those who take the alternative view, that there never was a historical Jesus.
A Brief History of Mythicism
THERE IS NO NEED for me to give a comprehensive history of the claim that Jesus never existed. I will simply say a few words about some of the most important representatives of the view up to Schweitzer’s time in the early twentieth century and then comment on some of the more influential contemporary representatives who have revitalized the view in recent years.
The first author to deny the existence of Jesus appears to have been the eighteenth-century Frenchman Constantin François Volney, a member of the Constituent Assembly during the French Revolution.3 In 1791 Volney published an essay (in French) called “Ruins of Empire.” In it he argued that all religions at heart are the same—a view still wildly popular among English-speaking people who are not religion scholars, especially as articulated in the second half of the twentieth century by Joseph Campbell. Christianity too, for Volney, was simply a variant on the one universal religion. This particular variation on the theme was invented by early Christians who created the savior Jesus as a kind of sun-god. They derived Jesus’s most common epithet, “Christ,” from the similar-sounding name of the Indian god Krishna.
Several years later a much more substantial and influential book was published by another Frenchman, Charles-François Dupuis, who was secretary of the revolutionary National Convention. The Origin of All Religions (1795) was an enormous work, 2,017 pages in length. Dupuis’s ultimate objective was to uncover the nature of the “original deity” who lies behind all religions. In one long section of the study Dupuis paid particular attention to the so-called mystery religions of antiquity. These various religions are called mysteries because the exact teachings and rituals were to be kept secret by their devotees. What we do know is that these various secret religions were popular throughout the Roman Empire, in regions both east and west. Dupuis subjected the fragmentary information that survived to his day to careful scrutiny, as he argued that such gods as Osiris, Adonis (or Tammuz), Bacchus, Attis, and Mithra were all manifestations of the solar deity. Dupuis agreed with his compatriot Volney: Jesus too was originally invented as another embodiment of the sun-god.
The first bona fide scholar of the Bible to claim that Jesus never existed was a German theologian named Bruno Bauer, generally regarded among New Testament scholars as both very smart and highly idiosyncratic.4 He had virtually no followers in the scholarly world. Over the course of nearly four decades Bauer produced several books, including Criticism of the Gospel History of John (1840); Criticism of the Gospels (2 vols., 1850–1852); and The Origin of Christianity from Graeco-Roman Civilization (1877). When he started out as a scholar, Bauer concurred with everyone else in the field that there was historically reliable material in the first three Gospels of the New Testament, known as the “Synoptic Gospels” (Matthew, Mark, and Luke; they are called “synoptic” because they are so much alike in the stories they tell that you can place them in parallel columns next to each other so that they can be “seen together,” unlike the Gospel of John, which for the most part tells a different set of stories). As he progressed in his research, however, and subjected the Gospel accounts to a careful, detailed, and hypercritical evaluation, Bauer began to think that Jesus was a literary invention of the Gospel writers. Christianity, he concluded, was an amalgamation of Judaism with the Roman philosophy of Stoicism. This was obviously an extreme and radical view for a professor of theology to take at the state-supported German University of Bonn. It ended up costing him his job.
The mythicist view was taken up some decades later in English-speaking circles by J. M. Robertson, sometimes considered the premier British rationalist of the beginning of the twentieth century. His major book appeared in 1900, titled Christianity and Mythology.5 Robertson argued that there were striking similarities between what the Gospels claim about Jesus and what earlier peoples believed about pagan gods of fertility, who, like Jesus, were said to have died and been raised from the dead. These fertility gods, Robertson and many others believed, were based on the cycles of nature: just as the crops die at the beginning of winter but then reappear in the spring, so too do the gods with which they are identified. They die and rise again. Jesus’s death and resurrection was based, then, on this primitive belief, transposed into Jewish terms. More specifically, while there once may have been a man named Jesus, he was nothing like the Christ worshipped by Christians, who was a mythical figure based on an ancient cult of Joshua, a dying-rising vegetative god who was ritually sacrificed and eaten. Only later was this divine Joshua transposed by his devotees into a historical figure, the alleged founder of Christianity.
