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Thomas Brodie; general comments

I was struck by IP96's addition of a quote from Thomas Brodie: (1) The quote, though lengthy, adds very little information to what's already in the article; and (2) starts to be undue weight. Although Brodie did emphasize the link between the Elisha/Elijah stories and the New Testament, there's a lot more to his ideas than just that. He talks a lot about Matthew's dependency on Deuteronomy and on the Pauline epistles, for example.

I notice that Gonzales John has recently been blocked indefinitely for sock puppetry, and that IP 49.144.167.188 is one of his suspected socks. So I guess that's the end of the RfC saga.

But, there were several other experienced editors who agreed with GJ that this article is out of control. Part of the reasoning behind the idea of creating topical sections, was that the biography sections could get shorter. So now we've started creating the topical sections, but I haven't seen much migration of text. Instead, the biographies just keep getting longer.

I'd like to suggest that we re-open the discussion about what's important here, and what the article should be emphasizing. JerryRussell (talk) 23:33, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

That the historical Jesus is not necessary to explain Christianity.
Per the original gospel (not-extant):
  • There were between 10 and 30 different Jewish sects (thus a very fragmented Jewish culture), some were breaking away from the mainstream and and denigrating the mainstream temple cult as being corrupt. i.e. proto-Christians.
  • Through mystical visions - Jesus revealed that he had tricked the Devil by becoming incarnate and had subsequently been crucified by the Devil, thereby atoning for all of Israel’s sins, thus the temple cult was no longer relevant and there was no need to pay taxes or participate in the secular world, etc. AS a river of fire was on its way to burn up all the damned sinners and all proto-Christians coincidently. But the proto-Christians (previously dead & newly burnt up) would be given new bodies and a new world, to go forth and gambol. As calves of the stall.
Per the extant gospel:
  • The works of Homer et al. were kind of like the Bible in the Hellenistic word, for the pagans viz. the Jews having the Old Testament and the Septuagint — i.e. how people understood the organization of the universe.
  • With the foundational Elijah-Elisha narrative sourced from the Septuagint. The gospel was then modernized with various modern Hellenistic elements, to create orthodox-Christianity.
The viewpoint that the historical Jesus is not necessary to explain Christianity, is held by:
  • Kurt Noll
  • Thomas L. Thompson
96.29.176.92 (talk) 00:54, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
Hi IP96, I know there are various theories about one or more "non-extant" gospels (Q, Hebrew Matthew, Latin Mark, etc.) and that Brodie talks about a core proto-Luke/Acts. I think Carrier discusses a proto-Christian sect similar to your suggestions, though I'm not sure what evidence he cites for it.
Dennis R. MacDonald would be the main go-to source for Hellenistic and Homeric elements of the gospels, though he's not normally thought of as a mythicist. JerryRussell (talk) 16:29, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
  • There is more source content available on the extant gospel genre and purpose, so that may be the best way to go.

MacDonald, Dennis R. (7 May 2015). Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 2–3. ISBN 978-1-4422-3350-8. The Markan Evangelist, as we shall see, created most of his characters and episodes without the help of antecedent traditions or sources; instead, he imitated the Homeric epics that centuries earlier had come to define Greek cultural identity and retained this unrivaled status for at least a millennium. The author of the Gospel of Luke rightly read Mark as a historical fiction and expanded its imitations to include even more Homeric episodes. Thus, to read the Gospels as historically reliable witnesses to the life of Jesus obscures their authors intention to demonstrate for their first readers that Jesus was the ultimate superhero, superior to gods and heroes in books such as the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Jewish Scriptures. Not only is he more powerful, but he also embodies different ethical values, such as justice, compassion, and love.  96.29.176.92 (talk) 13:01, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

I hadn't seen that new book from MacDonald. But, he definitely places himself in the Euhemerist camp. See pp. 1-2: "A Jewish teacher named Jesus actually existed, but within a short period of time, his followers wrote fictions about him..." JerryRussell (talk) 16:28, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Price notes, "I am dependent here upon many fine works by Randel Helms, Thomas L. Brodie, John Dominic Crossan, and others."
  • Carrier cites MacDonald et al.
  • Wells notes the "Wisdom Literature" composition of the gospels.
  • Thompson's Is This Not the Carpenter? with chapters by James G. Crossley, Thomas L. Thompson, Ingrid Hjelm, Joshua Sabith on the intertextual literary reading and the significance of the function of a rewritten Bible for literary composition”, and a chapter by K. L. Noll as a theoretical discussion of “the history of Christian origins without a historical Jesus."  96.29.176.92 (talk) 17:31, 5 October 2016 (UTC) & update 20:14, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Dubious Value

There are a few statements used in the criticism section that perpetuate wrong thinking when dealing with this issue. Here they are with my comments:

If we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. - COMMENTS: We should question them! Simply because we accept the historicity of other persons based on slim evidence, does not mean we should compound our error with yet another.

no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus - COMMENTS: In whose opinion are the scholars 'serious'? How do we know that they have not? What difference does it make to the discourse if they did? The answer of course is that it makes no difference at all, and it is surplus to the discussion.

The insistence of this article and of the Jesus page main article of claiming things like 'most scholars', and 'there is broad consensus' etc., is against the spirit of WP in my view, and amounts to weasel words. Even if we could provide 1000 sources of criticism against the JMT, we still could never make this claim about this theory or any other. How many historians are there in the world? How many have we sourced?

HappyGod (talk) 03:53, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

Hi HappyGod, I appreciate the sentiments. Unfortunately, the statements you mention above are real quotes from top scholars in Biblical Studies departments, and they seem to represent the actual state of affairs in the field. At Wikipedia we can only report what exists, we can't change it. However, I do wonder if there are other academic specialties (such as studies of folklore, or fictional literature, or hagiography) where we would find a wider spectrum of opinion? Biblical scholars might have a narrow view of the world as a whole. JerryRussell (talk) 17:26, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

[Doherty's jesuspuzzle.humanists.net - retrieved 23AUG2006] Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case - Four: Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism (with comments on "A History of Scholarly Refutations of the Jesus Myth" by Christopher Price)

The failure of historicist to give a straightforward and robust definition of Jesus is remarkable, whereas Carrier gives:

  1. An actual man at some point named Jesus acquired followers in life who continued as an identifiable movement after his death.
  2. This is the same Jesus who was claimed by some of his followers to have been executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.
  3. This is the same Jesus some of whose followers soon began worshiping as a living god (or demigod).

"The main reason for holding to the historicity of the figure of Jesus . . . resides not primarily in historical evidence but derives instead from a modern theological necessity." (Emanuel Pfoh. “Jesus and the Mythic Mind: An Epistemological Problem”, Is This Not the Carpenter?, pp. 80-81) - review by Neil Godfrey

Ellegård, Alvar (2008). "Theologians as historians". Scandia: Tidskrift för historisk forskning (59): 170–171. It is fair to say that most present-day theologians also accept that large parts of the Gospel stories are, if not fictional, at least not to be taken at face value as historical accounts. On the other hand, no theologian seems to be able to bring himself to admit that the question of the historicity of Jesus must be judged to be an open one. It appears to me that the theologians are not living up to their responsibility as scholars when they refuse to discuss the possibility that even the existence of the Jesus of the Gospels can be legitimately called into question.   -96.29.176.92 (talk) 20:32, 20 October 2016 (UTC) & update 20:14, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Back to square one

Pardon my French, but I'm starting to get f***ing annoyed by the constant policy violations on this page. The CMT pushers are determined to make the page what they want and will ignore any discussion that doesn't go their way. The most common tactic is to simply drag on and on and on and wear everybody else down, and then do what they planned to do anyways. So no matter how often we agree on using WP:RS, they will just wait it out and put their cherrypicked pet tin foil hats (Murdock, Ellegård etc.) back into the article. Not to mention the main NPOV-violation, trying to make it sound as if CMT is the scholarly debate instead of what it really is, a "debate" between academia on one side and uneducated conspiracy theorists on the other. Jeppiz (talk)—Preceding undated comment added 10:02, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Per your RV of 78 intermediate revisions, ~55 revisions have been to the following sections:

‎

  • George Albert Wells=20
  • Pauline epistles=10
  • Questionable accuracy and authorship of the Gospels=10
  • Earl Doherty and Richard Carrier=6
  • Bauer=4
  • Robert M. Price=2
  • Thomas L. Brodie=2
  • ‎Modern proponents=1
@Jeppiz do you have any objections to restoring the RVed content for George Albert Wells ? - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 14:04, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Hello Jeppiz, the characterization of such as Brodie, Price, Thompson, and Carrier as "uneducated conspiracy theorists" seems rather intemperate. WP:FRINGE/PS describes a spectrum of fringe theories, ranging from pseudoscience to alternative theoretical formulations. "Jesus atheism" is bogus according to all our modern RS (except maybe Carrier), but Jesus agnosticism is certainly subject to a "reasonable amount of academic debate" and might even rate as an ATF.
I notice that your only specific complaint above is about Ellegard and Murdock. IP96 had just recently introduced a full paragraph with a reference to Ellegard's work, which I agree violated earlier agreements. Could we agree to remove that, and bring back the rest for discussion? I would especially like to bring back the section on the Gospels, in some form; and I believe my edits to the Bruno Bauer section were correct. JerryRussell (talk) 18:21, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Comment JerryRussell and 96.29.176.92, thank you for your comments, much of which I agree with. Please understand that my revert is not a categorical denial that there is valuable content to be added. My main objection is not with the content as such (certainly not with all of it) but with the process. The real problem here is that, for months, there has been a parallel situation of discussions about what the article should be, paired with countless edits that (in my reading) reflects the talk page discussions quite poorly. At times, I even find them completely contradictory to the talk page. I do not accuse anyone of bad intentions, it's entirely possible that the person making an edit believe it to be in accordance with the discussions. However, any reading of what we actually discussed during the whole summer and early autumn and what the article had become reveals enormous problems. My impression was that most users agreed on at least three things:

1. A more focused article.
2. Moving away from focus on persons to focus on content.
3. Using reliable sources.
4. Following NPOV.

In my reading, the article then went in the completely opposite direction. First, it was extended beyond belief. When I reverted to a previous version (not so long ago), it was almost 30000 signs. That's not making a more focused article. It's the opposite, it's extending an already very long article, making it less focused. (I'm not opposed to length as such, though it is an issue for readers). This is something I, and others, have repeated a hundred times (and I don't think I exaggerate): Just because something is written on CMT, it does not automatically belong here. This is an article in an encyclopaedia, not an actual encyclopaedia on anything ever written on the topic. Next, the article remained very focused on persons, not content. At least this was not going in the wrong direction, but the changes didn't improve it much either. There was a consensus not to have sections on individual proponents. We're interested in the ideas, not the people who put them forward except as references when they are WP:RS. And that brings us on to the third point. Non-scholars or people with an academic degree do not belong here. This is not a matter of "I think, you think. It's an established Wikipedia policy. Anyone is free to think otherwise, but not free to WP according to that belief. Yes, we should mention the main ideas of the main proponents, of course. But even that needs to come from reliable sources. And that usually mean not using the sources produced by these people themselves, except where we make it clear it's an opinion. For instance: If we want to present Murdock's view, then we have a good RS in which Ehrman summarizes Murdock's view, and that's relevant. Murdock's own writings aren't RS, and don't belong here. Last but not least, NPOV. We are dealing with a fringe theory here. That means two things: one, the introduction should make it clear it's a fringe theory (not using the word "fringe", as that has negative connotations); two, the mainstream scholarly view should dominate the article. This should not be an article devoted to presenting CMT as science, with a "criticism" section at the end. It should present what CMT says, but make it clear throughout the article that mainstream academia rejects it. Jeppiz (talk) 20:16, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Hi Jeppiz, I agree that we haven't made much progress towards a more focused article. I also objected to that situation here on the talk page. But I didn't see any consensus in the RfC to eliminate the sections on individual proponents. Do we need to revisit the closing of the RfC? We never did have any uninvolved editor come by to close that RfC. We could get in the queue for a closer, if the outcome is controversial. I, for one, would not object to spinning out a new article on history of CMT, with the sections about proponents; but not until we have the topical sections finished.
Aside from Ellegard and Acharya S, do you have any specific objections to any of the other sources that were used in the article?
As to process, it's been pretty lonely around here lately. I'd been operating under the illusion that people liked my edits, and that no one was objecting to IP96's content either (except, to some extent, myself.) JerryRussell (talk) 21:10, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

I share Jeppiz's frustration, and the reason it's hard to be specific about what's wrong with the article is because there's so many problems with its current state. Here are a few issues that I have:

  • There are way too many direct quotes in the footnotes. The notes should not be a WP:QUOTEFARM; notes should contain quotations only when absolutely necessary (and that's almost never).
  • There are way too many footnotes; many of them seem to be tossed in at random, rather than to provide support for an assertion in the main text.
  • Why is there a separate "notes" section, each of which is a quotation? What purpose does this section serve?
  • Many of the descriptions of individual writers' positions are too long--they include irrelevant biographical information, lists of books, and direct quotations that don't serve to illustrate a point. Several of them seem like a collection of random points and/or quotes from the author's work instead of a focused overview of the author's position.
  • The article relies on individual editors' evaluation of what's important in an author's work rather than relying on the coverage of reliable secondary sources.
  • The beginning of the Pauline Epistles section seems unconnected to the article—it's at first totally unclear why it's there. If this section is to remain in the article it should begin immediately with what mythicists say about the epistles, rather than reciting a catalog of facts about the epistles.
  • The section "Argument against the Christ Myth Theory" is, by and large, *not* about argument(s) against the Christ Myth Theory, but is a (not very well written) summary of mainstream position(s) regarding the historical Jesus. This article should not contain a mini-version of historical Jesus, but should concentrate on what authors say about the Christ Myth Theory. That means leaving out people like Dale Allison and Amy-Jill Levine, because they haven't written about the CMT.
  • There should not be lists with bullet points (or numbers) in the text of an article. This article has at least three.
  • The lead is disjointed. Why do we go from Albert Drews to a list of common arguments against historicity?
  • The list of "arguments commonly used by Christ myth theory proponents" is odd. The list we have now is not based on any single source, but seems to have been cobbled together by editors, and it's highly redundant--the first five points are essentially "the evidence for Jesus isn't good," stated in various ways. Some of those ways are actually conclusions rather than arguments—e.g., "that no evidential conclusion is possible—for the existence of Jesus—that is also independent of the New Testament." The lead used to say that there were three arguments commonly used by CMT proponents, based on a passage from Van Voorst (2000). Those three arguments were: 1) the New Testament has no historical value 2) there are no 1st-century non-christian references to Jesus and 3) Christianity has pagan and/or mythical roots. This is a much better list than the one we've got now--the Van Voorst list is more coherent, and actually includes a point left out in our article (no non-Christian references to Jesus).

That's not everything wrong with the article by any stretch of the imagination. Probably the biggest problem is how to write the article so that it accurately describes the CMT while making it clear that its regarded as highly implausible (and that's putting it politely) by experts in the field. I think that will be difficult as long as the article is written by amateurs who are themselves CMT enthusiasts. --Akhilleus (talk) 21:27, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello Akhilleus, as the editor responsible for creating a couple of the situations you describe above, let me explain the rationale.
(1) The section "Argument against the Christ Myth Theory" was created by Wdford, and some of us felt that it was important to have a summary of mainstream views on historical Jesus. For the most part I agree that it could be better written, and should be more specific to addressing mainstream replies to CMT.
The original version contained a number of footnotes in refn template format. That broke the sources section, so I added the notes section so that these templates would produce unbroken output. I don't see any reason why they couldn't be either reformatted as standard ref templates to go in the source section, or else eliminated per WP:QUOTEFARM.
However, right after QUOTEFARM comes WP:LONGQUOTE, which says in part: Longer quotations may be hidden in the reference as a WP:FOOTNOTE to facilitate verification by other editors without sacrificing readability. Verification is necessary when a topic is controversial. I suspect that may be why the article has got so many quotes: because the article has been so controversial, the quotes may have been used to provide verification. We can certainly review that.
(2) The section on Pauline Epistles was intended to be the first of our new topical sections that should eventually form the core of the article. It was copied in from a 2013 version of the article, but I did some touch-up. I felt it would be appropriate to begin with a review of basic information about the epistles before launching into CMT views, but if you think it's more consistent with Wiki style policies to launch right in, I would gladly defer to your judgment. Shall I make the edits to implement your suggestion? JerryRussell (talk) 22:07, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
I would like to add, though, that it's discouraging to put time and effort into the article only to find a month's work reverted at one stroke. It would be much more helpful from my point of view if discussions could be at a somewhat more detailed level. JerryRussell (talk) 22:19, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
I understand your dismay at being reverted (it's never fun to see your work get erased!), but this is not the first time I've made these objections!
A basic problem I have with this article and many attempts to reframe it over the years is that editors seem (intentionally or unintentionally) to want to create a parallel universe of biblical scholarship. So they write their own, often very idiosyncratic, sections on the historical Jesus, Pauline epistles, etc., that is framed in a way to advance the CMT. It's much better to simply describe what CMT theorists say, and not review the basic information first--at least not the way it's done now. I can see the necessity to say something along the lines of "the letters written by the Apostle Paul are the earliest parts of the New Testament and are considered by some scholars to be an important source in understanding the historical Jesus", but I wouldn't go much farther than that. --Akhilleus (talk) 22:33, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Bullet points (or numbers) in the text of an article

@Akhilleus, Prior to the RV there were only 2 sections with bullet points, please cite the WP policy that supports your objection to bullet points (or numbers) in the text of an article. 96.29.176.92 (talk) 22:00, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

My objection is not based on Wikipedia policies. WP policies are not the only thing that should be considered in writing an article; the paramount consideration should be creating a good article that conveys information to the reader. Pick up a good non-fiction book, encyclopedia, or journal article. Do you see any lists contained there? They have their place, but if there is another way to convey the same information, a list should not be used. --Akhilleus (talk) 22:27, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
I see bullet points used all the time. In my view, if the information is most clearly represented by a list, there's no reason not to use one. As a case in point, the three-fold Bauer/Voorst summary of CMT could easily be presented as three semicolon-delimited clauses within a sentence. But, I think that would make it much less easy to read. JerryRussell (talk) 20:58, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Citing sources with additional annotation

Per Citing sources § Additional annotation, a footnote may also contain a relevant exact quotation from the source. This is especially helpful when the cited text is long or dense. And Quotations § Specific recommendations, longer quotations may be hidden in the reference as a WP:FOOTNOTE to facilitate verification by other editors without sacrificing readability. Verification is necessary when a topic is controversial. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 23:44, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Quote farm

Per Quotations § Overusing quotations, using too many quotes is incompatible with the encyclopedic writing style, however provided each use of a quotation within an article is legitimate and justified there is no need for an arbitrary limit, but quotes should not dominate the article.

  • The WP overusing quotations policy specifically applies to the article text ("running text") and does not apply to citing sources with additional annotation.

Prior to the RV each proponent section contained the the following number of quotes (which includes 1 block quote per section):

  • George Albert Wells=5
  • Thomas L. Brodie=5
  • Earl Doherty and Richard Carrier=3
  • Robert M. Price=2
  • Thomas L. Thompson=2

One block quote per proponent is hardly overusing quotations and is also per policy in regards to dealing with a controversial subject, since controversial ideas must never appear to be from Wikipedia. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 00:29, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Akhilleus and Jeppiz about this. The quotes don't add enough value to be worth the space, and they come across as almost hagiographic. It would be stronger to work on the topical sections. If we're making any changes to the proponent sections, it should be to migrate materials from those sections to the topic sections. Also, I've felt it appropriate to work on one topic at a time, rather than introducing an even larger slug of text all at once. JerryRussell (talk) 03:21, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
I assume you mean the single block-quote of each proponent's controversial viewpoint,
as the current quote count is:
  • George Albert Wells=1
  • Thomas L. Brodie=4
  • Earl Doherty and Richard Carrier=0
  • Robert M. Price=5
  • Thomas L. Thompson=4
The question is not should they be put in, But why were they RVed ? Here is the article prior to the RV. Please update me on the WP policy violation for this RV of block-quotes. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 05:45, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
IP96, the reason for the mass RV have already been explained by Jeppiz above, and seconded by Akhilleus. Please let's respect our fellow editors, and try to reach consensus. I also agree that some of the quotes added little value; I had specifically objected to a Thomas Brodie block quote, in a section above.
In his explanation, Jeppiz allowed for the possibility that some of the RV'd content was OK. So if there are specific quotes that you feel were conveying important information that needs to be in the article, could you bring them here and let's discuss? JerryRussell (talk) 19:34, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

CMT includes the origin of Christianity

  • The CMT (also known as the <alternative names>) refers to several theories for the origin of Jesus in relation to the origin of Christianity. The hypotheses for these diverse theories include: the hypothesis that Jesus never existed, or if he did exist, no meaningful historical verification is possible; the hypothesis that Jesus did exist but had virtually nothing to do with the origin of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels; the hypothesis that Christianity started, just like all the other Mystery religions in the Greco-Roman world; the hypothesis that Christianity started as a variation of Gnosticism; etc.. These various theories contradict the mainstream historical view, which is that while the gospels include many mythical or legendary elements, these are religious elaborations added to the biography of a historical figure.

