Blogging about Jesus Mythicism: The story so far

Last updated on: May 23, 2011 at 11:03 am by James F. McGrath

Regular readers of Exploring Our Matrix know that one of the topics I have been blogging about for some time is mythicism – the viewpoint that Jesus is more likely to be a purely fictional figure invented more-or-less from scratch based on earlier mythical figures and texts, than to be a historical figure around whom myths and legends subsequently developed. It is not a viewpoint that historians and scholars find persuasive, and since the agreement of experts often fails to mitigate the spread of ill-founded ideas on the internet, I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to explaining why almost no one who knows anything about how historical scholarship works, or takes the time to be well informed about ancient Judaism and/or the New Testament, finds the claims of mythicists to represent scholarship of any sort, much less persuasive scholarship.

On this blog in its old location, I recently posted a round-up of my earlier blogging on this subject, which I thought it would be useful to link to. I had also begun blogging through Earl Doherty’s tome, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus, and so I likewise thought that a round-up of links to my previous blog posts about that book should be posted here before proceeding further.