Christ is a recycled myth.

Question

The story of a dying-and-rising god born of a virgin, performing miracles, and being resurrected on the third day predates Christianity by centuries. Horus, Mithras, Dionysus, Osiris, Attis — the parallels are legion. The Gospels were written decades after the alleged events, by partisans, in Greek, far from Palestine. There is no contemporary non-Christian record of Jesus. The simplest explanation is that the figure is fictional, assembled from the mythological raw material of the Hellenistic world.

The Historian · Answer

Even the agnostic scholars say he existed.

I am not a believer, and I will not pretend to be one. I am a historian of late antiquity, and I am here to tell you that the mythicist position is not held by any serious scholar of the period in any major secular university. This is not a matter of religious bias. The faculty of ancient history at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, the Sorbonne — populated overwhelmingly by secular and agnostic scholars — agree that Jesus of Nazareth existed and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. The dispute is over what to make of him, not whether to count him.

The reasons are technical but solid. Paul's letters, written within twenty to thirty years of the crucifixion, refer to Jesus's brother James as a person Paul personally met. The historian Tacitus, writing in 116 AD, mentions "Christus, who was executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius" — and Tacitus was no Christian. Josephus, a Jewish historian writing in the 90s, mentions Jesus twice, once in a passage that has been interpolated by later Christian copyists but that almost all scholars agree contains an authentic core. The criterion of embarrassment — historians ask why a community would invent details that embarrass them — gives us a crucified messiah, baptism by John (which makes Jesus look subordinate), and a Galilean origin (which made him an unlikely candidate to begin with). You do not invent these details. You inherit them.

The dying-and-rising-god parallels are mostly bogus. Most of the alleged parallels — Horus born of a virgin on December 25th, Mithras crucified and resurrected — are nineteenth-century inventions or massive overreadings of fragmentary evidence. Read the actual primary sources and the parallels evaporate. What you are left with is a Galilean Jewish preacher, executed under Pilate, whose followers shortly afterward began making extraordinary claims about him. That much is history. What to do with it is theology.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

I have read myths. The Gospels are not myths.

I spent my professional life reading ancient and medieval literature, and I will say something the mythicist cannot: I know what myths read like, and the Gospels do not read like them. Myths are vague about geography, vague about chronology, populated by figures who exist outside ordinary time. The Gospels name a Roman procurator, a Jewish high priest, a Galilean tetrarch, a specific tax census. They report awkward, pointless details — the pillow Jesus slept on in the boat, the way he wrote in the dust, his irritation with his disciples. Myths do not have pillows in them. Reportage has pillows in it.

If the Gospel writers were inventing a mythological figure, they were inventing in a genre that did not yet exist — realistic biographical fiction. No one was writing this way in the first century. The novelistic technique that produces the Jesus of the Gospels was not developed until the eighteenth century. Either the evangelists were two thousand years ahead of their literary moment, or they were doing something other than inventing. Occam suggests the latter.

The mythicist also has to explain the rise of Christianity. A movement that recruits Jewish monotheists into the worship of a crucified man — crucifixion being the most shameful death the ancient world could imagine — has a steep hill to climb if its central figure never existed. The hill becomes much gentler if he did.

G.K. Chesterton · Answer

Pontius Pilate is not a mythological figure.

The genius of the Christian creed is that it grounds itself in the most embarrassing specificity. Suffered under Pontius Pilate. No mythology does this. Mythology lives in illo tempore, in the time of beginnings, when the gods walked. Christianity locates its central act under a specific Roman administrator whose career we can date, whose coins we have, whose archaeological inscriptions exist. This is not how myths work. It is the opposite of how myths work.

The mythicist argument requires us to believe that early Christians, wishing to fabricate a god, chose to attach him to the most awkward possible historical handle — a recent execution, in a remote province, by a named bureaucrat. It is as if someone fabricating a religion today set it under "the second Obama administration." You do not invent legends with bureaucratic timestamps. You inherit them.

The dying-and-rising god parallels are the favorite weapon of the mythicist, and the weakest. Frazer's Golden Bough, on which most of the parallels depend, has been quietly demolished by every generation of subsequent anthropology. The pagan parallels, examined closely, turn out to be either much later than Christianity (and dependent on it), or so structurally different that the comparison is meaningless. The atheist owes us a citation. He almost never has one that survives examination.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

The argument from the spread of the Church.

Even setting aside the textual evidence, the historical fact of the Church's expansion is itself an argument. Within a generation of the crucifixion, communities devoted to the worship of a particular Galilean Jew had spread across the Roman Empire, withstood three centuries of intermittent persecution, and converted the empire that crucified their founder. This expansion happened in literate, hostile, well-documented territory. Roman authorities, Jewish authorities, and pagan philosophers all had every motive to refute the Christian claim by producing evidence that the founder had not existed. None of them did. They argued instead that he had existed and that his followers were wrong about him.

This is not proof of the Resurrection. It is, however, evidence that the existence of Jesus was not a matter of dispute even among his ancient enemies. The mythicist position is not merely a modern academic minority view; it is a position the ancient world itself never seriously entertained, including the parties most motivated to entertain it.

What the believer adds to the historian's account is not a different set of facts but a different reading of the same facts. The historian gives us a man crucified under Pilate whose followers said impossible things about him. The believer says: those things were true.

Christ is a recycled myth.

The objection, in full

Even the agnostic scholars say he existed.

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