There is no monolithic CMT, where one size fits all and the CMT includes theories on the origin of Christianity in relation to the origin of Jesus, thus the opening sentence should note it, as given above for example. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 05:01, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Disagree. The existing formulation in the lede is sourced from Doherty and Ehrman, and represents a useful compact definition. While no one claims the field is monolithic, the existing definition encompasses all the variants listed above. JerryRussell (talk) 20:11, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

What Doherty actuall writes: Doherty, Earl (September 2009). Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus. Age of Reason Publications. pp. vii–viii. ISBN 978-0-9689259-2-8. [The Mythical Jesus viewpoint 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 [also rejecting the Q source advanced by Wells] that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition

Yes, that exact phrase is from Ehrman. But, Doherty was getting at the same concept with the phrase "no historical Jesus worthy of the name". In other words, some historical Jesus might have existed, but if so he was not "at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition"; that is, not involved in the founding of Christianity. I agree Doherty seems to be disagreeing with Wells' view of Q, but if so, Ehrman's formulation has the advantage of not excluding Wells. JerryRussell (talk) 21:28, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
The viewpoint of Doherty, like Carrier and the early Wells, is clear—the Jesus figure is a myth—full stop. So if Ehrman is including the later Wells, who is Q agnostic, then the opening sentence should reflect this. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 22:12, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
The article contents reflect the definition. If CMT means "the Jesus figure is a myth—full stop" then all our modern proponents except Carrier would be gone, and even Carrier allows some room for agnosticism. This has been extensively discussed recently, and the consensus was to keep the existing definition in the lede. I can find the link for you if you want. JerryRussell (talk) 23:19, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
I recall the discussion, however IMO the opening sentence should clearly reflect this diversity - be it agnosticism, or that Christianity originated from a mythic belief system which is not clear from, "he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels." Why not just say it clearly ? - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 23:58, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

removed secular evidence section

I have just removed the "secular evidence" section. There are a few reasons why: "secular" is not an apt characterization of Josephus or Tacitus. Information should not be presented solely through a table, and this information is better presented in prose than through a table. --Akhilleus (talk) 00:53, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Article length

I used the utility at readability-score.com to count the "readable prose" size of our article. (The guideline WP:SIZE recommends using a javascript, whose instructions I found quite inscrutable.) I got a result of 39,526 characters. This doesn't include footnotes, or quotes in footnotes, or images, or other markup, which in this article are quite extensive.

The guideline says that length alone does not justify division for articles <40K. Above that, the likelihood that a division is called for goes up with size, while articles >60K should definitely be divided.

At one time I had been concerned about notability for an article on 'history of CMT' but my guess is this will not be a problem. I think we should go ahead with the plan of adding topical sections; but with the understanding that as we do so, the article will grow to the point where it needs to be split. JerryRussell (talk) 20:27, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Every time the idea of splitting off a "history of CMT" article has come up here there has been strong resistance to it. This topic simply isn't notable enough to have sub-articles. I have serious doubts about the plan of having topical sections, but if that's the route that is followed it should be easy to pare down the sections on individual proponents. --Akhilleus (talk) 00:56, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Topical organization

Akhilleus, could you explain your doubts about topical organization? We had interpreted it as a consensus of the earlier RfC. Jeppiz also mentioned it as a consensus goal ("Moving away from focus on persons to focus on content.") JerryRussell (talk) 01:12, 24 October 2016 (UTC) tweaked JerryRussell (talk) 04:13, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

For comparison, please consider the article as of August 2013. From the point of view of readability, topicality and focus, I feel it's far superior to what we have today, although there's certainly room for discussion about sourcing. 1

Lede material on three-fold (or more-fold) framework for CMT

I agree with Akhilleus that the lede was stronger when it simply stated Bauer's three-fold argument, exactly as it is reported by Voorst. I suggest the following text for the lede:

Typically, one or more of the arguments used are derived from or directly taken from the threefold argument first developed in the 19th century by Bruno Bauer:

  • that the New Testament has no evidential value to establish the existence of Jesus
  • that there are no non-Christian references to Jesus Christ dating back to the first century
  • that Christianity had syncretistic or mythical roots.

As a reference, we could use the extended quote from Voorst, currently note 7.

The material that IP96 has been accumulating into the lede is all good, I have no objection to any of it, but I think it belongs in the body of the article, not the lede.

Akhilleus, is this what you're looking for? Jeppiz, would this be a move in the right direction? IP96, what's the rationale for building so much material into the lede? Any other votes? JerryRussell (talk) 03:36, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

More simple but not more stronger, the Voorst material is outdated and does not properly encompass:
  • Secular independence: that no evidential conclusion is possible—for the existence of Jesus—that is also independent of the New Testament.
  • Jesus agnosticism: that the evidence is so weak that no one can really know one way or another whether Jesus existed.
  • Chronological issues: that there is no attestation of a human Jesus on earth—in the earliest authentic New Testament writings—that places him in a time period contemporary to Paul
There is no monolithic CMT per se, but rather many disparate proponents with multiple ways of adducing their viewpoint and thus to not make that clear in the lede may violate NPOV. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 04:35, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
IP96, thanks for moving the material out of the lede and into a separate section. I've taken the liberty of re-inserting the original threefold argument back into the lede.
Looking at your "adduced viewpoints" bulleted list, I believe that your 2nd item is the same as Bauer/Voorst item 1. The first, third and fourth items all overlap Bauer/Voorst item 2. The 4th item also addresses "Jesus agnosticism", but this is discussed more clearly in the text of the lede. The fifth item is unclear, but to the extent it's denying evidence value of the NT, it's the same as Bauer/Voorst item 1. The chronological issue is addressed, but not very clearly, and is probably better saved for the section on Pauline epistles.
The 6th item is similar to Bauer/Voorst item 3, but misses the nuance that the mythical roots would include dominant Jewish aspects, as well as pagan (Egyptian) and Greco-Roman. (Early Christians considered the Greeks and Romans as pagans, but the Greeks and Romans didn't think of themselves that way, right?) The original Voorst formulation said "syncretistic or mythical", which I think covers the field better. Bauer definitely emphasized the syncretistic aspects.
You say Bauer/Voorst is outdated, I say it's timeless. Anyhow, it's a sourced overview / outline of the field. Jeppiz reverted your proposed alternative formulation, Akhilleus doesn't like it and I feel it's inappropriate. My recommendation is that you copy it into a sandbox somewhere and possibly we can use some of it elsewhere, but let's delete it from the article. JerryRussell (talk) 19:23, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

The entire "Raison d'être" was to remove the lede "bullet points"—that Akhilleus doesn't like. Thus the current lede bullet list should be removed.

Per the new section, Voorst is cited per the 3 items corresponding directly to Bauer's arguments, however the arguments of Bauer do not properly encompass:

  • Secular independence: that no evidential conclusion is possible—for the existence of Jesus—that is also independent of the New Testament.
  • Jesus agnosticism: that the evidence is so weak that no one can really know one way or another whether Jesus existed.
  • Chronological issues: that there is no attestation of a human Jesus on earth—in the earliest authentic New Testament writings—that places him in a time period contemporary to Paul.

Bauer/Voorst is outdated in the sense that modern proponents often make distinct arguments between the gospels and the epistle early writings and agnosticism and secular independence as per carrier, "For all the evidence anyone has ever adduced from the Epistles (once we exclude those known to be forged): it is ambiguous as to whether an earthly or celestial Jesus is being referred to. The Gospels I found wholly symbolically fictional and not even interested in actual history. And the Jesus in them I found to be so very like other mythical persons of the period. And then I found that no other evidence can be shown to be independent of the Gospels. At the very least, putting all of that together should make agnosticism about the historicity of Jesus a credible conclusion." - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 20:33, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

I don't have a problem with bullet points per se. I've asked Akhilleus about that in the section on that topic above.
'Secular independence' is the same as saying that there's no evidence outside the NT that's independent of it, right? Why isn't that covered by Bauer/Voorst point 2? "Independent" is getting at the same concept as "non-Christian".
'Jesus agnosticism', as a concept, is orthogonal to the rest of the contents of the list. And, it's covered elsewhere in the lede.
In addition to being redundant to B/V point 1, the 'Chronological issues' point seems rather odd. It's the same point that Price makes in the other bulleted list in the article, in the Price section. But, Price's views seem to have evolved: in 'Colossal Apostle' he's saying that the Pauline letters are actually later than the Gospels. This sort of detail is best addressed in the topical sections. JerryRussell (talk) 21:16, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
I've re-read Akhilleus' comments above. Ironically, he stated his objections to the article in a bullet point list. But looking past that, here is what he said:
* The list of "arguments commonly used by Christ myth theory proponents" is odd. The list we have now is not based on any single source, but seems to have been cobbled together by editors, and it's highly redundant--the first five points are essentially "the evidence for Jesus isn't good," stated in various ways. Some of those ways are actually conclusions rather than arguments—e.g., "that no evidential conclusion is possible—for the existence of Jesus—that is also independent of the New Testament." The lead used to say that there were three arguments commonly used by CMT proponents, based on a passage from Van Voorst (2000). Those three arguments were: 1) the New Testament has no historical value 2) there are no 1st-century non-christian references to Jesus and 3) Christianity has pagan and/or mythical roots. This is a much better list than the one we've got now--the Van Voorst list is more coherent, and actually includes a point left out in our article (no non-Christian references to Jesus).
Seriously, IP96, I think you're outnumbered here three to one, counting Jeppiz' original reversion. I've decided to delete this in view of what seems to be a local !vote clear preference, while remembering that consensus can change -- in this case, if other editors enter the conversation. JerryRussell (talk) 21:39, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Wow, that was huge. 14,800 bytes of mark-up. I do hope we can re-use some of that material elsewhere in the article. But, all Akhilleus' concerns about inappropriate quoting of sources do apply. JerryRussell (talk) 21:44, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Asserting that some given "Secular evidence" can not be guaranteed to be free ("independent") of Christian contamination is a conclusion of agnosticism. That is not the same as asserting that there's no evidence, which is a conclusion of absolute negation and rejection. Clearly you are not fully presenting the CMT viewpoint in violation of NPOV - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 21:47, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

IP96, you're right, and I apologize that my edit may have left the article in violation of NPOV. I agree that saying that some document can't be guaranteed to be independent, is not exactly the same thing as saying it certainly is dependent. The first position is more agnostic.
Do we have a source that specifically explains that distinction? The Carrier quote hints at it, but I don't feel it's explicit.
Do you think we need a topical section covering Jesus Agnosticism as a distinct position from traditional (19th century) Jesus Mythicism? I think that a new topical section like that, could be consistent with Jeppiz and Akhilleus' expressed desires for a more topical and well-focussed article. JerryRussell (talk) 23:11, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Lataster may state it more clearly somewhere, maybe ?
Perhaps more agnosticism content in a section "Adduced viewpoints of proponents". - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 07:02, 24 October 2016 (UTC) & 14:16, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

tables are great, how about one comparing mythicist views to mainstream views?

Even the editors who think that the mainstream view is wrong can at least acknowledge that it is our duty as WP editors to basically treat it as if it were right. How about we create a table that lists mythicist charges and lines each one up with mainstream answers? Then everyone could see that there's a mainstream answer to every mythicist charge. A table would help establish the mainstream view, and then when other parts of the page got weird, at least the table would be there as a sort of anchor. Honestly, the editors who are fired up about showing that Jesus never existed are more ardent in their zeal than those of us who simply want to promote mainstream scholarship, so this page will always lean toward the fringe. Likewise, the Jesus page will alway incline toward the Christian view. But our lead on this page is pretty clear, and a table denying each CMT charge would likewise ground the page in mainstream scholarship. Thoughts? Jonathan Tweet (talk) 00:45, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Thats what they do at ja.wikipedia.org:Christ myth theory. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 01:14, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
That Japanese table also displays some of the pitfalls of the approach. I felt that neither the mainstream or the CMT is as straightforward or monolithic as the table might indicate. But there were some good points in their table; as well as a lot that was hard to make head or tails of, from the translation. JerryRussell (talk) 03:20, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Per using tables with a Mainstream column and a CMT column, I propose that an RFC on their usage should be created. They are an excellent way of presenting the Mainstream viewpoint in conjunction with a NPOV presentation of the CMT viewpoint. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 03:09, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

IP96, why not put the table together first, and get it to a reasonably complete stage, working offline & on the talk page? Then when it's complete, maybe everybody will agree to put it on the page.
Our previous experience has left me a bit soured on RfC's: we have to wait a month for it to end, and then maybe another month to get an uninvolved editor to close it, if the outcome is controversial. Then when it's finally over, editors can still debate what it meant.
At the very least, if we do another RfC, we want to have plenty of discussion first to figure out what the question, problem or disagreement really is. JerryRussell (talk) 04:08, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Example table
Evidence Mainstream CMT
Josephus: Testimonium while not entirety authentic, it confirms Jesus's historicity forged document
Josephus: Antiquities confirms that James was the brother of Jesus refers to temple High Priests
Tacitus confirms Jesus's historicity can not be verified as an independent source

96.29.176.92 (talk) 14:29, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Trim for section on 20th century proponents

Per Akhilleus and Jeppiz' recommendation, I'm planning to go through the article and see if I can trim anything out. Today's project was the 20th century proponents section. I managed to trim about 1K of text, and I don't feel that anything important has been deleted. I found several items that seemed irrelevant or unsourced. Any objections? Having gone through the process, I feel that the remaining material in this section is all highly relevant and encyclopedic. JerryRussell (talk) 17:15, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Trim on 19th century proponents

I got another 1K out. I'm not coming anywhere close to Akhilleus' suggestion that the text size could be reduced by 1/3. Even with this small cut, I'm wondering if I took too much out. As I've left it, the prose seems a little choppy, purged of detail & human interest.

This section ends with a little link farm list of other proponents. Is this a valid function for the article, to provide links to information that's not been deemed important enough for detailed coverage here? I think it's reasonable that this article can serve as a hub for CMT resources. But if so, shouldn't we provide a secondary-source reference that puts the links in context? JerryRussell (talk) 18:24, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

I did a character count on the two sections. The total now is about 8500 characters, so I've managed to cut by almost 20%. JerryRussell (talk) 18:31, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

Key points

IP96, this is very similar to the material that you've tried to insert a couple of times before. Akhilleus objected to it, and I'm concerned about it, for three reasons. First, the material would be better expressed as prose, rather than as bullet points. Second, that several of the items seem to be getting at more or less the same point. Third -- that for an outline view of the topic, we should be able to cite a reliable secondary source, rather than relying on our own editorial viewpoint. The sources for each individual point are good, but a list of (some of) the trees isn't the same as a map of the forest. If we draw the map ourselves, we risk presenting a highly idiosyncratic viewpoint. Voorst 2000 and his summary of Bauer, along with the claim that those same points have been regurgitated by everyone since then, has been our map up until now. Do you know of anything better? I'm going to look around and see what I can find.

I apologize for reverting the material. I'm concerned that if we don't self-regulate and do quality control, Jeppiz will come back and zap everything again. JerryRussell (talk) 21:24, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

The reason for removing the bullet list from the lede, was that it cluttered the running text of the lede and the content did not really need to be in the lede. In the proposed new section, there is no running text, only enumerated key-points in a bullet list format that could be placed in a table format if needed. There is no WP policy against this presentation style and this presentation style is found in many Wikipedia:Good articles - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 22:19, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

OK. Let me re-write it in prose, and see if you don't like it better. Here's how I would say it:

Most Christ Mythicists agree that the evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus Christ is weak at best. No eyewitness accounts survive, in spite of the fact that many authors were writing at that time.[25] The Pauline epistles are dismissed because, aside from a few passages which may have been interpolations, they contain no references to an earthly Jesus who lived in the flesh. There is a complete absence of any detailed biographical information such as might be expected if Jesus had been a contemporary of Paul.[28][29][30] The canonical Gospels and other apocryphal materials cannot be verified as independent sources, and may have all stemmed from a single original fictional account.[26][27] Other early second-century Roman accounts contain very little evidence,[25] and cannot be guaranteed to be independent from Christian sources.[31][32] While some mythicists feel that the lack of evidence alone is sufficient to justify skepticism, others go further, and adduce various arguments to show that Christianity has syncretistic or mythical roots. As such, the historical Jesus should not be regarded as the founder of the religion, even if he did exist.[35][36]

What do you think?

JerryRussell (talk) 23:05, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

I think JerryRussell makes some great points above, especially in the first paragraph in this section. Nothing I've seen in the latest edits convinces me that we need to move beyond what Van Voorst says about common arguments used by CMT proponents. However, someone might want to look at Ehrman's book and see what he says about commonly used arguments. In any case a description of commonly used arguments needs to be based on a secondary source that discusses which arguments are commonly used by CMT authors—it's original research for a Wikipedia editor to compile their own list of commonly used arguments. --Akhilleus (talk) 23:13, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

I honestly don't know if it's WP:OR or not. It's all very well sourced, and avoids any sort of synth, aside from a few points that might slide by under WP:BLUE. IP96, if you want to take the time, you could go get some more opinions at WP:OR/N. I'm curious what they might say.
If we can find one author who sums things up in a similar way, we could just have one citation, and save the rest of all those footnotes for the article body.
This outline is pretty similar to Carrier's book, but unfortunately he doesn't ever pull it together in one place, or put it in context to the history of CMT. JerryRussell (talk) 00:05, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
JerryRussell's expository prose, skillfully paraphrases the reliable secondary sources cited, it would be suitable as the first paragraph following the opening sentence(s)—as an elaboration of the opening sentence. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 00:51, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks IP96 :-) Now we need to find a secondary source that gives a similar summary to satisfy Akhilleus. Or if we do find an author that sums up the modern case for CMT, they might have some additional points we forgot.
Or we could take it to OR/N and get some reassurance that it's OK. Another possible justification is that it represents a summary of the contents of the rest of the article, which has been developed as a result of long consensus process. JerryRussell (talk) 01:08, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

IP96 sent me some quotes from Eddy & Boyd and Ehrman at my talk page, and I've been reviewing Ehrman's introductory chapter. I believe we can give Ehrman, Eddy & Boyd and Carrier as sources for the overview. I don't see anything inconsistent, or that we're missing anything important. Furthermore, I think the new summary is considerably more complete and explanatory than the B/V threefold argument. @Akhilleus:, would you agree that this is ready to go in, given the additional secondary sourcing? JerryRussell (talk) 21:09, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

GA Wells Trim

Rather than starting from the existing article, I began with IP96's most recent version before the Jeppiz revert. I was able to cut about half the body text from that starting point. However, I kept all IP96's quotes in the footnotes. A few items were brought in from today's version. The net result is that the text size is down about 25% from today, but the markup size is plus 5K. @Akhilleus:, @Jeppiz:, would you say that the support via quotes in footnotes is excessive, or is it OK? JerryRussell (talk) 04:37, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

Well, maybe I already know in my heart that it was excessive. I sliced back 5K of quotes. Markup size is now unchanged.

This entire process was a lot of work. Does anybody have opinions about whether this is getting better or worse? IP96? JerryRussell (talk) 04:53, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

Tying up loose ends

I've been working on the article this morning. First I finished up my project of trimming up the proponent sections and bringing them up to date, also fetching back a few key items from earlier editions. Then I brought in text for sections on "Lack of historical evidence about Jesus from first century" and "Syncretistic and mythological roots of Christianity", again drawing on earlier versions of the article. I went through this material, consolidated, and did some quality control on the sourcing.

I learned how to install the page metric javascript, so it's now easy for me to measure the prose length of the article. Before Jeppiz' revert of Oct. 22, we were at 47K bytes of prose, 177K of markup. Today we're at 41K bytes of prose, and the markup is all the way down to 136K. The drastic reduction in markup reflects a huge reduction in the amount of quoting, both in blockquotes and footnotes. The prose length utility doesn't count blockquotes or bulleted lists.

I'm hoping that the result of all this work by myself and IP96 meets Jeppiz' first three criteria:

1. A more focused article. 2. Moving away from focus on persons to focus on content. 3. Using reliable sources.

Also, I believe that every item in Akhilleus' bulleted lists of problems has been addressed.

There's still an open issue regarding IP96's outline of our topic, expressed as bullet points and supporting footnotes with quotes. In my opinion, the best way to incorporate this material would be to distribute the information into the appropriate topical sections, to provide additional support. Another option would be to use my prose version, incorporated into the lede. Yet another approach would be to hold back the material for now. I don't have a strong opinion, and am waiting for consensus to develop.

The most important issue is NPOV. The fact is, neither IP96 nor I have made any effort to hide our personal POV. And there's nothing against policy if editors have a point of view, as long as it isn't pushed into the article against consensus. We've made no effort to remove mainstream rebuttals to CMT, and I've brought in mainstream answers to the best of my ability. But the fact is, because of our bias, IP96 and I might not be the ideal editors to bring this article to a truly neutral position. Aside from institutional factors, I really don't understand why the mainstream thinks we're bonkers.

