The Best Argument for Mythicism
I think the reason mythicism gets so quickly dismissed as a crank idea is people quickly get mired in the details and can’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak. To avoid this, the case needs to centered around the two main points:
1. The earliest texts portray Jesus as a divine being and not as a person.
We have multiple independent texts in which this is the case. The standard argument is that almost no one in that time and place is remembered in the historical record, so it’s normal that contemporaries didn’t write about him.
That’s true, but it’s beside the point. The problem isn’t that we don’t early and near-contemporary writings about him. The problem is that we do. But they all portray him as a demigod or angel that is the object of cultic worship, not as a teacher who spoke to his followers in person.
But what about Paul? Especially Paul. Reading Paul, he hardly seems to be talking about someone who was a contemporary — who knew people that Paul knew. This is probably where the mythicism hypothesis started.
2. No text is at once unambiguously independent of the Gospel of Mark and also unambiguously portrays Jesus as a person who lived in the 1st century.
This matters because — as noted in #1 — we do have multiple early Christian texts that are unambiguously independent of the Gospel of Mark and its influence. But the idea that Jesus’ mortal incarnation was as a contemporary of Peter and of John the Baptist appears to have originated with the Mark text and radiated out from there.
The Best Argument Against Mythicism
The overwhelming scholarly consensus is that the Jesus legend/movement traces its roots back to a real person who was a teacher who was executed by the Romans. Scholarly consensus is not to be dismissed lightly.
Why it Doesn’t Matter
Jesus is a little like Paul Bunyan. It’s not 100% clear whether the legend traces back to a real person or not. But the parts of the story that make it interesting and memorable and important — those parts are all made up.
Jesus’ best line: “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone,” is a later addition. And the other bits? There’s no strong evidence that he said or did any of them. They trace back to an anonymous text — from a generation later and a different language and culture. So it might as well be fiction for how much we really know about the person it is said to be based on.
Why it Does Matter
Christianity is the biggest religion in the world, so its origins are inherently interesting.
It looks like Christianity may well have been started by various groups in the Greek-speaking world around the Mediterranean — looking for meaning in their own creative interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures — and loosely affiliated with each other and with a Jewish sect in Jerusalem (possibly a branch of the Essene movement…?) through traveling preachers like Paul (and other “apostles”) who taught their own theological ideas based on their own revelations and readings of the Hebrew scriptures.
But it’s not possible to pursue and explore this hypothesis without getting dismissed as a kook…