Ancient Jesus mythers

[Ilisrum]

Are there any ancient writers (Christian, Jew, pagan, or otherwise) who believed that Jesus was a mythical figure? If so, could somebody present quotes of the relevant passages?

I know that the mythicist hypothesis has been beaten to death, but as far as I know it came about in the 18th century. I'd like to see some ancient examples of the theory. Thanks.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Celsus comes close. He believes that Jesus was a historical person, but that all the miracles / divinity attributed to him by Christians were BS.

Look him up in the great and powerful wiki.

And if you really want good stuff, try the book Christians as the Romans Saw Them. It has writings of ancients who criticize Christianity -- "if there is ancient Jesus myth theory," according to whatever definition you're using, it would be there.

And the book is very short.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Are there any ancient writers (Christian, Jew, pagan, or otherwise) who believed that Jesus was a mythical figure?.

No, nor that Nazareth was a mythical place.

 

[doppelganger]

It appears that there probably were by the mid-second century as Justin Martyr took great pains to detail arguments against the idea that Jesus was just a repackaging of characters and story elements from earlier myths.

One of his most famous is "diabolical mimicry."

Tertullian and Ireneaus also wrote quite a bit in refutation of non-christians apparently pointing out that Jesus bore some resemblance to other mythological figures.

My opinion is that many of the early "Gnostic" sects read and understood the stories about Jesus as metaphorical/spiritual wisdom and not histories of any particular person.

That's different than saying there was no specific person or persons that inspired a part of these stories. Which parts it's probably impossible to know. It's pretty clear from the historical record that there was some particular person named Jesus, mainly because the record shows one of the earliest leaders of Jerusalem Church (James) was this particular guy's brother. Indeed, setting aside the strange recitation of "appearances" that Paul mentions, the only historical detail of Jesus's life mentioned in Paul's epistles (and these are the earliest known and identifiably "Christian" writings we have) is that James was his brother.

 

[Copernicus]

And if you really want good stuff, try the book Christians as the Romans Saw Them. It has writings of ancients who criticize Christianity -- "if there is ancient Jesus myth theory," according to whatever definition you're using, it would be there.

I read that book and enjoyed it. The sad think about anciet critics is that Christians either destroyed or failed to preserve works that were critical of their doctrines. So we do not actually have the extensive criticisms of Christianity that Celsus wrote. Instead, we have only the excerpts that Christian apologists chose to respond to. As we all know from the experience of religious debates in online forums, people quite often fail to respond to the strongest arguments made by their critics, but they invariably quote and respond to those passages that they find easiest to attack.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

I read that book and enjoyed it. The sad think about anciet critics is that Christians either destroyed or failed to preserve works that were critical of their doctrines. So we do not actually have the extensive criticisms of Christianity that Celsus wrote. Instead, we have only the excerpts that Christian apologists chose to respond to. As we all know from the experience of religious debates in online forums, people quite often fail to respond to the strongest arguments made by their critics, but they invariably quote and respond to those passages that they find easiest to attack.

Was it the Christian's responsibility to do that?

We are fortunate to have a few fragments of the Roman polemists, because if the Christians didn't preserve what little we have, we wouldn't know anything about these people.

The Romans didn't see these writings as important enough to preserve or even quote in their literature.

 

[Copernicus]

Was it the Christian's responsibility to do that?

Absolutely. They were in charge of preserving the history and culture of their civilization. Unfortunately, they engaged in the deliberate destruction of all "pagan" influences and even the introduction of false material into the public record. Thankfully, some history was preserved outside of their influence and reintroduced during the Renaissance.

We are fortunate to have a few fragments of the Roman polemists, because if the Christians didn't preserve what little we have, we wouldn't know anything about these people.

We can be thankful that they did not destroy and/or distort the record even more than they did? I'm not the slightest bit thankful for that. I see no reason to excuse their behavior. They behaved like barbarians when it came to preserving the truth.

The Romans didn't see these writings as important enough to preserve or even quote in their literature.

Libraries were destroyed that had been preserved for centuries before the Christians came on the scene. The Greeks and Romans preserved works that were skeptical of their religions. So did the Muslims, and that is how we recovered many of the great works that the Christians had destroyed or failed to preserve.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Absolutely. They were in charge of preserving the history and culture of their civilization. Unfortunately, they engaged in the deliberate destruction of all "pagan" influences and even the introduction of false material into the public record. Thankfully, some history was preserved outside of their influence and reintroduced during the Renaissance.

I wish you saw the contradiction in this.

No one "outside the influence" of Christianity preserved the writings of Celsus or Marcion for that matter. There's also many fragments in Clement of Alexandria and other Christian writers of "pagan" scholars that were originally thought lost, and then more of it was discovered in the modern age.

O well. Obviously Christians were very destructive, but they were not always destructive. I don't debate that Christianity was responsible for the Dark Ages, that is obvious. But the impact of the Dark Ages was not worldwide, even within Christianity. The Eastern Church didn't have a Dark Age, and preserved many writings. There was also in every age scholars who preserved historical works, whether on purpose or on accident.

So I agree with the obvious, but you're carrying it to the extreme, and being more than a little melodramatic. Europe isn't the entire world.

 

[Copernicus]

So I agree with the obvious, but you're carrying it to the extreme, and being more than a little melodramatic. Europe isn't the entire world.

