Frank writes:

David writes:

   While I commend your refutation of Strobel's The Case for Christ in Challenging the Verdict, I was transfixed by The Jesus Puzzle. I had heard arguments that challenged the historical Jesus before, but I thought the issue had been, for the most part, laid to rest by an abundance of voluminous material from independent contemporaneous historians. Was I in for a surprise!
   I am an attorney living in Dallas, Texas. As you might imagine, the fundamentalist onslaught is almost too much to bear. I have ordered copies of your books for the few right-minded friends I have, as gifts, and they are as intrigued and as impressed as I. As you might imagine, I have not been too popular on the cocktail circuit lately, challenging the historicity of Jesus. Much to my surprise, however, there have been a few staunchly conservative religious folk whose initial ire was replaced with genuine curiosity after hearing my entire summation of your argument.
   Recently, I read anew all of Paul's contributions to the New Testament (or what most scholars ascribe to him), looking for some reference to an earthly Jesus.  Paul's insecurity is striking.  This is a man who begs and whines.  He constantly compares himself to the "super apostles," and desperately needs to convert others for his ego, if not out of guilt for hunting christians.  In short, he needs to be accepted and believed.
   The idea of Paul writing a veritable cornucopia of persuasive letters designed to cajole, intimidate, guilt, scare, and otherwise use any means necessary to convert gentiles without referencing an earthly Jesus and hosts of other fleshly beings to substantiate the latter's miracles and bear witness to his ministry is absurd.  This resonates stronger considering Paul's writings are thought to have been within 20 to 40 years after the alleged crucifixion, and thus would be more likely subject to eyewitness verification.  Paul worked tirelessly at marketing.  Why not use your most powerful sales pitch?  He never encouraged anyone to travel to the historical settings where the earthly, historical Jesus walked, ate, slept, taught, performed miracles, was crucified, or was resurrected.  Paul's personality craved this proof.  Clearly, he would have used these arguments if they were available.  Unfortunately for Paul, the gospel writers and other revisionists did not come along for several decades. I was a philosophy major in undergrad and am familiar with the Platonic tradition.  Paul is clearly referring to Jesus existing in that Greek intermediate realm between Heaven and earth.  The allegory of the cave has clearly left its imprint on the mindset of the time. And a natural reading of Hebrews 8:4 [E.D.: see below] must be troubling to those who argue otherwise.
   Your book inspired me to read the New Testament from a new perspective, unshackled from previous assumptions about Jesus's historicity. The result was nothing short of an epiphany for me!  Yes! Yes! Yes! This is it. Finally, a refutation of the historical Jesus which combines a critical study of the outside historical record, a natural reading of the biblical text itself, the philosophical milieu, and common sense.  By the way, thanks for destroying the credibility of the writings of Josephus, or at least pointing out that his original work was almost certainly altered.  Fundamentalists always throw Josephus at me, and now I am equipped with the rebuttal.
   The only tragedy about your efforts is that Strobel is probably rolling in dough for giving the people their dose of seemingly confirming medicinal gobbledygook and your provocative, sobering books are blacklisted by christian-owned (or at least influenced) bookstores. The Rev. T.D. Jakes just sold his home, less than 2 miles from me, for approx. 5.5 million dollars. For his sake, I hope the needles in heaven have gaping eyes or the camels are awfully diminutive. I've always said, ironically, "The only thing that prevents me from selling God is morality." At any rate, thank you for the books.  I'm doing what I can to spread the good word.

Maria writes:

   The Jesus Puzzle is still one of the most fascinating books I've ever read, and I've been "fighting the good fight," as it were, by asking people to be intellectually honest about history. It's tough, as you know, because so many people think that the Gospels are valid historical documents. Even the non-Christians I know are threatened by the idea of the Jesus Myth. It's amazing what it does to people. It's like their very foundations have been threatened. Back when I was a fundamentalist, I probably would have had a similar reaction, but then, I was asking many of the questions you answer about Paul, only to have my questions waved away with vague mumbling from church leaders. I abandoned rational thought for temporary assurances of all kinds.

