Reena

I have been reading some things alleging that Jesus was a myth, that he never existed as a person.

But I am wondering how this can be reconciled with the numerous Christian writings and the cult of Christianity. If there was never a Jesus, why would it have emerged? Why would Paul have written his letters? Why would there have been word-of-mouth stories about Jesus, why people would have become Christians.

Has something like this ever happened before/after Christianity?

NZSkep

1)King arthur

2)Achilles and all the greek god stuff associated with him
3)Perseus
4)Theseus
etc etc

as with jesus the most likely explanaqtion (IMO) is that yes, these were real people, but the stories associated with them are far far far exagarrated over the true historical events.
e.g. there probably was some celtic warlord called arthur/artorius back in 3-400CE but i'm pretty sure there was no real wizard called merlin (possibly a shaman of some kind) and there was definitely not a 'lady of the lake' lobbing swords at people.
Stories, especially when passed down by word of mouth, are bound to change, and people believe some of the most outlandish stuff - even when it has supposedly happened in recent times. check out www.snopes.com for a massive list of common 'urban legends' which a lot of people belive - even though they are not true.

Don't forget Joseph smith and the Mormons - one of the fastest growing religions IIRC.
Also Mohamed.

when people say that jesus never existed what they mean is that Jesus as described in the bible never existed. there were probably dozens of guys wandering around the middle east called Jesus at that point in history. there were loads of people claiming to be 'the messiah' and work so called miracles.

Reena

I guess my question is how can all this have arisen so quickly? Is it possible that there was a Jesus but maybe not 20 years before Paul wrote his first letter?

NZSkep

http://www.slumdance.com/blogs/brian...es/001422.html

check this guy out - he did an experiment to see how quickly stories spread. the story he made up actually has "THIS IS FICTION" at the bottom

and then do a google for 'death of a spammer'. see how many news sites reported it originally as fact. I'll tell you - loads. I know this is using the internet but this was done in a number of days. 20 years is plenty long enough for bed time stories to get out of had (especially if they are not written and passed vai oral tradition instead. each generation embellisg\hes them tomake them more exciting.

Gooch's dad

Good post, NZSkep, and I agree with you that there was probably a real Jesus at the basis of the biblical legends.

But there are many people, especially here at IIDB, who think that no Jesus existed at all, that Paul simply wrote about an entirely mythical person who existed in a "sublunar realm", and who was crucified in this sublunar realm, too.

The Jesus-Mythers that follow Doherty's lead are a group that definitely thinks that this "sublunar realm" Jesus--entirely made up--is a better explanation for the data than a charismatic preacher named Jesus, walking around Galilee.

And no, they haven't come up with any other examples of this happening, IIRC.

Julian

This might answer some of those questions: http://www.jesuspuzzle.com/

Julian

Amaleq13

As a mystical belief in a Descending Son bringing redemption to mankind?

PhilosopherJay

Hi Reena,

My "Dictionary of Ancient Deities" (Turner, Patricia, and Couler, Charles Russell, Oxford University Press) lists over 10,000 ancient deities. Virtually none of these gods and goddesses existed, but each of them were worshipped by thousands and sometimes millions of people for periods ranging from a few decades to 2,600 years.

Human beings are not born with a lie detector regarding stories. Rather the reverse, people learn very slowly through experience what is real and not real, what is actual and what is only imagined. Each year, millions of new human beings are born who go through the same process, more or less quickly, more or less well, more or less deeply.

There are a great number of reasons, some psychological, some social and some economical, why people accept and promulgate false stories. People feel good believing themselves related to supernaturally powerful beings, people like to associate and talk with other people about fabulous stories, and many people make a good deal of money selling them in a variety of ways (although, many also go broke).

Besides, Earl Doherty's excellent work on his website and his "the Jesus Puzzle.", I would recommend any of Robert Price's numerous books on the subject, including his latest "The Empty Tomb.". Hyam Maccoby's "the Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity" Burton Mack's "Who wrote the New Testament" and Peter Gandy and Timothy Freke's "The Jesus Mysteries" are certainly worth a read.

I myself will be coming out with a book called "The Evolution of Christs and Christianities" in the next month, which I hope will make a small contribution to the understanding of the development of the mythology of Christianity and provide an answer to the important "why" questions you raise.

Warmly,

PhilosopherJay

doubtingt

The overwhelming majority of undeniably fictional characters have bits and pieces of disparate facts brought together in the minds of the story tellers, and this includes dragons and Moby Dick. In fact, given that even the most creative human imagination is constrained by the facts of experience (look how unoriginal most depictions of space aliens are) it is quite implausible that even the most absudly fanciful invented creature would not contain bits and pieces of real experience. None of this changes the fact that such creatures are as fictional and mythical as could be or that the manufactured configuration of distorted facts does not remotely describe a configuration that actually occurred as described.

Not only do mythicists generally recognize these realities of the psychological nature of fiction, but it is these realities that historicists ignore, because they fully undermine one the most common arguments that defenders of a historical Jesus rely upon, which amounts to little more than "Look, some different version of these things probably happened to someone, somewhere, sometime, therefore Jesus is a historical figure."

If all historicists are claiming is that Jesus was "inspired by factual events" in the same way that dragons, Moby Dick and most other fiction is inspired by factual events, then their would be no disagreement. Of course, they are not claiming this, they are claiming something much more that they cannot rationally support.

jjramsey

In a trivial sense, the answer to the question, "Can the Jesus story have arisen without a real Jesus?" is yes. That is, someone or several someones could have made up the Jesus that we see in the Gospels if they really wanted to, or dumb luck could have lined up historical circumstances in such a way that the fictional Jesus that we see could have somehow evolved.

The answer to the question "Is it plausible that the Jesus story have arisen without a real Jesus?" is another story. For example, they argue that the references to "brothers of the Lord" in Galatians and 1 Corinthians might have been a title rather than a reference to Jesus' physical brothers, and that this later got misunderstood as a reference to a real blood relationship mentioned more explicitly in the Gospels and the reference to James in Josephus (which is not the TF!). The best argument I have seen in favor of this is that the Hebrew name "Ahijah" means "brother of Yah," "Yah" being short for the Divine Name "Yahweh," who the Jews referred to as "the Lord" to avoid saying the Divine Name. However, this name wasn't used as a title in the Old Testament, and "Yah" or "El" is a part of so many Hebrew names that it is not surprising that one of these names would be "brother of Yah." It's the law of large numbers at work. This is not enough to overturn the much simpler explanation that there was no misunderstanding and that "brother of the Lord" looks like a reference to a physical brotherly relationship because it is, and it is for that reason that it appears consistent with the more explicit references to such physical brotherly relationships in the Gospels and the reference to James in Josephus. I'm pretty much with Loren Rosson III on this:

An apocalyptic Jesus is a clean fit to the evidence, while what the Jesus-mythers have to offer is baroque and speculative.

The evidence that there was such an archetypical belief is lacking.

That's the Doherty that Gooch's Dad mentioned. Here's a review of Doherty's work: http://www.geocities.com/b_d_muller/djp1.html

Freke and Gandy are as worth reading as Acharya S. I reviewed them here: http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/inde...esus_Mysteries

If I seem hostile to Freke and Gandy, it's only because I have a gut dislike for people who distort and misquote their sources.

BTW, here's the link to a review of Deconstructing Jesus, which I quoted elsewhere: http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetai...ePage=805,2182

This is a strawman and a gross distortion.