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Concept
Christ myth theory
Summary
The Christ myth theory, also known as the Jesus myth theory, Jesus mythicism, or the Jesus ahistoricity theory, is the view that the story of Jesus is a work of mythology with no historical substantiality. Alternatively, in terms given by Bart Ehrman paraphrasing Earl Doherty, "the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity."
In contrast, the mainstream scholarly consensus holds that there was a historical Jesus who lived in 1st-century-CE Roman Judea, and that he was probably both baptized and crucified. Beyond that, mainstream scholars have no consensus about the historicity of other major aspects of the gospel stories, nor the extent to which they and the Pauline epistles may have replaced the historical Jesus with a supernatural Christ of faith.
Mythicism can be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment, when history began to be critically analyzed, and was revived in the 1970s. Proponents broadly argue that a mythological character was historicized in the gospels, and that thus a historical Jesus never existed. Scholars such as Robert M. Price and G. A. Wells argue that evidence of the historical Jesus is so obscured by myths and dogma that nothing about him is certain. A view closer to the mainstream position is that the historical Jesus was the Galilean preacher preserved in the hypothetical Q source, and that details about him were added via Paul's mythical Jesus.
Most mythicists employ a threefold argument: they question the reliability of the Pauline epistles and the gospels to establish Jesus's historicity; they argue that information is lacking on Jesus in secular sources from the first and early second centuries; and they argue that early Christianity had syncretistic and mythological origins as reflected in both the Pauline epistles and the gospels, with Jesus being a deity who was concretized in the gospels.
Official source
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