Mythicism: A Concise Summary

After I mentioned Paul Regnier’s draft on my blog, Jim West complained that he had hoped the post would offer my own definition of mythicism.

Since I plan to contribute to the Wiki too, I thought I should offer my own summary. And so I began writing this post.

But then a commenter named Ian summed it up more succinctly than I was going to. He wrote:

 man->myth or myth->man

That sums it up well. In a nutshell, while mainstream historians and scholars say that there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth who is later increasingly mythologized in written sources, Jesus mythicists (or mythicists for short) say the reverse happened: Jesus was initially a purely mythological and celestial figure who was subsequently historicized and claimed to be a human being that lived in history.