Jesus myth

The Jesus myth (more rarely: Christ myth , also non-existence - or non - historicity hypothesis ) describes the view that Jesus of Nazareth was not a historical person or that no reliable historical statements can be made about him. The person depicted in the scriptures of Christianity is a fiction or a myth .

Until 1930, this view was primarily discussed in German-speaking countries. Early main representatives were Bruno Bauer , Albert Kalthoff and Arthur Drews . They referred to the results of the research on Jesus at that time , which demonstrated the mythical and legendary character of many texts of the New Testament (NT), and to the school of religious history , which emphasized analogies in non-Christian mythology . Since the 1970s , English-speaking authors close to the New Atheism have represented the Christian myth theory , including George Albert Wells , Earl Doherty , Robert M. Price and Richard Carrier . However, the vast majority of historical-critical researchers explain the texts of early Christianity as reactions to the historical Jesus and use them to reconstruct the basic features of his work.

18th and 19th centuries

Volney and Dupuis

In 1752, during the Enlightenment , the English Count Bolingbroke declared the entire Bible to be a collection of spurious legends and fables ( Letters on the study of history ). Bolingbroke is believed to be the possible originator of the idea of a purely mythical Christ. In France, in 1769 , the enlightener Voltaire demanded a complete examination of the NT according to the standard of reason. He referred to contradictions and incredible prophecies in the Gospels. He offered no explanation for the origin of the NT, but distinguished himself from the thesis of some “disciples of Bolingbroke” that Jesus did not exist. One had to limit oneself to what one could know about Jesus: he was a strange Jew from the lower folk who was crucified as a blasphemer under Emperor Tiberius . The year of his death is impossible to determine. In 1785 Voltaire affirmed: The thesis that Jesus did not exist was "more inventive than learned".

The French philosophers Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809) and Constantin François Volney (1757–1820) were the first to openly deny Jesus' existence. In his major work Les Ruines (1791), which was highly regarded at the time , Volney contrasted all major religions with the revolutionary idea of human rights . His theory of religion (Chapter 22) was probably written before 1788 and was influenced by Holbach , Helvetius and Dupuis. All religions are contradicting systems invented by ignorant people to explain the misunderstood world. Christianity, like Hinduism and Persian religion, revere an allegory of the sun under names such as Chris-en or Christ or Yes-us or Jesus . Jesus of Nazareth is only a symbol for the sun myth. His earthly existence depicts the winter phase in the solar cycle. With Chris-en , Volney meant an alleged common root of Christ and Krishna , with Yes-us a variant of Bacchus . So he tried to derive the early Christianity from Far Eastern and Greek instead of Jewish religion.

In 1787, Dupuis derived all religions from astral cults. In the foreword to his main work from 1795, he announced: With a single stroke he would destroy the general conviction that Jesus held for God and man, and that of the new philosophers, that Jesus was only a man. He will strip Christ of both natures , since he sees him neither as God nor less as man. He would prove that the hero of the legends known as the Gospels is the same who is celebrated with far more genius in the poems honoring Bacchus, Osiris , Hercules , Adonis, and others. The Christ cult is only a variant of the sun cult widespread in antiquity . Like the twelve sons of Jacob, the twelve apostles personified the signs of the zodiac . Christian and pre-Christian mystery cults in Greater Syria, Ancient Egypt and Persia have the same origin: They symbolized the virgin birth of a god at the winter solstice and were based on the wintry ascent of the zodiac sign of Virgo . These and other annual apparitions are allegories for the stories of sun deities such as Sol Invictus .

Napoleon Bonaparte had studied Volney's work for his Egyptian campaign and was guided by it. In 1808 he is said to have said casually to the poet Christoph Martin Wieland : The big question is whether Jesus Christ ever lived. Wieland replied vividly: He knew that there were a few crazy people who doubted Jesus' existence. But that is just as stupid as doubting the existence of Gaius Julius Caesar or Napoleon himself. At that time, the librarian JB Peres from Agen published a text in which he applied the Dupuis method to Napoleon and satirically "proved" that Napoleon did not exist.

Dupuis and Volney found little approval from other enlighteners and free thinkers of their time. Thomas James Mathias (1754–1835) criticized, for example: By making Jesus the sun god, Volney demands that the reader give up common sense and arbitrarily allow all possible allegories. The British polymath Joseph Priestley criticized Volney's theses in three writings (1794–97). In a letter to Volney, he cited evidence of Jesus' historicity and requested evidence, among other things, of the link between Christ and Bacchus and Krishna. In 1799, he also challenged Dupuis in writing to substantiate his theses. Priestley affirmed the French Revolution , but not the anti-Christian attitude of many French enlighteners, which he attributed to the corruption of the Christian clergy, ignorance of the history of religion and prejudice. In the third edition of his Observations on Infidelity (1797) he affirmed to Volney and Dupuis: Religion existed before the priesthood and there is extra-Christian evidence for the existence of Jesus. The derivation of all religions from the cult of the sun is an unusual, capricious imagination, which shows that the authors have not understood the difference between polytheism and monotheism .

Some later proponents of the Jesus myth thesis such as Robert Taylor (1828), Charles Bradlaugh (1854) and Dorothy Murdock (2004) followed the sun cult thesis. John M. Robertson, on the other hand, distinguished himself from it. The derivation of early Christianity from India found many imitators who denied not Jesus 'existence but Jesus' Judaism and claimed an Aryan Jesus.

Bruno Bauer

The Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) assumed that religion was an alienated form of self-consciousness that philosophical criticism of religion had to do away with in order to free it into itself. His five related exegetical writings (1838–1842) should serve this purpose. They show his radicalization process.

In 1835, in his book Das Leben Jesu , David Friedrich Strauss demonstrated the large proportion of mythical and legendary motifs in the Gospels , especially with regard to the miracles of Jesus . In a review of the book, Bauer defended the historicity of the miracles of Jesus. In 1840 he described the Gospel according to Johannes (Joh) as a purely literary artifact that reflected the author's religious ideas, but did not contain any historically reliable data on Jesus. He assumed the historical reliability of the synoptic gospels . From 1841 he also questioned this. He stated that the Gospel according to Mark (Mk), the oldest of the four Gospels, also embeds the stories of Jesus in a literary theological concept. In addition, there was no general expectation of the Messiah in Judaism at that time . Jesus did not introduce himself as the expected Messiah, but instead represented the idea of the unity of God and man in his self-confidence and sacrificed his life to this idea. Only in the faith of the early community in Jerusalem was he risen as the Son of God . Everything that is known about the historical Jesus is due to the Christian conception of him, which Jesus lifted into heaven and thus again alienated self-confidence. Therefore the question of the historical Jesus is pointless. In 1850 ( criticism of the Pauline letters. I – III), Bauer denied the authenticity of all Pauline letters , thereby going beyond the Tübingen school . In this context, he finally declared that there never was a historical Jesus. The need of every religion for an author created it. In 1877 ( Christ and the Caesars ) he explained early Christianity from the later Stoa Senecas and the Hellenistic philosophy of Philon and Josephus .

Bauer was the first to try to justify the non-existence of Jesus of Nazareth with a scientific analysis of the NT texts. Because of his atheist position he lost his license to teach as a theology lecturer in 1842. Other New Testament scholars contradicted his non-existence thesis, so that it appeared publicly to be refuted and had no broad and lasting effect. Albert Schweitzer declared in 1906 that Bauer had presented the “most ingenious and complete repertory of the difficulties of the life of Jesus”. Bauer's radical conclusions for a long time concealed the fact that he had anticipated the main features of the editorial history method in NT research and had made significant contributions to it.

Dutch radical school

From 1878 on, a group of Dutch New Testament scholars, later called the “Dutch Radical School”, was particularly skeptical about the sources of the NT. Representatives were Allard Pierson (1831–1896), Samuel Adrian Naber (1828–1913), Abraham Dirk Loman (1823–1897), Willem Christiaan van Manen (1842–1905) and Gustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga (1874–1957) ; one follower was Thomas Whittaker. They represented a late emergence of the NT scriptures in the 2nd century and the inauthenticity of all Pauline letters , because they considered their self-statements to be less reliable than that of the Acts of the Apostles by Luke . The letter to the Galatians and the letter to the Romans represent opposing positions to the message of the Jerusalem apostles, which are only conceivable after the separation of Christianity from Judaism. That is why these main letters must also come from later Christian authors. From this point of view, they no longer came into consideration as possible sources for the historical Jesus. However, not all proponents of this direction denied Jesus' historicity.

Before Loman (1882) only Edward Evanson (1792) had declared the Letter to the Romans to be spurious because he considered the image of Paul in Acts to be historical. Only the Swiss Rudolf Steck followed him and the radical Dutch in 1888. GJPJ Bolland (1854–1922) disseminated her thesis at the University of Leiden .

However, since the Tübingen School, NT research has recognized at least four, mostly seven letters from Paul as genuine. Only individual authors contradict this today, such as Hermann Detering , who did his doctorate on Dutch radical criticism and, like the latter, considers all Pauline letters to be false ( Paulusbriefe ohne Paulus? The Paulusbriefe in Dutch radical criticism. 1992). The thesis that all Paul’s letters are inauthentic is not scientifically recognized and is considered a misinterpretation of the sources by modern New Testament scholars.

20th century

Development of Jesus research

Research into Jesus that has arisen since the Enlightenment had increasingly questioned the historical reliability of the early Christian testimonies of faith. From around 1840 the Synoptics were considered older and historically more reliable than the Gospel of John. Since 1863 the two-source theory prevailed, according to which the Gospel of Mark and the hypothetical source of logic Q were available to the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke . In 1901 William Wrede showed that the Gospel of Mark was also literarily shaped by a theological concept, so that no biography of Jesus could be inferred from it. Albert Schweitzer proved in 1906 ( Von Reimarus zu Wrede ) that all previous “Leben Jesu” authors had projected their own interests into the sources. Thus the attempt of liberal theology initially appeared to have failed to reconstruct a historical Jesus and to position it against the church's image of Christ. At the end of his series of lectures on Jesus research in 1908, Schweitzer summed up: "The Jesus whom modern theology wanted to depict does not exist [...] This Jesus did not exist."

The non-existence thesis is seen as a sideline to the liberal research on Jesus that was laid out in their source criticism . This made it questionable whether there was a real person behind the early Christian sources. The religious history school provided further impetus , especially James George Frazer's work The Golden Bough (1890): He compared early Christianity with ancient mystery cults of dying and resurrecting vegetation deities. Wilhelm Bousset separated the historical Jesus in 1909 from the early, Hellenistic-influenced Christology and declared that its symbolic content remained valid regardless of Jesus' historicity. The method of the history of form let the interest in the historical individual Jesus subordinate to the interest in the “community consciousness” and the meaning of the individual texts for this community. The historical Jesus appeared meaningless to explain Christianity.

Some radical skeptics drew further conclusions from such templates: Following the question of Jesus' peculiarity in relation to the religious environment, they asked what was historical about him and whether a historical Jesus was needed for the Christian faith. Some identified Jesus directly with pagan gods; others interpreted him as an amalgamation of borrowed features from other ancient cults. To this end, they highlighted mythical analogies that have now become known to many details of the Passion texts in the NT.

Albert Kalthoff, Arthur Drews and Peter Jensen started a broader public debate in Germany about the non-existence thesis with lecture tours, newspaper articles and books. They appeared with the claim that they were the only ones to bravely draw the necessary conclusions from the latest research against theological dogmas and church power, and accordingly announced their publications as epochal sensations. They advocated monism and viewed Jesus' historical existence as an obstacle to their worldview. In 1910, the German Monist Union held a conference in Berlin on the subject of "Did Jesus live?" With Drews and the New Testament scholar Hermann von Soden as the main speakers. The conference received a lot of media attention and sparked follow-up debates in the Netherlands, Great Britain and the USA.

Most of the works for and against the non-existence thesis were published between 1900 and 1930. In 1909 Paul Schmiedel named nine NT texts that contradicted the interests of the early Christians and were therefore irrefutable, irreducible "pillars" of the historicity of Jesus. Thereupon the skeptics tried to prove Jesus' non-historicity by denying these passages. Adolf von Harnack , the main exponent of liberal theology, declared in 1910 that NT science had sufficiently proven the non-existence thesis to be unfounded. Its representatives are only united in the negation, but completely divided in their positions on the emergence of Christianity, which mutually cancel each other out. The question is not whether Jesus lived, but why this question has become so popular.

Albert Schweitzer rejected the theses of Dupuis, Volney, Bauer, Kalthoff, Robertson, Smith, Jensen, Drews and their followers in detail in his Geschichte der Leben-Jesu -forschung (1913). But he also criticized the fact that many New Testament scholars had reinforced the error that the Christian faith depends on evidence of the existence of Jesus. Neither its existence nor non-existence could be proven, only their probability weighed up. The subsequent historicization of a Jesus myth is impossible to make plausible. The previous theses are incompatible and cancel each other out. Consequently, “the assumption that Jesus existed is extremely likely, but its opposite is extremely improbable”.

