Close study of the Bible and other ancient texts isn’t helping
My very devout mother was born in southern Indiana in 1905. It was always a puzzle to me that she was not a fundamentalist. I recall vividly that she never watched Billy Graham on TV—she was put off by his dramatic waving of the Bible above his head. She never attended college, but she read voraciously. While my father and I watched TV, she would go to another room in the house to read—especially history, biography. I remember so many books in the house. I’m grateful that her influence had more impact on me than my father’s devotion to TV.
When I was a teenager, she bought the 12-volume Interpreter’s Bible, a product of Protestant theology. I read it too and thought there was nothing unusual about this purchase. She once asked a new pastor at our church about something she’d read in one of the volumes—and he was stunned: “You have the Interpreter’s Bible?” Her non-fundamentalist piety rubbed off on me, and she allowed me to take those 12 hefty volumes with me when I went away to college.
This story is worth telling because, in my nine years as a Methodist pastor, I never met devout Christians who displayed that level of curiosity. It was no surprise to me—and surveys have shown this to be the case—because Bible reading/study is not a favorite activity of those folks who fill the pews at church services. Most of them had been coached in the basic ideas of the faith since they were toddlers: it’s simply a part of who they are. So, it is what it is. And they are unaware of the turmoil in Jesus studies that has been going on for a long time now. If we said to any of them, “In your opinion, was Jesus a real person, or just a mythical creation, a fictional character?” –they would have no clue why anyone is even asking such a question.
It was indeed a long time ago that serious thinkers, including New Testament scholars, began to suspect that the gospels cannot be trusted as historical documents. One response has been, “But they were divinely inspired, so how can anyone possibly suspect that they’re not absolutely true?” But if the gospels are read carefully—with eyes wide open—it is clear that their authors borrowed heavily from miracle and magic folklore; their audiences welcomed stories from these genres. It’s impossible to point to any story in the gospels that can be verified. These documents were written decades after the supposed events. Historians are stumped: where did the gospel authors get their information.? There are so many flaws, contradictions in the gospels: it’s risky indeed to claim that “divine inspiration” was somehow involved.
Hence careful study of the gospels prompted suspicion that Jesus began as a fictional, mythological character. It was in 1999 that Earl Doherty prompted fresh interest in this topic when he published The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Dr. Richard Carrier was encouraged to read Doherty’s book, and saw that this was a legitimate topic for serious analysis. In 2012 he published Proving History: Bayes’ Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. In 2014 he followed up with On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt—at more than 600 pages, a thorough exploration of the major issues involved in determining if Jesus was a real person. It is a highly readable book, and in 2020 he published Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Jesus. This was followed in 2025 with The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus.
I recently finished reading a new book by Adam Green, The Jesus Deception (Kindle, 421 pages), in which he explains exactly how the gospel portrait of Jesus was created from scripture and pagan mythologies.
“The truth about a mythical, scripturally-constructed Christ has been obscured for generations by apologetic strategies that are nothing short of intellectually disgraceful. The evidence for a historical Jesus is so thin that if biblical scholars were truly honest and cautious, they would at least remain agnostic on his existence. Instead, many assert his reality as a certainty, replacing warranted uncertainty with unwarranted confidence.” (Kindle, page 351)
“The constant drumbeat of ‘fulfilling the Scriptures’ is so blatant that it nearly gives the game away: what we are witnessing is not history, but an exercise in prophecy-driven mythmaking.” (Kindle, p. 65) The parallels he cites makes his case stunningly obvious, and he draws as well on the data provided by Carrier and Lataster.
“Christianity did not introduce the idea of resurrection into Greek religious language. It adopted an existing theme, already saturated with mythic, cultic, and salvific meaning, and applied it to Jesus. Christian apologists claim a dying and rising God is unique to Jesus, but it was in fact a recognized ritual in Near Eastern religions, already embedded in seasonal festivals, temple liturgies, and mystery rites centuries before the Common Era.” (Kindle, p. 312)
A recognized ritual in Near Eastern religions. I have often recommended Richard Carrier’s 2018 essay on this issue: Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan Guys. Get Over It. This is always worth careful study.
“If Jesus originated as a complete myth, then searching for a historical figure beneath the story is as futile as trying to peel away the miraculous layers of Superman to uncover a ‘historical’ Clark Kent. After all, no one tries to find the ‘real Zeus’ by reading between the lines of Greek mythology.” (Kindle, p. 349)
In The Jesus Deception, we also find a scathing critique of Bart Ehrman’s claim that Jesus was real; Green quotes Dr. Carrier:
“I was expecting Did Jesus Exist? to be the very best—and the clearest—defense of the historicity of Jesus to date, competently and carefully responding to the arguments of the best proponents of the Jesus-myth theory. . . I was thoroughly disappointed. In fact, I was so shocked at how poorly researched and illogical his arguments were in this book that appalled is a better word.” (Kindle, pp. 335-336)
So…for a quarter of a century now, the case against a real Jesus has been argued effectively by serious thinkers and scholars. It’s too bad this information has not come to the attention of the devout. The failure of curiosity continues.
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes:
· Guessing About God (2023),
· Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available.
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
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