The Mythic Jesus and the Fragmentation of Shamanism

A critique of Jesus mythicism

Image by Stephanie LeBlanc, from Unsplash

Imagine there was no historical Jesus. Suppose the man celebrated in the New Testament for being sent by God to be killed as a sacrifice at the hands of ignorant Jews and Romans never lived on earth. What if the foundational narrative of Christianity were pure fiction?

There are a handful of radical scholars known as “Jesus mythicists,” who argue indeed that Jesus wasn’t an historical figure. These scholars include Alvin Boyd Kuhn, George A. Wells, Robert Price, Earl Doherty, Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy, and Richard Carrier, and their views are rejected by the majority of New Testament scholars, which isn’t surprising since most of the latter are Christians.

One of the main mythicist arguments is that the gospel is comparable to numerous myths of dying and resurrecting gods such as Osiris, Dionysus, Inanna, Adonis, Asclepius, and Baal. Defenders of the historicist view reply that there’s no such dying-and-resurrecting god mytheme in the first place. As Jonathan Z. Smith says, the characters in those myths either rise from the dead but don’t die or they die but don’t rise.

Which Jesus was just another Dying and Rising God?

Arguing either case would require detailed analysis of the stories in question, but there’s a more blatant problem with the comparison between Jesus and those gods: as far as the earliest audiences of the synoptic gospels were concerned, Jesus isn’t a god. According to that primary Christian narrative, Jesus was a spiritual kind of messiah, a heroic human who was given divine power to heal, to perform miracles, and to conquer death to fulfill God’s plan for our salvation. But those gospel narratives are cagey about identifying Jesus with God himself, because the authors were caught between Jewish and Hellenistic influences.

Eventually, though, Christians did codify the idea that Jesus was God incarnated in human flesh, but that was with the Nicene Creed in the early fourth century.

There were at least two forerunners to that doctrine of God’s incarnation in Jesus. The Gospel of John treats Jesus as a preexistent figure, identifying him specifically with the Logos or with God’s capacity…