Talk:Christ myth theory/Citations

Citations Demonstrating Scholarly Support for the CMT

This section is for reference purposes. Citations are listed in reverse chronological order:

(1) FROM BOOKS AND JOURNALS:

• One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Jesus of Nazareth in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist.

Maurice Casey, Ph.D. Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? (Bloomsbury 2014), book cover.

• [B]y the method I have deployed here, I have confirmed our intuitions in the study of Jesus are wrong. He did not exist. I have made my case. To all objective and qualified scholars, I appeal to you all as a community: the ball is now in your court.

Richard Carrier, Ph.D. On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2014) p. 618.

• In my estimation the odds Jesus existed are less than 1 in 12,000. Which to a historian is for all practical purposes a probability of zero For comparison, your lifetime probability of being struck by lighting is around 1 in 10,000. That Jesus existed is even less likely than that. Consequently, I am reasonably certain there was no historical Jesus… When I entertain the most generous estimates possible, I find I cannot by any stretch of the imagination put the probability Jesus existed is better than 1 in 3.

Richard Carrier, Ph.D. On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2014) p. 600.

• I am not making a Mythicist argument here, but I do think that the Mythicists have discovered problems in the supposed common-sense of historical Jesus theories that deserve to be taken seriously.

Stevan Davies, Ph.D. Spirit Possession and the Origins of Christianity (Bardic Press 2014) p. 4.

• As Bart Ehrman himself has recently confessed, the earliest documentation we have shows Christians regarded Jesus to be a pre-existent celestial angelic being. Though Ehrman struggles to try and insist this is not how the cult began, it is hard to see the evidence any other way, once we abandon Christian faith assumptions about how to read the texts. The earliest Epistles only ever refer to Jesus as a celestial being revealing truths through visions and messages in scripture. There are no references in them to Jesus preaching (other than from heaven), or being a preacher, having a ministry, performing miracles, or choosing or having disciples, or communicating by any means other than revelation and scripture, or ever even being on earth. This is completely reversed in the Gospels. Which were written decades later, and are manifestly fictional. Yet all subsequent historicity claims, in all subsequent texts, are based on those Gospels.

     We also have to remember that all other evidence from the first eighty years of Christianity's development was conveniently not preserved (not even in quotation or refutation). While a great deal more evidence was forged in its place: we know of over forty Gospels, half a dozen Acts, scores of fake Epistles, wild legends, and doctored passages. Thus, the evidence has passed through a very pervasive and destructive filter favoring the views of the later Church, in which it was vitally necessary to salvation to insist that Jesus was a historical man who really was crucified by Pontius Pilate (as we find obsessively insisted upon in the letters of Ignatius). Thus to uncover the truth of how the cult began, we have to look for clues, and not just gullibly trust the literary productions of the second century.

Richard Carrier, Ph.D. “Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt: Should We Still Be Looking for a Historical Jesus?” Bible and Interpretation (August 2014). [1] (Cf. Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee [HarperOne, 2014])

• A superbly qualified scholar will insist some piece of evidence exists, or does not exist, and I am surprised that I have to show them the contrary. And always this phantom evidence (or an assurance of its absence) is in defense of the historicity of Jesus. This should teach us how important it is to stop repeating the phrase “the overwhelming consensus says…” Because that consensus is based on false beliefs and assumptions, a lot of them inherited unknowingly from past Christian faith assumptions in reading or discussing the evidence, which even secular scholars failed to check before simply repeating them as certainly the truth. It’s time to rethink our assumptions, and look at the evidence anew.

     There are at least six well-qualified experts, including two sitting professors, two retired professors, and two independent scholars with Ph.D.’s in relevant fields, who have recently gone on public record as doubting whether there really was a historical Jesus. I am one of them.