Many of these views came to be popularized by a German scholar of the early twentieth century named Arthur Drews, whose work, The Christ Myth (1909), was arguably the most influential mythicist book ever produced because it made a huge impact on one reader in particular.6 It convinced Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that Jesus was not a real historical figure. This, in large measure, led to the popularity of the myth theory in the emerging Soviet Union.
After a relative hiatus, the mythicist view has resurfaced in recent years. In chapters 6 and 7 I review the major arguments for this position, but here I want to say something about the authors themselves, a doughty and colorful ensemble. I have already mentioned Earl Doherty, seen by many as the leading representative of the view in the modern period. By his own admission, Doherty does not have any advanced degrees in biblical studies or any related field. But he does have an undergraduate degree in classics, and his books show that he has read widely and has a good deal of knowledge at his disposal, quite admirable for someone who is, in his own view, an amateur in the field. His now-classic statement is The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? This has recently been expanded in a second edition, published not as a revision (which it is) but rather as its own book, Jesus: Neither God nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Christ. The overarching theses are for the most part the same between the two books.
By contrast, Robert Price is highly trained in the relevant fields of scholarship. Price started out as a hard-core conservative evangelical Christian, with a master’s degree from the conservative evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He went on to do a Ph.D. in systematic theology at Drew University and then a second Ph.D. in New Testament studies, also at Drew. He is the one trained and certified scholar of New Testament that I know of who holds to a mythicist position. As with other conservative evangelicals who have fallen from the faith, Price fell hard. His first significant book, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?, answers the question of the subtitle with no shade of ambiguity. The Gospel tradition about Jesus is not at all reliable. Price makes his case through a detailed exploration of all the Gospel traditions, arguing forcefully and intelligently. Price has written other works, the most significant for my present purposes being The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems, which is due to be published (as I write) within a few weeks. I am grateful to Robert and the publisher of Atheist Press for making it available to me.7
That publisher is Frank Zindler, another outspoken representative of the mythicist view. Zindler is also an academic, but he does not have credentials in biblical studies or in any field of antiquity. He is a scientist, trained in biology and geology. He taught in the community college system of the State University of New York for twenty years before—by his own account—being driven out for supporting Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her attempt to remove “In God We Trust” from American currency. Extremely prolific, Zindler writes in a number of fields. Many of his publications have been brought together in a massive four-volume work called Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Won’t Reason. The first volume of this magnum opus is called Religions and Scriptures and contains a number of essays both directly and tangentially related to mythicist views of Jesus, written at a popular level.8
A different sort of support for a mythicist position comes in the work of Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David. Thompson is trained in biblical studies, but he does not have degrees in New Testament or early Christianity. He is, instead, a Hebrew Bible scholar who teaches at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. In his own field of expertise he is convinced that figures from the Hebrew Bible such as Abraham, Moses, and David never existed. He transfers these views to the New Testament and argues that Jesus too did not exist but was invented by Christians who wanted to create a savior figure out of stories found in the Jewish scriptures.9
Some of the other mythicists I will mention throughout the study include Richard Carrier, who along with Price is the only mythicist to my knowledge with graduate training in a relevant field (Ph.D. in classics from Columbia University); Tom Harpur, a well-known religious journalist in Canada, who did teach New Testament studies at Toronto before moving into journalism and trade-book publishing; and a slew of sensationalist popularizers who are not, and who do not bill themselves as, scholars in any recognizable sense of the word.
Other writers who are often placed in the mythicist camp present a slightly different view, namely, that there was indeed a historical Jesus but that he was not the founder of Christianity, a religion rooted in the mythical Christ-figure invented by its original adherents. This view was represented in midcentury by Archibald Robinson, who thought that even though there was a Jesus, “we know next to nothing about this Jesus.”10
The best-known mythicist of modern times—at least among the New Testament scholars who know of any mythicists at all—is George A. Wells, who takes a similar position. Wells is a professor emeritus of German at the University of London and an expert on modern German intellectual history. Over the years he has written many books and articles advocating a mythicist position, none more incisive than his 1975 book, Did Jesus Exist?11 Wells is certainly one who does the hard legwork necessary to make his case: although an outsider to New Testament studies, he speaks the lingo of the field and has read deeply in its scholarship. Although most New Testament scholars will not (or do not) consider his work either convincing or particularly well argued, it was by far the best mythicist work available before the studies of Price.
