Christ Mythicism: a theology for a rational world

Could Christianity survive if there was never an earthly Jesus?

The figure of Jesus Christ looms large over contemporary society. Western culture has been shaped by Christianity, and, as its influence spread across the world, it carried with it knowledge of Jesus and features of Christianity so that now even non-Christian societies and communities celebrate Christmas.

For the vast majority of Christians, and even non-Christians, there is no question whether or not Jesus existed. As far as they are concerned, Jesus’ birth and crucifixion are historical fact, and his resurrection is fundamental to Christian beliefs. More critically, Jesus’ historicity is necessary for the very existence and survival of the most longstanding and perhaps most powerful institution in the modern world, the Christian Church, with all its multifarious branches and offshoots.

Nevertheless, for all this certainty, there is room for doubt, for, apart from the Bible itself, there is no viable evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus.

Historicity versus Mythicism

The general consensus among Biblical historians is that a man called Jesus existed and his teachings began the movement that we now call Christianity. This is called Historicity. Historicity covers a wide range of theories about this historical Jesus ranging from that he was actually God manifest on Earth to that he was just an ordinary man, but an inspiring teacher around whom various legends have accreted. Yet despite the efforts of numerous Biblical scholars, none can agree on who this ordinary man was, what his motivations were, what he actually taught, or what he really did.

In the field of History, the general consensus is usually accepted as the best explanation and description of the past available. However, Biblical scholarship is encumbered by intractable vested interests. As Upton Sinclair put it: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. The vast majority of Biblical scholars are either believing Christians or beholden to Christian institutions for their funding or jobs. Since the very survival of Christianity requires there to have been an historical Jesus, there is little chance they will ever deny his existence and risk not only their current jobs but their future careers.

However, since the mid-19th century, a small but growing number of scholars have doubted that Jesus the man ever existed and propose that he is just a myth. This position is called Mythicism. This stance also covers a wide range of theories from the outright whacky to the vigorously academically tested. Given the cultural environment in which we live, it is the whackiest theories that have gained prominence, especially those championed by Joseph Atwill and the late Dorothy Milne Murdock, better known by her pen name Acharya S.

D.M. Murdock saw many parallels between Jesus and ancient gods of the Middle East, especially the Egyptian god Horus, and claimed that Christianity is a fabricated religion based on an amalgamation of other Middle Eastern myths. Her work has been criticized for what Dr Richard Carrier (see more below) calls ‘Parallelomania’, a tendency to see causality in correlations, even when the correlations are not actually there. There are indeed parallels between the gods of the Middle East and Christianity, but the connection is much more organic than Murdock claimed.

Joseph Atwill’s theory is particularly whacky. He contends that the Roman Emperor Titus, who had put down the Jewish rebellion and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70CE, commissioned the Jewish historian Josephus Flavian (and others) to write the New Testament in order to subvert nationalistic Judaism and turn Jews into amenable pacifists.

My first objection to this theory is that the authors must have been very clever indeed to cover their tracks by weaving so many contradictions into the text. One would expect a synthetic religious text, especially one designed to create peace, to at least have a uniform message in order to avoid all the division and heresies that have followed in the centuries since. One also wonders why a Roman Emperor, a military commander with many successful wars under his belt, would bother to use theology to pacify the Jews when he had much more direct and effective means at his disposal. Nonetheless, there are connections between the histories of Josephus and the New Testament, but the relationship is not so direct.

The Doherty/Carrier Thesis

The theory that Jesus was not an historical figure, but a creation of Christian mythology was first pioneered by German theologians and historians, Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), Albert Kalthoff (1850– 1906) and Arthur Drews (1865–1935). These scholars influenced the first English speaking proponent of Christ Mythicism, the English professor of German, G.A.Wells (1926–2017).

Wells proposed that the earliest existing Christian writings, most notably the authentic epistles of Paul, but also those of Peter and James, and Hebrews, display no knowledge of an historical Jesus who lived and died in the recent decades and who preached, performed miracles and went on trial. Rather, the early Christian epistles present him ‘as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past’. Wells claimed that the Jesus of these earliest Christians was not based on an historical character, but was a pure myth, derived from mystical speculations around the Jewish Wisdom figure.