Richard Carrier, Ph.D. “Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt: Should We Still Be Looking for a Historical Jesus?” Bible and Interpretation (August 2014). [2]

• ”Genesis is no longer regarded as scientific or historical for the most part. The exodus is mostly a myth. There’s no indisputable trace of David or Solomon from their time, and no trace of Jesus--after centuries of searching in his supposed environment. So, if you look from 1900 to 2014, you’ll see that most biblical scholars don’t believe in the historicity of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Solomon, maybe David. . . You can see what a big difference there is.

     “So, is it Jesus’ turn now? Well, maybe. See, doubt about Jesus is real, doubt about his bodily existence as recorded in the New Testament. More scholars are [now] willing to challenge this historicity openly.

     “There are three possible positions when it comes to Jesus. You can be a ‘historicist,’ you can be a ‘mythicist,’ or you can be an ‘agnostic’. . . An agnostic says: ‘Well, the data are insufficient to settle the question one way or the other.’ That’s where I am.”

Hector Avalos, Ph.D. “A Historical or Mythical Jesus? An Agnostic Viewpoint.” Lecture given at the University of Arizona, June 7, 2014. [3]

• Perhaps no historical figure is more deeply mired in legend and myth than Jesus of Nazareth. Outside of the Gospels—which are not so much factual accounts of Jesus but arguments about His religious significance—there is almost no trace of this simple Galilean peasant who inspired the world’s largest religion.

Reza Aslan Ph.D, “Five Myths About Jesus,” The Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2013.

• [T]he Bible accounts of Jesus are stories rather than history. The accounts are indeed history-like, shaped partly like some of the histories or biographies of the ancient world.

Fr. Thomas Brodie Ph.D, founder of the Dominican Biblical Centre, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2012) p. xiii.

• Our conversation was relaxed until it somehow turned to my work, and she asked what it was that most concerned me about the Bible.

     Eventually I said, "It’s just about Jesus."

     Her questions were gentle, but she did want to know more. I was physically holding myself together, and looking down at the carpet. Then looked up.

     "He never really existed," I said.

     "Oh, that’s what I believed since I was a little girl," she responded.

Fr. Thomas Brodie Ph.D, founder of the Dominican Biblical Centre, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2012) p. 41.

• [Dr. Everard Johnston, lecturer at the Seminary of St John Vianney, visited Dr. Brodie in 2004 and took his time in perusing Brodie’s book. On connections between 1 Corinthians and the Old Testament, he muttered:] "In the same order… the same order apart from minor modifications."

     [Brodie writes:]We turned to the gospels, discussing the extent to which they too are a product of the rewriting. Suddenly [Johnston] said, "So we’re back to Bultmann. We know nothing about Jesus."

     I paused a moment. "It’s worse than that."

     There was a silence.

     Then [Johnston] said, "He never existed."

     I nodded.

     There was another silence, a long one, and then he nodded gently, "It makes sense."

Fr. Thomas Brodie Ph.D, founder of the Dominican Biblical Centre, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2012) p. 36.

• [S]urely the rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth should be tested to see what weight it can bear, or even to work out what kind of historical research might be appropriate. Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case… [R]ecognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability… In fact, as things stand, what is being affirmed as the Jesus of history is a cipher, not a rounded personality.

Prof. Philip Davies, "Did Jesus Exist?" in The Bible and Interpretation journal (Aug. 2012) [4]

• So what do we have here by way of evidence for Jesus? No certain eyewitness accounts, but a lot of secondary evidence, and of course the emergence of a new sect and then a religion that demands an explanation. As the editors of Is This the Carpenter rightly recognize (and Mogens Müller’s essay in the volume especially), we really have to go through Saul/Paul of Tarsus. This is because his letters are the earliest datable evidence for Jesus, and because, if we accept what he and the author of Acts say, his writing is almost certainly the only extant direct testimony of someone who claims to have met Jesus (read that twice, and see if you agree before moving on). We need not (and should not) trust everything S/Paul says or accept what he believes, but explaining Christian origins without him is even more difficult than explaining it without some kind of Jesus. But in S/Paul we are not dealing with someone who knew the man Jesus (his letters would have said so). There are three accounts in Acts of an apparition (chs 9, 22, 26), including a voice from heaven. If this writer is correct—and the letters of S/Paul do not confirm the story in any detail—the history of the figure of the Jesus of Christianity starts with a heavenly voice, a word (cf. prologue to Fourth Gospel) perhaps on a road, even to Damascus…

