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Historicity of Jesus - Jesus as myth

Historicity of Jesus - Jesus as myth: Encyclopedia II - Historicity of Jesus - Jesus as myth

Some scholars argue that Jesus may never have existed outside of the mythological realm at all; in support of this claim, they cite a lack of detailed contemporary accounts of Jesus' life from sources other than Jesus' followers, insufficient physical evidence, and similarities between early Christian writings and many contemporary mythological accounts. Perhaps most prolific of these Biblical scholars disputing the historical existence of Jesus is the professor of German George Albert Wells. However, currently the position that Jesus never ...

Historicity of Jesus: Encyclopedia II - Historicity of Jesus - Jesus as myth

Historicity of Jesus - Jesus as myth

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Historicity of Jesus - Jesus and syncretism

The existence of Gnosticism and various mystery religions with similarities to Christianity has led the mythological school to suggest that Christianity was strongly influenced by these, essentially building a mystery religion on the foundation of a Judaic tradition (syncretism). This would have included linking the two through Jesus' attempts to fulfill Old Testament prophecies. More generally, it would have included mythologizing a Jewish leader into a Son of God, and a representative of wisdom and knowledge.

Some of the most well-known early adherents of the mythological school include Voltaire, Friedrich Engels, and David Strauss (1808-1874), who was the most intellectually influential early mythologist. Strauss accepted that Jesus had existed, but believed the miraculous aspects of the Gospel accounts to be mythical. According to the Slovenian scholar Anton Strle, Nietzsche lost his faith in Christianity as a result of reading Strauss' book Leben Jesu. Another important mythologist was Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879-1959), a philosopher and a consistent defender of the thesis that Jesus did not exist.

Another integral part of this view is the idea the early Christians were docetic - that Christ was a spiritual being rather than flesh and blood. Author G.A. Wells says regarding the New Testament:

"It is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way—as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion."

During the first and second centuries BC, Hellenic philosophy merged with various minor deities to produce mystery religions, in which a Life-death-rebirth deity was used as an allegory for the search for wisdom. Such religions quickly replaced or absorbed local religions and became the dominant beliefs in many places throughout the Mediterranean, with the resulting variations of the central god-man figure becoming known as Osiris-Dionysus.

Some scholars, most notably Martin A. Larson, who somewhat contradictingly hails from an evangelical background, and more recently Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, who wrote The Jesus Mysteries, think that Jesus was one of the forms of Osiris-Dionysus. CNN's David Dodson, in a review of their book, however, noted that "while the authors discuss many examples of elements of Osiris/Dionysus in the Jesus story, they virtually ignore the more direct ties to Jewish tradition and prophecy. This oversight undermines the credibility of many of their arguments, and could have the tendency to mislead the novice reader in this subject" [7]. On the other hand, the Canberra Times said

"The theory is not new. For two centuries at least, scholars have been aware of the intriguing parallels between the accounts of Jesus' life and that of preceding and contemporaneous figures such as Osiris, Dionysus, and Mithras. What is new is the powerful scholarship brought to the issue by authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in The Jesus Mysteries, just published in Australia. The result, which draws strongly on the Gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, is so persuasive that it is doubtful whether theological scholarship will ever be the same."

A recent book, The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light (2004), by professor, priest, and religious writer Tom Harpur, discusses another possible origin, based partly on the writings of Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Egyptologist Gerald Massey. Massey's The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ: A Lecture, published in 1880, explores the similarity between what has been written about Jesus and what has been written about Jehoshua Ben-Pandira, who "may have been born about the year 120 B.C." From page 2 of the lecture: "... according to the Babylonian Gemara to the Mishna of Tract 'Shabbath', this Jehoshua, the son of Pandira and Stada, was stoned to death as a wizard, in the city of Lud, or Lydda, and afterwards crucified by being hanged on a tree, on the eve of the Passover. ..." See Yeshu.

Historicity of Jesus - Other views

Another persistent theory is that Jesus' existence is based on a whisper campaign to expel the Roman rulers, originally intending to portray Jesus as a revolutionary leader rather than as a purely spiritual savior.^{[citation needed]}