Rudolf Bultmann summarized the state of research in 1926 again: We know “next to nothing more about Jesus' life and personality […], since the Christian sources were not interested in it, and are also very fragmentary and overgrown by legend, and there are other sources do not exist about Jesus ”. Only Jesus' proclamation can be found in the sources. In literary criticism one can penetrate to the oldest, originally Aramaic text layer, but no real Jesus words can be found with certainty. Nevertheless, the doubt about Jesus' existence is "unfounded and not worth refuting". That he stands behind the oldest Aramaic-speaking community is "absolutely clear". She names Jesus as the bearer of her tradition: "It is most likely that he really was." If not, this does not change the early Christian message in any way. It depends on whether this message concerns and challenges the present existence of the listener.

That remained the position of the vast majority of early Christian scholars. Drews tried to prolong the debate about the non-existence thesis with new editions of his Christ Myth (1928), but received hardly any attention. For decades since about 1940 no more publications on this have appeared in Christianity Studies. Nevertheless, the early proponents of the Jesus myth found imitators again and again later. Your theses are classified into three main types:

Jesus is a spontaneous product, reflection and symbol of the religious needs of a certain group.
It is the product of a syncretism of pre-Christian pagan cults.
It is a copy of the myths of other gods or heroes of cultural and religious history.

John M. Robertson and William B. Smith

The Scottish free thinker John M. Robertson (1856–1933) emerged with three writings (1900; 1903; 1916) on early Christianity. First, he offered an overview of myths and explained them as false, outdated explanations of nature. Then he compared the myths about Krishna and Christ. The older Krishnamythe influenced the younger Christ myth through Buddhism or Greco-Roman cults. Jesus is not a historical person, but in the Gospels (like Moses and Solomon in the Tanakh ) only serves to establish the ethical content of the religion. Robertson then referred to non-Christian analogies to individual motifs (birth of a virgin, in the stable, child murder, temptation, miraculous wine, sea walk, healings, temple cleansing, communion , betrayal, crucifixion , resurrection , doctrines, sovereign titles such as " Savior " and " Logos "): All this is given elsewhere, for example in Buddha legends, in myths about Asklepios , Dionysus , Mithras , Marduk , Osiris , Poseidon and in the Roman imperial cult . He found the closest parallel to a cult of the suffering Messiah in the Prometheus legend. The Eucharist grew out of the human sacrifice , the following Passion was a mystery drama like in the Mithras cult . Contradictions in the Gospels can only be explained by the acceptance of several Jesus and forerunner sects. So there was a pre-Christian cult of Jesus among the Mandaeans . According to Robertson, the source hypotheses of NT research (Q, Markinian Passion Report) confirmed the composition of the Gospels from various myths.

The natural scientist William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934) had learned biblical languages by himself. With the help of the theologian Paul Schmiedel, he published the German-language book Der vorchristliche Jesus in 1906 , the material of which was incorporated into his second, English-language book Ecce Deus . He rejected liberal as well as prophetic eschatological images of Jesus in research and instead suggested a symbolic interpretation of the sources. Behind the Gospels there is a general oriental cult of the God-Man. Here no man has been deified, but a god has been humanized. Because primitive Christianity is consistently syncretistic, and only the veneration of Jesus as God connects it. Had Jesus been human, nothing of him would have been narrated. Because of the hostile environment, the cult of Jesus was symbolically coded and must be deciphered. The “victory over Satan” in the synoptic broadcast texts should be understood as a mandate to Christian missionaries to defeat polytheism with monotheism. The figure of Jesus was subsequently portrayed as the revealer of this monotheistic cult. The four Gospels had more and more embellished his fictional story with material from Hellenistic mystery cults. The first Christians were Gnostics, as Acts 10.38 LUT proves. Those passages that express human feelings about Jesus should be interpreted symbolically and not related to real people. All traditional healing acts are symbolic healings from paganism. The figure of the fleeing naked youth in Mk 14,51f. The EU is a symbolic code for the fact that the God-man Jesus had not actually been arrested: That was unthinkable for Gnostic early Christians. Smith claimed that a Jewish sect had worshiped Moses' successor, Joshua, as a divine being centuries earlier. The early Christians followed this. They would have developed the alleged historical details of the life of Jesus in the NT from stories about the pre-Christian Joshua. In addition, Smith linked the Johannine majesty "Lamb of God" ( Latin Agnus Dei ) with the Indian deity Agni . He also considered non-Christian sources about Jesus to be worthless. Drews adopted his thesis of the pre-Christian Joshua- Jason- Jesus cult and its astrological interpretation from Smith. In 1921 Gilbert Thomas Sadler also adopted Smith's theses.

In 1911, the Christian historian Shirley Jackson Case pointed to a lack of evidence for the alleged cult of Joshua in all pre- and post-Christian Jewish literature. The mere similarity of names could not support the thesis, since Joshua and Jesus were common Jewish names. The custom of Hellenized Jews at the time to adopt similar-sounding Greek middle names (e.g. Jason for Joshua) is absent from Jesus of Nazareth. Jews at that time translated his Hebrew first name Yehoshua with the Greek Jesous, not with Jason as with other Jews of this name . They would have done the same with him if they had wanted to identify him with the Jason cult.

The religious-historical research had so indirectly ruled before 1920 an influence of Buddhism on the Palestinian Judaism and Jesus and declared emerged (about some parables and territorial securities) as independently externally similar motives. The well-known Indologist Friedrich Max Müller had searched for such influences for decades, but did not find them. Albert Schweitzer referred to this in 1913.

The atheist Fred C. Conybeare, like Robertson a member of the British Rationalist Press Association, criticized Drews, Robertson and Smith in 1914: These "untrained researchers" discovered mythical parallels everywhere that were nonexistent and impossible, but at the same time rejected proven and obvious parallels (e.g. on biblical-Jewish tradition). George Albert Wells distinguished himself from Smith's symbolic NT exegesis from 1975: "It is difficult to produce convincing evidence against researchers who insist on finding hidden meanings in simple statements."

Albert Kalthoff

The pastor Albert Kalthoff (1850-1906) belonged to Emil Felden (1874-1959), Oscar Mauritz (1867-1958), Moritz Schwalb (1833-1916) and Friedrich Steudel (1866-1939) to a group of Bremer Monisten who no longer believed in Jesus as a historical figure. Kalthoff and Felden combined this with social engagement for workers outside the church. Kalthoff understood Jesus as the mere product of the religious needs of a social movement that had come into contact with the Jewish expectation of the Messiah.

In 1902 Kalthoff published his book “The Christ Problem”, in 1904 he expanded it under the title “The emergence of Christianity. New contributions to the Christ problem. ”In it he took up the thoughts of Friedrich Engels and tried to explain Christianity purely in terms of social history. In doing so, he denied the existence of the historical Jesus. Its reconstruction "failed across the board". Its traditional form is only the personified early Christian community consciousness. According to the Marxist thesis of the class struggle , this figure should be understood as a moral “weapon” with which the emerging Christian society asserted itself against the old forces of Roman society.

Kalthoff had unquestionably represented the liberal image of Jesus in 1880, but later found no reference to early Christianity in it. From 1900 he criticized that it was impossible to start directly from the historical Jesus, but had to first determine the central ideas of early Christianity and then trace them back further. The idea of Christ has superhuman, heroic traits in all biblical writings. Jews of the time could not possibly have transferred them to a historical individual. Then, however, he asserted against Bruno Bauer and without any evidence that there had been many suffering and crucified Messiah candidates in Judaism before Jesus. The early Christians only got to know the Jewish faith in the Messiah in Rome. They learned from Jews the personification of an ideal hero, created the figure of Christ, invented their lives and transferred them to Galilee. The parables of Jesus reflected Roman conditions, such as large estates and the enslavement of overindebted small farmers. Even in the Gospels, Peter is always a symbol of the Roman Christian community. That is why she placed his confession of Christ near Caesarea Philippi , the Roman garrison town in Palestine.

Albert Schweitzer criticized in 1906: Kalthoff had rightly questioned the previous statements about the origin of early Christianity, but himself only offered speculation. He only replaces the bourgeois-liberal with a left-wing image of Jesus. His detour via Rome was not necessary for this.

Peter Jensen

In 1872 the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh was rediscovered. In the Babel-Bible dispute over the extent of Babylonian influences on the Bible, the Assyriologist Peter Jensen took a conscious outsider position from 1906: The figure of the god-man Gilgamesh was the background and source of many biblical main characters. Even Jesus is only an " Israelite Gilgamesh" and an appendage of his biblical forerunners. Jensen did not rule out unknown historical contributory causes of the depiction of Jesus in the Gospels, but considered them to be unimportant. In 1909 he also described Paul of Tarsus as a Gilgamesh copy. In 1910, like Drews, he questioned all sources for Jesus' existence and suggested that he be understood as a mere image of the heroic Theios aner . From 1911 onwards, the Leipzig Semitist Heinrich Zimmer represented a variant of Jensen's thesis.

Arthur Drews

Arthur Drews (1865–1935) had become a philosophy professor in 1898 and only then dealt with criticism of the gospel. With the work Die Christusmyth 1909 he wanted to show that everything about the NT depictions of Jesus is mythical, so that one does not have to assume a historical person behind it. He is disappointed that no Christianity researcher has so far represented this. Following on from James Frazer's Golden Bough , he asserted similar mythical motifs in many other cults and religions, which he traced back to an ancient sun cult. He declared all non-Christian evidence of Jesus' existence to be worthless and (like the radical Dutch) all of Paul's letters to be false. Like Kalthoff, he accused liberal theology of a “fundamental error” that the Christian Church began with the historical Jesus. However, it is "one-sided" to "pass Christ off as the mere reflection of the Christian community and its experiences".

Instead, Drews claimed a pre-Christian cult of Jesus in Hellenized Judaism . Thus, Daniel's apocalyptic adopted elements of dualistic Zoroastrianism and the Mithras cult . The Jewish Messiah was made into a figure of the end times and mixed with Philon's doctrine of Logos and the Stoa. Many ancient sects emerged from this syncretism. In Judaism there has been a cult around Joshua for a long time , which was a personification of the sun god and was associated with the Passover rite and circumcision . With speculative name similarities, Drews established a line from Joshua to Jason, whom he interpreted as a healer, and the therapists , from there to the Essenes and the Nazarenes: They all had worshiped an essentially identical healer deity, originally a sun deity. He also linked them with mystery cults around the son of Zeus , Dionysus and Demeter . He also took up the astrological thesis of Dupuis that the twelve number of the disciples of Jesus symbolized the signs of the zodiac. He traced the Christian sign of the cross back to a magical cult symbol Tau : it originally had no reference to suffering, death, execution and punishment, but to a gesture of victory with outspread arms like Moses (Ex 17:11).

In response to this book, some well-known theologians, orientalists and historians dealt with the non-existence thesis for the first time. The title of the book, Christ Myth , became the catchphrase for the entire debate. A lack of specialist knowledge and errors on the part of the author were often mentioned, which made his far-reaching thesis unbelievable. Otto Weinreich pointed out, for example, that Drews misinterpreted the Hebrew word for “buffalo” as the Luther Bible as “unicorn” and therefore misinterpreted it as an influence of Zoroastrianism. Elsewhere he has translated the same word as “bull” in order to be able to make a reference to the cross symbol from the bull horns. This shows a lack of methodology and arbitrariness. He applied far stricter criteria of source criticism to the Gospels than to his own theses. Comparative religious studies no longer deduce from linguistic and content similarities to relationship and historical dependence. Equating Jesus with Joshua in terms of content only because of a similarity of names is "nonsense". The completely unproven equation of Maria with Maia , the mother of Hermes , and other mothers of gods is a "highly dubious mythological chain break". With undisputed mythical features in the image of Christ one could neither prove the existence nor non-existence of Jesus, since many historical figures of antiquity had become carriers of mythical elements.

In 1921 Drews tried to explain the Gospel of Mark using only mythical motifs. Rudolf Bultmann criticized the book:

Drews is dealing with an outdated state of research. According to Wilhelm Bousset's work Kyrios Christ (1913), Persian than Babylonian redeeming myths influenced the early Christians' image of Christ.
His questions about the influence of biblical prophecies, astral mythology and proverbs are not open, but he always delivers the answer right away.
He succumbed to the earlier mistake of his opponents by demanding indubitable evidence. However, Jesus' existence can only be proven in such a way that “the overall historical picture corresponds to the sources” and makes them understandable. Bousset did that, but Drews didn't.
He misunderstood the difference between tradition and redaction in Mark's Gospel and only single out individual passages "completely methodless". So he overlooked the fact that only later, not the earliest, layers of the text speak of a cult deity and a redemption myth and that there were strong differences between Palestinian and Hellenistic early Christians.
He based his discoveries of astral mythology only on the editorial context of the Gospel.
He does not know the specific language style of discourses, miracle texts and other things and has therefore forgotten to depict the end-time prophet Jesus in addition to the rabbi and miracle worker.
He does not explain "how it came to translate the mythical Jesus into the historical, and why the story of Jesus was dated in such a recent past".
He gives no reason why the Palestinian early Christians should have invented the one to whom, according to the sources, they owed their existence and therefore consciously differentiated themselves from their environment. He doesn't even notice this oldest church himself.
He compares Lk 10,37 LUT (the disciples' controversy for the places of honor in the kingdom of God ) with the "superstition of an African Negro tribe": That reinforces the doubts about his religious-historical qualification.