Prof. Philip Davies, "Did Jesus Exist?" in The Bible and Interpretation journal (Aug. 2012) [5]

• The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence.

Stephen Law, Ph.D (Heythrop College, University of London). “Evidence, Miracles, and the Existence of Jesus.” Faith and Philosophy 2011. Vol. 28:2, April 2011.

• There is one rebuke regularly leveled at the proponents of Jesus mythicism. This is the claim--a myth in itself--that mainstream scholarship (both the New Testament exegete and the general historian) has long since discredited the theory that Jesus never existed, and continues to do so. It is not more widely supported, they maintain, because the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and this evidence has been presented time and time again. It is surprising how much currency this fantasy enjoys, considering that there is so little basis for it.

Earl Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man (Age of Reason Publications, 2009) p. viii.

• Once upon a time, someone wrote a story about a man who was God. We do not know who that someone was, or where he wrote his story. We are not even sure when he wrote it, but we do know that several decades had passed since the supposed events he told of. Later generations gave this storyteller the name of “Mark,” but if that was his real name, it was only by coincidence.

Earl Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man (Age of Reason Publications, 2009) p. 1.

• It is quite likely, though certainly by no means definitively provable, that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, Jesus is Dead (American Atheist Press 2007), p. 272.

• Jesus was eventually historicized, redrawn as a human being of the past (much as Samson, Enoch, Jabal, Gad, Joshua the son of Nun, and various other ancient Israelite Gods had already been). As a part of this process, there were various independent attempts to locate Jesus in recent history by laying the blame for his death on this or that likely candidate, well known tyrants including Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and even Alexander Jannaeus in the first century BCE. Now, if the death of Jesus were an actual historical event well known to eyewitnesses of it, there is simply no way such a variety of versions, differing on so fundamental a point, could ever have arisen. . . Thus I find myself more and more attracted to the theory, once vigorously debated by scholars, now smothered by tacit consent, that there was no historical Jesus lying behind the stained glass of the gospel mythology. Instead, he is a fiction.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, Jesus is Dead (American Atheist Press 2007), pp. 274–75.

• So, then, Christ may be said to be a fiction in the four senses that (1) it is quite possible that there was no historical Jesus. (2) Even if there was, he is lost to us, the result being that there is no historical Jesus available to us. Moreover, (3) the Jesus who “walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own” is an imaginative visualization and in the nature of the case can be nothing more than a fiction. And finally, (4) ‘Christ’ as a corporate logo for this and that religious institution is a euphemistic fiction, not unlike Ronald McDonald, Mickey Mouse, or Joe Camel, the purpose of which is to get you to swallow a whole raft of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors by an act of simple faith, short-circuiting the dangerous process of thinking the issues out to your own conclusions.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, Jesus is Dead (American Atheist Press 2007), p. 279.

• It appears, as Price suggests, that most of what is known about Jesus came by way of revelation to Christian oracles rather than by word of mouth as historical memory. In addition, the major characters in the New Testament, including Peter, Stephen, and Paul, appear to be composites of several historical individuals each, their stories comprising a mix of events, legend, and plot themes borrowed from the Old Testament and Greek literature.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), cover flap.

• Why are the gospels filled with rewritten stories of Jonah, David, Moses, Elijah, and Elisha rather than reports of the historical Jesus? Quite likely because the earliest Christians, perhaps Jewish, Samaritan, and Galilean sectarians like the Nasoreans or Essenes, did not understand their savior to have been a figure of mundane history at all, any more than the devotees of the cults of Attis, Jercules, Mithras, and Osiris did. Their gods, too, had died and risen in antiquity.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), pp. 66–67.