On Taking Mythicists Seriously
IT IS FAIR TO say that mythicists as a group, and as individuals, are not taken seriously by the vast majority of scholars in the fields of New Testament, early Christianity, ancient history, and theology. This is widely recognized, to their chagrin, by mythicists themselves. Archibald Robertson, in one of the classic works in the field, says with good reason, “The mythicist…does not get fair play from professional theologians. They either meet him with a conspiracy of silence or, if that is impossible, treat him as an amateur whose lack of academic status…robs his opinion of any value. Such treatment naturally makes the mythicist bellicose.”12
Not much has changed in the sixty-five years since Robertson’s brief volume appeared. Established scholars continue to be dismissive, and mythicists as a rule are vocal in their objections. As mentioned, the one mythicist within the vision of many New Testament scholars is G. A. Wells. In the massive and justly acclaimed four-volume study of the historical Jesus by one of the leading scholars in the field, John Meier, Wells and his views are peremptorily dismissed in a single sentence: “Wells’s book, which builds its arguments on these and similar unsubstantiated claims, may be allowed to stand as a representative of the whole type of popular Jesus book that I do not bother to consider in detail.”13
Even books that one might expect to take up the issue of Jesus’s existence simply leave it alone. A case in point is the volume I Believe in the Historical Jesus by British New Testament specialist I. Howard Marshall. The title gives one a glimmer of hope that at least some attention will be paid to whether there actually was a historical Jesus, but the book presents only Marshall’s theologically conservative views of the historical Jesus. Marshall mentions only one mythicist, Wells, disposing of him in a single paragraph with the statement that no scholar in the field finds his views persuasive since the abundant Gospel sources, based on a variety of oral traditions, show that Jesus must have existed.14
As I will indicate more fully later, I think Wells—and Price, and several other mythicists—do deserve to be taken seriously, even if their claims are in the end dismissed.15 A number of other mythicists, however, do not offer anything resembling scholarship in support of their view and instead present the unsuspecting reading public with sensationalist claims that are so extravagant, so wrongheaded, and so poorly substantiated that it is no wonder that scholars do not take them seriously. These sensationalist books may have a reading public. They are, after all, written to be read. But if scholars take note of them at all, it is simply out of amazement that such inaccurate and poorly researched publications could ever see the published light of day. Here I can give two examples.
The Christ Conspiracy
IN 1999, UNDER THE nom de plume Acharya S, D. M. Murdock published the breathless conspirator’s dream: The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold.16 This book was meant to set the record straight by showing that Christianity is rooted in a myth about the sun-god Jesus, who was invented by a group of Jews in the second century CE.
Mythicists of this ilk should not be surprised that their views are not taken seriously by real scholars, that their books are not reviewed in scholarly journals, mentioned by experts in the field, or even read by them. The book is filled with so many factual errors and outlandish assertions that it is hard to believe that the author is serious. If she is serious, it is hard to believe that she has ever encountered anything resembling historical scholarship. Her “research” appears to have involved reading a number of nonscholarly books that say the same thing she is about to say and then quoting them. One looks in vain for the citation of a primary ancient source, and quotations from real experts (Elaine Pagels, chiefly) are ripped from their context and misconstrued. Still, in opposition to scholars who take alternative positions, such as that Jesus existed (she calls them “historicizers”), Acharya states, “If we assume that the historicizers’ disregard of these scholars [that is, the mythicists] is deliberate, we can only conclude that it is because the mythicists’ arguments have been too intelligent and knifelike to do away with.”17 One cannot help wondering if this is all a spoof done in good humor.
The basic argument of the book is that Jesus is the sun-god: “Thus the son of God is the sun of God” (get it—son, sun?). Stories about Jesus are “in actuality based on the movements of the sun through the heavens. In other words, Jesus Christ and the others upon whom he is predicated are personifications of the sun, and the gospel fable is merely a repeat of mythological formula revolving around the movements of the sun through the heavens.”18
Christianity, in Acharya’s view, started out as an astrotheological religion in which this sun-god Jesus was transformed into a historical Jew by a group of Jewish Syro-Samaritan Gnostic sons of Zadok, who were also Gnostics and Therapeutae (a sectarian group of Jews) in Alexandria, Egypt, after the failed revolt of the Jews against Rome in 135 CE. The Jews had failed to establish themselves as an independent state in the Promised Land and so naturally were deeply disappointed. They invented this Jesus in order to bring salvation to those who were shattered by the collapse of their nationalistic dreams. The Bible itself is an astrotheological text with hidden meanings that need to be unpacked by understanding their astrological symbolism.
