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Excessive and Off-Topic In-Line Quotes and Notes

Start of this thread

I'm starting this section to address the many in-line citations to quotes and notes. These are excessive and I am not familiar with another article that has nearly as many. The way I see it, there are 4 primary issues with these:

1. The current formatting makes portions of the article very difficult to read. This could be partially alleviated by using standard reference formatting instead of the words "quote" and "note," which serve to break up the text.

2. Many of the quotes would be better-served as simple references. As just one example, the three quotes in the first sentence of the article could be removed and replaced with ordinary citations. This would be especially appropriate in the intro which would be best-served by a consensus definition, without need for quoting individual mythicists.

3. The notes are interesting and seem to be the product of a substantial amount of care. However, they are often off-topic to the subject of the page and are not generally helpful or illuminating to CMT. For example, look at the sentence "A central question is how these communities developed . . . which were deemed heretical by proto-orthodox Christianity." This is followed by three lengthy in-line citations that provide interesting background, but do not serve this page. Even though much work has clearly gone into these notes and quotes, they are not doing a service to an encyclopedic entry on CMT. Excising them entirely would likely improve the page.

4. Related to 1 & 3 - the many citations make the article feel like an academic article instead of an encyclopedia. Other articles on this site do not have these lengthy, in-line discursions. Magic1million (talk) 00:16, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

  • I'm starting this section to address the many in-line citations to quotes and notes. These are excessive. I agree.
  • The current formatting makes portions of the article very difficult to read. This could be partially alleviated by using standard reference formatting instead of the words "quote" and "note," which serve to break up the text. I agree.
  • Many of the quotes would be better-served as simple references. I agree.
  • the many citations make the article feel like an academic article instead of an encyclopedia-I am not sure about that, a lot of them are stating at length the arguments and positions of Richard Carrier, who is not an academic. Neither of course is Earl Doherty, also referred to many times.
  • Excising them entirely would likely improve the page. I agree.
Smeat75 (talk) 01:43, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Footnotes proper

The topic of this article is contentious and requires the absolute maximum in "Footnotes providing tangential information" and annotations of the "relevant exact quotation from the source".

The current formatting makes portions of the article very difficult to read
— User:Magic1million

No it does not. If we are talking about "Footnotes/Endnotes", only the markers appear in other sections that are not "footnote sections" - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 01:15, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the formatting, I started to reformat the extensive references with quotes into "quotes," to make it clear where in the articke extra information can be found, and where "only" standard refrences can be found. Next step would be to judge which quotes could be shortened, or grouped together. NB: the way the notes, and the references with quotes, are organised, is smart: not inline, but in a separate section, with named references. This makes editing the article itself much easier. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:11, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
The following sections are all "Footnotes/Endnotes" :
  • Notes
  • Quotes
  • References
Corresponding to the following group names:
  • note
  • quote
  • default i.e. no group name
Per Footnotes:
74.138.111.159 (talk) 06:22, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Joshua Jonathan, the WP guide you cited answers the question "What goes in footnotes?" But I do not see it as answering the question of how many footnotes there should be. Which is to say that tangential information can be included in footnotes, but that does not mean it should be included. In addition, many of the "quote" citations in the article do not follow the WP guide you cited. As I read the policy, quote citations are meant to provide "relevant exact quotation from the source" in situations where only part of a quote is presented. That is not how the quote cites are used in this article. For example, every quote cite in the first paragraph of the Section "Jesus and the origins of Christianity" follows something that is not a quote. I sense that you may not be the only person who feels that these notes and quotes are merited because the subject matter of this article is contentious. However, there are many articles on Wikipedia that deal with contentious topics and do not have these excessive annotations. Magic1million (talk) 17:43, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Apparently, many of those quotes are actually notes. Some India-related articles have a lot of notes. Thus, there is a parallel. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 18:03, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Even assuming that some India-related articles do this, the vast majority of Wikipedia articles do not have these excessive citations to extraneous information. I think there is a reason why, which is that this supplemental information does not improve the quality of the article. If the information backs up what is cited, it should be a reference. If it's important to understanding the subject of the article, it should be in the main text instead of a note. But if it provides only an aside, no matter how interesting or well-researched, it shouldn't be in this article. It seems a lot of work went into writing these notes and gathering the quotations. Perhaps the content can be worked into the main text of the entries on other topics. Magic1million (talk) 19:14, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

this supplemental information does not improve the quality of the article.
— User:Magic1million

Please give an example. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 19:30, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
I am happy to give a few examples. In the introduction, what is currently "Note 2" regarding the crucifixion would be better served as a wikilink on the word crucified pointing to the Historicity section of the Crucifixion article. Current "Note 3" is interesting, but the reference is already clear by way of introduction as the "Roman province of Judea." Further, Note 3 does not illuminate the subject of "Christ myth theory." Note 4's discussion of the history of heresy concerns is far afield from what is needed on this article about CMT. The current "Note 6" (a confusingly-worded note about the negative to the argument for silence) is a good example of a note whose content should appear in the main text if it merits being included. The current quotes 5, 6, and 7 could all just be simple references, if anything. I could give many more examples. Magic1million (talk) 22:34, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
None of these notes decrease the quality of the article, nor do they make the article less easy to read. You have not cited any WP policy that would prohibit these notes. – 74.138.111.159 (talk) 23:14, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
I've started to take a closer look at the quotes: see where they exactly fit in, added info to one quote, removed one quote from the lead. I'll see if those "quotes" should be mentioned as "notes"; in case if they're proper quotes, in addition to references, I'll consider to separate them, and list the reference sec as a proper reference, and the quote as an additional note. Renaming the quotes as quotes is helpfull in this regard; it makes it easier to single out referemces with quotes from references sec. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:20, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

To the unregistered user's concerns, I would say that these do, indeed, decrease the quality of the article. I am not the only person on this talk page who views the notes and quotes as lessening the overall quality of the article (see Smeat75's comments in response to the original post in this Talk section). As to WP policies, I would first note that the quotes do not fit with the WP Quotes policy, as discussed above. But, on a more general level, I think the notes/quotes are covered by WP:Not. Specifically, the following portions of the WP:Not policy:

1. Encyclopedic Content: "Information should not be included in this encyclopedia solely because it is true or useful. A Wikipedia article should not be a complete exposition of all possible details, but a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject."

2. Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal: Specifically, the admonition that Wikipedia articles should not be written like "Textbooks and annotated texts." I think it would be hard to characterize this article, in its current form, as something other than an "annotated text."

The next two policies also apply, albeit perhaps with somewhat less force.

3. WP:SOAP: A number of the notes read as opinion pieces on different preferred theories by the author. That's all fine and well on a blog, but not on an encyclopedic page. Some of the opinions are interesting, but they do not have a place here, whether in the main text or notes.

4. WP:DIRECTORY: Although this policy relates primarily to lists of quotes, I think the spirit of the rule applies to the many quotes presented here. Per the policy, "If you want to enter lists of quotations, put them into our sister project Wikiquote." Magic1million (talk) 05:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

Hereafter I uses the following non-standardized definitions for WP page content:
  • Body text - the sections of main content of the article. i.e. specifically not the sections defined as "Footnotes/Endnotes".
  • Footnotes/Endnotes - the sections of supplemental content of the article. i.e. specifically not "inline text".
  • Inline text - content that is in the "Body text".
  • Footnote text - content that is in the "Footnotes/Endnotes".
  • Markers - characters in the "Body text" that refer to an item in the "Footnotes/Endnotes".
The following sections are all "Footnotes/Endnotes" :
  • Notes
  • Quotes
  • References
Corresponding to the following group names:
  • note
  • quote
  • default i.e. no group name
In general the WP policies you note are intended for "Body text".

WP:SOAP: A number of the notes read as opinion pieces on different preferred theories by the author.
— User:Magic1million

Please elaborate on what you mean by "the author".
Please give one example (and only 1 at this time).

WP:DIRECTORY: Although this policy relates primarily to lists of quotes, I think the spirit of the rule applies to the many quotes presented here.
— User:Magic1million

Your reading of WP:DIRECTORY is tendentious. This claim is without merit as WP:DIRECTORY is clearly referring primarily to the "Body text".
74.138.111.159 (talk) 11:13, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
I'm not sure why policies about what merits inclusion in an article's body text should not also apply to what is included in lengthy footnotes. Even if some other standard applies (which is an inference you are making from the policy, but one that is not stated there), the many annotations still fail WP:Not's admonition that articles not be written as an "annotated text." That policy plainly applies to annotations like footnotes. This article has far too many annotations and those annotations are largely off-topic to the article.
re: WP:SOAP - "the author" refers to "the author of the note." Although I used "the author" as a shorthand, I concede that any given note may have multiple authors.
re: WP:DIRECTORY, I acknowledged that the explicit terms of the policy do not apply. But I think the spirit of the policy is clear, as discussed before.
I hope that we can move forward with deleting the many annotations and/or converting them into standard references. Magic1million (talk) 17:56, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

This article has far too many annotations
— User:Magic1million

Please cite the WP policy for how many is to many. And please elaborate on how any given number of footnotes makes this article hard to read.
  • Tangential: hardly touching a matter; peripheral.
Tangential footnotes are standard per "Footnotes/Endnotes". - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 20:44, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Please cite the WP policy for how many is to many.
— User:74.138.111.159

The relevant policy is the "Annotated Text" policy. It would be impossible for such a policy to set a firm number, and it is a judgment call. But right now, it reads like an annotated text and the notes are excessive.

And please elaborate on how any given number of footnotes makes this article hard to read
— User:74.138.111.159

I think I have been clear on this in my original post. They break up the page and make it hard for the eye to follow the text (for an example, look at the current intro section of "Overview of Main Arguments"). When moused over, they add a large block of text that is difficult to read.

Tangential footnotes are standard per "Footnotes/Endnotes".
— User:74.138.111.159

I do not believe you are giving a fair reading to the WP Footnote page, which is a How-to about formatting footnotes and answers a different question than what you are using it for. It cannot be the case that the Footnote how-to authorizes placing lots of tangential information into footnotes, because that would run up against WP:NOT's admonition that this is not an "Annotated Text." In addition, the usage is not justified under citation policies such as:

1. WP:OVERCITE generally, and, specifically, the first bullet point here.

2. The extra scrutiny governing use of quotes in articles about fringe theories.

3. WP:BOMBARDMENT, cautioning against "Overloading an article with dubious and tangential citations"

I could go on, and I have gone to some length talking about why these excessive citations should go. Having answered at length, I would be curious to hear any viewpoints about how the Notes and Quotes are helping the article (if at all) and why they should stay. Magic1million (talk) 00:09, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

As a point of comparison, look how much cleaner the citations were when this article was still listed as a Good Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christ_myth_theory&oldid=345141037 (edit: Albeit still containing a number of footnotes ripe for editing/removal) Magic1million (talk) 00:22, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Per WP:FN, Footnotes are used most commonly to provide:
  • references (bibliographic citations)
  • explanatory information
  • source information for tables and other elements.
Per the footnotes of tangential explanatory information and of directly relevant explanatory information (both a standard function of footnotes). You overstate the density of Markers of said footnotes in relation to the length/size of the "Body text", clearly this article is not an "annotated work" in violation of WP:NOTTEXTBOOK.

I would be curious to hear any viewpoints about how the Notes and Quotes are helping the article (if at all) and why they should stay.
— User:Magic1million

I have never seen a more contentious article than this one, requiring the absolute maximum in many relevant quotes of the cited sources in footnotes (a standard function of footnotes) to clarify the many disparate viewpoints held by mythicists and to present a WP:NPOV presentation of their viewpoints.

look how much cleaner the citations were when this article was still listed as a Good Article
— User:Magic1million

This 20 February 2010 revision supports the claim: Many relevant quotes of the cited sources in footnotes are needed to clarify the many disparate viewpoints held by mythicists and to present a WP:NPOV presentation of their viewpoints. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 01:10, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Rather than go around in circles on this, do we at least have consensus on reformatting the citations so they appear as standard numeral cites instead of the word "quote" or "note"? Magic1million (talk) 17:49, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

For a more (or at least equally) contentious topic that handles all these issues better, see Holocaust denial. There are some long footnotes in that article, but they are directly relevant to the text and subject matter. They are presented as ordinary cites. And, by in large, the most important points are worked into the main text rather than leaning on long quotes and detailed asides. And, relevant to my previous post, all references use the standard single numeral form, which breaks up the eye-line much less. Magic1million (talk) 17:55, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Academic status

Per Gullotta (2017): "[Some mythicists] hold degrees in relevant fields, such as biblical studies, ancient history, and classics. [...] These more noteworthy individuals include the late G.A. Wells, Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, Thomas L. Brodie, Raphael Lataster, and Richard C. Carrier." - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 02:05, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

I agree with Smeat75. If anybody cares. Carrier and Doherty do have academic degrees, but I am sure what was meant was that they have no academic standing. They have no jobs in the respective fields. Jenhawk777 (talk) 03
22, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
74.138.111.159 (talk) 04:01, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Apart from evangelical/fundamentalist works and other than Case (1928) [first pub. 1912], please list the peer-reviewed works specifically on the question of the "Historicity of Jesus". - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 04:16, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
These are not jobs in the field. It's not as though either of them got hired at a University like Oxford or Harvard. One of these is a defunct voluntary position and the other is a voluntary position with the Jesus Seminar people whose academic reputation is also virtually nill. Might as well admire Pat Robertson for volunteering at the religious right. Carrier's (and Doherty's) main occupation is blogger. *Jesus Project Fellow Carrier @ https://web.archive.org/web/20161222063910/http://www.centerforinquiry.net/jesusproject/fellows/carrier_richard/*Westar Fellow Carrier @ https://www.westarinstitute.org/membership/westar-fellows/fellows-directory/richard-carrier/ Jenhawk777 (talk) 07:46, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
I thought there was sign of a more cooperative atmostphere here, but I find all this ad hominen extremely distressing. Kindly withdraw it. The article is supposed to be about a historical issue, so what matters is what people say, not where their income comes from. I have changed Carrier's label from "Atheist activist" to "Historian", which is what he is in this context. (Perhaps he's an "atheist activist", perhaps he's a Republican voter, perhaps he's pro/anti-gun lobbyist...) Please do not put this back, or "Christian apologist" should preced every Christian mentioned. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:29, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
I agree that it is not necessary to label Carrier an "atheist activist" but I think it is misleading to call him a "historian". He does not hold any academic position as a historian or anything else. Strictly speaking I would say he is a freelance writer and blogger, focusing almost entirely on this fringe theory which has zero support among academic historians. I don't see why he needs a "label" at all, just call him by his name.Smeat75 (talk) 11:08, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
I see that Doherty is referred to as a "Canadian writer" so I changed Carrier's "label" to "American author" which I think is neutral, I do not accept "historian".Smeat75 (talk) 11:20, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

The point here is that it doesn't matter what you personally think of Carrier or if agree with any of his beliefs or not. We are not about "truth" here. Blog if that's your goal.
— User:Jenhawk777

  • "independent historian Richard Carrier"
    • Lataster, Raphael (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.
  • "historian Richard Carrier"
  • "Richard Carrier is an independent scholar"
    • Gullotta, Daniel N. (2017). "On Richard Carrier's Doubts: A Response to Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt". Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. 15 (2–3): 310–346. doi:10.1163/17455197-01502009.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 11:51, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

74.138.111.159--Inserted comment here just so I can say, solid burn, I am laughing, and you are totally right--of course. I deserved that. Jenhawk777 (talk) 22:10, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Right, "independent scholar" is also neutral. I will change Carrier's "label" to that.Smeat75 (talk) 12:20, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
As someone who has been labeling people in this article lately[1], I think that in general, what they are called here should rhyme with their WP-articles, if they have one. Richard Carrier puts historian first. If that's wrong, it should change. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:03, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
See Other stuff exists.Smeat75 (talk) 15:17, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Yep. It says "These "other stuff exists" arguments can be valid or invalid. When used correctly, these comparisons are important as the encyclopedia should be consistent in the content that it provides or excludes." Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:30, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Well, if you want to change Carrier's article, go ahead. I am not interested in possibly getting into an argument or defending a change over there, I am only concerned about this one.Smeat75 (talk) 15:44, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Title

And thank you for reminding me of that peer reviewed article on Carrier's book in the academic journal "Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus" which Gullotta begins by saying The Jesus Myth theory is the view that the person known as Jesus of Nazareth had no historical existence. So much more clear and accurate than the rather torturous definition we have on this article. That's what it is.Smeat75 (talk) 12:50, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

And he also says:

Originally known as the ‘Christ Myth theory,’ this school of thought has more recently adopted the moniker ‘Jesus Myth theory’ or ‘mythicism’. Those who support this theory call themselves ‘mythicists’ and label those who maintain the view that Jesus did exist as a historical human person as ‘historicists’.

It is certainly time to rename this article. 74.138.111.159 (talk) 14:15, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
"Jesus myth theory" is already mentioned in the lead. Google:
"Christ," of course, is by definition mythological, whereas "Jesus" may refer to a historical person. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 14:40, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Changing the introductory language to that suggested by Smeat75 is sensible and will make the introduction much cleaner and more straightforward. As for the name change, it seems that "Jesus myth theory" may be more accurate, but given that CMT appears to be the more accepted term in scholarship, it probably makes sense to keep that as the article name. Magic1million (talk) 17:55, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

In regards to WP:weight, the term "Christ myth theory" is deprecated in the newest works, i.e. of those works specifically on the question of the "Historicity of Jesus".

See Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources § Age matters - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 14:14, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Intro

Per the new lede:

Gullotta: "the view that the person known as Jesus of Nazareth had no historical existence." Ehrman: "the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity".

The Gullotta quote has more WP:weight, but it is not a case of ceteris paribus:

  1. Most leading mythicists do not hold the view that "of Nazareth" is a requirement for historicity.
  2. Ehrman's quote is more comprehensive.

Jesus mythicism is:

  • The construction of a theory which will explain the origin of Christianity.
  • A statement of the reasons for believing that Jesus cannot have been an historical person.

The new lede eliminates the presentation of a primary point of Jesus mythicism. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 22:54, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

74.138.111.159, you cited Gullotta re Carrier being an "independent scholar" so obviously you accept that Gullotta is a reliable academic source. I quoted his definition but did not want to alter the lead without consensus. User:Joshua Jonathan changed it to Gullotta's definition, Magic1million says the change is "sensible...much cleaner and more straightforward." That is pretty overwhelming consensus. I think the new definition is vastly better than the way it was before.Smeat75 (talk) 23:22, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
This lede is cleaner and more straightforward:

The Jesus myth theory (also known as the • • •) is the proposition that Christianity originated from a syncretistic and mythological Jewish theology and that "the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity".

Most mythicists question the reliability of the Pauline epistles and the Gospels regarding the historicity of Jesus; they note the lack of information on Jesus in non-Christian sources from the first and early second century; and they argue that this early Christianity is reflected in both the Pauline epistles and the gospels.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 03:56, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
I changed the lead per WP:BOLD, but I'm totally open to discussion in this regard, so consensus is not final yet. 74 may have a point regarding "Jesus of Nazareth." And he certainly has a point when stating that the Cmt is alos about the mythological origins of Christianity; the discussion on "historical existence yes/no" bypasses the earlier nuances in this debate, which our article also indicates. In this respect, the former lead may have been better. The lead used to say:

The Christ myth theory (also known as [...]) is the proposition that Christianity started with the belief in a new deity, named Jesus, "who was later historicized" in the Gospels, which are "essentially allegory and fiction". Alternatively in "simpler terms"—given by Bart Ehrman as per his criticism of mythicism—"the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity".

Another proposal may be:

The Christ myth theory (also known as [...]) is the proposition that Christianity started with the belief in a saviour deity, named Jesus, which originated in a syncretistic and mystical Jewish theology as reflected in the Pauline epistles, and "who was later historicized" in the Gospels. Alternatively, in simpler terms given by Bart Ehrman as per his criticism of mythicism, "the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity".

Skip "new" and "allegory and fiction." Skip also "mythological"; it implies an opposition toward other forms of theology which are nit mythological. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:00, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
This new proposal is the best.
Possible changes:
  • saviour [[deity]] → [[Soteriology|soteriological]] [[deity]]
  • mystical Jewish theology → mystical [[Hellenistic Judaism|Hellenized Jewish]] [[theology]]
74.138.111.159 (talk) 10:07, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
I didn't put the Gullotta definition into the article because I didn't really want to open up this kind of argument again, I just said I thought it was better. However now it is there I think it should stay. We do not know better than him what the CM theory is. "Christianity started with the belief in a new deity, named Jesus, "who was later historicized" in the Gospels" is pure Richard Carrier, he is not the only "mythicist", the simpler definition covers them all.Smeat75 (talk) 12:15, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
See WP:SOURCETYPESWhen available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources - the adapted definition that Joshua put back in has two longish quotes, one from Carrier and the other from Doherty. Neither of them are academics, Carrier is an "independent scholar" and Doherty a blogger. The Gullotta is from exactly an "academic and peer-reviewed publication, scholarly monograph" and must be preferred according to WP guidelines.Smeat75 (talk) 13:53, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
Also see WP:RSSELF Anyone can create a personal web page or publish their own book and claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published media are largely not acceptable. Self-published books and newsletters, personal pages on social networking sites, tweets, and posts on Internet forums are all examples of self-published media. "Earl Doherty self-published a 2005 re-release of The Jesus Puzzle under his own imprint, Age of Reason Publications." Doherty is a self published author and should not be used anywhere in the article except in the section for his own views.Smeat75 (talk) 14:17, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
  • "The Jesus Puzzle: Part One: A Conspiracy of Silence". Humanist in Canada. 114: 20–24. Autumn 1995.
  • "The Jesus Puzzle: Part Two: Who was Christ Jesus?". Humanist in Canada. 115: 10–14, 31. Winter 1995–1996.
  • "The Jesus Puzzle: Part Three: The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth". Humanist in Canada. 116: 24–30, 38. Spring 1996.
  • "The Jesus Puzzle: Postscript". Humanist in Canada. 117: 20–23, 38. Summer 1996.
  • "The Jesus Puzzle: The Second Century: What the Christian apologists of the second century present us with". Humanist in Canada. 120. Spring 1997.
  • "Book Review: Burton L. Mack - Who wrote the New Testament? The making of the Christian myth". Humanist in Canada. 120: 12–13. Spring 1997.
  • "The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins". Journal of Higher Criticism. 4 (2): 68–102. Fall 1997.
  • Not self-published: Doherty, Earl (1999). The Jesus Puzzle. Canadian Humanist Publications. ISBN 978-0-9686014-0-2. {{cite book}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
And the following should be acceptable:
  • The Mythical Jesus viewpoint holds that "Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure".^1
  • The Mythical Jesus viewpoint holds that "the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction".^1
Viewpoints of myth proponents that are not covered by Gullotta's simpler definition

  • "The main result at which the author [Arthur Drews (1910)] 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." [Cheyne, T. K. (1911).]
  • "The myth theory as stated by J. M. Robertson [1910] does not exclude the possibility of an historical Jesus." [Robertson, Archibald (1946).]
  • "We know next to nothing about this Jesus. He is not the founder of anything that we can recognize as Christianity." [Robertson, Archibald (1946).]
  • "Many (including the present writer) are content to infer ...that probably some Jew named Jesus adopted the Persian belief [see Avesta] in the end of the world [...] They feel that the question of historicity has little importance [...] the very scanty biographical details even as given in the Gospels [see Mark] do not justify the claim of a "unique personality,"..." [McCabe, Joseph (1948).]
  • "Yes, it is possible [there is a historical founder of Christianity], perhaps just a tad more likely than that there was a historical Moses, about as likely as there having been a historical Apollonius of Tyana. But it becomes almost arbitrary to think so. [Price, Robert M. (1999).]
  • "The Q material—whether or not it suffices as evidence of Jesus's historicity—refers to a [human] personage..." [Wells, George Albert (2004).]
  • "If we trace Christianity back to Jesus ben Pandera or an Essene Teacher of Righteousness in the first century BCE, we still have a historical Jesus." [Price (2011).]