• [H]e may have begun as a local variation on Osiris, with whom he shows a number of striking parallels, and then been given the title “Jesus” (savior), which in turn was later taken as a proper name, and his link to his Egyptian prototype was forgotten. Various attempts were made to place his death—originally a crime of unseen angelic or demonic forces (1 Cor. 2:6–8; Col. 2:13–15; Heb. 8:1–5)—as a historical event at the hands of known ancient rulers. Some thought Jesus slain at the command of Alexander Jannaeus in about 87 BCE, others blamed Herod Antipas, other Pontius Pilate. Some thought he died at age thirty or so, other thought age fifty. During this process, a historical Jesus became useful in the emerging institutional consolidation of Christianity as a separate religious community, a figurehead for numerous legitimization myths and sayings. The result was that all manner of contradictory views were retroactively fathered onto Jesus, many surviving to puzzle gospel readers still today.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), p. 67.

• [The epistles attributed to Paul] neither mention nor have room for a historical Jesus who wandered about Palestine doing miracles or coining wise sayings.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), p. 68.

• As Helmut Koester and James M. Robinson have shown in Trajectories through Early Christianity, the compilers and readers of such gospels [as the Gospel of Thomas] dis not revere a savior Jesus so much as a wise man Jesus, a Socrates, Will Rogers, or Abe Lincoln. Theirs was not a superman who walked on water or ascended into heaven.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), p. 68.

• One of the chief points of interest in [The Generations of Jesus/Toledoth Jeshu] is its chronology, placing Jesus about 100 BCE. This is no mere blunder, though it is not hard to find anachronisms elsewhere in the text. Epiphanius and the Talmud also attest to Jewish and Jewish-Christian belief in Jesus having lived a century or so before we usually imagine, implying that perhaps the Jesus figure was at first an ahistorical myth and various attempts were made to place him in a plausible historical context, just as Herodotus and others tried to figure out when Hercules “must have” lived.

Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), p. 240.

• The blunt truth is that seismic research by a few specifically neutral scholars, most notably Orientalists and Egyptologists, has been deliberately ignored by churchly authorities for many decades. Scholars such as Godfrey Higgins (1771–1834)m author of the monumental tome Anacalypsis, the British Egyptologist Gerald Massey (1828–1908), and more recently, and most important, the already cited American specialist in ancient sacred literature Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1881–1963) have made it clear in voluminous, eminently learned words that the Jewish and Christian religions do indeed owe most of their origins to Egyptian roots.

Rev. Tom Harpur, M.A., The Pagan Christ (Thomas Allen 2005, Kindle edition) Chapter 1.

• Whether the gospels in fact are biographies--narratives about the life of a historical person--is doubtful. Their pedagogical and legendary character reduces their value for historical reconstruction. New Testament scholars commonly hold the opinion that a historical person would be something very different from the Christ (or messiah), with whom, for example, the author of the Gospel of Mark identifies his Jesus (Hebrew: Joshua = savior), opining his book with the statement: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, God’s son.”

Thomas Thompson, PhD. The Messiah Myth (Basic Books 2005) p. 3.

• The most striking feature of the early documents is that they do not set Jesus’s life in a specific historical situation. There is no Galilean ministry, and there are no parables, no miracles, no Passion in Jerusalem, no indication of time, place or attendant circumstances at all. The words Calvary, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee never appear in the early epistles, and the word Jerusalem is never used there in connection with Jesus. Instead, Jesus figures as a basically supernatural personage who took the “likeness” of man, “emptied” then of his supernatural powers (Phil. 2:7)--certainly not the gospel figure who worked wonders which made him famous throughout “all Syria” (Mt. 4:24).