My challenge to editors supporting the mainstream POV is to bring in more mainstream arguments and evidence to counter the CMT point of view, rather than attempting to "win" by hacking away at our supporting materials again. Do you think you could do that? JerryRussell (talk) 22:36, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

BTW, the article version from Aug. 2013 that I've recommended as a benchmark, was 67K bytes of prose. That was way above the size that should "probably be divided". So compared to back then, at least this version isn't so much TLDR. JerryRussell (talk) 00:18, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Ehrman quote

  • Per Ehrman, Bart D. (20 March 2012). "An Introduction to the Mythical View of Jesus". Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperCollins. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-06-208994-6. [A Mythical Jesus viewpoint is, that if Jesus did exist], he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)

Is there any specific follow up by Ehrman on whom he is referencing —Wells et al. ? - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 23:22, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Hi IP96, here is the entire paragraph in which that quote appears: In a recent exhaustive elaboration of the position, one of the leading proponents of 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.” 1 In simpler terms, the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity. The footnote is to Doherty's "Jesus:Neither God nor Man" (2009). Also see our note [4] in the existing article. JerryRussell (talk) 23:43, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
The quote "he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity" (Ehrman) viz. "no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed" (Doherty) does not seem to be the same IMO. It seems to me that Ehrman is including the minimal Jesus of Wells. Does Ehrman note any historical Jesus that had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity per Wells et al. ? - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 00:30, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
Doherty's formulation doesn't define exactly what Jesus would need to do, in order to be "worthy of the name". But, most conceptions of "historical Jesus" involve the idea that the things he said and did were somehow memorable enough to trigger the foundation of Christianity. So, Ehrman's interpretation of Doherty's words: if Jesus existed, but had nothing to do with creating the religion, he wasn't "worthy of the name". Does that make sense? JerryRussell (talk) 02:26, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
So we should conclude that that Ehrman & Doherty concur, that the dominating key point of the CMT is, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure. And that any historical Jesus figure claimed to be relevant is thus rejected, i.e. Doherty specifically rejects Wells' minimal Jesus. — 96.29.176.92 (talk) 03:13, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
Doherty does specifically say that "Q... can be shown to have had no Jesus figure at its roots, some of which roots were ultimately non-Jewish." (This is in the preface, in the section 'The twelve pieces of the Jesus puzzle'.) Sounds like a specific rejection of Wells' Jesus/Q to me. Whereas Ehrman's reinterpretation of Doherty's definition seems to leave the matter open.
IP96, are you familiar with the view that there were two competing sects of primordial Christians as early as ~60 AD? That is, in Jerusalem before the destruction of the temple in ~70 AD, there was a group of zealous nationalists Jews led by characters like James, John and Eleazar; who were competing with a sect of Herodian and Roman collaborators, typified by their evangelist, St. Paul. In the end, the Roman sect emerged as dominant, while the messianic Jews were largely wiped out; but nevertheless, they did have some influence over the New Testament, if only as the target of a vicious Paulist satire. Robert Eisenman is a primary advocate of this view. He argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a documentary record of the activities of James and his zealots, and that Paul is their arch-enemy, the 'Wicked Priest'. But, he is agnostic about whether James had a brother named Jesus. And of course if he did, it would still make this 'Jesus brother of James' an anachronism with respect to any Jesus who could have been executed under Pilate.
Not specifically, but as I understand, the Jews were very divided and very fragmented and there were many fringe counter-cultural sects, many breaking away from the mainstream and denigrating the mainstream as being corrupt. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 17:28, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

The "mainstream" of the time would have been the Sadducees, who collaborated with the Romans and their Herodian proxies in maintaining and operating the Temple. The Sadducees helped the Romans collect the temple offerings and taxes. The Pharisees were a populist 'loyal opposition' group, but also had some Hellenistic tendencies. The radical nationalists such as the Essenes were basically underground, and they went by many names, such as Zealots, Sicarii, Nazarenes, and perhaps Therapeuts, but it's hard to tell how distinct those groups really were. These radicals were looking for a Messiah who would lead them in a military revolt against the Romans and Herodians. If I understand correctly, the mainstream speculation about historical Jesus is that he was one of these radicals, and that early Christianity grew out of one of these radical groups. JerryRussell (talk) 19:21, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Possibly relevant to the search for Wells' 'Q source' is this book by Daniel Unterbrink, Judas of Nazareth. Unterbrink argues that there are many parallels between Biblical Jesus and Judas the Galilean. Would JtG qualify as any mainstream scholar's idea of a Historical Jesus? The book has an endorsement by Robert Eisenman and a forward by Barrie Wilson, who is an emeritus professor of Biblical Studies at York University. The publisher is Inner Traditions / Bear & Co. JerryRussell (talk) 19:53, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
Looking through RS/N, Inner Traditions is not seen as a reliable publisher. Maybe the endorsements might help. It's a notch above SPS, anyhow. JerryRussell (talk) 20:30, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Messianic claimants by Jona Lendering includes Judas, the Galilean (6 CE). And the claimants would likely be included in J. M. Robertson's viewpoint that there were several Jesuses who claimed to be Messiahs. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 20:51, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Removal of category

Hello, I recently removed a category, because this is a theory,and not a person, so technically it doesn't fit there.Bye!Sexperson (talk) 00:02, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi Sexperson, I see exactly the problem you're talking about. Of course, Jesus Christ is the person whose existence is questioned. But, out of all the pages about Jesus Christ that could possibly be included in that category, this is the most relevant & useful one for readers. Also, anyone who clicks on the category link here on this page gets to see the list of other disputed persons. JerryRussell (talk) 01:16, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Ideally, it would be nice if the category link read: "(pages about) people whose existence is disputed". I tried inserting the text in the template, but that didn't work. Maybe there's some other way to perfect this, without losing the information? Is there a category template expert in the house? JerryRussell (talk) 01:21, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

:User:JerryRussel, I reverted back to my revision,because I think we need consensus here before we change it back.Sexperson 01:52, 16 November 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sexperson (talk • contribs)

The category is sensible. Isambard Kingdom (talk) 02:35, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

::It looks stupid from the Category page, because the page is for people, not theories. I suppose it would be sensible to move the Category from here to Jesus (though this page is more useful, but Jesus would make more sense).Sexperson 03:11, 17 November 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sexperson (talk • contribs)

It is useful for people. That's why it should stay. Isambard Kingdom (talk) 03:14, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

::::Yeah, I understand. But it still looks dumb, when you click the link to Category Page you'll see this theory alone amongst numerous people articles, looks totally out of place.Sexperson 03:16, 17 November 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sexperson (talk • contribs)

There is at least one other article analogous to this one, the article on 'historicity of Muhammad'. I know, because I just happen to have added it to the category myself, just a couple days ago. But, I agree it doesn't look right. I'm going to go over to that talk page, and see if we can find a solution that satisfies everyone. JerryRussell (talk) 04:50, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Discussion opened at Category_talk:People_whose_existence_is_disputed. JerryRussell (talk) 04:56, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Struck through edits by sock of Gonzales John Doug Weller talk 19:02, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

In this case, GJ had a good point (though he didn't have to edit war to prove it). Unfortunately, I looked through the category documentation, and I don't see any feasible way to fix the problem. It looks to me like it's baked into the system software. JerryRussell (talk) 00:47, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Disquisition on variations in the CMT

I just reverted 96.29.176.92's latest edit; I used a popup tool which didn't let me leave an edit summary, which wasn't my intention. So I'll explain myself here. The lead is no place for a long disquisition on variations in the CMT--these details, if important, are things that can be explained in the body of the article. However, there is a strong tendency in this article for people to include all sorts of minor details at the expense of the big picture, which is a big reason the article is as long as it is. Judicious editing could reduce the length of the text by at least a third, I'd say.

Furthermore, the notion that "However in the modern era, disparate proponents, typically have multiple ways of adducing their viewpoint beyond Bauer's three arguments..." is not something that finds much support in secondary sources on this topic. With few exceptions, what's striking about the CMT is how similar modern formulations are to early 20th-century versions of the theory. The exception is Carrier's use of Bayesian reasoning—however, his use of Bayes is so flawed that I'd call it pseudo-Bayesian. But I wouldn't put that in this article, because there aren't any secondary sources that back that opinion up. Similarly, unless there's a reliable secondary source that supports the text 96.29.176.92 added, it shouldn't be in the article. --Akhilleus (talk) 00:46, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Previously you objected to a bullet list in the lede, now you appear to be OK with Bauer's ? Clearly it should also be removed. The RVed content was hardly a disquisition, and in fact necessitated by your previous and current assertion that Bauer encompasses how modern CMT proponents adduce their viewpoint, even going so far as to RV a modern key-point cited with Eddy & Boyd. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 01:57, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
There shouldn't be a bulleted list in the lead—it should be formatted as prose.
You weren't using Eddy/Boyd as support for the point that "However in the modern era, disparate proponents, typically have multiple ways of adducing their viewpoint beyond Bauer's three arguments," were you? The citation to Eddy/Boyd supported the idea that CMT theorists say that Paul's letters don't place a historical Jesus in the same timeframe as Paul. This citation is actually to text by Robert Price in a book edited by Eddy/Boyd, so it's not a secondary source in the sense I meant—that is, it's not a scholar writing about the views of CMT proponents, it's a piece by a CMT proponent (and so a primary source). That aside, this point is not an example of CMT proponents going beyond any of the three points that Van Voorst set out (and I'm pretty sure Ehrman says something similar). Claiming that Paul doesn't make Jesus a contemporary fits under the idea that the NT doesn't provide good evidence for a historical Jesus. --Akhilleus (talk) 02:05, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
  • The later Wells concedes that content in the Gospels related to the Q source is evidence for a historical Jesus, whereas the early epistles have no evidence. Thus per Wells, saying that the New Testament has no evidential value is incorrect.
  • Carrier, the proponent with the most WP weight, adduces key-points beyond Bauer's arguments.
  • Price's agnosticism is beyond Bauer's arguments.
Given these problematic issues, why even enumerate Bauer's arguments in the lede. A better way is to put the content in a section "Adduced viewpoints of proponents". - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 06:39, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Very interesting point about Wells. In fact, it raises the question: how is Wells' acceptance of a historical Jesus whose sayings were preserved in the "Q source", any different from mainstream views about historical Jesus? Perhaps he maintained some agnosticism, and argued that this preacher's existence could not be proven?
I disagree that Carrier or Price have really gone beyond the B/V framework, which is extremely broad. B/V does not purport to prove Jesus' non-existence, so agnosticism is consistent with its premises. Carrier provided a great deal of detail, and supplied a Bayesian mathematical framework -- although the problem of attaching probabilities to unrepeatable historical situations leads to a rather subjectivist approach to the math.
Anyhow, I put the B/V bullet points back in the lede, and its fate is now in the hands of other editors. If it gets put into a semicolon-delimited sentence format, or even deleted entirely, c'est la vie. I'm not going to edit war or seek any other form of dispute resolution about it. JerryRussell (talk) 17:00, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Ellegård and Allegro also give a historical Jesus, along with Essene documentation in support of their viewpoint. In this case it is the reverse of Wells, as content the early epistles is evidence for a historical Jesus, whereas the Gospels have no evidence. Thus per Ellegård and Allegro, saying that the New Testament has no evidential value is incorrect.
  • Carrier and Price clearly maintain an agnostic qualifier with their conclusions viz. the absolute negation and rejection of B/V.
  • Carrier (and likely Lataster) assert that any extant "evidence", secular or otherwise, can not be guaranteed to be free ("independent") of Christian contamination—a conclusion of agnosticism. That is not the same as asserting that there's no evidence, which is a conclusion of absolute negation and rejection. Viz. Bauer, who "argued that the lack of mention of Jesus in non-Christian writings of the first century shows that Jesus did not exist. Neither do the few mentions of Jesus by Roman writers in the early second century establish his existence." - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 22:20, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
This strikes me as semantic hair-splitting. There's been a long-standing agreement that Ellegard is not covered on this page. The lede already mentions the idea of 'Jesus agnosticism'. Any nuances about Allegro, Carrier and Price's views as distinct from Bauer's could be discussed in their respective sections, or in their own articles. (Most of the CMT advocates discussed on this page also have their own Wiki pages.) JerryRussell (talk) 23:30, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

The same might be said of describing a "zebra" in the lede of an article about "mules". The enumeration of Bauer's arguments does not need to be in the lede, and in fact clutters up the lede. Clearly Bauer's adduced viewpoint and other leading proponents adduced viewpoints should be presented in a section "Adduced viewpoints of proponents", where similarities and differences can be clearly presented. Restating each proponent's adduced viewpoint in their corresponding section, would once again be focusing on the individual proponents, it would be better to group them in one section. Clearly Carrier has the most WP weight and due, and his adduced viewpoint is as similar to Bauer's adduced viewpoint as a zebra is like a mule, which is—sort of. Thus it is clearly incorrect to portray Bauer's arguments as the "Christ myth theory". And just because we are not talking about Ellegård and Allegro, does not mean they are not CMT proponents whose adduced viewpoints are radically distinct from Bauer.

Compatibility Thesis:

(Premise 1) Either mythicism is correct XOR historicity is correct.
(Premise 2) Mythicism claims that the available evidence rules out the possibility of a historical Jesus.
(Premise 3) The available evidence does not rule out the possibility of a historical Jesus (the Compatibility Thesis).
(Premise 4) (Entailed by premise 2 and 3) Mythicism is incorrect.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
(Conclusion) Historicity is correct.

Premise 2 is problematic as, per Bauer the conclusion is correct. However per Carrier and Price—the argument is not be sound, as Premise 2 is incorrect. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 02:13, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

OK, I have deleted that entire paragraph regarding the B-V threefold argument. With this deletion, I feel that the lede is getting pretty weak in terms of offering any support for CMT, but aside from that problem, it reads OK. We'll need some sort of secondary source to provide an alternative summary -- Akhilleus isn't going to let us say any old thing we want.
Getting on to the topic of a section on "Adduced viewpoints of proponents", could we come up with a different name? The Google dictionary entry for the word 'adduce' shows that its usage peaked in 1840 and has been going downhill ever since. I had to look it up to figure out what you were talking about, and my vocabulary isn't bad. The Aug. 2013 article had subsections entitled "Variations on a theme" and "Elements of the theories" which covered the different varieties of CMT. JerryRussell (talk) 02:23, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Strongly disagree that the B/V summary argues for premise 2. On the contrary, it simply states there is no evidence sufficient to establish the existence of Jesus, either in the NT or any other source. JerryRussell (talk) 02:30, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Per "Neither do the few mentions of Jesus by Roman writers in the early second century establish his existence.", It is indeterminate at best and is not a direct quote of Bauer, who likely did claim that the available evidence rules out the possibility of a historical Jesus. Thus it is likely that the entirety of his work is negated by the Compatibility Thesis, simply because he did not say "maybe" ? - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 03:21, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
How about "Key-points of proponent's viewpoints", or whatever you may like, I have no particular preference. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 04:14, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Most of Bauer's works haven't been translated to English. I have a copy of "Christ and the Caesars" translated by Brunar & Marchant, and have diligently searched for any claim that Jesus never existed. If he said any such thing, I certainly can't find it. He calls the New Testament "A Great History and a Late Work of Fiction" (ch. 8, p. 365) and on p. 377 he says "My in-depth critique has proven that the later editors of the Proto-Gospels enriched the answers of Jesus with additions", which sounds to me like he thought that a historical Jesus did exist. There are several more passages in that chapter that give a similar impression.
While Bauer may have had little influence on mainstream scholarship, I think Voorst is claiming that he had at least an indirect influence on later CMT authors. Recently I'd say there's a resurgence of appreciation. JerryRussell (talk) 05:03, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
My take on it is, If he does not unequivocally state an agnosticism viewpoint, that it is possible but unlikely that Jesus existed, then he is in jeopardy of being refuted by the Compatibility Thesis.
Bauer influenced Kalthoff, Drews and Ernst Haeckel of the German Monistenbund (Monism society), who were proponents of Monism. Drews celebrity (infamy) and the international translations of his works, wherein he credits Bauer was also a factor. Interestingly. Schweitzer highly praised the early work of Bauer in demythologizing the gospels. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 05:57, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Bauer was primarily interested in refuting "Biblical Jesus". The concept of "historical Jesus" had not been clearly articulated yet. Voorst says that Bauer "gained no lasting following or influence on subsequent scholarship, especially in the mainstream". Is this saying that Schweitzer was not mainstream? At any rate, this article isn't about the mainstream. Bauer has been influential among mythicists in general. So, I'm not sure we should be including this particular Voorst quote in the lede, and especially not without mentioning the qualification that Voorst was mainly talking about Bauer's lack of influence on the mainstream.
I also notice that Voorst says that Bauer was refuted by mainstream scholars in the years following the publication of his works. But, he gives no citations for that claim. Do you know of any mainstream refutation of Bauer's work? JerryRussell (talk) 15:52, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
SCHWEITZER, ALBERT (1910). "Bruno Bauer". THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS A CRITICAL STUDY OF ITS PROGRESS FROM REIMARUS TO WREDE. p. 157. At the end of his study of the Gospels, Bauer is inclined to make the decision of the question whether there ever was a historic Jesus depend on the result of a further investigation which he proposed to make into the Pauline Epistles. It was not until ten years later (1850–1851) that he accomplished this task, (Kritik der Paidinischen Briefe. (Criticism of the Pauline Epistles.) Berlin, 1850-1852.) and applied the result in his new edition of the "Criticism of the Gospel History." (Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs. (Criticism of the Gospels and History of their Origin.) 2 vols., Berlin, 1850-1851.) The result is negative: there never was any historical Jesus.
SCHWEITZER, ALBERT (1910). THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS A CRITICAL STUDY OF ITS PROGRESS FROM REIMARUS TO WREDE. p. 159. [Bauer] had long been regarded by theologians as an extinct force; nay, more, had been forgotten. [...] It was, indeed, nothing less than a misfortune that Strauss and Bauer appeared within so short a time of one another. Bauer passed practically unnoticed, because every one was preoccupied with Strauss. Another unfortunate thing was that Bauer overthrew with his powerful criticism the hypothesis which attributed real historical value to Mark, so that it lay for a long time disregarded, and there ensued a barren period of twenty years in the critical study of the Life of Jesus. [...] Bauer's "Criticism of the Gospel History" is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.
(ref. The Quest of the Historical Jesus) Schweitzer notes Bauer's conclusion, "there never was any historical Jesus" and Schweitzer likely refutes it himself or notes the scholarship the does ? Schweitzer's engagement with the CMT and praise of Bauer should be noted in the lede. (see also Quest for the historical Jesus) - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 20:21, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Bauer's "Criticism of the Pauline Epistles" and "Criticism of the Gospel History" appeared around 1850, and as far as I know they've never been translated into English. "Christ and the Caesars" didn't come out until 1877. I wonder if he changed his mind or softened his position during that time, based on criticism of the earlier works? Anyhow, for Wikipedia purposes, we have no choice but to rely on Schweitzer's review of the ~1850 German works. However, having just read through Schweitzer's chapter on Bauer, I would not say it represents a serious attempt to refute Bauer's work in "Christ and the Caesars". It's more of a quick, incredulous dismissal. JerryRussell (talk) 16:09, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

