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The Christ Myth Theory

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1Heidegger1!

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Theoretical Agnostic / Pragmatic Atheist
I just went back to the Wikipedia page on the Christ myth theory, which I haven't looked at in years, to find it is basically being portrayed as analogous to Young Earth Creationism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory . And, Internet Infidels/Secular Web gets a mention:

Ehrman notes that "the mythicists have become loud, and thanks to the Internet they've attracted more attention".[380] Within a few years of the inception of the World Wide Web (c. 1990), mythicists such as Earl Doherty began to present their argument to a larger public via the internet.[note 35] Doherty created the website The Jesus Puzzle in 1996,[web 24] while the organization Internet Infidels has featured the works of mythicists on their website[381] and mythicism has been mentioned on several popular news sites.[382]
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Since its resurgence in the 1970's, proponents of the Christ Myth Theory have only managed to publish one peer reviewed book on the topic, "On The Historicity Of Jesus" by Dr. Richard Carrier, with the footnote that this was published by Sheffield, who also published Thomas Brodie's mythicist autobiography, so they seem to like that sort of thing. The only related peer reviewed publication was by Dr. Raphael Lataster, arguing for Jesus Agnosticism. I have interviewed Richard before and find his argument rigorous and plausible, though I ultimately disagree with mythicism on interpretive grounds.

What do others think of Jesus Mythicism? Do you find it plausible, or finge/crank? Would anyone be interested in discussing the recent Loftus/Price mythicist book Varieties of Jesus Mythicism: Did He Even Exist.

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I realize I'm raising this in the context of Internet Infidels / Secular Web, where Richard used to work, and he has a significant online following, so there may be some interesting discussions to be had!
 
Politesse said:
1Heidegger1! said:
Do you find it plausible, or finge/crank?
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Those aren't necessarily non-overlapping categories.
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True, I find it fringe, and yet plausible.

I think Carrier makes a compelling argument that there is definitely influence here from Pagan Dying/Rising God mythology (see his post https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13890 ). Another good point he has is the Rank-Raglan mythotype, that if we put the names of figures in a hat that are as heavily mythologized as Jesus, the likelihood of drawing the name of an historical figure is at best 1/3.

I also don't feel the historicist's "go to" arguments like the "James, the brother of the Lord" passage, or the seed of David passage in Paul are particularly problematic for mythicism. With the former, Carrier is right that "James" in Paul could simply be referring to a non-apostolic baptized Christian, not a blood brother of Jesus, and for the latter, as Covington pointed out to Carrier, we have an analogy to magically preserved sperm in Zoroastrianism (which the Christians seem to have been using anyway), so that objection doesn't really work either.

I disagree with Carrier on interpretive grounds since the message the first Christians were trying to sell makes far more sense from a historicist perspective than a mythicist one. I try to outline my argument on the Internet Infidels/Secular Web "The Secular Frontier" blog in this post with embedded links here: https://secularfrontier.infidels.or...ast-about-mythicism-atonement-and-gnosticism/ . But yes, mathematically in terms of prior probability, I think Carrier has a better argument than the other historicism arguments I've seen out there like Bart Ehrman's.

It's not important to me from a personal point of view, since Christianity is not more likely true if Jesus existed. It's all just ancient superstition however you paint the portrait of Jesus, mythical or historical.
 
1Heidegger1! said:
I just went back to the Wikipedia page on the Christ myth theory, which I haven't looked at in years, to find it is basically being portrayed as analogous to Young Earth Creationism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory .
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Also N.B.:

Current discussion topics:
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Christ_myth_theory#Title
  2. The Hypocrisy Of Dr. Bart Ehrman On The Historicity Of Jesus & comments @
 
1Heidegger1! said:
It's not important to me from a personal point of view, since Christianity is not more likely true if Jesus existed. It's all just ancient superstition however you paint the portrait of Jesus, mythical or historical.
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^This.

It seems like a completely pointless discussion of things we do not, and probably never can have, sufficient evidence to determine; And even if we were able to find such evidence, it would have exactly zero impact on anything at all.