G. A. Wells, Can We Trust the New Testament? (Open Court 2004) p. 2.

• This astonishingly complete absence of reliable gospel material begins to coincide, along its own authentic trajectory, and not as an implication of some other theory, with another minimalist approach to the historical Jesus, namely, that here never was one. Most of the Dutch Radical scholars, following Bruno Bauer, argued that all of the gospel tradition was fabricated to historicize an originally bare datum of a savior, perhaps derived from the Mystery Religions or Gnosticism or even further afield. The basic argument offered for this position, it seems to me, is that of analogy, the resemblances between Jesus and Gnostic and Mystery Religion saviors being just too numerous and close to dismiss. And that is a strong argument.

Robert M. Price, Ph.D, Th.D. The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (Prometheus 2003) p. 350.

• My analysis in this book has led me to conclude that all the earliest Christian documents, first and foremost among them Paul’s Letters, present Jesus as somebody who had lived and died a long time ago. Hence neither Paul nor any of his contemporaries could have had any experience of the earthly Jesus, nor of his death. To them the crucifixion and resurrection were spiritual events, most likely in the form of overwhelming revelations or ecstatic visions. It was this heavenly Jesus that was important to these earliest Christians, just as the heavenly, spiritual world was vastly superior to the material one. Many scholars have considered Paul’s obvious lack of interest in Jesus’ earthly life as surprising and hard to explain. . .

Alvar Ellegård, Ph.D. Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ (Overlook Press 1999) p. 4.

• [T]he Gospels’ picture of Jesus as a Palestinian wonderworker and preacher is, as I shall show, a creation of the second century AD, when their Church had to meet challenges caused by competing movements inside and outside their church. An important way to meet the new situation was to create a history for that church, a myth of its origin. The central ideas in that myth were that Jesus was man who had lived and preached his Gospel in Palestine at the beginning of the previous century, and that he had been crucified and raised to heaven around AD 30. None of this mythical history is supported by any first-century writings, whether Christian or not. . .

Alvar Ellegard, Ph.D. Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ (Overlook Press 1999) pp. 4–5.

• There is no credible evidence indicating Jesus ever lived. This fact is, of course, inadequate to prove he did not live. Even so, although it is logically impossible to prove a universal negative, it is possible to show that there is no need to hypothesize any historical Jesus. The Christ biography can be accounted for on purely literary, astrological, and comparative mythological grounds. The logical principle known as Occam’s razor tells us that basic assumptions should not be multiplied beyond necessity. For practical purposes, showing that a historical Jesus is an unnecessary assumption is just as good as proving that he never existed.

Frank R. Zindler, “How Jesus Got a Life.” American Atheist journal, June 1992.

• [I]t is hardly to be denied that in reifying, personalizing and finally historicizing the Christ principle in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christian theology has diverted the direction of man's quest for the blessedness of contact with deity away from the inner seat of that divinity in man himself and outward to a man in history.

Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D. India’s True Voice (Academy Press 1955) p. 7.

• The Christians of the third and fourth centuries were plagued to distraction by the recurrent appearance of evidence that revealed the disconcerting identity of the Gospel narrative in many places with incidents in the "lives" of Horus, Izdubar, Mithra, Sabazius, Adonis, Witoba, Hercules, Marduk, Krishna, Buddha and other divine messengers to early nations. They answered the challenge of this situation with desperate allegations that the similarity was the work of the devil!

Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D. Who Is This King of Glory? (Academy Press 1944) p. 35.

• For the heavenly Christ subsequently to receive the name Jesus implies. . . that the form of the salvation myth presupposed in the Philippians hymn fragment [Phil 2:5–11] did not feature an earthly figure named Jesus. Rather, this name was a subsequent honor. Here is a fossil of an early belief according to which a heavenly entity. . . subsequently received the cult name Jesus. In all this there is no historical Jesus the Nazorean.