Gullotta never refutes or rejects Ehrman's expanded definition of mythicism so it is still usable.

Jesus mythicism (also known as [...]) is the proposition that Christianity started with the belief in a soteriological deity named Jesus, which originated in a syncretistic and a mystical Hellenized Jewish theology reflected in the Pauline epistles, and "who was later historicized" in the Gospels and "that the person known as Jesus of Nazareth had no historical existence." And Bart Ehrman—as per his criticism of mythicism—expands the definition of mythicism to include the qualifier: that if a historical Jesus existed then "he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity."

74.138.111.159 (talk) 01:04, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

I think the new lede still needs work. I think the phrase "which lay in Jewish syncretism of the 1st century Hellenistic world." fails Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal, specifically, "A Wikipedia article should not be presented on the assumption that the reader is well-versed in the topic's field. Introductory language in the lead (and also maybe the initial sections) of the article should be written in plain terms and concepts that can be understood by any literate reader of Wikipedia without any knowledge in the given field before advancing to more detailed explanations of the topic." Magic1million (talk) 05:30, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
I completely agree, thank you User:Joshua Jonathan for taking that phrase out.Smeat75 (talk) 15:59, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
I just wanted to chime in to say the article intro is much cleaner and clearer now. Thank you to User:Joshua Jonathan for your work on this! Magic1million (talk) 18:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Notice of neutrality dispute

I have lodged a dispute with the neutrality board. Jenhawk777 (talk) 21:44, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Thread is [2].Smeat75 (talk) 22:17, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
So weird to see the assertion that the authors of this article are believers in the CMT. Usually the complaints about this article are the exact opposite. --Akhilleus (talk) 03:03, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
I know! Hi --Akhilleus, good to see you here, things seem to be hotting up again here after a period of relative calm, please stick around.Smeat75 (talk) 03:18, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
The structure of this article is a mess and aids in its non-neutrality. It should be half as long with 1/10th as many quotes. The subject of the article is the Christ Myth Theory. There are other articles that discuss more mainstream views. I do not understand why this article needs in-depth discussion of those theories, instead of very briefly contrasting them and/or noting the non-mainstream nature of the interpretations. I don't see why the "Traditional and modern Christian views," "Other religious views on Jesus," and "Mainstream historical view" subsections can't be cut entirely or substantially reduced into one sub-section. Some of the writing is sloppy and biased in either direction, likely the product of emotion and devotion rather than creating a straightforward encyclopedic entry. Some perceptions of bias could probably be reduced by cutting other sections substantially, as well. For example, the exhaustive (and exhausting) descriptions of the various proponents through time and the unnecessary quotes and in-line citations thereto.Magic1million (talk) 20:53, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
You need to get consensus for those changes, I have reverted them. Especially changing the definition at the beginning, arrived at after years of arguing, must get consensus first. I agree that the sections on Traditional and then on Other religious views, added recently, are not necessary. Mainstream views must stay, we just had an editor arguing forcefully that the mainstream view is not represented adequately. I do agree that the article is too long and makes a simple idea unnecessarily complicated. Smeat75 (talk) 21:56, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
Sensible and sorry for jumping the gun. I genuinely did not view the changes as controversial, thinking of them more as copy-editing than substantive changes. I was trying to "be bold" when I probably should have recognized that more caution is required in controversial topics like this.Magic1million (talk) 22:36, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
So who removed the tag and was it done with consensus? I will not lodge a protest because I live in hope this is all resolvable between reasonable people who just want to produce a good quality article. First is some recognition this article has become more and more non-neutral the more that has been added.
Magic1million is right on target saying "The structure of this article is a mess and aids in its non-neutrality." I love this one too: "I do not understand why this article needs in-depth discussion of those theories, instead of very briefly contrasting them and/or noting the non-mainstream nature of the interpretations." I don't understand why this article needs such a long discussion of all the various points made repeatedly multiple times--with no mainstream view contrasting them at all. None. "Some of the writing is sloppy and biased"--and right now I am thanking my lucky stars I haven't written anything here yet... because that statement is entirely accurate as well. What this says is what I have been saying: both the structure and some of the actual writing are recognizable as biased and non-neutral. Taking down the tag doesn't change that.
Magic1million offers an idea rather than denial. This is a brilliant suggestion which should be followed through imho: "Some perceptions of bias could probably be reduced by cutting other sections substantially, as well. For example, the exhaustive (and exhausting) descriptions of the various proponents through time and the unnecessary quotes and in-line citations thereto." I would love to see that happen--it too is without mainline context/contrast which is part of what makes this look more like a mythicist blog than a neutral and yet fully informative Wiki article.
Magic1million please be bold some more! It prompted action that genuinely helped the article whereas all I did was get more unnecessary nonsense added. Sigh.Jenhawk777 (talk) 08:54, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Jenhawk77, you wrote before that you found this article to be well-structured, so I don't understand why you now state the opposite. The article gives an overview of the main arguments of mythicists, following a summary of those arguments as provided by Van Voorst. It then gives an overview of various mythicists, and it gives an overview of the main objections againts the mythicists pov. As has been noted so many times before: most scholars don't even bother to adress the Cmt. Frankly, I'm beginning to find your repetition of complaints to be WP:DISRUPTIVE, c.q. WP:ICANTHEARYOU. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 14:16, 18 April 2018 (UTC) By the way, the tag was removed here. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 14:24, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Ummm ... well structured? How is my repetition of unaddressed issues disruptive when I haven't even been here in nearly two weeks? I don't think I have ever referred specifically to the structure of this article before. I have said I think the article is a mostly good article and I stand by that. I also stand by that it is not neutral and needs improvement. Those two ideas are not contradictory. I have said I agree every time someone else says the article needs to be shorter. I agree with anything that will improve neutrality. This article used to be a good article; now it isn't; I think it could be again. What do you think would get it from where it is now to where it would qualify as good again? What changes--if any--would you be in favor of? Jenhawk777 (talk) 20:28, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Rewriting suggestions

A lot of the quotations of mainstream academics seem to be personal attacks or logical fallacies of some kind like blank statements and circular logic. It would probably be in this article's best interests to focus on solid arguments against the Christ myth hypothesis rather than going on tangents about mocking the qualifications of the proponents. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Falconfly (talk • contribs) 00:01, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

I'm sorry this was unsigned as it's a good and relevant comment. Being dismissive in general is not productive, but especially so here. The only requirement for recognizing the background of proponents and opponents is accuracy. Once that's given, it should be done. Ad hominem attacks are never good arguments. Agreed completely. What we may think of them personally is not relevant. If criticism is to be included, it should be along the lines of the topic itself, such as this: "Multiple critics note three common characteristics of Cmt: general dissatisfaction with the scholarly consensus, the use of old outdated scholarship that was often rejected when it was new, and the characteristics of conspiracy theory." But the single most important statement in this comment, to my way of thinking, is the assertion it is "in this article's best interests to focus on solid arguments". I wholeheartedly agree. Jenhawk777 (talk) 18:37, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

"Other, credible hypotheses" - such as Geza Vermes, "The Resurrection"

Geza vermez, in "The Resurrection" (2008) p.138-139 states that the exaltation of Jesus is the central belief of early Christianity. I think this is an interesting conclusion, since it implies that there was a historical Jesus, but also explains why his earthly life is not the focus point of Paul and the Gospels. The focus-point is that he was a righteous person, and therefore exalted after his death. This makes sense, I think. I've already been looking if this could be included, but I'm not sure if this is possible, nor if it isn't undue. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:29, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Does Vermes hold that per Exaltation Christology → After the Resurrection of Jesus, God exalted him to heaven and made him the anointed one, i.e. the Christ, and also his Son (see Son of God (Christianity)), therefore Jesus became divine (i.e. a god) and was not born divine.
Per Ehrman (Feb 14, 2013). "Incarnation Christology, Angels, and Paul". The Bart Ehrman Blog.: "I have argued that different Christians in the early decades of the Christian movement maintained that Jesus had been exalted to a divine status at some point of his existence – at his resurrection, at his baptism, at his birth. I have called this a christology from below, or an “exaltation” christology; it is sometimes called a low christology because it understands Jesus to have started out as a human (down here with us) and to have been raised to a divine status."
Cf. Ehrman, Bart D. (2014). How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-225219-7. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 00:44, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
I've been thinking about this further, and I still feel it's relevant. For what I know about it, maonstream scholarship is not concerned with a digital answer to a simple question about 'Jesus yes/no', but is concerned with with complex origins, and a narrative that is rooted in Jewish religious thinking of the time. That is, scholarship gives better explanations than 'Jesus existed yes/no'. Scholarship tells about what the fiorst Christians likely believed, and how their beliefs developed, in a way that makes sense in the context of that time, even/also if it does not make sense in a strictly natural way of thinking/explaining common in our times. An addition to the subsection "Mainstream historical view," something like

Mainstream scholarship places the development of early Christianity in the context of 1st century Jewish religiosity, in which a belief in resurrection developed in opposition against the Roman occupation. While the resurrection became a vocal point for Christianity, the early Jerusalem community seems to have focused on the exaltation of Jesus due to his righteousness, and the expected return of Jesus to judge the living and dead. The lack of information on a historical Jesus is to be understood in this context, in which the focus was on the fulfillment of God's promises, and not on the earthly life of a material man.

Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:36, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
I am not sure about this, the focus of this article needs to stay on "did Jesus exist or not" and why the sources on either side of the question say what they do. This material might be more suitable for Early Christianity. mainstream scholarship is not concerned with a digital answer to a simple question about 'Jesus yes/no' -most mainstream historians and other scholars consider the question silly and do not bother to engage with it unless asked, any more than Egpytologists bother to refute "Did space aliens build the pyramids?" However in recent years Maurice Casey "emeritus professor at the University of Nottingham, having served there as Professor of New Testament Languages and Literature" and Bart D. Ehrman, author of college textbooks and over seventeen books for Harvard and Oxford University Presses, both as mainstream as it is possible to be, have written whole books on the "binary"question "did Jesus exist" - answer, yes, for sure. ( Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? and Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth respectively.) The lack of information on a historical Jesus is to be understood in this context - this is more or less the central fallacy of Christ mythers. It is simply incorrect to say that there is a "lack of information on a historical Jesus" as several historians are quoted in the article as saying, for instance Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University has written...Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity."Smeat75 (talk) 11:58, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
I agree with Smeat75. It might be interesting but seems off topic for this particular article.Jenhawk777 (talk) 14:52, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Van Voorst (2000) argues against the Cmt that Wells and others do not offer alternative "other, credible hypotheses" for the origins of Christianity. So, some relevance? Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:29, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Two places, actually, which are good places to add info:
  • Mainstream historical view: somewhere in this section.
  • Pauline epistles - mainstream view: why was there no need for Paul to elaborate?
NB: it's been quite a while since I read all this stuff on the origins of Christianity, so I don't have a concrete proposal with references; I was hoping someone else could make a further suggestion... Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:37, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
The primary problem in an alternative explanation for the origins of Christianity is chronology. This is referenced in nearly every discussion of the origins of Christianity as possibly "mythic" or legendary from Will Durant to Eddy and Boyd. Will Durant, who identified himself as a "reluctant atheist", in his Pulitzer winning book "Caesar and Christ" (1-56731-014-1) concludes on page 554: "...Tacitus described Nero's persecution of the Christians in Rome and pictured them as (64 AD) already numbering adherents throughout the empire; the paragraph is so Tacitean in style, force and prejudice that of all biblical critics only Drews questions its authenticity. Seutonius mentions the same persecution, and reports Claudius' banishment (ca. 52)...the passage accords with the Acts of the Apostles which mentions a decree of Claudius "that the Jews should leave Rome." These prove the existence of Christians rather than of Christ, but unless we assume the latter we are driven to the improbable hypothesis that Jesus was invented in one generation; moreover, we must suppose that the Christiuan community in Rome had been established some years before 52 to merit the attention of an imperial decree" making the time frame possible for that invention even smaller.
James Dunn in "Jesus, Paul, and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians" also notes the extremely short time period. On page 98 he points out that whether the Jesus' tradition can be plausibly accounted for by the "legendary" thesis hinges on the plausibility of a group of first century Palestinian Second Temple monotheistic Jews being inclined to create, embrace and propagate a fictitious legend about a miracle working divine man who was to be given the worship their lives, training and community led them to believe was due only to Yahweh himself. Then they would spend the rest of their lives suffering beatings, expulsion and death rather than abandon what they knew to be invented. Hengel also points out the problem with time. Eddy and Boyd do.
From the dates Jesus--supposedly--died, laying out everything about Paul's activities till his approximate date of death means he converted within one to three years after the date given for Jesus' death, meeting more than once with those who had known Jesus including his brother. Paul includes multiple references to pre-Pauline material "passed down to him" by these men thereby shrinking the time for invention to a few short years.
Even Barton Mack, who reduces the whole New Testament to sociological myth, admits that this would involve "mythologizing a founder of very recent memory."
Attributing the invention of Jesus to Mark becomes even more problematic. Then there is all the evidence for Christianity and the worship of Christ existing before Jesus was invented by Mark. Chronology.
On page 557 of his aforementioned work Durant concludes: "[Gospel] contradictions are of minutiae, not substance; in essentials the Gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent portrait of Christ. In the enthusiasm of its discoveries, Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred worthies--e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates--would fade into Legend. Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed... After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of western man."
It is my opinion that going down this line of thinking will only open a can of worms for this article. I don't think you want to go there or that it adds value here.Jenhawk777 (talk) 16:58, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
  • "[Per] Richard Bauckham: "The earliest Christology was already the highest Christology." [cited: Bauckham, Richard (1998). God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. viii.] This is very true, and among Jews and with such speed it is hardly credible." —Doherty (2009). Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus. Ottawa: Age of Reason Publications. p. 716, n. 12. ISBN 978-0-9689259-2-8.
  • "[Bart] Ehrman’s solution [of low (adoptionist) Christology] is that different Christianities developed differently and at different times; an opinion he shares with the mythicists." —Lataster (2016). "Review Essay: Bart Ehrman and the Elusive Historical Jesus". Literature & Aesthetics (26): 186. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 22:29, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
I apologize, I must be dense today but I am not following how this is applicable to whether or not to include discussion of either the resurrection or alternate theories of how Christianity got started. Jenhawk777 (talk) 03:58, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Per Mack (1990), "The prevailing picture of Christian origins does need to be revised [...] All New Testament scholars are aware of textual material and historical data that cannot easily be reconciled [...] Some scholars are also aware that the literary and historical bases for the traditional reconstruction are very, very shaky. The picture itself has not yet budged, however, and will not budge until alternative explanations for the (sometimes very curious) data available are taken up for forthright discussion and evaluation." —Mack, Burton (1990). "All the Extra Jesuses". Semeia 49: The Apocryphal Jesus and Christian Origins. Society of Biblical Literature. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

There does not appear to be a consensus on Christian origins, e.g. Bauckham and Ehrman appear to be each supporting a different Christology in regards to Christian origins.

Scholarship tells about what the first Christians likely believed, and how their beliefs developed, in a way that makes sense in the context of that time, even/also if it does not make sense in a strictly natural way of thinking/explaining common in our times.
— User:Joshua Jonathan

Vermes viewpoint appears to be equally notable when there is no consensus per Christology in regards to Christian origins. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 05:00, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Ehrman, [How Jesus became God], course guidebook:

Over time, Christians who originally thought Jesus had become a divine being at the Resurrection came to think that, instead, he had been adopted to be divine at his baptism (as in the Gospel of Mark) or that he had been born as the Son of God (as in Matthew and Luke). Eventually, Christians moved beyond the idea that Jesus had become the Son of God to the notion that he had been God before coming into the world, a view we find in the writings of the apostle Paul and in the Gospel of John.

That's relevant, I think, and is in line with Vermes. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:54, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Ehrman: "Paul understood Christ to be an angel who became a human"

Ehrman:

Paul understood Christ to be an angel who became a human.

See also Paul’s View of Jesus as an Angel, Christ as an Angel in Paul (10 april 2014), Christ as an Angel in Paul (7 juni 2014). Quite relevant, I think; it's a thin line between Jesus agnosticism and this kind of reasoning. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 08:02, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Works 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
74.138.111.159 (talk) 10:58, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Carrier seems to have had the same thought, regarding this 'thin line': Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God. Apparently, Paul's understanding of Jesus is the focal point of Cmt. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 15:40, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Nota bene: "Platonism" is not the same as "Middle Platonism", while Platonism provides foundation concepts such as “Demiurge” (demiourgós), the maker of heaven and earth as per Plato in his work Timaeus. Middle Platonism (often conjoined with Stoicism and Neopythagoreanism) is likely the basis of a Jewish-Hellenistic syncretism that influenced Paul′s Christology.
74.138.111.159 (talk) 16:19, 21 April 2018 (UTC) && 00:28, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

"Middle Platonism (often conjoined with Stoicism and Neopythagoreanism) is likely the basis of a Jewish-Hellenistic syncretism that influenced Paul′s Christology."

We already have an article on Middle Platonism, though it could use expansion. Some of the proponents' beliefs were rather peculiar:

"The pre-eminent philosopher in this period, Plutarch (c. 45–120), defended the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul. He sought to show that God, in creating the world, had transformed matter, as the receptacle of evil, into the divine soul of the world, where it continued to operate as the source of all evil." Dimadick (talk) 17:38, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

And perhaps also notable:
Kooten, Geurt Hendrik van (2003). Cosmic Christology in Paul and the Pauline School: Colossians and Ephesians in the Context of Graeco-Roman Cosmology, with a New Synopsis of the Greek Texts. Mohr Siebeck. p. 133. ISBN 978-3-16-148007-2. [P]assages in Plato's Leges and Timaeus are evidence of a small yet undeniable measure of dualistic thinking in Plato to account for the reality of disorder in pre-cosmic times and for its potentiality ever since. As Mansfeld has clearly shown, this dualism should not be styled 'Gnostic' as Plato, unlike the Gnostics, considers the Demiurge to be good.
In Middle Platonist philosophy, this view on the antagonistic nature of the cosmic elements and principles—however limited this antagonism actually was—was taken seriously by, among others, Plutarch and Numenius. In fact, this view was so inseparably bound up with the notions of cosmic elements and matter that it also accounts for the negative evaluation of the elements of the cosmos by Paul (see chap. 2.1 above on Gal 4.3 and 4.9) and the author of Col, and explains why they considered Christ's intervention necessary. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 21:39, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Template: "Cite book" v. "Citation"

Template:Cite book Template:Citation
cite book |ref=harv |last1=Boyd |first1=Gregory A. |authorlink1=Greg Boyd (theologian) |last2=Eddy |first2=Paul R. |year=2007 |title=Lord Or Legend?: Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma |publisher=Baker Books |isbn=9780801065057 Citation | last1 =Boyd | first1 =Gregory A. | authorlink1 =Greg Boyd (theologian) | last2 =Eddy | first2 =Paul R. | year =2007 | title =Lord Or Legend?: Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma | publisher =Baker Books | isbn =9780801065057
Boyd, Gregory A.; Eddy, Paul R. (2007). Lord Or Legend?: Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma. Baker Books. ISBN 9780801065057. Boyd, Gregory A.; Eddy, Paul R. (2007), Lord Or Legend?: Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma, Baker Books, ISBN 9780801065057

Per Template:Citation § Anchored citations :
The special parameter |ref=harv generates an anchor; this is the default for the {{citation}} template. To disable anchor generation, specify |ref=none (in contrast, other Cite templates such as {{cite book}} and {{cite news}} do not create an anchor by default).