While Wells later retreated from any claim that Jesus himself never existed, his writings inspired Canadian author Earl Doherty to investigate the question himself. Doherty gained a B.A. with Distinction in Ancient History and Classical Languages (Ancient Greek and Latin) to which he later added a basic knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac. However, he was not able to complete an M.A. due to his health. Nonetheless, he pursued private studies in the origins of Christianity which, after 14 years, resulted in The Jesus Puzzle website and culminated in his book, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?(1999), (which he has since expanded into Jesus Neither God nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus [2009] published by his own imprint, Age of Reason Publications.)

Doherty’s thesis is that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegorical fiction, and that no single identifiable person named Jesus lay at the root of Christian tradition. Rather, he contends that the sacrificial Jesus originated as a myth born out of the dying and rising gods of the mystery religions and the Jewish Wisdom tradition influenced by Neo-Platonism, while his ministry was based on the Galilean preaching tradition. It was only in the 2nd century that belief in an historical Jesus developed among Christian communities.

Dr Richard Carrier received a doctorate in ancient history from Columbia University in 2008. By then he had worked and written extensively for several years in the American atheist movement, notably as editor of the The Secular Web, and had published several articles and books on atheism and ethics including Sense and Goodness without God: A Defence of Metaphysical Naturalism (2005) and Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed (2009).

After his graduation, Carrier was approached by a number of atheists who asked him to evaluate the arguments on both sides of the Mythicism debate. His involvement began with his, mostly but not solely, positive review of The Jesus Puzzle. With the financial support of numerous donors, not all of them atheists, Carrier was then able to devote several years to researching the subject, culminating in his book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014) in which he set out to vigorously and academically test Doherty’s theories. While Carrier disagreed with Doherty on some points, he came to the conclusion that there is a very high probability that, indeed, Jesus never existed and is entirely based in myth.

Christianity as a Jewish Mystery Cult

To make sense of the Doherty/Carrier thesis, we have to go back to the beginnings of agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean where the earliest farmers worshipped local gods whose annual life cycles reflected the rhythms of the agricultural year. Just like the seeds of grain these farmers planted, their gods would die or go into the underworld during the winter and be reborn in the spring.

With the Hellenization of the Middle East, these agricultural myths came into contact with Greek religious beliefs and philosophy which gave them a deeper meaning. The journey of these gods through death and rebirth was re-interpreted to be not just about the death and rebirth of seeds of grain, but about the potential for the human soul to overcome death and be reborn in the next world. These dying and rising gods became more than the gods of local villages, worshipped in order to ensure the survival of the community, but personal saviour gods who could promise their adherents eternal life and were worshipped in secret rituals called Mysteries.

In the meantime, the Jews found themselves at the crossroads of great civilizations and all-conquering empires. Invaded and enslaved again and again, they developed a mythology in which they became the chosen people of their all-powerful god Jehovah. Through his prophets he promised them that he would send a Messiah that would scatter all their enemies and herald the End of Days when the whole world would be destroyed and cleansed of all but Jehovah’s chosen people. When the Messiah repeatedly failed to arrive as predicted, they would return once again to their scriptures looking for secret clues as to when their day would finally come. Through their reading of the Book of Daniel, many believed that time would be around the time we know as the first century CE.

The Temple in Jerusalem was central to the Jewish people, as it was only there that they could practice the annual rites and sacrifices that ensured the survival of the community and their individual salvation. However, their conquerors had little respect for Jehovah as the one true god or his temple. In 167BCE, the Temple was sacked and desecrated by the army of the Seleucid Empire, then, after a brief period of independence under the Hasmonean dynasty, from 63BCE, Palestine was occupied and governed by the Romans. The Jewish priestly class had little choice but to accommodate their polytheistic overlords and collaborate with them. For many Jews, this was an anathema that polluted the Temple and rendered the rites carried out there null and void.

Some Jews developed a theology that would bypass the Temple and give them a direct line to God and their personal salvation. Rather than the annual animal sacrifice, they needed one all-mighty sacrificial victim that would render the sacrifices at the Temple obsolete. What better sacrifice than the son of God himself, and like the dying and rising gods of their neighbours, this perfect sacrifice would die to defeat all sin, rise again and return to the heavens, just as his faithful would.

This theology was revealed to its adherents, like the apostle Paul, through visions and secret codes read into the scriptures. There they found this perfect sacrifice in an existing celestial primordial entity, the archangel Joshua (literally ‘God’s Saviour’), or, as the Hellenised, Greek-speaking Jews called him, Jesus. Through their reading of the scriptures, they came to believe that this Jesus had taken physical form and descended from the highest heaven down to the firmament, the closest heaven to the earth, where Satan and his demons lived. There Jesus tricked the demons into crucifying him, thus bringing about their own defeat, after which he rose from the dead and returned to the highest heaven where, in return for his great sacrifice, God adopted him as his first-born son.

