Why the Mythicist Position Deserves a Careful Look

Mention Jesus on social media, and it generally won’t take long for someone to pipe in with the idea that he didn’t actually exist. What tends to follow is a whole litany of supposed evidence for their claim that can seem quite persuasive. It is no wonder that so many people think that there is some sort of debate here.

But there really isn’t a debate, at least not in an academic sense. Instead, we have a peculiar asymmetry here, where, on one side of the question, virtually all the experts and scholars in relevant fields stand. And on the other, well there’s not much. The standout really is Richard Carrier.

On the side of the historicist, those who accept that Jesus existed, you have a group that dominates in the universities, academic journals, and the scholarship in general. Among the mythicists, you have a group that dominates YouTube and social media.

Yet this second group isn’t really a cohesive unit. While Carrier tends to lean more towards an academic approach, the rest of the Mythicism field is rather scattered. Some lean heavily on outdated conspiracy theories, while others take novel approaches that lack real support, but are often put forth with great confidence.

This isn’t meant to be a snide observation; rather, it points to the current landscape of the subject and tells us something important about the nature of the disagreement. We aren’t looking at two similar or comparable schools of thought that are wrestling over a contested historical question. Instead, we are looking at a consensus position on one side, and a popular Internet phenomenon on the other. And generally, there isn’t much crossover, as those in academia have simply ignored Mythicism.

For historicists, the mythicist view is not a scholarly minority view. It’s a fringe position that circulates online, much like the view of flat-earthers.

Saying so is not an appeal to authority for its own sake. It’s an important observation about two things. First, it shows where the burden of proof rests. It’s not with the consensus, the experts and scholars within the field who take the view that Jesus existed. That position, from an academic perspective, is well-founded. The burden is on the mythicist.

Second, and this is more important. While the burden of proof is on the mythicist, that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore their position, as academia has largely done. While mythicists need to back their views up with actual arguments, those arguments need to be addressed by historicists. We simply can’t ignore the mythicist view any longer.

The Mythicist Self-Image and Why It Fails

Within mythicist circles, there is a tendency to drift towards conspiracy-type thinking. An image of themselves is put forth as if they are part of a brave intellectual minority that is holding out against a Christian-dominated academic establishment, an establishment that keeps Mythicism outside. In this narrative, the field of New Testament studies is depicted as being rotten with confessional bias, populated overwhelmingly by believers whose paychecks, as well as personal commitments, require them to defend the historicity of Jesus, regardless of what the evidence actually says.

It’s part of the conspiracy-sort-of thinking. For mythicists, they often tend to present themselves as the lone honest broker of truth, this Galileo-type figure who refuses to bend to institutional powers. This is in part why their position has largely been rejected. Conspiracy sort of talk doesn’t tend to get very far. It also tends to taint the entire group, including those who take a more legitimate approach.

This sort of framing, though, collapses once we begin looking at those who actually make up historicists. When we look at those who have truly taken on the mythicist position, it’s not those who are doing it because their faith depends on a historical Jesus; rather, it’s individuals for whom a mythical Jesus wouldn’t really cause much trouble.

It’s people like Bart Ehrman, a former evangelical Christian now turned agnostic. A good portion of his academic career has been built upon showing issues with the reliability of the Gospel tradition and the New Testament as a whole. Yet he’s one of the few scholars who have taken the mythicist position head-on in his 2012 book, Did Jesus Exist, in which he answered a resounding yes.

Maurice Casey is another great example. In 2014, he published Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths?, in which he delivered a scathing dismantling of the major mythicist arguments. Including the idea that those in academia are bound by statements of faith that prevent them from questioning the historicity of Jesus. While Casey acknowledges that such a thing may exist within some American Evangelical institutions, it’s simply not a thing in the majority of colleges and universities.

Then there are also individuals like Tim O’Neill, who created the website, History for Atheists. As an atheist himself, who has no real dog in the fight, he has spent years debunking mythicist claims. This personal project of his hasn’t been to defend Christian doctrine, but rather because he is invested in defending sound historical methods against what he regards as a popular movement that is embarrassing to the broader atheist community.

When it comes down to it, the common claim by mythicists that the defense of a historical Jesus is based on dogma, and that they are instead trying to present you the real truth that the establishment doesn’t want you to know, just doesn’t hold up.

What’s worse, though, is that this sort of conspiratorial thinking has largely just stopped any real discussion or examination of the more serious approaches to Mythicism, such as that by Carrier, which needs to be addressed. Instead, it just taints the entire field.

The Two Century Record

A second aspect of this thinking among many mythicists is the suggestion that Mythicism itself represents a fresh, cutting-edge re-examination of the evidence; the sort of breakthrough that the lumbering old academy is just too stuffy to recognize.

Now there may be some truth in that. Mythicism isn’t a new idea. It’s been around since the 1790s, with the French Enlightenment writers Constantin-François Volney and Charles-François Dupuis. They argued that Christianity had originated as a solar or astral myth and that Jesus was a personification of the sun or zodiac.

