Five Challenges to Christ Myth Theorists Nicole Scott Free Inquiry

It’s an odd role being the Cassandra to American secular humanists, warning them not to follow a siren call into an intellectual sinkhole. But while the Christ myth theory continues to get airtime, that is the situation. The latest outbreak, articulated by Eugene D. “Duke” Mertz (“Old Testament Evidence for the Mythical Jesus,” Free Inquiry, December 2023/January 2024, pp. 44–49), added little new material. Mertz was content to roll out a whole caravan of historical oddities and complexities—stuff nobody is denying—only then to spice it up by returning to a theory of the mystery drama as his explanation of Jesus’s non-historicity, a theory demolished more than a century ago by F. C. Conybeare.

Rather than tire the reader with a wearisome refutation of this discredited theory that has little support even among mythicists, it seems worthwhile to try once again to get the mythicists to look at the bigger picture and address a few crucial questions they have so far assiduously ignored. They are made in the form of claims with a minimum of context.

Claim Number One

Why should we ignore the majority consensus of Jesus scholarship around the world and pay attention to a few mythicists operating, for the most part, outside the academy?

The current scholarly view about Jesus outside evangelical seminaries is of an apocalyptic prophet who warned his fellow Jews that the end times were upon them and that the kingdom of God was at hand. This kingdom would happen in their lifetime and would be here on Earth, where the Romans would face God’s just wrath. The Romans saw Yeshua ben Yosef (now known as Jesus Christ) as a rabble-rouser and put him to death, as they were wont to do. I call this the “forgotten Yeshua theory,” because it highlights the Jewish origin of the Christ story, which was buried and forgotten by successive layers of Christian theology. Why should we reject this general consensus arising out of the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus in favor of the claims of a small group of enthusiasts?

Claim Number Two

Belief in the mythical Jesus is restricted to a minority of American humanists and is not shared by most humanists anywhere else in the world.

The understanding of Jesus advanced by the Third Quest scholars is shared by people of different persuasions: Christian, Jewish, and atheist. It is a conclusion open to anyone who values evidence over prior belief. The myth theory, by stark contrast, is supported only by a minority of mostly American humanists. No significant humanist body outside North America invests any serious time with the myth theory. For example, a recent pamphlet from the British Humanist Association titled “Who Was Jesus?” deals peremptorily with this issue of historicity: “Did Jesus exist? Almost all scholars believe that Jesus existed in the first century CE in Palestine.” The pamphlet goes on to give an account of Jesus identical to mine. Why are American mythicists content to stand apart even from fellow humanists elsewhere around the world on this issue?

Claim Number Three

The myth theory not only indulges in but relies on serious fallacies and flaws in logic.

The theory rests on a fallacy of the excluded middle. This is when two stark alternatives are presented as the only valid choices when in fact there is a range of options between the two extremes. So between the extreme at one end of total historicity, advanced by the Christian literalists, we have the mirror opposite, advanced by the mythicists, of total unhistoricity. We know that the gospels are successive accretions of dogma, mythology, wishful thinking, and political expediency that smothered the original story. It is a valid exercise to try and unravel the various layers in search of some reliable historical kernel of fact. But it is quite unjustified to suppose that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It is a non sequitur to conclude from confusing and contradictory evidence that the person being spoken about did not exist at all. Also, the myth theory contradicts Occam’s razor. By far the simpler explanation is that stories about a man actually relate to a man. It adds an extra layer of explanation to claim that stories about a man are actually made up and not about anyone at all. Why are myth scholars apparently willing to rely on such sloppy argumentation?

Claim Number Four

The myth theory adds nothing useful by way of response to what many theologians are actually saying now.

Even if all these flaws could be addressed, the myth theory is sterile. Many prominent theologians today are often willing to concede that the Resurrection was not a historical event. The focus of Rowan Williams, for example, is on the “theological vision they proclaim.” John Macquarrie can make no use of it in his very radical ending of Jesus Christ in Modern Thought. Alvin Plantinga goes one step further, awarding Christians the boon of “warranted belief,” which, because it’s Christian belief, doesn’t need to be defended at all. Now, this is a very weak foundation for a grand proclamation, but that’s not the point here. The point is, proponents of the myth theory can’t say much in response. If so many theologians are conceding the historicity of the Resurrection, then an argument built around questioning the historicity of the man allegedly resurrected is pointless. It adds nothing to the argument.

Claim Number Five

By mirroring the literalism of the evangelicals, mythicist arguments are implicated, however unintentionally, in the same casual anti-Semitism.

An even more serious problem with the myth theory is the support it gives, however unwittingly, to anti-Semitism. Following from the lead given by Geza Vermes, scholars have come to speak of “supersessionism,” or the willingness among Christians to see Jesus as superseding his Jewish roots and context in a Christian over-story. Christ’s mission superseded the narrower interests of the Jews. The New Testament superseded the Old Testament. And so on. Much of the value of the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus has been to help challenge the anti-Semitism latent in this sort of approach. But just as the evangelicals dismiss Yeshua’s Jewishness by turning him into a celestial savior, mythicists do the same when they turn him into a celestial myth. The consequences of discovering the Jewishness of Jesus are far more fatal to Christian theology than whether he existed or not. As a Jew, Yeshua had no intention of founding a new religion, and all the things said about him are progressively more alien to what he actually believed. But mythicists, just like the Christian literalists, sweep all this historical context away. By supporting the myth theory, mythicists are, however unwittingly, tapping into the latent anti-Semitism of Christian theology. How can mythicists support, however unknowingly, an anti-Semitic reading of Jesus?

The Challenge Is Set

These points need to be responded to if the myth theory of Jesus is to make any claim to academic credibility. If we as humanists condemn as invalid the Christian habit of adding 2 and 2 to get 5 in the form of a supernatural, savior deity, then what can we say about the mythicist subtracting 2 from 2 to get -5 to arrive at an entirely unhistorical character? The myth theory is an uncomfortable mirror image of the equally narrowly conceived theological Christ championed by evangelical Christians. The best conclusion we have at the moment is the forgotten Yeshua theory, which is the consensus of a broad range of mainstream academic scholarship from people of a wide range of beliefs: “Jesus Christ” is a bundle of dogmas, beliefs, superstitions, and wishes built up, around and over, until they smother the historical person probably known as Yeshua ben Yosef. The entirely Jewish world of Yeshua meant he had no intention of founding a new religion, let alone one as anti-Semitic as Christianity has proved to be. And what Yeshua did believe, about an imminent destruction of Rome and its replacement by the Kingdom of God, never materialized. Yeshua was quickly forgotten, and a corpus of belief was built up around his name he would not have understood, let alone approved of. [POOR SPECULATION?] The implications of this are far more serious for conventional Christianity than a claim Jesus never existed.

The myth theory of Jesus is, at best, a marginal footnote to Jesus scholarship. As a theory, it relies on invalid methods of arguing, has a cultic reliance on confirmation bias, relies on long-discredited lines of inquiry, and has little or no explanatory power as well as a tendency to resort to ad hominem arguments when challenged. The theory, advanced in self-published tomes and from minor publishing houses, has no academic credibility and allows mainstream scholars to sideline all humanist thinking on the grounds it might be as flawed as mythical thinking. Continued support for the myth theory of Jesus will serve only to discredit all other branches of humanist scholarship. If humanists want to be taken seriously as scholars, they need to wake up and smell the coffee.