Was Jesus Real or a Myth?

Great Debates
1

I’ve been doing a LOT of reading about Jesus, man or myth lately. The evidence overwhelming supports the idea that Jesus at most was a simple completely human man who was a rabbi in a turbulent time when the Jews getting sick of being ruled by Rome; that he went around preaching apocalyptic theology about a new kingdom coming to earth with Israel as its capital that he would be the king of, being the direct heir of David; that Rome viewed all this talk of a new kingdom as being seditious because they believed Jesus was indirectly hinting that this new kingdom would usurp Roman rule and make him the king of the Jews and ultimately all the known world; that the Romans crucified Jesus under the direct order of Pontius Pilate to get rid of a troublemaker; that his apostles were so devastated that they began hallucinating visions of him returning from the dead.

At worst, alternate research demonstrates that there was never a figure called Jesus (in reality there were hundreds of Jesuses roaming the area at the time preaching that they were the Messiah) that the figure Jesus was a conglomeration of various myths and legendary figures that piled one on top of the other borrowed from many sources (fiction like the Odyssey, rumors, circulating stories of dying/rising gods, etc) that were finally compiled by a person we know as Mark roughly 50 years after Jesus’ supposed crucifixion and the other gospels followed from there, each building Jesus to a greater and greater divine figure.

A third theory is a blending of these two theories: Jesus was a man who was crucified and over hundreds of years was built into a dying/rising god by church fathers whose sole intention was to win more and more converts and thus conglomerate their power as powerful heads of a new religion. So they borrowed the concept of eternal torment in hell from the Greek gnostics in order to bludgeon simple stupid peasants into accepting Christianity under threat of burning in hell forever.

My own theory is that Jesus could have been real or he could have been a myth; we just don’t have any secular writings or artifacts from the 1st century that prove a Jesus existed or that all these wildly supernatural events at his crucifixion ever happened.

What makes the idea that Jesus was the Son of God and therefore divine ludicrous is the simple fact that Jesus said no less than three times in the gospels that he would return to earth in the clouds with angels during the lives of his apostles. He never returned. Christian apologists make all sorts of excuses for this failure by saying that he was talking figuratively, not literally; that he was talking about the end times; that he did return but it was in the form of him being “THE kingdom of God” not a literal body, and all other sorts of nonsensical excuses but the fact remains he never returns visibly in the clouds as he said he would. All the apostles including Paul believed they were living in the end times and that Jesus’ return was imminent.

That he never returned makes him a false Messiah, not divine, and certainly not a credible sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind.

2

Your first theory is probably the most likely, although the Romans crucifying Jesus was almost certainly at the behest of the Jewish order. The Romans had little to worry about, given Jesus’ teachings of pacifism and brotherhood. It’s not like he was a military leader openly calling for armed revolt against the Romans.

(By the way, many Jews of the time would have considered Simon Bar Kokhba much more a prototypical Messiah than Jesus ever was.)

Jesus’ main target was actually the Jewish establishment, which he viewed as corrupt. Feeling threatened by the growing rebellion, they may have determined that Jesus “needed to go away.”

The Jesus mythology movement, intriguing though it may be, doesn’t hold much water. It makes little sense to make up the whole story. There seemingly was no motive to do so.

3

You have to be careful with revelatory new ideas, explosive in their potential and devastating to the simple faith of ordinary folk.

4

Have you been reading this MB? The subject has been debated here numerous times, FYI. Here are the last half dozen:

1 2 3 4 5 6

5

This is partially true. I think the Romans might have viewed Jesus, assuming his story is real, as a “stealth rebel”–one trying to stir up sedition covertly using a message of peace to mask a message of revolt, such as “I came not to bring peace but a sword” and other such puzzling statements that contradicted other things he said like “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

They might have tried but the Jesus legend was already halfway along by the time Simon came on the scene.

A mythological Jesus is one of the few ways to explain why all the events portrayed in his life via the gospels can be found in Old Testament stories e.g. slaughter of the innocents and fleeing to Egypt being a retelling of the Moses legend; Jesus walking on water a story from the Odyssey by Homer; dying/rising, virgin birth, 12 disciples; turning water to wine; appearing to disciples after resurrection can all be found in earlier mythologies of Osirus/Horus, Mithras, Dionysius, Romulus, Hercules, Krishna and a dozen others. Earle Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle); Richard Carrier (The Historicity of Jesus) Robert Price (Deconstructing Jesus) and a hundred others have written extensively about the likelihood Jesus was a mythical character borrowed from a dozen other deities. It became such a problem around 300 AD that Christian theologians had to invent the ridiculous excuse that satan knew in advance that Jesus was coming and so went back in time to before Jesus was born in order to set up all these other gods to thwart Jesus’ mission. :smack:

True. One writer I was recently reading correlated the Internet, higher intelligence, and family pressures to stay in Christianity as factors determining whether a person stayed in it or left. Basically, the more intelligent combined with a higher education and lower family pressure to stay predicted a much higher rate of walking away from Christianity compared to the Bible Belt where IQ is lower, opportunities for higher education is lower and peer pressure conspire to keep people in Christianity for life.