Lenin saw Drews as "a reactionary who openly helps the exploiters to replace the old and rotten religious prejudices with brand new, even more disgusting and shoddy prejudices". Nevertheless, it is communist duty to enter into a pragmatic alliance with people like Drews against the “religious dark men”. Accordingly, in 1922 all religious writings were banned from Soviet libraries. The non-existence thesis, however, was passed off as scientifically proven and included in school and university textbooks. Since 1989, the keyword “mythical Christ” and the non-historical thesis have disappeared from Russian dictionaries on Christianity.

The Bremerhaven theologian Hermann Raschke endorsed Drews' non-existence thesis in his book The Mystery of Christ (1954). He tried to explain the synoptic representation of Jesus as a logos myth of Gnosis , which was "composed of motifs from the Heracles and Dionysus myths". However, there is no concrete evidence for this.

Paul-Louis Couchoud

In France, only E. Moutier-Rousset took part in the non-existence debate in 1922. The doctor Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879–1959) only achieved that there was occasional discussion there . James George Frazer wrote a foreword for his first work (1924) and praised his dispassionate analysis without agreeing to the non-existence thesis. Couchoud dedicated his main work (1938) to Robertson and in it followed his thesis of a pre-Christian cult of Jesus.

He rejected non-Christian notes on Jesus, claimed that Paul knew nothing about Jesus and that all gospels were based on the Gospel of Mark. This was only created in Rome under Domitian and can be interpreted as a biblically expanded commentary on Paul's message of a mythical Christ. Jesus' existence is only a vague possibility, in concrete terms almost nothing can be known about him. Jesus appears as a messianic agitator like Theudas . Such could not explain the origin of Christianity; thus Jesus' existence is questionable. As a monotheistic Jew, Paul could not, in principle, have equated anyone with YHWH and worshiped him as God. His Jesus must therefore be a heavenly figure, his crucifixion a mystical allegory. In doing so, Paul projected his own suffering onto Jesus in a visionary manner and interpreted Ps 22 EU in terms of this invented figure. In the Gospels, this spiritual myth of Christ was later presented as a historical event. In doing so, the early Christians relied above all on the Jewish apocryphal Book of Enoch and the message of John the Baptist . They would have given the name of Joshua (Jesus) to the coming Savior whom he had announced. They would have Ex 23.20 f. and Num 13:16 distorted.

The historical-critical New Testament scholars Alfred Loisy , on whom Couchoud referred, and Maurice Goguel refuted Couchoud's theses in 1937/38 in specialist journals. Couchoud did not reply to the content of her statement; only the English translation of his main work ( The Creation of Christ. 1939) contained an appendix. His third work was a reprint of the second. Otherwise, only Edouard Dujardin represented the Jesus myth thesis in France at that time.

John Allegro

After 1945, only a few authors took the non-existence thesis. They mostly did not belong to subject-related research and were not taken into account by it. An exception was John Marco Allegro , a member of the editorial team of the Dead Sea Scrolls . In 1956, before the end of their text edition, Allegro claimed: A scroll fragment that relates Torah statements to the Roman crucifixion proves the cult of a crucified Messiah, whose followers awaited his parousia in a cleansed Jerusalem . The later cult of Jesus fits into this pattern. To this end, Allegro combined the fragment with pieces of text on the teacher of justice . The other editors rejected Allegro's theses in a joint statement as a sensation-seeking, speculative misinterpretation of the text fragments.

In 1968 Allegro claimed that the early Christians cultivated a fertility cult that included the consumption of a hallucinogenic mushroom. Jesus did not exist, but was a code name for that mushroom, as were the names of John, Peter and Paul. His followers invented him under the influence of this drug. 14 prominent British New Testament scholars panned the book. The publisher apologized for the publication. Allegro graduated from Manchester University and remained academically ostracized until his death in 1988.

George Albert Wells

From 1971 onwards, the British professor of German studies George Albert Wells took up the Jesus Mythos theses from works by Kalthoff, Jensen and Drews, which had never been translated into English, and tried to back them up with a series of books. In 1986 he summarized his main arguments:

All non-Christian Jesus notes are dependent on Christian tradition. The notes with Josephus are forged.
The Gospels were invented after 70 and did not contain any older text elements. They are largely dependent on one another, so that multiple attestations cannot be assumed. Their theological concepts all came from non-Jews outside Palestine.
The Pauline letters are indeed early early Christian writings (here Wells contradicted the radical Dutch). However, its author had no knowledge of Jesus' teaching, miracles and death circumstances. He had interpreted a Jewish myth of the preexisting wisdom that took up residence in Israel and biblical statements about the shameful death of the righteous (Isa. 52-53) to an undated crucifixion: So he expanded the wisdom myth to the myth of a preexisting, incarnate God of Savior .
Peter and the other Jerusalem apostles had also received this redeeming myth through visions of a resurrected crucified Christ and then proclaimed it, but knew no historical Jesus.

Wells also denied that Jesus' brother James belonged to the early church and that Paul met him there. In addition, Wells reinterpreted the expression "brother / brothers of Kyrios " in Gal 1.19 LUT and 1 Cor 9.5 LUT : Here we are not talking about physical brothers, but brothers in the sense of fellow Christians.

Wells changed his views on Jesus several times: in 1971 he repeated the theses of Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews and other German authors that the Jesus of the NT was a copy of pagan gods myths. In 1975 Wells took up some objections to this, drawing on more recent outsider positions in NT research. Its representatives, however, did not accept his conclusion that Jesus did not exist. In 1982 Wells no longer explained the Jesus figure from allegedly pagan parallels, but from a Jewish wisdom myth. In addition, he distinguished himself from William Smith, John Allegro and Guy Fau and made them responsible for the non-acceptance of the Jesus myth theses. No ordinary publisher published his fourth work on it; academic journals did not review it. In 1986 Wells claimed that a Jesus ben Panthera who lived about 100 years later initiated the NT tradition. Wells withdrew this thesis in his next book. In 2003 he accepted that Paul knew about Jesus' crucifixion in Jerusalem and that the teachings of the Gospels were from a Galilee preacher. However, he denied that the preacher and the crucified one were the same person.

This change of position also included Wells' view of the logia source Q. In 1986 he accepted that this written source could be reconstructed from the common material of Mt and Lk. However, he denied their Aramaic formulation and authentic Jesus words therein. Instead, he found his thesis of a wisdom myth adopted by Jews confirmed in it. In The Jesus Myth (1998) Wells assumed that Paul's mythical Jesus had been fused narrative with a “minimally historical Jesus”, whose teachings were partly handed down in the source Q of the Logia.

21st century

Since 2000, the non-existence thesis has received new attention, especially in the USA. The British New Testament scholar Maurice Casey named as factors that:

With Robert M. Price, a trained New Testament scholar also represents the thesis for the first time,
the World Wide Web provides a forum for authors and opinions that play no role in early Christian research,
publications by earlier representatives of the Jesus myth that have been overtaken and refuted by advances in research are reprinted and distributed,
the contrast between biblicism and Christian fundamentalism on the one hand, atheism and radical skepticism on the other polarizes and fuels the debate,
Some representatives of the Jesus myth theses used to be dogmatic, confessional and fundamentalist Christians themselves and only fight the views learned at the time, without taking into account the Jesus research, which was also influenced by agnostics, Jews and non-denominational Christians.

Neopaganism

The American authors Dorothy M. Murdock (author name: Arachya S.), Tom Harpur, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy again advocate the thesis that Jesus is a copy of an astral myth and pagan gods like Krishna, Horus and Mithras. They describe these as redeemer deities or "Christs" (plural) and refer to authors from the 19th and early 20th centuries such as Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey and Alvin Boyd Kuhn. Even in their time, these had not found recognition in oriental studies and Egyptology , since primary sources contain no evidence for their theses. Nonetheless, some films have adopted and disseminated these theses, including The God Who Wasn't There (2005), Zeitgeist (2007), and Religulous (2008).

Various authors, including Richard Carrier, have shown that the parallels between Horus and Jesus alleged by Murdock do not exist and were constructed through arbitrarily interpreted, scattered pictorial symbols and appeal to post-Christian authors. Original Egyptian sources on Horus do not contain any of the alleged analogies of virgin birth, baptism, disciple choice, teaching, betrayal by a disciple, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day.

Earl Doherty

The Canadian historian and linguist Earl Doherty has been advocating the thesis that Jesus was a mythical figure derived from Middle Platonism since 1999 . Some influences came from the Jewish mysticism of the merkabah . The belief in a historical Jesus only arose among the Christian communities in the 2nd century. In 2009 Doherty affirmed: Christianity began with belief in a spiritual, mythical figure. The Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction. No individually identifiable person founded the tradition of the Galilean sermons in them. None of the great Christian apologists except Justin Martyr and Aristides of Athens described a historical Jesus before 180, but a Christian movement that was founded on Platonic philosophy and Hellenistic Judaism . By this they understood a monotheistic veneration of the Jewish God and a personified Logos. Theophilus of Antioch , Athenagoras of Athens , Tatian and Minucius Felix offered no starting points for a historical Jesus, since his name did not appear in their testimonies.

Robert M. Price

Robert M. Price is a doctor of systematic theologian and New Testament scholar in the United States. He used to be a Baptist preacher who advocated the inerrancy of the Bible. Later he was part of the liberal Jesus seminar , which presupposes Jesus' historicity. According to him, the Gospels represent Jesus analogously to the hero archetype of Hercules , Apollonius of Tyana and others, which is widespread worldwide .

Price lists the main arguments against Jesus' existence:

Extra-Christian sources did not mention any miraculous Jesus.
Even the oldest NT epistles , written before the Gospels, did not contain any evidence of a Jesus who lived shortly before.
Only a mythical image of Christ of the incarnating, dying and resurrecting God of the Redeemer can be inferred from the Gospels.
There are parallels to this myth in many ancient oriental myths, for example in the cults of Baal , Osiris , Attis , Adonis and Dumuzi . All of these cults of the Hellenistic and Roman epochs would have influenced early Christianity. Christian apologists later tried to reduce these parallels.

With consistent source criticism, no reliable historical information about Jesus could be found in ancient sources. This leaves only an agnosticism on the question of historicity. A historical Jesus cannot be completely ruled out, but only a vague possibility. This made the question arbitrary and not to be decided by a majority of researchers.

Price also follows the inauthenticity thesis of the Dutch radical criticism of the Pauline letters.

Richard Carrier

Richard Carrier, philosopher and historian, followed Doherty's thesis in his blog in 2003, that early Christianity emerged as a mystical revelation religion and that the narrative depictions of Jesus were a subsequent historicization. Doherty explains the existing sources better than most "historicists", even if the existence of Jesus cannot be ruled out entirely.

To Kersey Graves , who in 1875 had claimed "16 crucified saviors" of antiquity, Carrier emphasized: Although many myths of ancient gods contained a kind of resurrection theme, no passion story comparable to Jesus. Only Inanna ( Ishtar ) reported a crucifixion as early as 1500 BC. According to Herodotus, Zalmoxis "buried" himself, kept himself hidden and reappeared after three years. Therefore, his followers would have deified him during his lifetime. With regard to Osiris, too, Carrier defended the thesis that deities of antiquity were dying and resurrected analogously to Jesus.

In 2012 ( Proving History ), Carrier rejected the historical-critical methods of early Christianity research as inadequate and suggested replacing them with a probability calculation according to Bayes' theorem . This calculates the statistical probability of future events that can be derived from given hypotheses. Whether and how subjective factors can be ruled out when drawing up the initial hypotheses and whether these can be calculated is highly controversial and is usually denied. Christian authors such as William Lane Craig had tried to make the resurrection of Jesus credible with this formula and were also criticized for it by other New Testament scholars. Various reviewers rejected Carrier's application of the formula to the question of the historicity of Jesus as mathematically flawed and as a transparent attempt to make one's own subjective opinion appear objectively unassailable.

In his book On the Historicity of Jesus (2014) Carrier applied Bayes' formula to the early Christian sources. As a result, he claimed that there was a far overwhelming probability that Jesus did not exist. According to Raphael Lataster and Jim Walker, Carrier has convincingly overtaken older Jesus myth theses and set "historians" the task of refuting his calculations. According to David Marshall, the work is full of factual errors and the resulting incorrect calculations. Carrier 1 Cor 13.2 EU misinterpreted: This passage diametrically contradicts his thesis that Paul's message resembles that of a mystery religion because it excludes the alleged primacy of an elite with secret knowledge in the Christian community.

New atheism

Some proponents of the New Atheism consider the existence of Jesus to be scientifically debatable. Richard Dawkins, for example, like George A. Wells, sees the Gospels as a mere infusion of the Jewish Bible. Presumably Jesus lived; however, despite the majority opinion, this could be seriously doubted. Unlike Mohammed, Christopher Hitchens found little or no evidence of Jesus' life. He advocated the more recent discussion about the non-existence thesis and took up the arguments in favor of it, in order to deprive the Koran and its portrayal of Jesus as a miracle worker and prophet from credibility. The former priest Dan Barker emerged as an atheist in 1992 and has been advocating the non-existence thesis since 2009, as has the Freedom From Religion Foundation .

Because the radical historical-critical New Testament scholars of the Jesus seminar did not consider the non-existence thesis either, in 2007 R. Joseph Hoffmann founded the Jesus Project at the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), a subdivision of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst (New York) . The approximately 20 members included some Christianity scholars (Bruce D. Chilton, James G. Crossley, Robert Eisenman , James McGrath, James M. Robinson, Dennis MacDonald, Gerd Lüdemann ) and some exponents of the non-existence thesis (Richard Carrier, Arthur Droge, Robert M . Price, Thomas L. Thompson, Frank Zindler, Hoffmann himself). US media perceived the project as an attempt to scientifically substantiate Jesus' non-existence and to advance an academic discussion about it. After a few meetings at which it was impossible to agree on goals and methods, and financing problems, Hoffmann discontinued the project in 2009. Most of the essays in a collective edition of the project represent the non-existence thesis.

