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Citations Demonstrating Scholarly Support for the CMT

section is for references only
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.


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

(1) FROM BOOKS AND JOURNALS:

  • One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Jesus of Nazareth in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist.
Maurice Casey, Ph.D. Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? (Bloomsbury 2014), book cover.
  • [B]y the method I have deployed here, I have confirmed our intuitions in the study of Jesus are wrong. He did not exist. I have made my case. To all objective and qualified scholars, I appeal to you all as a community: the ball is now in your court.
Richard Carrier, Ph.D. On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2014) p. 618.
  • In my estimation the odds Jesus existed are less than 1 in 12,000. Which to a historian is for all practical purposes a probability of zero For comparison, your lifetime probability of being struck by lighting is around 1 in 10,000. That Jesus existed is even less likely than that. Consequently, I am reasonably certain there was no historical Jesus… When I entertain the most generous estimates possible, I find I cannot by any stretch of the imagination put the probability Jesus existed is better than 1 in 3.
Richard Carrier, Ph.D. On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2014) p. 600.
  • I am not making a Mythicist argument here, but I do think that the Mythicists have discovered problems in the supposed common-sense of historical Jesus theories that deserve to be taken seriously.
Stevan Davies, Ph.D. Spirit Possession and the Origins of Christianity (Bardic Press 2014) p. 4.
  • As Bart Ehrman himself has recently confessed, the earliest documentation we have shows Christians regarded Jesus to be a pre-existent celestial angelic being. Though Ehrman struggles to try and insist this is not how the cult began, it is hard to see the evidence any other way, once we abandon Christian faith assumptions about how to read the texts. The earliest Epistles only ever refer to Jesus as a celestial being revealing truths through visions and messages in scripture. There are no references in them to Jesus preaching (other than from heaven), or being a preacher, having a ministry, performing miracles, or choosing or having disciples, or communicating by any means other than revelation and scripture, or ever even being on earth. This is completely reversed in the Gospels. Which were written decades later, and are manifestly fictional. Yet all subsequent historicity claims, in all subsequent texts, are based on those Gospels.
     We also have to remember that all other evidence from the first eighty years of Christianity's development was conveniently not preserved (not even in quotation or refutation). While a great deal more evidence was forged in its place: we know of over forty Gospels, half a dozen Acts, scores of fake Epistles, wild legends, and doctored passages. Thus, the evidence has passed through a very pervasive and destructive filter favoring the views of the later Church, in which it was vitally necessary to salvation to insist that Jesus was a historical man who really was crucified by Pontius Pilate (as we find obsessively insisted upon in the letters of Ignatius). Thus to uncover the truth of how the cult began, we have to look for clues, and not just gullibly trust the literary productions of the second century.
Richard Carrier, Ph.D. “Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt: Should We Still Be Looking for a Historical Jesus?” Bible and Interpretation (August 2014). [1] (Cf. Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee [HarperOne, 2014])
  • A superbly qualified scholar will insist some piece of evidence exists, or does not exist, and I am surprised that I have to show them the contrary. And always this phantom evidence (or an assurance of its absence) is in defense of the historicity of Jesus. This should teach us how important it is to stop repeating the phrase “the overwhelming consensus says…” Because that consensus is based on false beliefs and assumptions, a lot of them inherited unknowingly from past Christian faith assumptions in reading or discussing the evidence, which even secular scholars failed to check before simply repeating them as certainly the truth. It’s time to rethink our assumptions, and look at the evidence anew.
     There are at least six well-qualified experts, including two sitting professors, two retired professors, and two independent scholars with Ph.D.’s in relevant fields, who have recently gone on public record as doubting whether there really was a historical Jesus. I am one of them.
