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The study of Jesus Christ as myth is the examination of the narrative of Jesus, the Christ (the Anointed) of the gospels, Christian theology and folk Christianity from the perspective of mythography, as a central part of Christian mythology, paralleling mystery religions of the Roman Empire such as Mithraism and the myths of rebirth deities and sacral kingship.

The study of such elements is often, but not exclusively, associated with a skeptical position toward the historicity of Jesus. The claim of a purely mythical Jesus with no base in history, popularly known as the "Jesus-Myth theory", goes back to David Strauss' Life of Jesus (1835) and is now rejected by the majority of Biblical scholars and historians of classical antiquity. For a discussion of the question of historicity, see historicity of Jesus.

History of the theories

Current theories surrounding the mythological aspects of the Christ arose from 19th century scholarship on the formation of myth, in the work of writers such as Max Müller and James Frazer. Müller argued that religions originated in mythic stories of the birth, death, and rebirth of the Sun. Frazer further attempted to explain the origins of humanity's mythic beliefs in the idea of a "sacrificial king", associated with the Sun as a dying and reviving god and its connection to the regeneration of the earth in springtime. Frazer did not doubt the historicity of Jesus, however, stating, "my theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth The doubts which have been cast upon the historical reality of Jesus are unworthy of serious attention."

The first scholarly proponent of the theory was probably Bruno Bauer, a Hegelian thinker who argued that the true founder of Christianity was an Alexandrian Jew, Philo, who had adapted Judaic ideas to Hellenic philosophy.

Other authors included Edwin Johnson, who argued that Christianity emerged from a combination of liberal trends in Judaism and Gnostic mysticism. Less speculative versions of the theory developed under Bible scholars such as A. D. Loman and G. I. P. Bolland. Loman argued that episodes in Jesus's life, such as the Sermon on the Mount, were fictions written to justify compilations of pre-existing liberal Jewish sayings. Bolland developed the theory that Christianity evolved from Gnosticism and that "Jesus" was a symbolic figure representing Gnostic ideas about God.

The most influential of the books arguing for a mythic Jesus was Arthur Drews's The Christ-Myth (1909) which brought together the scholarship of the day in defence of the idea that Christianity had been a Jewish Gnostic cult that spread by appropriating aspects of Greek philosophy and Frazerian death-rebirth deities. This combination of arguments became the standard form of the mythic Christ theory. In Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), Bertrand Russell stated that even if Jesus existed, which he doubted, the public does not "know anything" about him. Some like Joseph Wheless in his 1930 Forgery In Christianity went even further and claimed there was an active effort to forge documents to make the myth seem historical beginning as early as the 2nd century.

The later works by George Albert Wells drew on the Pauline Epistles and the lack of early non-Christian documents to argue that the Jesus figure of the Gospels was symbolic, not historical. Earl Doherty proposed that Jewish mysticism influenced the development of a Christ myth, while John M. Allegro proposed that Christianity began as shamanic religion based on the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Pinchas Lapide was a strong proponent of recovering historical, Jewish, Jesus from beneath the layers of Christian mythology. Lapide saw the historical Jesus as a rabbi in the Hasidean tradition of Hillel and Hanina Ben Dosa, and in the context of Jewish independence struggle against Roman occupation.

Most recently Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have popularized the Jesus-myth concept in their book The Jesus Mysteries.

The myth

Further information: New Testament view on Jesus' life

Jesus is the fruit of a miraculous Virgin Birth, her impregnation with the Holy Spirit announced to his mother by the divine messenger, Gabriel. He is a scion of the royal blood of David, King of the Jews, and at the same time the divine Word incarnated. He is the predestined Saviour, recognized at birth by astrologer-kings, but has to avoid being killed by a jealous ruler, Herod, by spending time in exile. As an infant, he is part of the Holy Family often associated with the Holy Trinity in Christian symbolism.