P.L. Couchoud, “The Historicity of Jesus.” The Hibbert Journal 37 (1938) p. 85.

• [T]he urgency for historicizing Jesus was the need of a consolidating institution for an authoritative figurehead who had appointed successors and set policy.”

Arthur Drews, Ph.D. The Christ Myth (1909; rpt. Prometheus 1998) pp. 271–72.

• The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb.

Gerald Massey, The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ (Pioneer Press 1884) p. 395.

• “It is amazing that history has not embalmed for us even one certain or definite saying or circumstance in the life of the Saviour of mankind… there is no statement in all history that says anyone saw Jesus or talked with him. Nothing in history is more astonishing than the silence of contemporary writers about events relayed in the four Gospels.”  

Frederic W. Farrar, Ph.D. The Life of Christ (Cassell, London, 1874)

(2) SCIENTIFIC SUPPORT FOR THE CHRIST MYTH THEORY:

• On the inaccurate portrayal of Pilate and Jesus’ trial in the gospels:

     The Gospels portray Pontius Pilate as an honest but weak-willed governor who was strong-armed by the Jewish authorities into sending a man he knew was innocent to the cross. The Pilate of history, however, was renowned for sending his troops onto the streets of Jerusalem to slaughter Jews whenever they disagreed with even the slightest of his decisions. In his 10 years as governor of Jerusalem, Pilate eagerly, and without trial, sent thousands to the cross, and the Jews lodged a complaint against him with the Roman emperor. Jews generally did not receive Roman trials, let alone Jews accused of rebellion. So the notion that Pilate would spend a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser, let alone grant him a personal audience, beggars the imagination.

     It is, of course, conceivable that Jesus would have received an audience with the Roman governor if the magnitude of His crime warranted special attention. But any “trial” Jesus got would have been brief and perfunctory, its sole purpose to officially record the charges for which He was being executed.

Reza Aslan Ph.D, “Five Myths About Jesus.” The Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2013.

• Showing how Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, about the year 110 CE fought the contemporary opinion that Jesus was not physical:

[Jesus] suffered all these things for us; and He suffered them really, and not in appearance only even as also He truly rose again. But not, as some of the unbelievers, who. . . affirm, that in appearance only, and not in truth, He took a body of the virgin, and suffered only in appearance, forgetting as they do, Him who said, ‘The Word was made flesh’ [Jn 1:14]. . . I know that he was possessed of a body not only in His being born and crucified, but I also know that he was so after His resurrection, and believe that He is so now.

The Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (Eerdmans 1985) p. 87.

• Showing that Paul probably did not know any historical Jesus:

  The New Testament epistles can be read quite naturally as presupposing a period in which Christians did not yet believe their savior god had been a figure living on earth in the recent historical past. Paul, for instance, never even mentions Jesus performing healings or even as having been a teacher.

Robert M. Price, Ph.D, Th.D. Jesus is Dead (American Atheist Press, 2007) p. 274.

• On the lack of archaeological evidence for Bethlehem at the time of Jesus:

But while Luke and Matthew describe Bethlehem of Judea as the birthplace of Jesus, “Menorah,” the vast database of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) describes Bethlehem as an “ancient site” with Iron Age material and the fourth-century Church of the Nativity and associated Byzantine and medieval buildings. But there is a complete absence of information for antiquities from the Herodian period--that is, from the time around the birth of Jesus. . . [S]urveys in Bethlehem showed plenty of Iron Age pottery, but excavations by several Israeli archaeologists revealed no artifacts at all from the Early Roman or Herodian periods. . . Furthermore, in this time the aqueduct from Solomon’s Pools to Jerusalem ran through the area of Bethlehem. This fact strengthens the likelihood of an absence of settlement at the site, as, according to the Roman architect Vitruvius, no aqueduct passes through the heart of a city.

Archaeologist Aviram Oshri, Ph.D. “Where Was Jesus Born?” Archaeology, Nov.–Dec. 2005, pp. 42–43.