Richard Carrier, Ph.D. “Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt: Should We Still Be Looking for a Historical Jesus?” Bible and Interpretation (August 2014). [2]
  • ”Genesis is no longer regarded as scientific or historical for the most part. The exodus is mostly a myth. There’s no indisputable trace of David or Solomon from their time, and no trace of Jesus--after centuries of searching in his supposed environment. So, if you look from 1900 to 2014, you’ll see that most biblical scholars don’t believe in the historicity of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Solomon, maybe David. . . You can see what a big difference there is.
     “So, is it Jesus’ turn now? Well, maybe. See, doubt about Jesus is real, doubt about his bodily existence as recorded in the New Testament. More scholars are [now] willing to challenge this historicity openly.
     “There are three possible positions when it comes to Jesus. You can be a ‘historicist,’ you can be a ‘mythicist,’ or you can be an ‘agnostic’. . . An agnostic says: ‘Well, the data are insufficient to settle the question one way or the other.’ That’s where I am.”
Hector Avalos, Ph.D. “A Historical or Mythical Jesus? An Agnostic Viewpoint.” Lecture given at the University of Arizona, June 7, 2014. [3]
  • Perhaps no historical figure is more deeply mired in legend and myth than Jesus of Nazareth. Outside of the Gospels—which are not so much factual accounts of Jesus but arguments about His religious significance—there is almost no trace of this simple Galilean peasant who inspired the world’s largest religion.
Reza Aslan Ph.D, “Five Myths About Jesus,” The Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2013.
  • [T]he Bible accounts of Jesus are stories rather than history. The accounts are indeed history-like, shaped partly like some of the histories or biographies of the ancient world.
Fr. Thomas Brodie Ph.D, founder of the Dominican Biblical Centre, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2012) p. xiii.
  • Our conversation was relaxed until it somehow turned to my work, and she asked what it was that most concerned me about the Bible.
     Eventually I said, "It’s just about Jesus."
     Her questions were gentle, but she did want to know more. I was physically holding myself together, and looking down at the carpet. Then looked up.
     "He never really existed," I said.
     "Oh, that’s what I believed since I was a little girl," she responded.
Fr. Thomas Brodie Ph.D, founder of the Dominican Biblical Centre, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2012) p. 41.
  • [Dr. Everard Johnston, lecturer at the Seminary of St John Vianney, visited Dr. Brodie in 2004 and took his time in perusing Brodie’s book. On connections between 1 Corinthians and the Old Testament, he muttered:] "In the same order… the same order apart from minor modifications."
     [Brodie writes:]We turned to the gospels, discussing the extent to which they too are a product of the rewriting. Suddenly [Johnston] said, "So we’re back to Bultmann. We know nothing about Jesus."
     I paused a moment. "It’s worse than that."
     There was a silence.
     Then [Johnston] said, "He never existed."
     I nodded.
     There was another silence, a long one, and then he nodded gently, "It makes sense."
Fr. Thomas Brodie Ph.D, founder of the Dominican Biblical Centre, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix 2012) p. 36.
  • [S]urely the rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth should be tested to see what weight it can bear, or even to work out what kind of historical research might be appropriate. Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case… [R]ecognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability… In fact, as things stand, what is being affirmed as the Jesus of history is a cipher, not a rounded personality.
Prof. Philip Davies, "Did Jesus Exist?" in The Bible and Interpretation journal (Aug. 2012) [4]
  • So what do we have here by way of evidence for Jesus? No certain eyewitness accounts, but a lot of secondary evidence, and of course the emergence of a new sect and then a religion that demands an explanation. As the editors of Is This the Carpenter rightly recognize (and Mogens Müller’s essay in the volume especially), we really have to go through Saul/Paul of Tarsus. This is because his letters are the earliest datable evidence for Jesus, and because, if we accept what he and the author of Acts say, his writing is almost certainly the only extant direct testimony of someone who claims to have met Jesus (read that twice, and see if you agree before moving on). We need not (and should not) trust everything S/Paul says or accept what he believes, but explaining Christian origins without him is even more difficult than explaining it without some kind of Jesus. But in S/Paul we are not dealing with someone who knew the man Jesus (his letters would have said so). There are three accounts in Acts of an apparition (chs 9, 22, 26), including a voice from heaven. If this writer is correct—and the letters of S/Paul do not confirm the story in any detail—the history of the figure of the Jesus of Christianity starts with a heavenly voice, a word (cf. prologue to Fourth Gospel) perhaps on a road, even to Damascus…