The Citation template uses commas in places where the Cite book use periods (full stops) by default; either type of template can use periods (full stops) or commas by using an optional parameter. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 00:53, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Demythologization

I keep coming back to this point of early Christian understandings of Jesus' death and resurrection, but now from the other side of the historical continuum: it seems to me that the 'mainstream historical understanding' of Jesus, as a real person to whom myths were attached, is somehow also 'agenda-drive'. This demythologization is in line with Enlightenment-thought, and gave way to a liberal attitude in which the person of Jesus was an exemplary person regarding morals and ethical behaviour. Yet, ironically, the mythicist understanding of Jesus seems to be closer to early Christianity, namely that Jesus was the incarnation of God on earth. That is, myth is central to the understanding of Christianity, not an earthly person called Jesus.
My point, then, is: shouldn't we someone make stronger mention that this earthly life is of central importance in liberal theology, and that this is a quite recent development? It somehow explains why this earthly life is so important for many people; without it, the ground under liberal theology drops away, and "only" the myths remain... Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:15, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

The article now has, for the first time as far as I know, a clear and accurate definition of the CMT- "the view that the person known as Jesus of Nazareth had no historical existence". Thank you User:Joshua Jonathan for listening to me and Magic1million and putting that definition in the first sentence of the lead and I also appreciate 74.138.111.159, who does not really like that definition, for accepting it. So this is a question not about religion or theology but history.
  • myth is central to the understanding of Christianity, not an earthly person called Jesus - I don't see why this article needs to bring anyone closer to an understanding of Christianity. It is not about religion."Myth" is used by "Christ mythers" in an inaccurate way, this is true, and causes confusion but the term "Christ myth theory" simply means "the idea that there was no such thing as Jesus".
  • it seems to me that the 'mainstream historical understanding' of Jesus, as a real person to whom myths were attached, is somehow also 'agenda-drive'. This demythologization is in line with Enlightenment-thought, and gave way to a liberal attitude in which the person of Jesus was an exemplary person regarding morals and ethical behaviour - well of course Enlightenment scholars were not going to accept the supernatural or miraculous but I don't think it follows that modern historians want to follow an agenda presenting Jesus as "an exemplary person regarding morals and ethical behaviour". They simply say, as many are quoted in the article, that there is "very abundant" evidence that there was such a person without expressing a view of his ethics.
Smeat75 (talk) 16:15, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
User:Joshua Jonathan, The modern "liberal attitude" (John Dominic Crossan) is noted by Carrier at time 16 minutes 50 seconds per the following YouTube video: "The Gospel According to Carrier Part II §. Why are scholars reluctant to consider the non existence of Jesus hypothesis?" @ https://youtu.be/UmboG2xm5tY?t=16m50s
74.138.111.159 (talk) 10:03, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

"[Per Rudolf Bultmann] his February 1924 lecture on the “latest theological movement”—represented, he says, by Barth, Gogarten, and Thurneysen—when he explicitly contrasts this new movement with Herrmann and Troeltsch as the representatives of liberal theology. Bultlnann then states the thesis of his lecture: “The object [Gegenstand] of theology is God, and the charge against liberal theology is that it has dealt not with God but with human beings.” We see in this piece the maturation of the claim stated in his Eisenach lecture of 1920, namely, that liberal theology fails to reflect on the specific content of Christian faith. In that earlier writing he contrasts the spiritual content of genuine religion with the liberal emphasis on a particular moralistic form." —Congdon, David W. (2015). The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann's Dialectical Theology. Fortress Press. p. 108. ISBN 978-1-4514-8792-3. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 12:18, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Bultmann and form criticism are old scholarship and have been thoroughly refuted by multiple modern scholars beginning with Sanders back in the 1970's. Liberalism as a critical movement has also pretty much died out, but I don't think that is how Carrier is using the term. I think he is using it more in its modern sense of conservative vs. liberal worldviews. The validity of the question--why are scholars unwilling to engage--stands on its own merit. It needs neither Bultmann nor liberalism to validate it as a serious question worth addressing. It would make a nice sub-page, however, in my opinion, it is not central to the topic of this article. Jenhawk777 (talk) 21:56, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Bauckham review

[Regarding this addition],

though according to scholar in theology Richard Bauckham they may have received their information directly from eyewitnesses.[1] A review of Richard Bauckham's book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony states "The common wisdom in the academy is that stories and sayings of Jesus circulated for decades, undergoing countless retellings and embellishments before being finally set down in writing."[2]


References

  1. ^ Bauckham 2017.
  2. ^ Hahn, Scott W.; Scott, David, eds. (1 September 2007). Letter & Spirit, Volume 3: The Hermeneutic of Continuity: Christ, Kingdom, and Creation. Emmaus Road Publishing. p. 225. ISBN 978-1-931018-46-3.

I feel using this quote out of context misrepresents the views of the article's author. The reviewer goes on to say in the very next line: "Everything about those assumptions is called into question in this important and provocative book." This reviewer does not disagree with Bauckham as this quote implies. The quote as it stands seems misleading to me. Jenhawk777 (talk) 21:26, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Citation quoted Bauckham's viewpoint from the review and did a rough copyedit. Bauckham appears to hold a minority viewpoint? - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 04:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
I don't know exactly how to answer your query--I would not call him a minority view because I define 'minority view' as evaluated and largely rejected--I guess I would call him the contemporary view. With the general demise of form criticism his book is creating a paradigm shift--like Ed Sanders and Birger Gerhardsson and a couple notable others have done in the last 30 years or so--so I don't know that he qualifies as a minority view exactly. His book has been out a while now and no one has effectively refuted it--yet. It seems to be establishing itself as the new standard in the field. I think that may make him more "the point of the spear" than minority. Biblical studies is not a field that makes changes swiftly if you know what I mean. But every now and then there are seismic shifts--Bauckham is one. Jenhawk777 (talk) 22:13, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Theology and angels in the mainstream historical view section

The mainstream historical view section until yesterday included this -

Yet, Ehrman also argues that Paul regarded Jesus to be an angel, who was incarnated on earth, aligning with a developing insight that shortly after the supposed death of a historical Jesus a "High Christology" or "incarnation Christology" existed, which was also preached by Paul, and even predates him. This "High Christology" is "the view that Jesus was a pre-existent divine being who became a human, did the Father’s will on earth, and then wax (sic) taken back up into heaven whence he had originally come.

I tweaked it a little yesterday but thinking about it again I don't think this belongs in that section at all. It is not about history but theology and using technical theological terms " High Christology", for instance,nothing to do with history. Angels are not historical either, whether in heaven or on earth. This material does not belong in that section, I am removing it, whoever put it in can perhaps find a more suitable section for it elsewhere.Smeat75 (talk) 18:02, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

You also removed a reference and a note. Nevertheless, I understand why you removed it, though it is is noteworthy that Ehrman took over this idea that Paul regarded Jesus to be an angel. For Ehrman himself, the question why this 'historical person' came to be regarded as a god, in a very short time, is relevant enough to dedicate a whole book to it. The topic does not end with the notion that there was a historical Jesus. Best regards, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:09, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
Thank you User:Joshua Jonathan for moving that material out of the "mainstream historical view" section.Smeat75 (talk) 16:20, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
NB: The following caveat applies to the topic of angels per Carrier (2014):

I must first define some terms I will frequently use. . . . These definitions are not intended to be normative. So there is no sense in arguing whether my definitions are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. They merely specify what I mean when I use those terms, regardless of what anyone else might mean, or what any dictionaries say, or any other conventions. As long as you treat my definitions as nothing more than explanations of what I mean, confusion will be forestalled. I shall use god to mean any celestial being with supernatural power, and God to mean a supreme creator deity. Though by this definition angels and demons are indeed gods, I’ll sometimes (but not always) use angel or archangel to refer to ‘gods’ that are believed to be acting as messengers or servants of God . . . —(On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 60)

and per Gieschen (1998):

Although Paul does not overtly label Christ as “the Angel of the Lord” in any of his letters, Paul does identify Christ as “the Power”, “Wisdom”, “the Heavenly Man”, and especially as “the Glory”, all of which have angelomorphic roots closely linked with the Angel of the Lord; see Quispel, “Ezekiel 1.28 in Jewish Mysticism”, 7-13. Segal, Paul the Convert, 35-71. and Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology, 241-247. —(Angelomorphic Christology, p. 316, n. 6)

74.138.111.159 (talk) 13:22, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

it is is noteworthy that Ehrman took over this idea that Paul regarded Jesus to be an angel. [...] The topic does not end with the notion that there was a historical Jesus.
— User:Joshua Jonathan

Jesus mythicism is:

  • The construction of a theory which will explain the origin of Christianity.
  • A statement of the reasons for believing that Jesus cannot have been an historical person.
    — User:74.138.111.159

Per Carrier (25 April 2018). "Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus". Richard Carrier Blogs.:

The question of the historicity of Jesus isn’t really just about the trivia of whether Jesus existed or not. It’s actually a far more fundamental question about how Christianity as a world religion began.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 17:31, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

More notable proponents

  • René Salm (2008) The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus: attempts to show that archaeologically the town of Nazareth came into existence after the time that Jesus should have been living there. In his book, he makes 3 key assertions in his case against the existence of Nazareth during Jesus' time: A. The material finds reveal the following: (1) the lack of demonstrable material evidence from ca. 700 BCE to ca. 100 CE; (2) the 25 CE + dating of the earliest oil lamps at Nazareth; (3) the 50 CE + dating of all the post-Iron Age tombs at Nazareth, which are of the kokh type. Salm's claim that Nazareth did not exist has been criticized on the grounds that some elements dating to an appropriate era have been found, that Salm claims with too much certainty that certain items are from the doubtful edges of their latest possible dates (ignoring the plausible earlier dates), and that he makes the mistake of looking for artifacts relating to Nazareth in pious mis-locations by later pilgrims rather than places where Nazareth could have been. (Casey, 170)
  • Raphael Lataster religious studies scholar and author of books and articles questioning the historicity of Jesus, There Was No Jesus, There Is No God (2013), and Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists (2015), with Richard Carrier. Lataster's December 2014 Washington Post article, Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn't add up, drew replies from Christian authors John Dickson and Michael Bird. Lataster presented a program on the opening day of the 2015 Australian Historical Association Conference, "The Gospel According to Bart: The Folly of Ehrman's Hypothetical Sources."

74.138.111.159 (talk) 02:27, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Funny, I just read Price stating that Wells and Doherty are the most notable mythicists; I'd also add Price himself. Making that distinction made it more clear to me what really matters about the Cmt. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:03, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
Yet Carrier does have a uniquely cogent style, e.g. Carrier (9 November 2017). "How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? - Richard Carrier". Richard Carrier Blogs. Comment by: Richard Carrier November 14, 2017 [now bolded]:
  1. FACT. Many counter-cultural Jewish sects were seeking hidden messages in scripture.
  2. FACT. Cephas (Peter), a member or leader of one of those sects, had “visions” telling him one of those messages was now fulfilled.
  3. FACT. That fellow influenced or inspired others to have or claim supporting visions.
  4. FACT. They all died.
  5. FACT. Then some later folks did what was done for all savior gods: they made up stories about their savior god to promote what was by then a lifetime of the accumulated teachings, dogmas, and beliefs of various movement leaders.
  6. FACT. They all died.
  7. FACT. Then some later folks started promoting those myths as historically true.
  8. FACT. Those who protested that, were denounced as heretics and agents of Satan.
  9. FACT. They all died.
  10. FACT. Those who liked the new invented version of history won total political power and used it to destroy all the literature of those who had ever protested it.

All ten points are indisputable facts. Not theory. Facts. Documented. Undeniable. Facts.
[...]
Note that at no point is the historicity of Jesus even denied in these ten facts, individually or in conjunction. Because all ten can simply be a description of the invention of the historicity of the resurrection alone, not the man.

And yet these same ten facts fully explain the historicization of either the resurrection or the man. If the one could happen (and it did), so could the other. And we can assert that without positing a single other fact about anything.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 20:03, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

René Salm edits this page an is NOT a reliable source (see the history of this article). As far as those 10 "facts" are concerned, they are BS. Bill the Cat 7 (talk) 22:17, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
I don't understand the point of adding that long quote from Carrier's blog to this talk page. This is not a debating forum.Smeat75 (talk) 23:27, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
Per Hege, Brent, "Rudolf Bultmann on Myth, History, and the Resurrection" Myth, History, and the Resurrection in German Protestant Theology / (2017): 41-71

The cross is a historical event that is at the same time presented as a mythical event, alongside the mythical event of the resurrection that is also presented as a historical event. This intertwining of the historical and mythical creates particular difficulties for the interpreter who wishes to distinguish the historical from the mythical. The question is whether these narratives intend to express something that happened to the historical Jesus or whether their true intention is to express something else. —(p. 62)

If the resurrection—a "mythical event"—can be elaborately historicized in the Gospels, then this is a proof of concept that a "mythical person" can be elaborately historicized in the Gospels and thus should be noted in the article as a "plausibility" argument held by mythicists. – 74.138.111.159 (talk) 01:35, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Information about pseudoscience

Original thread

Copied from User talk:Talizman120#Christ myth theory

Sorry, I have reverted your very first edit to Wikipedia. This seemed like an argumentative paragraph and largely redundant in spirit with the paragraph that preceded it. I can see that some of these same statements appear much further down in the article, but you were stating new conclusions rather than summarizing what appeared down below. I think this point has been worked over pretty thoroughly on the talk page, but you are welcome to strike up a new discussion there if you think there is something more that has to be said. — jmcgnh(talk) (contribs) 05:07, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Please also note that you should "sign" contributions to the talk page, by typing ~~~~ (four twiddles) at the end of the post. Then we can see who said what - thanks! Imaginatorium (talk) 07:12, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

End of copied part. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:34, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

At the beginning, we should point out that this theory is considered pseudoscientific.

Most scholars consider this theory to be pseudo-scientific stupidity, comparable to creationism - "These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology" - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bart-d-ehrman/did-jesus-exist_b_1349544.html

That's why we should restore my edition:

Nearly all researchers recognize that Jesus existed[1][2], and the theory of Jesus' myth is treated like pseudoscience[3], comparable to creationism[4], mythicism hypotheses are treated as worthless, unscientific, which no researcher takes seriously[5] Proponents of this theory are accused of a lack of academic education[6], ignorance of how modern critical scholarship actually works[7]


References

  1. ^ Van Voorst (2003), p. 660.
  2. ^ Michael Grant (a classicist) states that "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant 2004 ISBN 1898799881 page 200
  3. ^ Casey, Maurice, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of His Life and Teaching (T&T Clark, 2010), pp. 33, 104, 499.
  4. ^ D. Ehrman, Bart (2012). "Did Jesus Exist?". Huffpost. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  5. ^ Jenkins, Phillip. "The Myth of the Mythical Jesus". patheos.com. Retrieved 9 April 2018.
  6. ^ Maurice Casey (2014). Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths?. A&C Black. pp. 10, 24. ISBN 978-0-567-59224-8. I introduce here the most influential mythicists who claim to be ‘scholars’, though I would question their competence and qualifications. [...] [Thomas L. Thompson] was Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993–2009. His early work, which is thought to have successfully refuted the attempts of Albright and others to defend the historicity of the most ancient parts of biblical literature history, is said to have negatively affected his future job prospects
  7. ^ Casey, Maurice (2014). Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths. London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishers. pp. 1–41. ISBN 978-0567294586.

Creationism is described as pseudo-science at the outset, whose proponents ignore the methodology of research. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Talizman120 (talk • contribs) 07:03, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

The article already says, in the lead:

The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory, supported by few tenured or emeritus specialists in biblical criticism or cognate disciplines.[5][6][7][q 2] It deviates from the mainstream historical view, which is that while the gospels include many legendary elements, these are religious elaborations added to the accounts of a historical Jesus who was crucified in the 1st-century Roman province of Judea.[8][9]

That suffices. What you added is indeed argumentative, and WP:SYNTHESIS. Especially this line,

mythicism hypotheses are treated as worthless, unscientific, which no researcher takes seriously. (Source: Philip Jenkins, The Myth of the Mythical Jesus, patheos.com)

Jenkins is probably a solid author, but what you're doing here is WP:CHERRYPICKING. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:53, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Some interesting blogs by Jenkins:
Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 08:02, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Per Gullotta (2017) doi:10.1163/17455197-01502009 [now reformatted]:

[N]ot all mythicists are amateurs; some are professionally trained historians who hold degrees in relevant fields, such as biblical studies, ancient history, and classics. Even Ehrman concedes that there are

‘a couple of bona fide scholars—not professors teaching religious studies in universities but scholars nonetheless ... Their books may not be known to most of the general public interested in questions related to Jesus, the Gospels, or the early Christian church, but they do occupy a noteworthy niche as a (very) small but (often) loud minority voice’. [cited: Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, p. 3]

These more noteworthy individuals include the late G.A. Wells, Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, Thomas L. Brodie, Raphael Lataster, and Richard C. Carrier.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 08:54, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

But he does not support the theory rejected by almost all researchers. Not only does he think so, Bart D. Ehrman is an agnostic and is not a friend of Christianity. Kent Hovind (creationist) and Terry Mortenson (creationistas) also have titles, does that make creationism scientific?

This view is completely rejected and is considered pseudoscientific. Researchers do not even want to argue with mythists. That is why it is necessary to put this information in the beginning, as it is said at the outset in creationism that it is a pseudo-theory. It must be said that this is a "minority" view, but the view rejected as unscientific.I propose such an introduction:

The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory, supported by few tenured or emeritus specialists in biblical criticism or cognate disciplines. Almost all researchers reject this view and compare it to creationism, pointing to his pseudoscience.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Talizman120 (talk • contribs) 10:10, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Fitzgerald, David (2017). "Myths of Mythicism – Bias Cut". Jesus: Mything in Action. Vol. 1. CreateSpace. p. 62. ISBN 978-1-5428-5888-5. [T]he majority of biblical historians in academia are employed by religiously affiliated institutions. This fact alone explains much of the resistance to Jesus Myth theory even among scholars who personally identify as secular. Furthermore, of those schools, we can quantify that at least 41% (if not 100%) require their instructors and staff to publicly reject Jesus Myth or they will not have a career at that institute of higher learning. So the question shouldn't be: "How many historians reject mythicism?" but "How many historians are contractually obliged to publicly reject mythicism?"
Despite much lip service given to academic freedom, the sad truth is that for religious institutions (and by extension, the majority of all biblical history positions), academics have only as much freedom as can fit comfortably within the school's theological constraints. Any scholar whose findings threaten to step over that line — no matter how innocent or innocuous the doctrine in question may seem — is in danger. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 10:29, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Be that as it may, a number of the authorities quoted in the article who reject the Christ myth are not "Biblical historians" but classical historians,such as Michael Grant, Alana Nobbs, Graeme Clarke and Phillip Jenkins.Smeat75 (talk) 14:38, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Sure, but can you help me out here: of these four, Jenkins at least is a (professed) Believer, so he Knows the myth theory is wrong even before he looks at it. How many of the other three is this true for? (You see, so many of these arguments seem to end up at Bart Ehrmann...) Imaginatorium (talk) 15:15, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
They are historians, classical historians. Their job is to examine evidence. Their beliefs,if any, are utterly irrelevant.Smeat75 (talk) 15:49, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Apart from evangelical/fundamentalist works and other than Case (1928) [first pub. 1912], Carrier (2014) there are no peer-reviewed works specifically on the question of the "Historicity of Jesus", therefore the additional authors per WP RS—specifically on the question of the "Historicity of Jesus"—are Ehrman (2012), Casey (2014). So in that context Jenkins is deprecated. – 74.138.111.159 (talk) 16:09, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

WP:RS:" Reliable sources may be published materials with a reliable publication process, authors who are regarded as authoritative in relation to the subject, or both". Philip Jenkins is "the Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University in the United States, and Co-Director for Baylor's Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He is also the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University (PSU). He was Professor (from 1993) and a Distinguished Professor (from 1997) of History and Religious studies at the same institution". Therefore the use of his statement in this article is not "deprecated".Smeat75 (talk) 16:52, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Per Arnal (2015): "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."
Are the relevant works of Jenkins specifically on "the question of the Historicity of Jesus" i.e. does he question "whether there is any historical core to be found at all."
Cf. Ehrman (5 May 2012). "Did Jesus Exist as Part One". The Bart Ehrman Blog.:

Odd as it may seem, no scholar of the New Testament has ever thought to put together a sustained argument that Jesus must have lived. To my knowledge, I was the first to try it, and it was a very interesting intellectual exercise.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 18:31, 16 May 2018 (UTC) && 05:12, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Sources needed

Talizman, you need sources for the following statements:

  • "Almost all researchers reject this view" (that is, have stated that they reject it)
  • "[Almost all researchers] compare it to creationism"
  • "This view [...] is considered pseudoscientific"; "it is a pseudo-theory"; "the view [is] rejected as unscientific"; "[Almost all researchers] point[...] to his [sic] pseudoscience."

Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 14:15, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

  • "Almost all researchers reject this view" (that is, have stated that they reject it) -
1 These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them... -Bart. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?". Huffington Post.
2 What you can’t do, though, without venturing into the far swamps of extreme crankery, is to argue that Jesus never existed. The “Christ-Myth Hypothesis” is not scholarship, and is not taken seriously in respectable academic debate. The grounds advanced for the “hypothesis” are worthless. The authors proposing such opinions might be competent, decent, honest individuals, but the views they present are demonstrably wrong....Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity - Jenkins, Phillip. "The Myth of the Mythical Jesus". patheos.com. Retrieved 9 April 2018.
  • [Almost all researchers] compare it to creationism" - Some compare this view to creationism
1 These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.- Bart. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?". Huffington Post.
  • "This view [...] is considered pseudoscientific"; "it is a pseudo-theory"; "the view [is] rejected as unscientific"; "[Almost all researchers] point[...] to his [sic] pseudoscience."
1 What you can’t do, though, without venturing into the far swamps of extreme crankery, is to argue that Jesus never existed. The “Christ-Myth Hypothesis” is not scholarship, and is not taken seriously in respectable academic debate. The grounds advanced for the “hypothesis” are worthless. The authors proposing such opinions might be competent, decent, honest individuals, but the views they present are demonstrably wrong....Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity - Jenkins, Phillip. "The Myth of the Mythical Jesus". patheos.com. Retrieved 9 April 2018.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Talizman120 (talk • contribs) 05:41, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
These quotes are already used in the article and it is right that they are. We do not need to summarize them in our own words with "Almost all researchers reject this view" or "[Almost all researchers] compare it to creationism". Under "Scholarly reception" the article also states "In modern scholarship, the Christ myth theory is a fringe theory and finds virtually no support from scholars" - a strong, and correct, statement. If you have new and different quotes from scholars (preferably historians, to try to avoid the accusations of bias that biblical scholars and theologians(unfairly) are met with here), please add them.Smeat75 (talk) 04:25, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Indeed. Un addition, the Ehrman-quote on creationism is interpreted (editorialized?), and is the statement of one author; same for Jenkins on "not scholrship." See also WP:TRUTH and WP:NPOV. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:31, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Solid author

[But] contrary to your claim above ("solid author"), Jenkins is employed by Baylor University, described as a "private Baptist university". His family's wellbeing ("college", "health insurance", sort of thing) depends on him asserting (professing, Believing, whatever) the opposite of the mythicist theory. So he is hopelessly partisan, and his opinion [clarify: "on this specific question"] is worthless. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:09, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

That is ridiculous and offensive. Jenkins is a distinguished professor of history and religious studies. The university that employs him does not require him to issue statements such as "Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity" which in fact is more or less what every classical historian who bothers to express a view of the Christ myth says. Attacking a living scholarly authority as partisan and worthless on WP, even on a talk page, could be considered a violation of WP's biography of living people policy.Smeat75 (talk) 14:17, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
No, the university may not require him to issue that particular statement, but his livelihood depends on not saying something like "There is considerable doubt whether the historical Jesus actually existed". Therefore he is partisan (can you seriously disagree with this?) and his opinion is not of any value relating to the question his employment does not allow him to contemplate addressing. Imaginatorium (talk) 15:05, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I certainly do seriously disagree that he is partisan and even on a talk page if you are going to make accusations like that about a living scholar they should be referenced to a reliable source, not just your opinion that "He is employed by a Baptist university therefore his scholarly assessment is worthless." A historian's job is to examine evidence and he finds, as classical historians Michael Grant, Alana Nobbs and Graeme Clarke also quoted in the article more or less say that "Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity."Smeat75 (talk) 15:36, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

I realise my statement above could (just) be misinterpreted, so I have edited it to make clear that I mean that his opinion on this specific question is worthless, because of his philosophical and economic lock-in. Of course he may be an excellent "bible scholar", and I started reading his blog on origins of Christianity, which was quite interesting. I am also still having some difficulty understanding the claim above: "...better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity", to work out who (I might have heard of who) would be worse documented. That's a serious question, btw, and I will try to write some more general comments on the article at some stage. Imaginatorium (talk) 15:31, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

"...better documented and recorded than [...]"