Survey

According to a 2005 survey by the private Christian Baylor University , an estimated one percent of all Americans believed that Jesus was a fictional character. Among those who described themselves as religiously unbound, the figure was 13.7 percent. In the UK in February 2008, 13 percent of 1,107 adult citizens polled, including 40 percent of those who claim to be atheists, believed that Jesus "never existed". According to a poll published in April 2009, 10 percent of 2500 Australians surveyed believed that Jesus did not exist.

Main arguments of the debate

Extra-Christian ancient mentions of Jesus

The fact that most of the non-Christian authors of the 1st and early 2nd centuries did not mention Jesus, and some only mentioned them in passing, proves the proponents of this thesis that Jesus did not exist. Volney and Dupuis already rejected the Jesus notes of the Jewish historian Josephus and those of the Roman historian Tacitus . Their successors also consider the ancient Jesus notes to be unreliable, forged or dependent on Christian tradition.

Research, on the other hand, classifies at least the James note by Josephus (around 90) and the Tacitus note (around 116) as credible, since both authors were otherwise relatively reliable, rejected Christianity and no Christian interpolation was discernible. According to her judgment, the second Josephus note, the Testimonium Flavianum , also contains a historical core. For Gerd Theißen and Annette Merz , the fact that Jesus was not mentioned does not speak against his existence, as Philo mentioned Pontius Pilatus , Josephus Johannes the Baptist and Jesus' brother James. The fact that Josephus, Tacitus and Mara Bar Serapion independently mentioned Jesus' execution and unquestionably assumed his existence could not be purely coincidental or fictitious.

Paul's letters

The Pauline letters recognized as genuine , the oldest written Christian sources, quote or paraphrase some words of Jesus. However, they do not mention John the Baptist, the names of eleven of the twelve apostles, Kajaphas , Pilate, discourses, healing miracles and parables of Jesus, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum and most of the Passion stories. It therefore appears questionable whether Paul was familiar with the synoptic Jesus tradition and whether it already existed at that time. The origin, extent and authenticity of the Jesus tradition handed down by him are disputed. Proponents of the Jesus myth thesis deny any knowledge of Paul about the historical Jesus. His letters should have represented more of Jesus' life if he had existed. Jesus' words in it did not come from historical memory or were not related to historical events. The synoptic Jesus tradition emerged only decades later.

New Testament scholars largely reject this view as irrelevant. Because the church letters were addressed to baptized Christians, who had already been given basic knowledge about Jesus, and referred to specific, current situations of their addressees. Therefore, the expectation that they would contain news of Jesus' life and confirm gospel material missed their particular intentions and purposes. The fact that Paul placed the risen Jesus Christ at the center of his message corresponded to his self-image that the risen One had called him, the former persecutor of Christians, with his own appearance to be the Apostle of the Nations (Gal 1: 1, 11ff; Damascus experience ). He had to defend his apostolate against those apostles who originally also required non-Jewish Christians to adhere to the entire Torah and for this purpose appealed to the pre-Easter Jesus (Mt 5:17). By emphasizing that God alone raised Jesus, who was crucified by men, he preserved Jewish monotheism. Accordingly, he also said that he no longer knew Jesus "according to the flesh" that he had known ( 2 Cor 5:16 LUT ).

Nevertheless, Paul passed on information about Jesus from the circle of the first followers that are considered authentic:

Rom 1,3f: Jesus was a Jew who was descended from King David.
Gal 4,4: He was a real man, born of a woman.
1 Cor 9: 5: He had several biological brothers. Paul also mentioned their wives here, whom he refers to as sisters in the faith, and distinguished them and Cephas from the apostles in the same sentence, so that “brothers” cannot mean “fellow Christians” here. - Jesus become brothers in Mk 3,31ff .; Joh 2:12; 7,3.5.10; Acts 1:14 confirmed and named in Mk 6,3.
Gal 1:19: One of these physical brothers was called James. Only he, not the named Peter, is called “brother of the Lord” here. In other places he appears as the authority of the early church (Gal 2: 9, 12; 1 Cor 15: 7). - Jesus' brother James and his leadership role in the early church in Jerusalem are described by Josephus and Acts 12:17; 15.13; 21:18 confirmed.
1 Cor 7:10: Jesus forbade divorce (Mk 10,9-12); From this, Paul concluded, upon request from one of his congregations, a reconciliation requirement for the divorced.
1 Cor 9:14: Jesus commanded that his followers should live only from their message (Mk 6.8; Mt 10.8–11: Jesus asked them to give up money, work and settle down).
Rom.12.14.17: Jesus commanded love for one's enemies (Matt.5.44f.). For Paul this corresponded to the biblical commandment (Prov 25:21) to shame the enemies of the righteous Jews by doing benevolent to them.
Rom 14:13: Paul exhorts Christians like Jesus (Mk 7.1) not to judge one another.
1 Cor 11: 23-25: Jesus was betrayed the night before his death and celebrated a last meal with his disciples, during which he indicated his impending death to them.
1 Cor 8: 1ff .; Phil 2: 6-8: Jesus was executed like a slave with the Roman punishment on the cross. He consciously accepted this death as the servitude of the Son of Man (Mk 10:45).
1 Thess 2.15; 1 Cor 2,8: Jesus was executed in the cooperation of Jews and "rulers of this world".
1 Cor 15: 3–4: He was buried.

According to Theißen / Merz, this information rules out that Jesus is a fictional figure, even if nothing else had been narrated about him. In addition, different genres of NT text that were created independently of one another and non-Christian sources confirm some of this information.

Although Paul did not narrate any healing miracles to Jesus, he probably heard of them. Because he knew the gift of healing (1 Cor 12: 9), asked Jesus Christ for it several times (2 Cor 12: 8) and emphasized that he himself had worked miracles as an apostle (2 Cor 12:12). Possibly he did not mention any miracles of Jesus because he centrally proclaimed the renunciation of the Son of God to his divine power in favor of the death on the cross (Phil 2: 6–8). The Gospel of Thomas does not contain any, either, the Gospel of John contains only a few miracle texts, including none of the exorcisms typical of Jesus according to Mark. The Gospel of Mark surrounds his miraculous texts with a silence command from Jesus. This reluctance is explained by the particular theological-missionary purposes of these sources. According to Theißen / Merz, this speaks more in favor than against the fact that Jesus himself caused the oldest miracle reports through his actions.

Gospels

Proponents of the non-existence thesis refer to long-established results of NT research: The Gospels were written 40 to 100 years after the narrated events, partly outside of Palestine, and were written in Greek. Their authors did not belong to the generation of the first followers of Jesus. They barely contain precise biographical information and contradict each other on important dates such as visits to Jerusalem and the day of Jesus' death. They are consistently shaped by the Easter faith, the congregation situation and an interest in preaching. Often narrated events are meant to fulfill biblical promises so that “scriptural evidence” may have produced them. Jesus' own statements in it can hardly be clearly distinguished from church formation.

However, these source properties cannot justify Jesus' non-existence. The special dates in Johannes are limited to his circle of authors, theologically explainable deviations from older synoptic tradition. This has several sources with strong similarities (Mk, Logia source, extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Agrapha ). Historical memories can also be found in the respective special property of the Gospels.

The genre of the Gospels includes the claim to depict the life of a historical person. The intention to preach and historical memory are not mutually exclusive. They serve to keep Jesus' words and deeds in memory: According to Acts 11:16, Peter “remembered” a word of Jesus. After Justin the Martyr , "Memories of the Apostles" were read out in Christian worship. According to Papias of Hierapolis , Mark wrote down Jesus' words and deeds "as he reminded them". They distinguish Jesus' time from their time; B. Jesus' commission to mission to Israel (Mt 10: 5f.) From the commission of the risen One to mission to the nations (Mt 28: 19f.). They tell of indisputably historical people like John the Baptist, Herod , Kajaphas, and Pilate, with whom Jesus dealt. This allows conclusions to be drawn about the reliability of other information about Jesus.

Some of the subjects of the Synoptic can only be explained by circumstances 40 to 50 years before their final version:

Mt 6.25-31 par., Mt 10 par. and other texts from the Logienquelle reflect the living situation of dispossessed wandering beggars. The evangelists tempered the radical demands of Jesus for Christians in settled local congregations. Lk 22,35f. the strict rules of the broadcast speech (Lk 10).
Followers of Jesus like the tax collector Levi must have spoken Greek for their profession. Bilingualism was common in the Syrian area.
The Pharisee image of the Logia source (Mt 23; Lk 11: 37ff.) Fits well-known practices of the Pharisees before the temple was destroyed (70), not afterwards.
Mk 13 (the synoptic apocalypse) must have originated before the Caligula crisis in 39.
Mk 14.47.51 does not name disciples of Jesus who resisted and escaped arrest, unlike in the context, probably because they were already known in the early community and were supposed to be protected from Roman persecution. The core of the oldest Passion Report was therefore probably written during Pilate's tenure (up to 36).

It is undisputed that early Christians adopted mythical motifs from their environment and ascribed to Jesus in order to testify to his divine origin and power. However, these analogies mainly concern later legendary texts that expand and frame the rest of the narrative tradition: for example, natal legends, duplicated, increased and motivically increased healing miracles. These were more and more aligned with a common folk miracle tradition. The oldest texts, on the other hand, interpret Jesus' miracle of healing as a sign of the onset of the kingdom of God and connect them with the call to follow Jesus : These features differentiated his appearance from other miracle workers of the time. The process of ascribing similar miracles to Jesus was thus initiated by his own actions. His healing deeds are attested in individual narratives as well as summaries as well as accusations of Jewish opponents (Mk 3,22f.), Which cannot be explained after Easter. Josephus and Mara bar Serapion confirm that even non-Christians had heard of Jesus' healing deeds and did not doubt them.

The scriptural evidence in the Passion stories is supposed to give real events a theological meaning. For example, the violent temple cleansing, the flight of the disciples (Mk 14: 27f.) And the crucifixion of Jesus between “robbers” ( zealots ) were hardly invented because of the quotations from the Bible, but these helped the early Christians to classify these unpleasant events. Conversely, there are no biblical quotations that would have been ideally suited to the interpretation of real events: z. B. Ps 22:17 for nailing Jesus to the cross (Lk 24:39f.), Which the archaeological find of a nailed skeleton made likely.

The previously common double criterion of difference (only those words of Jesus that differ from Judaism and early Christianity are authentic) presupposes that Jesus is ahistorically uniqueness and has rightly been replaced by the criterion of contextual plausibility. Jesus cannot be a fictional character, as many of his stories can only be imagined in the Jewish context of the time. Formal features make certain types of speech likely to be typical of Jesus, e.g. B. Parables , Beatitudes, and others.

Mythical analogies

Proponents of the Jesus myth thesis interpret the early Christian "salvation drama" of the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as an allegedly widespread pattern of older Pagan myths that early Christians would have adopted from Hellenistic mystery cults. Religious scholars refuted the alleged pattern in detail:

Hellenistic mystery cults had no dying and resurrecting sons of gods.
Dying vegetation gods like Adonis , Attis and Osiris were not sons of gods; some were not mystery deities either.
Her death was never presented as salvation.
Life for others was never portrayed as the goal of their mission in human form.
Participants in their cults did not become children of their god.
People portrayed as demigods or sons of gods were not seen as bodily resurrected, but rather as prehistoric heroes endowed with immortality ( apotheosis ), often for very different deeds than those narrated by Jesus.
No mystery cults are documented in the first century in the vicinity of Palestine. They did not spread there until the 2nd century, when Christianity already existed as a separate religion. They were therefore perceived by theologians of the early church as competition and excluded.
A pre-Christian Gnostic Redeemer myth is also unproven. The texts cited for this come from the 3rd century and responded to the early Christian message.
Similar early Christian language motifs (e.g. “redemption”) are not influenced by mystery cults, but come from the Jewish apocalyptic tradition.
Paul was a rabbinically trained Pharisee who advocated strict observance of the Torah before his conversion (Gal 1:14) and who also thereafter always professed Judaism (2 Cor 11:22; Rom 9.4; 11.1; Phil 3 , 5). The Judaism of that time was strictly separated from pagan cults; therefore it came to the Jewish War in 66–70 . It is therefore very unlikely that Paul and other early Christians were influenced by Hellenistic mystery cults.

The alleged cult pattern of dying and resurrecting gods has often been attacked since the 1930s because at least one, usually several aspects (death, resurrection, deity, salvation, participation of the followers) were missing in each example given. In religious studies it is therefore today an outdated category guided by Christian ideas.

The central argument for Jesus' historicity is his crucifixion: processing and interpreting it made the early Christians in the New Testament noticeably difficult, because this type of execution meant exclusion from God's people for Jews and extreme humiliation for non-Jews (1 Cor 1:18). Paul was aware that non-Jews had to understand the preaching of a crucified Jew as an absurdity and an attack on their religious, aesthetic, and political ideals. This is confirmed by contemporary reactions of educated Greeks and Romans to Christianity.