• In favor of jettisoning the passage known as the "Testimonium" of Josephus (1st century CE Jewish writer) as an early witness for the existence of Jesus:

Codex 76 contains Photius' first review of Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. Although Photius reviews the sections of Antiquities in which one would expect the Testimonium to have been found, he betrays no knowledge of any Christian connections being present in his manuscript.

Frank R. Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew (American Atheist Press, 2003) p. 48.

• On the gospel stories being adaptations of Old Testament stories:

As for the gospel stories, as distinct from the sayings, Randel Helms and Thomas L. Brodie have shown how story after story in the gospels has been based, sometimes verbatim, on similar stories from the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint...

[E]ven the account of the crucifixion itself is a patchwork quilt of (mostly unacknowledged) scripture citations rather than historical reportage.

Robert M. Price, Ph.D, Th.D. Deconstructing Jesus (Prometheus 2000) pp. 257–58.

• On the life of Jesus corresponding to the worldwide Mythic Hero Archetype:

[A]s folklorist Alan Dundes has shown, the gospel life of Jesus corresponds in most particulars with the worldwide pardigm of the Mythic Hero Archetype as delineated by Lord Raglan, Otto Rank, and others. Drawn from comparative studies of Indo-European and Semitic hero legends, this pattern contains twenty-two typical, recurrent elements.

Robert M. Price, Ph.D, Th.D. Deconstructing Jesus (Prometheus 2000) p. 259.

• On “Jesus” being entirely non-physical in the Book of Revelation:

While Revelation may very well derive from a very early period. . . the Jesus of which it whispers obviously is not a man. He is a supernatural being. He has not yet acquired the physiological and metabolic properties of which we read in the gospels. The Jesus of Revelation is a god who would later be made into a man. . .

Frank R. Zindler, “Did Jesus Exist?” American Atheist journal, Summer 1998.

• On the town of Nazareth not having existed in the time of Jesus:

Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament, nor do any ancient historicans or geographers mention it before the beginning of the fourth century. The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing of Nazareth. Josephus, who wrote extensively about Galilee (a region roughly the size of Rhode Island) and conducted military operations back and forth across the tiny territory in the last half of the first century, mentions Nazareth not even once--although he does mention by name 45 other cities and villages of Galilee. This is even more telling when one discovers that Josephus does mention Japha, a village which is just over a mile from present-day Nazareth! Josephus tells us that he was occupied there for some time.

Frank R. Zindler, “Where Jesus Never Walked.” American Atheist journal, Winter 1996–97.

• On Paul’s silence regarding an earthly Jesus:

[The Pauline letters] are so completely silent concerning the events that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events were not known to Paul who, however, could not have been ignorant of them if they had really occurred.

     These letters have no allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth. They never refer to a place of birth (for example, by him ‘of Nazareth’). They give no indication of the time or place of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter’s denial of his master. (They do, of course, mention Peter, but do not imply that he, any more than Paul himself, had known Jesus while he had been alive.)

     These letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to have worked, a particularly striking omission since, according to the gospels, he worked so many. . .

     Another striking feature of Paul’s letters is that one could never gather from them that Jesus had been an ethical teacher. . .

G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Prometheus 1988) pp. 22–23.

• In favor of eliminating the "brother of Jesus" passage as found in (the 1st century CE Jewish writer) Josephus, and therefore removing James as a witness to the historicity of Jesus:

On Ant. [Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus] 20:200 we conclude by suggesting that the phrase 'the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ' did not originate with Josephus. Rather, a Christian anxious to capitalize on the positive light in which an early Christian was placed, took the opportunity to insert these words.

Prof. Graham H. Twelftree (Regent Univ. Sch. of Divinity, Virginia), Ph.D. "Jesus in Jewish Traditions," in Gospel Perspectives: The Jesus Tradition Outside the Gospels, (Sheffield Academic Press, 1982) p. 300.

