User:BruceGrubb/Christ Myth theory

The term Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory, Jesus Myth, and Christ Myth) does not have an exact and agreed-upon meaning and has been used to describe various concepts:

1. Jesus originally being an allegoric myth to which historical details possibly including an actual obscure 1st century teacher of the same name were added later,

2. A c100 BCE Jesus being made to seem to be of the 1st century through legendary processes,

3. Gospel Jesus being a composite character formed out of both mythic and historical elements that may or may not include an actual 1st century teacher named Jesus,

4. There was there was indeed a 1st century teacher named Jesus but that the New Testament accounts tell us little to nothing about the man.

5. The New Testament account of the life of Jesus is so filled with myth and legend as well as internal contradictions and historical irregularities that at best no meaningful verification regarding Jesus of Nazareth (including his very existence) can be extracted from them.

6. The myth that either grew up around or was applied to the historical Jesus

Source of confusion

The confusion regarding the meaning of the term can seen in the lack of clarification of three terms: myth (including mythicist), historical, and fictional.

Meaning of "myth" and "mythicist"

Main article: Mythology

Folklorists define myths as "tales believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds or parts of the world, and with extra-human, inhuman, or heroic characters". However, other fields sometimes use the term "myth" otherwise. For example, the Oedipus story is often called a myth even though for folkorists it falls into the category of folktale. "Myth" and "legend" have been used as synonyms, as with the stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood. "Myth" has also been used to in reference to stories of the Spanish Inquisition using torture devices such as the Iron maiden and Choke pear and the power it supposedly had in medieval Spain.

Citing David Strauss and John Fiske, John Remsburg stated in his 1909 book, The Christ, that there were three kinds of myths: Historical, Philosophical, and Poetical.

• A Historical myth is "a real event colored by the light of antiquity, which confounded the human and divine, the natural and the supernatural. The event may be but slightly colored and the narrative essentially true, or it may be distorted and numberless legends attached until but a small residuum of truth remains and the narrative is essentially false. A large portion of ancient history, including the Biblical narratives, is historical myth. The earliest records of all nations and of all religions are more or less mythical."

• "A Philosophical myth is an idea clothed in the caress of historical narrative. When a mere idea is personified and presented in the form of a man or a god it is called a pure myth. Many of the gods and heroes of antiquity are pure myths."

• "A Poetical myth is a blending of the historical and philosophical, embellished by the creations of the imagination. The poems of Homer and Hesiod, which were the religious text books of the ancient Greeks, and the poetical writings of the Bible, which helped to form and foster the Semitic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, belong to this class."

Remsburg stated that "(i)t is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish a historical from a philosophical myth. Hence the non-agreement of Freethinkers in regard to the nature of the Christ myth. Is Christ a historical or a philosophical myth? Does an analysis of his alleged history disclose the deification of a man, or merely the personification of an idea?"

Remsburg pointed to Strauss' "Leben Jesu" as an example of the historical and the ideas of Thaddeus B. Wakeman as an example of philosophical regarding Jesus.

In 1946 Archibald Robertson published Jesus: Myth or History?. There he defined mythicist as simply being "the upholder of the theory that Jesus is a myth" and acknowledged that in his 1900Christianity and mythology the mythicist "(John M.) Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus perhaps more than one having contributed something to the Gospel story."

In 1989 the then senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine Gorden Stein wrote "Not all mythicists agree with each other about what they view as the correct explanation of the origin of Christianity and of the Jesus myth. (...) The mythicist denies the supernatural aspect of Jesus. He may also deny the "great moral teacher" aspect of Jesus. Some mythicists would also try to deny that even an ordinary man (a traveling magician, perhaps) existed and served as a basis for the myth that predated him and grew around him. Other mythicists would claim that whether a mere man named Jesus ever existed at the time then the Christian era began is an impossible thing to either prove of disprove today"

Meaning of historical

Biblical scholar I. Howard Marshall writes that there are "two views of the historical Jesus which stand at the opposite ends of a spectrum of opinion about him." At one extreme is the view that Jesus never existed, and that the gospels describe an essentially fictional person. At the other extreme is the view that the gospels portray events exactly as they happened, and each event depicted in the New Testament is the literal truth. Marshall also explains that the term "historical Jesus" itself has two meanings: that Jesus existed, rather than being a totally fictional creation like King Lear or Dr. Who, or that the Gospels accounts give a reasonable account of historical events, rather than being unverifiable legends such as those surrounding King Arthur. Because of this slipperiness in the meaning of "historical Jesus", Marshall states "We shall land in considerable confusion if we embark on an inquiry about the historical Jesus if we do not pause to ask ourselves exactly what we are talking about."

Meaning of fiction

In the Jesus: Fact or Fiction? debate between Dr. Robert Price and Rev. John Rankin, Price states "there are four senses in which Jesus Christ may be said to be a 'fiction:'"

1. "the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual", i.e. the Gospel is little more than "a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic 'Uncle Sam' figure."
2. "the "historical Jesus" reconstructed by New Testament scholars is always a reflection of the individual scholars who reconstruct him" to the point that "even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn't one any more."
3. "Jesus as the personal savior, with whom people claim, as I used to, to have a 'personal relationship' is in the nature of the case a fiction, essentially a psychological projection, an 'imaginary playmate.'"
4. "Christ is a fiction in that Christ functions, in an unnoticed and equivocal way, as shorthand for a vast system of beliefs and institutions on whose behalf he is invoked."

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