I am also still having some difficulty understanding the claim above: "...better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity", to work out who (I might have heard of who) would be worse documented. That's a serious question, btw, and I will try to write some more general comments on the article at some stage. Imaginatorium (talk) 15:31, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Taking a sentence more or less at random from the opening of Tacitus' "Annals",the same work which contains the confirmation of the execution of Christ by Pontius Pilate, Tacitus refers to the "excesses" of a member of the family, or maybe a friend of Emperor Augustus (alive at the time of Jesus) named Quintus Tedius and as an annotated edition of the Annals says about him "we know nothing".[3] One mention of this person,a high ranking elite member or associate of the imperial family, and the only thing we know about him is this one mention in Tacitus from 80 years or so after the time he is talking about. No historian however looks at that passage and thinks "I don't believe that person ever existed." There are literally thousands of such examples, not just in Tacitus but all other surviving works of ancient history, of figures known only from one passage written many years after their death,it is not at all unusual. What is unusual about Jesus is not how little evidence we have of his existence, but how much (as Jenkins and the other classical historians quoted in the article say).Smeat75 (talk) 16:20, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Per, Ehrman (2012), p. 97, §. Non-Christian Sources. "[Per the writings of Josephus and Tacitus] Their informants were [...] [1. Christians or 2. non-Christians who themselves had heard stories about Jesus from Christian informants]. It is impossible to know [with certainty] whether these Christians [informants] had been influenced by the sources we have already discussed, but it is [also] completely possible that they themselves had simply heard stories about Jesus [i.e. they were merely passing on hearsay]. [...] [Therefore Tacitus—and possibly Josephus—indirectly] provide independent attestation to Jesus’s existence from outside the Gospels..."
Cf. Wells, George A. (24 May 2012). "Ehrman on the Historicity of Jesus and Early Christian Thinking". Free Inquiry. Vol. 32, no. 4. [Per Tacitus and Josephus] Ehrman seems a little reluctant to surrender these two witnesses altogether, for he reverts to them (97), saying that 'Tacitus and (possibly) Josephus... indirectly provide independent attestation to Jesus's existence from outside the gospels,' for they 'heard information' about him from informants who 'themselves had heard stories about him' from Christians who may in turn 'have simply heard stories about him.' Of course there were umpteen stories about him current by the late first and early second centuries; but what they attest to is not Jesus's existence but rather to belief in his existence.
We do not know where ancient historians got their information, for the most part. They almost never discuss their sources. As the article Tacitus on Christ says, in his book " Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium" Ehrman writes "Tacitus's report confirms (no "weaselly" 'indirectly' this time) what we know from other sources, that Jesus was executed by order of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, sometime during Tiberius's reign." The same article also points out that "Tacitus was a member of the Quindecimviri sacris faciundis, a council of priests whose duty it was to supervise foreign religious cults in Rome, which as Van Voorst points out, makes it reasonable to suppose that he would have acquired knowledge of Christian origins through his work with that body."Smeat75 (talk) 17:27, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Not "weaselly" in this context, just slippery as an eel: "confirm" is not the same as "attest—be evidence of". - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 17:51, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Per Casey (2014), Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths?, T&T Clark, ISBN 9780567015051 {{citation}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help):

Almost all our surviving primary sources about Jesus are Christian because most people who had any interest in writing about him were his followers, and the few relatively early comments by other writers such as Josephus and Tacitus are largely due to special circumstances, such as Jesus’ brother Jacob (Jos. Ant. XX,200), or the great fire of Rome” (Tac. Annals XI, 44).

  • Casey does not make any clear assertion from Tacitus.
  • Ehrman′s assertion from Tacitus, is that it provides attestation of Jesus's existence (from outside the Gospels)—with the caveat that it is not a "direct attestation"—while also conceding that the Christian informants may have "simply heard stories about Jesus" i.e. they were merely passing on hearsay.

Inexplicably it appears that neither Casey nor Ehrman note that Tacitus was a member of the Quindecimviri sacris faciundis? – 74.138.111.159 (talk) 22:32, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

"Christian informants may have "simply heard stories about Jesus" i.e. they were merely passing on hearsay." Well,maybe, maybe not. That is sheer speculation. As a senator,Tacitus had access to the official state archives,which we know he consulted on various occasions, maybe he did in this case also, who knows? I have quoted this passage from the Annals "The domestic life too of Augustus was not spared.... There were the excesses of Quintus Tedius." Who was that? what were these "excesses" (and note that Augustus died 14 AD, and the Annals were written about 100 years later). We don't know, this is the only mention of this person that exists anywhere. But no historian looks at that and says or thinks "Hmmm, this Tedius is not mentioned anywhere else, that is not good enough evidence that there ever was such a person and where did Tacitus get that information anyway, maybe Tedius and his excesses were just hearsay." However I shouldn't really be responding to these points here and I will not continue, this talk page is not a forum.Smeat75 (talk) 05:02, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Interpolations

@Smeat75: could you please post replies at the bottom of the thread, instead of interpolating your answers? This thread has become to complicated qua structure. Thanks! Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 18:10, 16 May 2018 (UTC)}}

OK.Smeat75 (talk) 18:30, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:28, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Grant

[And] perhaps Michael Grant (classicist) (1914–2004) may be just a little outdated?

Reprinted 2004 sans subtitle as,

74.138.111.159 (talk) 15:39, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

No, it isn't outdated for an article which includes discussion of the first scholar " to systematically argue that Jesus did not exist", Bruno Bauer (1809-1882).Smeat75 (talk) 15:53, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

"Traditional and modern Christian views" and "Other religious views on Jesus"

I agree with editor Magic1million above that these two sections, recently added I believe to try to meet the concerns of editor Jenhawk, which didn't work, and that editor seems to have decided to direct their attentions elsewhere, at least for the moment, do not add value to the article. Just stating elements of faith is not directly relevant to the CMT. The section "Other religious views on Jesus" is currently entirely unreferenced. I think it is a mistake to have these sections at the beginning of the main body of the article as it gives the impression that opposition to the Christ myth theory is on a basis of faith and religious belief when really it is a matter of secular history more than anything else imo. Discussion of miracles does not belong in this article, that has nothing to do with whether Jesus existed as a person or not. Can we agree to remove those two sections?Smeat75 (talk) 03:44, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Totally fine with removing "Other religious views on Jesus"; would like to keep the "Traditional and modern Christian views" section. We refer to it in the introductory subsection, and religious views are part of the debate as well; see Casey's and Ehrman's comments about the anti-Christian c.q. anti-fundamentalist nature of the works of some mythicists. And there are, of course, significant relations between critical scholarship and liberal theology/Christianity. As Casey also notes, mythicists operate in a field where there are also moderate, liberal Christians, not only fundamentalists. But this is not a 'hard issue' for me. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:06, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for removing "Other religious views on Jesus". I am going to move "Traditional and modern Christian views" to after "Mainstream historical view". I would prefer to remove it but will see if we can get consensus for that first. I feel "Mainstream historical view" should come first as this is actually much more a matter of history than of faith.Smeat75 (talk) 04:14, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
I have removed the "Other religious views" section
I am sorry to have taken so long to get back to this. Life interferes with my online presence at times. And sometimes I just need a break. I think there has been some misunderstanding here. I did not support the addition of those two "religious" sections and if it was done to appease me, then consider me grateful for the effort, but not in support of the actual effect. Smeat and I agreed on his talkpage that it was not what I wanted--for the reasons he states which are good ones. "Mainline historical views" is entirely adequate in my opinion since this is supposed to be an historical question. That section needs expanding to include all the relevant views on the points mentioned in the overview of mythicism, but beyond that, adding religious views does not add to the quality of the article in my opinion. Jenhawk777 (talk) 08:36, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
You know, the more I look at that section, the more I dislike it. There shouldn't be a separation between "traditional Christian" and "scholarly"--that presents a bias in itself--in New Testament studies, traditional views are an aspect of mainline scholarly views. This section offers no new or particularly relevant information, it is not connected as contrast to anything anywhere in the article, it's not historical, it just doesn't belong. Neutrality won't be created by setting off an arbitrary section by itself. It will be created by including contrasting views where they belong. Where there are ten lines explaining the mythicist view, there should be one mentioning the contrasting view. Readers shouldn't have to go searching for that information. It should be right next to what it's referencing. It should be focused, specific, and only include what is absolutely relevant to mythicism. But imho it should be there.
I don't think continually restating "this is fringe" or "scholars ignore it" or anything like that is gonna create neutrality either. I am with Ehrman on this one, personally I think mythicism should get more scholarly attention than it does--but I know, I know, my personal opinion is beside the point. What I mean by saying that is that I don't think being dismissive is going to create the quality of article I think everyone wants here.
And in my opinion, for accuracy's sake, that section should be titled Mainline Historical views or simply Alternate historical views. Titling it as 'Scholarly' creates a bias toward the mythicist writers as well. Jenhawk777 (talk) 21:02, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
@Smeat75: You say "I would prefer to remove it but will see if we can get consensus for that first." You have my wholehearted support to remove it.Jenhawk777 (talk) 21:09, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
User:Joshua Jonathan said he would prefer to keep it and I do not have strong feelings about it so I would prefer to get his agreement before removing the section.Smeat75 (talk) 01:57, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Makes sense. We'll wait and see what he says. Jenhawk777 (talk) 03:14, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't think there's a bias in a separation between "traditional Christian" and "scholarly" views, on the contrary. A couple of centuries ago, critical scholarship on Christinaity as it exists now would hacve been impossible, due to traditional Christian views. More bluntly: their lives would have been in danger... Or more contemporary: a scholar like Ehrrman is not really aprreciated by Evangelicals, is he?
Bu alas, apart from that: imagine a Hindu reader who comes to this article; what do they know about Christianity, apart from it being the religion of the colonial suppressors? They'll need to know for them that there are multiple views on Jesus. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:35, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
NB: I think that "traditional views" should precede "scholarly views." Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:36, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Van Voorst (2000), Nonexistence Hypothesis, p.658:

The argument that Jesus never existed, but was invented by the Christyian movement around the year 100, goes back to Enlightenment times, when the historical-critical study of the past was born. Although maintream New Testament scholarship has not paid attention to this argument in recent decades, debate on the existence has been on the fringes of scholarship and popular relgious discussion for more than two centuries.

That's a rich quote. It connects the Cmt with critical scholarship, implying that critical scholarship departs from traditional views; but it also clearly states that the Cmt is fringe. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:07, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanx for talking it through Jonathon. The first thing that comes to my mind is that how things were two hundred years ago is not how they are today. That's why it's important on Wiki to focus primarily on modern scholarship. All modern scholarship studies the Bible in the same manner using the same variety of critical methods. Simple exegesis is still done for preaching and teaching but not for PhD's or for publication. There is no separation in scholarship styles and methods anymore just in conclusions.
Yes it's true a scholar like Ehrman--whom I respect--is disliked by some evangelicals--just as the evangelicals and conservatives are sometimes disliked by the agnostics and liberals--and excluded from being referenced in articles like this simply because they are conservatives. They are marked and set aside in their own special box where they are identified not by their methods of scholarship but by their conclusions, and I guarantee any attempt to identify others as atheist or agnostic in this manner would be instantly reverted. And justly so. And that should justly apply in both directions.
Let me say again that all modern biblical scholarship uses critical method but different people come to different conclusions; "traditional views" are not separated by their methods. N. T. Wright is the premier Pauline scholar in the world. He's at Oxford University. He's a conservative. His methods are as scrutinized as his product. Wiki says Martin Hengel was one of the greatest theological scholars of his time. He too was conservative using critical methods. Eddy and Boyd are scholars, have recently written a book on method, and are conservative in their conclusions. Bauckham's scholarship is impeccable and even those who dislike his conclusions support that view. This list could go on because these are the actual people that compose about half of the middle of modern scholarship. There should be no separation between "tradition" and "scholarly" in our modern day because that separation--which existed 200 years ago--no longer exists today.
That's a good quote, but I don't agree it implies critical scholarship departs from traditional views. Mainline critical scholarship today includes all the views from agnostic/liberal to conservative. Gerry Schoberg is Senior Academic Administrator and Lecturer in New Testament at Regent College, Vancouver, holds a PhD in New Testament from the University of Bristol, and has recently written "Perspectives of Jesus in the Writings of Paul: A Historical Examination" (978-1-62032-008-2) that reflects exactly that -- it includes discussion of the distribution and arguments for and against all the various critical views of Paul on Jesus. Fundamentalists at both ends are excluded from that central group, and that includes Cmt usually, (which point has been sufficiently stated in this article imho). The idea here is not to dismiss but to inform--fully and fairly inform--and that is not accomplished in my thinking by creating an artificial separation of views here in this article that doesn't exist in the field. Jenhawk777 (talk) 15:19, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Correction. Tom Wright is currently at St.Mary's.Jenhawk777 (talk) 15:22, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
I seem to be having a little trouble following this conversation about whether or not to separate traditional views from scholarly ones as the article has a section "Mainstream historical view" followed by "Traditional and modern Christian views", it is distinguishing, it seems to me, not between "scholars" and "traditionalists" but between the views of historians and views based on religion. The reason why I do not like that section "Traditional and modern Christian views" and really do think if it is going to stay in the article it needs to come after, not before, "Mainstream historical view" is that I do not believe that this question has anything to do with religious views, it is a matter of history. All the time, for years, in these articles and talk pages on WP you see editors assuming that the only people who think Jesus existed are fundamentalist Christians and that is just not true.Smeat75 (talk) 15:37, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

"[I]t will prove helpful to break down the wide variety of views regarding the Jesus of history found in New Testament scholarship today into four broad (and admittedly overly simplistic) categories. [...] A fourth and final group of scholars argue that [the] positions [of categories] 1-3 are overly skeptical toward the Gospel material. [...][category 4] scholars maintain that historical research can indeed disclose a good deal of reliable information about the historical Jesus." —Eddy, Paul Rhodes; Boyd, Gregory A. (2007). The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus" Tradition. Baker Academic. pp. 24f. ISBN 978-0-8010-3114-4.

  • Does "overly skeptical toward the Gospel material" imply conservative or liberal?

Per Arnal (2015), "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,”..."

  • Who arrives at the minimal Jesus conclusion: conservative or liberal?

74.138.111.159 (talk) 16:40, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Therein lies the rub, to quote Shakespeare--or Oxford--as the case may be. They both have their versions of the "minimal Jesus". It cannot be said that one is definitively provably more accurate than the other. The sources are simply too limited. This is not a question that is resolvable here--certainly not by us. All we can do is present the discussion points fairly.
"Overly skeptical" is liberal, agnostic and atheist. Please see the quote below in the Vermes/resurrection section from "reluctant atheist" Will Durant in his "Caesar and Christ" where he references this, asserting that if the same standards applied to the NT were applied to others in history, hundreds would become "legendary". That would make history chaos. This "extreme skepticism" is also referenced by others about Bultmann and his school--by N.T.Wright, Eddy and Boyd and Bauckham and others--which is the main reason why Bultmann is considered outdated by so many nowadays and his assumptions/conclusions are seen as historical and no longer "mainline". The effort to apply skepticism to ourselves and our own assumptions--all of us--is part of this current discussion. Assuming personal neutrality and the bias of others is a kind of bias in itself.
As user Smeat75 says: All the time, for years, in these articles and talk pages on WP you see editors assuming that the only people who think Jesus existed are fundamentalist Christians and that is just not true. Once again, it is my opinion user Smeat75 is 100% on target with this.
Having these separate headings does, in my view, distinguish "between the views of historians and views based on religion" and that is an artificial separation of the scholarship on this subject; all historians have religious views, yay or nay, and religious people have done, and do, good critical historical work. That's because the majority of religious are not fundamentalist. Even if Smeat75 doesn't see things exactly as I do, their argument is sound. This article should stay focused on history as much as that is possible and avoid the quicksand of "traditional" religious views. Jenhawk777 (talk) 17:52, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
@Smeat75: I can see how this would be confusing since I was originally responding to the suggested heading of 'Mainstream Scholarly Views' as separate from 'Traditional religious views'. I support 'Mainstream historical views' as the best heading and think all historical views that fall into that category should be included without reference to their religious leanings as conservatives or liberals. Jenhawk777 (talk) 18:08, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
"Given the fringe status of these [Mythicist] theories, the vast majority have remained unnoticed and unaddressed within scholarly circles. In the rare instances where these theories have been addressed, they are predominantly countered by self-confessed (and typically evangelical) Christian apologists and scholars. (For examples, see [...] Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007); Gregory A. Body and Paul Rhodes Eddy, Lord or Legend?: Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007) [...])" —Gullotta (2017). "On Richard Carrier's Doubts: A Response to Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt". Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. 15 (2–3): 310–346. doi:10.1163/17455197-01502009. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 19:08, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
74.138.111.159 now I am the one confused--are you calling me evangelical? Is that supposed to dismiss my arguments or me or what exactly? Are you saying you think there are no mainstream objections? That "traditional" and "evangelical" are the same? What? I am clearly not understanding what point you are trying to make here. Jenhawk777 (talk) 07:33, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
The quote of Daniel N. Gullotta (cited: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/17455197-01502009) is given in support of,

I don't think there's a bias in a separation between "traditional Christian" and "scholarly" views
— User:Joshua Jonathan

as Gullotta does note scholars who are Christian apologists (typically evangelical). - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 13:59, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
I would have to see some actual facts on that. I don't think it's correct. Jenhawk777 (talk) 17:09, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
Ehrman notes fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals scholars per "Did Jesus Exist as Part One". The Bart Ehrman Blog. 5 May 2012. [Comment by Bart Ehrman May 7, 2012] I never belonged to the Jesus seminar. My main point of disagreement is that I think the conclusion of the seminar, that Jesus was NOT an apocalyptic prophet, is precisely wrong. That is exactly what Jesus was, in my opinion. And in the opinion, I think, of the majority of scholars in the field for the past century (excepting fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals). - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 14:24, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Scholars contractually obligated to reject mythicism

David Fitzgerald notes that some scholars are contractually obligated to publicly reject mythicism.

  • Fitzgerald, David (2017). "Myths of Mythicism – Bias Cut". Jesus: Mything in Action. Vol. 1. CreateSpace. p. 62. ISBN 978-1-5428-5888-5. [T]he majority of biblical historians in academia are employed by religiously affiliated institutions. This fact alone explains much of the resistance to Jesus Myth theory even among scholars who personally identify as secular. Furthermore, of those schools, we can quantify that at least 41% (if not 100%) require their instructors and staff to publicly reject Jesus Myth or they will not have a career at that institute of higher learning. So the question shouldn't be: "How many historians reject mythicism?" but "How many historians are contractually obliged to publicly reject mythicism?"
    Despite much lip service given to academic freedom, the sad truth is that for religious institutions (and by extension, the majority of all biblical history positions), academics have only as much freedom as can fit comfortably within the school's theological constraints. Any scholar whose findings threaten to step over that line — no matter how innocent or innocuous the doctrine in question may seem — is in danger.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 16:04, 23 April 2018 (UTC) && 01:54, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

That there are evangelicals who have spent time responding to Cmt is irrefutable. That not many mainstream have bothered is also irrefutable. No argument. Can an evangelical be scholarly? That is the question I guess. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, probably. I don't really know for sure as I don't follow "evangelicals" as a group. I tend to think anyone doing research using critical historical methods qualifies as a scholar no matter what their views. I research both sides of any article I work on and try to be sure both views are included in the proportion I find them when doing that research. Since evangelicals are in fact the ones mostly responding to Cmt, that's what I found, but I have agreed to exclude them here as not mainstream. Not all respondents to the varied aspects of this theory are evangelicals. But that may be beside the point here. My point was that titling these sections in such a way that religious views and scholarship are separated evidences a conclusion to that question on what qualifies as scholarly. That also seems irrefutable to me.Jenhawk777 (talk) 17:00, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Proto-Christian communities

The article says:

before Paul started preaching, a number of proto-Christian communities seem to have been in existence.