Prof. Philip Davies, "Did Jesus Exist?" in The Bible and Interpretation journal (Aug. 2012) [5]
  • The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence.
Stephen Law, Ph.D (Heythrop College, University of London). “Evidence, Miracles, and the Existence of Jesus.” Faith and Philosophy 2011. Vol. 28:2, April 2011.
  • There is one rebuke regularly leveled at the proponents of Jesus mythicism. This is the claim--a myth in itself--that mainstream scholarship (both the New Testament exegete and the general historian) has long since discredited the theory that Jesus never existed, and continues to do so. It is not more widely supported, they maintain, because the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and this evidence has been presented time and time again. It is surprising how much currency this fantasy enjoys, considering that there is so little basis for it.
Earl Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man (Age of Reason Publications, 2009) p. viii.
  • Once upon a time, someone wrote a story about a man who was God. We do not know who that someone was, or where he wrote his story. We are not even sure when he wrote it, but we do know that several decades had passed since the supposed events he told of. Later generations gave this storyteller the name of “Mark,” but if that was his real name, it was only by coincidence.
Earl Doherty, Jesus Neither God nor Man (Age of Reason Publications, 2009) p. 1.
  • It is quite likely, though certainly by no means definitively provable, that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, Jesus is Dead (American Atheist Press 2007), p. 272.
  • Jesus was eventually historicized, redrawn as a human being of the past (much as Samson, Enoch, Jabal, Gad, Joshua the son of Nun, and various other ancient Israelite Gods had already been). As a part of this process, there were various independent attempts to locate Jesus in recent history by laying the blame for his death on this or that likely candidate, well known tyrants including Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and even Alexander Jannaeus in the first century BCE. Now, if the death of Jesus were an actual historical event well known to eyewitnesses of it, there is simply no way such a variety of versions, differing on so fundamental a point, could ever have arisen. . . Thus I find myself more and more attracted to the theory, once vigorously debated by scholars, now smothered by tacit consent, that there was no historical Jesus lying behind the stained glass of the gospel mythology. Instead, he is a fiction.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, Jesus is Dead (American Atheist Press 2007), pp. 274–75.
  • So, then, Christ may be said to be a fiction in the four senses that (1) it is quite possible that there was no historical Jesus. (2) Even if there was, he is lost to us, the result being that there is no historical Jesus available to us. Moreover, (3) the Jesus who “walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own” is an imaginative visualization and in the nature of the case can be nothing more than a fiction. And finally, (4) ‘Christ’ as a corporate logo for this and that religious institution is a euphemistic fiction, not unlike Ronald McDonald, Mickey Mouse, or Joe Camel, the purpose of which is to get you to swallow a whole raft of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors by an act of simple faith, short-circuiting the dangerous process of thinking the issues out to your own conclusions.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, Jesus is Dead (American Atheist Press 2007), p. 279.
  • It appears, as Price suggests, that most of what is known about Jesus came by way of revelation to Christian oracles rather than by word of mouth as historical memory. In addition, the major characters in the New Testament, including Peter, Stephen, and Paul, appear to be composites of several historical individuals each, their stories comprising a mix of events, legend, and plot themes borrowed from the Old Testament and Greek literature.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), cover flap.


