Tristan Scott

I was thinking the same thing, Greg. In The Hero of a Thousand Faces Campbell shows, with the help of Freud and Jung, that the myths and religions we create are based on our Phsyche. This is why there are so many similarities between our mythical figures.

Toto

Why is no one mentioning Joseph Campbell? I searched through his works a while back, trying to find his position on the Jesus Myth, and he deftly sidesteps the issue. You cannot tell from his writings if he thinks that Jesus was a historical figure with a growth of myth surrounding him, or a completely mythical figure invented by later Christians.

Tristan Scott

I disagree. I think he clearly points out the mythology involved in the Jesus figure. If you are talking about whether or not Jesus was a real living person, that is not an issue with Campbell, at least in his .Hero book. The issue there is why we create myths in the first place, not whether those assigned to the myths are real or not. I believe that most myths are built around real people. George Washington was a real person, but he probably didn't really confess to chopping down a cherry tree

Toto

Tristan - some people claim that there was never a real person behind the Jesus legend. See Earl Doherty's work at <a href="http://www.jesuspuzzle.com" target="_blank">www.jesuspuzzle.com</a> for the issue. There was a George Washington, although he did not chop down the cherry tree. There was no William Tell. There may not have been a Confucius, and probably was no Lao Tze.

For instance, Joseph Campbell discusses John the Baptist, and points out that much about him fits into a mythic pattern of a local water god. But then he says that John the Baptist is mentioned in the history of the time (in Josephus), so John was actually a real person. He then discusses the mythic nature of Jesus, but says nothing about whether there was a real person behind the myth.

For many people (perhaps most) this doesn't make any difference. There are things in history that we can never know because the historical records are just inadequate, and there is no problem with being a Jesus-agnostic.