Later we will see that all of Acharya’s major points are in fact wrong. Jesus was not invented in Alexandria, Egypt, in the middle of the second Christian century. He was known already in the 30s of the first century, in Jewish circles of Palestine. He was not originally a sun-god (as if that equals Son-God!); in fact, in the earliest traditions we have about him, he was not known as a divine being at all. He was understood to be a Jewish prophet and messiah. There are no astrological phenomena associated with Jesus in any of our earliest traditions. These traditions are attested in multiple sources that originated at least a century before Acharya’s alleged astrological creation at the hands of people who lived in a different part of the world from the historical Jesus and who did not even speak his language.
Just to give a sense of the level of scholarship in this sensationalist tome, I list a few of the howlers one encounters en route, in the order in which I found them. Acharya claims that:
In short, if there is any conspiracy here, it is not on the part of the ancient Christians who made up Jesus but on the part of modern authors who make up stories about the ancient Christians and what they believed about Jesus.
The Jesus Mysteries
ALSO APPEARING IN 1999 was the (intended) blockbuster work by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? Freke and Gandy have collaborated on a number of books in recent years, most of them uncovering the conspiratorial secrets of our shared past. Like Acharya S, remarkably, they argue that Jesus was invented by a group of Jews who resembled the Therapeutae in Alexandria, Egypt, leading to the invention of a new mystery religion (the Jesus Mysteries), which flourished at the beginning of the third century. In their view, however, Jesus was not a sun-god. He was a creation based on the widespread mythologies of dying and rising gods known throughout the pagan world. And so their main thesis: “The story of Jesus is not the biography of a historical Messiah, but a myth based on perennial Pagan stories. Christianity was not a new and unique revelation but actually a Jewish adaptation of the ancient Pagan Mystery religion.”19
At the heart of all the various pagan mysteries, Freke and Gandy aver, was a myth of a godman who died and rose from the dead. This divine figure was called by various names in the pagan mysteries: Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Baccus, Mithras. But “fundamentally all these godmen are the same mythical being” (4). The reason that Freke and Gandy think so is that supposedly all these figures share the same mythology: their father was God; their mother was a mortal virgin; each was born in a cave on December 25 before three shepherds and wise men; among their miracles they turned water to wine; they all rode into town on a donkey; they all were crucified at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; they descended to hell; and on the third day they rose again. Since these same things are said of Jesus as well, it is obvious that the stories believed by the Christians are all simply imitations of the pagan religions.
Real historians of antiquity are scandalized by such assertions—or they would be if they bothered to read Freke and Gandy’s book. The authors provide no evidence for their claims concerning the standard mythology of the godmen. They cite no sources from the ancient world that can be checked. It is not that they have provided an alternative interpretation of the available evidence. They have not even cited the available evidence. And for good reason. No such evidence exists.
What, for example, is the proof that Osiris was born on December 25 before three shepherds? Or that he was crucified? And that his death brought atonement for sin? Or that he returned to life on earth by being raised from the dead? In fact, no ancient source says any such thing about Osiris (or about the other gods). But Freke and Gandy claim that this is common knowledge. And they “prove” it by quoting other writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who said so. But these writers too do not cite any historical evidence. This is all based on assertion, believed by Freke and Gandy simply because they read it somewhere. This is not serious historical scholarship. It is sensationalist writing driven by a desire to sell books.
In any event, as Freke and Gandy work out their scheme, the original “Christ” was a godman like all the other pagan godmen. Only at a second stage was he taken over by Jews and turned into a Jewish messiah who was imagined as a historical figure, thereby creating the Jesus of history. The apostle Paul, on this reconstruction, knew nothing about this historical Jesus, and neither did anyone else in the early church. They worshipped the pagan Christ who had been Judaized before anyone thought to make him into a real person who actually lived and died in Judea. The Gospel by Mark was instrumental in making this actual person come to life; it was he who historicized the myth for the sake of Jews who needed not a divinity but a real historical figure to save them. Freke and Gandy contend that many Christians in the eastern part of the Roman Empire—who, like Paul, were Gnostics—understood that the historicized version of the myth was not a literal truth but a kind of extension of the myth. Only Christians in the western empire failed to realize this. Their center of activity was Rome. And so there emerged the Roman Catholic Church, which took the historicized view of a savior figure literally and came to suppress the original mythological views of the Gnostics. This led to traditional Christianity, with a historical figure of Jesus at its beginning. But he did not really exist. He was an invention modeled on the gods of the pagan mystery religions.