From 66–73CE, in response to a rebellion by the Jews, the Romans ravaged Palestine and destroyed the Temple in 70CE. This gave the Jews an added incentive to find an alternative religious practice. For some this became Rabbinical Judaism, for others it became Christianity. While the Jews clung to their belief in a future Messiah, Christians came to the conclusion that a Messiah that would lead an earthly war against their enemies was not feasible, and instead, concluded that the Messiah would not have his victory on earth but in the heavens, and, indeed, as Jesus, already had.

Eventually, again taking the religious practice of their neighbours as example, Christians wrote stories about Jesus that placed him as a human being on Earth. These stories were meant as allegories with which to gain converts. Once initiated, the converts would learn the cosmic truth behind the earthly parables. However, in the diverse marketplace of religions that was the ancient world, an earthly Jesus would be a much more effective sell than a cosmic one and so, over time, some Christians (dubbed the ‘proto-orthodox’ by Biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman) began to teach that these stories were true and that Jesus had walked as a man on earth. This would also allow the proto-orthodox to claim that their doctrine and authority could be traced back to this earthly Jesus, thus putting them in a strong position to compete with any other Christians proclaiming new revelations coming directly from a celestial Jesus. (See Passion Play: Mark’s Passion Narrative as Allegory.)

By the time the future Emperor Constantine was fighting his rivals for leadership of the Roman empire at the beginning of the 4th century CE, Christianity, although still a minority religion, was widely dispersed and well established in the Roman Empire. During his reign from 306–337CE, Constantine adopted Christianity (while still practising Sun Worship) as one of Rome’s state religions and by 395 CE it had become the only state religion. It so happened that the branch of Christianity Constantine favoured was the proto-orthodox sect. How or why he came to this decision is shrouded in religious hagiography. Most likely he was raised as a proto-orthodox Christian himself, but as a politician he would have also realised that the religion of this minor sect was not only theologically uniform and amenable to centralized authority, but culturally neutral, and thus an ideal vehicle for unifying the vast and diverse Roman Empire.

This gave the proto-orthodox leadership the power and resources to impose their theology on the whole Roman Empire. Over the following millennium or so, the Church fathers managed to suppress all but a few remnants of any alternative version of Christianity, while ensuring that only the records and literature that they favoured would survive, except, as we have only discovered in the last century or so, for a few buried fragments.

The Evidence for Mythicism

The evidence for Mythicism is thoroughly examined in their books by Earl Doherty and Dr Richard Carrier, as well as by David Fitzgerald in his books Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All and Jesus: Mything in Action, and in the extensive writings by Robert M. Price, so I won’t go into it in detail here, except to give you an overview. (You can also find several talks by Carrier, Fitzgerald and Price on my YouTube playlist Essential Mythicism.)

There is no archaeological evidence at all that can be legitimately linked to Jesus. While we have fragments of Roman documents accidentally preserved through time, we have absolutely none that mention Jesus or his crucifixion. Neither do we have any of the family or church records we might expect to have been kept by his family and followers. Defenders of Historicity have therefore had to rely entirely on textual evidence. However, apart from the Bible itself, there is very little such evidence and what there is is of no value at best and dubious at worst.

The most valued text is a paragraph found in Josephus Flavian’s Jewish Antiquities, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, which calls Jesus ‘the Christ’ (the Greek equivalent to the Jewish word ‘Messiah’ and a word which Josephus never used) and basically summarises Luke’s gospel. However, this passage is not in Josephus’ style, is unrelated to its context, and was not noticed until 300 years after the book was written, not even by earlier Christians who had combed Josephus’ histories and criticised him for not mentioning Jesus. In fact, it takes little examination to see that this passage is clearly nothing more than a forged fourth century interpolation. (The text before and after this passage is clearly meant to follow one after the other. Most likely the forger found a random gap at the end of a scroll and decided to ‘correct’ Josephus by adding the passage.)

