I am going to give a very basic sketch of the study of the historical Jesus, why experts have universally accepted Jesus as a historical figure, the biggest problems with the mainstream rejections of Jesus as pure myth, and finally give various sources to go for more information.
Before I start, I should state briefly my own religious bias and educational background (although I have stated these elsewhere in other posts). I am not Christian. I am currently working on my dissertation on the oral tradition within the Jesus tradition.
Why have scholars of the historical Jesus/early Christianity/NT studies/etc from all different religious backgrounds accepted Jesus as historical? Simply put, there is more historical evidence for Jesus than the vast majority of ancient figures. People who regard Jesus as mythical usually haven’t read enough ancient biographies or histories. They see the miracles and historical inaccuracies in the NT, along with the biases of the authors, and the vast gulf between the genre/style of the gospels and modern history books and conclude that we the gospels clearly can be rejected completely as unhistorical.
There is no problem with that conclusion, as long as you are ready to apply the same method of criticism to all ancient written history. For example, take Herodotus. The same person who first called Herodotus the “father of history” (Cicero) said in the same breath that in Herodotus “sunt innumerabiles fabulae” (De Legibus 1.5). As Stewart Flory writes in his book “The Archaic Smile of Herodotus: “Herodotus does not ever state at the beginning of his book or anywhere else that he will tell only the truth about the past, for the father of history does not always accept the superiority of truth to fiction. Herodotus often tells lengthy stories he admits are false, disproves plausible stories, or accepts preposterous ones without proof” (50). All ancient historians, even those more dedicated to the truth, accepted vastly different standards of what could be counted as history than we do today. They often accepted second, third, or fourth hand oral accounts. They included miraculous events or divine accounts within histories. They displayed incredible biases (ethnic, religious, etc) which colored and altered their accounts. For this reason, historians of ancient times have to sift through these sources and attempt differentiate between what is historical and what is not. The gospels, although they look blatantly unhistorical to us, fall into a genre of ancient biography. They are not so dissimilar to the “Lives” of ancient historians like “Plutarch.”
To take another example, let's look at Socrates, a historical figure whose existence few (if anyone) would doubt. Are main sources (and virtually our only sources, as with the gospels and jesus) of information for his life are from Plato, Xenophon (memrobilia) and Aristophanes (The Clouds). All three of the men knew Socrates. Yet their accounts of him are strikingly different. Xenophon presents a Socrates little concerned with problems of logic and metaphysics. Rather, his only concern is as a somewhat populist ethics teacher. Plato, on the otherhand, has Socrates very much concerned with metaphysical speculation. Aristophanes, radically differing from both, presents him as a buffoon. Now if we were to treat Socrates as so many would have us treat Jesus, we may imagine a "Socrates Myth," in which Socrates is no more than a mythic Wisdom character, to be used however a writer may wish, but who was never really any historical figure. This is in essence what popular non-experts have done with Jesus and the gospels.
Basically, when modern people who are not experts in the field look at the gospels and say “these aren’t historical and therefore nothing in them can be accepted as historical” are holding the gospels up to a modern standard of historical inquiry. Obviously, we can’t (unless for religious reasons) accept many things in the gospels as history, but the same holds true for all ancient history. So how do experts sort through the gospels for historical truth? I’ll get into this a little later. First I want to address the major problems with most mainstream “Jesus is a myth” books.
I’ll use one of the more popular and “historical looking” books as an example: “The Jesus Myth” by Freke and Gandy. First, it is important to point out that, like all authors of such books, these two are far from experts in the area. One has a B.A. in psychology, the other has an M.A. in Classical Studies (yet somehow their translations of Greek and knowledge of paganism are incredibly flawed). Next, I want to address the main issues in their book, most of which are shared by other such works:
1. Similarities between the Gospels and other pagan myths
This is a big one, and very popular. Frazer was one of the first to put forth this theory back in the days of “armchair anthropology,” and he was criticized even then for all the problems with the theory.
First, many of the similarities are superficial, and are made more significant by changing the language. For example, various pagan gods are said to have been resurrected (like Osiris) when actually his pieces were just put back together. Or comparisons are made between various pagan deities called “son of God” and Jesus. However, there is a vast difference between the son of a monotheistic God in what began as a Jewish cult, and sons of pagan gods who had children left and right.
2. Misunderstanding paganism
There is a whole nest of issues here, but I’ll mention one of the biggest here. Works like Freke and Gandy’s tend to view paganism as a somewhat unified whole. They draw aspects of this and that myth, put them all together haphazardly and then try to show how similar the Christian Jesus is to these myths. However, these are separate cults, and although pagans believed in many of these simultaneously, any one myth compared to the Jesus tradition is vastly different. If this isn’t bad enough, authors like Freke and Gandy not only pick and choose from various pagan myths to draw similarities, they also take quotes from philosophers and add these to further the comparison. The idea that a movement that began within Jewish circles would have (like Freke and Gandy and those similar to them) selected various aspects of pagan myths and put them together into a unified whole is ludicrous. Even Philo, the most Hellenized Jew we know of, retained his monotheism, and although he drew on pagan philosophy, he came nowhere near to the kind of bizarre syncretism posited by “Jesus myth” advocates.
3. Dating
If you look through Freke and Gandy’s book, you will see them compare many quotes from pagan works to works by Christians (both the NT and early Christian authors). I have already addressed on problem with this above (you can cherry pick versus from any vastly diversified system of thought and make it seem similar to virtually anything). Another is date. Many of their quotes are from works written AFTER the gospels, but they never mention that. Not only that, some of the pagan myths or cults they compare to Jesus were not even around until after all the gospels were written. Mithras is a figure frequently compared to Jesus. And indeed, of all the pagan gods he is probably the most similar. However, he is only similar in the Hellenistic mystery version of the cult, NOT the ancient Persian version. The Hellenistic mystery cult version did not exist until the beginning of the second century. In fact, many scholars argue that it was influenced by Christianity. In fact, the move to a unified pagan religion (all gods are one god) in late paganism was largely a response to Christianity, and didn’t take place until long after the gospels. Also, it probably existed only among the pagan literary elite.
4. Combining pagan myth with pagan philosophy
This is in part a combination of mistakes 1 and 2. Freke and Gandy frequently combine statements from philosophers with aspects of pagan myths. However, the two existed quite separately.
I could go on, but these are some of the biggest types of methodological problems (to be distinguished from outright errors, which are all over the place) found in “The Jesus Myth” and similar works.
(cont. on next post)
