A couple of times this year, one name has been popping up in my research. The first time was in my episode on the Ark of the Covenant. John M Allegro, I told you then, was an eccentric archaeologist who worked with the team in Jerusalem that brought the Dead Sea Scrolls to the world’s attention, and it was Allegro who translated the Copper Scroll and believed that the treasures it recorded were real and could be found. He was himself a kind of proto-Indiana Jones in that he led expeditions to track down this long lost treasure, which he never managed to discover. Something I didn’t mention at the time, but which serves as noteworthy context for what came next in his career is the fact that he jeopardized his academic standing by making unusual claims about the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, asserting that certain fragmentary mentions of a “Teacher of Righteousness” who seemed to be a precursor messiah analogous to Jesus Christ, actually proved that the story of Jesus was just a recycling of this older story, and thus Jesus Christ himself was a myth. Allegro appeared again, briefly, in my recent episode on the Entheogen Theory of Religion, as his notion of Jesus Christ being a myth that represents someone or something else had developed in a remarkable direction by 1970, after he encountered the work of R. Gordon Wasson, the world’s first ethnomycologist and inventor of a grand unifying psychedelic theory of religion and world history. Besides a sect that reworked older traditions about a Teacher of Righteousness, Allegro had come to view early Christians as a fertility cult, devoted to the imagery of penises and sperm, and also to ritual drug use, specifically the eating of the Amanita muscaria mushroom as a sacrament. As a mystery cult, they did not speak openly of their rite or their true beliefs, he claimed in his book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and instead spoke only in a sort of code, and early Church fathers unwittingly canonized their drug allegory as dogma. Just such a coded meaning surrounded the figure of Jesus Christ, for just as their sacred mushroom was known to spring from the earth without a seed, so too Jesus was said to have been conceived without seed. While Wasson took his mushroom theory of religion much too far, Allegro took it further still, claiming that through his maverick etymology, tracing words back to Sumerian, he could show the Bible was constantly making mushroom references. And as further evidence, he pointed to a 13th-century fresco in a French Church that depicts the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in a way that looks a lot like a cluster of mushrooms. But of course, as I pointed out before, a 13th-century French work of art could not possibly shed light on early Christian thought or the rites of a Middle Eastern mystery cult in antiquity. None of his academic colleagues found his Sumerian etymology convincing, and his scholarly career fell to shambles. Even R. Gordon Wasson, who we might imagine would latch onto Allegro as an ally, could not credit his outlandish claims, stating that Allegro “has stuck to a naive misinterpretation…only because he thinks this would serve his thesis.” While the claims of John Allegro that Jesus Christ was a myth, not a real person, have never been taken seriously by scholars and are widely viewed as unconvincing, he is not alone in theorizing that Jesus Christ was not a real, historical person. This holiday, I’ve still got more to say about the man who many see as the reason for the season. So gather round the fire as I tell a different kind of nativity story, about the birth of a modern myth, but maybe not the one you suspect I’m going to tell.

In my last holiday special, you could say that I put the Christ back in Christmas, even though I began with a lengthy discussion of the false notion that the abbreviation “Xmas” was a nefarious secular attempt to remove Christ’s name from the holiday. In that episode, I discussed the image of Christ, and how the images we revere today may have differed from the man Jesus. The underlying assumption in that holiday special was that Jesus Christ existed, historically, as a human being, though we may more accurately call this a given than an assumption. The fact is that the consensus among scholars of the New Testament and first century Palestine is that Jesus Christ was a real person. In fact, for most of the Common Era, there simply never was a reason to doubt that Jesus was real; the entire notion of Christ Mythicism is relatively recent. Now, don’t get me wrong. Even during Christ’s time and ever since there have been skeptical views about him. In his own time, he was largely viewed by everyone but his followers as a heretic or a revolutionary rabble rouser. And long have there been alternative views regarding who and what his followers proclaimed him to be, one of the first being that he certainly had not been born of a virgin. One alternative view of Christology, or “Christology,” was that Joseph was his biological father, and that Jesus only became the “Son of God” when the Holy Spirit descended on him at his baptism. Thus God was his adoptive father rather than the inseminator of Mary. Along with these “adoptionist” creeds was a “psilanthropist” view, holding that Jesus was merely a man—a man chosen to bear the revelations of God, perhaps, but a man nonetheless. Another claim, popular among critics of early Christians, was that, while Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s father, he did indeed have a biological father, a Roman soldier named Panthera who illegitimately fathered Christ. One doctrine, Docetism, even argued that Christ was divine but had no physical form and rather walked around as a kind of ghost or projected illusion. What we can see here is that, all of these Christologies uniformly took a view that there really was a figure named Jesus Christ on Earth during the first 30 years or so of the Common Era. Even the doctrine that he wasn’t corporeal still did not attempt to say that he was not actually there, doing and saying things and known to his followers and his persecutors alike. The notion that he wasn’t real would not appear until the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment.

