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Talk:Christ myth theory/definition

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Present definition in Wiki-article edit

Definition per january 2019:

The Christ myth theory, also known as the Jesus myth theory, Jesus mythicism, or the Jesus ahistoricity theory,[1][q 1] is the view that "the story of Jesus is a piece of mythology", possessing no "substantial claims to historical fact".[2] Alternatively, in terms given by Bart Ehrman paraphrasing Earl Doherty, "the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity."[q 2]

Discussion: Talk:Christ myth theory/Archive 30#Definition (january 2019)

Added/moved upward & copy-edited per 6-8 february 2022:

Views that "the historical Jesus did not exist" are rejected as fringe theories by virtually all scholars of antiquity.[q 3][3][4][web 1]

Discussion: no discussion; no objetions raised diff

Added january 2019; copy-edited per consensus at talkpage february 2022:

Mythicism "goes back to Enlightenment times, when the historical-critical study of the past was born,"[5] and was revived in the 1970s. Proponents broadly argue that a historical Jesus never existed, and that a mythological character was later historicized in the gospels.[q 2][q 4] Some authors have argued that the sources on Jesus are so obscured by myths and dogma that "we could no longer be sure there had ever been a real person at the root of the whole thing."[q 5] A view closer to the mainstream position is that the historical Jesus was the Galilean preacher preserved in the Q-source, and that details about him were added to Paul's mythical Jesus.[6][7][q 6]

Discussion: Talk:Christ myth theory#Rejection of Paul's "Christ of faith" is not 'mythicism" (february 2022)

Quotes edit

  1. ^ Gullotta 2017, p. 311: "Originally known as the 'Christ Myth theory,' this school of thought has more recently adopted the moniker 'Jesus Myth theory' or 'mythicism'."
  2. ^ a b Ehrman 2012, pp. 12, 347, n. 1: "[Per] Jesus mythicism, Earl Doherty, defines the view as follows: it is "the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition." [Earl Doherty (2009), Jesus: Neither God nor Man: The Case for a mythical Jesus (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications), vii–viii.] In simpler terms, the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity."
  3. ^ The Christ myth theory is regarded as a fringe theory in mainstream scholarship:
    • Gullotta 2017, p. 312: "[Per Jesus mythicism] Given the fringe status of these theories, the vast majority have remained unnoticed and unaddressed within scholarly circles."
    • Patrick Gray (2016), Varieties of Religious Invention, chapter 5, Jesus, Paul, and the birth of Christianity, Oxford University Press, p.114: "That Jesus did in fact walk the face of the earth in the first century is no longer seriously doubted even by those who believe that very little about his life or death can be known with any certainty. [Note 4:] Although it remains a fringe phenomenon, familiarity with the Christ myth theory has become much more widespread among the general public with the advent of the Internet."
    • Larry Hurtado (December 2, 2017), Why the "Mythical Jesus" Claim Has No Traction with Scholars: "The "mythical Jesus" view doesn't have any traction among the overwhelming number of scholars working in these fields, whether they be declared Christians, Jewish, atheists, or undeclared as to their personal stance. Advocates of the "mythical Jesus" may dismiss this statement, but it ought to count for something if, after some 250 years of critical investigation of the historical figure of Jesus and of Christian Origins, and the due consideration of "mythical Jesus" claims over the last century or more, this spectrum of scholars have judged them unpersuasive (to put it mildly)."
    • Michael Grant (2004), Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels, p.200: "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."
    • Bart Ehrman (2012), Did Jesus Exist?, p.20: "It is fair to say that mythicists as a group, and as individuals, are not taken seriously by the vast majority of scholars in the fields of New Testament, early Christianity, ancient history, and theology. This is widely recognized, to their chagrin, by mythicists themselves."
    • Raphael Lataster (2019), Questioning the Historicity of Jesus: Why a Philosophical Analysis Elucidates the Historical Discourse, BRILL, p. 1: "One common criticism is that we are on the fringes of scholarship."
    • Robert M. Price, The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-Four Formative Texts (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2006) p. 1179: "New Testament criticism treated the Christ Myth Theory with universal disdain." Price, a Christian atheist who denies the existence of Jesus, agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars; Robert M. Price "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" in The Historical Jesus: Five Views edited by James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy, 2009 InterVarsity, ISBN 0830838686 p. 6.
  4. ^ Proponents broadly argue that a historical Jesus never existed:
    • Gullotta 2017, p. 311: "In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Constantin-François Volney, Charles François Dupuis, and Bruno Bauer all advocated for the theory that Jesus did not exist as a historical person. While their arguments failed to convince the academy, their questions have persisted and inspired a new movement within North America, which also argues that Jesus did not exist. Originally known as the 'Christ Myth theory,' this school of thought has more recently adopted the moniker 'Jesus Myth theory' or 'mythicism'"
    • Price 2000, p. 17: "Generations of Rationalists and freethinkers have held that Jesus Christ corresponds to no historical character: There never was a Jesus of Nazareth. We might call this categorical denial "Jesus atheism"
    • Price 2011, p. 18–19: "G. A. Wells, like his predecessors advocating the Christ Myth theory, discounted the gospel story of an historical Jesus [...] implying that there was no Jesus tradition floating around in either oral or written form at the time Paul and Peter were writing letters"
  5. ^ "obscured by myths and dogma":
    • Price 2000, p. 17: "What I am describing is something different, a "Jesus agnosticism". There may have been a Jesus on earth in the past, but the state of the evidence is so ambiguous that we can never be sure what this figure was like or, indeed, whether there was such a person."
    • Price 2000, p. 34: "The historical Jesus has gotten lost behind the stained glass curtain of the Christ of dogma."
    • Price 2000, p. 518: "It doesn't prove there was no historical Jesus, for it is not implausible that a genuine, historical individual might become so lionised, even so deified, that his life and career would be completely assimilated to the Mythic Hero Archetype. But if that happened, we could no longer be sure there had ever been a real person at the root of the whole thing."
    • Wells 2013, p. 19 leaves open the question regarding Paul's Christ "as to whether such a person had in fact existed and lived the obscure life that Paul supposed of him." According to Wells, "There is no means of deciding this issue."
  6. ^ In his later works, Wells argued that Paul's Jesus was a mythical character, which was woven together in the gospels with stories about a Galilean preacher. Wells insisted that this figure of the Q-source is distinct from the sacrificial Christ myth of Paul's epistles and other early Christian documents, and that these two figures have different sources before being fused in Mark:
    • Wells 2009, pp. 14–15: "When I first addressed these problems, more than thirty years ago, it seemed to me that, because the earliest Christian references to Jesus are so vague, the gospel Jesus could be no more than a mythical expansion and elaboration of this obscure figure. But from the mid-1990s I became persuaded that many of the gospel traditions are too specific in their references to time, place, and circumstances to have developed in such a short time from no other basis, and are better understood as traceable to the activity of a Galilean preacher of the early first century, the personage represented in Q (the inferred non-Markan source, not extant, common to Matthew and Luke; cf. above, p. 2), which may be even earlier than the Paulines. This is the position I have argued in my books of 1996, 1999, and 2004, although the titles of the first two of these—The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth—may mislead potential readers into supposing that I still denied the historicity of the gospel Jesus. These titles were chosen because I regarded (and still do regard) the virgin birth, much in the Galilean ministry, the crucifixion around A.D. 30 under Pilate, and the resurrection as legendary."
    • Wells 2009, p. 16: "What we have in the gospels is surely a fusion of two originally quite independent streams of tradition [...] the Galilean preacher of the early first century who had met with rejection, and the supernatural personage of the early epistles, [the Jesus of Paul] who sojourned briefly on Earth and then, rejected, returned to heaven—have been condensed into one. The [human] preacher has been given a [mythical] salvific death and resurrection, and these have been set not in an unspecified past (as in the early epistles) but in a historical context consonant with the Galilean preaching. The fusion of the two figures will have been facilitated by the fact that both owe quite a lot of their substance in the documents—to ideas very important in the Jewish Wisdom literature."
    Compare David Tacey (2015), Religion as Metaphor: Beyond Literal Belief, Transaction Publishers: "I do not doubt the existence of a real Jesus, but I adopt the view that the representation of this figure in the gospels is not historical but mythological. This has caused some to draw a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of theology. We know little about the former, but I concur with Jung that "this Christ of St. Paul's would hardly have been possible without the historical Jesus.
    My reading of Jesus is not to be confused with the tradition known as the "Christ Myth Theory."