That recalls Mack, Who Wrote Te New Testament?, yet no reference has been given for this statement. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:14, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Per Doherty, "Book Review: Burton L. Mack - Who wrote the New Testament? The making of the Christian myth" @ http://jesuspuzzle.org/review1.htm "[Per the preservation of separate elements of Jesus by separate communities] How did all these fragmented little groups, Q, the Jesus School, the Thomas people, the Congregation of Israel, exist in glorious isolation from each other, immune to crossover influences, and all of them blithely indifferent to the cultic movement which had turned Jesus into God and had chucked the whole teaching tradition and every aspect of a recent human ministry onto the scrap heap?
[...]
Mack’s final “Jesus movement” is the group known as the “pillars” in Jerusalem, but this will be left until after a discussion of his second general type of early Christian response to Jesus: the Christ cult, with Paul as its high priest.
[...]
the Christ cult already existed at the time of Paul’s conversion. [...] the myths of the Christ cult—prayers, hymns, etc.—include the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 where Paul states the basic gospel he preaches about the Christ, then lists a series of ‘appearances’ of the risen Christ to people in Jerusalem, ending with himself." - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 16:09, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Alternative terms:
  • Early Christianity
  • Christ cult
  • Jesus movement
  • Jesus-confessing communities
74.138.111.159 (talk) 22:24, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
I would like to see some reputable source defining proto-Christian communities as pre-existing Paul. We know Peter et al pre-existed Paul, so there must be something out there, but this may be a confounding of terms. In his book "Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew" on pages 151 and 175 Ehrman discusses his views on the development of orthodox theology as beginning in "proto-orthodoxy". Ehrman is the originator of that phrase "proto-orthodox" which refers to those commonly known as the early “church fathers” and all the references I have, so far, found are post-Pauline. Much of Ehrman's discussion is about the gnostics which were second century.
"James, Brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem Church: A Radical Exploration of Christian Origins" By Alan Saxby, isbn 978-1-4982-0390-6 describes proto-Christian communities as existing in the mid-first century to a half century later (pg.95). This one is the same: "The Gospel in Christian Traditions" By Ted A Campbell, isbn 978-0-19-537063-8, pg.25. So far, all the books I have looked at say the same. Proto-Christian and proto-orthodox are not interchangable terms as Ehrman uses it--but perhaps they are by others? Reference?
If "The Jesus Puzzle" is going to be used as a reference, shouldn't a review of it be included? Or maybe some summation of reviews? Something? Jenhawk777 (talk) 22:17, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Yes, if you want to add a concise overview of how "The Jesus Puzzle" was received, go ahead. If there are problems with your addition, I am sure you will be notified.Smeat75 (talk) 01:53, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Oh joy. Is it possible to find any? This won't open: "Book Review: Burton L. Mack - Who wrote the New Testament? The making of the Christian myth" @ http://jesuspuzzle.org/review1.htm Jenhawk777 (talk) 06:52, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Apparently Earl Doherty "In 2009 ... self-published a revised edition of ("The Jesus Puzzle") with a new title of Jesus: Neither God nor Man and both Ehrman and Casey in their books on the Christ myth critique that version pretty savagely. I may try to add something from their books to the section.Smeat75 (talk) 16:03, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
I found exactly the same things, though I have had some difficulty finding a full edition of Casey--have you found one? I've started working on a paragraph in my sandbox--that I don't like much yet--but I am happy for you to do something instead. I respect your work. I found a couple reviews of Mack too. And while this is all good, it doesn't really address the original statement--"before Paul started preaching, a number of proto-Christian communities seem to have been in existence"--being without a verifiable reference. Jenhawk777 (talk) 08:19, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
@Smeat75: Perhaps you could tweak, maybe shorten, something like this: New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman quotes Doherty from The Jesus Puzzle as saying it was Paul's view that Jesus' death took place in the spiritual not the earthly realm, [1]: 258 , but Ehrman says, not only is there "no evidence to support Doherty's assertion of what Paul's view of Jesus was", but there are also "a host of reasons for calling Doherty's view into serious question."[1]: 254, 258  (This comment could reasonably end right here--or include what follows explaining a couple of those reasons.)
These include Doherty's unfounded assertions about a single Hellenist worldview being present in the first century which was no more unified than worldviews in the 21st century are; Paul's worldview was not Hellenistic but was that of a practicing Second Temple Jew; mystery cults are never mentioned in a favorable light by Paul or any other Christian author for Christianity's first one hundred years, yet all make repeated reference to the Old Testament.[1]: 256  Paul leaves little doubt he believes Jesus' burial and resurrection to have been physical events on earth.[1]: 258 . Ehrman describes the majority of mythicist books, including Doherty's, as "sensationalist" [1]: 19, 21, 23, 26, 30  and "not serious historical writing." [1]: 26  He says "their agenda is religious... [and books like Doherty's are written] for ideological reasons rooted in non-historical agendas." [1]: 337, 338 
I didn't use Casey--I figured one response was enough and even that didn't need to be comprehensive, just representative. What do you think? Jenhawk777 (talk) 22:29, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Ehrman, Bart D. (2012). Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York: Harper One. ISBN 978-0-06-20899-46.

I have added the Ehrman quote as you suggested (you really don't have to get my permission, you could have done so yourself!) and I agree with you that "This comment could reasonably end right here" - I think that's enough. Reading Casey I think that his strongest criticism of Doherty is that he tries to analyse the texts but he does not understand the languages they are written in so I have added that comment of Casey's from the Earl Doherty article. Ehrman and Casey are actually much ruder and dismissive of Doherty than these comments we are adding so I think it is neutral.Smeat75 (talk) 02:08, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

I love the change and the addition and agree you did make it neutral. I wasn't happy with mine and I am happy with "ours". They were rude! I was trying to figure out how to accurately represent them without including that and you did it. Thank you.
I have had some really bad--really bad--experiences here on Wikipedia attempting to edit articles having to do with religion. It's my field of study. I have a degree in religion--from a secular university--and one in Philosophy and a Masters in New Testament and I don't really feel qualified to write on anything else. I'm retired now and have time to just write but this is all I know honestly--totally ignorant of all else! I have my head buried in books on one subject at all times--otherwise clueless. But there are many who are highly emotionally invested on this subject and they get--have gotten--downright abusive--and administrators don't care. No one does anything. The only answer offered is run away. Stop fighting with them. Let the bullies win. All that seems necessary is to accuse someone of being "religious" and all reason goes out the window. It gets very discouraging. So I am trying different approaches. At first I took Wikipedia's "be bold" at face value. It took me a while to figure out that doesn't really fly in the real Wiki world. Then I tried the idea of editing small pieces, but that didn't change the response. So now I am trying for consensus before acting. People get invested. I understand that. I don't want to step all over someone else's work, call their baby ugly, and then try to get agreement I'm right. That just has no way to ever go well. So I am really trying to be aware of everyone's "feelings" and going for consensus up front. I am very grateful for your cooperation, for your help, and especially for your reasonableness above all else. I know I don't have to do it this way, but as long as you are willing to work with me, I appreciate you letting me. Thank you again. Jenhawk777 (talk) 03:07, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Jenhawk77, good to know you're retired. I had the impression you're a young guy, but age and life-experiences deserves due respect. Also thanks for your explanation above. Best regards, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:17, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
I am young on the inside. :-) Jenhawk777 (talk) 15:42, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
So did anyone ever come up with a valid reference for this? A non-accessible review of Burton Mack doesn't qualify. "The article says:

before Paul started preaching, a number of proto-Christian communities seem to have been in existence.

" That is, I think, possibly, a misreading of Mack even if the reference is to him. I can find proto-orthodox--but not proto-Christian--has anyone else found a description of this and what it is supposed to be?Jenhawk777 (talk) 05:15, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Call it differently; I'll look-up my copy. The point is, Mack describes a number of early Jesus movements, not a single point of origin. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:08, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Per Wayback Machine:
Ehrman, Bart D. (2018). The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World. Simon & Schuster. pp. 128, 309, n. 39. ISBN 978-1-5011-3672-6. Christianity was an amazingly diverse phenomenon throughout the first four Christian centuries, with different Christians advocating an enormous range of beliefs and engaging in strikingly different practices. This has been the subject of a large number of books in modern times, especially over the past forty years. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 13:43, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Joshua Jonathan, those are not different terms for the same thing. They have very different meanings. What Mack refers to as going before Paul are "Jesus cults" though there is no historical evidence of such a thing, if he is being quoted, he should be accurately quoted and referenced.
74.138.111.159, understanding Ehrman's quote correctly means knowing he is talking about an extended period of time --the "first four Christian centuries"--that is not specifically or necessarily about the first fifty years. There was no variety in the first fifty or so years--not until gnosticism appeared. According to Richard Carrier Paul was converted before AD 37. Comparing extra-biblical sources and Acts locates the beginning of Christianity reasonably well too, and pretty much everyone agrees Paul was converted within one to three years of Christianity's beginnings which most associate with the time of Jesus' death. That creates some problems, but regardless, if Mack is being quoted, it should be accurate and referenced accordingly. Jenhawk777 (talk) 13:57, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Friesen uses the term "Proto-Christian": Friesen, Steven J. (2010). "Injustice of God's Will: Explanations of Poverty in Proto-Christian Communities". In Horsley, Richard (ed.). Christian Origins. Vol. A People’s History of Christianity, vol. 1. Fortress Press. pp. 240–260. ISBN 978-1-4514-1664-0.

Per "diversity in early Christianity" see Hurtado (8 October 2015). "Early Christian Diversity". Larry Hurtado's Blog.:

[E]arly Christian diversity, however, was not a number of totally separate communities or forms (hence, my dissatisfaction with “early Christianities”). As I contend in a recent article, the diverse expressions of early Christianity seem to have been in vibrant contact with one another, sometimes conflicting, at other times seeming to agree to overlook differences, at other times seeking to persuade others of their own views/emphases

74.138.111.159 (talk) 17:14, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Ha ha! I can't believe you're quoting Hurtado! Be careful! What he means by diversity is not how I understand you to be using that term. Perhaps I misunderstand you, but Hurtado also says: "Today there are at least as many and as major divisions among those whom modern historians classify as “Christians,” but we don’t have references to “modern Christianities." Hurtado says of the model that asserts different Christianities developed separately from each other that, "to state matters candidly, it simply does not reflect adequately the historical data. Part of the reason may perhaps be the apparent impetus for the model. Koester, for example, indicates with commendable candour in a retrospective essay in the 1991 Festschrift in his honour that his own views were heavily shaped in reaction against the traditional ecclesiastical model of a primary and unified orthodoxy."[4] Hurtado asserts the presence of that primary orthodoxy in all the earliest Christian communities, in all his books.
So how does Friesen use the term and can he be referenced instead? I am not familiar with Friesen's work.Jenhawk777 (talk) 18:19, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Friesen's banal usage is as per Wiktionary:proto —preceding the proper beginning of something. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 19:04, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Per Bock, Darrell L. (2006). "Introduction". The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities. Thomas Nelson. p. 18. ISBN 978-1-4185-7810-7. The new school claims that Irenaeus "won" and was the key architect of orthodoxy. The claim is that this orthodoxy (or the claim of a defined, legitimate Christianity) emerged even more clearly in the third and fourth centuries. So the new school argues that the Christianity we know has roots that do not really go back to the time of Jesus or even to the apostles in a way that precludes other alternative views of Christianity. [...] Was orthodoxy something that emerged out of the earliest period (the traditional view)? Or were there merely competing and alternative Christianities with no real orthodoxy present in that early period (the alternative or new school view)?

King (2009). "Which Early Christianity?". doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199271566.003.0004. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

Per King, Karen L. (2008). "Which Early Christianity?". In Harvey, Susan Ashbrook; Hunter, David G. (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. OUP Oxford. pp. 70, 80. ISBN 978-0-19-927156-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link):

[T]he tendency has been to characterize variety within early Christianity as being of a single sort with a unitary core, increasingly referred to as ‘proto-orthodoxy’ (for example, Ehrman 2003). In this way, variety is presented as in some sense merely different versions of the same thing. Moreover, although this nomenclature implicitly acknowledges that ‘orthodoxy’ is a term of hindsight when applied to the earliest materials, the term ‘proto-orthodoxy’ functions to establish continuity with true orthodoxy defined by canon and creed. In contrast, other types of early Christianity are generally characterized in terms of their marginality or deviance from established norms, and are generally not referred to by a single term but by distinctive nomenclature, such as Montanism, Ebionism, and Gnosticism, or even ‘lost Christianities’.

The effect is to emphasize sameness and continuity among the works classified as ‘proto-orthodox’, while other forms of Christianity are characterized by their differences, both from ‘the mainstream’ and from each other. So in the end, despite widespread recognition of the enormous variety of early Christianity, in practice this diversity has been resolved back into the two basic categories of the ancient master narrative: orthodoxy and heresy.
[...]
A more adequate analysis would replace the division of early Christianity into static and inaccurate types—which do little more than reproduce or (slightly) readjust the boundary-setting enterprises of ancient discourses of orthodoxy and heresy—with an analysis of the full range of early Christian practices of mapping difference and identity. While not all diversity is about identity formation or boundary setting, this approach would serve to illustrate the dynamics of early Christian practice, and it would simultaneously restore a fuller and more accurate portrait of early Christian diversity, including a place for those whose perspectives have been marginalized, silenced, or inadequately engaged critically.

Per Behr, John (2013). Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. OUP Oxford. pp. 5–6. ISBN 978-0-19-166781-7.:

[Walter Bauer claimed] that Christianity was a diverse phenomenon from the beginning, that ‘varieties of Christianity’ arose around the Mediterranean, and that in some places what would later be called ‘heretical’ was initially normative. [...] Although some of Bauer’s reconstructions are inaccurate and have been dropped, the idea that Christianity was originally a diverse phenomenon has now been generally accepted.

While Bauer still utilized fairly static notions of orthodoxy and heresy, others developed the ‘Varieties’ model in a more historically dynamic fashion into a ‘trajectories’ model of early Christianity, tracing the movement of different trends over time. And yet, in a sense, the ‘varieties’ and ‘trajectories’ models still operate on the basis of some of the assumptions outlined by [Karen] King: they construe these different groups as defined and fixed entities, in varying degrees independent, and supposes that we can view them as different horses in a rerun of a race, keeping our eye all the time on the one we know to be the eventual winner and so defining the race itself in the terms given by the winner. Determining the reason why one group eventually came to dominate is no longer sought, as in early modern times, on the basis of a pure originating source, but rather, in equally modern terms, through the interaction of historical and socio-political forces.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 09:26, 3 May 2018 (UTC) && 20:45, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

I checked Mack; what he actually writes is that at the time of Paul several Jesus-movements existed, which all gave their own, divergent interpretations of Jesus' teachings. As some others no doubt also have noticed, Mack doesn't dare to take the further step, that those divergent teachings did not point back to one person, but point back tovarious elaborations of a shared background qua mythology. Anyway, my fault qua the phrasing above; I'll correct it. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:36, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
Reminds me of,
"[Frazer′s] subtitle of the first edition of The Golden Bough was ‘A Study in Comparative Religion’, whereas that of the second edition was ‘A Study in Magic and Religion’. [...] Although Jesus of Nazareth is never mentioned—Frazer had no stomach for religious polemic—only the slowest reader could fail to make the connection: if Attis, Adonis, Osiris, and Dionysus are now only barbaric reminders of a backward age, can Jesus be any different? The conclusion follows that Christianity must also take its place on the same shelf as these outworn creeds." —Ackerman, Robert, ed. (2005). Selected Letters of Sir J. G. Frazer. OUP Oxford. p. 72. ISBN 978-0-19-926696-8.
There is an amusing quote (I do not recall who said) about Frazer being like an explorer who maps in exquisite detail the outline of a new found island, but who never dares set foot on it. Thus Frazer is able to die in the bed at Cambridge that he slept in around forty years. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 14:42, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

James, Brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem Church

I came across this book: Alan Saxby (2015). James, Brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem Church: A Radical Exploration of Christian Origins. It "explores the possibility that James, the brother of Jesus, was leader of a movement in Jerusalem distinct from, yet contemporaneous (or earlier), with that of Jesus in Galilee" (quote from the original doctoral thesis; the link to the PDF is blacklisted, so one will have to Google it [ http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/5560/1/Saxby_thesis.pdf ]). Sounds like an interesting read for those interested in 'parallel sciences', so to speak.
But seriously, it's interesting to see that there are other possibilities for explaining Paul's disinterest in the/a earthly Jesus, other than "it was just a myth." Maybe it was both, a real life and a myth. Maybe it was the expected coming of God's Kingdom which was central in earliest Christianity, and was Jesus it's first martyr, and the first to be awakened again, the sign that God's reign was coming indeed. Who knows. Anyway, food for brain. Best regards to all, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:48, 5 June 2018 (UTC) Here's a review. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:51, 5 June 2018 (UTC) && add demagiced link 74.138.111.159 (talk) 11:53, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Saxby verse Carrier

"James, Brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem Church By Alan Saxby". wipfandstock.com. [Saxby] opens fresh ground in our understanding of Christian origins through an exploration of the role of James in the founding of the church. Based on the author's doctoral research, that first Christian church, with its roots in the Baptist movement, is shown to be part of the broad contemporary Judaic movement for the restoration of Israel. The events surrounding the death of Jesus (their leader's brother) both confirmed their commitment to Judaic reform and transformed their understanding of it. Despite the impact of that experience, they seem to have had neither knowledge nor interest in the teaching and ministry of Jesus in Galilee. Set in the world of James, this careful study of the difficulties and opportunities facing Judaic peasants in first-century Palestine proposes that James and his other brothers moved to Jerusalem (where work was available) several years before the final visit of Jesus and, under James's leadership, became the kernel of a growing group of followers of the Baptist that would later emerge onto the page of history as the Jerusalem Church.

Per Carrier (25 April 2018). "Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus - Richard Carrier". Richard Carrier Blogs. [Comment by Richard Carrier—May 23, 2018] The distinguishing characteristic of a Christian sect would be the archangel Jesus having died.
[...]
there probably were pre-Christian sects (one of which probably became Christian, by novel revelation) that did revere the archangel Jesus and probably even taught he would be the coming messiah, but had not yet come to the conclusion that he'd died to effect his plans, thus had already initiated the end times timetable. There are hints in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the sect(s) represented there did have some such view (and may even have written up pesher prophecies of that angel's future planned death). But we don't know that for sure, we don't know if the only such sect simply became Christianity, we don't know if any members of that sect protested the revelation and stuck to the original timetable and thus broke away, we don't know if there were other sects never impacted by the revelation who continued preaching their own thing. Paul does say there were sects preaching "another Jesus" whom the Christians should shun. So those could have been any of the above, for example.
[...]
there could well have been sects still revering or expecting the Jesus angel as not having died, and who (like possibly Philo) thought it absurd that he would ever do so, and/or who (like possibly the Qumran sect) thought it was not time yet for it to happen, who were competing with Christian sects. They could be the "other Jesus's" Paul talks about. But we sadly just don't know.

74.138.111.159 (talk) 12:26, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

"If Jesus didn't exist, you would think his brother would know about it" - Bart Ehrman. [5]Smeat75 (talk) 14:06, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
"[N]o reliable extra-biblical/scriptural accounts exist to support the historical existence of, inter alia, Jesus of Nazareth, James the Just or John the Baptist." —Allen N.P.L. (2015) Clarifying the Scope of Pre-Fifth-Century C.E. Christian Interpolation in Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicae (c. 94 C.E.). Unpublished Philosophiae Doctor thesis, Potchefstroom: North-West University. [Allen curriculum vitae] – 74.138.111.159 (talk) 22:18, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
That, of course, is not the scholarly consensus though it is very interesting, IP74, that you have access to an unpublished phd thesis.Smeat75 (talk) 22:58, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
Per Google Scholar @ [6], unpublished does not imply unavailable online @ http://dspace.nwu.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10394/14213/Allen_NPL.pdf [n.b. I previously posted this link, c.f. Archive 29 §. Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd] – 74.138.111.159 (talk) 23:26, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

It is an interesting book. Saxby suggests that Paul's silence on jesus sayings etc. may originate with the Jerusalem Church around James, being equally silence. Saxby relates those sayings etc. To Peter & the Twelve, apparently suggesting that James was 'written out of the story'. I have to read further, but it's interesting. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 14:58, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Does Saxby support a "Jerusalem brotherhood" contra Habermas?

[§. Josephus] Others speculate that he was referring to a mythic Christ that had already been historicized, or to fraternal brotherhood rather than a literal sibling. [Robert M. Price. The Christ-Myth Theory and its Problems, Atheist Press, 2011, p. 132, ISBN 9781578840175] This is dismissed by some in mainstream academia on the grounds that there is no evidence of a supposed "Jerusalem brotherhood". [The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ, by Gary R. Habermas, College Press, 1996. pp. 31–35]

NB: This content should probably be in §. The Pauline epistles. - 74.138.111.159 (talk) 20:45, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Article title and first sentence

Please note this op-ed on excess parenthetical "metadata" in lead. I just removed one of the "alternative names", plain "mythicist", as ridiculous. Obviously, in context, as Maurice Casey was writing in the "citation", the term "mythicist" can be used to refer to supporters of this theory, but only in context. Do we really need to burden the opening sentence with a list of variant names? (I really do not believe this is how normal encyclopedias are written.) Then we should consider the title: as I understand it, theologically speaking "Christ" is more a title than a reference to the person. In this case the title would more correctly be "Jesus myth theory"; the list of alternatives could be removed, and perhaps a sentence added about historical variation in the names used. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:32, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

I could agree that "Jesus myth theory" may be a better title, considering that many scholars accept that a historical Jesus likely existed but that there was also a mythological one (with the powers attributed in the Gospels, the Christ of the Christians). It is probably somewhat contentious and would require a proper move discussion (WP:COMMONNAME also taken in consideration). —PaleoNeonate – 09:36, 5 August 2018 (UTC)
Yes, per WP:COMMONNAME the title should stay as the "Christ myth theory" as that is what its proponents call it. It is a silly term, I agree, it uses the word "myth" inaccurately, but that is what it is known as.Smeat75 (talk) 10:58, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Section:Opponents

New user Lygu1560 blanked the section "Opponents" which reads "Few scholars have bothered to criticise Christ myth theories, regarding them as too outlandish to be worthy of serious criticism. Some notable exceptions are Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey and Philip Jenkins" with an edit summary "Removing clear religious bias from phrasing"along with other changes that I reverted. He was adivised on his talk page by User:PaleoNeonate not to reinstate those edits without opening a discussion on this talk page. Today he blanked the same section again, ignoring this advice referring again to "clear religious bias" which is ridiculous, it is a matter of established historical fact, not religion, and those writers are historians. So I put it back again and user Imaginatorium took it out again with an edit summary "No, there is no consensus (among thinking people, not your "scholars") for this abusive and loaded description. Do no revert again without attempting to justify on talk". According to WP:BRD it is Lygu1560 who should have opened a discussion on talk after I reverted him, not me. And "thinking people" do not matter one little bit on WP, "your "scholars" are everything. I did not write that section but it is strictly accurate and should stay. I can expand it if wanted with more quotes from "your scholars" on what absolute nonsense the Christ myth theory is.Smeat75 (talk) 19:36, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

I went ahead and added a quote, with a reference, to that section from another one of "your scholars" - " Paul L. Maier, former Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University and current professor emeritus in the Department of History there has stated ""Anyone who uses the argument that Jesus never existed is simply flaunting his ignorance." I have many more along the same lines if desired.Smeat75 (talk) 19:54, 7 August 2018 (UTC)
I rewrote the sentence that Lygu1560 and Imaginatorium object to with a direct quote from Robert van Voorst.Smeat75 (talk) 01:43, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
The paragraph is still ludicrously biased. Of course you have "many more along the same lines", but they are all faith-based, and fundamentally inadmissible. I will edit the paragraph again, and remove the "bothered" word; please do not put it in without a neutral source that says that an independent survey found that a majority of these "scholars" said nothing because they "couldn't be bothered". Imaginatorium (talk) 07:44, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
While I understand that the scholarly consensus is against the myth theory, which the article should portray, I also agree that the tone of that sentence was problematic. —PaleoNeonate – 08:43, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
Yes, thank you Imaginatorium, that is fine. I agree that it is better to have a specific quote from a scholar rather than saying they "couldn't be bothered". This is how achieving consensus is supposed to work, not through edit-warring. (Though it really, really isn't "faith-based" to say that Jesus certainly existed, it is history-based, there are many professors and scholars of classics and ancient history quoted in the article and you will not find a single one who says anything different. Do you really think it is "fundamentally inadmissible" to cite what a "Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University and current professor emeritus in the Department of History" says on this matter of ancient history?)Smeat75 (talk) 12:11, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
You do not seem to be very familiar with the empirical method: one of the rules is that you are not allowed to Know the answer before you look for it. The paragraph below from Maier is classic apologetics: he knows the answer, so he repeats it a lot, and hopes that will be convincing. (His text might need copy-editing if it is a transcript.) This article is (supposed to be!) about people who have actually looked at the evidence, and found it extremely flimsy. The only evidence I have yet seen is, well, the Bible, plus about three sentences (paragraphs) in Roman writers. The counter to this never seems to be to point to any more evidence: either we are told we "don't know how modern schoarship works" (well, how does it work?) or we are told that this extremely flimsy evidence is immensely strong by the standards historians use, which leaves me wondering quite what historians are doing. Maier in particular appears to claim that there is as much evidence for both JCs, Christ and Caesar, which I do not think many (real) historians would accept. Imaginatorium (talk) 09:21, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

On WP we as editors do not decide that a professor of ancient history and emeritus professor of history isn't a "real"historian because he does not follow the empirical method. All we do is quote what scholars such as Maier say. This article allows the mythicists to make their case and then says why the scholarly consensus rejects it. There is a very big difference between ancient history and more recent history, sources for ancient history are very few, independent multiple attestation of an event from antiquity such as there is for the crucifixion is exceedingly rare.Smeat75 (talk) 10:21, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

one of the rules is that you are not allowed to Know the answer before you look for it. - It is the Christ mythicists who do that, not historians. Anyone who knows anything about ancient history and examines the evidence with an open mind will conclude that Jesus certainly existed. It is the mythicists who have made up their minds and will not let the evidence get in their way.Smeat75 (talk) 10:34, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Maier quote

Maier, Paul L. (2010) ap. "Historian Interview: Paul L. Maier". Apologetics 315 podcast. (13 December 2010) @ http://apologetics315.blogspot.com/2010/12/historian-interview-paul-l-maier.html

[Per the argument that Jesus never existed] anybody who is using that argument is simply flaunting his ignorance, I hate to say it but it's about that bad. We have more documentation on Jesus Christ then anybody in the ancient world as far as that's concerned. There is no question whatever in the mind of any serious scholar anywhere in the world that there certainly was a historical personality named Jesus of Nazareth.