  • Why are the gospels filled with rewritten stories of Jonah, David, Moses, Elijah, and Elisha rather than reports of the historical Jesus? Quite likely because the earliest Christians, perhaps Jewish, Samaritan, and Galilean sectarians like the Nasoreans or Essenes, did not understand their savior to have been a figure of mundane history at all, any more than the devotees of the cults of Attis, Jercules, Mithras, and Osiris did. Their gods, too, had died and risen in antiquity.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), pp. 66–67.
  • [H]e may have begun as a local variation on Osiris, with whom he shows a number of striking parallels, and then been given the title “Jesus” (savior), which in turn was later taken as a proper name, and his link to his Egyptian prototype was forgotten. Various attempts were made to place his death—originally a crime of unseen angelic or demonic forces (1 Cor. 2:6–8; Col. 2:13–15; Heb. 8:1–5)—as a historical event at the hands of known ancient rulers. Some thought Jesus slain at the command of Alexander Jannaeus in about 87 BCE, others blamed Herod Antipas, other Pontius Pilate. Some thought he died at age thirty or so, other thought age fifty. During this process, a historical Jesus became useful in the emerging institutional consolidation of Christianity as a separate religious community, a figurehead for numerous legitimization myths and sayings. The result was that all manner of contradictory views were retroactively fathered onto Jesus, many surviving to puzzle gospel readers still today.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), p. 67.
  • [The epistles attributed to Paul] neither mention nor have room for a historical Jesus who wandered about Palestine doing miracles or coining wise sayings.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), p. 68.
  • As Helmut Koester and James M. Robinson have shown in Trajectories through Early Christianity, the compilers and readers of such gospels [as the Gospel of Thomas] dis not revere a savior Jesus so much as a wise man Jesus, a Socrates, Will Rogers, or Abe Lincoln. Theirs was not a superman who walked on water or ascended into heaven.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), p. 68.
  • One of the chief points of interest in [The Generations of Jesus/Toledoth Jeshu] is its chronology, placing Jesus about 100 BCE. This is no mere blunder, though it is not hard to find anachronisms elsewhere in the text. Epiphanius and the Talmud also attest to Jewish and Jewish-Christian belief in Jesus having lived a century or so before we usually imagine, implying that perhaps the Jesus figure was at first an ahistorical myth and various attempts were made to place him in a plausible historical context, just as Herodotus and others tried to figure out when Hercules “must have” lived.
Robert Price, Ph.D, Th.D, The Pre-Nicene New Testament (Signature Books 2006), p. 240.
  • The blunt truth is that seismic research by a few specifically neutral scholars, most notably Orientalists and Egyptologists, has been deliberately ignored by churchly authorities for many decades. Scholars such as Godfrey Higgins (1771–1834)m author of the monumental tome Anacalypsis, the British Egyptologist Gerald Massey (1828–1908), and more recently, and most important, the already cited American specialist in ancient sacred literature Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1881–1963) have made it clear in voluminous, eminently learned words that the Jewish and Christian religions do indeed owe most of their origins to Egyptian roots.
Rev. Tom Harpur, M.A., The Pagan Christ (Thomas Allen 2005, Kindle edition) Chapter 1.
  • Whether the gospels in fact are biographies--narratives about the life of a historical person--is doubtful. Their pedagogical and legendary character reduces their value for historical reconstruction. New Testament scholars commonly hold the opinion that a historical person would be something very different from the Christ (or messiah), with whom, for example, the author of the Gospel of Mark identifies his Jesus (Hebrew: Joshua = savior), opining his book with the statement: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, God’s son.”
Thomas Thompson, PhD. The Messiah Myth (Basic Books 2005) p. 3.
  • The most striking feature of the early documents is that they do not set Jesus’s life in a specific historical situation. There is no Galilean ministry, and there are no parables, no miracles, no Passion in Jerusalem, no indication of time, place or attendant circumstances at all. The words Calvary, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee never appear in the early epistles, and the word Jerusalem is never used there in connection with Jesus. Instead, Jesus figures as a basically supernatural personage who took the “likeness” of man, “emptied” then of his supernatural powers (Phil. 2:7)--certainly not the gospel figure who worked wonders which made him famous throughout “all Syria” (Mt. 4:24).
G. A. Wells, Can We Trust the New Testament? (Open Court 2004) p. 2.