The Festival of Reason, a celebration of rationality held by the atheistic Cult of Reason in the wake of the French Revolution.

Specifically the Christ myth theory appeared among French thinkers during the French Revolution, a time when religious dogma was being actively stamped out in favor of what was viewed then as Reason—remember that Christian churches were converted to state-run atheist Temples of Reason. During this turmoil, one Constantin Volney was the first to hazard this claim in 1791, suggesting that Christ was a kind of mythological sun god whose name was derived from the Hindu god Krishna. By 1795, the claim was taken up by Charles-François Dupuis, who, as many have done since, suggested that Christ was just another mystery cult solar deity, like Mithra. By the late 18th century, early 19th century, the idea had spread to America, where political theorist and founding father Thomas Paine, in his least popular volume of The Age of Reason, asserted “that so far from his being the Son of God, he did not exist even as a man—that he is merely an imaginary or allegorical character, as Apollo, Hercules, Jupiter, and all the deities of antiquity were. There is no history written at the time Jesus Christ is said to have lived that speaks of the existence of such a person, even as a man.” As we will see, Paine’s objection about records would resonate with later Mythicists. Later in the 19th century, the German Bruno Bauer, claimed Jesus was invented by the writers of the gospels, which as we will see would also become a mainstay argument of Mythicists. At the end of the 19th century, white supremacist William Benjamin Smith also cast doubt on all contemporaneous sources about Christ and further hypothesized that a cult worshipping some Jesus figure had existed prior to Christ’s lifetime. At the dawn of the 20th century, Scotsman John Robertson took up this theory and brought it back to its roots by again arguing Christ was a solar deity worshipped by a Jewish mystery cult, specifically identifying the sacrificed messianic figure worshipped by a certain cult of Joshua as the deity that would become Jesus Christ. In 1909, German philosopher and historian Arthur Drews synthesized these arguments in a successful and controversial book called The Christ Myth. While Drews’s work was embraced by Vladimir Lenin and Christ Mythicism became a foundational tenet of Russian atheism, the theory was almost universally rejected by historians and scholars, for reasons I will discuss throughout the episode. Thus the Christ myth theory disappeared from academic and popular discourse, until 1975 when English scholar George Albert Wells took up the cause throughout the 1980s. By the 1990s, there had arisen a coterie of Christ Mythicists publishing more and more sophisticated arguments. The consensus view of historians and scholars remains that there was indeed a historical Jesus, but if one were to read mythicist works alone, without also reading the works of trained historians and scholars that explain how we know Jesus did exist historically—like the ponderous multi-volume work A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus by John P. Meier or the more accessible work of Bart D. Ehrman, like my principal source for this episode, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth—one might think that mythicists have made an ironclad argument against Christ’s existence. In fact, while their books may be more successful with the reading public, the scholarly community rejects their methods as flawed, their arguments as unsound, and their conclusions as false.