Brendan writes:

   In college I studied under Paula Fredriksen at Boston University, and for years I was convinced that she did the best job (compared to her contemporaries, like Crossan, Mack, and others) of portraying a historical Jesus who actually made sense in the context of being a Galilean Jew in late Second Temple Judaism.
   There were some lingering questions in my mind that her depiction of Jesus never fully answered (like how he became elevated to godhead so suddenly upon his death, or why the epistle writers show so little interest in Jesus's life and teachings), but until I came across a better explanation, I just had to accept that those questions would remain.
   Then a couple of years ago I found your writings on the Secular Web, became intrigued, and over the course of reading through your entire website, was quite convinced that you have presented a depiction of the origins of Christianity that has the most explanatory power.
   So a heartfelt congratulations on your insight, and my sincere thanks for sharing your scholarship via the internet.
   I do hope that mainstream New Testament scholars will be forthcoming in their serious critical reviews of your work. I was quite disappointed to see my former mentor, Prof. Fredriksen dismissing any notion of a mythological Jesus argument out of hand.
   Finally, I'd like to bring up a point that I don't think I've seen raised in your previous 25 reader feedbacks. It seems that most New Testament scholars, both secular and apologetic, accept that Jesus had brothers and/or sisters (be it James and Jude of the epistles; James, Joseph, Simon and Judas mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew; or the unnamed brothers in the Gospel of John). But what is striking, then, is that throughout the formative years of Christianity, there are not significant attempts made by Christians to trace their lineage back to a blood relative of Jesus.
   It seems to me to parallel the glaring absence among the earliest Christian writers of tracing their chain-of-teachings back through an original apostle to Jesus himself. While having (or claiming to have) a bloodline back to a brother or sister of Jesus might not have guaranteed a position of power in the early church, surely it would have gone a ways toward gaining some respect, authority, reverence, etc.

Response to Brendan:

The Brothers of the Lord

   I have reread your web pages rather thoroughly.  I still come up with the same question.  I'm no religious nut.  But I still get the impression every time the subject comes up that you avoid the subject of the cross.  In discussing if Christ was a man, you point out that the mythical Christ in the hymn in Philippians 2: 6-11 humbles himself and becomes obedient unto death. And that this must be interpreted mythically.  I agree 100 per cent.  But the next phrase says "even the death of the cross."  Here it becomes hard to believe in a mythical cross.  In 1 Cor. 2 the point is not just that "rulers of this age" put the Christ to death, but that they crucified him.  Why a cross and why crucified?  It seems to me that it would be easier for the Jews if the Christ had been stoned to death.  Does having a "Jesus" who is "crucified" give the story an historical setting?

Response to Mac:

   In reading your website, I was interested in your feedback on a website writer, Hayyim ben Yehoshua. Though Mr. Yehoshua states his case as one for a mythical Jesus, he actually refers to several historical Rabbis whose description in the Talmud fit certain descriptions of the Jesus of the Gospels, such as Yeishu ben Pandeira, also known as Yeishu ha-Notzri. How do you see these Talmudic references fitting in with your thesis?

Response to Reg:

The basic answer to this question is that all written references to a Jesus figure by Jewish rabbis come from the 3rd century and later, and have no reliable basis in actual historical knowledge going back to the first century, but may simply be reactions to Christian developments during those later times. This area is a complex one, and I will refer the reader to two sources on this website. The first is a general survey of the written Jewish commentaries as I laid out in an earlier Reader Feedback in my response to Jarek. The second is my book review of Frank Zindler's The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, which is the best and most thorough review of this literature from the point of view of the mythicist case.