It would really be with the German theologian Bruno Bauer, in 1877, that the mythicist view was taken up in a more academically serious manner. But his work was largely seen as scandalous, and it ended his career. At best, his Mythicism would be seen as a curiosity, if not simply ignored.

The view would once again surface in Germany in 1909 with Arthur Drews’ book The Christ Myth. This work generated considerable public controversy and even triggered formal debates, the most famous being a public symposium in Berlin in 1910. The outcome was a thorough rejection of Mythicism, and the view would once again recede into the fringes, while academia continued to ignore it.

It wouldn’t be until the end of the 20th century that the view once again peeked its head into the public, with G.A. Wells’ works. However, Wells would later retreat from full-blown Mythicism, admitting that there must have been some historical truth there.

By this time, academia no longer really cared, though. And this would be the state of the field in the 2000s and 2010s, as we saw a revival of the mythicist position, largely aided by the development of the Internet. While Mythicism spread much more quickly, much of what was put forth wasn’t new evidence but just the same old view repackaged for the digital age.

What has largely been Mythicism’s biggest gain, though, isn’t a supposed re-examination of the evidence, but the ability to get its message to more eyes. And mythicists have excelled in this regard. Conversely, historicists have lacked in this sphere, partly because they have ignored what they often deem a fringe or conspiracy theory, or because they haven’t successfully navigated the world of educational communication.

But The Consensus Has Been Wrong Before

Possibly one of Carrier’s strongest arguments is that the scholarly consensus can be challenged, and should be challenged. At times, we tend to hold on to the consensus too tightly, without reevaluating it. And when it comes to history, we’ve seen this shift in the consensus view happen from time to time.

Objecting to the consensus can be reasonable. If a well-reasoned objection is given, then it needs to be taken seriously. However, the big question here is, what would we be looking for in such an objection?

There are really one of two things that need to occur. First, we could expect new evidence to have come to light. Maybe a new manuscript was discovered, or an archeological discovery sheds more light. Possibly, it could also come from new techniques being created that help us better understand some aspect of history.

Second, a new explanatory framework could be developed that better explains and handles the existing evidence than the current framework we are working on. Either way, what would be needed is something quite substantial. And it would need to survive additional testing and questioning from others in the field.

As it currently stands, neither of those conditions has been satisfied by mythicists. Instead, what we have largely gotten are the same late-19th- and early-20th-century arguments, just repackaged. Or we have seen attempts to apply new methodology to the field that just don’t work.

Some have attempted to do this much better than others. Carrier stands out here and stands as a challenge that certainly shouldn’t be ignored. Others, like D.M Murdoch, were able to rebrand old data and leverage the internet to successfully influence a large number of people. And in that, also should be addressed.

Why It Matters: The Cost of Ignoring

One may ask, why is any of this worth worrying about? If Mythicism is a fringe idea, and academia has already rejected it, why spend the time and energy in producing a database to refute it? Why not simply ignore it and let the consensus speak for itself?

The answer really is twofold. First, because the consensus does not speak for itself in the areas and communities where Mythicism is most active. The mythicist case is often made on YouTube, Reddit, in self-published books, and in podcast interviews. It’s largely online. It reaches audiences who aren’t diving into peer-reviewed journal articles, which is most people. Largely because even when those articles are free, they are still gatekept behind jargon and technicalities. Not to mention, many mythicists already distrust these institutions.

If the response to Mythicism remains locked behind academic literature, the result is a culture in which the academic view and the popular understanding drift further and further apart.

Second, and possibly more importantly, the standards of evidence and arguments that Mythicism normalizes are corrosive far beyond the specific question of Jesus’s historicity. The mythicist habit of constructing reference classes to suit one’s preferred conclusion, of dismissing inconvenient sources as wholesale forgeries on minimal evidence, of reading symbolic and allegorical meaning into texts wherever literal readings prove embarrassing, of treating superficial parallels as casual influence; these are not merely bad habits in the study of Christian origins. They are bad habits, period. They are the same habits that produce conspiracy theories about every other historical question. A culture that accepts these standards in the case of Jesus will accept them in the case of the moon landing, the Holocaust, and the Kennedy assassination. The fight over Jesus Mythicism is, in this larger sense, a fight over what counts as historical evidence and what does not.

This is why, despite its fringe status, Mythicism warrants a sustained response; it can’t simply be ignored any longer.

This series will take the mythicist arguments, individually, in their strongest forms, and show why each fails when examined closely. We will examine Carrier’s Bayesian viewpoint, the alleged pagan parallels behind the Gospel narratives, the Pauline epistles that Mythicism finds so difficult to accommodate, the extra-biblical testimony of Josephus and Tacitus, the so-called “argument from silence,” the reliability of the Gospels, and their dating. By the end, we should gain a clear sense not only why the scholarly consensus stands where it does, but why it deserves to.

The first step in that journey is the one we have just taken: recognizing that the debate is not symmetrical, that the consensus is not confessional, that Mythicism is not new, and that the burden of proof rests, as it always has, on those who would overturn the historical reading of the evidence rather than on those who maintain it.