One of the central arguments of those who assert that Jesus Christ never existed as an actual person is that the principal sources for his existence, the gospels, cannot be trusted. They point out that that the original manuscripts of the gospels no longer exist, and that they were not written by the individuals they are named after, who might have had some first- or even second-hand knowledge of the man Jesus, but rather by men writing in a distant land some fifty years after the events narrated, give or take a decade. Since the gospels are full of contradictions and clearly legendary material, and since by their view, the gospel writers themselves were the ones inventing a mythical Christ, or at least were among the earliest promoters of the myth, they cannot be viewed as historical evidence whatsoever, and they look instead for non-Christian sources that mention Jesus within the first century of his lifetime. Such sources are few and far between, which they argue itself is proof Christ didn’t exist, though the fact is, such record keeping was not extensive or detailed in 1st century Palestine, and nevertheless there actually are some contemporaneous mentions of Jesus Christ outside of New Testament works. The most prominent of these are from Flavius Josephus, a former Jewish military commander during the First Roman-Jewish War who defected to Rome and lived the rest of his days writing histories, such as The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. In the latter work, there is a passage called Testimonium Flavianum, in which Josephus seemingly tells about Jesus, a “teacher of people,” who “was the Messiah.” In the passage, he describes Pilate’s condemnation of him, his crucifixion, and his subsequent resurrection. The problem with this passage, however, is that it doesn’t make sense for Josephus, who was not a Christian, to have stated some of these things. Since it is known that Josephus’s works survive today because they were copied and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Christians, there is scholarly consensus then, that this passage is an interpolation, something added by a Christian scribe at some later date. So, Jesus mythicists will say, you can’t trust the Bible, and the only mention of him outside the Bible is also untrustworthy. However, from a more scholarly perspective, this is an overstatement.

A romanticized woodcut engraving of Flavius Josephus

While it is true that the Testimonium Flavianum is mostly viewed as some kind of scribal interpolation, it is untrue to suggest that scholars believe the entirety of the passage was inserted by later Christians. The fact is that most scholars who are experts on the works of Josephus believe that only certain elements were added to a passage that Josephus did write himself, specifically wording that identified Jesus as divine and mentioned his resurrection. Without those interpolations, the Testimonium only describes a teacher who was put to death and who continued to inspire a tribe of followers who call themselves Christians—a historical account much more in keeping with something Josephus would have written. More than this, there is actually a second mention of Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews, a blurb in which Josephus mentions James, whom he identifies as “brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah.” The Messiah, for those who don’t know, was a Jewish eschatological concept, a redeemer or savior figure who would appear at the end of days. The word would later be translated into Greek as Christ. So here we have Josephus specifically referring to Jesus Christ, who in gospel traditions is also said to have a brother named James. Mythicists dismiss this as another scribal interpolation, but scholars disagree, as there is no reason to suspect that Josephus would not have written this. But this is a common tactic of mythicists, as Bart Ehrman consistently points out. When some source is raised as support for the historicity of Christ, they simply dismiss it as probably fake with no evidence that it is. For example, there are no less than three other potential non-Christian sources for the historical existence of Christ that appeared within a century of the years in which it is believed he lived. In 112 CE, Pliny the Younger wrote about a sect who call themselves Christians and “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.” In 115 CE, Suetonius wrote that during the reign of Roman Emperor Claudius, he deported the Jews from Rome due to riots “at the instigation of Chrestus,” which scholars believe was a misspelling of the Latin “Christus,” or Christ. And that same year, Tacitus wrote in his Annals of Imperial Rome about Nero’s persecution of a group “called Christians. The author of this name, Christ,” he explains, “was put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, while Tiberius was emperor; but the dangerous superstition, though suppressed for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but even in the city.” When mythicists address these other sources, they often say that these too must have been scribal interpolations, even though they add no Christian message to the text, get the name wrong, and even call Christianity evil. So here we see mythicists moving the goalposts, saying they would need some non-Christian source but then refusing to accept such sources when they are given.

