Christ myth theory

Christ myth theory holds that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist as a historical person and that accounts of him developed from myth or religious traditions.

Historical Jesus: The historical figure of Jesus reconstructed through critical study of ancient sources. Most historians accept that Jesus existed, while debating what can be known about his life.
Bruno Bauer: A nineteenth-century German theologian and historian who argued that the Gospels were literary creations rather than reliable records. Bauer’s influential criticism helped shape early arguments that Jesus was not historical.
Historical method: A disciplined approach to reconstructing the past from surviving evidence and explicit reasoning. Both mythicist and historicist arguments depend on how evidence is evaluated.
Richard Carrier: An American historian who has defended a contemporary version of the hypothesis that Jesus did not exist. Carrier has presented a modern probabilistic case for Christ myth theory.
Criterion of embarrassment: A historical method that treats potentially awkward details in a source as less likely to have been invented by its author. Some arguments for Jesus’s existence rely on whether early Christian texts preserve inconvenient details.
Arthur Drews: A German philosopher who argued in the early twentieth century that Christianity arose from myth rather than a historical Jesus. Drews popularized the theory in Germany and helped make it a public controversy.
New Testament: A collection of early Christian writings that became the second part of the Christian Bible. Its texts are the main surviving sources for early claims about Jesus.
Earl Doherty: A Canadian writer who argues that early Christianity began with a celestial Jesus later historicized in the Gospels. Doherty’s account is a prominent modern formulation of the theory.
Tacitus on Christ: A passage in Tacitus’s Annals, written around 116 CE, reporting that Christus was executed under Pontius Pilate. The passage is a non-Christian reference often weighed in debates over Jesus’s historicity.
The Christ Myth: Arthur Drews’s 1909 book arguing that Jesus was a mythical figure and Christianity emerged from older religious ideas. This book gave the theory one of its most widely discussed early formulations.

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