As a grown man, he receives initiation in the form of ritual purification by John the Baptist, fruit of a similarly miraculous birth announced by Gabriel, later jailed and executed by the same Herod who persecuted the infant Jesus. Jesus is identified as the Son of God and receives the Spirit of God in the form of a dove. After withstanding temptation to abuse his divine powers, he attracts a body of followers, the Twelve Apostles, and wanders around the land preaching and performing miraculous healing. On one instance, he appears to his closest followers in a radiant epiphany, again revealed as the Son of God, and seen conversing with two major prophets of the Old Testament, Elijah and Moses. At the same time as the Son of God, Jesus is also the Son of Man, he is essentially both Man deified (the "new Adam") and God incarnate, transcending the status of demigod of half-man and half-god by being fully God and fully man at the same time in hypostatic union.

Further information: Death and resurrection of Jesus

Following a triumphal entry into the national capital, and the Last Supper where he gives a final sermon, he is betrayed, apprehended and flogged, and forced to undertake a second, mock-triumphal procession to the place of execution, where he is executed with ostensible cruelty, accompanied by dark omen, both chthonic (earthquakes) and celestial (eclipse). He dies and is embalmed and placed in a tomb, his spirit descending to the underworld and returning on the third day, and appears bodily resurrected to his followers, before miraculously ascending to heaven. For his death to atone for humanity, he is given the title Lamb of God, after the sacrificial lamb of Hebrew tradition, and as the Christ (Messiah, Anointed) in reference to his fulfilling of prophecies of a royal saviour. His followers are given the divine spirit in order to carry on his mission, and are charged with ritually commemorating his death in the sacrament of the Eucharist, involving symbolic ingestion of Christ's body.

A triumphal Second Coming of Christ is prophesized in Christian eschatology, when he will preside over the Last Judgment and heralding in a golden Messianic Age or Kingdom of God for the faithful.

Predecessors and parallels

Further information: Comparative mythology

Many aspects of the Gospel stories of Jesus have remarkable parallels with life-death-rebirth gods in the widespread mystery religions prevalent in the Hellenic culture amongst which Christianty was born. Closely related to this are mythemes of sacral kingship and "theophagy", the eating of the body of a fertility god, traced by Walter Burkert to a neolithic fertility rite surrounding a god who needs to die and rise again in order to feed the community, sublimated in the Christian eucharist.

The central figure of one of the most widespread mysteries, Osiris-Dionysus, was consistently localised and deliberately merged with local deities in each area, since it was the mysteries which were imparted that were regarded as important, not the method by which they were taught. Other prominently cited parallels are with Tammuz, Horus and Mithras. Horus was one of the life-death-rebirth deities, and was connected and involved in the resurrection of Osiris, whose Egyptian name (Asar) is very similar to the root of Lazarus. In the view of some advocates of the Jesus Myth theory, most prominently Freke and Gandy in The Jesus Mysteries, Jewish mystics adapted their form of Osiris-Dionysus to match prior Jewish heroes like Moses and Joshua, hence creating Jesus.

Several prominent early Christians, like Irenaeus, actually acknowledged the existence of many parallels, complaining that the earlier religions had copied Christian religion and practices, before Jesus was even born, as some form of diabolically inspired pre-cognitive mockery.

In comparative mythology, there is always the danger of parallelomania, as Samuel Sandmel (1962) calls it, the excessive and superficial identification of what are really mythic universals. Sandmel cautions that

"We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying a literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction.".

Egypt

ḥr ḳrst

in hieroglyphs

In Egyptian myth, Horus gained his authority by being anointed by Anubis, who had his own cult, and was regarded as the main anointer; the anointing made Horus into Horus karast, written in Egyptian as ḥr ḳrst, "anointed/embalmed Horus". ḳrst is a false cognate of Greek chrisma "unguent" whence the title Christos is derived. Tom Harpur of the University of Toronto suggests that Christos was chosen as a translation of Mašíaḥ because of this similarity. Gerald Massey (1907) compares in particular the embalming of Jesus described in Matthew 26:12 and John 19:39,40 as "making the Christ as the anointed-mummy previous to interment" and refers to Tertullian's claim that the name of the Christians derives from this unction received by Jesus.

Worship of Isis, Horus' mother, was a prominent cult, and the proposal that this is the basis of veneration of Mary, and more particularly Marian Iconography, has some merit.