It is true, though, that these non-Christian sources cannot alone prove the historical Christ’s existence, as they only go to prove the existence of Christians, or at most that the story of Christ, the gospel traditions, were spreading during the first hundred years after his lifetime. For stronger evidence, we must look earlier, which means examining the books of the New Testament historically. I do not mean taking their accounts as works of history, as their contents cannot be viewed as inerrant fact. But to contend that, just because they have a bias or contain some clearly mythological or legendary elements means that they are of no use to historians is absurd. If we were to throw out all such literature, then that would mean historians would also have to reject many other ancient works of history, such as Herodotus, who commonly blended fact with fantasy and rumor. Instead we must look critically at the texts to discern what they can show us. Mythicists, as with other skeptics, including myself, will first point out the authorship of these works. It was long believed that Matthew and John were written by actual disciples of Christ—Matthew supposedly being a converted tax collector mentioned in the gospel that bears this name, and John long believed to have been the unnamed Beloved Disciple. See my episode on the Authorship of John for more on that. Meanwhile, the other two canonical gospels, Mark and Luke, were believed to have been written by followers of Christ’s followers, Mark supposedly being a companion of the disciple Peter and Luke a follower of the apostle Paul. However, as mythicists will point out, none of this appears to be true, as all evidence points to these works having been written anonymously decades later by educated individuals fluent in Greek, rather than in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his followers. And more than this, mythicists further deconstruct the gospel traditions by pointing out that almost nothing in John agrees with or repeats anything in the other three so-called Synoptic gospels, so it should be rejected as a work of fiction. And more than this, they point to evidence that both Matthew and Luke appear to use the exact wording of passages in Mark, suggesting that their authors used Mark as a source. According to mythicists, then, this means that there is really only a single source, Mark, which they view as a work of fiction that invented the man Jesus. However, as with other mythicist arguments, they have latched onto one aspect of modern scholarship to make an argument that no New Testament scholars agree with.

Codex Vaticanus, a 4th century Greek Bible which contains one of the earliest extant complete manuscripts of The Gospel According to Mark, itself the earliest of the surviving gospels.

The fact is that mythicists are absolutely right when they point out that we don’t have original documents of the gospels, and that they contain a multitude of discrepancies, and that John presents an almost entirely different story from the Synoptic gospels, and that Matthew and Luke do appear to repeat elements of Mark. But a further fact is that Matthew and Luke also each contain unique and independent elements not copied from Mark, like the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Matthew also contains the story of the Magi, which no other gospel contains, and Luke contains the parables of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son, which are unique to that gospel. Does this mean that these are all invented whole cloth? Experts on this topic don’t believe that. The academic consensus is that the writers of the canonical gospels were working from numerous sources. Luke even references these older accounts in chapter 1, stating, “Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account.” New Testament scholars designate these pre-existing sources using letters. The source of episodes that appear only in Matthew being called M, and those that appear only in Luke being called L, and the source of traditions that appear in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark being designated Q, for quelle, the German word for “source.” Rather than viewing John as a complete aberration that doesn’t match source material at all, The Gospel According to John is also believed by experts to be based on pre-existing sources that simply have not survived. These are called the Signs Source, believed to be the source from which John took accounts of Christ’s miracles, and more than one Discourse Source, from which he took the speeches that he attributes to Jesus. Some scholars even suggest that his account of the passion is derived from some other currently lost work. Beyond these, there are other surviving gospels that simply aren’t canonized, like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas. And beyond even the written sources there is scholarly analysis of the gospels that suggests they all derive ultimately from oral traditions, which would make a lot of sense considering that it’s believed literacy was uncommon in 1st century Palestine. Moreover, the fact that occasional words in the gospels are given in Aramaic and then explicitly translated into Greek supports the notion that written Gospel sources were recording Aramaic oral traditions. So altogether, this provides a picture of the evolution of gospel traditions, coming out of Palestine during the time of Christ in the form of oral tradition, being written out afterward in sources now lost to us, and then preserved in the surviving gospels. Thus, while mythicists try to reduce these sources to a single work, all evidence suggests there were numerous contemporaneous accounts of the living man named Jesus who was called by his followers the Christ.