  • George Seaver (1947). Albert Schweitzer: the man and his mind. A. and C. Black. p. 45. His published work on the Synoptic Problem had already contributed towards exploding the theory of the "Christ-myth"—that Jesus as a historical person never existed—by providing the two oldest records of His life to be genuine historical documents.
  • An examination of the claims for and against the historicity of Jesus thus reveals that the difficulties faced by those undertaking to prove that he is not historical, in the fields both of the history of religion and the history of doctrine, and not least in the interpretation of the earliest tradition are far more numerous and profound than those which face their opponents. Seen in their totality, they must be considered as having no possible solution. Added to this, all hypotheses which have so far been put forward to the effect that Jesus never lived are in the strangest opposition to each other, both in their method of working and their interpretation of the Gospel reports, and thus merely cancel each other out. Hence we must conclude that the supposition that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely. This does not mean that the latter will not be proposed again from time to time, just as the romantic view of the life of Jesus is also destined for immortality. It is even able to dress itself up with certain scholarly technique, and with a little skillful manipulation can have much influence on the mass of people. But as soon as it does more than engage in noisy polemics with 'theology' and hazards an attempt to produce real evidence, it immediately reveals itself to be an implausible hypothesis. (pp. 435–436) - Schweitzer, Albert (2001). John Bowden (ed.). The Quest of the Historical Jesus. trans. John Bowden et al. (2 ed.). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. ISBN 978-1-4514-0354-1. Translated by W. Montgomery, J. R. Coates, Susan Cupitt, and John Bowden from the German Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, published by J. C. B. Mohr, Tübingen. © J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1906, 1913, 1950. (1st English translation of the 1913 2nd ed.) - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 08:02, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
Ahaha, I was looking at the first edition. So the 2nd edition is where Schweitzer addressed Drews, and specifically tried to refute the Christ Myth theory. But with Bauer, the main point is that the Christian ethics and theology developed in the New Testament is from Seneca and Philo, and in direct opposition to nationalist Jews like the Pharisees and Essenes of the time. Did Schweitzer deal with that any more in the 2nd edition than in the first? Maybe I'll have to buy that new translation to find out? JerryRussell (talk) 15:24, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
Per René Salm
  • 1906 The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A book beloved by the tradition. While professing skepticism, Schweitzer counters mythicism at every turn. The expanded (and suppressed) 2nd edition came out in 1913.
  • 1913 Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung), being the second edition of his Quest of the Historical Jesus. It is characteristic that for almost a century the first edition appeared in numerous English printings, while the more complete second edition (with the important chapters 22 and 23 on Jesus mythicism) was universally overlooked, until it finally became available to the English reader from Fortress Press (2000, ed. by John Bowden). In any event, Schweitzer hardly offers an impartial assessment of the mythicist thesis but launches into extended philosophical digressions and consistently sides with the tradition while, at the same time, admitting that the tradition has nothing firm upon which to stand.
96.29.176.92 (talk) 16:26, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
Is there a conspiracy theory necessary to explain the "suppression" of the 2nd edition, or could it be just a matter of business priorities? I suppose the 1st edition was selling well enough. Could Schweitzer's defense against mythicism be as lame as Rene Salm says? I'm almost getting curious enough to buy a copy and see for myself.
Linked from Salm's page, Price's review of Bauer's "Christ and the Caesars":
  • Reading the prescient Bruno Bauer one has the eerie feeling that a century of New Testament scholarship may find itself ending up where it began. For instance, the work of Burton Mack, Vernon Robbins, and others makes a powerful case for understanding the gospels as Cynic-Stoic in tone. Abraham J. Malherbe and others have shown how great a debt to Cynicism and Stoicism the Pauline Epistles owe. Walter Schmithals demonstrated how the Corinthian Epistles deal with issues known to us from second-century Gnosticism. Many now admit there was no single Messiah concept in pre-Christian Judaism. Robert M. Fowler, Frank Kermode, and Randel Helms have demonstrated how thoroughly the gospels smack of fictional composition. Thus, from many directions, New Testament researchers seem to be converging uncannily on the theses that Bruno Bauer set forth over a century ago.
JerryRussell (talk) 20:52, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Philo used philosophical allegory to attempt to fuse and harmonize Greek philosophy with Jewish philosophy. His method followed the practices of both Jewish exegesis and Stoic philosophy. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 00:14, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Since there's been no further discussion on this recently, and most of the old discussion has fallen off into the archive, I've taken the liberty of inserting the proposed "Disquisition" into the lede. Since the deletion of the three-fold Bauer/Voorst summary, it's been seriously lacking in any concise representation of CMT viewpoints. Also, I inserted the Price quote about Bauer, which I think is very helpful in establishing mainstream support of Bauer's viewpoint. @Akhilleus:, @Jeppiz:, have you looked at what IP96 and I have been doing with the article lately? How are we doing? JerryRussell (talk) 02:10, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Acharya S/Murdock & her mythicist position should be in this article

Acharya S/Murdock should be in this article as she once was and should never have been removed. She deserves her own section as she wrote the very first succinct, comprehensive position for mythicists:

The Mythicist Position:

"Mythicism represents the perspective that many gods, goddesses and other heroes and legendary figures said to possess extraordinary and/or supernatural attributes are not "real people" but are in fact mythological characters. Along with this view comes the recognition that many of these figures personify or symbolize natural phenomena, such as the sun, moon, stars, planets, constellations, etc., constituting what is called "astrotheology."

As a major example of the mythicist position, various biblical characters such as Adam and Eve, Satan, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, King David, Solomon & Jesus Christ, among other figures, in reality represent mythological characters along the same lines as the Egyptian, Sumerian, Phoenician, Indian, Greek, Roman and other godmen, who are all presently accepted as myths, rather than historical figures."

- Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection page 11-12

The Mythicist Position | What is Mythicism? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63BNKhGAVRQ

There are plenty of highly respected scholars who support Acharya's work. Scholars who've actually studied Acharya's work tend to be supportive:

"I find it undeniable that many of the epic heroes and ancient patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament were personified stars, planets, and constellations." "I find myself in full agreement with Acharya S/D.M. Murdock" - Dr. Robert Price, Biblical Scholar with two Ph.D's, review of Acharya's "Christ in Egypt"

Earl Doherty defers to Acharya for the subject of astrotheology:

"A heavenly location for the actions of the savior gods, including the death of Christ, would also have been influenced by most religions' ultimate derivation from astrotheology, as in the worship of the sun and moon. For this dimension of more remote Christian roots, see the books of Acharya S" - Earl Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, (2009) page 153

"Your scholarship is relentless! ...the research conducted by D.M. Murdock concerning the myth of Jesus Christ is certainly both valuable and worthy of consideration." - Dr. Ken Feder, Professor of Archaeology

"...In recent months or over the last year or so I have interviewed Frank Zindler and Richard Carrier and David Fitzgerald and Robert Price all on the issue of mythicism ... when I spoke to these people I asked for their expertise collectively and what I got, especially from Fitzgerald and Robert Price, was that we should be speaking to tonights guest D.M. Murdock,author of 'Did Moses Exist? The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver'." - Aron Ra, The Ra Men podcast EP10 - Did Moses Exist? with D.M. Murdock

"I've known people with triple Ph.D's who haven't come close to the scholarship in Who Was Jesus?" - Pastor David Bruce, M.Div

"...I have found her scholarship, research, knowledge of the original languages, and creative linkages to be breathtaking and highly stimulating." - Rev. Dr. Jon Burnham, Pastor

"I can recommend your work whole-heartedly!" - Dr. Robert Eisenman

"This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral dissertation entitled “Solar Worship in the Biblical World” which was submitted to the Graduate School of Yale University in the Spring of 1989. As may be judged from the title of that work, I had at one time planned to cover more territory than sun worship in ancient Israel, but found the material pertaining to ancient Israel so vast that I never got beyond it." - Rev. Dr. J. Glen Taylor, "Yahweh and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient Israel" (1993)

"At Stonehenge in England and Carnac in France, in Egypt and Yucatan, across the whole face of the earth are found mysterious ruins of ancient monuments, monuments with astronomical significance. These relics of other times are as accessible as the American Midwest and as remote as the jungles of Guatemala. Some of them were built according to celestial alignments; others were actually precision astronomical observatories ... Careful observation of the celestial rhythms was compellingly important to early peoples, and their expertise, in some respects, was not equaled in Europe until three thousand years later." - Dr. Edwin Krupp, astronomer and director at Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles

Mythicism and the Ph.D.: A Brief History http://freethoughtnation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=18805

Zeitgeist Part 1: The Greatest Story Ever Told https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt-qYDb7UcI

Astrotheology of the Ancients http://stellarhousepublishing.com/astrotheology.html

Star Worship of the Ancient Israelites http://astrotheology.net/star-worship-of-the-ancient-israelites/

Zodiacs on the Floor of Synagogues http://freethoughtnation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=4148

2,750-year-old solar-aligned temple discovered in Israel http://freethoughtnation.com/2750-year-old-solar-aligned-temple-discovered-in-israel/

Stone Age Zodiac by National Geographic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk8R6IyM5Ec

“The claim that the 12 tribes of Israel were identified with the 12 signs of the zodiac is spelled out clearly by the ancient Jewish writers Philo and Josephus, during the first century. During the first century BCE, Diodorus Siculus identified the 12 tribes with the 12 months.

“See Exodus 39:9-14: "...they made the breastplate... And they set in it four rows of stones... And the stones were according to the names of the children of Israel, twelve...according to the twelve tribes.”

As Josephus says (Antiquities, 3.8): “And for the twelve stones, whether we understand by them the months, or whether we understand the like number of the signs of that circle which the Greeks call the zodiac, we shall not be mistaken in their meaning.” (Josephus/Whiston, 75.)

Earlier than Josephus, Philo (“On the Life of Moses,” 12) had made the same comments regarding Moses: “Then the twelve stones on the breast, which are not like one another in colour, and which are divided into four rows of three stones in each, what else can they be emblems of, except of the circle of the zodiac?” (Philo/Duke, 99.)”

– Christ in Egypt, 261-2

Malachi 4:2

“…the sun was worshipped by the Israelites, who associated it with their tribal god Yahweh. Like Father, like son, and the connection between Jesus and the sun is first evidenced in the OT book of Malachi (4:2), which immediately precedes the New Testament and in which the author refers to the “Sun of Righteousness” who will “arise with healing in his wings.” This scripture, which is in the last chapter before the Gospel of Matthew, sounds much like the winged solar disc of Babylon and Egypt.”

“This scripture in Malachi is perceived as a reference to the coming messiah, Jesus Christ. In this regard, this clearly solar appellation “Sun of Righteousness” is repeated many times by early Church fathers as being applicable to Christ.”

For more information: Jesus as the Sun throughout History http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/jesussunexcerpt.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.94.225.154 (talk) 20:29, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Add Template to above IP97, FYI not the same as me. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 20:40, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
I disagree that Acharya should have an entire section. Her work was self-published, which makes it inappropriate for citation as a WP:RS in a general article such as this. Many other authors had provided succinct summaries of the mythicist position long before Acharya.
But on the other hand, I do believe that she should be briefly mentioned, and put in context, in the section on 'Syncretistic and mythological roots of Christianity'. The context should be provided by a reliable secondary source review. Acharya S currently has her own Wiki article, and we should provide a link so that interested readers can easily find more information. This can be done without unduly bloating the article, or hurting neutrality. JerryRussell (talk) 17:57, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
Since there has been no further discussion or objections over the last 2 weeks, I've taken the liberty of inserting a one-sentence mention of Acharya's work, with a link, into the article. JerryRussell (talk) 02:12, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Which ENGVAR is this article written in?

The problem occurred to me when I noticed "an historical Jesus", a variant that is overwhelmingly more common in British English than American English (although not non-existant therein) and is difficult to pronounce in a way that doesn't sound like Cockney slang (see [1]). But the article is a mess ENGVAR-wise. Excluding direct quotations (obviously), -ise is used twice, while -ize appears more than a dozen times. Obviously there is a preference in the current version for American spellings and ... vocabulary (?), but what was first, and should we WP:PRESERVE that if British spellings were? The topic doesn't apparently have strong WP:TIES one way or the other. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:23, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

I agree there is no obviously consistent usage in the article. I'm almost blind to this sort of thing, so I'm not the person to fix it. I would support moving to American english. JerryRussell (talk) 18:30, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Biblical inerrancy? Biblical literalism? Is the implication that there is some connection between belief that Jesus of Nazareth existed as a historical person and biblical inerrancy? Because as a non-inerrantist who accepts the historical consensus regarding the existence of Jesus I find that association questionable.

Others are arguably just as weird, though. Criticism of Christianity only links to this page in a misleading paragraph loaded with weasel words and misrepresents criticism of Christianity as "originating" with the "Christ Myth theory", and Criticism of Christianity only mentions this topic while quoting a self-contradictory opinion of Bertrand Russell that Jesus didn't exist but at the same time was worthy of being argued with; honestly, I don't see why you would want to criticize someone who you don't think ever existed.

The section needs to be culled, IMO.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:34, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

I agree that CMT has little if anything to do with inerrancy or literalism. I do think it's related to Criticism of Christianity and Criticism of Jesus. I don't see anything contradictory in the Bertrand Russell quote: Jesus himself might not have existed, but his alleged words and teachings certainly do exist. At any rate, if there are problems in those other articles, they should be fixed there, right? Anyhow, I'll get rid of the inerrancy and literalism links, and we'll go from there. JerryRussell (talk) 18:36, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

(J. M. Robertson (1910), p.287) ap. Archibald Robertson (1946) redaction

  • All that can rationally be claimed is that a teacher or teachers named Jesus, or several differently named teachers called Messiahs, may have Messianically uttered some of these teachings at various periods, presumably after the writing of the Pauline epistles.
  • [J. M.] Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus perhaps more than one having contributed something to the Gospel story. "A teacher or teachers named Jesus, or several differently named teachers called Messiahs" (of whom many are on record) may have uttered some of the sayings in the Gospels. (J. M. Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, revised edition, p. 125)
  • The myth theory as stated by J. M. Robertson does not exclude the possibility of an historical Jesus. “A teacher or teachers named Jesus” may have uttered some of the Gospel sayings “at various periods.” The Jesus ben-Pandera of the Talmud may have led a movement round which the survivals of an ancient solar or other cult gradually clustered. (Robertson, pp.284f) It is even “not very unlikely that there were several Jesuses who claimed to be Messiahs.” (Robertson, p.287)

The above quoted (J. M. Robertson (1910), p.287) ap. Archibald Robertson (1946) was redacted per "Quote taken out of context." - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 08:01, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

I thought that @Hijiri88: made several positive improvements to the lede. I don't see anything out of context about the Robertson quote. But, there's plenty of support remaining for that particular sentence. So, per WP:OVERCITE, and the quote farming criticisms we've had, I don't see any problem with leaving it out.
With regards to Hijiri88's statement in the edit summary, It's a near-certainty that several Jesuses made messianic claims, since Jesus was an extremely common name and messiah claims were almost as common. And it's in Josephus. It has no bearing one way or the other. I'm not so sure it has no bearing one way or the other. Several recent books have made claims that characters mentioned in Josephus, such as Judas the Galilean, or The Egyptian, were in fact the historical basis of the Jesus character in the New Testament. Furthermore, Judas the Galilean may have been the actual founder of the Christian religion, or at least the Ebionite (Jewish Zealot) branch. The Egyptian may have been an important prophet and leader of that same Ebionite church. Yet neither of those characters was said to be born in Nazareth, or crucified under Pontius Pilate. So if someone claims that Judas the Galilean was the Historical Jesus, is that person a mythicist? How would such a claim be evaluated by the mainstream? Can this discussion be worked into the article, given that the Wiki RS status of the books making these claims will be subject to debate? JerryRussell (talk) 19:33, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
IP96 and I have been discussing this matter in the section above entitled "Ehrman quote" since last Oct. 30, and so far there has been no objection. So, I am planning to take the initiative to write it up sometime in the next few weeks, unless there is further discussion. After I do so, we can review whether the sources I come up with are sufficiently reliable to support the information. JerryRussell (talk) 19:58, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
  • [Per a review of The Christ Myth (1910)] The main result at which the author [Arthur Drews] arrives is that the Jesus of the canonical Gospels is a largely humanised form of a pre-Christian cult-god of that name ...[and it is also] possible that there was a great teacher and healer bearing the same name [Jesus], who was confounded with that supposed deity. (T. K. Cheyne of Oxford (1911). The Hibbert journal, Volume 9, Issues 3-4 pg 658)
  • Thanks for the ping. I didn't even look at the bibliographical details of the source before saying that the quote was out of context. I was assuming that sources cited for factual statements and not attributed inline were to modern, reputable, scholarly sources, and had no idea how dependent the article was on very old sources and sources written by the "theory"'s advocates, and in this case both.
The simple fact is that there were many people named Jesus in 1st-century Palestine, and at least one who was apparently different from Jesus of Nazareth did apparently make a messianic claim. This has no relevance to the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth existed. Simply stating that there were many Jesuses making messianic claims without pointing out that it is irrelevant is inappropriate, and stating something before immediately stating that it is irrelevant is inappropriate for the lead. What we should do is (in the body of the article!) discuss the fact that some mythicists have claimed that the existence of other Jesuses making messianic claims is evidence against Jesus of Nazareth having existed, and balance it out with the claims of their opponents that this is irrelevant.
Anyway, the lead should not be sourced independently from the body. I personally loath WP:LEDECITEs on principle, but I know there is no universal ban on their inclusion. However, we should be very careful that nothing in the lead is sourced independently from the body, and that the lead accurately and fairly summarizes the body. The existence of this many LEDECITEs usually sends up red flags that the lead misrepresents the body and was written independently based on external sources, so I am already suspicious.
Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:09, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
Hi @Hijiri88:, I can confirm that the lede was recently rewritten & sourced independent from the body. The process is discussed in the section "Disquisitions on variations in the CMT" above, as well as some earlier related discussions now in the archives. In addition to the sources given for the individual points, we believe the paragraph also represents an outline of two recent comprehensive books on the CMT, by Bart Ehrman (in criticism) and Richard Carrier (in support). We weren't sure how to cite it as such, but that was our intent. By "we" I mean IP96 and myself, who worked together on the paragraph.
We are also in the process of re-writing the article to reflect the outline given in the paragraph. Looking at where we stand, I see we're missing a section "Argument from Silence" on the absence of early 1st century evidence. Other than that, I think the article and the lede are in pretty good agreement. Of course IP96 and I would welcome your opinion. JerryRussell (talk) 18:28, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
Question: What we should do is (in the body of the article!) discuss the fact that some mythicists have claimed that the existence of other Jesuses making messianic claims is evidence against Jesus of Nazareth having existed, and balance it out with the claims of their opponents that this is irrelevant. Hijiri88, do you have a source for this claim by opponents? I agree it should be in the article. JerryRussell (talk) 18:44, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Per René Salm, Semi-mythicists endorses the existence of a prophet at the origin of Christianity, but maintains that prophet had little or no resemblance to Jesus of Nazareth.

René Salm's list of semi-mythicists

(Semi-Myth) = Semi-mythicist. Endorses the existence of a prophet at the origin of Christianity, but maintains that prophet had little or no resemblance to Jesus of Nazareth.

1791 • (Semi-Myth) COMPTE DE VOLNEY, Les Ruines. Volney argued that the gospel story was compiled organically when simple allegorical statements like “the virgin has brought forth” were misunderstood as history. Volney parted company with Dupuis by allowing that confused memories of an obscure historical figure may have contributed to Christianity when they were integrated with solar mythology. He predicted the final union of all religions and the recognition of a common truth underlying them all.

1871 • (Semi-myth) SYTZE HOEKSTRA, De Christologie van het kanonische Marcus-Evangelie (Dutch). One of the first Dutch Radicals, Hoekstra considered Mark’s gospel worthless as a biography of Jesus. For him, the synoptics are symbolic poetry.

1886 • (Semi-Myth) ABRAHAM DIRK LOMAN. Quaestiones Paulinae (“Questions on the Paulines”) contends that not only Galatians, but all of Paul’s Epistles are (following Bruno Bauer) 2nd century forgeries. Loman finds no evidence of the Paulinae before Marcion and considers the epistles to be Gnostic treatises. For him, Jesus is a 2nd century fiction though ‘some’ Jesus may have existed, quite buried in history. The Jesus of Christianity is an ideal symbol, a non-historical construction.

1914 • (Semi-Myth) FREDERICK C. CONYBEARE, The historical Christ, or, An investigation of the views of Mr. J.M. Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W.B. Smith. Conybeare was an Orientalist and Professor of Theology at Oxford. For him, the texts show a gradual deification of an existing human source.

1930 • (Semi-myth) DANIEL MASSÉ, The Enigma of Jesus Christ. Massé believed that Jesus was in fact John of Gamala, the son of Judas of Gamala. The true Nazareth was Gamala, where Jesus bar Judah was born. Massé viewed the gospels as deliberate efforts on the part of the Church to falsify history. For him, exegesis is a way in which ecclesiastics propagandize the masses.

1957 • (Semi-Myth) JOHN MARCO ALLEGRO, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of Christianity. Prof. Allegro, one of the original DSS team, had the courage to buck his teammates. Prescient in many ways, Allegro’s provocative proposals may not be all correct but they nevertheless attest to a remarkable scholar.

1975 • (Semi-Myth) GEORGE A. WELLS, Did Jesus Exist? Greatly influenced by Arthur Drews, Wells is a prolific writer and arguably the foremost mythicist representative in Europe today. Wells may be best characterized as a semi-mythicist, for he does not exclude the possibility that a prophet lay at the origins of Christianity, yet one with little in common with Jesus of Nazareth. Wells is a former Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association, with degrees in German, Philosophy, and natural science.

1999 • (Semi-myth) ALVAR ELLEGARD. Jesus—One Hundred Years Before Christ: A Study In Creative Mythology. Ellegard argues that Jesus is to be identified with the Essene Teacher of Righteousness and actually lived a century before the common era, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus.

2008 • (Semi-Myth) RENÉ SALM. The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus. Presents an exhaustive review of the primary archaeological evidence from the Nazareth basin and concludes that the town came into existence between the two Jewish revolts. Salm received undergraduate degrees in Music and German, and was active as a composer and keyboardist for a number of years. Interest in religion began in early adulthood and led to independent study of Buddhism and then Christianity, including occasional post-graduate coursework. Salm considers himself an Atheist, a Buddhist, and (in an ethical rather than doctrinal sense) a Christian . He is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and maintains several websites. He is pursuaded that Jesus of Nazareth is a pure invention as regards all biographical particulars, but suspects that a prophet may have lived several generations before the turn of the era, one who inspired the gnostic religion known as Mandeism and (though considerable perversion) Pauline Christianity.