The nativity of Christ is similar in some respects to that of Ra, the Sun, in Egyptian mystery religion. Ra is given virginal birth by Neith, who was impregnated by Kneph, the "breath of life", and who had her fate foretold to her by Thoth. A sound-alike to Mary, similar to the case of krst above, is the title of "beloved", mery, frequently bestowed on Neith. Plutarch states that the Egyptian kneph translates to Greek pneuma, the term for the Holy Spirit. Amenhotep III applied this myth to his wife and the birth of his son, Akhenaten, who was consequently identified as Horus.

File:LuxorAmenhetep.gif

Image from the temple at Luxor in which Akhenaten is shown as being born to a virgin mortal mother, who is made pregnant by divine actions, of which she is foretold

Mesopotamia

Tammuz-Adonis is the Mesopotamian archetype of the dying and risen-again fertility god. His cult involved ritual mourning. The Pan-Babylonianist school in particular derives many later myths from this complex, popularized by Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, which further parallels Tammuz and Christ with Joseph and Osiris. Tammuz is paralleled to Christ in particular by his epithet, the shepherd.

Greek mysteries

The Greek Eleusinian Mysteries were an initiation cult surrounding Demeter, her daughter Persephone, and the agricultural hero Triptolemus. The derived Hellenistic Orphic traditions syncretized Greek traditions with Egyptian and Mesopotamian elements. In the Orphic tradition, it is Dionysus who is killed and resurrected. Orphism puts strong emphasis on salvation in the afterlife. Orphism and Hermeticism strongly influenced Platonist mysticism which in turn was a formative influence on early Christian theology and dogma.

Mithras

The worship of Mithras was widespread in much of the Roman Empire from the mid-2nd century CE, and mainstream historians regard it as possible that many Christian practices derived originally from Mithraism through a process known as christianization, including 25th December being Jesus' birth-date, and Sunday being the dedicated day of worship. Mithras was a solar deity, closely associated with the Roman Sol Invictus later identified with Christ.

Old Testament

Further information: Christianity and Biblical prophecy and Claimed Messianic prophecies of Jesus

The gospels purposedly style Jesus as a figure rooted in and foretold by the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, notably the Book of Isaiah and the Book of Daniel. Drawn upon heavily by libretto of Handel's Messiah and generally at the root of British Israelism. Thus, Jesus' nativity is placed in Bethlehem to comply with Micah 5:2, and Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem is designed to answer Zechariah 9:9–10.

The small amount of material unique to the gospel of Matthew, that is, not reconstructed for the hypothetical source document of the synoptic gospels ("Q"), Jesus is presented with strong parallels to Old Testament figures, most noticeably Moses. Matthew appears to have used Moses' birth narrative and sojourn in the wilderness as the basis for the narrative of Jesus, in the tradition of midrash creative narratives based on the stories, prophecies, and quotes in the Hebrew Bible, in particular Toledot Yeshu.

Work done by prominent Q scholars such as John Kloppenborg identifies Q's genre as ancient Near-Eastern "instruction", which consistently attributes its wisdom to a human figure and not the personified Wisdom that one finds in the biblical book of Proverbs.

Advocates of an unhistorical Jesus even claim that when the midrashic elements are removed, little to no content remains that could be used to demonstrate the existence of an historical Jesus., but the mere presence of Old Testament influence is widely dismissed as sufficient evidence against historicity; there are many examples of ancient Jewish and Christian literature that shaped their stories and accounts according to Old Testament influence, but nevertheless provided some historical accounts; for example, in 1 Maccabees, Judas and his battles are described in terms which parallel those of Saul's and David's battles against the Philistines in 1 and 2 Samuel, but nevertheless 1 Maccabees has a degree of respect amongst historians as having a reasonable degree of historical reliability.

Influence on other mythologies

The mytheme of Christ, the divine saviour crucified, has in turn left traces in other mythologies. This holds for 2nd to 3rd century mystery religions and the emergence of Gnosticism; in Reinventing Jesus, the authors put forth the position that "Only after 100 A.D. did the mysteries begin to look very much like Christianity, precisely because their existence was threatened by this new religion. They had to compete to survive.".