Angellous, what prompted my response was your question about "duty". It was their duty to preserve the historic record, and it is more than a little ridiculous that they would not preserve Celsus, given the effort they made to preserve the Christian critique of Celsus. You didn't ask me whether I expected them to have acted differently, and you were the one who raised this issue.

Censorship and alteration of historical records was not unique to Christians in those times. On balance, I think that the pagan-dominated Empire was more tolerant of diverse opinion than the Christian-dominated Empire. Christians were persecuted at times, but there were also periods of time when they were a tolerated minority. Libraries preserved works of diverse religious opinion. Under Christian emperors, Jews experienced less tolerance and book burnings of "blasphemous" works became publicly encouraged. Although the Library of Alexandria had suffered destruction during attacks before Christians came to power, it was systematically gutted for religious reasons by the Patriarch Theophilus in 391 AD. Previous acts of destruction had not been carried out specifically to purge it of content that was considered blasphemous by the authorities. That was in a time when the Christian Emperor Theodosius made paganism illegal in the empire and explicitly sanctioned the burning of pagan works.

 

[outhouse]

theres a reason why they hid the dead sea scrolls and the nag hammadi.


Im sure in time more might surface. Its a shame the history that went up in smoke

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Angellous, what prompted my response was your question about "duty". It was their duty to preserve the historic record, and it is more than a little ridiculous that they would not preserve Celsus, given the effort they made to preserve the Christian critique of Celsus. You didn't ask me whether I expected them to have acted differently, and you were the one who raised this issue.

Censorship and alteration of historical records was not unique to Christians in those times. On balance, I think that the pagan-dominated Empire was more tolerant of diverse opinion than the Christian-dominated Empire. Christians were persecuted at times, but there were also periods of time when they were a tolerated minority. Libraries preserved works of diverse religious opinion. Under Christian emperors, Jews experienced less tolerance and book burnings of "blasphemous" works became publicly encouraged. Although the Library of Alexandria had suffered destruction during attacks before Christians came to power, it was systematically gutted for religious reasons by the Patriarch Theophilus in 391 AD. Previous acts of destruction had not been carried out specifically to purge it of content that was considered blasphemous by the authorities. That was in a time when the Christian Emperor Theodosius made paganism illegal in the empire and explicitly sanctioned the burning of pagan works.

*yawn*

 

[angellous_evangellous]

theres a reason why they hid the dead sea scrolls and the nag hammadi.


Im sure in time more might surface. Its a shame the history that went up in smoke

The hiding of the Dead Sea Scrolls were because the Romans were about to destroy the community. Christians were not an issue.

The Nag Hammadi texts may have been buried to protect it from *Roman* Christians.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Jeez, I'm still bored by Copernicus's post.

Inauthentic melodrama.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

theres a reason why they hid the dead sea scrolls and the nag hammadi.

Good grief!

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Good grief!

That was an honest mistake though.

I found his comment much more insightful and fresher than Mr. C.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

I found his comment much more insightful and fresher than Mr. C.

Fresh perhaps, but you can find fresh by walking behind a gaggle of geese. What was the insight?

 

[angellous_evangellous]

fresh perhaps, but you can find fresh by walking behind a gaggle of geese. What was the insight?

Mr. C. looked at a little information, and came to the wrong conclusion.

Mr. O. didn't look at anything and tried to express a thought without looking at anything, pulling two examples from memory that really didn't make sense in the conversation.

Which is worse? Grossly misinterpreting something or just expressing a thought in a way that doesn't make sense. The first to me seems like a gross error rooted in bias and lack of education, and the second is perfectly excusable as a simple misstatement.

The insight is in the fact that Mr. O. had an authentic thought, however misguided or misremembered or poorly expressed.

Mr. C's may as well be spam.

 

[doppelganger]

I think one fair way to look at it is that given how little there actually is to go on regarding the details of an historical Jesus and given the wealth of obvious similarities to common mythological motifs in the gospel stories strongly suggesting that they are to a large extent mythological in function rather than the historical, it is reasonable to say that the Jesus of Christian belief is a mythological character and has been probably since very near the beginning. There probably was a historical person at the bottom of all of this who was likely a reformer trying to renew the core spirituality of Judaism, but beyond that, there's precious little way to sort out what he actually did and taught from the stories created around him as the central figure of a growing religious cult that was gradually coming to deify him and borrowing mythological motifs from several traditions in the process.

As for the destruction of "heretical" early writings, when the orthodox form of Christianity that started to come together in the mid-Second Century was adopted later as the official imperial religion of Rome, it's a simple fact that the Roman state stamped out dissenters and destroyed writings to cleanse the historical record of competition for their version. You can sneer about it all you want, but there's little doubt that it occurred. And the result is that a paltry historical record is even more circumspect because we don't know what else was lost to us, or what might have been buried to hide it from early witch-hunts and is still waiting to be dug up.

 

[Copernicus]

I agree pretty much with what doppelgänger said. While I think it a reasonable possibility that there was no actual historical Jesus, that really isn't the important issue here. If there was, we likely do not have an accurate picture of him or his life from the records that do survive.

 

[Copernicus]

Jeez, I'm still bored by Copernicus's post.

Inauthentic melodrama.

You were so bored that you felt compelled to post two comments on my post, neither of which said anything of substance. But maybe you think that rhetorical posturing is more interesting than actually engaging in discussion.