  • According to [Richard] Carrier, a solution that requires no special pleading. His take on Christianity’s origins begins in the religiously roiling Israel of the 30s, when the restive population was starting to rebel against the Temple elite. [...] Through visions, apocalyptic math and study of the Scriptures, one group ...came up with a celestial being made human flesh, killed by the forces of evil in a sacrifice that combined and eclipsed both Yom Kippur and Passover, who rose from the dead and will very soon come again to save the faithful.
More of Carrier's key points noted by Brian Bethune
  • [Richard Carrier notes that per corroborating the New Testament account of Jesus] for a century there are no other Christian witnesses; perhaps more inexplicably, no pagan witnesses (whose references to Jesus would have been mentioned by later Christians, either to celebrate or [to] refute).
  • [Richard Carrier notes that per Christianity] the first adherents can’t agree, within a century, when their founder died or who killed him.
    • The apocryphal Gospel of Peter says King Herod signed the death warrant.
    • [Those who] thought Jesus was nearly 50 when he died—believed that happened in the 40s of the first century, long after Pilate had been recalled to Rome.
    • The Nazorians, an intriguing sect of Torah-observant early Christians discussed by a fourth-century scholar, believed Jesus died a century before the canonical Gospels, around 70 BCE. (And, since they were descended directly from the first followers of Christ, called Nazarenes before they became known as Christians, the Nazorians cannot be easily dismissed. The Babylonian Talmud, composed by the fifth century, notes the same.)
  • [Richard Carrier notes that per early Christianity] the new faith’s most prominent Apostle [Paul] seems only to know a cosmic Christ, about whom he has learned by vision and close reading of the prophets.

96.29.176.92 (talk) 20:21, 1 December 2016 (UTC) & update 20:54, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Citations Demonstrating Scholarly Support for the CMT

section is for references only

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). [2] (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). [3]
  • ”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. [4]
  • 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) [5]
  • 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) [6]
  • 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) [7]
  • 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) [8]
  • 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,[9]
  • 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). [10]
  • “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)
Copied content to Wikipedia:Subpages - Citations and replaced template hab with collapse, so it will be auto archived. - 96.29.176.92 (talk) 20:51, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Thomas Brodie update

The Thomas Brodie case with the Dominicans was closed in 2014. The source for this information is the Dominican periodical 'Doctrine and Life'. The Dominicans seem to be rather old-fashioned: this publication doesn't appear on the Web as far as I can find, except where it is quoted at the Wikipedia article for Thomas L. Brodie. Is it considered reasonable to assume that the earlier Wiki editor (in this case, Kky123), has quoted the material correctly?

2010 'Good Article' version

Continuing through my tour of the archives, I found that this 2010 version had briefly been awarded 'good article' status. In following discussions, CMT proponents claimed that the article had been 'owned' by mainstream critics of the CMT, and the article was delisted from 'good' status as a result. Looking at the 2010 article, it does seem that it's a little thin on its representation of proponent viewpoints. But, the section on criticisms is really very good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christ_myth_theory&oldid=345603403#Scholarly_reception

— Preceding unsigned comment added by JerryRussell (talk • contribs) 20:00, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Note: copied to archive manually. The bot must have missed these items because I forgot to sign them. JerryRussell (talk) 17:51, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Removing Dorothy Murdock's claims

There is an obvious fringe claim in this Wikipedia article, and that is noting that Dorothy Murdock believes that Jesus is based on earlier characters like Horus. This clearly outrageous claim violates Wikipedia:Fringe theories and Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Dorothy Murdock is not a notable individual in academia in the slightest, in fact she doesn't even have anything more than a Bachelors degree in historical fields. She's just a conspiracy theorist who got too popular. Either way, the inclusion of her claims is in clear violation of at least two important Wikipedia policies, and dare I say a violation of WP:NPOV. This must obviously be removed.Korvex (talk) 22:31, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Dorothy Murdock is not a notable individual in academia in the slightest... I beg to differ. Her writings have been criticized by a number of highly notable individuals, including by the preeminent scholar of New Testament history alive today. Please familiarize yourself with WP:FRINGE, WP:NOT and WP:WEIGHT. I understand that you are a new editor and that some aspects of WP may seem counter-intuitive, but our policies have stabilized to their current form with good reason. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 22:44, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
As an aside, making statements like This must obviously be removed. with an edit count of less than 200 is very bad form, and likely to only galvanize resistance to your position by more experienced editors. Your limited experience just doesn't lend itself to a complete understanding of WP policy. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 22:46, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for bringing up my form, I'll work on that. Anyways, I beg to differ to your begging to differ, Mjolnir. Dorothy has hardly been addressed in actual peer-review. Off-hand dismissals do not qualify as scholarly scrutiny. Secondly, even if I was entirely wrong and there was actual scholarly response to her fringe theories, her citation still violates Wikipedia:Reliable sources. But thanks about noting to me that scholarly scrutiny can also qualify one to bypassing Wikipedia:Fringe theories -- I did not know that. One thing to ask as well -- did you figure out I'm a new user by quickly clicking on my profile? Point is, unless one can show published scholarly scrutiny rather than off-hand dismissals of her fringe views, Dorothy's notion gets shot down by WP:FRINGE and the current citation is subject to WP:IRS regardless.Korvex (talk) 23:06, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
Off-hand dismissals do not qualify as scholarly scrutiny. You are clearly unfamiliar with the treatment of her writings. Her claims have been highly influential among mythicists, and as such have gotten significant coverage. For example, Ehrman devotes an entire subheading of Did Jesus Exist? to her most popular book and cites two other works of hers on the subject.
her citation still violates Wikipedia:Reliable sources. No. Otherwise unreliable sources most certainly can be used to evince the views of the author. That is how they are used in this case.
But thanks about noting to me that scholarly scrutiny can also qualify one to bypassing Wikipedia:Fringe theories. It's not bypassing anything. So long as the fringe material is attributed to the source and isn't given undue weight, it's perfectly acceptable. How else could we possibly have a Flat earth article?
One thing to ask as well -- did you figure out I'm a new user by quickly clicking on my profile? That and the way you write on talk pages.
Point is, unless one can show published scholarly scrutiny rather than off-hand dismissals of her fringe views, Dorothy's notion gets shot down by WP:FRINGE and the current citation is subject to WP:IRS regardless. I STRONGLY suggest you carefully read both of those pages, because you are not representing them in a way that conforms to the community's understanding.
Even if nothing I've argued matters to you, take this as advice from an experienced wikipedian to a new editor: You are wrong on this. It's okay, it doesn't have to be the end of your editing tenure here. It doesn't even have to be a very big deal. But I've noticed you have engaged in some heated discussions with other experienced editors (including at least one admin who is also a member of the arbitration committee). The track you're on right now is heading straight for a brick wall called "sanctions", and that's not something that needs to happen. You can decide to drop these arguments and edit in less controversial areas, or confine yourself to smaller edits in these areas long enough to get a good feel for how things work around here, and then this will be nothing but a learning experience. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 23:28, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
Very well. So, in your view, the citation to Robert Price's book on Dorothy's position qualifies Wikipedia:Reliable sources? Ehrman's definitely qualifies, of course.Korvex (talk) 23:58, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
You seem to have some confusion regarding a number of policies. WP:IRS is a guide to finding sources for claims of fact. But it also mentions how to find sources for claims that a certain person asserts a certain claim. For claims that "Person X said Y", any verifiable writings of person X are acceptable, so long as they assert Y. So for example, Alex Jones has asserted that Barack Obama intended to destroy the United States. This is a ridiculous claim that certainly falls under WP:FRINGE. So we cannot, for example, put the statement "Obama intends to destroy the United States" in Barack Obama. However, we can put the statement "Alex Jones frequently stated that Barack Obama intends to destroy the United States", provided the statement garners enough recognition to warrant inclusion (see WP:DUE and WP:NOT for policies addressing this).
In this case, Murdock's books have been hugely influential in the Mythicist movement. Indeed, she is the largest popularizer of the idea that the Christ stories originated as stories about Horus, and many of her novel claims to this effect are echoed in popular culture, including in the pseudo-documentary Zeitgeist, which then introduced those claims to much of the internet and popularized them a great deal. This resulted in serious scholars (including the two otherwise reputable scholars who lend their support to the mythicist movement) criticizing her writings. (Rightfully so; they're quite out there and she knows almost nothing about Egyptian mythology. I'd love to see her or one of her followers try to tell me how Jesus once jacked off on some lettuce and fed it to James). So the notability claims have been established. Furthermore, because she influenced subsequent writers on the subject -negatively in the case of Price and Carrier, and positively in the case of most of those who lack any credentials- the claims of due weight are satisfied: her writings are influential on the subject. Finally, because she verifiably wrote these claims herself, her books are, in fact, reliable sources for her views on the subject.
So nobody's disagreeing with you that her writings were ignorant and fringe. However, to provide a clear and accurate picture of this subject, we need to document them, even while we withhold endorsement of them. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 00:17, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
Alright, thanks for clearing that up. I hadn't known the difference between citing actual truth claims and merely providing a reference for something someone has asserted/said. You have my thanks.Korvex (talk) 00:32, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
I'm happy to help. If you ever have any more questions, you can reach my at my talk page, which is accessible through a link in my signature (the part that says "tell me all about it"). MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 02:24, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

This discussion has gone quiet, and I'm happy with the outcome. But for the record, I want to add that the existing text about Acharya was a compromise that I suggested as a resolution to a long-standing conflict. At one time, Acharya's views were the topic of an entire paragraph in this article. This was deleted after much controversy as undue. Not too much later, one of Acharya's readers stopped by the talk page and demanded to know how such a famous individual could go unmentioned. I feel the same way, and introduced the existing sentence with a link to her Wikipedia article. I should also add, the suggestion above that Acharya's views on the relation between Horus and Jesus are universally rejected by respectable scholarship, is incorrect. Or at least, if you view Price as a respectable scholar. His review was full of praise for Acharya's book "Christ in Egypt: the Horus-Jesus Connection", complaining only that Acharya did not go far enough. That's why I chose that particular source. JerryRussell (talk) 17:37, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

I should also add, the suggestion above that Acharya's views on the relation between Horus and Jesus are universally rejected by respectable scholarship, is incorrect. No, it's not. There are no scholars who have put any serious study into this assertion and concluded that there might be something to it. Price has mentioned it a few times to my knowledge, but Price's qualifications to make accurate statements about Egyptian mythology are non-existent. The differences between Horus and Jesus are vast, and most of the similarities described by Acharya are simply made up, and do not appear anywhere else in the available literature (except where they're sourced to her). Hell, just checking the publicly accessible sources at Horus will show that this is so. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 19:02, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
I did qualify my statement with the premise that it's based on the notion that Price is a respectable scholar. I understand that not everyone would think so. Furthermore, it's also true that his qualifications aren't primarily in Egyptology. But with the fragmentation in academia today, it's hard to find someone who is solidly qualified in both Egyptology and New Testament studies. And no one is denying that there are vast differences between Horus and Jesus. At any rate, Price and Murdock's work will stand or fall on its own merits, our job at Wikipedia is just to report what the sources say.
And, @MjolnirPants:, I really do appreciate that you stood for keeping this content in the article. I've come to see you as an editor who puts NPOV above your own opinions. Respect! JerryRussell (talk) 00:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
I did qualify my statement with the premise that it's based on the notion that Price is a respectable scholar.I see what you mean. When it comes to theology, sure; I respect his opinion a great deal. But as has been pointed out by a number of experts: you're only an expert in your particular field of study.
I get the impression from your comments, however that Price has written more about the Horus/Jesus theory than I'm aware of. I seem to recall him mentioning Harpur once, and Acharya a few times and that's about it as far as him citing specific Jesus-Horus theories. I know he wrote that Jesus may be a blending of Greek, Persian and Egyptian figures. So if you're aware of Price having argued that Jesus and Horus had the same mythological origin, or that Jesus is a corruptions of the Horus myth, or if you're just referring to the simple claim that there are similarities between Jesus and Horus, then I can see where you're coming from.
I've come to see you as an editor who puts NPOV above your own opinions. Well thank you for saying so. Respect goes both ways. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 04:38, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Pageview count

Quite interesting tool. --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 08:54, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Christ myth theory (365 days)

talk:Christ myth theory (365 days)

I won't edit this page here for the next months since now there is no use, no reason, it only would attract others and even make some of them curious and that's not my aim, I don't want to play that role. --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 09:13, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Archive size

How about a larger archive size? 75k is quite inconvenient, when one wants to scroll through the archives. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:09, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

L Ron Hubbard

This

Why does this keep getting removed?Slatersteven (talk) 11:18, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Apparently it is because the source is not "scientific" (whatever that means).Slatersteven (talk) 11:57, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

I reverted the deletion: The author, the book and the subject are all notable, and this is a single sentence with a short quote. It's perfectly within the guidelines to keep it in. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 16:40, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
I know that, I was hopeing the user who wants to delete it would discus their objection.Slatersteven (talk) 16:53, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
This doesn't strike me as the sort of edit made by an editor willing to discuss anything. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 13:34, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
Really the issue is whether or not Scientology makes this claim. Hubbard is "just this guy", not an authority of any importance outside of the religion he created. Mangoe (talk) 19:19, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
Yeah, but he's a notable guy who managed to found a religion based on the kind of sci-fi I might come up with while drunk. At age 12. After some head trauma. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 19:32, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
It's still apparently a personal opinion expressed in private and transmitted only through a "problematic" (to quote our article) source. Given the, um, lack of reliability surrounding Hubbard I'm reluctant to even accept this as an accurate statement of his belief. Mangoe (talk) 22:50, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
If you can convince me this source isn't reliable, then I'll back you up. But it looks reliable enough for me. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 22:53, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyHfVReWpTA

What deliberations should be included?

I think that the founder of a rival religious belief system cannot be open-minded and therefore scientific honestly deliberate on whether Jesus of Nazareth existed and on what he did. Therefore it isn't proper to include it in THIS article. If that founder's opinion on "Christ myth theory" is an important topic for that belief system then it has to be added THERE. (But until now it isn't even mentioned there.)--RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 19:57, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Please read WP:DUE. Wikipedia's policies and guidelines override your personal opinion. And stop edit warring or you will be reported for it. Two different editors have been trying to get you to engage on talk for over a week now, and while I'm glad you finally decided to show up here, the fact that you did so while reverting yet again does you no favors, nor does the fact that you've evinced a battleground mentality about this edit. The fact that you haven't made any policy-based arguments is not helping, either. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 20:23, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
(1) What I've said above is a quite obvious argument, isn't it? (2) Can you refute it? --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 20:34, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
I just did. Did you read my comment? WP policy overrides your personal opinion on these matters. And do not add your own personal commentary to the article page. That's as blatant a violation of WP policy as there can be. All content requires reliable secondary sources to support it. Nobody has suggested that Hubbard was "open minded and scientific" about anything (in fact, I'm pretty sure I did a very clear job ob lambasting him in the section above). You're arguing against a position no-one has taken, based on your own misunderstanding about how WP works. Please. Stop. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 20:38, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
But why include a deliberation when it's not open-minded (and therefore not scientific)? (And it isn't even important for that belief system since it isn't mentioned there.) Of what value is it then for the article "Christ myth theory"? --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 20:48, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
Please read WP:YESPOV and WP:SELFPUB. The article is about the theory that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as a person. This theory has made its way into the popular consciousness numerous times, so this article covers what notable commentators have said about it, in order to inform the reader about the popular aspects of it. Like him or not, Hubbard is a very notable individual. In addition to being rather well known as a science fiction author, he managed to found a religion that has been the center of numerous controversies in its own right, over the years. His opinion may be right or wrong, it doesn't matter. But the fact that he had an opinion does matter for this article. I have no doubt in my mind that there is an earnest (ill-informed but still) young Scientologist out there, wondering what to believe about the existence of Jesus, who will be quite happy to learn that the central figure of their religion didn't believe he existed. I'm equally sure that there is an earnest young Atheist out there, wondering what that ole buzzard Hubbard and his hokey religion thought about Jesus, who will be quite pleased to learn Hubbard didn't believe in him. I'm also sure there's an earnest young pastor out there in a Scientology-inundated region trying to put together a sermon in which what Hubbard thought of Jesus' existence is an important point, who will be quite happy to learn that Hubbard didn't believe.
But I don't believe, for one second, that we're helping to inform anyone by excising well-sourced material from the article simply because we don't think the author can be objective enough to satisfy our own preconceptions about what makes an expert. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 20:58, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
This article is not about what prominent people thought about it but about the theory itself. Those who are mentioned must have invested some time on that topic for it's own merit. If it's only a opinion without deliberation, then it doesn't improve the knowledge. Why mention it here and not in the article about the celeb? --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 21:10, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
To repeat it once again in short. Why isn't it mentioned there? If it's of no use there, much less it's here! --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 21:14, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@MjolnirPants: You say that it is important for the 3 mentioned people to know what that founder of a rival religious belief system thinks about issue of the historicity of Jesus from Nazareth. But why don't you add it to the wikipedia article about the founder or the article about that religious belief system? --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 21:46, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
Because those articles aren't about the Christ myth theory, ffs! Do I really need to explain that to you? ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 21:56, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
But this article is about a theory, theory means reason/science! Not one religious belief system commentating on the other one on its core issue (which is rather impolite , isn't it?) --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 22:11, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@MjolnirPants:It's even self-contradictory: Google article with the sentence "honored the great religious leaders of the past for the wisdom they brought to the world" and you get the official statement! So either not mention it at all or with inclusion of the official statement. And on the article about that religious belief system, not here. --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 22:28, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
Hello, @MagicatthemovieS: You've removed "Dispute about|non-scholar source" and you're the original editor of that topic. Can you give a short comment on that topic? So far there is only the automatic summary. --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 22:58, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom: This article defines itself as "the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels". It goes on to point out that "The Christ myth theory contradicts the mainstream historical view, which is that while the gospels include many mythical or legendary elements, these are religious elaborations added to the biography of a historical figure".
So it's fair to ask what sort of information would be of proper WP:WEIGHT to include in an article with that description? Wikipedia's policy on inclusion of content in articles, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view is clear that we should be "representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic." Considering that the article reports the views of some two dozen notable figures from the Comte de Volney and Charles-François Dupuis in the 18th century to Thomas L. Thompson in 2012, is it really WP:UNDUE to include a one sentence summary of the views of L. Ron Hubbard, a genuinely notable figure who clearly propounded the view that Jesus did not exist? I would have though that a reasonable inclusion, even though I join with you in thinking his reasoning to be nonsensical. If you will concede that an article about what we might consider a fringe theory will necessarily have to include content that hardly anybody agrees with, or that is patently non-scientific, then I think it follows that we have to report the views of notable proponents. This does not constitute an endorsement of their views, but simply as neutral a summary of them as we can muster. At that point, you will need to explain either why Hubbard is not notable (he has a Wikipedia article), or why his views are not significant, or why the source is not reliable. Of course, if you feel that the article doesn't accurately summarise the source, or that other reliable sources contradict that one, then you really should be stating what you propose as an alternative summary or contradictory source. --RexxS (talk) 00:24, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
@RexxS:(1) Comte de Volney was historian. Charles-François Dupuis albeit avocat and mathematician also "devoted himself to the study of astronomy (his tutor was Lalande) in connection with mythology, the result of which was his magnum opus: Origine de tous les Cultes, ou la Réligion Universelle": He was interested in the exploration of religion, he didn't found a new one. Thomas L. Thompson was a biblical scholar. So all there are very different from the founder of a religious belief system.
(2) Google article with the sentence "honored the great religious leaders of the past for the wisdom they brought to the world". In this article it is said, "And again it was handed on to a man named Christ. And he handed it on and even the Arab nations benefited from this through their own prophet, Muhammad." Isn't this a contradiction? My first edit (in the article space) under the username RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (because I'm very impressed of her famous saying) was on the article alternative facts. Increasingly interesting name, I must say. --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 00:57, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
(1) Yes, Volney was a historian, Dupuis was a polymath, Thompson was a biblical scholar, Remsburg was a schoolteacher, and Hubbard was a science-fiction writer. All very different from each other, but not relevant to the question of whether the sources relating their views on the Christ myth theory are reliable. We are not dealing with self-published sources about third-parties (whose reliability rests solely on the authority of the author as an expert in that field). We are dealing with sources that are published by reliable publishers with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. It matters not one jot that J. M. Robertson was a member of parliament, because we're not relying on that fact to establish the reliability of the source Wells, George Albert, ed. (1987). J.M. Robertson (1856-1933): liberal, rationalist, and scholar : an assessment by several hands. Pemberton. pp. 162–163. ISBN 0301870020.. We're relying on the editorial skills and reputation of George Albert Wells and the publication process of Pemberton Publishers to give us confidence that the source is reliable in what it says about Robertson's views. See Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources for the full guidance.
(2) Google gives most of us a personalised set of results when we search, and that's one reason why we don't accept a Google search as a source. If you have a reliable source that contradicts Corydon, Bent; Ambry, Brian (1992). L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?. Barricade Books. p. 353. ISBN 0-942637-57-7., then state it here. WP:BALANCE tells us "when reputable sources contradict one another and are relatively equal in prominence, describe both points of view and work for balance. This involves describing the opposing views clearly, drawing on secondary or tertiary sources that describe the disagreement from a disinterested viewpoint." It doesn't tell us to leave out both sets of views, when it is clear that they are relevant and significant per WP:NPOV. --RexxS (talk) 01:41, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
@RexxS: Can't you understand me? The Google search "honored the great religious leaders of the past for the wisdom they brought to the world" leads to an official website of this religious belief system. Google is only a means to get there without me giving the LINK here in Wikipedia. Only Science-fiction writer? Oh my, don't you know what they are doing to people?! --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 21:18, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
It doesn't matter what they are doing to people. Wikipedia is not about social activism. Wikipedia is not about pushing an ideology, no matter how 'correct' it is. Wikipedia is about documenting notable people, events, concepts and objects. L Ron Hubbard is notable, the Christ myth theory is notable. When L. Ron Hubbard comments on the Christ myth theory, that is notable. Simply including it here is not an endorsement of his view, nor does it imply him to be an expert in any way. This is exactly analogous to our coverage of Jenny McCarthy and the anti-vaccination movement. She's as full of shit when it comes to vaccinations as Hubbard is when it comes to history. But both of them are notable, and both of them actually expressed their views. We can't combat bullshit by pretending bullshit doesn't exist. Why you can't seem to get that through your head is beyond me, but if you can't, you're just going to end up being blocked from editing or prohibited from editing certain articles. Please knock it off, you're only digging yourself a deeper grave here. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 21:41, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
Do you reflect the offensive words you say? I won't do that to you, just a benign reference to The pot calling the kettle black. And my answer was just a correction to your (and to a lesser extent my) previous posts pretending that there is no elephant in the room! But besides that, the article is about a scholar question not about junk science. And no, that source has zero scholar credibility: Science-fiction dreams doesn't disqualify from scientific reasoning (e.g. Jules Vernes) but "notability" only gained from (far-off) sci-fi doesn't qualify someone to be scholar source worth mentioning in that article either. But what disqualifies him (as it would everyone else) is the impossibility to be open-minded due to being a promoter/founder of a rival religious belief system.
And I asked the question at least thrice. Why isn't it mentioned in the article about that religious belief system what their founder said about that topic? If it's not interesting there, why here? THERE one could represent in due length his two opposing answers: (1)Jesus of N. was a great man according to official website (go to via Google "honored the great religious leaders of the past for the wisdom they brought to the world") , (2)Jesus of N. didn't exist. NOT HERE.--RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 23:16, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Much ado about nothing

