I decided to dig up the article series Who Wrote the Bible?, after having come across information recently on the history of very early Christianity. Of particular interest is article #4. The other sources I’ve been reading/listening to:
- The documentary The God Who Wasn’t There
- The book/web site Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth
- The “Bible Geek” Bob Price on The Infidel Guy podcast.
These sources all make the points that:
- There is zero contemporaneous mention of Jesus from when he was alive.
- The gospels, the first of which is from Mark, was written around AD 70 or later, decades after Christ, if he really existed, died.
- The only references we have about Christ in those decades between his death and the gospels is from Paul of Tarsus, who wrote voluminously about Jesus, penning many if not most of the books of the New Testament.
- Paul wrote about Jesus as having existed in a purely mythological realm, and never mentioned any of the things we think of as making up Christ’s story, such as Mary, Joseph, Bethlehem, Pontius Pilate, the sermon on the mount, etc., except that he does mention the resurrection and ascension, but speaks of it as if it happened in this mythological realm. He seems wholly unaware even of the concept that Jesus supposedly walked the earth as a man.
- The stories of Jesus’s life from the Gospels all happened to other characters in pagan mythology, long before they happened to Christ, in quite a bit of detail. These characters were Osiris, Dionysus, Mithras, etc., and their stories indicate that somewhere along the line in the intervening decades, pagan mythology got mixed in with Christianity, and became what most people know as Christ’s life. By the way, the Church’s explanation for how these pagan myths were integrated into Christianity is that the devil planted those other stories hundreds of years in advance of Christ to discredit him.
This is mostly a different topic from the existence of Christ, which Cecil wrote about, but I was expecting to see these kinds of things addressed more in this SD article. Are the sources I referenced above pretty credible, and is my summary pretty well accepted by scholars?