The problems with this thesis are rife, as will become clear in later chapters. For now it is enough to say that what we know about Jesus—the historical Jesus—does not come from Egypt toward the end of the first century, in circles heavily influenced by pagan mystery religions, but from Palestine, among Jews committed to their decidedly antipagan Jewish religion, from the 30s.
Quite apart from the enormous problems with the book’s major contentions, it is hard to take it seriously. In both its detail and its overarching thesis, the book often reads like an undergraduate thesis, filled with patently false information and inconsistencies. When the authors do quote “scholarly” sources, it is almost always extremely dated scholarship, from 1925, 1899, and so on. It is easy to see why. The views they assert may have been believable more than a century ago, but no scholars hold to them today. As an example of inconsistency, consider these two statements made within two pages of one another. First:
Jerusalem Christians had always been Gnostics, because in the first century the Christian community was made up entirely of different types of Gnosticism! (174)
And then, a page later:
The more we looked at the evidence we had uncovered, the more it seemed that to apply the terms “Gnostic” and “Literalist” to the Christianity of the first century was actually meaningless. (175)
So which is it? Were the Jerusalem Christians of the first century Gnostic? Or is the term Gnostic meaningless with respect to the first century? It is hard to have it both ways.
Moreover, as with Acharya, here too the factual errors abound at an embarrassing rate. As some examples, in the order one finds them (this is by no means an exhaustive list):
While it is useful to provide a taste of the sensationalist claims that one can find in this literature, I do not think that the serious authors who have pursued a mythicist agenda (for example, G. A. Wells, Robert Price, and now Richard Carrier) can be tarnished with the same brush or be condemned with guilt by association. Their work has to stand or fall on its own, independent of the foibles and shortcomings of the sensationalists. Those who have done research do indeed make a case that Jesus did not exist. Although they use some of the same arguments, they do not use the total package as those I’ve just mentioned. I will be dealing with these arguments at greater length later. First, however, I want to show the positive evidence that convinces everyone except the mythicists that Jesus existed. But to make sense of that evidence, I need at the very least to give a rough idea about why some of the smarter and better informed writers have said he did not exist.
The Basic Mythicist Position
THE CASE THAT MOST mythicists have made against the historical existence of Jesus involves both negative and positive arguments, with far more of the former.20
On the negative side, mythicists typically stress that there are no reliable references to the existence of Jesus in any non-Christian sources of the first century. Jesus allegedly lived until about the year 30 CE. But no Greek or Roman author (or any other non-Christian author, for that matter) mentions him for over eighty years after that. If Jesus was such an important figure—or even if he wasn’t so important—wouldn’t there be a reference to him in some of our many surviving sources from the first century? We have the writings of historians, politicians, philosophers, religion scholars, poets, and scientists; we have inscriptions placed on buildings and personal letters written by average people. In none of these non-Christian writings of the first century is Jesus ever mentioned, not even once.
It is typically argued by those who hold to Jesus’s historical existence that he is, in fact, mentioned by one author: the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote a number of surviving books near the end of the first century. Mythicists, however, claim that the two references to Jesus in Josephus’s book Jewish Antiquities (these are the only two mentions of Jesus in all of Josephus’s abundant writings) were not written originally by Josephus but were inserted into his writings by later Christian scribes. If they are right, this would mean that we don’t have a single reference to Jesus in non-Christian texts before the writings of Pliny, a Roman governor of a province in what is now Turkey, in 112 CE and in the writings of the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius a few years later. Some mythicists claim that these references too were inserted into these writings, that they are not original. We will be looking at all of these references soon; for now it is enough to note that mythicists argue that it is hard to believe that Jesus would not be talked about, argued with, commented on, or even mentioned by writers of his own day or in the decades afterward if he really existed.