Finding out that there really was a reporter for a major newspaper in the twentieth century called Clark Kent, who was adopted as a baby by a mid-western farming couple, and had colleagues called Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, would be of very minor interest. Nothing about such a discovery would really matter.

Now, proof that a person could leap tall buildings in a single bound, was more powerful than a locomotive, or was faster than a speeding bullet: That would be interesting. But such proof would remain interesting whether or not there was a real Clark Kent.

Jesus historicism or mythicism is futile. There were people in Nazareth in the first century CE. Some were undoubtedly carpenters. Did one such have a son called Jesus? Who cares? There were doubtless plenty of mid-western farmers called Kent in the early twentieth century, and it would be unremarkable if one had adopted an infant. That doesn’t add or subtract anything from the Superman stories.
 
dbz said:
1Heidegger1! said:
I just went back to the Wikipedia page on the Christ myth theory, which I haven't looked at in years, to find it is basically being portrayed as analogous to Young Earth Creationism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory .
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Also N.B.:

Current discussion topics:
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Christ_myth_theory#Title
  2. The Hypocrisy Of Dr. Bart Ehrman On The Historicity Of Jesus & comments @
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Thanks for sharing the video. With all the Ehrman video cross-referencing it must have taken a long time to put together unless he had a team working on it. Yes, Carrier says he was disappointed with Ehrman because he had hoped Ehrman would have put forth a much better case in favor of historicity than he did in "Did Jesus Exist?" For me,, one point Ehrman could have made is that while Carrier thinks Jesus paid our sin debt by being crucified by demons in outer space and was never on earth, then why does Luke not have a sin debt atonement interpretation of the cross? Ehrman comments:

It is easy to see Luke’s own distinctive view by considering what he has to say in the book of Acts, where the apostles give a number of speeches in order to convert others to the faith. What is striking is that in none of these instances (look, e.g., in chapters 3, 4, 13), do the apostles indicate that Jesus’ death brings atonement for sins. It is not that Jesus’ death is unimportant. It’s extremely important for Luke. But not as an atonement. Instead, Jesus death is what makes people realize their guilt before God (since he died even though he was innocent). Once people recognize their guilt, they turn to God in repentance, and then he forgives their sins. see: https://ehrmanblog.org/did-luke-have-a-doctrine-of-the-atonement-mailbag-september-24-2017/
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In the link I gave above I argue that this Lukan model of non sin debt atonement is actually what we see in Paul and Mark, so mythicism is wrong about the meaning of the central event of the religion (the meaning of the crucifixion), and so thematically Jesus probably died on earth because the main idea doesn't make sense from the celestial Jesus point of view.
 
1Heidegger1! said:
dbz said:
1Heidegger1! said:
I argue that this Lukan model of non sin debt atonement is actually what we see in Paul and Mark, so mythicism is wrong about the meaning of the central event of the religion (the meaning of the crucifixion), and so thematically Jesus probably died on earth because the main idea doesn't make sense from the celestial Jesus point of view.
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Per Kimbell, John (2014). The Atonement in Lukan Theology. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4438-6856-3.
• CHAPTER TWO – THE NEW COVENANT SACRIFICE @ https://www.google.com/books/editio...QBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA18&printsec=frontcover
When attention is given to the Old Testament ideas standing behind Luke’s account, it becomes evident that Jesus is interpreting his death as a sacrifice that atones for the sins of God’s people so that they might enter a new eschatological covenant with God.
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Does your Lukan model of non sin debt atonement derive from "the sins of God’s people" ?
 