Another mention in the same book can be found in a long passage about two brothers called James and Jesus, where this Jesus is described as a person ‘who was called the Christ’. However, this story is so different to the one in the gospels, it is obvious this is another Jesus. (Both the names James and Jesus, or Jacob and Joshua in Hebrew, were common names in Palestine, so two pairs of brothers with those names is no great coincidence.) In fact, the passage goes on to name the father of these two brothers as Damneus, not Joseph. This was most likely an accidental scribal insertion of what started out as a marginal note. (When manuscripts were hand copied, if scribes left words out of the text, they would note them in the margins. At the same time, readers of a manuscript might write their own comments in the margin. A scribe copying a text could easily mistake a reader’s comment for words accidentally omitted and ‘reinstate’ them.)

There are only a handful of other texts which are little more than passing mentions of Christians and what they believed: evidence of the existence of Christianity, indeed, but hardly of Jesus Christ. Moreover, most of them are questioned as either changes to or interpolations into the original text. Meanwhile, even though this period is one of the most attested in ancient history, none of the many philosophers and historians who might have written about Jesus even mentioned him. Furthermore, of those histories of the era that do survive, the sections covering this period are suspiciously missing, suggesting that the church suppressed them because they did not mention Jesus.

Jesus in the Gospels

Christians set great store by the gospels as evidence of the existence of Jesus. What better evidence, they ask, than four independent eyewitness accounts? However, the gospels are replete with both historical and physical impossibilities, so from the outset, it is clear that, as witness accounts, they are highly unreliable. Furthermore, there are inconsistencies and vast differences between the gospels, which would indicate that the accounts cannot be of actual events.

Indeed, the gospels never claim to be eyewitness accounts. The closest they come is in the gospel of John where the authors claim to be basing their account on that of an unnamed disciple. (We do not know who actually wrote the gospels. Authors were attributed to them many decades after they were written, but we continue to call the authors by those names as we have no others. All we know is that they were highly educated Greek-speakers who referred to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, as their scriptures.)

In fact, the gospels display meticulous rhetorical tropes and structures that indicate that they are works of polemics in the form of allegorical fiction. Furthermore, Mark’s Jesus himself tells his disciples that he is preaching in parables in order to disguise the hidden truths of his teachings (Mark 4:11–12), again indicating the gospel itself is a parable disguising hidden truths. (See Who invented Jesus? The origins of Mark’s Gospel)

Biblical scholars have long recognised that the first three gospels, known as the Synoptic gospels, are all based on the same sources. In fact, Matthew and Luke are clearly revised versions of the gospel of Mark. While large sections of their gospels were lifted verbatim from Mark, they made changes and added material in order to deliver a different message. While John’s gospel is very different to the first three in content and message, it is evident that he knew the Synoptic gospels and that some of his stories are actual reworkings of or responses to them. (See Jesus and the Naked Man)

In Mark, Jesus never claims to be God, but declares that the End of Days will come within the lifetime of his own disciples. As the End of Days did not come, the evangelists had to adapt Jesus’ message until Mark’s soon-to-come Kingdom of God on Earth, became John’s eternal Kingdom of God in Heaven which can only be reached through a Jesus who loudly proclaims himself God.

The Synoptic gospels also deliver different messages in relation to the preaching of the gospel to gentiles and Jews. While Mark’s gospel is gentile friendly, Matthew clearly states that gentiles can only become Christians if they first conform to Jewish law. Luke, on the other hand, tries to reconcile gentiles and Jews, teaching that the gospel is equally for both, a message he carries through to the Acts of the Apostles. Meanwhile, John is stridently anti-Jewish.

The gospels themselves also reflect the earthly Jesus’ journey from myth to history. Mark’s gospel presents itself as parable which disguises cosmic teachings. Matthew emphasises that the story of Jesus is rooted in Jewish scriptures, where the celestial Jesus originated. Luke is the first gospel to present itself as history, while the gospel of John continually asserts that it is telling what really happened. This trajectory suggests that Jesus was understood as a celestial being when Mark wrote his gospel, by the time Luke was writing, the proto-orthodox church had begun teaching Jesus as historical, while John was written to rebut any lingering doubt that an earthly Jesus ever existed.

Jesus in Acts and the Epistles

Despite their position in the canon, the earliest Christian writings in the New Testament are the epistles, most of which are attributed to the Apostle Paul (although, most scholars agree that only seven of those are authentic). While Christians interpret Paul’s epistles with foreknowledge of the gospels, if his letters are read on their own terms with an open mind, it becomes clear that Paul never wrote about a Jesus who walked the earth, preached and gathered disciples. His Jesus came to him through visions and his reading of Jewish scripture. Even when defending his beliefs, he never resorted to quoting Jesus or his disciples, but instead quoted scripture.