In addition, they typically claim that the historical Jesus does not appear prominently even in early Christian writings apart from the New Testament Gospels. In particular, they maintain that the apostle Paul says hardly anything about the historical Jesus or that he says nothing at all. This may come as a shock to most readers of the New Testament, but a careful reading of Paul’s letters shows the problems. Paul has a lot to say about Jesus’s death and resurrection—especially the resurrection—and he clearly worships him as his Lord. But he says very little indeed about anything that Jesus said and did while he was alive. Why would that be, if Jesus was in fact a historical person? Why doesn’t Paul quote the words of Jesus, such as the Sermon on the Mount? Why does he never refer to any of Jesus’s parables? Why doesn’t he indicate what Jesus did? Why not mention any of his miracles? His exorcisms? His controversies? His trip to Jerusalem? His trial before Pontius Pilate? And on and on.
Here again defenders of Jesus’s historicity point out that Paul on several occasions does appear to quote Jesus (for example, 1 Corinthians 11:22–24). Some mythicists argue that these quotations, like those of Josephus, were not originally in the writings of Paul but were inserted by later scribes. Other mythicists argue that Paul is not quoting the words of the historical Jesus but is quoting the words the heavenly “Jesus” has spoken through Christian prophets in Paul’s communities. For both kinds of mythicist, Paul did not know or think about a historical person Jesus. For him Christ was a heavenly being of mythical proportions. How, you might wonder, could a nonhistorical person die? Mythicists have an explanation for that too, as we will see. For now it is enough to know that they generally insist that Paul did not refer to the historical Jesus, and they point out that this would be very strange if in fact he knew that he existed. The same can be said of the other writings of the New Testament, outside the Gospels.
This means that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are our only real sources for knowing about the historical Jesus, and mythicists find these four sources highly problematic as historical documents. For one thing, they were written near the end of the first century at best, four or five decades or more after Jesus allegedly lived. If he really did live, wouldn’t we have some earlier sources? And how can we rely on such hearsay from so many years later?
Moreover, mythicists typically point out that the Gospels cannot be trusted in what they do say. Their many accounts of what Jesus said and did are chock-full of contradictions and discrepancies and so are completely unreliable. The Gospels are thoroughly biased toward their subject matter and so do not present anything like disinterested history “as it really was.” They can be shown to have modified the stories they relate, and in some places they obviously have made up stories about Jesus. In fact, virtually all—or even all—of the stories may have been invented. This is especially the case with the so-called miracles of Jesus, narrated by the Gospel writers to convince others to believe in him but incredible to the point that, well, they are literally incredible—not to be believed.
Furthermore, many mythicists insist that the four Gospels ultimately all go back to just one of the Gospels, Mark, on which the other three were based. This means that of all the many writers—pagan, Jewish, and Christian—that we have from the first century (assuming Mark was written as early as the first century), we have only one that describes or even mentions the life of the historical Jesus. How plausible is that, if Jesus actually lived?
Given all these problems, some mythicists insist that the burden of proof rests on anyone who wants to claim that Jesus did in fact exist. Added to these negative arguments is one very important positive one, that the stories about Jesus—many of them incredible, all of them based on late and unreliable witnesses—are paralleled time and again in the myths about pagan gods and other divine men discussed in the ancient world. And so mythicists typically appeal to accounts of other gods or demigods, such as Heracles, Osiris, Mithras, Attis, Adonis, and Dionysus, who were said to have been born on December 25 to a virgin mother, to have done miraculous deeds for the sake of others, to have died (often for the sake of others), and to have been raised from the dead and later departed to live in the divine realm.
I have already said a few words about such claims, and we will examine them in greater detail at a later point. For now it is enough to stress that mythicists make a two-pronged argument: given the negative argument, that we have no reliable witness that even mentions a historical Jesus, and the positive one, that his story appears to have been modeled on the accounts told of other divinities, it is simplest to believe that he never existed but was invented as another supernatural being. In this reading of the evidence, Christianity is founded on a myth.
Before countering the claims of the mythicists, I will set out the evidence that has persuaded everyone else, amateur and professional scholar alike, that Jesus really did exist. That will be the subject of the next several chapters.