Per John MacDonald:
Per Carrier @ comment-31255 (3 October 2022) "Open Thread On the Historicity of Jesus".
Modern theology is irrelevant. To explain the origins of Christianity you have to work from their theology, not someone else’s. For example, Hebrews 9 is an accurate and actual representation of the original Christian atonement theory that formed the religion. And it matches very closely Jewish atonement theology generally from the time, as one would expect. That is why this is what I discuss in OHJ. Everything there is based on what actual ancient Christians and Jews said, as interpreted historically, not through the lens of modern apologetics. How modern Christians conceptualize crucifixion theology has no bearing on this question.
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dbz said:
1Heidegger1! said:
dbz said:
1Heidegger1! said:
I argue that this Lukan model of non sin debt atonement is actually what we see in Paul and Mark, so mythicism is wrong about the meaning of the central event of the religion (the meaning of the crucifixion), and so thematically Jesus probably died on earth because the main idea doesn't make sense from the celestial Jesus point of view.
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Per Kimbell, John (2014). The Atonement in Lukan Theology. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4438-6856-3.
• CHAPTER TWO – THE NEW COVENANT SACRIFICE @ https://www.google.com/books/editio...QBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA18&printsec=frontcover
When attention is given to the Old Testament ideas standing behind Luke’s account, it becomes evident that Jesus is interpreting his death as a sacrifice that atones for the sins of God’s people so that they might enter a new eschatological covenant with God.
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Does your Lukan model of non sin debt atonement derive from "the sins of God’s people" ?
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As with anything else in biblical studies regarding the New Testament, the evidence is often ambiguous and can be taken a number of ways. I find Ehrman's interpretation of Luke's crucifixion model compelling as he outlines it in Misquoting Jesus and The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. It fits nicely with the ancient understanding of the "turning of the mirror" imagery we see with the death of Socrates in the Phaedo ("let us offer a rooster to Asclepius") and elsewhere. I outline all of this in the article I linked to. This reading of Ehrman was current as of his 2017 blog post I linked to, and fits perfectly with the "father forgive them" statement of the Lukan crucified Jesus.
 
dbz said:
Per John MacDonald:
Per Carrier @ comment-31255 (3 October 2022) "Open Thread On the Historicity of Jesus".
Modern theology is irrelevant. To explain the origins of Christianity you have to work from their theology, not someone else’s. For example, Hebrews 9 is an accurate and actual representation of the original Christian atonement theory that formed the religion. And it matches very closely Jewish atonement theology generally from the time, as one would expect. That is why this is what I discuss in OHJ. Everything there is based on what actual ancient Christians and Jews said, as interpreted historically, not through the lens of modern apologetics. How modern Christians conceptualize crucifixion theology has no bearing on this question.
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As I have discussed with Carrier in the past when I interviewed him for II/SW, his "sin debt payment" interpretation of the cross has some major flaws.

For one thing, as he himself admits, sin debt atonement is logically incoherent because it doesn't, for instance, serve justice to punish an innocent child in Africa for the crimes of a felon in Chicago. That's the opposite of justice! Moreover, as Dr. McGrath has repeatedly and compellingly shown along with other progressive Christian thinkers, that "sin debt payment" interpretation as God demanding justice because he can't forgive is completely idiosyncratic in a Jewish context because if there is one thing the God of the Hebrew scriptures can and does do, it's forgive.

Dr. Fredriksen has compellingly shown that Paul was not divorced from Judaism but thoroughly Jewish to the end. To say Paul, highly educated in Judaism and from the birthplace of the Stoic enlightenment, would have as his core belief something utterly incoherent and fundamentally un-Jewish at such a foundational level is problematic. To maintain the penal substitution interpretation of atonement you have to believe the original Jesus movement had at its foundation a principle that was completely logically incoherent and utterly foreign to the basic understanding of the forgiving Jewish God.

Carrier would have to outline a highly sophisticated argument to overcome these prior existing contextual interpretive hurdles. He certainly doesn't provide such a defense in his scholarly monograph On The Historicity Of Jesus or his popular trade book Jesus From Outer Space. As Gordon Wenham shows regarding Christ's sacrifice and the book of Hebrews, the Levitical background of Hebrews shows that the sacrifice of the one animal is meant to purify the location so God can be present amidst a sinful people. The other Levitical animal here, scapegoat that the sins are placed upon, is not killed, but in fact released into the wilderness, so this isn't a model that can be used to prooftext Christ's death as being responsible for the sin debt being wiped clean.
 
I recall a Christ mythicist from highschool, the only other one I've met in the flesh. I think about her, wishing that she had not been essentially dragged off to Texas by her dad and forced to marry and be "cowed".

Eventually her point sank in even if it took almost a decade, and exposure to these forums: a hundred percent of the cultists came about in the timeline that would be explained well by a Greek style play presented as reality.

Whether Jesus existed or not, the only contemporary accounts are accounts about the cultists and what they believed.

