The myth theory of Jesus, which claims that Jesus Christ was not a real person but a congeries of myths, is popular among humanists, especially in the United States. But the theory’s popularity flies in the face of academic credibility and is an embarrassment to serious humanist scholarship. It needs, as a matter of urgency, to be abandoned. What follow are the six main reasons why. In a short article like this I am attempting no more than a manifesto-style declaration rather than any extended argument, which I have done elsewhere.

1. Theological thinking and confirmation bias

A key factor in any credible intellectual theory is that it can be supported by scholars who might disagree about a range of other issues. In this way, understanding Jesus as an historical figure is shared by scholars of different persuasions: Christian, Jewish and atheist. It is a conclusion open to anyone who values evidence over prior belief. The myth theory, by stark contrast, is supported only by unbelievers and is an uncomfortable mirror image of the equally narrowly conceived theological Christ construct of the evangelical Christians. The title of a recent defence of the myth called Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists admits this point. It is little to the credit of humanist scholarship if we do not demand the same standard of myth theorists that we demand of theologians, particularly when they are committing the same type of error.

2. The myth theory relies on fallacies and poor argumentation

Not only is mythicist scholarship poorly conceived, it is also poorly argued. It rests, for instance, on a fallacy, often called the excluded middle. This is when two stark alternatives are presented as the only valid choices, when in fact there is a range of options between the two extremes. So, between the extreme at one end of total historicity, advanced by the literalists, we have the opposite extreme, advanced by the mythicists, of total unhistoricity. Evangelical theologians and mythicists agree in disparaging any option between their extreme positions. But it is between those extremes where all the serious scholarship is taking place. All the options scholars are actually looking at involve a living person; a Jew called Yeshua ben Yosef, who made some inflammatory claims, annoyed the Romans and paid the price. It is legitimate scholarship, then, to determine where and when it was that subsequent layers of theology transformed Yeshua ben Yosef into Jesus Christ. But all this legitimate scholarship is banished from consideration by myth scholars, trapped as they are in the vice-like grip of fallacy of the excluded middle.

As well as resorting to fallacious arguments and relying on low quality evidence, myth scholars are in the habit of deprecating evidence that undermines their case. From the very beginning, myth theorists have been too willing simply to dismiss inconvenient biblical passages that referred to an historical Jesus as ‘interpolations’. Of course, many such passages are indeed inauthentic, but not all of them, and not all of the inconvenient ones. To give but one example, one mythicist, when not lacing his work with casual insults of opponents, makes the mistake of discrediting Epistles not written by Paul as ‘forgeries’. (Carrier in Loftus, 299-303) This misunderstands the practice, then common, to attribute something one has written to an earlier, highly respected name. It is nothing more than an ad hominem argument – long recognised as invalid practice – to describe as a forger someone who would have seen their action as a tribute.

Mythicist scholarship also bears some uncomfortably close similarities to conspiracy theory thinking. In Raphael Lataster’s account of Richard Carrier’s work, for which Carrier supplied an approving preface, mythicists alone are bearers of the truth and those who disagree are necessarily dishonest. The probability of a historical Jesus, we are told, is 0.008 percent. Lataster concludes declaring that ‘anyone that (sic) fails to see how the minimal mythicist theory perfectly – at least in the relative sense – fits the evidence ought to leave the discussion.’ (Lataster, p 384)

3. The anti-Semitic implications of the myth theory

Another serious problem with the myth theory is the support it gives, however unwittingly, to anti-Semitism. Scholars have come to speak of ‘supersessionism’, or the willingness to see Jesus as superseding his Jewish roots and context in a Christian over-story. Christ’s mission superseded the narrower interests of the Jews. The ‘New Testament’ superseded the ‘Old Testament’. And so on. Part of the value of the Third Quest for the historical Jesus has been to help challenge the anti-Semitism latent in this sort of approach. But when it dismisses the historicity of Yeshua’s life and thought, the myth theory operates, however unconsciously, just as Christian anti-Semitism does. In the same way evangelicals dismiss Yeshua’s Jewishness by turning him into a celestial saviour, mythicists do the same thing when they turn him into a celestial myth.