6

A fun peer reviewed book by a historian with relevant expertise, arguing that there was no historical Jesus, is On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier.

Carrier himself is quite overly disputatious in tone in his stuff online, but this book almost completely avoids those tonal choices. It really is an extremely interesting and informative read, regardless of how you come down on the merits of his argument.

Here’s a blog entry by a biblical studies guy (working on his PhD I think? But other scholars with blogs regularly link to him) called Why you should read Richard Carrier.

7

I just joined today and I will browse those threads with great interest. Thanks much.

8

For me, the main giveaway that Jesus was a myth is that when you consider that the first writing to come along, the authentic Pauline epistles, Paul gives absolutely no details of Jesus’ life before the supposed Last Supper, although he supposedly had extensive conversations with the apostles about Jesus’ life years before he wrote his first epistle 1st Thessolonians. All of Paul’s theology is his own, not Jesus’. So, in effect, Paul was the creator of Christianity, not Jesus. Jesus was merely a figurehead to hang Paul’s theology on.

9

Also, for me the greatest proof that Jesus was/is a myth is the total inaction of Jesus on his celestial throne in heaven to come here and stop this mass exodus of Christians away from Christianity. I mean if you were a father of 20 children and 19 of them were disowning you wouldn’t you at least inquire as to what the problem was? I believe that every last Christian could leave Christianity, the religion could die out and there would be no appearance by Jesus to stop the extinction of his religion.

10

It’s fairly unlikely that Jesus was a myth. There’s a lot of random stuff that seems completely unnecessary for the story, if you were going to make him up.

You have, for example, Paul claiming to have known nothing of Christianity before the revelation, just before admitting that he had worked as a lawyer prosecuting Christians, back in Jerusalem. We have a meeting overview and various Gnostic documentation stating that James was the successor to Jesus after Jesus’ death, and yet in the Gospels, Peter is announced to be Jesus’ successor, the story largely starts when Peter joins Jesus’ gang, Peter is the only character who tries to help Jesus at his trial, etc. Coincidentally, Peter is the only one of Jesus’ followers who switched sides to join Paul. You have a tale of Paul going to give bags of gold to the Jerusalem church and coming back having gained their approval of his gentile teachings, which discard all the Jewish elements. You have explicit mention that Jesus was a friend or follower of St John the Baptist, of whom Peter was a follower, before leaving for Jesus, before leaving for Paul and St John the Baptist is known as the founder of the Gnostic group, the Mandaeans. He’s also known as the teacher of Simon Magus and Dositheos, both of whom are known as Gnostic teachers, and the Bible feels it necessary to slam those two as “fakes, practicing black magic”, warning the followers of Christianity away from them, but Jesus used “real, white magic”. And then there’s a whole bunch of Gnostic works that cite Jesus as their founder or various of his disciples. More, we know that a few Christian groups were Gnostic within the 1st Century: The Ophites, the Borborites, the Cainites, and the Carpocratians. And those groups appear to have been writing documents denouncing the Pauline Christians as heretics, just as much as the Pauline Christians were denouncing them.

Overall, I would say that there’s too much evidence of struggle within the early church, politics, murder, suppression, etc. to suggest that there was a linear path to the creation of the Jesus story. It could be said that, for the information we have which survives to today, what we know is basically a myth, just like we could say that Santa Claus is a fictional character even though he’s actually a severely modified version of the real St. Nicholas. But for all the non-magical, non-teaching parts of the gospels, like the statement that Jesus was born in Nazareth, there’s no strong reason to doubt its veracity. But what he actually taught, whether he was a friend or follower of St John the Baptist, whether he thought that you needed to have parts of your weewee lopped off, and whether he really announced St Peter as his successor…well I’d be pretty skeptical of any answer.

11

If you really wan to argue in that direction, I’d like to see any references from the Bible (or collected Christian thought) that says the Second Coming has anything at all to do with the number of Christians in the world.

Christian eschatology is certainly full of conflict and differing interpretation; I have never heard, however, the idea that Christ will return in order to keep people from leaving the faith.

12

Many of your points are valid but they can be answered logically.

For example Paul’s sudden conversion: it’s possible he had an extreme attack of guilty conscience after causing Stephen’s death, feeling that he had taken part in the death of a righteous man, regardless of his religious convictions. Re his Damascus conversion the question has been rightfully asked, "What in the hell was he doing going to Damascus for letters of permission when all the authority he needed to get letters of authority to persecute Christians in Jerusalem was right there IN Jerusalem lying with the Jerusalem council. And we know that Paul was extremely susceptible to hallucinating; do we have a right to suspect he merely hallucinated this appearance of Jesus? In Acts the story is told in at least three differing version so which is the correct version?