  • This astonishingly complete absence of reliable gospel material begins to coincide, along its own authentic trajectory, and not as an implication of some other theory, with another minimalist approach to the historical Jesus, namely, that here never was one. Most of the Dutch Radical scholars, following Bruno Bauer, argued that all of the gospel tradition was fabricated to historicize an originally bare datum of a savior, perhaps derived from the Mystery Religions or Gnosticism or even further afield. The basic argument offered for this position, it seems to me, is that of analogy, the resemblances between Jesus and Gnostic and Mystery Religion saviors being just too numerous and close to dismiss. And that is a strong argument.
Robert M. Price, Ph.D, Th.D. The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (Prometheus 2003) p. 350.
  • My analysis in this book has led me to conclude that all the earliest Christian documents, first and foremost among them Paul’s Letters, present Jesus as somebody who had lived and died a long time ago. Hence neither Paul nor any of his contemporaries could have had any experience of the earthly Jesus, nor of his death. To them the crucifixion and resurrection were spiritual events, most likely in the form of overwhelming revelations or ecstatic visions. It was this heavenly Jesus that was important to these earliest Christians, just as the heavenly, spiritual world was vastly superior to the material one. Many scholars have considered Paul’s obvious lack of interest in Jesus’ earthly life as surprising and hard to explain. . .
Alvar Ellegård, Ph.D. Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ (Overlook Press 1999) p. 4.
  • [T]he Gospels’ picture of Jesus as a Palestinian wonderworker and preacher is, as I shall show, a creation of the second century AD, when their Church had to meet challenges caused by competing movements inside and outside their church. An important way to meet the new situation was to create a history for that church, a myth of its origin. The central ideas in that myth were that Jesus was man who had lived and preached his Gospel in Palestine at the beginning of the previous century, and that he had been crucified and raised to heaven around AD 30. None of this mythical history is supported by any first-century writings, whether Christian or not. . .
Alvar Ellegard, Ph.D. Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ (Overlook Press 1999) pp. 4–5.
  • There is no credible evidence indicating Jesus ever lived. This fact is, of course, inadequate to prove he did not live. Even so, although it is logically impossible to prove a universal negative, it is possible to show that there is no need to hypothesize any historical Jesus. The Christ biography can be accounted for on purely literary, astrological, and comparative mythological grounds. The logical principle known as Occam’s razor tells us that basic assumptions should not be multiplied beyond necessity. For practical purposes, showing that a historical Jesus is an unnecessary assumption is just as good as proving that he never existed.
Frank R. Zindler, “How Jesus Got a Life.” American Atheist journal, June 1992.
  • [I]t is hardly to be denied that in reifying, personalizing and finally historicizing the Christ principle in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christian theology has diverted the direction of man's quest for the blessedness of contact with deity away from the inner seat of that divinity in man himself and outward to a man in history.
Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D. India’s True Voice (Academy Press 1955) p. 7.
  • The Christians of the third and fourth centuries were plagued to distraction by the recurrent appearance of evidence that revealed the disconcerting identity of the Gospel narrative in many places with incidents in the "lives" of Horus, Izdubar, Mithra, Sabazius, Adonis, Witoba, Hercules, Marduk, Krishna, Buddha and other divine messengers to early nations. They answered the challenge of this situation with desperate allegations that the similarity was the work of the devil!
Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D. Who Is This King of Glory? (Academy Press 1944) p. 35.
  • For the heavenly Christ subsequently to receive the name Jesus implies. . . that the form of the salvation myth presupposed in the Philippians hymn fragment [Phil 2:5–11] did not feature an earthly figure named Jesus. Rather, this name was a subsequent honor. Here is a fossil of an early belief according to which a heavenly entity. . . subsequently received the cult name Jesus. In all this there is no historical Jesus the Nazorean.
P.L. Couchoud, “The Historicity of Jesus.” The Hibbert Journal 37 (1938) p. 85.
  • [T]he urgency for historicizing Jesus was the need of a consolidating institution for an authoritative figurehead who had appointed successors and set policy.”
Arthur Drews, Ph.D. The Christ Myth (1909; rpt. Prometheus 1998) pp. 271–72.
  • The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb.
Gerald Massey, The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ (Pioneer Press 1884) p. 395.
  • “It is amazing that history has not embalmed for us even one certain or definite saying or circumstance in the life of the Saviour of mankind… there is no statement in all history that says anyone saw Jesus or talked with him. Nothing in history is more astonishing than the silence of contemporary writers about events relayed in the four Gospels.”  
Frederic W. Farrar, Ph.D. The Life of Christ (Cassell, London, 1874)