• Doubt regarding the existence of Jesus was current in early Christian times:

Justin [Martyr], in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as saying, “You follow an empty rumor and make a Christ for yourselves. . . If he was born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown.”

L. G. Rylands, Ph.D. Did Jesus Ever Live? (London 1936), p. 20.

• Showing that a Christian writer of the 2nd cent. CE (Justin Martyr) himself drew strong parallels between Christianity and Paganism:

And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. And if we assert that the Word of God was born of God in a peculiar manner, different from ordinary generation, let this, as said above, be no extraordinary thing to you, who say that Mercury is the angelic word of God. But if any one objects that He was crucified, in this also He is on a par with those reputed sons of Jupiter of yours, who suffered as we have now enumerated.

Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165 CE), First Apology, ch. 21-22.

(3) FROM NON-PRINT SOURCES (WEBLOGS, ETC.):

• Brodie’s book [Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus] doesn’t have to convince everyone. What it does accomplish is help establish that a serious scholar can indeed take a mythicist position. It helps show that mythicism is an intellectually viable position even if not universally convincing.

Tom Dykstra, author of Mark: Canonizer of Paul. Blog (July 20, 2014) [6]

• Throughout Ehrman’s book [Did Jesus Exist?], the one theme that he keeps repeating over and over again is his assertion that no reputable New Testament scholars deny the historicity of Jesus. I pointed out some of the problems with this view already in my last post, and now Brodie’s book certainly blows that assertion out of the water. Brodie is not some half-educated interloper in the field of New Testament scholarship; he is an established biblical scholar who heads an institution devoted to biblical scholarship and has published widely on topics in New Testament studies… A more realistic and constructive approach is to see our coming to terms with a nonhistorical Jesus as the modern counterpart to medieval Christians’ coming to terms with the realization that the earth is not the center of the universe.

Tom Dykstra, author of Mark: Canonizer of Paul. Blog (Dec. 25, 2012) [7]

• Ehrman falsely claims in his book (DJE?) that there are no hyper-specialized historians of ancient Christianity who doubt the historicity of Jesus. So I named one: Arthur Droge, a sitting professor of early Christianity at USCD. . . And of those who do not meet Ehrman’s irrationally specific criteria but who are certainly qualified, we can now add Kurt Noll, a sitting professor of religion at Brandon University (as I already noted in my review of Is This Not the Carpenter) and Thomas Brodie, a retired professor of biblical studies (as I noted elsewhere). Combined with myself (Richard Carrier) and Robert Price, as fully qualified independent scholars, and Thomas Thompson, a retired professor of some renown, that is more than a handful of well-qualified scholars, all with doctorates in a relevant field, who are on record doubting the historicity of Jesus. And most recently, Hector Avalos, a sitting professor of religion at Iowa State University, has declared his agnosticism about historicity as well. That makes seven fully qualified experts on the record, three of them sitting professors, plus two retired professors, and two independent scholars with full credentials. And there are no doubt many others who simply haven’t gone on the record. We also have sympathizers among mainstream experts who nevertheless endorse historicity but acknowledge we have a respectable point, like Philip Davies." --Richard Carrier, "Ehrman on Historicity Recap" (2012 Freethought Blogs,[8]

• But it's not that Earl [Doherty] advocates lunacy in a manner devoid of learning. He advocates a position that is well argued based on the evidence.

Prof. Stevan Davies, CrossTalk post 5438 (Feb. 26, 1999). [9]

• “We must frankly admit that we have no source of information with respect to the life of Jesus Christ other than ecclesiastic writings assembled during the fourth century.” 

Dr. Constantin von Tischendorf. Codex Sinaiticus. (British Library, London)

Content from Original talk by User:Renejs 4 January 2015 & copied to here by 96.29.176.92 (talk) 23:08, 17 December 2016 (UTC)