Trusting the documents OF a cult ABOUT the cult is about as reasonable as picking up a Mormon text and saying it's an argument for the historicity of Xenu.

We have 2000 years of vigorous book burnings and book HIDING going on from the organization that grew up from those tiny cults.

There's just no evidence for it.

Personally I think it has more value as a tragedy and allegory and work of fiction anyway.

From this lens as "fiction but one which contains truth", we can glean much: a number of decent fables, some ethical paradigms with good staying power, and a number of good imprecations against being a greedy fuck which I managed to learn (and more importantly come to understand) in spite of rigorous Republican upbringing.
 
FYI: Cho presents the argument made by Ehrman per Lukan atonement theology contra Kimbell et al.

• Cho, Jeung Un (2020). "Studies by Bart D. Ehrman". A text-critical study on the Lukan account of the Lord’s Supper (Luke 22:17-20) : the shorter reading and its implications. Stellenbosch University: Thesis (MTh). p. 20, § 2.4.4. Online PDF is available.
Ehrman makes a specific discussion about Acts 20:28, which is often brought up as an example of Lukan atonement theology (Kimbell, 2014:53-58; et al.). Contra arguments associating Acts 20:28 with the Pauline theology of atonement while focusing on the phrase περιεποιήσατο διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου, he argues περιεποιήσατο does not imply Jesus’ self-giving act as an atoning sacrifice, but God’s action using Jesus’ blood to acquire the church.
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Jarhyn said:
I recall a Christ mythicist from highschool, the only other one I've met in the flesh. I think about her, wishing that she had not been essentially dragged off to Texas by her dad and forced to marry and be "cowed".

Eventually her point sank in even if it took almost a decade, and exposure to these forums: a hundred percent of the cultists came about in the timeline that would be explained well by a Greek style play presented as reality.

Whether Jesus existed or not, the only contemporary accounts are accounts about the cultists and what they believed.

Trusting the documents OF a cult ABOUT the cult is about as reasonable as picking up a Mormon text and saying it's an argument for the historicity of Xenu.

We have 2000 years of vigorous book burnings and book HIDING going on from the organization that grew up from those tiny cults.

There's just no evidence for it.

Personally I think it has more value as a tragedy and allegory and work of fiction anyway.

From this lens as "fiction but one which contains truth", we can glean much: a number of decent fables, some ethical paradigms with good staying power, and a number of good imprecations against being a greedy fuck which I managed to learn (and more importantly come to understand) in spite of rigorous Republican upbringing.
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I appreciate Christian origins from a secular philosophical standpoint. For instance, I appreciate Jesus redefining Love/Agape from love of God and neighbor to include love of enemy. This helps us move beyond the eros of glory/honor obsessed Achilles to bestowing value where even those who are sometimes seen as undesirable like widow, orphan, stranger and enemy have full worth. That was Nietzsche's positive takeaway from Jesus in the Antichrist: the loving Jesus vs the blaming Christ. It's just a healthy approach to life if you strip away the magic/superstition.

It can certainly get heated debating with mythicists. Ehrman said of Carrier that:

Carrier wrote a very long and detailed response which was meant to show, as is his wont, that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have been asked several times by several people to respond to his response, but I know where that will go – it will take a response twice as long as his to show why his views are problematic, he will reply with a reply that is four times as long to show I don’t know what I’m talking about, I will respond with a response twice as long as that to show that I do, he will rejoin with …. (Ehrman, 2016, ehrmanblog)
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1Heidegger1! said:
Jarhyn said:
I recall a Christ mythicist from highschool, the only other one I've met in the flesh. I think about her, wishing that she had not been essentially dragged off to Texas by her dad and forced to marry and be "cowed".

Eventually her point sank in even if it took almost a decade, and exposure to these forums: a hundred percent of the cultists came about in the timeline that would be explained well by a Greek style play presented as reality.

Whether Jesus existed or not, the only contemporary accounts are accounts about the cultists and what they believed.

Trusting the documents OF a cult ABOUT the cult is about as reasonable as picking up a Mormon text and saying it's an argument for the historicity of Xenu.

