I’ll take a leaf out of many an RS essay here – in talking
about mythicism, I’m going to start with Wikipedia.
If you look at the
Wikipedia entry for Jesus, and
compare it to the entries for other figures such as
Julius Caesar,
Socrates, or
Pythagoras, you might, if
you read carefully, notice something interesting: there is a section devoted to
the question of Jesus’ existence, and to the “mythical view”, that Jesus did
not exist. In fact, there is a separate, and fairly extensive, wiki page
devoted to the topic.
But there is nothing similar for Caesar, Socrates, or Pythagoras: their
existence does not appear to be in doubt. So is the existence of Jesus less
certain than that of these historical figures?
There is a group of people who say that it is. These people
are most commonly known as mythicists, and the Virtually University course I am
hoping to run (if enough people sign up for it – subtle hint) is going to be
about the mythicism and the question of Jesus’ existence.
One important thing to understand is that when we discuss Jesus’
existence, we mean the historical existence of a person called Jesus of
Nazareth. Saying that Jesus existed historically is not necessarily the same as
saying that every story found in the New Testament or every Christian belief
about Jesus is true, just as saying that Muhammad lived is not necessarily the
same as saying that every Muslim belief about him is correct. Since the 18th
century, Biblical scholars have attempted to use historical methods to detach
the “real”, historical Jesus from the Christian portrayal of him, with varying
degrees of success – or perhaps more accurately, with varying degrees of
failure.
Mythicists, however, claim that there is no historical
person to detach: they deny that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived. For mythicists, the
person of Jesus is nothing more than a religious or literary invention of the
Christian church. As evidence for their views, mythicists point to the
unreliability of the Christian New Testament as a historical source, the
relative lack of ancient references to Jesus from non-Christian sources, and to
similarities between the figure of Jesus and characters of Pagan and Jewish
mythology.
It needs to be stressed here that mythicism is rejected by
the overwhelming majority of Biblical scholars: by this I mean people who have
advanced qualifications in and/or teach Biblical Studies at University level. In
turn, Mythicists are usually critical of these scholars, arguing that the
academic discipline of “Biblical Studies” is compromised, because the methods
used by Biblical scholars are flawed, and because Bible scholarship reflects an
implicit pro-Christian bias. In fact, one prominent mythicist, Richard Carrier,
has rather charming described the whole discipline of New Testament studies as
“f****d”. Please note: his words, not mine.
I’ll be open here and say that I’m not a fan of mythicism as
a theory or the way that mythicists go about their work. I even have a few
problems with the name “mythicism”, and think that
other
terms should be used instead.
Nonetheless, mythicism raises an interesting set of
questions: about the Bible, about how we study Jesus from a Historical
perspective, and about how and why certain groups of people deny the consensus position
of the academic community. For me, this last question is perhaps the most
interesting one, and for A level students, I think it touches on the important
problem of how to tell the difference between legitimate academic views and
fringe or conspiracy theories.
So... that’s it for my shameless plus for my Virtually
University offering. I’ll post some more about my views on mythicism before or
during Virtually University. If you’d like to find out a bit more about the
mythicist case, you can check out the
website of Earl Doherty, a
well-known mythicist writer. If you want to understand how New Testament
scholars feel about mythicism, you might wish to look
here
or
here.
