Derek Lambert, the enthusiastic and open-minded host of the MythVision podcast and video channel, was kind enough to have me on as a guest. Derek is someone who has been both a Christian and then a Jesus Mythicist, but is now exploring ideas about the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity with a broad range of guests. It was a pleasure to speak with him and explore the problems with Jesus Mythicism in a fairly long and wide ranging…
It is always nice to be invited to speak to other atheists and to highlight the work I do here on History for Atheists. This week I had the pleasure of talking to Davidian from Answers in Reason in a live discussion which was mainly about the historical Jesus but also on how history is analysed, the nature of ancient source material and the problem of atheist bad history and anti-theist tribalism. We did not get to cover many other…
Not only is the idea that Jesus came from Nazareth a common element in all four canonical gospels, it also seems to have been an awkward fact that did not fit well with the gospel writers’ claim he was the Messiah. This indicates it is likely his origin in this small village was a historical fact. Jesus Mythicists often deal with this by removing Nazareth from the story and some even claim all the archaeologists are wrong and Nazareth did…
When discussing the historicity of Jesus and debating the claims of Jesus Mythicists I often come across people who take the view that there may be at least some historical basis for Jesus, but there was no single historical person. They claim he was an amalgam of many different figures from the time, not one man. These people rarely back this idea up with evidence-based argument, but when they do, it does not stand up to critical scrutiny. The “Amalgam…
For over a century, scholarship on the origins of Christianity has been dealing with a fundamental issue – the Jesus in the earliest Christian texts is presented as preaching an eschatological message about an imminent apocalypse. Despite ongoing rearguard actions, the idea that the historical Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet remains the most likely interpretation of the evidence. A Galilean Peasant’s World If in the early first century AD a preacher appeared in a Galilean village proclaiming repentance in…
The consensus of scholars, including non-Christian scholars, is that a historical Jesus most likely existed and the later stories about “Jesus Christ” were told about him. The idea that there was no such historical person at all and that “Jesus Christ” was a purely mythical figure has been posited in one form or another since the eighteenth century, but is not taken seriously by anyone but a tiny handful of fringe scholars and amateurs. Despite this, the Jesus Myth thesis…