Other arguable traces of the Christ mytheme can be found in Norse Balder and Odin. It is also carried into Islam as the Mahdi prophecy and the Ahmadi myths of Jus Asaf.

Interpretations

The mythological parallels discussed above can be interpreted in diametrally different ways. Christian interpretations may either consider non-Christian parallels demonic mockery, or intuitive glimpses of truth by virtuous pagans. Secular interpretations will simply treat Christian myth as one stage in a long unbroken tradition, while sceptical or atheist criticism may argue that Christianity loses credibility by its "copying" earlier mythemes.

Jesus as "true myth"

Further information: mythopoeia

Christian mythologists such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien understood the narrative of Christ's sacrificial death of atonement for humanity as a myth with the special property that it had been enacted historically in time and space. In this view, mythological predecessors of the "drama" of Christ were inspired glimpses of divine truth that would only become fully manifest at an appointed moment and place, viz. in Roman Judea. For these authors, the mythological elements in the story of the Christ do not undermine but rather enhance the transcendental truth of the gospel.

Jesus as historical nucleus of Christian myth

Further information: Christian mythology

Regardless of the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, the titles accorded to him in the New Testament and later literature clearly establish him in the tradition of both Hebrew and Hellenistic mythology, as a semi-divine or deified hero or sacred king (Christ or Messiah), as a saviour (soter). This circumstance is by no means in contradiction to a historical figure as outlined by the gospel, it is rather the predictable interpretation of a story of a "dead and risen Son of God" by the Hellenistic public of the early centuries AD, and during the Constantinian shift (between the Edict of Milan of 313 and the prohibition of pagan cults by Theodosius I in 391) even a conscious amalgamation of the tenets of the early Church Fathers with established cult practice of Roman imperial cult. The identification of Christ with Sol Invictus and the establishment of the Pontifex Maximus as the "steward of Christ" in the Roman church is a result of this process of amalgamation. Similarly, Christian liturgy and liturgical calendar were modelled after Roman examples, e.g. the adoption of the festival of Sol Invictus to commemorate Epiphany of Christ.

These aspects were taken up in Germanic Christianity and combined with Germanic myth, giving rise to heroic poetry surrounding Christ and his sacrificial death, such as The Dream of the Rood.

Jesus as an ahistorical myth

It has been suggested that this article be split into a new article titled Jesus-myth. (discuss)

In spite of Frazer's verdict that attepts to build a case of the non-historicity of Jesus from mythological parallels as "unworthy of serious attention", such attempts have been repeatedly made. Presently, as in Frazer's time, New Testament scholars and historians consider the question as resolved in favour of Jesus' historicity.

In recent years, opinions of a purely mythical Christ have been advanced by Emeritus Professor of German George Albert Wells (The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth) and by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, co-authors of The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus and the Lost Goddess, who are both popular writers on mysticism, with Gandy having an MA in ancient pagan mystery religions. Another proponent is Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle).

There are many different views regarding the nature of the early texts. Doherty suggests that Jesus is a historicised mythic figure created out of the Old Testament, whom the early Christians experienced in visions, as Paul says he did. Advocates of the Jesus-myth theory have the same range for the dating and meaning of the early Christian texts as do mainstream scholars and this is not a point of dispute between the camps.

The New Testament epistles

It is widely held that the authentic letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings. The earliest datable references we have and the earliest manuscripts are from Paul . However epistles discuss theology and morality abstractly while gospels teach metaphorically showing examples from "Jesus' actual life and ministry" . Proponents of Jesus as myth note however that the epistles are silent in areas where you would expect to see events from Jesus's actual life

Quotes of "Jesus' teachings" are not attributed to him
When describing the church there is no mention of Jesus' "recent activities"
Areas that would normally beg for references to Jesus' ministry lack such references

There are a variety of explanations offered for this among a few who believe in a historical Jesus, while proponents of the Jesus-myth theory regard it as key evidence to support their position.

