I was recently wondering about what it would take for a Jesus Mythicist to start believing that Jesus existed as a historical figure. And then that go me thinking as to what it would take for me to deny (or at least seriously doubt) that Jesus existed.
What would it take for me to be become a Jesus Mythicist?
I consider myself a fairly open-minded person and so this deserves some thought. To be honest, it is easier for me to imagine God not existing than it is to imagine Jesus not existing. This is not surprising as most atheists believe that Jesus existed even if they don’t believe in his divinity, miracles, or resurrection.
Would clear pagan parallels be enough?
Not really. First of all, by far the majority of claimed parallels are very different than what we find in the Gospels. But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that there were some clear parallels.
The problem would be that having mythical themes included in a biography does not mean that the person described is unhistorical. Take Alexander the Great for instance. There are legends of Alexander being fathered by a god (not a virgin birth as people claim). And yet I know of no historians that use that as evidence that Alexander never existed.
What if we discovered that everything that Josephus said about Jesus was a forgery?
Imagine that we found the original manuscripts of the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus and there was no mention of Jesus. That is possible, although unlikely. That would not require a denial of Jesus’ historical existence. The Gospels and Paul are still our best sources.
So what would it take?
There is only one thing that I can imagine would get me to doubt that Jesus lived. It would require the historians of the world to rethink everything about how they do history. Basically, if they took on the historical method of Jesus Mythicists.
So historians would have to confess that we know pretty much nothing about the past and that we cannot say for certain that more than a handful of figures from antiquity actually lived.
They would have to say that any document more than a year after the events, that includes any mention of the supernatural, and has any sort of bias (for or against) is inadmissible as a historical source.
They would have to change their position, not just on Jesus of Nazareth, but also on the hundreds and thousands of figures from antiquity that we often have less evidence for than for Jesus. Historians in general, not a fringe minority, would have to take on the perspective radical skepticism for determining historicity.
Would I then deny Jesus?
While that is the closest I can imagine, even if historical scholarship made that shift en masse, I would struggle to embrace such skepticism (and not just about Jesus). But that is the only way I could imagine that I would reject a historical Jesus.
What would it take for you to reject the historical Jesus?