The fact is, though, that there are numerous other early Christian sources beyond gospel accounts that attest to the existence of Jesus Christ. One source was Papias, an early second century church father who describes, in words that only survive in quotation by later writers, how he pieced together what he knew of Jesus by seeking out and questioning those who had known Christ’s disciples in life. His writing, a five-volume work reportedly called Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord, would amount to a primary source document if it had been transmitted by ancient scribes and survived for us to read today. We further have Ignatius of Antioch’s early second century letter to the Smyrnaeans, which repeats the major incidents of the gospels, and I Clement, a letter written by Roman Christians and addressed to the Christians in Corinth, which makes clear that there was early, widespread knowledge of Jesus’s life, teachings, and death. Throughout the New Testament, beyond the gospels, we see clear knowledge among early Christians of Jesus and his life that mythicists will tell you had just recently been invented. The information litters the Acts of the Apostles, numerous epistles such as I Timothy, the Letter to the Hebrews, and I and II Peter, and I John. Even the Book of Revelations contains passages that reflect clear knowledge of Christ and gospel traditions, all of which are dated to the 1st century. And the biggest stumbling blocks that mythicists must negotiate are the Pauline epistles, the numerous letters written by the Apostle Paul, which make up the majority of the New Testament and according to scholarly consensus actually were written years, even decades before the surviving, canonized gospels. You heard that right. The gospels record events said to have occurred during the life of Christ, but the letters of Paul, a one-time persecutor of Christians who was converted, are the earliest written sources that appear in the New Testament. To deal with this massive blind spot in their argument, they cast doubt on whether the epistles of Paul really show that he had any knowledge of Christ. They argue that, for someone who supposedly was so devoted to faith in Christ, he sure doesn’t talk much about Jesus and his life. The fact is that his letters were to other early Christians who were well aware of the life story of Christ, so there was no need for him to be preaching to the converted, as it were. Regardless, there are clear instances in which Paul references the life and death of Jesus—specifically about his birth, his being a Jew of the Davidic line, his brothers (specifically naming James), his teachings, his prediction of his own death, his crucifixion, and his burial. Some mythicists, as is typical of many of their arguments, attempt to address this fact, which seems devastating to their argument, by again weakly suggesting without a shred of evidence that later Christian scribes just inserted these references to Christ in Paul’s epistles.

A portrait of Paul the Apostle by Rembrandt

As Bart Ehrman explains, one major criterion for determining the historical authenticity of any report in ancient works, besides whether it is independently attested to in numerous sources—which is certainly the case with the historicity of Jesus Christ—is the so-called “criterion of dissimilarity.” Essentially, this has to do with whether the reported fact or incident serves some purpose or accords in some way with an article of faith that the transmitters of the document want to promote. To put it plainly, if some detail concerning Jesus’s life did not help later Christians, or even early Christians, to promulgate their doctrines, why would they make it up or insert it into works that did not include it. Mythicists too use this criterion to argue that each part of Christ’s story serves a purpose in spreading the Christ myth, but as Ehrman points out, this criterion is supposed to be used—can only be used, really—to prove something did happen, not to prove it did not happen. And there are several independently corroborated details of Christ’s life that meet this criterion. One is the existence of Jesus’s family, specifically his brothers. Not only does this information appear in a variety of our sources, it also seems to serve no clear Christian agenda. If it were made up, why? Another is Christ’s crucifixion, which was likewise corroborated in numerous sources, and was actually quite inconvenient for Christians. It must be remembered that Christians were trying to tie their Jesus to the foretold messiah of Jewish tradition, but it had never been part of prophecy that the Messiah would suffer and die so violently. It was said the Messiah would bring about the resurrection, but this wasn’t about the Messiah dying and rising again. Rather, it was about the resurrection of all the dead and the conquering of death altogether. Christians had to bend over backward, finding old bits of scripture that they suggested were actually prophecies about the Messiah being pierced and not having bones broken in order to bolster their case that their man Jesus was the Messiah. Why would they have made up the story of the passion if it made it harder to argue their doctrine? And lastly, the fact that Jesus came from a poor little backwater village in Galilee called Nazareth was also a real problem for early Christians, as it was said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. To address this problem, they told a dubious story about his mother traveling to Bethlehem for a census that, according to historians, would not take place for another 6 years. The point is that, though it does indeed seem that this gospel tradition, like others, is not to be trusted, if early Christians were just inventing the story of Jesus Christ, if it were not based on a real, historical person’s life, why would they not just say that he was born in Bethlehem? Well, mythicists have an interesting response to this problem. They claim that no such place as Nazareth even existed, that Jesus being from Nazareth in the gospel traditions resulted from a mistranslation of a word for “branch,” referring to Jesus supposedly being a branch from the line of King David, or that he was a member of a sect called Nazirites, mistakenly called a Nazarene. We can safely dismiss this mythicist argument as well, though, since archaeologists have actually located the small Judean village of Nazareth. Mythicists have done mental gymnastics to refute this archaeological evidence, suggesting that, while it may have existed, it wasn’t inhabited during Jesus’s lifetime, a claim further refuted by archaeologists who have turned up a variety of evidence, from pottery to coins, that prove it was not only a real place, but also inhabited during the time in question.

