Notes on Mythicism

Did Jesus exist? Nearly a century ago, Edward Carpenter wrote, "[A]s to the person of Jesus, there is no certainty at all that he ever existed..." (Carpenter 1921, 258) "How do we know Jesus ever existed?" To this question, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart answered, "The testimony, both Christian and non-Christian, is more than sufficient to lay to rest any idea that Jesus, in fact, never existed." (McDowell and Stewart 1980, 71) John Dominic Crossan claimed that "Jesus' death by execution under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical can ever be." (Crossan 1995, 5) Mills, however, thinks Jesus probably didn't exist. (Mills 2006, 35) Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy wrote a book exploring this topic. They wrote,

The Jesus story does have all the hallmarks of a myth, so could it be that that is exactly what it is? After all, no one has read the newly discovered Gnostic gospels and taken their fantastic stories as literally true; they are readily seen as myths. It is only familiarity and cultural prejudice that prevent us from seeing the New Testament gospels in the same light. If those gospels had also been lost to us and only recently discovered, who would read these tales for the first time and believe they were historical accounts of a man born of a virgin, who had walked on water and returned from the dead? (Freke and Gandy [1999] 2000, 9)

Freke and Gandy, according to one author, made "a compelling case that the original Christians were ... gnostics and that the story of Jesus was invented by Hellenistic Jews ... as a mystery play patterned after the Osiris/Dionysus mystery cults, and was not to be taken literally." (Barker 2008, 272) As they theorized, "Jews expected the Messiah to be a historical figure who literally came to rescue his people. So, if the Jewish Osiris-Dionysus was to be convincingly portrayed as the Messiah, the myth would have to be recast as a historical drama." (Freke and Gandy [1999] 2000, 199) The renowned Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, on the other hand, wrote that "the claim that Jesus was simply made up falters on ever ground." (Callahan 2014, 12)

Ehrman's best argument, in my opinion, follows:

What if a saying or deed attributed to Jesus ... does not obviously support a Christian cause, or even goes against it? A tradition of this kind would evidently not have been made up by a Christian. Why, then, would it be preserved in the tradition? Perhaps because it really happened that way. "Dissimilar" traditions, that is, those that do not support a clear Christian agenda, or that appear to work against it, are difficult to explain unless they are authentic. They are more likely to be historical. (Ehrman 1999, 92)

As Tim Callahan put it, "one criterion for testing the validity of an ancient document is the criterion of embarrassment; i.e., people don't generally go out of their way to fabricate fictions that place their heroes in a bad light." (Callahan 2014, 16) For example: "If it is hard to imagine a Christian inventing the story of Jesus' baptism, since this could be taken to mean that he was John's subordinate, then it is more likely that the event actually happened." (Ehrman 1999, 93) The baptism account is believable for an even more compelling reason. It was, according to Professor Randel Helms, "a troubling fact." He explained, "Ordinarily, John's baptism stood as a sign that one had repented of sin"! (Helms 1988, 29 & 30) This, of course, would not have been made up by Christians who believed in Jesus' sinlessness. Another tradition that Ehrman strongly doubts would have been invented is the one about Jesus' hometown. "Jesus is said to have come from Nazareth in all four Gospels," Ehrman explained. "[I]t is difficult to imagine why Christians would have wanted to make the tradition up ... If you wanted to speak about a powerful Messiah of Israel, surely you'd have him come from ... Jerusalem ... or possibly Bethlehem." Ehrman concluded, "There is little doubt that the tradition of Jesus coming from Nazareth is so firmly entrenched in the tradition precisely because it's historically accurate." Lastly, a particularly compelling example is the tradition about Jesus' father:

About the only thing said about Joseph in the Gospels, outside the birth narratives, is that he was a common laborer ... The Greek word used to describe his profession is tekton ... [A] tekton was a lower-class, blue collar worker ... It is hard to imagine why Christians would have wanted to make up this tradition. (Ehrman 1999, 98 & 99)

In addition to Ehrman's logic, the history of bible scholarship should serve as a warning to any author who wants to challenge the belief that Jesus existed. As historian Michael Grant reported,

[F]rom the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that ... all tales of (Jesus') appearance upon earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was compared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods ... More convincing refutations of the Christ-myth hypothesis can be derived from an appeal to method. In the first place, Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of the deaths and rebirths of mythical gods seems so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit. But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned ... [M]odern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' - or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary. (Grant 1977, 199 & 200)

Freke and Gandy claimed that "Paul's Jesus is the mystical dying and resurrecting godman of the Gnostics," not a historical figure. However, their case is flawed for a couple of reasons. When promoting a dubious thesis, it is essential for the proponent(s) to acknowledge and refute all the data that could undermine the thesis. They wrote, "Paul's Christ …is a timeless mythical figure." This thesis is, perhaps, fatally weakened by the passage in 1 Thessalonians (2:14 & 15 KJV) where Paul says that "the Jews … killed the Lord Jesus." Freke and Gandy do not comment on this verse and only mention it in a reference note. (Freke and Gandy [1999] 2000, 151, 163, & 293) Happily, Freke and Gandy do mention Galatians 1:19 where Paul wrote that he saw "James the Lord's brother." (KJV) This verse is likely the strongest piece of evidence that Jesus existed; as Tim Callahan commented, "I do find the fact that Paul refers to James as 'the Lord's brother'…, a clear indication that Jesus was a real person." (Callahan 2014, 13) Attempting to explain the verse away, Freke and Gandy wrote that "[i]n both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, Jesus calls his followers his 'brothers' without inferring that they are his blood family." They proceeded to cite an apocryphal Gnostic gospel that said that James was the Lord's brother in "a purely spiritual sense." The authors then, inexcusably, move on to another topic without addressing the datum that the tradition about Jesus having a brother named James is multiply attested. Mark said that Jesus had blood brothers and that one of them was named James. (Mark 6:3) Perhaps I'm expecting too much from what the authors admitted is "a popular book". What makes me reluctant to forgive is that Freke and Gandy gave the impression that their work was based on first-rate scholarship. Recall how Mills claimed that all the information in his book was accessible in the books at the library. Freke and Gandy make an even stronger claim: "[A]lthough this book makes extraordinary claims, it is not just entertaining fantasy or sensational speculation. It is firmly based upon the available historical sources and the latest scholarly research." (Freke and Gandy [1999] 2000, 2, 3 & 152, emphasis added) While this may be technically true, it doesn't mean that the book is in any way scholarly. The relegating of a mention of a relevant verse to an end note looks suspiciously underhanded. The complete silence about other inconvenient facts would be unforgivable not just for a scholarly tome but for a popularization as well.

Concerning the "mythicist" position, Professor of Theology John Hick said in 1985 that it "goes back, I suppose, some one hundred and fifty years and has not been persuasive to more than a very small minority of those who have studied the matter carefully." He advised the secular humanist movement, "Don't identify too closely with this kind of eccentric view. For the theory that Jesus never existed is not really a very probable one." (Hoffmann and Larue 1986, 212) Mills, Freke, Gandy and the makers of the film "The God Who Wasn't There" have, of course, behaved contrary to Hick's advice. Richard Dawkins believes that Jesus probably existed. (Dawkins [2006] 2008, 122) Why do some atheists endorse the opposite view? In denying the historicity of Jesus they likely have more to explain away than if they accepted it. (Unless, of course, they just avoid the tough issues.) It's difficult to understand why, "in recent years, there has been increasing attention given to the theory that Jesus never existed…" (Callahan 2014, 10).