There are different ways we can understand Jesus Mythicists and their distinctions. Some are scholars and some are not. Some are atheists and some are not.
What I want to do here is to look at four motivations for people to become Mythicists. There are probably more.
- Some are hostile to Christianity. Some of the New Atheists would belong to this camp. Their anger at Christianity is so dominant that it is not enough for them to deny God, they need to deny Jesus. Some of these also use it as a way of using something controversial to get noticed.
- Some see Mythicism as a means to unite the religions. I was able to have coffee with Tom Harpur. He was a man of faith but he was bothered by how Christians used Jesus to exclude others. Removing a historical Jesus was a means toward achieving that.
- Some are drawn to conspiracy theories. One of the attractions of the Jesus Myth Theory is that it includes a conspiracy by organized religion into tricking the masses into believing that Jesus was a historical figure.
- Some are drawn by what they see as genuine parallels. They see examples of dying and rising gods (at least from secondary sources) and Jesus was a divine man who died and rose again. Some Mythicists are sincere seekers of truth.
Are there other types of Jesus Mythicists that you have encountered?
Yes, though often in the genuine seekers category. The one that sticks out the most is Thomas L. Brodie, a committed Catholic Priest (and still self avowed Christian) who argues that Jesus did not exist, and was actually built using the LXX. This is partly through his ingenious look at the Gospels and Pauline Epistles and how they use the LXX quite intriguingly. It is not a convincing theory, but one of the better ones.
Jean Magne’s gnosticism thesis is also ingenious as a new origin for Christianity, and he was definitely a genuine seeker of truth as well.