The last mythicist argument to consider looks farther back, before the Common Era, to pagan traditions of antiquity. What most of the various mythicist arguments have in common is the claim that Jesus Christ was just one more version of a pagan myth or deity, that his myth was a reinvention or evolution of previous myths. I’ve brought up ideas like this before, and to be honest, they cannot be refuted entirely because there is clear reason to believe that elements of pagan belief were incorporated into Christian traditions. However, what mythicists do is take this entirely too far. For example, one strain of Christ Mythicism takes supposed similarities to Mithra and Mithraism and argues that Jesus did not exist any more than Mithra did, that Christianity was just a rebranding of Mithraism. I spoke about this in greater detail in my very first holiday special. Essentially, there is good reason to think that December 25th was chosen as the date for Christmas not because it was the literal date of Jesus’s birth, but because it coincided with the pagan holiday of the birth of the unconquered sun, Sol Invictus, which seems to have been a later development of the Mithraic mystery cult, but the numerous claims about every single element of Christianity being derived from Mithraism lack credibility. He was not born of a virgin; he was born of a rock. He did not have twelve disciples; rather, he was pictured in certain reliefs with figures representing the twelve signs of the zodiac. While it is true that certain early Christian apologists like Justin Martyr and Tertullian drew comparisons between the two religions, suggesting Christian baptism and the eucharistic ceremony were similar to Mithraic ritual meals and ablutions, these parallels are dubious. They were promoted by Christians hoping to convert pagans by suggesting their practices were not so dissimilar, and if there was any connection or crossover between the two, it may very well be that evolving Mithraic customs were actually beginning to incorporate nascent Christian practices. Any absolutist argument about Christianity being a whole-cloth adaptation of Mithraism just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Relief depicting Mithra slaying a Bull (a tauroctony). The image was iconic in Mithraism and has no clear connection to Christianity.

Mythicists do not limit themselves to Mithraism, though. Many draw parallels to a wide variety of mythological deities, specifically what they call pagan dying-rising gods. They take this notion from the writings of comparative mythologist James Frazer, who raised the idea in his important late 19th-century work, The Golden Bough. According to Frazer, there is a motif among world religions and mythologies, a kind of archetype or category into which many deities fit, and it involved dying and rising again. For Frazer, this had to do with fertility cults and their preoccupation with the life cycles of vegetation. Just as ancient sun worship saw the setting and rising of the sun as a kind of death and resurrection, so too fertility cults saw the life cycles of plants that seem to die in the winter and revive in the spring as a cycle of rebirth. Frazer identifies deities like Osiris, Adonis, and Tammuz as just such dying and rising gods, and mythicists would throw Jesus Christ on the pile. In this, however, mythicists are working in an outmoded scholarly tradition. More recent scholarship views Frazer’s claims as flawed, suggesting that most of the deities he identified are more like disappearing gods or just dying gods. For example, Osiris does die, but he doesn’t come back to life, instead becoming the lord of the dead. Likewise, Adonis is simply forced to live some of his life in the realm of the living and some in the realm of the dead because Aphrodite and Persephone fight over him. And like Adonis, since these vegetative deities represent a cycle, there is often a perpetual death and rebirth, which is, of course, not the case for Jesus. As I have already mentioned, for early Christians, it is clear that Christ’s resurrection represented the beginning of the Messianic age, in which all the dead would be resurrected. He was viewed explicitly as a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, not as some pagan fertility deity. And the simple fact is, though Christians throughout history have refused to acknowledge it, the earliest of Christians did not view Jesus as a god, or The God, at all. He was just the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed king, the son of God in the same way that all Davidic kings were the Sons of God, and whether in a biological sense the offspring of God as well, or just perhaps the adoptive son of God, still not God Himself. In short, there is just no clear evidence to support the notion that this human man, this historical man that came to be the leader of an apocalyptic Judaic sect, was actually, secretly viewed as a fertility deity, let alone that he did not exist and was invented to represent such a deity.