Now you can argue about whether he [Jesus] was the son of God or not, you can argue about the supernatural aspects of his life. But in terms of the historical character there is absolutely no evidence to the contrary and all the evidence is in the favor and I just can't stand the computer blogs and so many other would-be authorities trying to use this argument: "He's only a myth, he never lived." Well that's simply ridiculous on the face of the facts.

Cf. Ben Stanhope (2 March 2015). "Salon.com's Remarkably Bad Historical Jesus Article". Remythologized. [Maier cited:] The following quotes are taken from a video and audio compilation "Do Historians Believe Jesus Existed." YouTube video, 6:05. Dec 27, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP15Pc2Lljc— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:a000:160c:a232:c5ea:e9b4:d2f9:f543 (talk) 23:25, 8 August 2018‎ (UTC)

Once Again (sigh), It Seems that I need to Post This - Sources Saying that "most scholars agree"

Citations
  • [T]he view that there was no historical Jesus, that his earthly existence is a fiction of earliest Christianity—a fiction only later made concrete by setting his life in the first century—is today almost totally rejected.
G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1988) p. 218
  • It is customary today to dismiss with amused contempt the suggestion that Jesus never existed.
G. A. Wells, "The Historicity of Jesus," in Jesus and History and Myth, ed. R. Joseph Hoffman (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986) p. 27
  • "New Testament criticism treated the Christ Myth Theory with universal disdain"
Robert M. Price, The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-Four Formative Texts (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2006) p. 1179
  • "Van Voorst is quite right in saying that 'mainstream scholarship today finds it unimportant' [to engage the Christ myth theory seriously]. Most of their comment (such as those quoted by Michael Grant) are limited to expressions of contempt."
Earl Doherty, "Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case: Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism, Part Three", The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus?
  • Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher.
Graham Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus (2nd ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. xxiii
  • In the last analysis, the whole Christ-myth theorizing is a glaring example of obscurantism, if the sin of obscurantism consists in the acceptance of bare possibilities in place of actual probabilities, and of pure surmise in defiance of existing evidence. Those who have not entered far into the laborious inquiry may pretend that the historicity of Jesus is an open question. For me to adopt such a pretence would be sheer intellectual dishonesty. I know I must, as an honest man, reckon with Jesus as a factor in history... This dialectic process whereby the Christ-myth theory discredits itself rests on the simple fact that you cannot attempt to prove the theory without mishandling the evidence.
Herbert George Wood, Christianity and the Nature of History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934) pp. xxxiii & 54
  • The defectiveness of [the Christ myth theory's] treatment of the traditional evidence is perhaps not so patent in the case of the gospels as it is in the case of the Pauline epistles. Yet fundamentally it is the same. There is the same easy dismissal of all external testimony, the same disdain for the saner conclusions of modern criticism, the same inclination to attach most value to extremes of criticism, the same neglect of all the personal and natural features of the narrative, the same disposition to put skepticism forward in the garb of valid demonstration, and the same ever present predisposition against recognizing any evidence for Jesus' actual existence... The New Testament data are perfectly clear in their testimony to the reality of Jesus' earthly career and they come from a time when the possibility that the early framers of tradition should have been deceived upon this point is out of the question.
Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity Of Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912) pp. 76-77 & 269
  • If one were able to survey the members of the major learned societies dealing with antiquity, it would be difficult to find more than a handful who believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not walk the dusty roads of Palestine in the first three decades of the Common Era. Evidence for Jesus as a historical personage is incontrovertible.
W. Ward Gasque, "The Leading Religion Writer in Canada... Does He Know What He's Talking About?", George Mason University's History News Network, 2004
  • [The non-Christian references to Jesus from the first two centuries] render highly implausible any farfetched theories that even Jesus' very existence was a Christian invention. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate (for whatever reason) and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be the part of the bedrock of historical tradition. If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score.
Christopher M. Tuckett, "Sources and Methods" in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 124
  • [A]n attempt to show that Jesus never existed has been made in recent years by G. A. Wells, a Professor of German who has ventured into New Testament study and presents a case that the origins of Christianity can be explained without assuming that Jesus really lived. Earlier presentations of similar views at the turn of the century failed to make any impression on scholarly opinion, and it is certain that this latest presentation of the case will not fare any better. For of course the evidence is not confined to Tacitus; there are the New Testament documents themselves, nearly all of which must be dated in the first century, and behind which there lies a period of transmission of the story of Jesus which can be traced backwards to a date not far from that when Jesus is supposed to have lived. To explain the rise of this tradition without the hypothesis of Jesus is impossible.
I. Howard Marshall, I Believe in the Historical Jesus (rev. ed.) (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004) pp. 15–16
  • A phone call from the BBC’s flagship Today programme: would I go on air on Good Friday morning to debate with the aurthors of a new book, The Jesus Mysteries? The book claims (or so they told me) that everything in the Gospels reflects, because it was in fact borrowed from, much older pagan myths; that Jesus never existed; that the early church knew it was propagating a new version of an old myth, and that the developed church covered this up in the interests of its own power and control. The producer was friendly, and took my point when I said that this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese.
N. T. Wright, "Jesus' Self Understanding", in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, Gerald O’Collins, The Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 48
  • A school of thought popular with cranks on the Internet holds that Jesus didn’t actually exist.
Tom Breen, The Messiah Formerly Known as Jesus: Dispatches from the Intersection of Christianity and Pop Culture (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008) p. 138
  • I feel that I ought almost to apologize to my readers for investigating at such length the hypothesis of a pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical Mary, and for exhibiting over so many pages its fantastic, baseless, and absurd character... We must [, according to Christ myth advocates,] perforce suppose that the Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of Pagan mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. If we adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing else. Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At one end of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of Christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only hope the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their Scriptures are a thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal inspiration is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with mythico-symbolism. Verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind, you rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a "Christist" to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the Bacon-Shakespeareans we have seen nothing like it.
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare,The Historical Christ, or an Investigation of the Views of J. M. Robertson, A. Drews and W. B. Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2009/1914) pp. 42 & 95
  • Today only an eccentric would claim that Jesus never existed.
Leander Keck, Who Is Jesus?: History in Perfect Tense (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000) p. 13
  • While The Christ Myth alarmed many who were innocent of learning, it evoked only Olympian scorn from the historical establishment, who were confident that Jesus had existed... The Christ-myth theory, then, won little support from the historical specialists. In their judgement, it sought to demonstrate a perverse thesis, and it preceded by drawing the most far-fetched, even bizarre connection between mythologies of very diverse origin. The importance of the theory lay, not in its persuasiveness to the historians (since it had none), but in the fact that it invited theologians to renewed reflection on the questions of faith and history.
Brian A. Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004) pp. 231 & 233
  • It is certain, however, that Jesus was arrested while in Jerusalem for the Passover, probably in the year 30, and that he was executed...it cannot be doubted that Peter was a personal disciple of Jesus...
Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, 2 (2nd ed.) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000) pp. 80 & 166
  • We do not need to take seriously those writers who occasionally claim that Jesus never existed at all, for we have clear evidence to the contrary from a number of Jewish, Latin, and Islamic sources.
John Drane, "Introduction", in John Drane, The Great Sayings of Jesus: Proverbs, Parables and Prayers (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 1999) p. 23
  • By no means are we at the mercy of those who doubt or deny that Jesus ever lived.
Rudolf Bultmann, "The Study of the Synoptic Gospels", Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, Rudolf Bultmann & Karl Kundsin; translated by Frederick C. Grant (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962) p. 62
  • Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical movement whose first distinct stage is represented by the oldest Palestinian community.
Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Scribner, 1958) p. introduction
  • It is the nature of historical work that we are always involved in probability judgments. Granted, some judgments are so probable as to be certain; for example, Jesus really existed and really was crucified, just as Julius Caeser really existed and was assassinated.
Marcus Borg, "A Vision of the Christian Life", The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, Marcus Borg & N. T. Wright (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007) p. 236
  • To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus'—or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.
Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (New York: Scribner, 1995) p. 200
  • I think that there are hardly any historians today, in fact I don't know of any historians today, who doubt the existence of Jesus... So I think that question can be put to rest.
N. T. Wright, "The Self-Revelation of God in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus with N. T. Wright", in Antony Flew & Roy Abraham Vargese, There is a God (New York: HarperOne, 2007) p. 188
  • Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate, and continued to have followers after his death.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1996) p. 121
  • The historical reality both of Buddha and of Christ has sometimes been doubted or denied. It would be just as reasonable to question the historical existence of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne on account of the legends which have gathered round them... The attempt to explain history without the influence of great men may flatter the vanity of the vulgar, but it will find no favour with the philosophic historian.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 7 (3rd ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1919) p. 311
  • We can be certain that Jesus really existed (despite a few highly motivated skeptics who refuse to be convinced), that he was a Jewish teacher in Galilee, and that he was crucified by the Roman government around 30 CE.
Robert J. Miller, The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 1999) p. 38
  • [T]here is substantial evidence that a person by the name of Jesus once existed.
Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millenium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997) p. 33
  • Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel.
Will Durant, Christ and Caesar, The Story of Civilization, 3 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972) p. 557
  • There are no substantial doubts about the general course of Jesus’ life: when and where he lived, approximately when and where he died, and the sort of thing that he did during his public activity.
E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 1993) p. 10
  • There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.
Richard A. Burridge, Jesus Now and Then (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) p. 34
  • Although Wells has been probably the most able advocate of the nonhistoricity theory, he has not been persuasive and is now almost a lone voice for it. The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question... The nonhistoricity thesis has always been controversial, and it has consistently failed to convince scholars of many disciplines and religious creeds... Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted.
Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000) pp. 14 & 16
  • No reputable scholar today questions that a Jew named Jesus son of Joseph lived; most readily admit that we now know a considerable amount about his actions and his basic teachings.
James H. Charlesworth, "Preface", in James H. Charlesworth, Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) pp. xxi–xxv
  • [Robert] Price thinks the evidence is so weak for the historical Jesus that we cannot know anything certain or meaningful about him. He is even willing to entertain the possibility that there never was a historical Jesus. Is the evidence of Jesus really that thin? Virtually no scholar trained in history will agree with Price's negative conclusions... In my view Price's work in the gospels is overpowered by a philosophical mindset that is at odds with historical research—of any kind... What we see in Price is what we have seen before: a flight from fundamentalism.
Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008) p. 25
  • The scholarly mainstream, in contrast to Bauer and company, never doubted the existence of Jesus or his relevance for the founding of the Church.
Craig A. Evans, "Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology", Theological Studies 54, 1993, p. 8
  • There's no serious question for historians that Jesus actually lived. There’s real issues about whether he is really the way the Bible described him. There’s real issues about particular incidents in his life. But no serious ancient historian doubts that Jesus was a real person, really living in Galilee in the first century.
Chris Forbes, interview with John Dickson, "Zeitgeist: Time to Discard the Christian Story?", Center for Public Christianity, 2009
  • I don't think there's any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus. There are a lot of people who want to write sensational books and make a lot of money who say Jesus didn't exist. But I don't know any serious scholar who doubts the existence of Jesus.
Bart Ehrman, interview with Reginald V. Finley Sr., "Who Changed The New Testament and Why", The Infidel Guy Show, 2008
  • What about those writers like Acharya S (The Christ Conspiracy) and Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy (The Jesus Mysteries), who say that Jesus never existed, and that Christianity was an invented religion, the Jewish equivalent of the Greek mystery religions? This is an old argument, even though it shows up every 10 years or so. This current craze that Christianity was a mystery religion like these other mystery religions-the people who are saying this are almost always people who know nothing about the mystery religions; they've read a few popular books, but they're not scholars of mystery religions. The reality is, we know very little about mystery religions-the whole point of mystery religions is that they're secret! So I think it's crazy to build on ignorance in order to make a claim like this. I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.
Bart Ehrman, interview with David V. Barrett, "The Gospel According to Bart", Fortean Times (221), 2007
  • Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn’t even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.
William Lane Craig, "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?", debate with Richard Carrier, 2009
  • The alternative thesis... that within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible. It involves too many complex and speculative hypotheses, in contrast to the much simpler explanation that there was a Jesus who said and did more or less what the first three Gospels attribute to him.
James D. G. Dunn, The Evidence for Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985) p. 29
  • This is always the fatal flaw of the 'Jesus myth' thesis: the improbability of the total invention of a figure who had purportedly lived within the generation of the inventors, or the imposition of such an elaborate myth on some minor figure from Galilee. [Robert] Price is content with the explanation that it all began 'with a more or less vague savior myth.' Sad, really.
James D. G. Dunn, "Response to Robert M. Price", in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy, The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009) p. 98
  • Since the Enlightenment, the Gospel stories about the life of Jesus have been in doubt. Intellectuals then as now asked: 'What makes the stories of the New Testament any more historically probable than Aesop's fables or Grimm's fairy tales?' The critics can be answered satisfactorily...For all the rigor of the standard it sets, the criterion [of embarrassment] demonstrates that Jesus existed.
Alan F. Segal, "Believe Only the Embarrassing", Slate, 2005
  • Some writers may toy with the fancy of a 'Christ-myth,' but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the 'Christ-myth' theories.
F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (6th ed.) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) p. 123
  • Jesus is in no danger of suffering Catherine [of Alexandria]'s fate as an unhistorical myth...
Dale Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) p. 37
  • 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.
Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by John Bowden et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) pp. 435–436
  • In fact, there is more evidence that Jesus of Nazareth certainly lived than for most famous figures of the ancient past. This evidence is of two kinds: internal and external, or, if you will, sacred and secular. In both cases, the total evidence is so overpowering, so absolute that only the shallowest of intellects would dare to deny Jesus' existence. And yet this pathetic denial is still parroted by 'the village atheist,' bloggers on the internet, or such organizations as the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
Paul L. Maier, "Did Jesus Really Exist?", 4Truth.net, 2007
  • The very logic that tells us there was no Jesus is the same logic that pleads that there was no Holocaust. On such logic, history is no longer possible. It is no surprise then that there is no New Testament scholar drawing pay from a post who doubts the existence of Jesus. I know not one. His birth, life, and death in first-century Palestine have never been subject to serious question and, in all likelihood, never will be among those who are experts in the field. The existence of Jesus is a given.
Nicholas Perrin, Lost in Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) p. 32
  • While we do not have the fullness of biographical detail and the wealth of firsthand accounts that are available for recent public figures, such as Winston Churchill or Mother Teresa, we nonetheless have much more data on Jesus than we do for such ancient figures as Alexander the Great... Along with the scholarly and popular works, there is a good deal of pseudoscholarship on Jesus that finds its way into print. During the last two centuries more than a hundred books and articles have denied the historical existence of Jesus. Today innumerable websites carry the same message... Most scholars regard the arguments for Jesus' non-existence as unworthy of any response—on a par with claims that the Jewish Holocaust never occurred or that the Apollo moon landing took place in a Hollywood studio.
Michael James McClymond, Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) pp. 8 & 23–24
  • You know that you can try to minimize your biases, but you can't eliminate them. That's why you have to put certain checks and balances in place… Under this approach, we only consider facts that meet two criteria. First, there must be very strong historical evidence supporting them. And secondly, the evidence must be so strong that the vast majority of today's scholars on the subject—including skeptical ones—accept these as historical facts. You're never going to get everyone to agree. There are always people who deny the Holocaust or question whether Jesus ever existed, but they're on the fringe.
Michael R. Licona, in Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007) p. 112
  • If I understand what Earl Doherty is arguing, Neil, it is that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as an historical person, or, at least that historians, like myself, presume that he did and act on that fatally flawed presumption. I am not sure, as I said earlier, that one can persuade people that Jesus did exist as long as they are ready to explain the entire phenomenon of historical Jesus and earliest Christianity either as an evil trick or a holy parable. I had a friend in Ireland who did not believe that Americans had landed on the moon but that they had created the entire thing to bolster their cold-war image against the communists. I got nowhere with him. So I am not at all certain that I can prove that the historical Jesus existed against such an hypothesis and probably, to be honest, I am not even interested in trying.
John Dominic Crossan, "Historical Jesus: Materials and Methodology", XTalk, 2000
  • A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical person Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today—in the academic world at least—gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.
Mark Allan Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998) p. 168
  • When they say that Christian beliefs about Jesus are derived from pagan mythology, I think you should laugh. Then look at them wide-eyed and with a big grin, and exclaim, 'Do you really believe that?' Act as though you've just met a flat earther or Roswell conspirator.
William Lane Craig, "Question 90: Jesus and Pagan Mythology", Reasonable Faith, 2009
  • Finley: There are some people in the chat room disagreeing, of course, but they’re saying that there really isn’t any hardcore evidence, though, that… I mean… but there isn’t any… any evidence, really, that Jesus did exist except what people were saying about him. But… Ehrman: I think… I disagree with that. Finley: Really? Ehrman: I mean, what hardcore evidence is there that Julius Caesar existed? Finley: Well, this is… this is the same kind of argument that apologists use, by the way, for the existence of Jesus, by the way. They like to say the same thing you said just then about, well, what kind of evidence do you have for Jul… Ehrman: Well, I mean, it’s… but it’s just a typical… it’s just… It’s a historical point; I mean, how do you establish the historical existence of an individual from the past? Finley: I guess… I guess it depends on the claims… Right, it depends on the claims that people have made during that particular time about a particular person and their influence on society... Ehrman: It’s not just the claims. There are… One has to look at historical evidence. And if you… If you say that historical evidence doesn’t count, then I think you get into huge trouble. Because then, how do… I mean… then why not just deny the Holocaust?
Bart Ehrman, interview with Reginald V. Finley Sr., "Who Changed The New Testament and Why", The Infidel Guy Show, 2008
  • The denial that Christ was crucified is like the denial of the Holocaust. For some it's simply too horrific to affirm. For others it's an elaborate conspiracy to coerce religious sympathy. But the deniers live in a historical dreamworld.
John Piper, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006) pp. 14-15
  • I just finished reading, The Historical Jesus: Five Views. The first view was given by Robert Price, a leading Jesus myth proponent… The title of Price’s chapter is 'Jesus at the Vanishing Point.' I am convinced that if Price's total skepticism were applied fairly and consistently to other figures in ancient history (Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Nero, etc.), they would all be reduced to 'the vanishing point.' Price's chapter is a perfect example of how someone can always, always find excuses to not believe something they don't want to believe, whether that be the existence of Jesus or the existence of the holocaust.
Dennis Ingolfsland, "Five views of the historical Jesus", The Recliner Commentaries, 2009
  • The Jesus mythers will continue to advance their thesis and complain of being kept outside of the arena of serious academic discussion. They carry their signs, 'Jesus Never Existed!' 'They won’t listen to me!' and label those inside the arena as 'Anti-Intellectuals,' 'Fundamentalists,' 'Misguided Liberals,' and 'Flat-Earthers.' Doherty & Associates are baffled that all but a few naïve onlookers pass them by quickly, wagging their heads and rolling their eyes. They never see that they have a fellow picketer less than a hundred yards away, a distinguished looking man from Iran. He too is frustrated and carries a sign that says 'The Holocaust Never Happened!'
Michael R. Licona, "Licona Replies to Doherty's Rebuttal", Answering Infidels, 2005
  • Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ - the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.
Graeme Clarke, quoted by John Dickson in "Facts and friction of Easter", The Sydney Morning Herald, March 21, 2008
  • An extreme instance of pseudo-history of this kind is the “explanation” of the whole story of Jesus as a myth.
Emil Brunner, The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2002) p. 164
  • An extreme view along these lines is one which denies even the historical existence of Jesus Christ—a view which, one must admit, has not managed to establish itself among the educated, outside a little circle of amateurs and cranks, or to rise above the dignity of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare.
Edwyn Robert Bevan, Hellenism And Christianity (2nd ed.) (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1930) p. 256
  • When all the evidence brought against Jesus' historicity is surveyed it is not found to contain any elements of strength.
Shirley Jackson Case, "The Historicity of Jesus: An Estimate of the Negative Argument", The American Journal of Theology, 1911, 15 (1)
  • It would be easy to show how much there enters of the conjectural, of superficial resemblances, of debatable interpretation into the systems of the Drews, the Robertsons, the W. B. Smiths, the Couchouds, or the Stahls... The historical reality of the personality of Jesus alone enables us to understand the birth and development of Christianity, which otherwise would remain an enigma, and in the proper sense of the word, a miracle.
Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926) pp. 30 & 244
  • Anyone who talks about "reasonable faith" must say what he thinks about Jesus. And that would still be so even if, with one or two cranks, he believed that He never existed.
John W. C. Wand, The Old Faith and the New Age‎ (London: Skeffington & Son, 1933) p. 31
  • That both in the case of the Christians, and in the case of those who worshipped Zagreus or Osiris or Attis, the Divine Being was believed to have died and returned to life, would be a depreciation of Christianity only if it could be shown that the Christian belief was derived from the pagan one. But that can be supposed only by cranks for whom historical evidence is nothing.
Edwyn R. Bevan, in Thomas Samuel Kepler, Contemporary Thinking about Paul: An Anthology (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950) p. 44
  • The pseudoscholarship of the early twentieth century calling in question the historical reality of Jesus was an ingenuous attempt to argue a preconceived position.
Gerard Stephen Sloyan, The Crucifixion of Jesus: History, Myth, Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) p. 9
  • Whatever else Jesus may or may not have done, he unquestionably* started the process that became Christianity…
UNQUESTIONABLY: The proposition has been questioned, but the alternative explanations proposed—the theories of the “Christ myth school,” etc.—have been thoroughly discredited.
Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) pp. 5 & 166
  • One category of mythicists, like young-earth creationists, have no hesitation about offering their own explanation of who made up Christianity... Other mythicists, perhaps because they are aware that such a scenario makes little historical sense and yet have nothing better to offer in its place, resemble proponents of Intelligent Design who will say "the evidence points to this organism having been designed by an intelligence" and then insist that it would be inappropriate to discuss further who the designer might be or anything else other than the mere "fact" of design itself. They claim that the story of Jesus was invented, but do not ask the obvious historical questions of "when, where, and by whom" even though the stories are set in the authors' recent past and not in time immemorial, in which cases such questions obviously become meaningless... Thus far, I've only encountered two sorts of mythicism."
James F. McGrath, "Intelligently-Designed Narratives: Mythicism as History-Stopper", Exploring Our Matrix, 2010
  • In the academic mind, there can be no more doubt whatsoever that Jesus existed than did Augustus and Tiberius, the emperors of his lifetime. Even if we assume for a moment that the accounts of non-biblical authors who mention him - Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and others - had not survived, the outstanding quality of the Gospels, Paul's letters and other New Testament writings is more than good enough for the historian.
Carsten Peter Thiede, Jesus, Man or Myth? (Oxford: Lion, 2005) p. 23
  • To describe Jesus' non-existence as "not widely supported" is an understatement. It would be akin to me saying, "It is possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, scientific case that the 1969 lunar landing never happened." There are fringe conspiracy theorists who believe such things - but no expert does. Likewise with the Jesus question: his non-existence is not regarded even as a possibility in historical scholarship. Dismissing him from the ancient record would amount to a wholesale abandonment of the historical method.
John Dickson, Jesus: A Short Life (Oxford: Lion, 2008) 22-23.
  • When Professor Wells advances such an explanation of the gospel stories [i.e. the Christ myth theory] he presents us with a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the gospels.
Morton Smith, in R. Joseph Hoffman, Jesus in History and Myth (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1986) p. 48
  • Of course, there can be no toleration whatever of the idea that Jesus never existed and is only a concoction from these pagan stories about a god who was slain and rose again.
Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul (New York: Menorah, 1943) p. 107
  • Virtually all biblical scholars acknowledge that there is enough information from ancient non-Christian sources to give the lie to the myth (still, however, widely believed in popular circles and by some scholars in other fields--see esp. G. A. Wells) which claims that Jesus never existed.
Craig L. Blomberg, "Gospels (Historical Reliability)", in Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight & I. Howard Marshall, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992) p. 292
  • In the 1910's a few scholars did argue that Jesus never existed and was simply the figment of speculative imagination. This denial of the historicity of Jesus does not commend itself to scholars, moderates or extremists, any more. ... The "Christ-myth" theories are not accepted or even discussed by scholars today.
Samuel Sandmel, A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament‎ (New York: Ktav, 1974) p. 196
  • Dr. Wells was there [I.e. a symposium at the University of Michigan] and he presened his radical thesis that maybe Jesus never existed. Virtually nobody holds this position today. It was reported that Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University, even though he is a skeptic himself, responded that Dr. Wells's view was "absurd".
Gary Habermas, in Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989) p. 45
  • I.e. if we leave out of account the Christ-myth theories, which are hardly to be reckoned as within the range of serious criticism.
Alexander Roper Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934) p. 253
  • Such Christ-myth theories are not now advanced by serious opponents of Christianity—they have long been exploded ..."
Gilbert Cope, Symbolism in the Bible and the Church (London: SCM, 1959) p. 14
  • In the early years of this century, various theses were propounded which all assert that Jesus never lived, and that the story of Jesus is a myth or legend. These claims have long since been exposed as historical nonsense. There can be no reasonable doubt that Jesus of Nazareth lived in Palestine in the first three decades of our era, probably from 6-7 BC to 30 AD. That is a fact.
Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1976) p. 65
  • There is, lastly, a group of writers who endeavor to prove that Jesus never lived--that the story of his life is made up by mingling myths of heathen gods, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, etc. No real scholar regards the work of these men seriously. They lack the most elementary knowledge of historical research. Some of them are eminent scholars in other subjects, such as Assyriology and mathematics, but their writings about the life of Jesus have no more claim to be regarded as historical than Alice in Wonderland or the Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
George Aaron Barton, Jesus of Nazareth: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1922) p. x
  • The data we have are certainly adequate to confute the view that Jesus never lived, a view that no one holds in any case
Charles E. Carlston, in Bruce Chilton & Craig A. Evans (eds.) Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research (Leiden: Brill, 1998) p. 3
  • Although it is held by Marxist propaganda writers that Jesus never lived and that the Gospels are pure creations of the imagination, this is not the view of even the most radical Gospel critics.
Bernard L. Ramm, An Evangelical Christology: Ecumenic and Historic (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1999) p. 159

