Peter Kirby

Hmmm...now I might be confused. Heh.

gurugeorge

Hmm, of all the "publicly visible" books touting MJ today:

Earl Doherty is a humanist rationalist of no apparent fixed political abode (probably classical liberal I'd say).

Acharya S. is difficult to pin down, but she seems to be a sort of New Agey ex-Wiccan-turned semi rationalist. Political allegiance not obvious, probably vaguely left.

Freke and Gandy are stone-gone non-dual mystics, probably vaguely left but I shouldn't imagine hardcore left of the type you're talking about.

Tom Harpur, another genuine religionist, hoping to "rescue" a true, mystical Christianity from the historical claptrap encrusting it.

GA Wells - again, some kind of patrician humanist rationalist, not evidently leftist to my knowledge.

Robert M Price seems to be, again, of no fixed political abode that's evident - if anything he seems to be a bit of a neocon.

To none of these people is the Communist version of the MJ idea relevant at all, nor the reasons why Communists developed that idea.

(Plus, my understanding of the Communist line on Jesus - please correct me if I'm wrong! - is that he was mythologised, not that he was a myth - i.e. the Communists held the usual rationalist/materialist view of Jesus, that he was some kind of small-time revolutionary or preacher who got blown out of all proportion into a myth that was used as a tool of political control. The MJ idea as I understand it is 180 degrees different - it's that there was no person behind the myth at all, and that the myth originated in philosphy/spiritual experience, and that - if a political slant is considered - the myth later got turned into a political tool by virtue of the historicisation.)

Ted Hoffman

She is a he.

gurugeorge

Eek! Thx Also of course Wells isn't an MJ-er strictly so-called, but he's close enough for jazz in this context - similar "Paul silent where one wouldn't expect him to be" basis to Doherty, etc.

No Robots

No she's not.

Zeichman

I think it would be inappropriate to say all communists hold one thing about Jesus (after all, Christians can be communists), but in Russia the Jesus Myth hypothesis was comparatively popular for some time, largely due to the fact that Lenin believed such, along the lines of the sun-god version of it.

No Robots

This is misleading. Mythicism in the USSR was not "popular". It was party policy.

Zeichman

That's not what I had read. Can you verify this? I can provide a source and a quote for my statement after I hit up the library.

No Robots

You can start with this post from this very thread.

Ben C Smith

He was the great don of mythicism in the eighties.

He believed that there was no kernal of historical truth behind the figure of Jesus, that the entire story arose as a myth or a legend. Two of the books he wrote were entitled The Jesus Myth and The Jesus Legend.

I do not even understand your question, Jacob. How can Wells not have been considered a mythicist, at least at the time? What definition of mythicist do you have that would exclude Wells in his heyday?

Ben.