Historicity of Jesus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The historicity of Jesus concerns the historical authenticity of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth. Scholars often draw a distinction between Jesus as reconstructed through historical methods and the Christ of faith as understood through theological tradition. The historical figure of Jesus is of central importance to various religions, but especially Christianity and Islam, in which the historical details of Jesus’ life are essential.
Jesus as myth
The existence of Jesus as an actual historical figure has been questioned by few biblical scholars and historians, some of the earliest being Constantin-François Volney and Charles François Dupuis in the 18th century and Bruno Bauer in the 19th century. Each of these proposed that the Jesus character was a fusion of earlier mythologies.
The views of scholars who entirely rejected Jesus' historicity were summarized in Will Durant's Caesar and Christ, published in 1944. Their rejections were based on a suggested lack of eyewitnesses, a lack of direct archaeological evidence, the failure of ancient works to mention Jesus, and similarities early Christianity shares with then-contemporary religion and mythology.
More recently, arguments for non-historicity have been discussed by George Albert Wells, Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle, 1999), Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy (The Jesus Mysteries) and Robert M. Price.
The scholarly mainstream not only rejects the myth thesis, but identifies serious methodological deficiencies in the approach. For this reason, many scholars consider engaging proponents of the myth theory a waste of time, comparing it to a professional astronomer having to debate whether the moon is made of cheese. As such, the New Testament scholar James Dunn describes the mythical Jesus theory as a "thoroughly dead thesis".