Historicizing a Myth

Proponents of the Jesus myth thesis assume that the early Christians found a myth of a pre-existing God, adopted it, expanded it and subsequently historicized it. They consider this to be more plausible than the common explanation of Jesus research: a Jewish person from Galilee was proclaimed by his followers as the Son of God after his death, which is why the Jesus tradition was expanded with myths and legends.

According to Robert E. Van Voorst , no proponent of the Jesus myth thesis has plausibly explained the emergence of Christianity and the alleged manufacture of a historical Jesus. The thesis is based on a vague understanding of ancient mythology as syncretism, for which there is little independent, specific, supporting evidence. It was often set up not for objective research reasons, but for non-specialist, tendentious anti-religious intentions in order to remove the basis of every form of Christianity with the historical Jesus. Therefore, the thesis did not gain acceptance in research. She is no longer considered there and is "effectively dead". Standard works of NT research and books on Jesus of the 21st century only narrowly reject the non-historicity thesis as unfounded or do not mention it at all.

Additional information

Works by representatives

Constantin François Volney:

Les Ruines Ou Méditations Sur Les Révolutions Des Empires. 1791.

German edition: Günther Mensching (Hrsg.): Constantin François Volney: The ruins or reflections on the revolutions of the empires and the natural law. Translated by Dorothea Forkel and Georg Forster. Berlin 1792.

Reprint: Syndikat, Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-8108-0033-3 .

Charles-Francois Dupuis: L'origine de tous les cultes, ou la réligion universelle. Paris 1795.
Robert Taylor: The diegesis; being a discovery of the origin, evidences, and early history of Christianity. London 1829.
Anonymus: The Existence of Christ Disproved by Irresistible Evidence: In a Series of Letters, from a German Jew, Addressed to Christians of all Denominations. Henry Hetherington, 1841.
Bruno Bauer:

Critique of the Gospels and History of Their Origin. Berlin, 1850-1852.

Critique of the Pauline letters. (1851); Reprint: Kindle Edition, 2014.

Christ and the Caesars. The origin of Christianity from Roman Greece. Grosser, Berlin 1877; Reprint: Let Me Print, 2012, ISBN 5-87403-520-6 .

Gerald Massey:

The Birth, Life, Miracles and Character of Jesus Christ. 1874.

Paul the Gnostic Opponent of Peter and Not an Apostle of Historic Christianity. 1887; Reprint: Kessinger, 2010, ISBN 1-162-85272-0 .

The Name and Nature of the Christ. 1888.

The Jesus Legend Traced in Egypt for Ten Thousand Years. In: Ancient Egypt Light Of The World. 1907; Reprint: Cosimo Classics, 2008, ISBN 1-60520-313-0 .

Gnostic and Historic Christianity. (~ 1900); Reprint: Kessinger, 2010, ISBN 1-169-19845-7 ( digitized version ).

Kersey Graves : The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (or Christianity Before Christ). 1875.
Charles Bradlaugh: Who Was Jesus Christ? 1887.
Edwin Johnson:

Antiqua Mater. A Study of Christian Origins. London 1887; German edition: Frans J Fabri (ed.): Edwin Johnson Antiqua Mater: Who were the first Christians? 2nd Edition. 2010, ISBN 3-8391-6314-5 .

The Rise of Christendom. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, 1890.

John M. Robertson:

Christianity and Mythology. London 1900; 2nd edition 1910.

The Gospel Myths: With the author's foreword for the German edition. Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1910.

Pagan Christs: Studies in Comparative Hierology. Watts & Co, London 1903; 2nd edition 1911.

The Historicity of Jesus. Being a Contribution to the “Christ-Myth” Controversy. Cambridge 1912.

The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions. Watts & Co, London 1916.

The Jesus problem; a restatement of the myth theory. 1917.

Albert Kalthoff:

The Christ problem. 1902.

The emergence of Christianity. New contributions to the Christ problem. Eugen Diederichs, 1904.

What do we know about Jesus? A settlement with Professor D. Bousset in Göttingen. Lehmann, Berlin 1904.

Emilio Bossi: Gesù Cristo non è mai esistito. Rome 1904.

C. Promus: The emergence of Christianity: according to modern research, presented for wide circles without any preconditions . Eugen Diederichs, 1905.

Peter Jensen:

The Gilgamesh Epic in World Literature. Volume 1. 1906.

Moses, Jesus, Paul: three variants of the Babylonian god-man Gilgamesh: an indictment and an appeal. New Frankfurter Verlag, 1910.

Did the Jesus of the Gospels Really Live? An answer. 1910.

William Benjamin Smith:

The pre-Christian Jesus: In addition to further preliminary studies on the history of the origins of early Christianity. Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1906; 2nd edition 1911; Reprint: Let Me Print, 2012, ISBN 5-87926-891-8 .

The Silence of Josephus and Tacitus. Chicago 1910.

Ecce Deus. The early Christian teaching of the pure divine Jesus. Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1911.

The Birth of the Gospel: a study of the origin and purport of the primitive allegory of the Jesus. Philosophical Library, 1957 (posthumous).

Gerardus Johannes Petrus Josephus Bolland:

De Evangelische Jozua: Eene poging tot aanwijzing van den oorsprong des Christendom. AH Adriani, 1907 ( digitized version )

Het Evangelie. 1909.

Thomas Whittaker: The Origins of Christianity, with an Outline of Van Manen's Analysis of the Pauline Literature. Watts & Company, 1909; 2nd edition 1933.
John E. Remsberg: The Christ. 1909; Reprint: Truth Seeker Co., New York 2000, ISBN 0-87975-924-0 ( full text online ).
Arthur Drews:

The myth of Christ: the testimony to the historicity of Jesus: an answer to the scribes with special consideration of the theological method. Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1909; 3rd edition, Mainz 1928; Reprints: Lenz, Neustadt 1994, ISBN 3-9802799-6-0 ; Let Me Print, 2012, ISBN 5-87565-361-2 .

The Christ myth, part two. The testimonies to the historicity of Jesus. Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1911.

The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus. Watts, London 1912. Reprinted in BiblioBazaar, 2009, ISBN 1-110-31504-X .

The Gospel of Mark as a testimony against the historicity of Jesus. Eugen Diederichs, 1921.

The emergence of Christianity from Gnosticism: Eugen Diederichs, 1924.

The denial of the historicity of Jesus in the past and present. G. Braun, 1926 ( digitized version ).

Andrzej Niemojewski: God Jesus: in the light of foreign and own research including representation of the evangelical astral substances, astral scenes and astral systems. A. & R. Huber's Verlag, 1910.
Friedrich Steudel: In the struggle for the Christ myth: A discussion especially with I. Weiss, P. W. Schmiedel, A. Harnach, Chwolson. Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1910.
Samuel Lublinski : The early Christian world and its myth. Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1910:

Volume 1: The emergence of Christianity from ancient culture.

Volume 2: The emerging dogma of the life of Jesus.

Heinrich Zimmer: On the dispute over the "Christ myth": The Babylonian material presented in its main points. Reuther and Reichard, Berlin 1910.
Christian Paul Fuhrmann: The astral myth of Christ: The solution of the Christ saga through astrology. With 1 star map and 1 star sketch. Brandstetter, 1911.
Gustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga: The Dutch radical criticism of the New Testament, its history and meaning for the knowledge of the emergence of Christianity. Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1912.
Gilbert Thomas Sadler:

Has Jesus Christ Lived on Earth? Cassell & Company, 1914.

The Gnostic Story of Jesus Christ. C. W. Daniel, 1919.

The Inner Meaning of the Four Gospels, re-interpreted in the Light of Modern Research and in Relation to Spiritual and Social Needs. 1920.

Behind the New Testament. 1921.

Harriette Augusta Curtiss: The Key of Destiny. 1919; Reprint: SOS Free Stock, 1975, ISBN 0-7873-0234-1 .
E. Moutier-Rousset:

Le Christ at-il existé? Société Mutuelle d'Édition, 1922.

Le mystère de Jesus. 1924.

La legend de Jésus - Saint Paul: essai de critique historique. Idée libre, 1930.

Robert Stahl:

Le Document 70. libr. Istra, Paris 1923.

Les Mandéens Et Les Origines Chrétiennes. Paris 1930.

Paul-Louis Couchoud:

The Enigma of Jesus. 1924.

The Creation of Christ: An Outline of the Beginnings of Christianity. Watts, London 1939.

The Historicity of Jesus: A Reply to Alfred Loisy. In: Hibbert Journal. 37, 1938-1939, pp. 193-214, pp. 815.

Georg Morris Cohen Brandes:

Say om Jesus. 1925.

German: The saga of Jesus. Translated by Erwin Magnus. E. Reiss, 1925.

English: Jesus a Myth. New York 1926.

Louis Gordon Rylands:

Did Jesus Ever Live? Watts, London 1936.

The Beginnings of Gnostic Christianity. Watts, London 1940.

Edouard Dujardin: Ancient History of the God Jesus. Watts, London 1938.
Alvin Boyd Kuhn: Who is this King of Glory? A Critical Study of the Christos-Messiah Tradition. 1944; Reprint: CreateSpace, 2011, ISBN 1-4611-9036-3 .

The Shadow of the Third Century: A Revaluation of Christianity. 1949; Reprint: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007, ISBN 1-59986-838-5 .

A rebirth for Christianity. 1963; Reprint: Quest Books, 2nd Edition 2008, ISBN 0-8356-0838-7 .

Archibald Robertson: Jesus: Myth Or History. Watts, London 1949.
Herbert Cutner: Jesus: God, Man or Myth? An Examination of the Evidence. 1950; Reprint: Paul Tice (Ed.), Book Tree, 2000, ISBN 1-58509-072-7 .
Hermann Raschke: The Mystery of Christ: the rebirth of Christianity from the spirit of Gnosis. C. Schünemann, 1954.
Guy Fau: La Fable de Jesus Christ. 1967.
John M. Allegro: The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East. 1968; Reprint: Gnostic Media Research & Publishing, 2009.
George Albert Wells:

The Jesus of the Early Christians. Pemberton, 1971, ISBN 0-301-71014-7 .

Did Jesus Exist? (1975) Reprint: Prometheus Books, 1987, ISBN 0-87975-395-1 .

The Historical Evidence for Jesus. (1982) 2nd revised edition, Prometheus Books, 1988, ISBN 0-87975-429-X .

The Jesus Legend. (1986) Open Court, 1996, ISBN 0-8126-9334-5 .

The Jesus Myth. Open Court, 1998, ISBN 0-8126-9392-2 .

Cutting Jesus Down to Size: What Higher Criticism Has Achieved and Where It Leaves Christianity. Open Court, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8126-9656-1 .

Max Rieser: The true founder of Christianity and the Hellenistic philosophy. Graduate Press, 1979.
John G. Jackson: Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth. Amer Atheist Press, 1985.
R. Joseph Hoffmann , Gerald A. Larue: Jesus in History and Myth. Prometheus Books, 1986, ISBN 0-87975-332-3 .
Bernard Dubourg: L'invention de Jésus: La fabrication du Nouveau Testament. Gallimard, 1987, ISBN 2-07-071093-9 .
Iosif Aronovich Kryvelev: Christ - myth or reality? Religious studies in the USSR. Social Sciences Today, 1987.
Alvar Ellegård: Myths om Jesus: den tidigaste kristendomen i nytt ljus. (1992) Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2014, ISBN 91-0-014952-7 .
Jonathan M. Roberts: Antiquity Unveiled: The Heathen Origins of Christianity. (1990) Gordon Press Publishers, 1992, ISBN 0-8490-8747-3 .
Burton L. Mack:

Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth. HarperOne, 1996.

A myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins. Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998, ISBN 0-8006-2113-1 .

The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy. Continuum, 2003, ISBN 0-8264-1543-1 .

Francesco Carotta :

Was Jesus Caesar? 2000 years of adoration of a copy. Goldmann, 1999, ISBN 3-442-15051-5 .

Jesus was Caesar. Aspect Uitgeverij BV (NL), 2004, ISBN 90-5911-396-9 .

Dorothy M. Murdock (Acharya S.):

The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999, ISBN 0-932813-74-7 .

Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled. Adventures Unlimited Press, 2004.

Who What Jesus? Fingerprints of The Christ. Stellar House Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0-9799631-0-0 .

Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection. Stellar House Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9799631-1-7 .

The Gospel According to Acharya S. Stellar House Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9799631-2-4 .

Earl Doherty:

The Jesus Puzzle: Is Christianity Based on a Legend? ( The Jesus-Puzzle. 1999) Angelika Lenz, 2003, ISBN 3-933037-26-3 .

Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus. Age of Reason Publications, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9689259-2-8 .

Hal Childs: The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness. Soc Biblical Literature, 2000, ISBN 0-88414-029-6 .
Harold Liedner: Fabrication of the Christ Myth. Survey Press, 2000, ISBN 0-9677901-0-7 .
Robert M. Price:

Deconstructing Jesus. Prometheus Books, 2000, ISBN 978-1-57392-758-1 .

Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition? Prometheus Books, 2003, ISBN 978-1-59102-121-6 .

The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems. American Atheist Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-57884-017-5 .

Jesus is dead. American Atheist Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1-57884-000-7 .

with Frank R. Zindler: The Case Against the Case For Christ: A New Testament Scholar Refutes the Reverend Lee Strobel. American Atheist Press, 2014.

Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy:

The Jesus Mysteries - Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? (2000) HarperCollins, 2003, ISBN 0-7225-3677-1 .

Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians. Harmony, 2002, ISBN 1-4000-4594-0 .

Frank R. Zindler:

The Jesus the Jews Never Knew. American Atheists Press, 2003, ISBN 1-57884-916-0 .

as editor: Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth. American Atheist Press, 2013.

Tom Harpur: The Pagan Christ. Allen & Unwin, 2004, ISBN 978-0-8027-1449-7 .
Jay Raskin: The Evolution of Christs and Christianities. Xlibris, 2006, ISBN 1-4134-9791-8 .
Joseph Atwill:

The Messiah Riddle : The Secret Matter Jesus. Allegria, 2008, ISBN 3-7934-2091-4 .

Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus. NLightning WorkZ, 3rd edition 2011.

Dan Barker: Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists. Ulysses Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-56975-148-0 (Chapter 15: Did Jesus exist? ).
Richard Carrier:

Not the Impossible Faith. Lulu.com, 2009

Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books, 2012, ISBN 1-61614-559-5 .

On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press Limited, 2014, ISBN 1-909697-49-4 .

David Hernandez: The Greatest Story Ever Forged: Curse of the Christ Myth. Red Lead Press, 2009, ISBN 1-4349-6299-7 .
David Fitzgerald: Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All. Lulu.com, 2010, ISBN 0-557-70991-1 .
R. Joseph Hoffmann: Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth. Prometheus Books, 2010, ISBN 1-61614-189-1 .
Larry Marshall: The Mythical Life of Jesus. Trafford Publishing, 2011, ISBN 1-4269-5297-X .
Geoff Roberts: Jesus 888. The Myth behind the Man. Troubador Publishing, 2011, ISBN 1-78088-013-8 .
Thomas L. Brodie: Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012, ISBN 1-907534-58-X .
Raphael Lataster: There was no Jesus, there is no God: A Scholarly Examination of the Scientific, Historical, and Philosophical Evidence & Arguments for Monotheism. CreateSpace, 2013, ISBN 1-4922-3441-9 .
John Ostrowick: Did Jesus Christ Exist? lulu.com, 2013, ISBN 1-291-43833-5 .
Thomas L. Thompson:

The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David. Vintage Digital, 2013.

with Thomas S. Verenna: 'Is This Not the Carpenter?': The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. Acumen, 2013, ISBN 1-84465-729-9 .

Michael Paulkovich: No Meek Messiah: Christianity's Lies, Laws and Legacy. Spillix, 2013, ISBN 978-0-9882161-1-2 .
Kenneth Humphreys: Jesus Never Existed: An Introduction to the Ultimate Heresy. Nine-Banded Books, 2014, ISBN 978-0-9896972-4-8 .

literature

Early replicas

Wilhelm Bousset : What do we know about Jesus? Gebauer-Schwetschke, Halle 1904.
Wilhelm Kapp : The Christ and Christianity problem at Kalthoff: a lecture. Heitz, 1905.
Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel ; The person of Jesus in the controversy of contemporary opinions. M. Heinsius successor, 1906.
Karl Barth : Did Jesus Live? A retrospective consideration of Easter. 1910; Christian Faith and History. 1910. In: Barth-Gesamtausgabe III (lectures and smaller works 1909–1914), pp. 37–45 and pp. 188–190.
Karl Beth : Did Jesus Live? A critique of Drews' myth of Christ. Borussia Publishing House, 1910.
Kurt Delbrück : Did Jesus Christ Live? A presentation. Vossische Buchhandlung, 1910.
Martin Dibelius : Did Jesus Live? (Collective review). In: Theological literary newspaper. 1910, pp. 545-552.
Albert Hauck : Did Jesus Live? Zehlendorf-Berlin, 1910.
Adolf Jülicher : Did Jesus Live? A contribution to the psychology of the dispute over the historicity of Jesus. Marburg 1910.
Hermann von Soden : Did Jesus Live? Answered from the historical documents. Protestant publication distribution, 1910.
Heinrich Weinel : Has the “liberal” image of Jesus been refuted? Tübingen 1910.
Otto Weinreich: The Christ myth. Heidelberg 1910 ( excerpt online ).
Johannes Weiß : Jesus of Nazareth, Myth or History? An argument with Kalthoff, Drews, Jensen. Tübingen 1910.
Carl Clemen : The Historical Jesus: A generally understandable investigation of the question: Did Jesus live and what did he want? Töpelmann, 1911; Reprint: Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 3-11-201434-0 .
Karl Dunkmann : The historical Jesus, the mythological Christ and Jesus the Christ: a critical walk through modern research on Jesus. A. Deichert, 1911.
Franz Xaver Kiefl : The historical Christ and the modern philosophy. A genetic exposition of the philosophical prerequisites in the dispute over the Christ myth. Mainz, Kirchheim, 1911.
Shirley Jackson Case : The Historicity of Jesus. A criticism of the contention that Jesus never lived, a statement of the evidence for his existence, an estimate of his relation to Christianity. University of Chicago, 1911 ( full text online ).
Albert Schweitzer : History of the life of Jesus research. (1913); 9th edition, Mohr / Siebeck, Tübingen 1984, ISBN 3-8252-1302-1 (chapters 11; 18; 22; 23).
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare : The Historical Christ: Or, An Investigation of the Views of Mr. JM Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W. B. Smith. Open court, London 1914.
Conrad Gröber : Christ Lived: A Critique of the "Christ Myth" Arthur Drews'. Akt.-Ges. Upper Baden Publishing House, 1923.
Erich Klostermann : The latest attacks on the historicity of Jesus. (1923); Reprint: BiblioBazaar, 2009, ISBN 1-116-84161-4 .
Johannes Leipoldt : Dying and resurrecting gods: A contribution to the dispute over Arthur Drews' Christ myth. Werner Scholl, 1923.
Maurice Goguel : Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? T. Fisher Unwin, 1926; New edition: Prometheus Books, 2006, ISBN 1-59102-370-X .
Elwood Worcester: What did Jesus in a Historical Person? Oxford University Press, 1926.
Oskar Graber: In the fight for Christ. A review of Professor Artur Drews' attacks on the historical existence of Jesus. J. Meyerhoff, Graz 1927 ( full text online ).
Hans Windisch (theologian) :

The problem of the historicity of Jesus: the myth of Christ. Theologische Rundschau 2/1930, pp. 207-252.

Christ myth and historical Jesus in Hbr. In: The Letter to the Hebrews. Explained by D. Dr. Hans Windisch (= New Testament manual. Volume 14). Mohr, Tübingen 1931.

Alfred Loisy : What is Jesus about Historical Person? In: Hibbert Journal. 36, 1937-1938, pp. 380-394, pp. 509-529, p. 814.
Herbert George Wood : Did Christ Really Live? Student Christian Movement Press, 1938.
Arthur Denner Howell Smith: Jesus Not a Myth. Watts & Co, London 1942.

Newer replicas

Richard Thomas France: The Evidence for Jesus. Regent College Publishing, London 1986; New edition 2006, ISBN 1-57383-370-3 .
Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century: 1900-1950. T&T Clark, 1999, ISBN 1-56338-280-6 (Chapter 2: The Nonhistorical Jesus , pp. 45-71).
Elizabeth E. Evans: The Christ Myth: A Study. Book Tree, 2000.
Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. William B. Eerdman, 2000, ISBN 0-8028-4368-9 .
Theodore Ziolkowski : Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. Wipf & Stock, 2002, ISBN 1-57910-931-4 .
Ronald H. Nash: The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought? P&R Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-87552-559-8 .
Stanley E. Porter, Stephen J. Bedard: Unmasking the Pagan Christ: An Evangelical Response to the Cosmic Christ Idea. Clements Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1-894667-71-9 .
Paul R. Eddy, Greg A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition. Baker Academic, 2007, ISBN 0-8010-3114-1 .
James Patrick Holding: Shattering the Christ Myth. Xulon Press, 2008, ISBN 1-60647-271-2 .
Walter Martin, Jill Martin Rische: The Kingdom of the Occult. Nelson / Word Pub Group, 2008, ISBN 1-4185-1644-9 .
James G. Crossley: Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism: Quests, Scholarship and Ideology. Equinox Publishing, 2012, ISBN 978-1-908049-70-4 .
Bart D. Ehrman : Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperOne, 2012.
Albert Mcilhenny: This Is The Sun? Zeitgeist and religion. Vol. I: Comparative Religion. lulu.com, 2012, ISBN 1-105-33967-X .
Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014, ISBN 978-0-567-01505-1 .

Web links

per Jesus myth

Dan Barker: Debunking the Historical Jesus. In: Freedom from Religion Foundation. January 30, 2006
Earl Doherty: Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case, Four: Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism. In: jesuspuzzle.humanists.net
Richard Carrier: Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity. In: infidels.org
Kenneth Humphreys: Jesus never existed. In: jesusneverexisted.com

per historical Jesus

Mike Licona (TruthQuest Publishers, 2001): A Refutation of Acharya S's book, The Christ Conspiracy
Edmund Standing: Against Mythicism: A Case for the Plausibility of a Historical Jesus (January 22, 2009)
Gary Habermas: The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ
James Patrick Holding: Did Jesus Exist?
Christopher Price: A History of Scholarly Refutations of the Jesus Myth
Tim O'Neill: Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that Show Jesus Never Existed at All by David Fitzgerald (Review and overview of related theses. May 28, 2011)
Thom Stark: The Death of Richard Carrier's Dying Messiah (April 25, 2012)