Indeed, many of Jesus’ sayings and teachings found in the gospels can be found in Paul’s epistles, but the trajectory is much more likely to be that the gospel writers derived these from Paul and then gave them a fictional, real-world context. For example, we do find a description of the Eucharist in First Corinthians. However, Paul calls it the Lord’s Supper, not the Last Supper, and his version of it reads as a private vision between him and Jesus rather than a description of a real meal with other people in attendance. (1 Cor. 11:23–26)

Historicists can claim only two instances in Paul’s epistles as evidence that Jesus existed as a living man, both from the letter to the Galatians. In Galatians 4:4 Paul writes that Jesus was ‘born of woman’. However, the correct translation is ‘made of woman’ and is just a passing remark in a discussion in which he is making an analogy between being a son and heir and being a Christian. The passage is clearly metaphorical (though rather obtuse). He never mentions Mary, Joseph or Bethlehem.

The second is in Galatians 1:18–19 in which Paul describes his visit to Jerusalem where he met with Cephas (Peter?) but ‘did not see any other apostle except James the brother of the Lord.’ Again we have to be aware of nuances of translation. Ancient Greek has only a definite article so it could equally be translated as ‘a brother’ or ‘the brother’. And note Paul calls James a brother of ‘the Lord’, not of ‘Jesus’. Nor does he say anything more to or about this James and certainly does not show him the attention or deference due the brother of one’s saviour. In fact, Paul is dismissive, even hostile, towards the Jerusalem church leaders, and is adamant they have no greater authority or knowledge of Jesus than he does. So rather than this James being the biological brother of Jesus, it is much more likely that ‘brother of the Lord’ means no more than ‘baptised Christian’.

Luke must have noticed that Paul never claimed to have known an earthly Jesus and so accounted for it in the Acts of the Apostles with his depiction of Paul’s vision and conversion on the road to Damascus long after Jesus’ death and resurrection. However, Paul never mentioned any such incident in his letters. In fact, most of the stories recounted about Paul in Acts are not in the epistles and, in some cases, Paul actually contradicts Acts. To convey his message of inclusivity, Luke has constructed Acts to present a point by point parallel between Paul, apostle to the gentiles, and Peter, leader of the Jewish church. Moreover, he makes them even greater miracle workers than Jesus himself. This is all indicative that Acts is also a total work of fiction. (See also When did Christianity Begin?)

Biblical scholars also claim the fact that there are many parallels between them and Josephus’ histories as proof that the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are true. However, as a writer of historical fiction myself, I know that one tries to create verisimilitude by populating one’s fiction with real people and events drawn from authoritative histories. Indeed, there are such parallels, but they are evidence that the evangelists, Luke in particular, drew on Josephus for historical background and even for storylines.

Moreover, there are many errors in Acts and the gospels about the geography, laws and customs of Judea and Galilee, which demonstrate that the evangelists never lived in or even visited those places, nor were they able to draw on the experiences and knowledge of people who had. Again, this is more evidence that the gospels and Acts are pure fiction.

Is a mythical Jesus the end of Christianity?

What would happen if Christian authorities accepted that Jesus was an exclusively celestial figure who was crucified and resurrected in the heavenly realms? Would it destroy the Christian church and eliminate Christianity?

Unfortunately, that is unlikely. Religious authorities have long accepted that much of the Hebrew Bible is fictional myth and legend, yet Jews and Christians who believe implicitly in the literal ‘truth’ of the Bible still maintain that those stories are true. Fundamentalist Christians would cling to their beliefs and dig in. It would certainly not undermine the ‘faith’ of Christians who do not practise what they preach but instead use Christianity as a cudgel to attack their opponents or as a means of gaining wealth and power. However, over time, a widespread acknowledgement that Jesus is a myth would undermine their power and influence as well as their ability to recruit new adherents or hold on to their more thoughtful members, especially younger people born into the church.

On the other hand, I doubt it would shake the faith of true Christians, those Christians that truly believe and live by the Christian message. They already believe in an invisible, all-loving God that exists on a heavenly plane. A Jesus who lived and died in the heavenly realms and will one day welcome them into heaven need not be beyond their comprehension.

© Pauline Montagna 2024

Read more reflections on Christ Mythicism

References

Dr Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, Sheffield Phoenix Press (2014)

Earl Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus, Age of Reason Publications (2009)

Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, HarperOne (2009)

David Fitzgerald, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All, Lulu (2010)

David Fitzgerald, Jesus: Mything in Action, Create Space (2016)