References edit

  1. ^ Lataster 2015a
  2. ^ Bromiley 1982, p. 1034.
  3. ^ Van Voorst 2003, pp. 658, 660.
  4. ^ Burridge & Gould 2004, p. 34.
  5. ^ Van Voorst 2000, p. 568.
  6. ^ Wells 1999.
  7. ^ Wells 2009.

Sources edit

Printed sources
Web-sources
  1. ^ Ehrman, Bart D. (April 25, 2012). "Fuller Reply to Richard Carrier". The Bart Ehrman Blog. Retrieved May 2, 2018.

Christ myth theory definitions edit

  • Dodd, C. H. (1938) under the heading "Christ-myth Theory" History and the Gospel Manchester University Press pg 17:

Or alternatively, they seized on the reports of an obscure Jewish Holy man bearing this name and arbitrarily attached the "Cult-myth" to him.

  • Pike, Royston (1951) Encyclopaedia of Religion and Religions:

The theory that Jesus Christ was not a historical character, and that the Gospel records of his life are mainly, if not entirely, of mythological origin.

  • Wood, Herbert George (1955) Belief and Unbelief since 1850:

When Bertrand Russell and Lowes Dickinson toyed with the Christ-myth theory and alternatively suggested that, even if Christ were a historic person, the gospels give us no reliable information about him, they were not representing the direction and outcome of historical inquiry into Christian origins.

  • Wiseman (1964) The Dublin Review‎ pg 358:

The extreme form of denial is, or was, the Christ Myth theory. It affirmed that Jesus was not an actual person at all.