G. A. Wells suggests that the level of discussion of the historical Jesus in the Pauline epistles, except for the Pastorals, as well as in Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, the Johannine epistles and Revelation supports his position. In these works, Wells conjectures, references to Jesus is presented as "a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past". Wells considers this to be the original Christian view of Jesus, based not on the life of a historical figure but on the personified figure of Wisdom as portrayed in Jewish wisdom literature.

A more radical position is taken by Earl Doherty, who holds that these early authors did not believe that Jesus had been on Earth at all. He argues that the earliest Christians accepted a Platonic cosmology that distinguished a "higher" spiritual world from the Earthly world of matter, and that they viewed Jesus as having descended only into the "lower reaches of the spiritual world". Doherty also suggests that this view was accepted by the authors of the Pastoral epistles, 2 Peter, and various second-century Christian writings outside the New Testament. Doherty contends that apparent references in these writings to events on earth, and a physical historic Jesus, should in fact be regarded as allegorical metaphors. Opponents regard such interpretations as forced and erroneous.

Historiography and methodology

Earl Doherty argues that the gospels are inconsistent concerning "such things as the baptism and nativity stories, the finding of the empty tomb and Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances" and contain numerous "contradictions and disagreements in the accounts of Jesus' words and deeds". He concludes that the evangelists freely altered their sources and invented material, and therefore could not have been concerned to preserve historical information.

Although seldom remarked on by New Testament scholars, some advocates of the Jesus Myth theory argue that historians lack any reliable and widely accepted methodology for determining what is historical and what is not. As J. D. Crossan, a well respected scholar of early Christianity, comments, "I do not think, after two hundred years of experimentation, that there is any way acceptable in public discourse or scholarly debate, by which you can go directly into the great mound of the Jesus tradition and separate out the historical Jesus layer from all later strata". While this is not an argument that Jesus did not exist any more than it is an argument that the Paul described in Acts, or even Napoleon, did not exist, advocates of the Jesus Myth theory believe it does call into question the results of historical inquiry into Jesus of Nazareth.

Opponents of the theory, including skeptical commentators such as the Jesus Seminar, argue that some reliable information can be extracted from the Gospels if consistent critical methodology is used.

Mainstream scholarly reception

The idea of Jesus as a myth has received strong criticism from a number of biblical scholars and historians. The points below highlight some of these criticisms.

Parallels between Christianity and Mystery Religions are not considered compelling evidence by some scholars.
Through cultural diffusion it would have been natural for Jesus and/or his followers within a Hellenized Judea to incorporate the philosophy and sentiment of Epicureanism, Stoicism, Platonism/proto-Gnosticism , and mystery cults. The ideas that these belief systems brought concerning the afterlife, presence of the divine, and wisdom were incorporated into Judaism for several centuries before Jesus and can be found in the Old Testament and Apocrypha.
Those who do not hold to the Jesus-Myth disagree with the notion that the Apostle Paul did not speak of Jesus as a physical being. They argue that arguments from silence are unreliable and that there are several references in Paul's letters to historical facts about Jesus's life. He claims that Jesus "descended from David according to the flesh." Paul also states that "God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law" and that "the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being." Paul clearly states that in "taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross." Furthermore, he invokes the "command," "charge," or "word" of Jesus four times in the Epistles.
The Epistle to the Hebrews is debatably an early source, which some, but not all, scholars put before 70 CE. Their reasoning is that the Epistle makes mention of animal sacrifice, which was a practice that fell out of favor in Judaism after the destruction of the temple. In Hebrews, Jesus is mentioned several times in physical form and even speaks.

Polemical

In addition there are some points which are utilized by apologists though rejected by scholars

Christianity was actively opposed by both the Roman Empire and the Jewish authorities, and mainstream Christianity would have been utterly discredited if Jesus had been shown as a non-historical figure. There is good early evidence in Pliny, Josephus and other sources of the Roman and Jewish approaches at the time, and none of them involved this suggestion.
Some scholars, like Michael Grant, do not see significant similarity between the pagan myths and Christianity. Grant states that "Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of the deaths and rebirths, of mythical gods seemed so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit."

