part0011

Section Eight of Buddhism’s Relation to Christianity (130ff) comprises a lengthy discussion of the “historicity” of Jesus Christ, reproducing at first the article from the internet site Wikipedia by the same name. The argument centers on whether or not, under the layers of mythical motifs that sober historians are not prepared to accept as “historical fact,” there is a man named “Jesus,” titled “the Christ,” who had wandered about Judea and Galilee preaching a Hellenized and Romanized “Jewish” doctrine full of unique sayings attributable to a “historical” figure.

This “euhemerism” or “evemerism”—the theory named after the Greek philosopher Euhemeros or Evemeras (4th cent. BCE ), who argued that the gods and goddesses were kings, queens and heroes of antiquity puffed up by supernatural biographical filler—may sound satisfying at first. However, as these mythological and other precedent layers are peeled, there remains no “historical” core to the onion, and a composite of 20 people, historical and mythical, is simply no one .

This latter contention of Christ as a mythical or fictional composite constitutes part of what is called the “mythicist theory,” “mythicist case,” “mythicist school” or simply “mythicism,” here specifically “Jesus mythicism.”

The inclusion of the Wikipedia article by Lockwood is deliberate in that it shows how the subject of Christ’s historicity is accepted a priori with little discussion and a hand-waving dismissal of the significant body of literature from the mythicist school over the past several centuries. Wikipedia is, of course, edited by the public, and these editors tend to be very protective of their articles, with Christians guarding Christianity-related subjects, and so on. Hence, these articles are biased in favor of received Christian history.

In any event, the subject of Jesus mythicism in this Wiki article is merely touched upon and handled highly inadequately, for the reasons above. The article also presents arguments for historicity that have been rebutted, such as the value of supposed independent testimonies in the works of the ancient writers Josephus, Pliny, Suetonius and Tacitus, et al. 13 Yet, this fact of rebuttal has not been included in this Wiki article, nor have any other germane details from the extensive mythicist scholarship dating back hundreds of years, the screed ending with a shallow dismissal of countless thousands of pages of serious scholarship that shows many if not most of the article’s contentions to be false, such as:

Nevertheless, non-historicity is still regarded as effectively refuted by almost all Biblical scholars and historians… “There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.”

Again, the inclusion of this article demonstrates the mainstream view of these issues in the world at large, so it is useful for that reason and to serve as a thesis refuted by this present work, Buddhism’s Relation to Christianity .

As Lockwood goes on to show, there exist especially in the field of Buddhism many respectable scholars —the most critical, in fact—who will contend either that Christ was a historical figure who had studied Buddhism or that he is a mythical composite significantly dependent upon Buddhism. As Lockwood demonstrates, New Testament scholars in general remain uninformed in studies of the broader milieu in which the Christian effort originated. Hence, while their criterion for a scholar to be “respectable” is the unscientific and uncritical acceptance of Church doctrine and history, we would define “respectable” scholars as those who look outside of the Bible and possess a more complete picture of world at the time, particularly the very many potential and probable influences on Christian origins, including and especially Buddhism.

A longstanding complaint in the field of Buddhist studies, is, in fact, the seemingly willful ignorance of these external influences and the derogation of those who have raised them as “disrespectable” and “non-scholars.” In other words, the field of NT scholarship has been set apart in an arrogant bubble of untouchability, as divinely unique as its subject. That barrier, however, is falling, and the denigration of comparative-religion scholars and mythicists as “unrespectable” needs to be tossed away.