Another rather ironic claim by mythicists is that there was no Jesus because the stories about Jesus’s life are nearly identical to the stories about another sage who lived at the same time, Apollonius of Tyana, whose existence is widely confirmed by scholars. In such a claim, worded as carefully as I’ve just worded it, they are absolutely correct. According to the principal source for the life of Apollonius, a third-century biography by Lucius Flavius Philostratus, Apollonius’s mother was visited by the apparition of the Egyptian god Proteus and bore this god a son, who would himself be divine. And this son, Apollonius, was a precocious young teen, demonstrating his great wisdom at only fourteen, and he grew to become an itinerant mystic philosopher, performing miracles and mustering disciples. He runs afoul of Roman law, and according to some accounts rises into heaven instead of dying. What’s ironic about Christ mythicists suggesting Apollonius was real and Christ wasn’t is first that they would trust the majority of scholars in this case but not in the other. Indeed it is believed that Apollonius of Tyana did exist, as there are sources independent of Philostratus, including a certain 3rd or 4th century inscription, the Adama Inscription, as well as manuscript sources that Philostratus relied on. However, the sources for Apollonius’s existence suffer from the very same issues, or more! Philostratus was writing in the 220s or the 230s, it’s believed, and that’s far later removed from Apollonius’s lifetime than the gospels were from Christ’s. Like the gospel sources, Philostratus’s sources have now been lost, and one of them, a diary written by one of Apollonius’s acolytes, is believed by many scholars to have been a fictional source made up by Philostratus as a kind of literary device. There are numerous letters supposedly written by Apollonius himself, but some or all of these have also been argued to be later pseudepigraphal works. In some ways, evidence for the existence of Apollonius is weaker than that for Jesus. It simply shows a confirmation bias that mythicists would look at these two figures and argue that the gospels must have actually been about Apollonius, someone who is never even said to have visited Judea, rather than reaching the far more sensible conclusion that the similarities were a result of Philostratus, who was writing later, cribbing from the gospel traditions when he mythologized Apollonius. Interestingly, when mythicists draw this comparison, they are following a long tradition of anti-Christian polemicists going all the way back to the late 3rd century, when Porphyry of Tyre, in his work Against the Christians, argued that the Apollonius story showed that the miracles and achievements of Jesus were not unique or special. And in the early 4th century, during Diocletian’s brutal persecution of Christians, Sossianus Hierocles claimed that Apollonius was an even greater miracle worker than Jesus. But even they didn’t hazard the argument that Jesus was not a real person.

A 2nd century Greco-Roman medallion depicting Apollonius of Tyana, further independent evidence of his historical existence.

I think that, as with my refutation of the entheogen theory of religion, some who have come to view this podcast and my thinking as anti-Christian or anti-religion may be surprised by my spirited defense of the historicity of Christ. But anyone who closely follows my work should recognize that my bias, if we can call it a bias, is to lean heavily in favor of critical thought, reliable evidence, and scholarly consensus. I’ve had my pitfalls, made mistakes regarding what sources I rely on, etc., and I try to own up to them, but I always make a strong effort, in what little time I have to research each episode, to present not only the main points of arguments I think are wrong, but also the evidence that refutes them. Even though I am agnostic with atheist sensibilities, I have no qualms about arguing that Jesus Christ existed historically because the evidence supports that conclusion. This does not, however, mean that I believe he did indeed perform all the miracles attributed to him, that he rose from the dead or that he was in any way more than human. That, of course, is another argument altogether, and more a matter of faith than of history or even science. Interestingly, my view of Jesus Christ is essentially the early Christian view of every other god. There is a name for this argument: euhemerism, named after the 4th-century BCE Greek mythographer Euhemerus. Euhemerism is the argument that the gods of mythology were once just normal men and women, and as their stories were told and retold over time, they became exaggerated, made fantastical, until finally they were deified. Ironically, early Christian apologists themselves relied on euhemerism in their efforts to discredit pagan beliefs. Rather than argue that Zeus and Osiris were entirely made up, they simply said that they were more likely to have been normal men, or kings, perhaps, who were later mythologized into something more. All I would suggest, then, is that the same could be said about their man Jesus Christ, who certainly was a living human being, and perhaps the single most influential spiritual teacher in human history, if nothing else.

Until next time, ask yourself if, a couple thousand years from now, people might not have a hard time finding concrete evidence that you yourself existed.

The Historical Jesus and the Myths of Christ Mythicism (Another Historically Blind Xmas)

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