Overall, the unhistoricity theory is regarded as effectively refuted by almost all Biblical scholars and historians.

The nonhistoricity thesis has always been controversial, and it has consistently failed to convince scholars of many disciplines and religious creeds. ... Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted.

However, Doherty's interpretation of this fact is that:

New Testament scholarship has not kept pace with today’s mythicism... Someone in the mainstream, a respected, open-minded critical scholar, unencumbered by confessional interests and peer pressure, needs to take a fresh look, to consider and address every aspect of the mythicist case in an in-depth fashion...

Footnotes

^ Van Voorst, Robert E (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Studying the Historical Jesus). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 16. ISBN 978-0802843685.
^ Frazer, JG (2005). The Golden Bough - A Study in Magic and Religion. Cosimo. ISBN 978-1596056855.
Allegro, John M. (1970). The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East. London: Hodder and Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-12875-5.
^ Freke, T (2001). The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God?. Three Rivers Press. ISBN 978-0609807989. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
Sandmel, S (1962). "Parallelomania". Journal of Biblical Literature. 81 (1): 1–13. doi:10.2307/3264821.
Massey, Ancient Egypt pp. 215ff.
Beard, M (1998). Religions of Rome Volume 1: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 266, 301. ISBN 0-521-30401-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
Beck, RL (2003). "Mithras". In Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (ed.). The Oxford Classical Dictionary (revised 3rd edition ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 991–992. 978-0198606413. {{cite encyclopedia}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
Martindale, Cyril (1908). "Christmas". Catholic Encyclopaedia. New York. Retrieved 2007-03-18.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Kloppenborg, John (1987). The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Studies in Antiquity and Christianity). Trinity Press International. pp. 263–316. ISBN 978-1563383069.
Doherty, E. "THE JESUS PUZZLE Was There No Historical Jesus?". Retrieved 2007-03-18.
*Doherty, Earl (2000). The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin With a Mythical Christ? (rev. ed. ed.). Ottawa: Canadian Humanist Publications. ISBN 0-9686014-0-5. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
Price, C (2003). "Earl Doherty on Christian Use of the Hebrew Bible". Retrieved 2007-03-18.
Bartlett, JR (1998). 1 Maccabees (Guide to the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, 5). Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 978-1850757634.
Bartlett, John R. (1973). The First and Second Books of the Maccabees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521086582.
Komoszewski, JE (2006). Reinventing Jesus. Kregel Publications. p. 237. ISBN 978-0825429828. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
John 18 exempted see List of New Testament papyri for additional information
See for example Doherty's The Sound of Silence
Wells, GA (1999). "Earliest Christianity". New Humanist. 114 (3): 13–18. Retrieved 2007-01-11. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
^ Doherty, E (1997). "The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins". Journal of Higher Criticism. 4 (2). Retrieved 2007-01-09. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
Doherty, E. "Christ as "Man": Does Paul Speak of Jesus as an Historical Person?". The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus?. Retrieved 2007-01-11.
Price, C (2005-05-20). "Earl Doherty use of the phrase "According to the Flesh" (sic)". Bede's Library. Retrieved 2007-01-11.
Martin, WC (1966). These Were God's People: A Bible History. Southwestern Company. pp. 392, 432–440. ASIN B000HSGIW4.
^ France, RT (1986). Evidence for Jesus (Jesus Library). Trafalgar Square Publishing, 19-20. ISBN 0340381728.
Romans 1:3
Galatians 4:4.
1 Corinthians 15:21.
Philippians 2:7-8
Romans14:14, 1 Corinthians 7:10 and 9:14, and 1 Thessalonians 4:15.
See Epistle to the Hebrews.
Hebrews 5:7, 7:14, and 12:3.
Hebrews 10:5-9
Grant, Michael (1995). Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels. Scribner. p. 199. ISBN 0684818671.
Doherty, E. "Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case". Retrieved 2007-01-09.

External links

"The Jesus Mysteries" review of Freke/Gandy (1999)

historicity

Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ
"A History of Scholarly Refutations of the Jesus Myth" by Christopher Price

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