(2) SCIENTIFIC SUPPORT FOR THE CHRIST MYTH THEORY:

  • On the inaccurate portrayal of Pilate and Jesus’ trial in the gospels:
     The Gospels portray Pontius Pilate as an honest but weak-willed governor who was strong-armed by the Jewish authorities into sending a man he knew was innocent to the cross. The Pilate of history, however, was renowned for sending his troops onto the streets of Jerusalem to slaughter Jews whenever they disagreed with even the slightest of his decisions. In his 10 years as governor of Jerusalem, Pilate eagerly, and without trial, sent thousands to the cross, and the Jews lodged a complaint against him with the Roman emperor. Jews generally did not receive Roman trials, let alone Jews accused of rebellion. So the notion that Pilate would spend a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser, let alone grant him a personal audience, beggars the imagination.
     It is, of course, conceivable that Jesus would have received an audience with the Roman governor if the magnitude of His crime warranted special attention. But any “trial” Jesus got would have been brief and perfunctory, its sole purpose to officially record the charges for which He was being executed.
Reza Aslan Ph.D, “Five Myths About Jesus.” The Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2013.
  • Showing how Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, about the year 110 CE fought the contemporary opinion that Jesus was not physical:
[Jesus] suffered all these things for us; and He suffered them really, and not in appearance only even as also He truly rose again. But not, as some of the unbelievers, who. . . affirm, that in appearance only, and not in truth, He took a body of the virgin, and suffered only in appearance, forgetting as they do, Him who said, ‘The Word was made flesh’ [Jn 1:14]. . . I know that he was possessed of a body not only in His being born and crucified, but I also know that he was so after His resurrection, and believe that He is so now.
The Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (Eerdmans 1985) p. 87.
  • Showing that Paul probably did not know any historical Jesus:
    The New Testament epistles can be read quite naturally as presupposing a period in which Christians did not yet believe their savior god had been a figure living on earth in the recent historical past. Paul, for instance, never even mentions Jesus performing healings or even as having been a teacher.
Robert M. Price, Ph.D, Th.D. Jesus is Dead (American Atheist Press, 2007) p. 274.
  • On the lack of archaeological evidence for Bethlehem at the time of Jesus:
But while Luke and Matthew describe Bethlehem of Judea as the birthplace of Jesus, “Menorah,” the vast database of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) describes Bethlehem as an “ancient site” with Iron Age material and the fourth-century Church of the Nativity and associated Byzantine and medieval buildings. But there is a complete absence of information for antiquities from the Herodian period--that is, from the time around the birth of Jesus. . . [S]urveys in Bethlehem showed plenty of Iron Age pottery, but excavations by several Israeli archaeologists revealed no artifacts at all from the Early Roman or Herodian periods. . . Furthermore, in this time the aqueduct from Solomon’s Pools to Jerusalem ran through the area of Bethlehem. This fact strengthens the likelihood of an absence of settlement at the site, as, according to the Roman architect Vitruvius, no aqueduct passes through the heart of a city.
Archaeologist Aviram Oshri, Ph.D. “Where Was Jesus Born?” Archaeology, Nov.–Dec. 2005, pp. 42–43.
  • In favor of jettisoning the passage known as the "Testimonium" of Josephus (1st century CE Jewish writer) as an early witness for the existence of Jesus:
Codex 76 contains Photius' first review of Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. Although Photius reviews the sections of Antiquities in which one would expect the Testimonium to have been found, he betrays no knowledge of any Christian connections being present in his manuscript.
Frank R. Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew (American Atheist Press, 2003) p. 48.
  • On the gospel stories being adaptations of Old Testament stories:
As for the gospel stories, as distinct from the sayings, Randel Helms and Thomas L. Brodie have shown how story after story in the gospels has been based, sometimes verbatim, on similar stories from the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint...
[E]ven the account of the crucifixion itself is a patchwork quilt of (mostly unacknowledged) scripture citations rather than historical reportage.
Robert M. Price, Ph.D, Th.D. Deconstructing Jesus (Prometheus 2000) pp. 257–58.
  • On the life of Jesus corresponding to the worldwide Mythic Hero Archetype:
[A]s folklorist Alan Dundes has shown, the gospel life of Jesus corresponds in most particulars with the worldwide pardigm of the Mythic Hero Archetype as delineated by Lord Raglan, Otto Rank, and others. Drawn from comparative studies of Indo-European and Semitic hero legends, this pattern contains twenty-two typical, recurrent elements.
Robert M. Price, Ph.D, Th.D. Deconstructing Jesus (Prometheus 2000) p. 259.
  • On “Jesus” being entirely non-physical in the Book of Revelation:
While Revelation may very well derive from a very early period. . . the Jesus of which it whispers obviously is not a man. He is a supernatural being. He has not yet acquired the physiological and metabolic properties of which we read in the gospels. The Jesus of Revelation is a god who would later be made into a man. . .
Frank R. Zindler, “Did Jesus Exist?” American Atheist journal, Summer 1998.
  • On the town of Nazareth not having existed in the time of Jesus:
Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament, nor do any ancient historicans or geographers mention it before the beginning of the fourth century. The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing of Nazareth. Josephus, who wrote extensively about Galilee (a region roughly the size of Rhode Island) and conducted military operations back and forth across the tiny territory in the last half of the first century, mentions Nazareth not even once--although he does mention by name 45 other cities and villages of Galilee. This is even more telling when one discovers that Josephus does mention Japha, a village which is just over a mile from present-day Nazareth! Josephus tells us that he was occupied there for some time.

