The Mythic Jesus and the Fragmentation of Shamanism
A critique of Jesus mythicism
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.