We have 2000 years of vigorous book burnings and book HIDING going on from the organization that grew up from those tiny cults.

There's just no evidence for it.

Personally I think it has more value as a tragedy and allegory and work of fiction anyway.

From this lens as "fiction but one which contains truth", we can glean much: a number of decent fables, some ethical paradigms with good staying power, and a number of good imprecations against being a greedy fuck which I managed to learn (and more importantly come to understand) in spite of rigorous Republican upbringing.
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I appreciate Christian origins from a secular philosophical standpoint. For instance, I appreciate Jesus redefining Love/Agape from love of God and neighbor to include love of enemy. This helps us move beyond the eros of glory/honor obsessed Achilles to bestowing value where even those who are sometimes seen as undesirable like widow, orphan, stranger and enemy have full worth. That was Nietzsche's positive takeaway from Jesus in the Antichrist: the loving Jesus vs the blaming Christ. It's just a healthy approach to life if you strip away the magic/superstition.

It can certainly get heated debating with mythicists. Ehrman said of Carrier that:

Carrier wrote a very long and detailed response which was meant to show, as is his wont, that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have been asked several times by several people to respond to his response, but I know where that will go – it will take a response twice as long as his to show why his views are problematic, he will reply with a reply that is four times as long to show I don’t know what I’m talking about, I will respond with a response twice as long as that to show that I do, he will rejoin with …. (Ehrman, 2016, ehrmanblog)
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I mean, fuck, I'm a mythicist and I'm a fucking wizard. I am going to point out that I do absolutely think that parts of this story are the result of someone the original author knew, being observed living his life.

It sounds like the kind of trouble I would get into if I was born at the turn of the age, myself.

Even so, the majority of it is a work of fiction, and was spread around originally as such. The cult only likely ever saw this fiction is how I see it, and it has value moreso as fiction.

There's value in a good piece of fiction. I mean shit, my favorite author is a Mormon! And a fiction author.
 
Jarhyn said:
1Heidegger1! said:
Jarhyn said:
I recall a Christ mythicist from highschool, the only other one I've met in the flesh. I think about her, wishing that she had not been essentially dragged off to Texas by her dad and forced to marry and be "cowed".

Eventually her point sank in even if it took almost a decade, and exposure to these forums: a hundred percent of the cultists came about in the timeline that would be explained well by a Greek style play presented as reality.

Whether Jesus existed or not, the only contemporary accounts are accounts about the cultists and what they believed.

Trusting the documents OF a cult ABOUT the cult is about as reasonable as picking up a Mormon text and saying it's an argument for the historicity of Xenu.

We have 2000 years of vigorous book burnings and book HIDING going on from the organization that grew up from those tiny cults.

There's just no evidence for it.

Personally I think it has more value as a tragedy and allegory and work of fiction anyway.

From this lens as "fiction but one which contains truth", we can glean much: a number of decent fables, some ethical paradigms with good staying power, and a number of good imprecations against being a greedy fuck which I managed to learn (and more importantly come to understand) in spite of rigorous Republican upbringing.
Click to expand...

I appreciate Christian origins from a secular philosophical standpoint. For instance, I appreciate Jesus redefining Love/Agape from love of God and neighbor to include love of enemy. This helps us move beyond the eros of glory/honor obsessed Achilles to bestowing value where even those who are sometimes seen as undesirable like widow, orphan, stranger and enemy have full worth. That was Nietzsche's positive takeaway from Jesus in the Antichrist: the loving Jesus vs the blaming Christ. It's just a healthy approach to life if you strip away the magic/superstition.

It can certainly get heated debating with mythicists. Ehrman said of Carrier that:

Carrier wrote a very long and detailed response which was meant to show, as is his wont, that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have been asked several times by several people to respond to his response, but I know where that will go – it will take a response twice as long as his to show why his views are problematic, he will reply with a reply that is four times as long to show I don’t know what I’m talking about, I will respond with a response twice as long as that to show that I do, he will rejoin with …. (Ehrman, 2016, ehrmanblog)
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I mean, fuck, I'm a mythicist and I'm a fucking wizard. I am going to point out that I do absolutely think that parts of this story are the result of someone the original author knew, being observed living his life.