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

  • On Paul’s silence regarding an earthly Jesus:
[The Pauline letters] are so completely silent concerning the events that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events were not known to Paul who, however, could not have been ignorant of them if they had really occurred.
     These letters have no allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth. They never refer to a place of birth (for example, by him ‘of Nazareth’). They give no indication of the time or place of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter’s denial of his master. (They do, of course, mention Peter, but do not imply that he, any more than Paul himself, had known Jesus while he had been alive.)
     These letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to have worked, a particularly striking omission since, according to the gospels, he worked so many. . .
     Another striking feature of Paul’s letters is that one could never gather from them that Jesus had been an ethical teacher. . .
G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Prometheus 1988) pp. 22–23.
  • In favor of eliminating the "brother of Jesus" passage as found in (the 1st century CE Jewish writer) Josephus, and therefore removing James as a witness to the historicity of Jesus:
On Ant. [Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus] 20:200 we conclude by suggesting that the phrase 'the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ' did not originate with Josephus. Rather, a Christian anxious to capitalize on the positive light in which an early Christian was placed, took the opportunity to insert these words.
Prof. Graham H. Twelftree (Regent Univ. Sch. of Divinity, Virginia), Ph.D. "Jesus in Jewish Traditions," in Gospel Perspectives: The Jesus Tradition Outside the Gospels, (Sheffield Academic Press, 1982) p. 300.
  • Doubt regarding the existence of Jesus was current in early Christian times:
Justin [Martyr], in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as saying, “You follow an empty rumor and make a Christ for yourselves. . . If he was born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown.”
L. G. Rylands, Ph.D. Did Jesus Ever Live? (London 1936), p. 20.
  • Showing that a Christian writer of the 2nd cent. CE (Justin Martyr) himself drew strong parallels between Christianity and Paganism:
And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. And if we assert that the Word of God was born of God in a peculiar manner, different from ordinary generation, let this, as said above, be no extraordinary thing to you, who say that Mercury is the angelic word of God. But if any one objects that He was crucified, in this also He is on a par with those reputed sons of Jupiter of yours, who suffered as we have now enumerated.
Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165 CE), First Apology, ch. 21-22.