Response to Malachi:

     [E.D.: Carla asked me several very involved questions, each of which could require an article to answer properly, one or two of which also went beyond my area of research. I would encourage readers to ask questions that are more specific and relate directly to elements of the Jesus Myth theory, although questions and comments relating to the general area of rationality vs. religion are also welcome, since, as you know, I am concerned with such matters on my Age of Reason website. Negative responses, such as from Robert which led off this Feedback, are also acceptable, since it always remains a hope that a believer will have something more substantive to say on the subject than threats of hellfire or appeals to their own subjective experiences of Jesus—something of an evidentiary nature, for example, that might call into question the validity of the mythicist case, and hopefully that have not been raised and answered a hundred times before. For now, I will quote and reply to one of Carla's questions...]
   There seems to be an extreme movement to completely discredit the idea that Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus died and raised from the dead. But the evidence seems to be incontrovertible, as is the evidence that at least in part they were symbolized by the cycle of vegetation. (Even the Oxford Dictionary of Egyptian Mythology admits Osiris as symbolizing the corn, and his raising from the dead. Similarly, the Orphic myths clearly speak of Dionysus reconstituted after being torn apart by the Titans, and would anyone deny Dionysus' connection to vegetation/vine?) What is your take on all this?

Response to Carla:

There is no question that the idea that Christianity began as basically another ancient-world mystery religion with a dying and rising god of the Osiris and Dionysus type—albeit in a Jewish context—is the most threatening one there is to Christian claims of uniqueness and legitimacy. This explains why there has been and continues to be a determined apologetic dedication to discrediting it. The heyday of the History of Religions School which flourished early in the 20th century under such figures as Cumont, Bousset, and Reitzenstein, and which traced many Christian ideas back through the wider Hellenistic religious expressions in the salvation religions, eventually ran up against scholarly resistance in the middle decades of the century precisely because it was recognized to be so threatening; at the same time there was a switching of the focus of attention in mainstream scholarship to Christianity's Jewish roots and to correcting some of its more blatant expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment. This took place after the Second World War, and I suspect some of the motivation for legitimizing Christianity as a Jewish sect and downplaying any pagan roots was a reaction to the horrific fate of the European Jews in that war.

From the fifties on, there was a concerted effort to discredit the parallels between the Jesus story and the myths of the Hellenistic savior gods, by appealing to every possible difference and discrepancy between them, however minor or understandable on the basis of differences in culture between Jewish and pagan. Two of the best examples of this were Gunter Wagner's Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries (1967), and Jonathan Z. Smith's extended article "Dying and Rising Gods" in the Encyclopedia of Religion (vol. 4, 1987).  The best debunking of such would-be debunkers is to be found in Robert M. Price's Deconstructing Jesus (p.86-93), where he points out that because no single pagan savior god embodies all the motifs found in the field, and none embodies all those attached to Jesus, 'apologists' like Smith assume that this discredits any comparison at all. "Without everything in common, Smith sees nothing in common." I have several times pointed out that basic differences in attitude and expectation about the afterlife between Greek and Jew led to a different casting of the conquest of death in regard to the Osiris type of savior god on the one hand, and Jesus on the other. Just because the Gospels gave Jesus a resurrection in flesh (unlike Paul, who did not), while the Greeks found the idea of the body returning from death repugnant, should not prevent us from acknowledging that the differences between the two "resurrection" types are a product of cultural differences and proceed from the same impulse. They still represent the same motif, growing as different branches on a common tree.

Similarly, the nonsense that the pagan mysteries borrowed their basic ideas from Christianity in the second and third centuries has also been debunked. Christian apologists like Justin and Tertullian admitted that the mystery cults' expressions came first, though counterfeited by demons. And Christianity was in no position in the second or even the third century, in the eyes and estimation of pagans, to be able to entice the mysteries to mimic its concepts wholesale. While the bulk of our evidence on the mysteries comes from the early Christian era, enough is known about its more ancient expression to show that the savior-god phenomenon had long roots, and if we allow ourselves to understand early Christianity as an offshoot of that phenomenon in a Jewish-oriented setting, with certain distinct and even unique features as part of that setting, our understanding of the evolution of western religion will come a long way. Of course, then Christianity will have to be removed from its privileged status and positioned as part of an ongoing natural and human process of evolving ideas.

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