Individual evidence

↑ James Leslie Houlden: Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia. Volume 1, ISBN 1-57607-856-6 , p. 658 ( preview in Google book search).
↑ Craig A. Evans: The Historical Jesus, Volume 1. Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0-415-32751-2 , p. 308 ; Peter G. Bietenholz; Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity. Brill Academic Publishings, Leiden 1997, ISBN 90-04-10063-6 , p. 325, fn. 34.
^ Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 8 and footnote 12.
↑ Jan A. B. Jongeneel: Jesus Christ in World History: Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 3-631-59688-X , S. 172nd
↑ Urs App: The Birth of Orientalism (= Encounters with Asia ). University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2010, ISBN 978-0-8122-4261-4 , pp. 457-459.
^ Martin Priestman: Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830. Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 24.
^ Peter G. Bietenholz; Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity. Leiden 1997, p. 327.
^ Herbert Cutner, Paul Tice: Jesus: God, Man or Myth? 2000, p. 1 ; P. 114 ; P. 139.
↑ George Albert Wells: Stages of New Testament Criticism. In: Journal of the History of Ideas . Volume 30, Issue 2, 1969.
↑ Osama W. Abi-Mershed: Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria. Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-8047-7472-2 , p. 22 ; Rachida El Diwani: Le Discours Orientaliste de Volney. Lulu.com, 2009, ISBN 0-557-04158-9 , p. 31.
↑ Jan A. B. Jongeneel: Jesus Christ in World History. Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 172, fn. 115 ; Peter G. Bietenholz; Historia and Fabula. Leiden 1997, p. 326.
↑ Craig A. Evans: The Historical Jesus, Volume 1. 2004, p. 319, fn. 17 ; Egon Friedell: Cultural History of the Modern Age. 4th book: The crisis of the European soul from the black plague to the First World War. tredition, 2011, ISBN 3-8424-1972-4 , p. 34.
^ Martin Priestman: Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830. 2000, p. 24 f.
↑ Robert E. Schofield; The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804. Penn State University Press, 2009, p. 376.
↑ Timothy Larson: Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-19-928787-2 , 2007, p. 96.
↑ Acharya S .: Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled. 2004, p. 446ff.
^ Herbert Cutner, Paul Tice: Jesus: God, Man or Myth? 2000, p. 279.
^ Susannah Heschel: The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians & the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press, 2008, ISBN 0-691-12531-7 , p. 39 and fn. 54.
↑ Douglas Moggach: The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer. Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 1-139-44197-3 , pp. 65 f.
↑ Ernst Haenchen: The Gospel of John: A Comment. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1980, ISBN 3-16-143102-2 , p. 28 f. (Introduction); in detail in Helmut Reinalter: The Young Hegelians: Enlightenment, Literature, Criticism of Religion and Political Thought. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 3-631-60385-1 , pp. 66-75.
↑ Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbook of Antisemitism. Volume 2: People. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2009, ISBN 3-598-24072-4 , p. 58 f.
^ Robert E. van Voort: Nonexistence Hypothesis. In: James Leslie Houlden (ed.): Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia. Volume 1. 2003, p. 658.
^ Joachim Mehlhausen: Bruno Bauer. In: Theological Real Encyclopedia. Volume 5. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-11-007739-6 , p. 315.
^ W. Ward Gasque: A History of the Interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles. Wipf & Stock, 1999, ISBN 1-57910-449-5 , p. 86 f.
↑ Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1984, p. 453.
↑ Ernst Haenchen: Critical-exegetical commentary on the New Testament. Volume 3: The Acts of the Apostles. 16th edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1977, ISBN 3-525-51634-7 , p. 36.
^ Theodore Ziolkowski: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2002, p. 143.
↑ Examples: Gerd Lüdemann : Heretics. Westminster John Knox Press, 1996, ISBN 0664226426 , p. 263 ; E. Verhoef: The Dutch radical criticism. In: Reimund Bieringer: The Corinthian correspondence. Peeters, 1996, ISBN 90-6831-774-1 , pp. 428-432; Martin Hengel , Anna Maria Schwemer: Paul between Damascus and Antioch: the unknown years of the apostle. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2000, ISBN 3-16-147469-4 , p. 39, fn. 141 ; Jürgen Becker: The apostle of the people Paul in the mirror of his newest interpreters. In: Theological literary newspaper . No. 11, Volume 122, November 1997, Columns 977-978.
↑ Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The historical Jesus. 4th edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, pp. 23-25.
^ Albert Schweitzer: Strasbourg lectures. Works from the estate. Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-41171-1 , p. 524.
^ Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 7.
^ Theodore Ziolkowski: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2002, p. 143f.
↑ Gudrun Beyer: "History [...] points beyond itself". In: Martina Janßen: Early Christianity and religious history school: Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Gerd Lüdemann. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-525-53977-4 , p. 172, fn. 43.
↑ ^a ^b Theodore Ziolkowski: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2002, p. 147.
^ Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. 1999, p. 50.
^ Theodore Ziolkowski: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2002, pp. 144f.
↑ Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Tübingen 1984, p. 502.
↑ Deutscher Monistenbund (Ed.): Did Jesus live? Speeches about the "Christ Myth" (= Berlin Religious Discussion. Volume 1), Berlin 1910.
^ Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. 1999, p. 45 ; Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 7 ; New York Times. February 6, 1910: Jesus never lived, asserts Prof. Drews.
^ Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 13.
↑ Adolf von Harnack: Did Jesus live? In: Kurt Nowak, Hanns-Christoph Picker (Ed.): Adolf von Harnack as a contemporary: Speeches and writings from the years of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, part 2. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-11-205517- 9 , p. 169.
↑ Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Tübingen 1984, pp. 171-190; 361-365; 451-560; Quote p. 560.
↑ Rudolf Bultmann: Jesus. 1926; Excerpt from Werner Zager : Research on Jesus in four centuries. 2002, pp. 290-293.
^ Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 12, fn. 9.
^ Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century: 1900–1950, 1999, pp. 58–60.
^ Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. 1999, pp. 54-56.
↑ Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition. Tübingen 1984, pp. 476-486.
↑ Craig A. Evans: The Historical Jesus. 2004, p. 321, fn. 37.
↑ Albert McIlhenny: This Is The Sun? Zeitgeist and religion. Volume I: Comparative Religion. In: lulu.com, 2012, ISBN 1-105-33967-X , p. 278.
^ David E. Aune: Studies in New Testament and Early Christian Literature: Essays in Honor of Allen P. Wikgren. Brill Academic, Leiden 1997, ISBN 90-04-03504-4 , p. 142 .
↑ Jason Colavito: Jason and the Argonauts through the Ages. Mcfarland & Co, 2014, ISBN 0-7864-7972-8 , p. 243.
↑ Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Tübingen 1984, p. 333 f.
^ Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare: The Historical Christ. 1914; lectures at Bruce Manning Metzger: Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian. Brill, Leiden 1969, p. 9.
↑ James Patrick Holding: Shattering the Christ Myth. 2008, p. XVI.
↑ Article Bremen. In: Theological Real Encyclopedia . Volume 7, 1980, p. 161.
↑ Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The historical Jesus. 2011, p. 96.
↑ Martin Hengel: Kleine Schriften, Volume 5: Jesus and the Gospels. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-16-149327-0 , p. 217, fn. 1.
↑ Werner Zager (ed.): Jesus research in four centuries: texts from the beginnings of historical criticism to the "third question" about the historical Jesus. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 3-11-031842-3 , p. 117 f.
↑ Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Tübingen 1984, pp. 361-365.
^ Theodore Ziolkowski: Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic. Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 209.
↑ Craig A. Evans: The Historical Jesus. 2004, p. 308.
↑ Susannah Heschel: The Aryan Jesus. 2010, p. 58.
^ Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. P. 49 f.
↑ James Patrick Holding: Shattering the Christ Myth. S. IVX.
↑ Werner Zager: Jesus research in four centuries. Berlin 2014, p. 118.
↑ Walter P. Weaver: The historical Jesus in the twentieth century, 1900-1950. 1999, pp. 50-52.
^ Brian A. Gerrish: Jesus, Myth, and History: Troeltsch's Stand in the 'Christ-Myth' Debate. In: The Journal of Religion. Volume 55, Issue 1, 1975, pp. 3-4.
↑ Erich Gräßer: Departure and Promise: collected essays on the Hebrews. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-11-013669-4 , p. 100.
↑ Otto Weinreich: The Christ myth. 1910. In: Selected Writings. 1. 1907-1921. Pp. 56-58.
↑ Rudolf Bultmann: The newest controversy of the historicity of Jesus. In: Frankfurter Zeitung . October 12, 1921; quoted n .: Matthias Dreher (Ed.): Theology as Critique: Selected Reviews and Research Reports. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-16-147406-6 , pp. 114-119.
↑ Martin Morgenstern, Wolfgang Harich: Nicolai Hartmann - size and limits: attempt at a Marxist self-understanding. 2004, p. 75.
↑ Vladimir Nikiforov: Russian Christianity. In: Leslie Houlden (ed.): Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2003, p. 749.
^ ^A ^b Renate Lipinsky: The representation of the Christian vocabulary in general Russian dictionaries of the 20th century. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 3-631-60009-7 , p. 83 f. and footnote 261.
^ Maarten 't Hart: De bril van God. De Arbeiderspers, 2011, p. 90.
^ Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. 1999, pp. 300-302 and footnote 86-90.
↑ Clark Heinrich: Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy. Park Street Press, 2002, ISBN 0-89281-997-9 , p. 24.
↑ James H. Charlesworth, Brian Rhea (ed.): Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions: The Second Princeton-Prague Symposium on Jesus Research (= Princeton-Prague Symposia series on the historical Jesus. Vol. 2). William B. Eerdman, Grand Rapids, Michigan 2014, ISBN 0-8028-6728-6 , pp. 265-267.
↑ ^a ^b James Patrick Holding: Shattering the Christ Myth. 2008, p. XVI.
↑ George Albert Wells: The Historicity of Jesus. In: R. J. Hoffmann, G. A. Larue (Ed.): Jesus in History and Myth. Buffalo 1986, pp. 27-45; lectures with Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The historical Jesus. 4th edition 2011, p. 123 f.
↑ George Albert Wells: The Jesus Legend. 1996, p. 162 ff . ; Can We Trust the New Testament? 2004, p. 43 ff.
↑ George Albert Wells: The Jesus Myth. 1999.
↑ Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 2014, pp. 2–4.
^ Albert McIlhenny: This Is the Sun? 2012, p. 99 ; Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 2014, p. 174 and note 3.
↑ Stephen J. Bedard: Exposing the Spirit of the Age: Responding to the Zeitgeist Movie. In: Stephen J. Bedard (Ed.): Hope's Reason: A Journal Of Apologetics. Vol. 1, 2010, ISBN 1-4583-8190-0 , pp. 145-161.
↑ Earl Doherty: The Jesus Puzzle. 1999.
↑ Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 2013, p. 2.
↑ Asher Norman: Twenty-Six Reasons Why Jews Don't Believe in Jesus. Black White and Read Publishing, 2007, ISBN 0-9771937-0-5 , p. 181.
^ Robert M. Price: Jesus at the Vanishing Point. In: James K. Beilby, Paul Rhodes Eddy (Eds.): The Historical Jesus: Five Views. InterVarsity, 2009, pp. 55-63.
^ Robert M. Price: The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. Prometheus, 2003, p. 351; lectured at Douglas A. Jacoby: Compelling Evidence For God and the Bible: Finding Truth in an Age of Doubt. Harvest House Publishers, 2010, p. 97.
↑ A Wave of Hypercriticism. In: intellectual.com. 2013.
↑ Richard Carrier: Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity. 2002.
↑ Geoff Roberts: Jesus 888. 2011, p. 107 ; Richard Carrier: Kersey Graves and The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors. 2003.
^ Richard Carrier: Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic.
^ Hilary Putnam: Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge University Press, 2008, ISBN 0-521-29776-1 , p. 190.
↑ Chris Sandoval: Can Christians Prove the Resurrection? A Reply to the Apologists. Trafford Publishing, 2010, ISBN 1-4269-2382-1 , p. 34.
↑ Ian Irrco (8 September 2012): A Mathematical Review of "Proving History" by Richard Carrier. ; James McGrath (August 7, 2012): Review of Richard C. Carrier, Proving History.
↑ Raphael Lataster (June 2014): Review of Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt ; Jim Walker (2014): On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier (Review).
^ David Marshall: An Impressive, but Complete, Failure. In: biblicalcatholic.com. 3rd August 2014.
^ Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin, 2006, p. 122.
^ Christoper Hitchens: The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. Da Capo Press, 2007, p. 475 (chapter Did Jesus exist? ).
↑ Dan Barker: Godless. 2009, chapter 15.
↑ Barbara G. Walker: The Jesus Myth. In: Freethought today. August 2007.
↑ Center for Inquiry: From the News Desk: Jesus Project ( Memento June 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: centerforinquiry.net, accessed May 6. 2018.
↑ James G. Crossley: Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism. 2012, pp. 134–141.
^ Rodney Stark: What Americans Really Believe. Baylor University Press, 2008, p. 63.
↑ Communicate Research (February 2008): Theos: Easter Survey - Feb 08 ( Memento from March 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
↑ Barney Zwartz: Australians not so skeptical about Jesus, survey finds. In: The Age. April 7, 2009.
^ Paul Rhodes Eddy, Gregory A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend. 2007, p. 32 ; Hermann Detering: False witnesses: Non-Christian Jesus testimonies to the test. Alibri-Verlag, 2011.
^ Casey D. Elledge: Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius: Seeing Jesus through the Eyes of Classical Historians. In: Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions. The Second Princeton-Prague Symposium. William B. Eerdman, 2014, ISBN 0-8028-6728-6 , pp. 691-720.
↑ ^a ^b ^c Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The historical Jesus. 4th edition, Göttingen 2011, pp. 97–122.
^ Paul Rhodes Eddy, Gregory A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend. 2007, p. 203.
↑ Detlef Häusser: Confession of Christ and Jesus tradition in Paul. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-16-148962-4 , pp. 38-41.
↑ Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 2014, p. 133 ff.
↑ Theißen / Merz, 2011, p. 97 ff. And p. 503 f.
↑ Theißen / Merz, 2011, p. 270 f.
↑ Martin Hengel: The Son of God. In: Martin Hengel: Studies on Christology (= small writings. Volume 4). Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 3161491963 , pp. 90-101.
↑ Andreas Lindemann: Faith, Action, Understanding: Studies for the Interpretation of the New Testament. Volume II. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2011, ISBN 3-16-151683-4 , p. 33.
^ Paul Rhodes Eddy, Gregory A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend. 2007, p. 139.
^ Paul Rhodes Eddy, Gregory A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend. 2007, p. 143 and footnote 33.
↑ Eduard Schweizer: Jesus Christ I. In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie. Volume 16, 1986, p. 710.
↑ Gerhard Maier: The first letter of Paul to the Corinthians: Historical-Theological interpretation. 3rd edition, SCM R. Brockhaus, 2014, ISBN 3-417-29724-9 , p. 129 f.
^ Robert E. van Voort: Nonexistence Hypothesis. In: James Leslie Houlden (ed.): Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia. Volume 1. 2003, p. 660.

[Houlden_658-1] James Leslie Houlden: Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia. Volume 1, ISBN 1-57607-856-6 , p. 658 ( preview in Google book search).

[2] Craig A. Evans: The Historical Jesus, Volume 1. Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0-415-32751-2 , p. 308 ; Peter G. Bietenholz; Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity. Brill Academic Publishings, Leiden 1997, ISBN 90-04-10063-6 , p. 325, fn. 34.

[3] Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 8 and footnote 12.

[4] Jan A. B. Jongeneel: Jesus Christ in World History: Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 3-631-59688-X , S. 172nd

[5] Urs App: The Birth of Orientalism (= Encounters with Asia ). University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2010, ISBN 978-0-8122-4261-4 , pp. 457-459.

[6] Martin Priestman: Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830. Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 24.

[7] Peter G. Bietenholz; Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity. Leiden 1997, p. 327.

[8] Herbert Cutner, Paul Tice: Jesus: God, Man or Myth? 2000, p. 1 ; P. 114 ; P. 139.

[9] George Albert Wells: Stages of New Testament Criticism. In: Journal of the History of Ideas . Volume 30, Issue 2, 1969.

[10] Osama W. Abi-Mershed: Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria. Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-8047-7472-2 , p. 22 ; Rachida El Diwani: Le Discours Orientaliste de Volney. Lulu.com, 2009, ISBN 0-557-04158-9 , p. 31.

[11] Jan A. B. Jongeneel: Jesus Christ in World History. Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 172, fn. 115 ; Peter G. Bietenholz; Historia and Fabula. Leiden 1997, p. 326.

[12] Craig A. Evans: The Historical Jesus, Volume 1. 2004, p. 319, fn. 17 ; Egon Friedell: Cultural History of the Modern Age. 4th book: The crisis of the European soul from the black plague to the First World War. tredition, 2011, ISBN 3-8424-1972-4 , p. 34.

[13] Martin Priestman: Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830. 2000, p. 24 f.

[14] Robert E. Schofield; The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804. Penn State University Press, 2009, p. 376.

[15] Timothy Larson: Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-19-928787-2 , 2007, p. 96.