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

  • Brodie’s book [Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus] doesn’t have to convince everyone. What it does accomplish is help establish that a serious scholar can indeed take a mythicist position. It helps show that mythicism is an intellectually viable position even if not universally convincing.
Tom Dykstra, author of Mark: Canonizer of Paul. Blog (July 20, 2014) [6]
  • Throughout Ehrman’s book [Did Jesus Exist?], the one theme that he keeps repeating over and over again is his assertion that no reputable New Testament scholars deny the historicity of Jesus. I pointed out some of the problems with this view already in my last post, and now Brodie’s book certainly blows that assertion out of the water. Brodie is not some half-educated interloper in the field of New Testament scholarship; he is an established biblical scholar who heads an institution devoted to biblical scholarship and has published widely on topics in New Testament studies… A more realistic and constructive approach is to see our coming to terms with a nonhistorical Jesus as the modern counterpart to medieval Christians’ coming to terms with the realization that the earth is not the center of the universe.
Tom Dykstra, author of Mark: Canonizer of Paul. Blog (Dec. 25, 2012) [7]
  • Ehrman falsely claims in his book (DJE?) that there are no hyper-specialized historians of ancient Christianity who doubt the historicity of Jesus. So I named one: Arthur Droge, a sitting professor of early Christianity at USCD. . . And of those who do not meet Ehrman’s irrationally specific criteria but who are certainly qualified, we can now add Kurt Noll, a sitting professor of religion at Brandon University (as I already noted in my review of Is This Not the Carpenter) and Thomas Brodie, a retired professor of biblical studies (as I noted elsewhere). Combined with myself (Richard Carrier) and Robert Price, as fully qualified independent scholars, and Thomas Thompson, a retired professor of some renown, that is more than a handful of well-qualified scholars, all with doctorates in a relevant field, who are on record doubting the historicity of Jesus. And most recently, Hector Avalos, a sitting professor of religion at Iowa State University, has declared his agnosticism about historicity as well. That makes seven fully qualified experts on the record, three of them sitting professors, plus two retired professors, and two independent scholars with full credentials. And there are no doubt many others who simply haven’t gone on the record. We also have sympathizers among mainstream experts who nevertheless endorse historicity but acknowledge we have a respectable point, like Philip Davies." --Richard Carrier, "Ehrman on Historicity Recap" (2012 Freethought Blogs,[8]
  • But it's not that Earl [Doherty] advocates lunacy in a manner devoid of learning. He advocates a position that is well argued based on the evidence.
Prof. Stevan Davies, CrossTalk post 5438 (Feb. 26, 1999). [9]
  • “We must frankly admit that we have no source of information with respect to the life of Jesus Christ other than ecclesiastic writings assembled during the fourth century.” 
Dr. Constantin von Tischendorf. Codex Sinaiticus. (British Library, London)

Thomas Brodie; general comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dubious Value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to square one

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

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

‎

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citing sources with additional annotation

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

Quote farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CMT includes the origin of Christianity

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

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

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

What Doherty actuall writes: Doherty, Earl (September 2009). Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus. Age of Reason Publications. pp. vii–viii. ISBN 978-0-9689259-2-8. [The Mythical Jesus viewpoint is] the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and [also rejecting the Q source advanced by Wells] that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition

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

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

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

Article length

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

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

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

removed secular evidence section

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

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