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Bill the Cat 7 (talk • contribs) 00:38, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

This contribution does not appear to be signed. Please say if you added it. Otherwise it could be removed. It is of zero significance, because "Most scholars have to agree" in order to keep themselves in employment. Imaginatorium (talk) 12:33, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
I added the user's name and timestamp. —PaleoNeonate – 12:45, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
It is of zero significance, because "Most scholars have to agree" in order to keep themselves in employment. Non sequitur. Most US-based lawyers have to agree that individual constitutional rights trump statutory law in order to keep themselves in employment. That doesn't change the fact that it's true.
Most contractors have to build to code in order to keep themselves in employment. Most police officers have to follow statutory guidelines and respect suspect's constitutional rights in order to keep themselves in employment. Most physicists have to avoid contradicting the standard model in order to keep themselves in employment. The list goes on and on. Attempts like this to reframe the scholarly consensus as a "party line" that must be toed ignore the blatantly obvious question of why that because the consensus to begin with. And in the modern age of growing secularism and outspoken atheism (including more than one of the world's leading Jesus scholars), attempting to answer that question with "religious dogma" is one of the most ignorant assumptions one could make. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 12:54, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
I added it, yes. And if you remove it, I'll just add it back in again because it is of great significance. If you can't see that, I can't help you. On the other hand, if you want to discuss it further, feel free; I'm willing. Bill the Cat 7 (talk) 12:47, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
Oh, and I was the one who added the humorous image near "expressions of contempt". —PaleoNeonate – 12:52, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

We do not use self-published material as sources

IP 71.218.57.83 added material from a book "Deciphering the Gospels: Proves Jesus Never Existed" by a non scholar, R G Price, printed by Lulu Publishing Services which is a self publishing service. See WP:SPS Anyone can create a personal web page or publish their own book, and also claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published media, such as books, patents, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, personal or group blogs (as distinguished from newsblogs, above), content farms, Internet forum postings, and social media postings, are largely not acceptable as sources... if the information in question is suitable for inclusion, someone else will probably have published it in independent reliable sources. I am removing the references to that self-published book.Smeat75 (talk) 11:59, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Agreed, I also left a similar message on their talk page. Thanks for the comment, —PaleoNeonate – 12:23, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
Ditto. Bill the Cat 7 (talk) 12:54, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Historicity from the Epistles

Historicity from the Epistles is typically asserted from:

  • Jesus was born of the seed of David (Rom. 1:3).
  • Jesus was born of a woman (Gal. 4:4).
  • Paul knew people called Brothers of the Lord (1 Cor. 9:5 & Gal. 1:19).
  • On “the night” before he died Jesus handled bread and wine and taught Christians the theological ritual of the Lord’s supper (1 Cor. 11:23).
  • In “the days of his flesh” Jesus cried and prayed to God to save him (Heb. 5:7).

Perhaps the mythicist′s arguments on these points should be more fully featured in the article? – 74.138.111.159 (talk) 00:19, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Paul knew people called Brothers of the Lord (1 Cor. 9:5 & Gal. 1:19)Galatians 1:19 says Paul met with James, the "Lord's brother", not "people called Brothers of the Lord." Josephus also refers, as you are very well aware, to "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James.". Having two independent attestations like that for someone from antiquity who is not an Emperor or military hero or queen or some such member of a super-elite is exceedingly rare. This is one of the major reasons why classical historians do not take the Christ myth theory seriously, we can say for sure, with certainty, as much as any event in history can be sure, that Jesus had a brother named James and as I have already quoted Bart Ehrman on this page "If Jesus didn't exist, you would think his brother would know about it". I think that point could be strengthened in this article. Of course "mythicists" attempt desperate and convoluted arguments to try to make these two clear confirmations of each other that Jesus had a brother called James go away but it doesn't convince actual historians, only other "mythicists" or gullible members of the public who know nothing about ancient history.Smeat75 (talk) 04:08, 8 June 2018 (UTC)
Per http://biblehub.com Interlinear Greek:
74.138.111.159 (talk) 09:14, 8 June 2018 (UTC)
Prince Philip is the brother of John Frum, a man who as currently presented by his followers likely didn't exist, so even if the "Lord's brother" is read the way you claim it doesn't prove anything. In fact, the noted anthropologist Peter Worsley stated in an 1957 paper "Belief in Christ is no more or less rational than belief in John Frum." Heck, Jean Guiart's 1952 paper "John Frum Movement in Tanna" not only documents three natives using the name "John Frum" but the various statements made about John Frum, various people claiming to be his son (last I check non existent people don't have kids), and a letter from 1949 that states "The origin of the movement or the cause started more than thirty years ago." which would put the real John Frum in the 1910s somewhere rather then the 1930s that is currently claimed by the believers.--Professor Phantasm (talk) 12:23, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
And that argument will start to gain some traction just as soon as ole Phil starts preaching the good news of John Frum. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 12:32, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Sarcasm doesn't help as this is a perfectly valid method in anthropology. I should mention that even the article on James the Just acknowledges Paul uses the exact same Greek word ("adelphos" ie brother) in 1 Corinthians 15:6) so either Jesus had one huge family (more than five hundred brothers) or the word is not being used in the biological sense. Q.E.D.--Professor Phantasm (talk) 12:39, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
The Historicity of Jesus (which is what this concerns) is not anthropology. it's history. And round here, "Q.E.D." usually translates to "I have no idea what I'm talking about" so I would advise not ending your comments with that tired old canard. Also, your sidetrack about the etymology of "adelphos" doesn't address my point. Finally, your argument about it isn't even coherent. Just being a Greek word doesn't mean it can only be used in one sense, every single time it's used. For crying out loud, my 5-year old could figure that one out. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 13:18, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
As the article on anthropology itself points out over in Europe is is sometimes "grouped under other related disciplines, such as history." In fact, even in the United States there are fields that directly connect anthropology with history. I would go so far as to say given what the many versions of the Christ Myth theory try to do (ie get into the minds of the Christians of 1st to 4th century) that Ethnohistory and Historical anthropology are more the fields in play here then straight up history.--Professor Phantasm (talk) 18:06, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

The Greek term "ἀδελφός" has several different meanings, depending on context. See: http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.1:7:22.LSJ:

  • 1) "son of the same mother", "brother"
  • 2) "kinsman", "tribesman"
  • 3) "colleague", "associate", "member of a college"
  • 4) "term of address, used by kings... esp. in letters...as a term of affection, applicable by wife to husband"
  • 5) "brother (as a fellow Christian)", "of other religious communities, e.g. Serapeum"
  • 6) metaphorically, "fellow".
  • 7) In adjective form, "brotherly or sisterly"
  • ) In adjective form, "of anything double, twin, in pairs".

The feminine form is "ἀδελφή", which also has multiple meanings. See: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=a)delfh/

  • 1) "sister"
  • 2) "kinswoman"
  • 3) "term of endearment", ; "applied to a wife"

Since the term is still in use in Modern Greek, I would assume you are aware that you can call just about anyone "brother". Did you thing that the popular Greek song "Αδέρφια μου, αλήτες, πουλιά" (1970), “My Brothers, Footloose Tramps, and Birds” was talking about biological siblings? Dimadick (talk) 13:25, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure who you're responding to. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 13:35, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Professor Phantasm and his/her definition of "adelphos" as brother. Dimadick (talk) 14:45, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
User:Professor Phantasm, please note that at the top of the page is a banner that says This page is not a forum for general discussion about personal beliefs, apologetics, or polemics. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article so discussing Prince Phillip, John Frum,natives of Tanna, or what you think the word "brother" means, does not belong here.Smeat75 (talk) 15:21, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Its not "my" definition and these are not my points either. Read some of Carrier's 2014 On the Historicity of Jesus. Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN 978-1-909697-49-2 (you know the only freaking peer reviewed Christ myth book out there) and blog comments on material he missed finding regarding his book before trying to invoke nonsense. The John Frum connection (as well as the Prince Phillip one) is on pages 9-10 and 160. Carrier goes the route of a gloss that was inserted into the main text at a later date in addition to the other reading of "brothers" as alternative hypothesizes.--Professor Phantasm (talk) 18:05, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
If you're just here to argue that mythicism is real, I know an admin that would be happy to topic ban you. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 21:28, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Appropriate for Wikipedia?

"The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory, supported by few tenured or emeritus specialists in biblical criticism or cognate disciplines." Does not seem to me to be a balanced comment whatever the evidence. "specialists in biblical criticism" is surely a biassed sample. Hughwill (talk) 12:36, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Does not seem to me to be a balanced comment whatever the evidence. How it seems to you, me or any other editor is irrelevant. What is stated by reliable sources is what matters, and the bit you quoted is stated by multiple reliable sources.
"specialists in biblical criticism" is surely a biassed sample. No, it is not. "Criticism" in that sentence does not mean what you think it means. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 12:48, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
What ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants says is correct. 'Biblical criticism' is an academic field, in which many leading experts are explicitly non-Christian, and have published widely on aspects of biblical criticism going against a religious view. No bias whatsoever. All this sentence say is that almost every expert in the relevant field consider it a fringe theory, just as almost every biologist consider intelligent design a fringe theory, almost every geographer consider flat earth a fringe theory etc. Jeppiz (talk) 15:23, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
Far too much certainty there. I know you believe it's justified, but many see it differently. HiLo48 (talk) 04:16, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Believe what is justified? ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 12:52, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
My issue is when you go through the material on how "Christ myth theory" is defined it is not all in the 'Jesus didn't exist as a human being' camp.--Professor Phantasm (talk) 12:01, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
We finally have a clear definition after years of arguing about this. "In the peer-reviewed scholarly Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Daniel N. Gullotta" states that "The Christ myth theory is "the view that the person known as Jesus of Nazareth had no historical existence." See WP:RS and especially the section WP:SOURCETYPES "When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources." We do not argue with reliable sources here and the Gullota quote is exactly that, we just reference the reliable sources. If you want to dispute them you have to start your own blog or go to another website.Smeat75 (talk) 13:43, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
when you go through the material on how "Christ myth theory" is defined it is not all in the 'Jesus didn't exist as a human being' camp.[citation really needed] ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 14:19, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Bart Ehrman (who we cite in the article as a reliable source) states that a Jesus who existed but "had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity" would also qualify as part of the Christ Myth. So a Jesus who preached a form of Judaism that Paul and others turned into Christianity (Remsburg's position) or someone who took over an already existing movement (ala Michael O. Wise or Israel Knohl) would both quality as Christ Myth theories. Eddy and Boyd's 2007 Jesus Legend conflates the idea of Jesus didn't exist (at all) with Jesus existed but the Gospel account is so legendary that the actual man is totally different but just on this side of recognizable; they also state a work by Wells that clearly accepts the Gospel Jesus as an actual person was in the same world as those who side Jesus didn't exist as a human being. Side note, Mike Bird, who serves on the editorial board for the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, stated "I can tell you that the Jesus mythicist nonsense would never get a foot in the door of a peer-reviewed journal committed to the academic study of the historical Jesus." So here was have a person on the editorial board of the journal you are presenting clearly stating that his journal is bias against the "Jesus mythicist nonsense" position.--Professor Phantasm (talk) 19:46, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
I would have been happy with just a reference to Ehrman. Yeah, I guess that's true. Good job. As for the rest of your comment: Yeah, I would certainly hope that everyone on the editorial board of a journal that we regularly used is biased against nonsense. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 21:27, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Professor Phantasm, what's the source for the Mike Bird quote? --Akhilleus (talk) 01:28, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
It is here - [7]. Thanks Bruce, some of it should be referenced in the article.Smeat75 (talk) 11:19, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment To state the obvious: A person on an editorial board saying that something would not get into a peer-reviewed journal could of course express a bias, but is much more likely to just state the obvious fact that no serious academic journals accept speculative conspiracy theories. As a member of five editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals myself (absolutely nothing to do with religion) I would never say that anything would not get into the journal because I dislike the idea, but I would definitely say so about non-scholarly conspiracies by amateurs. Most academics would. You would not expect Lancet or Nature to give space to a flat-earth proponent either. Not because of any bias, just because of the non-existent quality of the non-scholarship behind. Before accusing Mike Bird of any bias, it needs to be firmly established that he expressed opposition to an opinion regardless of the quality of the scholarship behind (that really would be unsuitable bias) rather than the much more likely reason, that he simply stated that conspiracy theories by amateurs are unlikely to make it into any peer-reviewed journal. Jeppiz (talk) 12:49, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Fringe theory is utterly inappropriate here and WP:UNDUE. I tried a compromise edit, but it was reverted. The sample of "Biblical Scholars" used for the source of fringe theory is clearly biased. I preferred to merely remove "fringe theory" and leave the same meaning with a compromise edit because religion by its nature has elements that are articles of faith and are not, and I feel should not be, subjected to the standards required by science. Fringe theory implies science. Specifically, fringe theory implies pseudoarchaeology, pseudohistory and/or pseudoscience. The fringe theory article and many, many sources tie it to the consensus of all scientists and historians, not just "biblical scholars". I don't believe the average reader would like to see this turned into a scholarly article with the view of all scientists. There are interesting and involved scientists NOT included in the article like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, Daniel Dennett, Peter Singer, et al. who have scientific credentials that make those used in the article seem laughable and positions that refute any mention of "fringe theory" in an encyclopedic article.