[16] Acharya S .: Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled. 2004, p. 446ff.

[17] Herbert Cutner, Paul Tice: Jesus: God, Man or Myth? 2000, p. 279.

[18] Susannah Heschel: The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians & the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press, 2008, ISBN 0-691-12531-7 , p. 39 and fn. 54.

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[20] Ernst Haenchen: The Gospel of John: A Comment. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1980, ISBN 3-16-143102-2 , p. 28 f. (Introduction); in detail in Helmut Reinalter: The Young Hegelians: Enlightenment, Literature, Criticism of Religion and Political Thought. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 3-631-60385-1 , pp. 66-75.

[21] Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbook of Antisemitism. Volume 2: People. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2009, ISBN 3-598-24072-4 , p. 58 f.

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[23] Joachim Mehlhausen: Bruno Bauer. In: Theological Real Encyclopedia. Volume 5. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-11-007739-6 , p. 315.

[24] W. Ward Gasque: A History of the Interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles. Wipf & Stock, 1999, ISBN 1-57910-449-5 , p. 86 f.

[25] Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1984, p. 453.

[26] Ernst Haenchen: Critical-exegetical commentary on the New Testament. Volume 3: The Acts of the Apostles. 16th edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1977, ISBN 3-525-51634-7 , p. 36.

[27] Theodore Ziolkowski: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2002, p. 143.

[28] Examples: Gerd Lüdemann : Heretics. Westminster John Knox Press, 1996, ISBN 0664226426 , p. 263 ; E. Verhoef: The Dutch radical criticism. In: Reimund Bieringer: The Corinthian correspondence. Peeters, 1996, ISBN 90-6831-774-1 , pp. 428-432; Martin Hengel , Anna Maria Schwemer: Paul between Damascus and Antioch: the unknown years of the apostle. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2000, ISBN 3-16-147469-4 , p. 39, fn. 141 ; Jürgen Becker: The apostle of the people Paul in the mirror of his newest interpreters. In: Theological literary newspaper . No. 11, Volume 122, November 1997, Columns 977-978.

[29] Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The historical Jesus. 4th edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, pp. 23-25.

[30] Albert Schweitzer: Strasbourg lectures. Works from the estate. Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-41171-1 , p. 524.

[31] Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 7.

[32] Theodore Ziolkowski: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2002, p. 143f.

[33] Gudrun Beyer: "History [...] points beyond itself". In: Martina Janßen: Early Christianity and religious history school: Festschrift for the 65th birthday of Gerd Lüdemann. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-525-53977-4 , p. 172, fn. 43.

[Ziolkowski147-34] Theodore Ziolkowski: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2002, p. 147.

[35] Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. 1999, p. 50.

[36] Theodore Ziolkowski: Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. 2002, pp. 144f.

[37] Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Tübingen 1984, p. 502.

[38] Deutscher Monistenbund (Ed.): Did Jesus live? Speeches about the "Christ Myth" (= Berlin Religious Discussion. Volume 1), Berlin 1910.

[39] Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. 1999, p. 45 ; Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 7 ; New York Times. February 6, 1910: Jesus never lived, asserts Prof. Drews.

[40] Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 13.

[41] Adolf von Harnack: Did Jesus live? In: Kurt Nowak, Hanns-Christoph Picker (Ed.): Adolf von Harnack as a contemporary: Speeches and writings from the years of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, part 2. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-11-205517- 9 , p. 169.

[42] Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Tübingen 1984, pp. 171-190; 361-365; 451-560; Quote p. 560.

[43] Rudolf Bultmann: Jesus. 1926; Excerpt from Werner Zager : Research on Jesus in four centuries. 2002, pp. 290-293.

[44] Robert Van Voorst: Jesus Outside the New Testament. 2000, p. 12, fn. 9.

[45] Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century: 1900–1950, 1999, pp. 58–60.

[46] Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. 1999, pp. 54-56.

[47] Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition. Tübingen 1984, pp. 476-486.

[48] Craig A. Evans: The Historical Jesus. 2004, p. 321, fn. 37.

[49] Albert McIlhenny: This Is The Sun? Zeitgeist and religion. Volume I: Comparative Religion. In: lulu.com, 2012, ISBN 1-105-33967-X , p. 278.

[50] David E. Aune: Studies in New Testament and Early Christian Literature: Essays in Honor of Allen P. Wikgren. Brill Academic, Leiden 1997, ISBN 90-04-03504-4 , p. 142 .

[51] Jason Colavito: Jason and the Argonauts through the Ages. Mcfarland & Co, 2014, ISBN 0-7864-7972-8 , p. 243.

[52] Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Tübingen 1984, p. 333 f.

[53] Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare: The Historical Christ. 1914; lectures at Bruce Manning Metzger: Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian. Brill, Leiden 1969, p. 9.

[54] James Patrick Holding: Shattering the Christ Myth. 2008, p. XVI.

[55] Article Bremen. In: Theological Real Encyclopedia . Volume 7, 1980, p. 161.

[56] Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The historical Jesus. 2011, p. 96.

[57] Martin Hengel: Kleine Schriften, Volume 5: Jesus and the Gospels. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-16-149327-0 , p. 217, fn. 1.

[58] Werner Zager (ed.): Jesus research in four centuries: texts from the beginnings of historical criticism to the "third question" about the historical Jesus. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 3-11-031842-3 , p. 117 f.

[59] Albert Schweitzer: History of the life of Jesus research. 9th edition, Tübingen 1984, pp. 361-365.

[60] Theodore Ziolkowski: Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic. Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 209.

[61] Craig A. Evans: The Historical Jesus. 2004, p. 308.

[62] Susannah Heschel: The Aryan Jesus. 2010, p. 58.

[63] Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. P. 49 f.

[64] James Patrick Holding: Shattering the Christ Myth. S. IVX.

[65] Werner Zager: Jesus research in four centuries. Berlin 2014, p. 118.

[66] Walter P. Weaver: The historical Jesus in the twentieth century, 1900-1950. 1999, pp. 50-52.

[67] Brian A. Gerrish: Jesus, Myth, and History: Troeltsch's Stand in the 'Christ-Myth' Debate. In: The Journal of Religion. Volume 55, Issue 1, 1975, pp. 3-4.

[68] Erich Gräßer: Departure and Promise: collected essays on the Hebrews. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-11-013669-4 , p. 100.

[69] Otto Weinreich: The Christ myth. 1910. In: Selected Writings. 1. 1907-1921. Pp. 56-58.

[70] Rudolf Bultmann: The newest controversy of the historicity of Jesus. In: Frankfurter Zeitung . October 12, 1921; quoted n .: Matthias Dreher (Ed.): Theology as Critique: Selected Reviews and Research Reports. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-16-147406-6 , pp. 114-119.

[71] Martin Morgenstern, Wolfgang Harich: Nicolai Hartmann - size and limits: attempt at a Marxist self-understanding. 2004, p. 75.

[72] Vladimir Nikiforov: Russian Christianity. In: Leslie Houlden (ed.): Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2003, p. 749.

[Lipinsky-73] A ^b Renate Lipinsky: The representation of the Christian vocabulary in general Russian dictionaries of the 20th century. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 3-631-60009-7 , p. 83 f. and footnote 261.

[74] Maarten 't Hart: De bril van God. De Arbeiderspers, 2011, p. 90.

[75] Walter P. Weaver: The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century. 1999, pp. 300-302 and footnote 86-90.

[76] Clark Heinrich: Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy. Park Street Press, 2002, ISBN 0-89281-997-9 , p. 24.

[77] James H. Charlesworth, Brian Rhea (ed.): Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions: The Second Princeton-Prague Symposium on Jesus Research (= Princeton-Prague Symposia series on the historical Jesus. Vol. 2). William B. Eerdman, Grand Rapids, Michigan 2014, ISBN 0-8028-6728-6 , pp. 265-267.

[Shatteringxvi-78] James Patrick Holding: Shattering the Christ Myth. 2008, p. XVI.

[79] George Albert Wells: The Historicity of Jesus. In: R. J. Hoffmann, G. A. Larue (Ed.): Jesus in History and Myth. Buffalo 1986, pp. 27-45; lectures with Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The historical Jesus. 4th edition 2011, p. 123 f.

[80] George Albert Wells: The Jesus Legend. 1996, p. 162 ff . ; Can We Trust the New Testament? 2004, p. 43 ff.

[81] George Albert Wells: The Jesus Myth. 1999.

[82] Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 2014, pp. 2–4.

[83] Albert McIlhenny: This Is the Sun? 2012, p. 99 ; Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 2014, p. 174 and note 3.

[84] Stephen J. Bedard: Exposing the Spirit of the Age: Responding to the Zeitgeist Movie. In: Stephen J. Bedard (Ed.): Hope's Reason: A Journal Of Apologetics. Vol. 1, 2010, ISBN 1-4583-8190-0 , pp. 145-161.

[85] Earl Doherty: The Jesus Puzzle. 1999.

[86] Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 2013, p. 2.

[87] Asher Norman: Twenty-Six Reasons Why Jews Don't Believe in Jesus. Black White and Read Publishing, 2007, ISBN 0-9771937-0-5 , p. 181.

[88] Robert M. Price: Jesus at the Vanishing Point. In: James K. Beilby, Paul Rhodes Eddy (Eds.): The Historical Jesus: Five Views. InterVarsity, 2009, pp. 55-63.

[PriceJacoby-89] Robert M. Price: The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. Prometheus, 2003, p. 351; lectured at Douglas A. Jacoby: Compelling Evidence For God and the Bible: Finding Truth in an Age of Doubt. Harvest House Publishers, 2010, p. 97.

[90] A Wave of Hypercriticism. In: intellectual.com. 2013.

[91] Richard Carrier: Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity. 2002.

[92] Geoff Roberts: Jesus 888. 2011, p. 107 ; Richard Carrier: Kersey Graves and The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors. 2003.

[93] Richard Carrier: Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic.

[94] Hilary Putnam: Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge University Press, 2008, ISBN 0-521-29776-1 , p. 190.

[95] Chris Sandoval: Can Christians Prove the Resurrection? A Reply to the Apologists. Trafford Publishing, 2010, ISBN 1-4269-2382-1 , p. 34.

[96] Ian Irrco (8 September 2012): A Mathematical Review of "Proving History" by Richard Carrier. ; James McGrath (August 7, 2012): Review of Richard C. Carrier, Proving History.

[97] Raphael Lataster (June 2014): Review of Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt ; Jim Walker (2014): On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier (Review).

[98] David Marshall: An Impressive, but Complete, Failure. In: biblicalcatholic.com. 3rd August 2014.

[99] Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin, 2006, p. 122.

[100] Christoper Hitchens: The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. Da Capo Press, 2007, p. 475 (chapter Did Jesus exist? ).

[101] Dan Barker: Godless. 2009, chapter 15.

[102] Barbara G. Walker: The Jesus Myth. In: Freethought today. August 2007.

[103] Center for Inquiry: From the News Desk: Jesus Project ( Memento June 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: centerforinquiry.net, accessed May 6. 2018.

[104] James G. Crossley: Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism. 2012, pp. 134–141.

[105] Rodney Stark: What Americans Really Believe. Baylor University Press, 2008, p. 63.

[106] Communicate Research (February 2008): Theos: Easter Survey - Feb 08 ( Memento from March 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

[107] Barney Zwartz: Australians not so skeptical about Jesus, survey finds. In: The Age. April 7, 2009.

[108] Paul Rhodes Eddy, Gregory A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend. 2007, p. 32 ; Hermann Detering: False witnesses: Non-Christian Jesus testimonies to the test. Alibri-Verlag, 2011.

[109] Casey D. Elledge: Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius: Seeing Jesus through the Eyes of Classical Historians. In: Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions. The Second Princeton-Prague Symposium. William B. Eerdman, 2014, ISBN 0-8028-6728-6 , pp. 691-720.

[Theißen/Merz97ff-110] Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The historical Jesus. 4th edition, Göttingen 2011, pp. 97–122.

[111] Paul Rhodes Eddy, Gregory A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend. 2007, p. 203.

[112] Detlef Häusser: Confession of Christ and Jesus tradition in Paul. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-16-148962-4 , pp. 38-41.

[113] Maurice Casey: Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? 2014, p. 133 ff.

[114] Theißen / Merz, 2011, p. 97 ff. And p. 503 f.

[115] Theißen / Merz, 2011, p. 270 f.

[116] Martin Hengel: The Son of God. In: Martin Hengel: Studies on Christology (= small writings. Volume 4). Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 3161491963 , pp. 90-101.

[117] Andreas Lindemann: Faith, Action, Understanding: Studies for the Interpretation of the New Testament. Volume II. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2011, ISBN 3-16-151683-4 , p. 33.

[118] Paul Rhodes Eddy, Gregory A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend. 2007, p. 139.

[119] Paul Rhodes Eddy, Gregory A. Boyd: The Jesus Legend. 2007, p. 143 and footnote 33.

[120] Eduard Schweizer: Jesus Christ I. In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie. Volume 16, 1986, p. 710.

[121] Gerhard Maier: The first letter of Paul to the Corinthians: Historical-Theological interpretation. 3rd edition, SCM R. Brockhaus, 2014, ISBN 3-417-29724-9 , p. 129 f.

[122] Robert E. van Voort: Nonexistence Hypothesis. In: James Leslie Houlden (ed.): Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia. Volume 1. 2003, p. 660.