Hard to believe the amount of discussion for something very simple: Hubbard does not belong here. This is an article about a specific scholarly view. Hubbard was not a scholar, and his personal opinion is entirely WP:UNDUE here. Perhaps relevant in the article about Hubbard or about Scientology. The user arguing that the opinion of any notable person is a notable opinion on any matter is quite simply mistaken. This is not the article to list any Tom, Dick or Harry who thought this or that about Jesus, no matter if they are notable in other regards. Jeppiz (talk) 00:56, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

There's bound to be discussion when editors attempt to exclude content based on personal bias, not Wikipedia policy. How do you square your assertion that "This is an article about a specific scholarly view" with the Wikipedia policy WP:NPOV: "All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic."? That's all of the significant views, not just the ones that you cherry-pick. --RexxS (talk) 01:30, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Would you include the views of a very famous sports hero (pick one, your choice) who commented that he doesn't believe jesus ever existed? I think it would be undue, per Jeppiz. Bill the Cat 7 (talk) 15:56, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Jeppiz This is an article about a specific scholarly view. No. This is an article about the Christ myth theory in general, which most certainly has a footprint in popular culture. It's not limited to the scholarly aspects of the theory. See Christ myth theory#Documentaries for a list of popular documentaries alleging it. Those are most certainly not scholarly works. Considering that this mention is a single sentence, relegated to a subsection called "Other modern proponents" at the end of the "Modern proponents" section, I hardly think there's any case to be made for this being undue. This is akin to suggesting that we not mention Jenny McCarthy in MMR vaccine controversy. I understand the assertion that this person is not an expert and that their opinion is worthless. I even agree with that assertion, wholeheartedly. But to suggest that it's not notable because it's not reliable is ridiculous. If we only acknowledge experts, we'd have to gut a huge chunk of the encyclopedia, including virtually everything we have on entertainment and the arts. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 16:48, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
@Bill the Cat 7: if you give me a reliable source that discusses the view of a famous sports hero (or politician or late-night TV host, etc.) on the Christ myth theory, then we can discuss whether or not that view is significant. There are only two grounds in Wikipedia policy for excluding the sourced view of a person on a topic: (1) the view is not significant; or (2) the source is not reliable. That's it. There's no criterion about the notability of the person whose view is under debate (although being notable may be a factor in assessing the significance of the view, it's not essential); there's no criterion about the expertise of the person (with a similar caveat); and there's no criterion about how credible or unpalateable the view may be. Assuming the source is reliable (and it doesn't have to be "scholarly"), it's simply a matter of assessing the significance of a particular view. Now that's a tougher question, because we have to actually muster arguments and convince others to generate a consensus on the issue. I'm willing to be persuaded one way or the other whether Hubbard's views are significant. But all I've seen so far is a lack of seeking consensus on the question that matters, replaced by a lot of insisting on a position leading to edit-warring. This was then followed by a lot of hand-waving about how Hubbard is not a scholar and how loathsome his views are, both of which I'd agree with, but they are not relevant to assessing whether his views are significant. I hope that clarifies my position on this. --RexxS (talk) 17:08, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
In this context, the views of the founder of a significant world religion are obviously more noteworthy than the views of a sports figure. For that matter, they are probably more noteworthy than the views of any academic researcher in a religious studies department. JerryRussell (talk) 17:27, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
I have to say that this is a rather good point. I responded to the sports figure analogy with an actress analogy, but this points out that both analogies fall rather short when it comes to the central question: the significance of the view. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 18:54, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Mainstream objections to Hubbard's point of view will be based on the fact that there is no evidence of existence of Xenu, the R6 implant. At least we can be reasonably sure that L. Ron Hubbard did exist. JerryRussell (talk) 00:30, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

RexxS, I'm afraid you're unfamiliar (or, given your veteran status, you momentarily forgot) WP:DUE. It is unclear to me, at least, how the views of an uneducated cult leader (Scientology is a "cult" as per my county's parliament, so that's the term I'll use) are due here. If you want to make the argument for why it's due, please do. I'm merely pointing out it has not been made. It's not as if we post the bogus "interpretation" of Egyptian hieroglyphs made up by Joseph Smith in any article on Egyptology. Jeppiz (talk) 01:09, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

No, I assure you, Jeppiz, that I'm very familiar with WP:DUE, and that's precisely the place where this debate needs to take place. As you know, WP:DUE is a subsection – a consequence in fact – of WP:NPOV, which I've been striving to focus this dispute on. I'll repeat the point that WP:NPOV says "All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic. It is the policy that determines whether a piece of content should be included in an article or not. Do you agree with me so far?
Now, you want to raise the issue of WP:DUE, but that is actually WP:NPOV #Due and undue weight, in other words the content policy that determines the extent that a source is represented in an article relative to the views of other sources. I take it that you understand what the policy means when it states "Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources." Again you see the insistence on the the phrase "all significant viewpoints". I hope you can see that the word "due" in content terms actually means "proportionate" as the policy makes clear. Can we agree that?
Now what you're trying to suggest, if I understand you correctly, is that the policy of due weight would exclude Hubbard's views. But surely you will have read the very policy you think I've forgotten? The only way that WP:DUE can be called on to justify the total exclusion of a significant viewpoint is via "Views that are held by a tiny minority should not be represented except in articles devoted to those views.". And I can see some face value in the argument: not many people subscribe to Hubbard's views on the Christ myth theory. But what if not many people hold the views of Bruno Bauer? Note that "Bauer's work was heavily criticized at the time ... and his work did not have much impact on future myth theorists." Not much impact = little significance, yet it gets a sentence in the lead and a whole section with two paragraphs in the article body. Or to the viewpoint that "Christianity was an amalgamation of various ancient mythologies and that Jesus was a totally mythical character." per Volney & Dupuis, which gets a whole paragraph (admittedly only two sentences), and so on through all the different sections. Hubbard's view is given a single sentence (admittedly a paragraph in its own right) in a section comprising of nine paragraphs devoted to the 20th century proponents. So I ask you: is Hubbard's viewpoint held by such a tiny minority that it does not even deserve a single sentence, while the views of the MP John Mackinnon Robertson (that Jesus was invented by a first-century messianic cult, which believed in a solar deity symbolized by the lamb and the ram) are worthy of a paragraph of six sentences. I could go on, but I'm sure you can appreciate the point I make, regardless of whether you agree with it. If Hubbard's viewpoint in the published, reliable sources has achieved the same order of magnitude of prominence as those of Robertson, then your only argument to exclude it would be if nobody held that view. But I expect a lot of hard-core Scientologists take what Hubbard expressed as their gospel, and I very much doubt that your argument will stand up to that scrutiny.
You see, the whole article concerns a spectrum of fringe theories, none of which has much currency in the mainstream. I'm afraid that to include a whole bunch of minority viewpoints and then to flatly exclude one other significant minority viewpoint would be disproportionate – and WP:DUE really argues against you in trying to do that.
My advice would be to go back to WP:NPOV and try to gather support for the assertion that Hubbard's views are not significant. Believe me, I am a veteran of countless debates on NPOV in many controversial articles, and I honestly don't think my advice is mistaken here. --RexxS (talk) 02:13, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
Indeed, "Views that are held by a tiny minority should not be represented except in articles devoted to those views." Is this not the article devoted to this view on Christ, which Hubbard subscribes to? Hubbard's view was that no historical Jesus existed. Well, when I look that view up at Historicity of Jesus I'm directed right back to this article. Which is as it should be.
If I were just learning that some people believe that Jesus did not exist historically, one of the things I would want to know is "Which famous figures believed this theory, and what does that say about this theory?" If there were a whole laundry list of say, Greek historians or Persian historians buying into it, that would say one thing. But a handful of non-historians, a handful of amateur historians and a handful of weirdos like Kuhn and Hubbard believing it says something entirely different. It changes the narrative, a test which I've found to be a wonderfully accurate heuristic for what's due and undue. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 04:49, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
@RexxS. It is a huge difference between between a fringe theory (e.g. rising CO2 isn't the main cause of current rise of temperature), a conspiracy theory (e.g. the moon landing was a fake), and an impossible sci-fi story (-> billions of persons transported from outer space to Earth 75 million years ago and brainwashed by psychologists [and all the artifacts adapted to conceal it and fool everyone before a sci-fi author got to know all].) --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 16:01, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
@RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom: That raises two questions: (1) What reliable sources support your assertion that there are different types of fringe theories? (2) Even if there were differences, what bearing would that have on your desire to exclude Hubbard's fringe theory from this article? Please note that our article on fringe theories doesn't suggest that there is a "huge difference" between fringe theories, and that this article is very clear in the lead: "In modern scholarship, the Christ Myth Theory is a fringe theory". If you can't produce any Wikipedia policy or guideline that supports your position that Hubbard's section should be excluded, then I think that there is really no value in trying to force your personal opinion in opposition to WP:NPOV: all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources. --RexxS (talk) 16:31, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
I think, that this section from Fringe theories#Definition explains the difference:
Financial journalist Alexander Davidson characterized fringe theories as "peddled by a small band of staunch supporters," but not necessarily without merit.[7] Daniel N. Robinson described them as occupying "a limbo between the decisive dead end and the ultimately credible productive theory."[15]
That the rise of CO2 concentration isn't the main cause of the rise of temperature is within this limbo, it's even in the vicinity of an ultimately credible productive theory (but not quite reaching the level, but that is only a unscientific feeling of mine because of the political associations), so that belongs to the perhaps or partly credible fringe theories (=fringe theory s.str.) whereas conspiracy theories like the Moon landing conspiracy theories belong to the incredible fringe theories (s.l.), albeit not impossible. But that "billions of persons transported from outer space to Earth 75 million years ago ..." is impossible. So the later is not a fringe theory even in a wider sense. --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 08:34, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
@RexxS: That's my last edit for at least a few months (reason: see below), so I'll read your answer but not answer back, bye. --RosaLuxemburgOnFreedom (talk) 09:17, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
You should not be referring to the article Fringe theory, but to the content guideline WP:FRINGE. The article you quoted is not a reliable source, nor is it used to determine how we should handle fringe subject. Nor is that one source's opinion (I wonder at your willingness to quote a financial journalist on science, but your reticence to quote a religious leader on a religious question due to questions you have about his qualifications) universal or even particularly impactful. Nor is the story of Xenu and the Unhappy Thetans categorically impossible. It may be practically impossible, but the basic principles of skepticism prevent us from ruling out out entirely. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 13:20, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Additions to the lead

Additions

This was recently added to the lead: " According to these theories, the Jesus of the Gospel sayings is a literary construct, the embodiment of Wisdom, while the Christ of Paul is a mythological redeemer whose death opened the convenant for non-Jews. Together with Messianistic and apocalyptic expectations, the two characters converged in the Gospel narratives, which were later taken as historical accounts." This seems very problematic to me, number one there is only one Christ myth theory, which is that Jesus never existed, it should not say "theories", then it is not the case that all proponents of this theory say that Jesus in the Gospels is the embodiment of Wisdom and Paul's Christ is a mythological redeemer. I think this passage should be removed but will wait to see what others think.Smeat75 (talk) 18:49, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

This was added by Joshua Jonathan, along with some other material indicating Doherty is the source of the concept. Yes, not all mythicists would see it this way, and it doesn't belong in the lede. JerryRussell (talk) 19:13, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
The article describes a long list of "Christ myth theories." To quote from the lead:
  • "The Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory, Jesus mythicism, mythicism,[1] or Jesus ahistoricity theory)[2] is the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels."
  • "...some of whom—in terms given by Robert M. Price—hold the "Jesus agnosticism" viewpoint, while others go further and hold the "Jesus atheism" viewpoint.[24][25][26][27] Some scholars have made the case that there are a number of plausible "Jesuses" that could have existed, but that there can be no certainty as to which Jesus was the historical Jesus.[28][29][30] Others have said that Jesus may have lived far earlier, in a dimly remembered remote past."
To summarize these various stances as "Jesus never existed" is incorrect, and too simplistic; it's not even what the lead and the article already said. I'd rather say that those theories say that the character of Jesus/Christ is the result of a complex whole of mythologies and literary developments. But you've already noted yourself that not all proponents do not say the same thing. I think it's good to add a little bit more than only "Jesus never existed." The sentences I've added are referenced in the article; some additions can be made of course. Best regards, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 19:23, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
I've changed "Jesus of Nazareth never existed" into "the historical Jesus of Nazareth did not exist"; "historical is what the quotes in the references say, and makes a subtle difference. And I've added "According to the Christ myth theories, the Christ was a mythological figure, who eventually was historicised.", to add a little bit more info on the content of these theories, which go further than "Jesus never existed." Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 19:41, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree that the quoted sentences sum up only a subset of the various mythicist positions, and I'm glad to see they were removed from the lede. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 19:45, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi @Joshua Jonathan:, I'm getting caught in edit conflicts here. I appreciate that you're not pressing for the "wisdom literature" formulation in the lede. I'll wait for dust to settle a bit before commenting on you new edit. JerryRussell (talk) 19:50, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
You're right that my initial edit only gave Doherty's view (though it's also close to Wells); it's just that there is more to these theories than "Jesus did not exist." The past week I've been working on Gnosticism; there too there is a complex background of mythological themes and developments; once you see this "gestalt" emerge, it's an impressive history with an internal "logic" which makes it much more understandable. The same "mytho-logic" seems to be at work here - not coincidentally of corse, since the topics are closely related. Fascinating. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 20:20, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

I fear this article is trying to eat its cake and have it. Far too often, it combines amateur tinfoil conspiracy theorists (like Doherty) with minority scholars (like Price). It basically uses Price as a cover while putting forward the conspiracy theories. It's time to make a choice and stop conflicting these - are we going to present the scholarly minority and do away with the amateurs, or are we going to present amateurs and clearly identify it as a conspiracy theory? Both options are fine, but this current practice of using the odd scholar as veneer for the conspiracy theorists just isn't serious. Jeppiz (talk) 23:55, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

This thread at your talkpage clarifies your statement above. I think "A+B1" (academic source plus relevant amateur sources (Doherty)) is to be preferred, downplaying the "conspiracy" part, and emphasizing the complexity of the religious and mythological background of the Gospel and Pauline narratives. "Jesus never existed" is a cathchy phrase which easily draws attention and summarizes a main current of these ideas, but it's unfaithfull to the (detail of) scholarship (or study, to include the "amateurs") behind it, and the nuances which can be wrought from a comparative mythology approach and textual analysis. See Bruno Bauer and the difference between "Bauer [...] argue[d] that Jesus did not exist," and "Bauer argued that the Biblical Jesus was primarily a literary figure." Also, both Wells and Price argue that there may have been an historical personal, whose narrative was interwoven with mythological accounts. Compare this to scholars who argue that there was an historical person, of whom only two facts can be certain (baptism and crucufixion), while the rest is mythology and religious narratives. Hmmm... where's the difference? Best regards, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:16, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
By the way, your analysis might be relevant for the article: "While some scholars take an activist stance, emphazising the absence of a historical Jesus, other scholars emphasize the intricate complexities of the Christ-narratives, and the 1st century religious and historical context from which these narratives come." Something like that. But that takes another sort of secondary sources, which reflect on the theories themselves, without taking an activist stance themselves. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:24, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
both Wells and Price argue that there may have been an historical personal, whose narrative was interwoven with mythological accounts. Compare this to scholars who argue that there was an historical person, of whom only two facts can be certain (baptism and crucufixion), while the rest is mythology and religious narratives. Hmmm... where's the difference? That is why the Christ myth theory needs to be defined as it is at the start of the article, there was no historical Jesus, or if there was he had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity, as opposed to the mainstream view, Jesus definitely existed but the only two certain historical facts are the baptism and the crucifixion. If editors try to muddy the waters so that there is no difference between the Christ myth and the mainstream there would be no point in having this article.Smeat75 (talk) 13:21, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
The definition in the lead, "the proposition that the historical Jesus of Nazareth did not exist, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels," was synthesized from three different sources. This is what those sources say:
  • Ehrmann: "In a recent exhaustive elaboration of the position, one of the leading proponents of 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." In simpler terms, the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity."
  • Carrier: "[T]he basic thesis of every competent mythologist, then and now, has always been that Jesus was originally a god just like any other god (properly speaking, a demigod in pagan terms; an archangel in Jewish terms; in either sense, a deity), who was later historicized."
  • Logan Mitchell (1842...): "Jesus Christ in the New Testament, has no reference whatever to any event that ever did in reality take place upon this globe; or to any personages that ever in truth existed: and that the whole is an astronomical allegory, or parable, having invariably a primary and sacred allusion to the sun, and his passage through the signs of the zodiac; or a verbal representation of the phenomena of the solar year and seasons."
So, the definition given here is basically Ehrman's simplification of Doherty. Doherty also mentions "spiritual, mythical figure," where Carrier speaks of "a god," "demogod," "archangel," and Mitchell speaks of "the sun." Doherty further mentions "allegory and fiction," whereas Mitchell speaks of "astronomical allegory, or parable," "sacred allusion," and "verbal representation." Clearly, something is omitted from those sources when only the phrase "Jesus did not exist" is being used. The point of this article is "(Jesus) Christ was a myth, and has little if anything to do with a historical person," not "Jesus did not exist." As implied in the title of this article. But it is, indeed, the point of view of Ehrmann, who repeatedly uses the phrase "Jesus did not exist" to summarise the ideas of various mythicists.
I've rephrased the definition, in accordance with those sources. As it is now, the difference between mythologists and mainstream is clear: for the mythologists, Jesus is a mythological figure who was historicised but has little to do with a historical person; while for the mainstream Jesus was a historical person to whose biography "religious elaborations," "many mythical or legendary elements" were added. From myth to history, or from history to myth ("to myth or not to myth," so to speak). Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 15:15, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
The lead now gives a long summary of the arguments against a historical Jesus. What's missing are the arguments pro a mythological account, that is, the comparisons with Jewish mythological themes of the time, et cetera. That info is also missing from the article, excpet for the comparison with mythologies from non-Jewish religions. Why? Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 15:33, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
I am not so sure that the difference between mainstream and mythicist views of Jesus is primarily about "historical Jesus" as opposed to the 'Jesus of Nazareth' of faith, or 'Biblical Jesus'. The fact is, some prominent mythicists (including Price and Carrier) write very extensively and polemically in opposition to 'Biblical Jesus of faith', while mainstream historians simply avoid touching on the question. The mainstream will not raise any factual objections to disturb the faithful in their beliefs. This may actually be the most important operative difference between mythicists and the mainstream. So I preferred the original formulation in the lede, "Jesus of Nazareth did not exist, or if he did...", thus being inclusive of biblical Jesus as well as historical Jesus. According to mythicists, neither one of them existed, or had much to do with the founding of Christianity.
The inclusion of the Carrier quote "Jesus was originally a [deity] who was later historicized" is appropriate. Carrier claims that every mythicist would agree, and I think he's right. It does seem to be a universal definition of mythicism.
Whereas the other new quote, from Logan Mitchell 1842, is undue in my opinion. Logan Mitchell isn't even mentioned in the article as a prominent mythicist. And, the quote is sheer hyperbole. The NT certainly does contain references to events and personages that did exist in reality, such as Augustus Caesar and Pontius Pilate, and, of course, many others.
Regarding: What's missing are the arguments pro a mythological account, that is, the comparisons with Jewish mythological themes of the time, et cetera. This is a totally valid criticism of the article, especially when it comes to Jewish and gnostic mythological themes. Partly, this is because most mythicist authors emphasize pagan, Greek, Roman and/or Egyptian sources much more so than Jewish sources. Thomas Brodie comes to mind as a primary advocate for the view that Jesus is based on Jewish myth. I don't know if any of our page editors have read Brodie -- I certainly haven't. So, @Joshua Jonathan:, I am looking forward to any information you can add to the article about this. JerryRussell (talk) 17:13, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

@JerryRussell: thank you for your response; I'll response later; dinner is waiting. But you've got a point about Carrier's polemics, and I'd love to incorporate more about the pro-arguments. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 17:22, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Re-ordered info

I've re-ordered the info in the lead and in the first section:

  • grouped together the various mythicist positions;
  • re-ordered the various arguments, and grouped them together under "Pauline epistles," "lack of eyewitness-accounts," "genre of the Gospels";
  • moved down the criticism part;
  • re-ordered the "Arguments"-section (previously called "Analysis"-section), in the same order as in the lead.