4. Myth theory scholarship is irrelevant

Even if all these flaws in argumentation could be addressed, the myth theory is irrelevant to much modern Christian thought. Many prominent theologians today have sidestepped the historicity issue, at least in its more crass versions. They are often willing to concede that the Resurrection was not an historical event. Their focus, rather, is on the ‘theological vision they proclaim’. (Williams, vii) Alvin Plantinga goes one step further, awarding Christians the boon of ‘warranted belief’, which, because it’s Christian belief, doesn’t need to be defended at all. Now, this is a very weak foundation for a grand proclamation, but that’s not the point here. The point is, what can the myth theory say in response? Nothing that matters. If the theologians are conceding the historicity of the Resurrection, then an argument built around questioning the historicity of the Resurrection is not going to amount to much.

5. Myth theory is sterile

A key element in any successful theory is its ability to generate further research that builds on its insights. This the myth theory has signally failed to do. Even scholars sympathetic to the myth theory could do little with it. Paul Kurtz (in The Transcendental Temptation) paid lip service to the theory, while Michael Martin (in The Case Against Christianity) endorsed it more openly. But, significantly, neither of them went on to make any use of the myth theory in their wider critiques of Christianity. More recently, John Loftus’ capable summary of Third Quest scholarship also makes no use of the myth theory. He doesn’t need to. He leaves it to a footnote to observe, correctly, that the vast majority of scholars reject the myth theory, because the dominant theory is simpler. (Loftus, note 6, 338) Bart Ehrman makes a similar point in his demolition of the myth theory. When a theory is unable to offer practical help even to sympathetic scholars, then you know it’s not worth much.

6. Admitting historicity

Perhaps the biggest failing of the myth theory is that it is fatally inconsistent. It is a constant theme through much myth literature, that someone called Jesus may well have existed, but that ‘Jesus Christ’ is still a myth. Richard Carrier admits that Jesus, or several Jesuses were crucified under Pontius Pilate. (Lataster, p 302) And part way through an argument for the lack of historical evidence of Jesus from G A Wells, the reader is surprised then to read: ‘The utmost that is affirmed of him in the late first-century epistles is that he lived in an unspecified past which may have been recent.’ (Wells [1986], p 57) Wells, to his credit, became more willing, and understood the significance of, his acknowledgement of the existence of a historical Jesus. But apart from Wells, mythicists seem quite unaware how damaging this admission of historicity is to their argument. Any theory arguing for a historicised mythology is surely undermined fatally when admitting the existence of an historical person. Either Jesus existed or he didn’t. If Jesus didn’t exist, then the stories about him have to be explained in some way, and some variation of a myth theory may well work. But once it is admitted Jesus did actually exist, in however modest and insignificant way, then we are not dealing with a myth theory. It now becomes a theory about someone who did exist but not in the way commonly understood. But that, of course, is where we started from.The myth theory ends up as a massive diversion; a wandering through the wilderness, punctuated with fanfare and tumult, only to arrive back where it began, having achieved nothing.

Conclusion

The issue here is not that the Christian claims about Jesus are credible; clearly they are not. The most widely held conclusion among scholars (be they Christian, Jewish, atheist or whatever) is that ‘Jesus Christ’ is a bundle of dogmas, beliefs superstitions and wishes built up, around and over, until smothering, a historical person probably known as Yeshua ben Yosef. The entirely Jewish world of Yeshua meant he had no intention whatever of founding a new religion, let alone one as anti-Semitic as Christianity has proved to be. And what Yeshua did believe, about an imminent destruction of Rome and its replacement by the Kingdom of God, never materialized. Yeshua was quickly forgotten and a corpus of belief built up around his name he would not have understood, let alone approved of. The myth theory of Jesus is, at best, a marginal footnote to Jesus scholarship. It relies on poor and invalid methods of arguing, is unwittingly anti-Semitic, is irrelevant to much modern Christian thinking about Jesus, is unable to produce insights that can stimulate further research and lacks the courage of its convictions. Given this, it poses a major impediment to humanist scholarship being taken seriously. We need to wake up and smell the coffee.

Bibliography

Cooke, Bill, Kernel and Husk: The Waning of Jesus in Godzone, Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2104.

Cooke, Bill, ‘It’s time to put the myth theory of Jesus aside’, Free Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 2, February-March 2018, pp 26-29.

Ehrman, Bart, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, New York: HarperOne, 2013.

Kurtz, Paul, The Transcendental Temptation, Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1986.

Lataster, Raphael with Richard Carrier, Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists, [self-published], 2015.

Loftus, John (ed), The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010.

Martin, Michael, The Case Against Christianity, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Plantinga, Alvin, Warranted Christian Belief, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Wells, G A, Did Jesus Exist? London: Pemberton, 1986 [1975].

Wells, G A, “Jesus, historicity of,” in Flynn, Tom (ed), The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007.

Williams, Rowan, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003 [1982].