It sounds like the kind of trouble I would get into if I was born at the turn of the age, myself.

Even so, the majority of it is a work of fiction, and was spread around originally as such. The cult only likely ever saw this fiction is how I see it, and it has value moreso as fiction.

There's value in a good piece of fiction. I mean shit, my favorite author is a Mormon! And a fiction author.
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There's so many different ways to interpret Jesus. Some of the more popular are apocalyptic prophet, charismatic healer, Cynic philosopher, Jewish messiah, prophet of social change, and rabbi. More recently, we can add Jesus as mythical figure placed in human history (like Hercules). I think mythicism is a perfectly reasonable portrait, is rigorously argued by Price, Carrier, Fitzgerald, Godfrey, etc. I disagree with it because it depends on the penal substitution interpretation of the cross, which I disagree with as an interpretive model. I don't think there was any theology originally connected to the cross. That came later. Our first gospel Mark has an interesting story of the disciples getting violent at the arrest. It's unlikely Mark would have invented the story of the disciples being violent. Also, they wouldn't have gotten violent if it was part of the plan for Jesus to die. But who knows? Maybe mythicists are right, or maybe historicists are. I think Jesus existed, but is basically lost behind endless layers of propaganda and magic.
 
The Hebrew scriptures appear to be awash in atoning blood:

• Godfrey, Neil (4 January 2019). "Why a Saviour Had to Suffer and Die? Martyrdom Beliefs in Pre-Christian Times". Vridar.
The blood of the martyr atones for the sin of his people -- Deut. 32.43; II Mac. 7.37 f; IV Mac. 1.11; 6.28 f; 12.7 f; 17.21 f; SB, II, 274 ff; 281 f; MidrHL. on 7.9; MidrPr. on 9.2
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• Godfrey, Neil (15 January 2019). "Salvation through a Saviour's Death -- Another List". Vridar.
[T}he blood of Jewish martyrs was believed to purify and cleanse the nation; the martyrs’ blood led to God’s forgiveness of the sins of the nation and the salvation of all.
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Does your Lukan model of non sin debt atonement derive from "the sins of God’s people" ? (dbz)
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So basically what I'm arguing is Jesus was wrongly put to death because of the sins of the enraged crowd, corrupt religious elite, and crowd placating indifferent to justice Pilate, who are also in all of us to varying degrees. So, the more you hear or read about Jesus and all he said and did, the more you see what a travesty his execution was. God's specially chosen one meant to restore the Davidic throne was given the most horrific possible execution.

As we come to see our guilt in this, we repent and also want the world to change. This happens, for instance, when we look at our society we created and how it trampled on LGBTQ rights with the traditional definition of marriage. This repentance was especially urgent in Jesus' time because they thought the end of the age and judgment was imminent. We see something similar with the death of Socrates where the more we learn about him, the more offended and outraged we are that society put him to death. And this approach works. We no longer execute people for being a nuisance (Socrates the gadfly).

This is what I'm arguing against the penal substitution interpretation, which as I said is logically incoherent and fundamentally un-Jewish.
 
Per Varieties of Jesus Mythicism: Did He Even Exist? (2021).

• Comment by rgprice—3 December 2021—per Widowfield (1 December 2021). "We've Been Published -- Varieties of Jesus Mythicism". Vridar.
I just want to make the following note. I wrote my contribution for this shortly after the publication of Deciphering the Gospels, and before I got deep into the research for the new book I’m working on now. My views have changed significantly since I wrote the contribution for this book. I don’t think what I wrote for this is particularly problematic, but it doesn’t really reflect my current views on the Gospel origins. That’s fine, because I qualified my proposition: “The case I’ve laid out may not be entirely correct in every detail, but what is important here is that nothing about this model is outlandish or even novel.”