I hope that this adds to the readability of the article. Best regards, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 19:58, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

I like it, and agree it's more readable. JerryRussell (talk) 21:39, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
I think the first sentence of the article is an improvement on the previous version.Smeat75 (talk) 04:01, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Carrier's definition

According to Carrier, as cited in the lead, "Jesus was originally a [deity] who was later historicized." This is incorrect, at least regarding Wells and Doherty. They both relate Jesus to a wisdom tradition, as represented in Q; accoridng to Wells, there may have been a real teacher, while according to Doherty this character is "fictionous," the personification of Wisdom. Both agree that Paul's Christ was mythological. They also both state that the Gospels joined together various views, most notably this Q-teacher and Paul's cosmic Christ. According to Doherty, the Gospel is a form of midrash, reading new meanings intoe xisting texts. Doherty further argues that the Gospel of Marc borrowed the baptism by John the Baptist from a concurring group. Altogether, it gives the sequence of Baptism - preaching - crucification. So, it seems to me that Carrier's definition is misleading, or, at least, not accurate. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:11, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

But according to this analysis by Wells and Doherty, wouldn't it be fair to say that there was a pre-existing deity, the Logos or Wisdom, whose attributes were personified and historicized into the Gospel character after the fact? That is, if there was a real teacher (as Wells admits), that person was not worshipped as a god until after his lifetime, when his story was superimposed on the Logos or Wisdom deity? I would say Carrier's definition does fit this framework, although far from a complete description. JerryRussell (talk) 17:31, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

"Paul sincerely believed that the evidence (not restricted to the Wisdom literature) pointed to a historical Jesus who had lived well before his own day; and I leave open the question as to whether such a person had in fact existed and lived the obscure life that Paul supposed of him. (There is no means of deciding this issue.)" [Wells, George (2013). The Jesus Legend. Open Court Publishing Company. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-8126-9872-5.]

Naming: God, Wisdom, Torah and Christ
Further information: Biblical cosmology

The pre-Exilic (before 586 BCE) Old Testament allowed no equals to Yahweh in heaven, despite the continued existence of an assembly of subordinate servant-deities who helped make decisions about matters on heaven and earth. The post-Exilic writers of the Wisdom tradition (e.g. the Book of Proverbs, Song of Songs, etc.) develop the idea that Wisdom, later identified with Torah, existed before creation and was used by God to create the universe: "Present from the beginning, Wisdom assumes the role of master builder while God establishes the heavens, restricts the chaotic waters, and shapes the mountains and fields." Borrowing ideas from Greek philosophers who held that reason bound the universe together, the Wisdom tradition taught that God's Wisdom, Word and Spirit were the ground of cosmic unity. Christianity in turn adopted these ideas and applied them to Jesus: the Epistle to the Colossians calls Jesus "...image of the invisible God, first-born of all creation...", while the Gospel of John identifies him with the creative word ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God").

74.138.110.32 (talk) 19:12, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

So, the wisdom teacher Jesus was deified, while the deity Jesus was believed to be an historical person who was also a deity, and the deity Jesus was historicised? My... J, J', J, etc. Anyway, the mythicists (well, at least some) seem to agree that various Jesuses come together in the Gospels. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 20:38, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
Yep, there's little if any difference between Wells' later work, and mainstream biblical criticism, as far as concrete statements they're willing to make about Jesus. If you read back through the archives, there's been considerable controversy over whether scholars such as Wells and Price should even be considered mythicists, because they do admit that such a person probably did exist, and might have played some small role in the establishment of the religion. But they certainly put their emphasis elsewhere: if this Jesus didn't exist, it would have been necessary to invent him; but the inventors didn't need the person.
Thompson denies that he himself is a mythicist, because he shares this agnosticism about historical Jesus, and sees mythicism as being defined by a hardcore 'Jesus atheism'. But, other authors consistently see him as a mythicist, so we say that's what he is. JerryRussell (talk) 02:16, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
Per Earl Doherty, "It was at the opening of the 20th century that the first serious presentations of the Jesus Myth theory appeared. The earliest efforts by such as Robertson, Drews, Jensen and Smith were, from a modern point of view, less than perfect, lacking a comprehensive explanation for all aspects of the issue. Pre-Christian cults, astral religions, obscure parallels with foreign cultures, even the epic of Gilgamesh, went into a somewhat hodge-podge mix; many of them didn’t seem to know quite what to do with Paul. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Paul-Louis Couchoud in France offered a more coherent scenario, identifying Christ in the eyes of Paul as a spiritual being. (While not relying upon him, I would trace my type of thinking back to Couchoud, rather than the more recent G. A. Wells who, in my opinion, misread Paul’s understanding of Christ.)" [ref. Earl Doherty’s forerunner? Paul-Louis Couchoud and the birth of Christ by Neil Godfrey 2011-12-15]
Per Couchoud, "[Jesus as Presented by Paul] A divine Being, in humility without parallel, assumes the human condition. He is crucified by supernatural agents, the Princes of this Age, who are, in Paul's language, Satan and his acolytes. ...The crucifixion, as presented by Paul, is that of a super natural being executed by beings who are also supernatural." [Couchoud, Paul Louis (1939). "The Historicity of Jesus". The Creation of Christ: An Outline of the Beginnings of Christianity ; Tr. by C. Bradlaugh Bonner. Vol. 2. Watts. p. 438. First published: "The Historicity of Jesus" in The Hibbert Journal 37, (1938). p.193-214]
"For a good, direct, and recent statement of the mythicist view, see George A. Wells, “Independent Confirmation." [Wells, George A. “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?" Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 19-25.] As will be clear, in one important respect Wells differs from most other mythicists: rather than tracing the invention of the historical Jesus back to the myths about the pagan gods, Wells thinks that it derived from Jewish wisdom traditions, in which God’s wisdom was thought to have been a personalized being who was with him at the creation and then came to visit humans (see, for example, Proverbs 8)." [Ehrman, Bart D. (20 March 2012). Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperCollins. p. 349, n. 20. ISBN 978-0-06-208994-6. - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 03:12, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Popular reception - in America?

James Patrick Holding, Shattering the Christ Myth; Mark Gerard Craig Med, The Christ Myth; Bart Ehrmann, Did Jesus Exist? - they all note that "the Christ myth" i gaining popularity, and take aim at this popularity. Is this an American debate? In Holland, frankly, most people don't care if he existed or not, and are also not interested in analyses which state that he didn't. So, is this an American debate? Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 21:26, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Ref. translate.google.com:
Ref. vridar.org:
Ref. Argument from fallacy or All the substandard Jezusmythe published does not imply that all Mythicism is substandard:
  • The substandard Zeitgeist (film series) Part I - asserts that the Christian religion is mainly derived from other religions, astronomical assertions, astrological myths, and other traditions. In furtherance of the Jesus myth hypothesis, this part disputes the historicity of Jesus, who, it claims, is a literary and astrological hybrid, nurtured by political forces and opportunists. And attracted massive interest from the public.
  • A good effort, The God Who Wasn't There (film) - The argument for the Jesus myth hypothesis is presented in the first fifteen minutes.
  • ??? Batman & Jesus (2017 film)
Most of the successful popularisers are English speakers. - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 22:44, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
I don't know about Holland. As an American editor, it would be provincial and presumptuous of me to say what people think about this debate worldwide.
But here in the USA, there are lots of people who care very much, and are very convinced that Biblical Jesus existed. And as I've said earlier, this Jesus of faith is really the one that the mythicists focus their energies against. Maybe I should look for a quote or reference to that effect? JerryRussell (talk) 02:31, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
  • "The main reason for holding to the historicity of the figure of Jesus ...resides not primarily in historical evidence but derives instead from a modern theological necessity." [Pfoh, Emanuel (2012). "Jesus and the Mythic Mind: An Epistemological Problem". In Thomas L. Thompson (ed.). "Is this Not the Carpenter?": The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. Thomas S. Verenna. Equinox. p. 80f. ISBN 978-1-84553-986-3.] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 04:22, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Per Jesus Mythicism: An Introduction by Minas Papageorgiou, Nineteen prominent academics and researchers were asked to comment upon the question: Did Jesus really exist? The interviewees are: Dr Robert Price (theologian), Dr Richard Carrier (historian), Dr Maria Dzielska (historian), Dr Gerd Ludemann (theologian), Dr Gunnar Samuelsson (theologian), Dr Lena Einhorn (biologist and history researcher), Dr Payam Nabarz (writer and recreationist of the Mithraic Temple), Raphael Lataster (academic and researcher), Earl Doherty (historian), D. M. Murdock/ Acharya S (writer and scholar of comparative religion and mythology), Kenneth Humphreys (writer and researcher), Joseph Atwill (writer and researcher), Neil Godfrey (coordinator of the mythicist blog Vridar), Fritz Heede (filmmaker), Francesco Carotta (linguist and researcher), Daniel Unterbrink (writer and researcher), Ioannis Mpousios (writer and organiser of the “Gardens of Adonis” celebrations), Christos Morfos (writer and researcher), and Harita Meenee (philologist and writer). —Ref. Neil Godfrey (4 May 2015). "Jesus Mythicism: An Introduction by Minas Papageorgiou". Vridar.

Changes to what used to be the "criticism" section

There have been a lot of changes to this article recently, mostly for the better imo, however at some point these quotes were removed from what was the "criticism" section "Bart Ehrman (a secular agnostic) wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees". Bart D. Ehrman states that the existence of Jesus and his crucifixion by the Romans is attested to by a wide range of sources including Josephus and Tacitus. Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, highly skeptical with regard to the Gospel accounts of miracles, wrote in 1995 That (Jesus) was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus... agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact." I think these need to be re-instated, I will slightly modify them, because they show why classical/ancient historians regard the idea that Jesus never existed as preposterous. Anyone who has studied ancient history at all knows that there is nothing unusual about all sorts of major personages or events being known about from only one reference hundreds of years later in one of the very few works of ancient history that survive.Historians do not look at a passage from Tacitus and say "I don't think there ever was such a person" as the person Tacitus says did this or that. What is unusual in the case of Jesus is that there is so much evidence for him, multiple attestation in ancient documents, Christian, Jewish and Roman, exceedingly rare.Smeat75 (talk) 13:56, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi Smeat75. I moved Crossan-quote upwards, to the Josephus and Tacitus section; I thought if fitted there better, because it's about those two. If you put it back, then it would be good if you also add this explanation which you gave above, with a reference. Consider, though, that "the" mythicists reject this argument; for NPOV, it would be good to add this criticism too - and then we're presenting a discussion which is already covered in the "Josephus and Tacitus-section." Anyway, give it a shot!
The Ehrman-quote must have disappeared before I re-organised the article; it's not in this version from 10 march 2017. I can't even find it in the last 5000 versions. Neither with these terms. Did I overlook something? Best regards, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 15:31, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
I didn't notice that the Crossan quote had been moved, I took it out from where I put it. I don't know when the Ehrman quote disappeared, I don't always have time to watch these pages, but I do think it is useful. Smeat75 (talk) 15:38, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
The Ehrman-quote is at Historical Jesus, Historical reliability of the Gospels, and Historicity of Jesus:
"<ref name=Ehrman285>In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, [[Bart Ehrman]] (a secular agnostic) wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees" B. Ehrman, 2011 ''Forged : writing in the name of God'' ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6. page 285</ref>"
Ready for use! Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 15:40, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Ha, you already did. I've removed my doublure, and merged the two subsections. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 15:50, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Outdated "argument from silence" claim in the lead.

@Joshua Jonathan:Richard Carrier uses Paul's letters to show that Paul and Peter believed in a visionary/dream Jesus, with the resurrection stuff coming from Septuagint verses Isaiah 52-53, Daniel 9, Zechariah 3 and 6 etc. This is not an "argument from silence".VictoriaGraysonTalk 23:57, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Per Carrier,
“if Paul was really writing about a cosmically crucified and buried archangel, and all his explicit statements to that effect were expunged, what would we expect to find his Epistles saying today?” Rather than just assuming the Gospels are all accurate histories or even have any real sources whatever. You have to assume they don’t. And then ask how well the evidence of the Epistles fits expectation. And you’ll find the answer is: pretty much exactly (I allow some exceptions on the a fortiori side, but it turns out they aren’t strong enough to carry the case the other way: OHJ, pp. 592-95).
[viz.]
How well does that same evidence fit the expectation if there was a Jesus, and Paul wasn’t talking about a celestial one all that time? Not really all that well. And indeed, the more you assume in the Gospels is true, the less probable the contents of the Epistles become (e.g. see OHJ, pp. 354-55; p. 557 nn. 55 and 56; pp. 574-75, n. 82). Which is why only a theory of historicity that assumes the Gospels are almost entirely mythical has any chance of being true (OHJ, Ch. 2).

[Ref. "Desperately Searching the Epistles for Anything That Attests a Historical Jesus - Richard Carrier". Richard Carrier. 20 March 2017.] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 01:33, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

The above noted Carrier content could be paraphrased into Christ myth theory#Notes as contrast to: "As Morton Smith remarks, [G. A.] Wells’s argument is mainly based on the argument from silence ...arguing for “unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified”." [ Morton Smith ap. Voorst, Robert Van (13 April 2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. pp. 14f, n. 34. ISBN 978-0-8028-4368-5. (Morton Smith, "The Historical Jesus," in Jesus in Myth and History. ed. R. Joseph Hoffmann and Gerald A. Larue [Buffalo: Prometheus, 1986] 47-48)] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 18:12, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
@VictoriaGrayson: Richard Carrier is not the only "mythicist" and this article is about the entire history of the Christ myth theory not just the ideas of one leading proponent of today. If you feel this article does not sufficiently reflect his views you can try adding them where appropriate but expunging big chunks of carefully sourced text because it doesn't agree with Carrier is not a good thing to do imo.Smeat75 (talk) 16:43, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
You should allow neural editors to edit this page.VictoriaGraysonTalk 17:09, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
You made big changes to the lead, deleting a lot of on topic sourced material, I reverted you. Please have a look at WP:BRD. You made a bold edit, I reverted you, the next step is to discuss on this talk page, not to revert my revert of you. That is edit warring. Don't restore your changes or engage in back-and-forth reverts, because that will probably be viewed as edit-warring. The changes you made are not acceptable.Smeat75 (talk) 17:19, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Let @Joshua Jonathan: decide. You are not a neutral editor.VictoriaGraysonTalk 17:22, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
That is not how this works; all contributors have equal say. It won't be any single user's decision. In the meantime, I have restored this per WP:BRD and concur that this long standing and well cited material should remain. Scr★pIronIV 17:30, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

I've re-inserted the edits at the apprpriate places, namely the "Pauline epistles" section and the "Richard Carrier" section. We have to be carefull, though, not to lend too much weight to too little pieces of info from specific writers. As for the various opinions of editors: it's up to each one what to believe, or what too conclude. The task for the Wiki-article, though, is to give a representative overview. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 18:34, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Richard Carrier's OHJ is the only peer-reviewed mysticist book.VictoriaGraysonTalk 18:40, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
As Carrier has described the editorial process for OHJ, it really isn't so different from any other academic book. Carrier sent the book to several of his friends to get comments on it, and then it was (presumably) reviewed by the editorial staff at Sheffield Phoenix, which is a reasonably reputable academic press. The process for most journals is quite a bit tougher, as the editor of the journal selects a panel of anonymous reviewers, some of whom might be hostile. There are several reviews of Carrier's book posted on the Internet, where you can get an idea what some of the more hostile reviewers might have said. JerryRussell (talk) 16:32, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Where does he say the peer review was his friends, as opposed to anonymous?VictoriaGraysonTalk 16:48, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
That's a good question. Since Carrier's legal troubles, I'm not sure how to search his archives that have been deleted from his former blog site. JerryRussell (talk) 17:06, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

The section for potential authors on Sheffield Phoenix Press's website says, 'Manuscripts offered by the author will always be sent for evaluation to a series editor or a reader for the Press.' [11]

That's absolutely standard for history books published by UK academic presses, although frequently it's two readers, often one of series editors and an outside reader.

Series editors will be major experts in the field covered by the series. That they are the editors of a particular series is not secret. Typically the one who will read it will be whichever of them is most qualified. If a second reader is used, this will usually be an outside expert. The series editors then take a collective decision on whether to accept the book. Obviously the views of the one who has read the book tends to carry the most weight. Given that one of the readers' reports will probably be by a series editor, it may not be too difficult for the author to work out who wrote that particular report. But the author will know that it's the series editors who have the final say anyway. The author may well also find out who the other reader was, as this is where the publishers get their blurbs from. Or the reader may just tell the author.

The process for collections of essays in history is usually much the same. Most academic presses will send them out to one outside reader. That's because the editor(s) of the collection will usually have invited the contributors to contribute and so cannot be considered independent.

Academic publishers will sometimes ask authors for recommendations for possible readers. But of course they do so in the full knowledge that authors will recommend names they think will be sympathetic. This can be used as a way of working out who not to send the book to.

Trade publishers are rather different. Some do retain prominent academics to read submissions. But this may involve them reading submissions on subjects on which they're not really an expert. Indeed, what the publisher may want from them is not a thorough check so much as a general sense of its quality. Others trade publishers do not use academic readers at all.

In any case, saying that a history book has been peer-reviewed does not mean that what the book says is correct. Criticisms that a reader might make are not necessarily taken on board. An author is entitled to try to convince the editors that those criticisms are wrong, irrelevant or simply a matter of opinion. Yet those criticisms could still prove to be well-founded. It is also not unknown for readers to recommend publication while saying that they personally disagree with the author's conclusions. Nor is there any requirement for a particular series or a publisher's wider list to be consistent. I'm pretty sure that many of the other authors published by Sheffield Phoenix Press will strongly disagree with Carrier's views. The only person involved in the whole publication process who must agree with Carrier's views is Carrier himself.