Is it easier and more useful to the reader to change "The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory, supported by few tenured or emeritus specialists in biblical criticism or cognate disciplines" to something like "The Christ myth theory is not supported by the majority of tenured or emeritus specialists in biblical criticism or cognate disciplines" or do we have to clarify by encompassing all of the scholarly views and determine which is the scholarly consensus among all involved scholars and not just biblical scholars. I propose the former is much easier and encyclopedic than the latter. 2600:1700:1111:5940:D9F6:63D1:857A:104 (talk) 20:17, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

Nope, calling it "fringe" is being generous. I really think it's time (again!!) to create a faq. I have the references but not too much time (there is a serious illness in my family and it's taking up 99% of my time). If anyone agrees that a faq is needed, let me know and I can provide a whole host of references. Bill the Cat 7 (talk) 22:11, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
Uhh, no it is not generous. It is bias and undue and the only way this stands is by framing the argument within only the view of biblical scholars. This article is not the discussion of the Christ as a myth among biblical scholars. If it was, that would be fine, but the title would need to be changed. Each person I mentioned is a scholar, they happen to be atheists, and each has written about the historicity of Christ. Richard Dawkins closes a lengthy article with "In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable." [1], in the Washington Post no less. Richard Dawkins' views, and he is far from fringe, are widely watched, widely cited and often agreed with by the academic community. Framing the argument to only the scholars (biblical of course) that support this nonsensical "fringe view" is intellectually dishonest. 2600:1700:1111:5940:D9F6:63D1:857A:104 (talk) 22:32, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
You could not be more wrong. At Wikipedia, we always strive to give an accurate representation of the academic consensus. What people with no qualifications in a certain believe is utterly irrelevant. No matter how many neonazis believe there was no Holocaust, we report what historians say. No matter how many celebrities claim the earth is flat, we ignore it. This article is no exception. Richard Dawkins is a biologist. He is as credible to discuss the historicity of Jesus as a biblical scholar is to discuss biology. Being famous is no argument for credibility. If you believe we should apply complete different standards here and start to give preference to "celebrities with opinions" rather than academic expertise in the field, then you don't understand Wikipedia. Jeppiz (talk) 22:46, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
I have already heard this argument and actually you could not be more wrong. He is one of the world's leading experts on Atheism, which is certainly a branch of religious studies/theological philosophy. He is widely cited, widely quoted and publishes extensively in the field, so yes, he is an expert. So the standards problem, is not a standards problem at all, he meets the standard as do all the individuals I mentioned. I have no need to make this another atheism versus Christianity article or be involved with anything that becomes a battleground. I do have a concern with an encyclopedia calling a fairly widely held secular view as "fringe" without qualifiers. That is all. I am fine with removing it, or qualifying it like "The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory among Christians," or "The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory among biblical scholar," or ""The Christ myth theory is a fringe theory among theologians,". Any of those works great. BTW, that was the quickest proving of Godwin's Law I have ever seen. 2600:1700:1111:5940:D9F6:63D1:857A:104 (talk) 23:32, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
I don't want to be rude, but to be somewhat blunt: a fact remains a fact regardless of whether you understand it or not. If you wish to think that a popular author with no academic the training in the field is an expert because he's popular, then you're wrong. Plain and simple. And that a view is fairly widely held (an unproven claim) is utterly irrelevant. Creationism is a widely held view among both Muslims and Christians, we still do not try to pass it of as credible. All you show in your post above is that you don't understand academia, and Wikipedia policies. Again, I don't mean to be rude, but this is getting somewhat tedious. Your personal beliefs do not trump academic consensus. Jeppiz (talk) 00:51, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
And one more thing: kindly refrain from that old "atheism vs Christianity"-argument. This is about academia vs conspiracy theories. We have countless articles contradicting Christianity, and rightly so. On numerous topics academic consensus clashes with Christian belief and we rightly go for the academic view. That is what we are doing in this article ad well, regardless of whether it's contrary to your beliefs. At least have the honesty to stop using blatantly false arguments to gain sympathy. Jeppiz (talk) 00:57, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Conspiracy theories and nazis, well done! Wikipedia requires WP:COMPETENCE not rhetoric and nonsense 2600:1700:1111:5940:D9F6:63D1:857A:104 (talk) 01:40, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
There is nothing in your argument to address what I said. Needless to say, I made a rough comparison to show there are many different groups who may not agree with what Wikipedia says, nothing else. You are right that we required competence. As it's borderline insulting to invoke it, I was hesitant to do so, but as you chose to go there I guess it's ok. Competence is required here. By continuously arguing that we should adhere to laymen with no training in the field over academics, or resort to what you claim is popular opinion over academics, you have made it very clear you do not understand how Wikipedia works. Furthermore, we have been over these exact same arguments for a decade now, nothing new here. Jeppiz (talk) 01:46, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
It is incorrect to say, as the IP does, that the sources that reject the Christ myth theory are "biblical scholars" or theologians. The question "Was there ever such a person as Jesus?" is not a matter of religion but of history, and historians consider the question absurd as there is more evidence for Jesus' existence than almost anyone from antiquity. For instance, as stated in the article "Paul L. Maier, former Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University and current professor emeritus in the Department of History there has stated "Anyone who uses the argument that Jesus never existed is simply flaunting his ignorance".Smeat75 (talk) 02:52, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

WP:TLDR; I like (love!) the CMT, but it's obvious that it is fringe. Period. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:07, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

"there is more evidence for Jesus' existence than almost anyone from antiquity." hahaha, that is absurd. if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. 2600:1700:1111:5940:D9F6:63D1:857A:104 (talk) 02:44, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
Paul L. Maier is a Christian apologist and served as the Vice President of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. Quoting him is a really biased argument and the crux of the problem here. Using only Christian historians to label Christ Myth as fringe is completely biased. If you introduce any historians who says it is unclear or uncertain that Christ existed due to the lack of evidence outside one religious book, the article gatekeepers have it thrown out because that person won't be a Christian historian. (IF they figured out Jesus never existed, they are really unlikely to be Christians, and Christian Historian or Theologian is even less likely) This article is silly and biased and it will never change like all the other terribly written religious articles. 71.136.189.245 (talk) 19:21, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
If you introduce any historians who says it is unclear or uncertain that Christ existed due to the lack of evidence outside one religious book, the article gatekeepers have it thrown out - No historians who say that have ever been thrown out of this article for the very good reason that there aren't any.Smeat75 (talk) 19:14, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

I think the "objectivity" of this article can be nicely exemplified by the simple fact that the article highlights the quote by Ehrman who is claiming the six-day creationist analogy, but the very relevant comment by Davies that the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth is rather fragile, and a recognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability is buried in an inappropriate place. I think that Davies even wrote this as a reaction to such bold claims by Ehrman [that have obviously nothing in common with a sober scholarly approach].Jelamkorj (talk) 19:55, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

@Jelamkorj: Actually Ehrman's book on the subject was very thorough and states flatly that from all CMT-proponents known to him at most two have relevant education, forget about paid teaching credentials in Bible scholarship. Jesus is more documented that Alexander the Great, one being a mighty emperor while the other an underclass preacher. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:04, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
I have quite a different opinion than you, Tgeorgescu, but this does not matter; this is not a discussion forum for our opinions. My point is that the reaction of Prof. Davies to Ehrman (Davies, Philip (August 2012) "Did Jesus Exist?" Citation quote 16 in Article) would be naturally appropriate to be highlighted in the respective place, when the editors have decided that Ehrman's derogatory remarks must be there. In normal scholarship it is the sober scholarly arguments what matters. But yes, "New Testament studies is not a normal case" as prof. Davies puts it. In this sense it might be indeed good that Article also demonstrates how non-scholarly some official scholars express themselves, but it would be then also appropriate to show that not all of them are "Ehrman-like".Jelamkorj (talk) 14:51, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
Quote from the article by Philip Davies in which he refers to the "rather fragile" historical evidence for Jesus -[8] "Am I inclined to accept that Jesus existed? Yes, I am." Smeat75 (talk) 16:33, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
Yes, but this does not address the substance of my comment. It is unclear why a reference to Davies appears in the section "Christ myth theorists". He should be quoted in the section "Scholarly reception", by making clear that he is inclined towards (the basic) historicity but at the same time he finds the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth rather fragile and says that a recognition that his (Jesus') existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability. At the moment, such scholarly voice is clearly suppressed in the Article. That's all.Jelamkorj (talk) 20:00, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/18/did-historical-jesus-exist-the-traditional-evidence-doesnt-hold-up/

David Fitzgerald

In the section "Other modern proponents: there has been a sentence for some time apparently David Fitzgerald has self-published several works in defense of the Christ myth theory, including Nailed: 10 Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All (2010), and Jesus: Mything in Action, Vols. I–III (2017). I didn't notice it until just now when another editor added The first, a pop-historical book, is the author's summary of objections to historicity in favor of a largely unformulated mythicist position. Relying principally on Carrier's exposition of Doherty's thesis, Mything in Action further builds on the criticisms of historicity (as well as presenting a case to condemn the Jesus Studies academic community) to produce a speculative account of the evolution of the Christian narratives about Jesus.

David Fitzgerald appears to be non-notable and we do not use self-published material on WP articles except in very rare cases. The first sentence is unreferenced and so is the material just added, it seems to be WP:OR. I am removing the whole section, it would need citations to WP:RS to be reinstated.Smeat75 (talk) 16:18, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Thomas Thompson isn't a mythicist

Under 'modern proponents', this page includes Thomas Thompson. The problem is, Thompson isn't a modern proponent of mythicism at all, and so I've removed his section completely. Thompson has written;

"Bart Ehrman has recently dismissed what he calls mythicist scholarship, my Messiah Myth2 from 2005 among them, as anti-religious motivated denials of a historical Jesus and has attributed to my book arguments and principles which I had never presented, certainly not that Jesus had never existed." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wallingfordtoday (talk • contribs) 02:27, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

From what I see on Google Books, it's more complicated than that:

holds that such important biblical figures as King David and Jesus of Nazareth are little more than literary tropes or metaphors, with roots found deep in ancient Near Eastern literature, rather than actual historical figures.

It's true that the other review says:

Unlike many in the historical Jesus debate, Thompson is not interested in disputing Jesus’ existence per se.

— [9]
So, it's kind of complicated what his own position is, in respect to CMT. I have not read his book, but I guess that his position is "Jesus has probably existed, but his real person did not have much to do with Christianity", which is a position that Ehrman ascribes to CMT. Tgeorgescu (talk) 01:50, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
Correct, that's his position. I.e. he's a minimalist, not a mythicist.Wallingfordtoday (talk) 02:03, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
For Ehrman Thompson is a CMT cheerleader. Ehrman has defined what he means by mythicism and, yes, that includes some really existing Jesus which is only vaguely related to Christianity. Tgeorgescu (talk) 02:16, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
Who cares if Ehrman misunderstands Thompson's position? Thompson has explicitly written in print that he's not promoting mythicism. End of discussion.Wallingfordtoday (talk) 02:22, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
It depends upon how we define "mythicism". So, yes, I would agree that Ehrman is wrong that Thompson has denied the real existence of Jesus. But he is right that Thompson is a cheerleader of mythicism, if by mythicism we mean what I have stated above. Tgeorgescu (talk) 02:32, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
According to Thompson's definition of mythicist (and pretty much everyone else's definition: someone who thinks Jesus didn't exist), Thompson is not a mythicist. This is like insisting that Bart Ehrman is a mythicist if someone defines mythicism as not accepting the historicity of Jesus as outlined, detail by detail, in the Gospels.Wallingfordtoday (talk) 02:45, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

I've been saying for years that Thompson doesn't belong in this article as he has specifically denied, with a certain amount of indignation I believe as he probably resents being lumped in with a lot of cranks, being a mythicist as the article stated until yesterday " he rejected the label of "mythicist" and has said "This doesn't mean that I say that Jesus never existed". But I cannot fight and struggle about everything in this article so I have let it pass.Perhaps now however we can reach consensus to omit him from this article.Smeat75 (talk) 02:56, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

This is like insisting that Bart Ehrman is a mythicist if someone defines mythicism as not accepting the historicity of Jesus as outlined, detail by detail, in the Gospels- yeah, that's exactly what several editors to this page have tried to make it say over the years.Smeat75 (talk) 03:07, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Horribly written page, major cleanup needed

This page is, quite frankly, awful. It's endlessly tedious, there are countless redundant citations (each of which have one giant quote in them), numerous unreliable references (lataster), etc, etc, etc. Major cleanup is needed. I've already begun, having removed some 20,000 characters and, though it's a little better, not by a substantial amount in the least.Wallingfordtoday (talk) 02:13, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

You are right Wallingfordtoday but I think you are quite new to WP and do not realise how contentious this article is and how strongly the "Christ myth" is likely to be defended by its true believers. Good luck to you though and yes there are all sorts of quotes from and citations to non-scholars such as Lataster and Earl Doherty which really ought to be removed. Far, far too much emphasis on the views of Richard Carrier also which carry zero academic credibility.Smeat75 (talk) 03:02, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
If I can get your support any moment a true believer tries to revert my edits, despite them contradicting WP's policies, I'm sure I can be quite successful. No need to give up because of a few zealots.Wallingfordtoday (talk) 03:04, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
Well I didn't really give up, just concentrated on a few areas. You may not believe it but it is only within the last year that I succeeded in getting the definition of "Christ myth" to be "the idea that Jesus had no historical existence". Before that there were a lot of editors who tried to make it say "the idea that the Jesus of the gospels never existed" and then since almost every scholar says that there is no evidence that Jesus turned water into wine or walked on water or flew up into the air for a chat with Elijah, etc., they are all Christ mythicists. Then there is an incessant stream of editors coming here to say "Biblical scholars are all prejudiced because they are Christians" even though not all of them are Christians and these editors try to do an inquisition on every quoted historian or scholar to see if they are a Christian and then attempt to remove them from the article on that basis, it gets very wearisome but I have insisted that the scholarly consensus, ie that this idea is absolute malarkey, is represented here.Smeat75 (talk) 04:14, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
Good to hear. I should also note that WP:BIASED is quite clear that biased sources are certainly allowed to be used and that biased scholars can often be more rigorous than unbiased ones. Not to mention the fanatical bias of Price, Carrier, and other mythicist acolytes. I should also note that there's a major presence of non-Christian scholars in NT scholarship.Wallingfordtoday (talk) 04:28, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
No, Earl Doherty is not to be removed. My finger is itching to hit "rollback," but we'll see what you end-up with. But be aware of WP:BRD. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:42, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
Yup, newbies should avoid editing aggressively; in general, all editors should avoid editing aggressively. Sometimes POV-pushers could see aggression where there is none, but I was not speaking about such cases. Tgeorgescu (talk) 08:35, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

I've restored the bullit-list with an overview of the mythicist-arguments; the corresponding subheaders with the elaborate arguments; and the info some modern proponents. Wells is indispensable; his subsection may be trimmed (Voorst?), but not removed. Cleaning-up is not the same as distorting the structure of an article. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 09:39, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

I've summarized Wells's section, since I suppose it's reasonable enough that he gets to stay. Otherwise, I've re-removed the bullet list as I've simply never seen any other article that has a "bullet-list" of the main propositions of an article. The positions of mythicism can all be combined into one paragraph. As far as I'm concerned, my editing on the page is essentially complete. The only thing I still dispute, which we can discuss here, is having headings for the "modern proponents" section. There are no named headings for early proponents, 20th century proponents, and critics of mythicism, so why should this section have any named headings for each and every single proponent?Wallingfordtoday (talk) 16:37, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
A bullit-list reads easier. See WP:OTHERSTUFF for the argument I've simply never seen any other article that has a "bullet-list" of the main propositions of an article. But if you want anexample: Noble Eightfold Path. The introductory paragraph, and the four main arguments, could somehow be integrated, but not in a rush. Subheadings for the modern proponents is indeed somewhat arbitatrary, but it also makes it easier to read. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 16:52, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
The issue I have is that I don't think the bullet-list makes it easier to read. In fact, it seemed completely tedious when I first saw it. The four points should be integrated into something that reads "First, .... Second, .... Third, ... and fourth ..." Noble Eightfold Path doesn't have a bullet-list of arguments anywhere that I can tell, and keeping in subheadings for modern proponents, once again, is rather inconsistent. As far as I'm concerned, in fact, the modern proponents section is still quite long and deserves further summarizing into a single section without divisions like the early proponents, 20th century proponents and critics.Wallingfordtoday (talk) 18:03, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

For the record: If I can get your support any moment a true believer tries to revert my edits, despite them contradicting WP's policies, I'm sure I can be quite successful. No need to give up because of a few zealots. is a breach of WP:GOODFAITH, and betrays a WP:BATTLEFIELD mentality. So far for Wiki-policies... Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:15, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

I have a feeling that canvassing support, let alone organising armies, may be against the rules :) PiCo (talk) 06:22, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Definition

Smeat, I just noticed this under Description in the summary template (is that what it's called? 0 the box to the right of the main article): "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." That seems to me to go against your definition in the lead - certainly most scholars, so far as I can tell, would say that Jesus had no intention of founding Christianity, he saw himself as a good Jew, nor is it easy to tell what parts of the gospels are historically accurate.PiCo (talk) 22:31, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Yup, I think mythicism is the thesis that the historical Jesus either did not exist or is wholly irretrievable to historians. That seems to me a more accurate definition. You'd be amazed that this makes some Christian fundies belong in the boat of mythicism. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:47, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
I guess you mean the infobox PiCo ( I can tell you don't edit classical music or opera articles, there have been bitter feuds about infoboxes for years in that area). That definition in the infobox is the second sentence of the lead. The first sentence is not, of course, "my"definition, we agreed a while back by consensus to have it as the first definition of the "Christ Myth." It is an exact quote from a review of Carrier by Daniel Gullota in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus in 2017. The second sentence is from a "popular book" by Bart Ehrman. WP:RS says When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources and the Gullota quote is exactly that. I would most strongly object to it being removed. We didn't take out the Ehrman quote as of course you can see it is at the top of the page, twice.Smeat75 (talk) 23:25, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
I am still unhappy with this "definition". The actual proponents of the Theory use a different definition. Why do we use a perverted definition from a critic of the Theory rather than the definition of the people who invented the Theory itself - especially when the critic's definition is misleading? Wdford (talk) 09:36, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
We follow WP policy and I have quoted the policy. The definition is from an "academic and peer-reviewed source" which is preferred to others that are not by policy.WP:RS Smeat75 (talk) 12:41, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Smeat75, I think the lead sentence could be tightened up: ""the view that the person known as Jesus of Nazareth had no historical existence."[2] Alternatively, in terms given by Bart Ehrman as per his criticism of mythicism,[3] "the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity." The idea that "the historical Jesus did not exist" isn't an alternative to "Jesus of Nazareth had no historical existence", and you could just go with the second one. PiCo (talk) 01:49, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't agree and I have said why twice. The first sentence is a quote from a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, identified as the best kind of source in WP:RS. If one has to go, which I don't see why it does, it should be the second.Smeat75 (talk) 02:02, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
WP:SOURCETYPES states that "When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources." It goes on in the very next sentence to say that "However, some scholarly material may be outdated, in competition with alternative theories, or controversial within the relevant field." Smeat is cherry-picking here.
While peer-reviewed publications are indeed "usually" the most reliable sources, WP:SCHOLARSHIP does also warn that peer-review is NOT a guarantee of reliability. In this particular case, it is clear and obvious that Gullota is NOT a reliable source for the definition of the Christ Myth Theory.
  • Firstly, Smeat's reference is actually from a review of a Carrier article. Carrier himself has demolished this review, accusing Gullotta of having misunderstood the argument, of deceiving his readers, of drawing illogical conclusions and indeed of criticizing Carrier's work without even reading it properly. See here [10]. That speaks strongly against this Gullotta article as a reliable source on this particular subject.
  • Second, while Doherty does not have Gullotta's credentials in Christian history in general, Doherty is the world's leading expert on Doherty's own theory. I continue to object to the misuse of wikipolicy to assert that a critic of a theory is better able to define that theory than the people who formulated the very theory itself.
  • Third, Gullotta's blatant mis-definition exhibits elements of a strawman attack. By falsely defining the Christ Myth Theory as something patently ridiculous, he makes it easier for critics to demolish it. That borders on intellectual fraud.
The policy requires that we use "reliable sources", rather than "academic peer reviewed sources", and where the two are not the same thing, we must therefore choose "reliable" over "peer-reviewed". Thus, while the policy is obviously correct that academic and peer-reviewed publications are "usually" the most reliable sources, it is clearly NOT the case with this particular example, and we should not pretend the opposite. Doherty is the best authority for explaining Doherty's theory, and where a third party blatantly misrepresents Doherty's clear written statement, we must recognize that misrepresentation for what it is. Wdford (talk) 14:40, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
Of course Carrier doesn't like Gulotta's review as it tears Carrier's ideas to shreds. The rest of your post is the same stuff you repeated on here over and over, what was it, four years ago? and is no more persuasive now than it was then. And this is not an article about "Doherty's theory". The idea that there was never such a person as Jesus goes back to late 18th-century France with the works of Constantin François Chassebœuf de Volney and Charles-François Dupuis and 19th century German Bruno Bauer who became the first author to systematically argue that Jesus did not exist, as the article states.Smeat75 (talk) 23:36, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
Quote-note 1, right after Ehrmann, gives the full quote for Ehrmann, citing Doherty link:

“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.”

That's more or less the same, but not conclusive; Ehrmann's additional summary Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity also captures Wells. I think it's quite sufficient. See also Christ myth theory#Christ myth theorists, which describe three stances taken by 'mythicists': 'minimal mythicists' (my phrase), "Jesus atheism" (Price's term), "Jesus agnosticism" (also Price's term). Given this variety of stances, it seems to me that there is no "exact" definition, only a "descriptive" definition. But maybe we can/could add these three stances to the lead? Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:08, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
I've added a description of these three stances to the lead; I hope that this helps. Best regards, Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:18, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
The corrections I made to the subsection on Christ myth theory#David Strauss provide a clue about two somewhat different 'definitions': '(Jesus) Christ is a myth' (Strauss' 'third way'); alternately, 'Jesus did not exist' (the rationalist, even anti-Christian activist approach (which looses the fine nuances of Strauss' third way, I think)). Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 09:17, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
Carrier demolishes Gullotta's review – the fact that Smeat believes Gullotta "tears Carrier to shreds" is merely indicative of Smeat's lack of neutrality.
The summary added to the lead by Joshua Jonathan is a big improvement. I feel it should be added to the first paragraph, in place of the inaccurate "definition" from Gullotta. The fact that Gullotta's "definition" is so very different from the summary of the actual Mythicist positions, indicates once again that Gullotta is a poor source for this issue. Wdford (talk) 12:52, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

The main thesis is that the Jesus (Christ) of Paulus and the Gospels is first and foremost myhtology, and not, or lamost not, based on history. Bromiley (1995) says more or less the same. I've replaced Gullotta by Bromiley:

the story of Jesus is a piece of mythology, possessing no [...] substantial claims to historical fact.

Better? At least, Bromily is published by BRILL; not bad, with repsect to WP:RS. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 21:33, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Certainly the best opening, so far. – 2605:A000:160C:83E1:100C:75B8:CB44:F8E5 (talk) 22:43, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
I will accept that. It is essential that the Ehrman quote stays.Smeat75 (talk) 23:06, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
Much better - thank you Joshua. Wdford (talk) 09:56, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Notes & quotes

Not exactly sure how to proceed. Mention all notes? Or only the ones that may stay? I'll just start, and see what happens. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 10:43, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Ehrman_def

[Per] Jesus mythicism, Earl Doherty, defines the view as follows: [...] link

Seems okay to me. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 10:43, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Gullotta.2017.fringe

Gullotta (2017), p. 312: "[Per Jesus mythicism] Given the fringe status of these theories, the vast majority have remained unnoticed and unaddressed within scholarly circles." link

Seems okay to me. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 10:46, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

That seems like an important enough point to be in the body of the article rather than a footnote to me.Smeat75 (talk) 18:38, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Jesus.Biography

Three quotes on the basic facts of Jesus life link. Seems quite usefull to me. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 11:07, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Lataster

According to Lataster, "the only thing New Testament scholars seem to agree on is Jesus' historical existence". (source: Lataster, Raphael (December 18, 2014). "Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn't add up". The Washington Post. WP Company LLC. Retrieved May 2, 2018.)

Nice punch. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 11:09, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

argument.from.silence

link seems helpfull to me. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 19:11, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

"mix.Wells.1999.1999.2009" - "Eddy2007_p202" - "Price2003_p350"

"mix.Wells.1999.1999.2009" explains "supernatural entity; may be usefull. Idem for "savior figure" "Eddy2007_p202" "Price2003_p350". Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:39, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

"Johnson.2010.241" - Pauline epistles

"Johnson.2010.241" lists the 'authentic' letters of Paul. seems usefull to me. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 14:37, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

"vridar_Couchoud-112" - influence of Couchoud

"vridar_Couchoud-112", statement by Doherty on the influence of Couchoud. Seems relevant to me. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 15:35, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

"Ehrman_angel-187"

"Ehrman_angel-187" gives links to blogs by Ehrmann on this topic; worthwhile reading. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:35, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

"mix.Price.2010.103.Price.2002" - Gnosticism

"mix.Price.2010.103.Price.2002" Price argues that early Christianity contained Jewish Gnostic elements. Looks like an eyebrow-raising statement to me, so some additional info may be warranted here. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:48, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Mystery cults - differences

link solid, I think; it gives additional information contra CMt; good for WP:NPOV. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 08:12, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

"Ehrman.2012.p11_15" and "Casey2014" - Thompson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory#cite_note-Ehrman.2012.p11_15-272 "Ehrman.2012.p11_15"] and "Casey2014", on regarding Thompson as a mythicist; for obvious reasons. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:48, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

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