I could go on and on but scores of books have been written on the differences between Paul’s doctrine and Jesus’. At the end of the day Paul taught a new theology that was vastly different from what emerged in the gospels decades later, most prominently Paul’s faith alone for salvation vs Jesus ’ faith plus good works. In nearly all doctrinal issues Paul won the battle.

13

You’re right, there is no Biblical doctrine for what I suggest. It’s just simple logic. Will Jesus let the Christian faith hemorrhage like it is happening today, and will continue doing so, without doing something supernatural to intervene or does he simply not care? :confused: If you see your child running into the street with a car coming do you just stand there and say, “Well, I warned him not to run in front of oncoming cars” or do you act to save him?

14

While I’m sympathetic to mythicism–I think it’s probably right, and at the very least I think even if it’s wrong our confidence that it’s wrong should be WAY WAY low–it’s worth pointing out that the very fact that Jesus is a figurehead to hang Pauline theology on would, itself, provide a plausible explanation for a lack of biographical detail whenver Paul writes about Jesus. If Paul’s focus isn’t so much Jesus the person but Jesus the theological figure, then what Paul will write the most about is what Jesus did that had to do with Paul’s theology, namely, dying and rising.

For me it’s not so much Paul’s silence about Jesus’s biography (though that is something) as it is about what Paul actually does say. What he does say, if you read it forgetting about the gospels etc, seems to suggest a cosmic figure who is coming, not a human figure who is returning.

15

That is evidence that whoever or whatever Jesus was, he was not supernatural. However it provides very little (I think no) evidence that Jesus was a myth. On the usual scholarly hypothesis that Jesus was a preacher about who supernatural stories were told but who himself was just an ordinary human being, it is no surprise at all that Jesus fails to act supernaturally today.

16

Biblically speaking, that’s not his role, and not his job, and not his mandate. God is not much into doing magic tricks, at least not since the ascension of Christ; he’s kind of big on, yanno, faith. And free will. If that means the number of Christians in the world decreases, so what? Biblically (and theologically), that’s not really a big deal.
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17

I think he was a myth in the sense it could have been an amalgamation of stories contributed to a single person. I am firmly in the Camp that no single individual existed as Jesus.

18

That’s not a question I raised, so I’m not sure what you’re addressing.

The topic of the thread is whether Jesus existed. It would have been unnecessary for Paul to give a description of his interactions with the Jerusalem church, for him to have politicked with them, to explain why his teachings were valid, despite his tenuous connections to the church, etc. unless there was another church that he didn’t create. His description of the events, while seeming like a single testimony, are in essence a double testimony since they treat matter-of-factly the existence of a secondary church in the 30-45 AD timeline. It would be very difficult for a mythical Jesus to have sprung up and separated into two churches already in such a short time, unless the myth was based on a real event.

19

I’m perfectly open to the idea that Jesus in all likelihood was a real man with nothing supernatural or divine about him who died a perfectly normal death and rotten away in an unmarked grave. I strongly suspect that had a real resurrection occurred the cave where he resurrected from would have been made into a shrine, the most holy shrine in the world, and with us even today.

Where all this leads, however, is not whether Jesus was real or not but that over 1 BILLION people believe he WAS real on the flimsiest historical evidence–actually no historical evidence at all when you get right down to it. These billion people believe sincerely that Jesus atones for their sins. How do they go on believing this? What kind of world is it when a billion people accept that they are sinful trash; that Jesus died for their sins; that their ONLY hope of getting into heaven is believing on Jesus and if they don’t believe in him and on him they will be thrown into hell to burn for all eternity? :eek: And one of the real kickers when you point out the total illogic of being sent to hell for eternity for just a thought crime is, “God didn’t send you to hell; you sent yourself to hell by your freewill choice not to believe in Jesus”. Imagine a billion people actually believing this nonsense??? :smack:

Why is it that WL Craig for instance, one of the most intelligent guys in the Christian community, if not the world, says that even if concrete proof was laid before him that Jesus was a myth he would disregard it because what is proof enough for him is the warm fuzzy glow he felt in his heart when he accepted Jesus as his Savior? :eek: I mean how does an intelligent person come to think this way? And how does a rational person deal with this kind of lopsided conviction? :eek: :eek:

And it’s not just him. Look at Mike Licona and Gary Habermas and NT Wright and a thousand other prominent Christian apologists who all basically say the same thing, “It’s not the concrete evidence; it’s the conviction in my heart that is the deciding factor.” I just cannot wrap my head around this kind of blind-sighted thinking–to ignore empirical evidence in favor of an emotion. And when you corner them on logic it’s always “You’re being guided by satan” and “I’ll pray for you” --responses so flimsy and insubstantial that you just kind of have to look up to heaven because you can’t have a real dialogue with them; they always retreat back to well-honed responses to such evidence that just become circular rationalizations.

20

edit landed in the original response above