I stand by that. I don’t think what I laid out is correct, but it also wasn’t outlandish. For those who haven’t or won’t read it, I basically laid out a case for Mark having been written by an associate of Paul’s and for the other Gospels being derived from Mark through mundane ways and for rather obscure reasons. I would say now that I don’t think the writer of Mark was an associate of Paul’s, and that we have a much better understanding of the motivations behind the writing of Matthew, Luke and John than what I understood when I wrote that. I now view Matthew and Luke as having been derived from Marcion’s Gospel and written in opposition to Marcionism. John appears to be a “Gnostic”/Valentinian Gospel that was appropriated and revised into an orthodox form. So this views Matthew, Luke and John as appropriations of “heretical Gospels”. I still view Mark as the first of the recognizable Gospels, preceding Marcion’s Gospel.
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1Heidegger1! said:
I just went back to the Wikipedia page on the Christ myth theory, which I haven't looked at in years, to find it is basically being portrayed as analogous to Young Earth Creationism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory . And, Internet Infidels/Secular Web gets a mention:

Ehrman notes that "the mythicists have become loud, and thanks to the Internet they've attracted more attention".[380] Within a few years of the inception of the World Wide Web (c. 1990), mythicists such as Earl Doherty began to present their argument to a larger public via the internet.[note 35] Doherty created the website The Jesus Puzzle in 1996,[web 24] while the organization Internet Infidels has featured the works of mythicists on their website[381] and mythicism has been mentioned on several popular news sites.[382]
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Since its resurgence in the 1970's, proponents of the Christ Myth Theory have only managed to publish one peer reviewed book on the topic, "On The Historicity Of Jesus" by Dr. Richard Carrier, with the footnote that this was published by Sheffield, who also published Thomas Brodie's mythicist autobiography, so they seem to like that sort of thing. The only related peer reviewed publication was by Dr. Raphael Lataster, arguing for Jesus Agnosticism. I have interviewed Richard before and find his argument rigorous and plausible, though I ultimately disagree with mythicism on interpretive grounds.

What do others think of Jesus Mythicism? Do you find it plausible, or finge/crank? Would anyone be interested in discussing the recent Loftus/Price mythicist book Varieties of Jesus Mythicism: Did He Even Exist.

View attachment 38791

I realize I'm raising this in the context of Internet Infidels / Secular Web, where Richard used to work, and he has a significant online following, so there may be some interesting discussions to be had!
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When I was asked to contribute a chapter to this book I was relieved that I did not have to argue a case for Jesus mythicism. To me, there is no case to answer: The Jesus of the gospels is recognized as mythical by critical scholars and the Jesus of Paul's letters is a theological construct. Whether there is a historical Jesus behind either the gospels or the letters is impossible to determine because there is no contemporary independent source to confirm the existence of such a person. That state of affairs was explicitly acknowledged by Albert Schweitzer in his detailed book arguing against the mythicists of his day. And reliance upon contemporary independent witnesses is the touchstone of the historical method. (Even where sources are late, historians look for indications that the author was drawing upon sources from the time of the person or event being discussed.)

The problem with trying to make a case for the historical Jesus by trying to imagine what the author of the gospels would or would not have made up (criterion of embarrassment) -- e.g. the disciples getting violent at Jesus' arrest -- is that very many details in those gospels were evidently made up to illustrate some fulfilment of scripture. But more to the point, I think, is if we let ourselves be guided by the normal methods of dating documents, and that means again relying upon independent witnesses. In the case of the canonical gospels, there is no clear cut evidence that anyone knew of them until the mid second century. We can speculate all sorts of reasons that we lack earlier evidence of their existence, but then we are merely trying to explain why we don't have the evidence for what we want to be true.

As for the meaning imputed to the crucifixion of Jesus, among the earliest sources is a range of views. Some spoke of his death as a ransom being paid to "the devil" to release the dead from Hades. Others treated his death the same way some treated the (momentary) death of Isaac (some traditions said Isaac was slain but restored immediately) and the Maccabean martyrs -- the blood atoned for all sins of Israel.

There is also good reason to think that the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark was a careful personification or metaphor for the people of Israel, especially their demise in 70 and even perhaps 135 CE. But one thing is sure: we have no clear cut evidence that anyone had heard of a gospel narrative until the middle of the second century -- and that first evidence comes with Marcion apparently producing his gospel (whether that was based on an earlier gospel we don't know). And once one was known, a cottage industry of producing lots more was begun.

Before then, who knows? We have the Book of Revelation. Perhaps the Ascension of Isaiah.
 
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