  • Farmer, William R. 1975 "A Fresh Approach to Q," Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults (Vol 2), eds. Jacob Neusner, Morton Smith Brill, 1975) p. 43

The radical solution was to deny the possibility of reliable knowledge of Jesus, and out of this developed the Christ myth theory, according to which Jesus never existed as an historical figure and the Christ of the Gospels was a social creation of a messianic community.

  • Bromiley, Geoffrey W. (1982) International Standard Bible Encyclopedia:

This view states that the story of Jesus is a piece of mythology, possessing no more substantial claims to historical fact than the old Greek or Norse stories of gods and heroes,...

  • Jones Alan H. (1983), Independence and Exegesis: The Study of Early Christianity in the Work of Alfred Loisy, Charles Guignebert, and Maurice Goguel; Mohr Siebeck, p. 47:

In particular these rationalist organisations helped to promulgate the quasi-dogma of the non-historicity of Jesus of Nazareth and thus to foster the 'Christ-myth' school of thought, to be encountered later in this study.

  • Walsh, George (1998) "The Role of Religion in History" Transaction Publishers pg 58:

The theory that Jesus was originally a myth is called the Christ- myth theory, and the theory that he was an historical individual is called the historical Jesus theory.

  • Doherty, Earl (1999) Book And Article Reviews: The Case For The Jesus Myth: "Jesus — One Hundred Years Before Christ by Alvar Ellegard:

The year 1999 saw the publication of at least five books which concluded that the Gospel Jesus did not exist. One of these was the latest book (The Jesus Myth) by G. A. Wells, the current and longstanding doyen of modern Jesus mythicists.

  • Price, Robert M (!999) "Of Myth and Men A closer look at the originators of the major religions-what did they really say and do?" Free Inquiry magazine Winter, 1999/ 2000 Volume 20, Number 1:

Christ-myth theorists like George A. Wells have argued that, if we ignore the Gospels, which were not yet written at the time of the Epistles of Paul, we can detect in the latter a prior, more transparently mythic concept of Jesus,[...] The Gospels, Wells argued, have left this raw-mythic Jesus behind, making him a half-plausible historical figure of a recent era.

  • Horbury, William (2003), "The New Testament," A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain Oxford p. 55:

Defence of biblical criticism was not helped by revival at this time of the 'Christ-myth' theory, suggesting that Jesus had never existed, a suggestion rebutted in England by the radical but independent F. C. Conybeare.

  • Eddy & Boyd (2007), The Jesus Legend, p.24-25:

Scholars such as Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, and G. A. Wells have argued that the Jesus tradition is virtually — perhaps entirely — fictional in nature (i.e., “legendary” as we are using the term). Indeed, it might be more accurate to refer to this position as the mythic-Jesus thesis rather than the legendary-Jesus thesis inasmuch as in common parlance “myth” tends to connote a story that is without any historical foundation, while “legend” tends to connote a fititious story that revolves around an ostensibly historical figure. In any event, this view holds that we have no good grounds for thinking any aspect of the Jesus narrative is rooted in history, including the very existence of an actual historical person named Jesus. Some scholars we could include in this category, such as Robert Price, would back of this thesis slightly and argue that we simply lack suffient information to decide whether a historical Jesus existed. Here, a sort of “Jesus agnosticism” emerges.

  • Ehrman (2012), Did Jesus Exist?, p.12, 347, n. 1:

"[Per] Jesus mythicism, Earl Doherty, defines the view as follows: it is "the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition." [Earl Doherty (2009), Jesus: Neither God nor Man: The Case for a mythical Jesus (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications), vii–viii.] In simpler terms, the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity.

  • Micah Issitt, Carlyn Main (2014), Hidden Religion: The Greatest Mysteries and Symbols of the World's Religious Beliefs, p.37:

The basic theory comes in two varieties, the strongest of which suggests that Jesus Christ never existed as a historical person but was an invention of early Christian writers to serve as a vehicle for Christian teachings. The more modeerate version of the theory holds that Christ did exist in Galilee during the early Christian period, but that stories of his life may be a composite of several different individuals.

  • David Tacey (2015), Religion as Metaphor: Beyond Literal Belief, Transaction Publishers:

I do not doubt the existence of a real Jesus, but I adopt the view that the representation of this figure in the gospels is not historical but mythological. This has caused some to draw a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of theology. We know little about the former, but I concur with Jung that "this Christ of St. Paul's would hardly have been possible without the historical Jesus.
My reading of Jesus is not to be confused with the tradition known as the "Christ Myth Theory."

  • M. David Litwa (2019), How the Gospels Became History, Yale University Press:

...there is a vast difference between rejecting the historical nature of the gospels and denying Jesus' existence. One can say that the gospel stories of Jesus are "mythic" while at the same time believing that Jesus existed as a first-century Jew. One simply must acknowledge that the Jesus whom early Christians remembered and described in the gospels was already a figure creatively imagined by Christians as someone more than human - and in that sense mythicized.
But mythicists say more. Not only was Jesus constructed in particular ways by early Christians, he actually did not exist or - by exerting no influence - functionally did not exist.

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