Finally, the real process of peer-review of history books happens after publication, when the book gets reviewed in academic journals. The glowingness of the readers' reports counts for little if the journal reviews are damning.
74.138.110.32 (talk) 17:16, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Here's Carrier's statement: http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/4090 where he says that he sent it to four reviewers, strongly implying he selected them himself. He also mentions that Sheffield sent the book to outside readers, however, so IP74's remarks are correct. JerryRussell (talk) 17:23, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Carrier's ideas are not the only ideas; the "argument from silence" is prominent in the writings of Wells and Doherty. To suggest that Carrier sort of represents the "concensus view," or is the most prominent because one book was peer-reviewed, is a little bit overstating his relevance, when the field is as narrow as a handfull of original authors. The best this article can do is to give an overview of the arguments, the authors, and some sort of insight into the "development" of these ideas, c.q. who was influenced by who. Paul-Louis Couchoud, for example, is mentioned in only one short sentence. Yet, he influenced Ellegard (not mentioned anymore in the article), and Price mentions Couchoud's comment on the Christ Hymn as the last blow to the historicity of Jesus in "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man." Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 17:30, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Different academic publishers have different procedures for review. It may be read internally by several people, and externally often by more than one. A book from an academic publisher is generally to be treated as reliable, but yes we should also look at the academic reviews. I only found one review of this book in Web of Science, which was highly favourable, indeed the reviewer and author were co-authoring shortly afterwards (which is not a problem, as the review was in a good journal).The existence of Carrier's book is a major fact, it seems to me, implying that the theory can no longer has to be treated as a fringe notion, but as a topic of debate within the academy. Itsmejudith (talk) 21:41, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Lataster previously wrote the only book review—that was peer reviewed—on Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus [Lataster, Raphael (December 2014). "Richard Carrier: On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014; pp. xiv + 696". Journal of Religious History. 38 (4): 614–616. doi:10.1111/1467-9809.12219.] and Available @ raphaellataster.com - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 22:13, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Don't forget the review by Aviezer Tucker, "The Reverend Bayes vs. Jesus Christ", in 'History & Theory' (already cited in the article). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.10791/full JerryRussell (talk) 01:33, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
This review is of Proving History, not OHJ.VictoriaGraysonTalk 02:28, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Scathing review of Carrier's book by Christina Petterson of the University of Newcastle, Australia, in the academic journal Relegere- [12] - says his methodology is "tenuous", was "shocked" by the way he uses mathematics,and that he uses statistics in a way that seems designed "to intentionally confuse and obfuscate", statements in the book "reveal Carrier's ignorance of the field of New Testament studies and early Christianity", etc.Smeat75 (talk) 23:12, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
This is a ridiculous review that makes no sense. She contradicts herself by saying “It is not that I disagree with some or all of his representations of the material". See Carrier's response here. VictoriaGraysonTalk 02:35, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Aviezer (2016) is not a review of OHJ (2014) - Per Carrier, "Harvard University philosopher, Aviezer Tucker, just published a review of my book Proving History: [Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (2012)]... It is also important to note his qualifying remark: “I disclaim any expertise in the historiographical debate about Jesus.” He is thus not attempting to evaluate any claims in that field. He is only interested in looking at my Bayesian analysis of them and assessing how far it gets toward what he’d like to see done." [Ref. "Tucker's Review of Proving History in the Journal History & Theory - Richard Carrier". Richard Carrier. 3 February 2016.] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 02:41, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Per Petterson, Christina (2015). "Book Review: On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, by Richard Carrier". Relegere. 5 (2): 253–258. - Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception is a journal dedicated to the study of reception history, broadly conceived, in the fields of religion and biblical studies. Relegere is published online two times a year and is open-access. All articles undergo blind peer review. [13] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 03:13, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

@Itsmejudith: the CMt has a much older history than Wells & co.; if you take this in account, another question arises: how did theology develop in the 20th century, especially the study of the historicity of Jesus? Bultmann, with his scpecis on this topic, seems to have played an esential role. Did he 'deadlock' the topic for a couple of decades? I don't know (Smeat75 and JerryRussell probably know). Why did the topic re-surface in the 1970s? Interesting questions, which give a more sociological-historical approach. And the topic seems to have reached a broader public with two ducimentaries in the mid 2000s (Derek Murphy chapter 2. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:30, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Historically the term "Christ myth theory" is problematic. IMO "Modern Mythicism" is "Couchoud, Doherty, Carrier Mythicism" which gives positive evidence in support (Price dates the epistles later but mostly concurs otherwise). "[Per the Writings of Paul-Louis Couchoud] The controversy as to the historical existence of Jesus ..appeared [in France] under a new form, entirely distinct from the theories of Drews, J. M. Robertson, and W. B. Smith. It is of some interest to describe this new aspect of the thesis that the history of Jesus is a myth, and to try to explain the genesis of the contention." [Goguel, Maurice (April 1926). "Recent French Discussion of the Historical Existence of Jesus Christ". Harvard Theological Review. 19 (02): 115. doi:10.1017/S001781600000763X.] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 14:16, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Re-organization

Before all of the recent shuffling, there had been a section titled "Syncretistic and mythological roots of Christianity". Most of the material in that section has been moved into the section on the Gospels. But the arguments in that section weren't specific to the Gospels, but would apply to the entire New Testament and much of the apocrypha and early church literature and traditions as well. So I feel it should be moved back into its own section, as it had been previously. Thoughts? JerryRussell (talk)

The section contained three parts of info:
1. Bauer, who suggested that Christianity was a new religion which synthesised Stoicism, Greek Neo-Platonism (,emtioned by Voorst, but omitted in the older version) and Judaism; and Price's comment.
2. Price's "mythic hero archetype," which was also mentioned in the subsection "Questionable genre and authorship of the Gospels," and a long rebuttal of Price's suggestion.
3. Dawkins suggestion about the appeal of the New testament to Gentiles, Brodies ideas about Elijah and Elisha, and the sentence about Christian theologians.
  • ad1: I see your point here. Yet, Price explicitly mentions the Gospels, in response to Bauer. This part couls also be moved to the section on Bauer, but then we miss the introductory info on Cynism, which is refferred to by Doherty.
  • ad2: this is about "stories of Jesus," and mentions Gospel elements, so it seems appropriate to have this in the section on the Gospel's Cosmic saviour; it also already was mentioned in the section on the Gospels.
  • ad3: the section on Brodie says that Brodie "argued that the gospels are essentially a rewriting of the stories of Elijah and Elisha," so it seems appropriate to have it in the Gospels section.
Basically, the info on syncretism could stand on its own. It's in line with the notion that early Christianity was wildly diverse, with many influences. Doherty also notes these backgrounds. In The Jesus Puzzle. Main Articles (1995-1996), Earl Doherty follows five steps, which partly resemble the structure of the Wikipedia-article:
  • Part 1, "Conspiracy of silence": the lack of historical information in early Christian writings; this is partly covered in the section on the Pauline epistles.
  • Part 2, "Who Was Christ Jesus?": this is partly about Paul, but also about the religious background of the time, inclusing the mystery cults. Doherty even writes: "Out of this rich soil of ideas arose Christianity, a product of both Jewish and Greek philosophy."
  • Part 3, "The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth": this is about the Gospels and Q, just like the Wikipedia-article.
  • Part 4, the non-Christian sources. This is also in the Wikipedia-article.
  • Part 5, "The Second Century Aplogists": this is not in the Wikipedia-article, and seems undue to me.
So, looking at Doherty, a section about the early, wild years of Christianity is certainly a possibility. But then, I think, we also have to make mention of this "Argument from silence," right at the beginning. NB: the aricle is already at 150K (maybe we should split-off the references to a stand-alone article? ;)) Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:56, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
It's true that mythicists often refer to the Gospels when writing about mythological and syncretistic sources of Christianity, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their remarks can be taken as referring only to the Gospels, in isolation or opposition to other early Christian sources. So I don't think it's helpful to split these arguments into two different sections.
The latest changes have added quite a bit to the length of the article. In the archives you'll find complaints that the article is too long; and yet, there's also been tremendous resistance to splitting the article, on the grounds that sub-articles would be non-notable and undue promotion of fringe. JerryRussell (talk) 02:33, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Split it like like this: Age of Enlightenment § Important intellectuals & List of intellectuals of the Enlightenment - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 02:54, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Regarding the duplicate arguments: Jerry, you've got a point there; yet there already was duplication. It's probably inevitable.
Regarding the length: I was surprised to see what the actual length is; when scrolling through it, it doesn't seem that long. Parts which seem to be less interesting (depending on personal preference, of course) can easily be skipped, without influencing the flow of the reading. So, it doesn't seem to be too long, despite the 150K. But indeed, splitting off a page with Christ mythicisists is a reasonable option. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:22, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
It could also be just a subset: List of ante 21st century CMT proponents - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 05:20, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
I suppose any editor could create such an article, and then we might have a 'delete or merge' discussion at AfD. JerryRussell (talk) 16:25, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

I already did: User:Joshua Jonathan/List of Christ myth proponents. No missing refs, so it could be moved into mainspace rigth-away. but if we condense the correspondng info in the main article, there are probably some named refs missing, so that might take some work to correct. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 17:19, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

At seconf thought: this listpage probably won't work; it may easily become a coatrack, with an incredible long list of myhticists, unreadable, and abandoned by those who also want to give the counter-arguments. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:19, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Couchoud, again

In the previous thread, I wrote "The best this article can do is to give an overview of the arguments, the authors, and some sort of insight into the "development" of these ideas, c.q. who was influenced by who. Paul-Louis Couchoud, for example, is mentioned in only one short sentence. Yet, he influenced Ellegard (not mentioned anymore in the article), and Price mentions Couchoud's comment on the Christ Hymn as the last blow to the historicity of Jesus in "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man."" Vridar.org quotes Doherty, stating "It wasn’t until the 1920s that Paul-Louis Couchoud in France offered a more coherent scenario, identifying Christ in the eyes of Paul as a spiritual being. (While not relying upon him, I would trace my type of thinking back to Couchoud, rather than the more recent G. A. Wells who, in my opinion, misread Paul’s understanding of Christ." Couchoud argued that Jesus is not a "myth," but a "religious conception," and as such, a new deity, not a person who was deified. A few additinal lines seem to be justified. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:17, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, a new deity. That makes it more understandable. Paul & co. didn't argue about "Did Jesus exist or not?", as we are doing; they argued about the implications of their new belief (opening up the convenant for everyone, not just the Jews, as I wrote before in the lead). So, I've changed
"According to mythologists "Jesus was originally a [deity] who was later historicized""
into
"According to mythologists, Christianity started with the belief in a new deity, Jesus, "who was later historicized""
That's the real point. Not the sensationalist question "Did Jesus exist exist or not?", but "How did Christianity start?" Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:37, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
Per Doherty, "[The Mythical Jesus viewpoint holds] that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure." [Doherty, Earl (2009). Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus. Age of Reason Publications. pp. vii–viii. ISBN 978-0-9689259-2-8.
Per Carrier's Minimal Mythical Jesus, "At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other." [Carrier, Richard (2014) On the Historicity of Jesus Sheffield Phoenix Press ISBN 978-1-909697-49-2 pg 53] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 08:49, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Missing sections

Some essential info is still missing:

  • Synopsis of the "Christ myth theory." The article starts with descriptions of the CMT by Ehrman and Carrier, but the corresponding section is missing. I'm aware that there have been a lot of discussions about "the" definition of the CMT, so a "Definition-section" might not be usefull, but a short synopsis is. This should be based on what the main proponents (Couchoud, Wells, Doherty, Price) argue, namely "Christianity started with the belief in a new deity, who was historicised in the Gospels," witht hr addition of Wells contention that the sayings-teacher may have been a real person; and seconded by the popular turn (tune?) to "Jesus did not exist." Something like:
"According to modern proponents. Christianity started with the belief in a new deity called Jesus, who was derived from Jewish writings and shows Greek influences, and similarities with Pagan saviour deities. Eventually this new deity was fleshed out in the Gospels, which added a narrative framework and Cynic-like teachings, and eventually came to be perceived as a historical biography. According to Wells, these sayings may come from a real person, of whom close to nothing can be known.
Elements of the "Christ myth," and its cultus, can be found in the Pauline epistles, for example the Christ hymn of Philippens (Mack, Price) (shoot me if I'm quoting the wrong letter here; JJ)
While proponents like Couchoud, Wells, Doherty and Price are concerned with the origins of Chrisyianity, the perception of and debate about the CMT has increasingly turned to the [simple] question whether Jesus existed or not."''
  • Orthodox views: mainstream scholarship basically says that Christianity started with a real person, who was deified; this is contrast with the mythicist view, which says that Christianity started with a new deity, who was historicised. But both are also in contrast with the orthodox view, which says that God was incarnated as the Christ in the person of Jesus: the "mainstream scholarly view" is itself a deviation from the "mainstream Christian view."
  • Research questions: both mythicist and mainstream have to explain how a person Jesus could become a "deity" Christ, within a few years after his death. This question somehow should also be mentioned; scholarship starts with questions, not with truths. So, one extra section? "Research question," "The problem of the origins of Christianity"? Which may include the links at the top of the article. Something like this:
"The origins of Christianity, and the historical Jesus and the historicity of Jesus, are a matter of longstanding debates in theological and historical research. Within a few years after the proposed death of Jesus in ca. 33 CE, a large number of proto-Christian communities seem to have been in existence. A central question is how these communities developed, and what their original convictions were. While orthodox Christian theology and dogmas view Jesus as the incarnation of God/Christ on earth, mainstream scholarship views Jesus as a real person who was subsequently deified. Mythicists take yet another approach, presuming a widespread set of Jewish ideas on personified aspects of God, which were subsequently hsitoricised when proto-Christianity spread among non-Jewish converts."

Ample space here for more links to relevant Wiki-pages. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 09:33, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

PS: the two opening descriptions in the lead should be reversed, in my opinion. AnEhrman's description should be appended with his own words: "In simpler terms:". Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:48, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

I've added a section which combines the above points. references are partly missing; I'll search for some, but input by more knowledgeable editors is welcome. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 11:16, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Reply by 74.138.110.32
Per Thompson:

  • 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), opening his book with the statement: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, God’s son.” [Thompson, Thomas L. (20 April 2009). "Historicizing the Figure of Jesus, the Messiah". The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David. Basic Books. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-7867-3911-0.]
  • In an article ('The Historiography of the Pentateuch: 25 Years after Historicity' Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 13, 1999, 258-283) I have discussed why I think it is very difficult to establish the historicity of figures in biblical narrative, as the issue rather relates to the quality of texts one is dealing with. I work further on this issue in my Messiah Myth of 2005. Here I argue that the synoptic gospels can hardly be used to establish the historicity of the figure of Jesus; for both the episodes and sayings with which the figure of Jesus is presented are stereotypical and have a history that reaches centuries earlier. I have hardly shown that Jesus did not exist and did not claim to. Rather, I compared our knowledge about Jesus to our knowledge of figures like Homer. As soon as we try to identify such an historical figure, we find ourselves talking about the thematic elements of stories. [Thomas L. Thompson (July 10, 2012). "The Bible and Interpretation - Is This Not the Carpenter's Son?". www.bibleinterp.com. Comments section. Retrieved 19 September 2016. Comments #4 - Thomas L. Thompson - 07/10/2012 - 09:11.]
[ref. Thompson, Th. L. 1974. The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: the Quest for the Historical Abraham, BZAW, Vol. 133, Berlin: de Gruyter.]
[ref. Thompson, Thomas (1999). "Historiography in the pentateuch: Twenty-five years after historicity". Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament. 13 (2): 258–283. doi:10.1080/09018329908585157.]

Per Arnal:

  • Whether Jesus himself existed as a historical figure or not, the gospels that tell of him are unquestionably mythic texts. ...Investigations into the historical Jesus require, by contrast, that the gospels be used as historical sources, and in fact the main difference between “conservative” and “liberal” scholarship revolves around how much legendary accretion is stripped away in order to arrive at the “historical core,” not whether there is any historical core to be found at all. In seeking to find the real, historical person behind these narratives, we are using these texts as sources for a figure that they themselves show no interest in at all. Just as the myths and legends about Herakles are simply not about a historical person, so also the gospels are not about the historical Jesus. [Arnal, William E. (12 August 2015). The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity. Routledge. pp. 75–76. ISBN 978-1-317-32440-9.]

And excerpted in Pfoh, Emanuel (2012). "Jesus and the Mythic Mind: An Epistemological Problem". In Thomas L. Thompson (ed.). "Is this Not the Carpenter?": The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. Thomas S. Verenna. Equinox. p. 85. ISBN 978-1-84553-986-3. —Ref. [Godfrey, Neil (2 September 2012). "Why Historical Knowledge of Jesus is Impossible: 'Is This Not the Carpenter?' chapter 5". Vridar.] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 00:37, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Oops...

The "cherry-picking" was my own work... My apologies. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:47, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Rhetorics

Ehrman writes:

"That is the claim made by a small but growing cadre of (published ) writers, bloggers and Internet junkies who call themselves mythicists [...] of the hundreds — thousands? — of mythicists, two (to my knowledge) actually have Ph.D. credentials in relevant fields of study."

When it is about the number of mythicists, they are marginal. But when it is about the number of PhD's among them, there are suddenly much more, so that the percentage of PhD's is very small. Curious. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:42, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

I wryly note the substandard quality of his work, "[Per the books for the historicity of Jesus] by Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey—outside fundamentalist apologetics, the only two books defending the historicity of Jesus written in nearly a hundred years; neither of them peer reviewed—in fact, to this day, there has never been a peer reviewed defense of the historicity of Jesus, not since Shirley Jackson Case wrote an absurdly outdated treatise on it in 1912 (yes, 1912; merely updated in 1928...)." [Ref. Richard Carrier Blog (23 December 2016).]
Per Raphael Lataster, "Throughout Did Jesus Exist? Ehrman asserts that the highly questionable, fiction-filled, and relatively late Gospel accounts can generally be trusted, because of the written and oral sources underlying them that “obviously” existed, though they do not anymore (for example, see pp. 75-79). Not once does Ehrman explain the rationality and widespread endorsement of this ‘method’. Nor does he explain how his approach can provide information about the content, genre, and so forth, of these hypothetical sources." [Lataster, Raphael (4 January 2017). "Review Essay: Bart Ehrman and the Elusive Historical Jesus". Literature & Aesthetics. p. 182. Retrieved 10 February 2017. Literature & Aesthetics. Vol 26 (2016). ISSN: 2200-0437] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 08:05, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Quote from Carrier: "Let’s face it. Jesus is a dick. The Gospels portray him as a cruel, sociopathic asshole who gloats over millions being horribly tortured for billions of years at his command" - I can understand that this tone provokes some strong responses... But I'll read the review; thanks. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 13:01, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Per Raphael Lataster, "Throughout Did Jesus Exist? Ehrman asserts that the highly questionable, fiction-filled, and relatively late Gospel accounts can generally be trusted, because of the written and oral sources underlying them that “obviously” existed, though they do not anymore (for example, see pp. 75-79). Not once does Ehrman explain the rationality and widespread endorsement of this ‘method’. Nor does he explain how his approach can provide information about the content, genre, and so forth, of these hypothetical sources." Note that I'm responding to the Lataster quote.
This is, in a word, bullshit. I've read all three Ehrman books, and it's simply not true that he doesn't explain the rationality and endorsements of his methods, nor that he doesn't explain how his methods produce results. I have Did Jesus Exist? in ebook format and can provide quotes if needed (I remember him doing both in that book alone, but I know he explained this stuff in the other two books as well). ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 14:07, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Just to be clear, Lataster is specifically criticising the untenable usage of hypothetical (i.e. non-existent) sources, "Only Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey have thoroughly attempted to prove Jesus’ historical existence in recent times. Their most decisive point? The Gospels can generally be trusted – after we ignore the many, many bits that are untrustworthy – because of the hypothetical (i.e. non-existent) sources behind them." [Raphael Lataster (December 18, 2014). "Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn't add up". Washington Post. - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 15:28, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
That's a less problematic statement (though still problematic, as Ehrman's argument isn't that the Gospels are trustworthy in general, but that specific elements of the Gospels are trustworthy for specific claims), but it doesn't address the claim I responded to. Lataster directly stated that Ehrman doesn't do certain things that Ehrman explicitly does. Now, I'm not suggesting we add my own OR to the article (even though it's demonstrably correct) because I'm not an idiot (most of the time), but it's something to consider when trying to assign weight to Lataster's statement. All in all, the most surprising thing is that Lataster apparently has his own WP article. His notability is questionable, at the least. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 15:46, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Neil Godfrey highlights the scholarly literature discussing the influence of ancient philosophy on the thinking of Paul:
  • Troels Engberg-Pedersen: Paul and the Stoics
  • Th. D. Niko Huttunen: Paul and Epictetus on Law
  • Abraham J. Malherbe: Paul and the Popular Philosophers
and I again wryly note the substandard quality of Ehrman's work, "Ehrman is a well-read scholar so he knows very well that there is an abundant scholarly literature discussing the influence of ancient philosophy on the thinking of Paul. [...] Is Bart Ehrman so offended by the very idea of mythicism that he is quite prepared to deny the research of his own scholarly peers, and even deny what he himself has written, if he suspects any of that might become tinder for a mythicist flame?" [ref. Godfrey, Neil (8 April 2012). "Ehrman sacrifices Paul to launch his attack on mythicism". Vridar.] - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 03:15, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Doherty Bibliography of The Jesus Puzzle

  • Jesus Puzzle Book:
Doherty, Earl (2009). Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus. Ottawa: Age of Reason Publications. ISBN 978-0-9689259-2-8. New edition, Revised and Expanded, Originally published under the title: The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? - Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus
Doherty, Earl (2005) [First published 1999]. The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? - Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus. Ottawa: Age of Reason Publications. ISBN 978-0-9689259-1-1. 4th print [1st print Ottawa: Canadian Humanist Publications]. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  • Jesus Puzzle Journal Article:
Doherty, Earl (1997). "The Jesus Puzzle. Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins". Journal of Higher Criticism. 4 (2): 68–102.
  • Jesus Puzzle Website:
2004 - Present: jesuspuzzle.humanists.net ["Historical Jesus or Jesus Myth: The Jesus Puzzle". Retrieved 4 April 2017.]
1995 - 2004: magi.com/~oblio/jesus ["The Jesus Puzzle". 5 December 1998.]

I understand that Doherty (2009) content supersedes the Journal and Website content. - 74.138.110.32 (talk) 00:59, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately, Doherty (2009) is out of print. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:22, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
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