Is there actually any evidence that Jesus existed?  Are there reasons for thinking he was completely made up?  That  Jesus of Nazareth is actually a myth?

I have been providing a series of posts connected with the various books I’ve written for general audiences over the years and now I’ve arrived at my book Did Jesus Exist (HarperOne: 2011).  I wrote the book when “mythicism” was still kind of taking off and most people hadn’t heard about it.  I suppose most still haven’t heard about it, but lots of agnostics, atheists, skeptics, and general-internet-junkies have.  It was so unheard of at the time that my publisher (Harper) was not interested in publishing the book.  They wanted it to come out only digitally, since they were pretty sure that as many people would buy it as would buy a book that mounted the evidence that there really was a successful landing on the moon.

But after I wrote the book they decided it would be worth putting into print.  In the end, it got a lot of people ticked off, especially mythicists.  I was rather surprised to receive far more vitriolic email from  that side than I ever did (or have) from fudndamatalist Christians.  I think the harsh response was mainly because people on that side of things thought that since I was a critical scholar of the New Testament who was personally agnostic, I would agree with them that the whole thing was made up.

Yeah, well, I don’t.  Over the course of two posts I’ll extract portions from the Preface.  Here is part one.

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Every week I receive maybe two or three emails asking me whether Jesus existed as a human being.   When I started getting these emails, some years ago now, I thought the question was rather peculiar and I did not take it seriously.  Of course Jesus existed.  Everyone knows he existed.  Don’t they?

But the questions kept coming and soon I began to wonder:  why are there so many people asking?  My wonder only increased when I learned that I myself was being quoted in some circles – misquoted rather – as saying that Jesus never existed.  I decided to look into the matter.  As it turns out, to my surprise, there is an entire literature devoted to the question of whether or not there ever was a real man, Jesus.

I was surprised because I am trained as a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, and for thirty years I have written extensively on the historical Jesus, the Gospels, the early Christian movement, the history of the church’s first three hundred years.   Like all New Testament scholars, I have read literally thousands and thousands of books and articles in English and other European languages on Jesus, the New Testament, and early Christianity.  But I was almost completely unaware of this body of skeptical literature, except as a slight image on the very periphery of my vision.   As are most of my colleagues in this field of scholarship.

I should say here at the outset that none of this literature is written by the scholars trained in New Testament or early Christian studies teaching at the major, or even the minor, accredited theological seminaries, divinity schools, universities, or colleges of North America or Europe (or anywhere else in the world).  Of the thousands of early Christianity scholars who do teach at such schools, none of them, to my knowledge, has any doubts that Jesus existed.  But there is this other literature out there, some of it highly intelligent and well informed, that makes the case.

These sundry books and articles (not to mention websites) are of varying quality.  Some of them are at about the level of The Da Vinci Code for their passion for conspiracy and the shallow depth of their historical knowledge, not just of the New Testament and early Christianity, but of ancient religion generally and, even more broadly, the ancient world.  But there are a couple of bona fide scholars – not professors teaching religious studies in universities, but scholars nonetheless, and one of them, at least, with a PhD in the field of New Testament – who have taken this position and written about it.   Their books may not be known to most of the general public interested in questions related to Jesus, the Gospels, or the early Christian church, but they do occupy a noteworthy niche as a (very) small but (often) loud minority voice.  Once you tune in to this voice, you quickly learn just how persistent and vociferous it can be.

And the voice is being heard loud and clear in some places.  Even a quick Internet search reveals how influential such radical skepticism has been historically, and how rapidly it is spreading even now.  For decades it was the dominant view in countries such as the Soviet Union.  Yet more striking, it appears to be the majority view in some regions of the West today, including some parts of Scandinavia.

The authors of this skeptical literature understand themselves to be “mythicists” – that is, those who believe that Jesus is a “myth.”  Rarely do mythicists define what they mean by the term myth, a failure that strikes real scholars of religion as both unfortunate and highly problematic, since the term has come to mean many things over the years in technical scholarship.  When mythicists use the term they appear most often simply to mean a story that has no historical basis, a history-like narrative that in fact did not happen.  In this sense, Jesus is a myth because even though there are plenty of ancient stories told about him, they are not historical.  His life and teachings, instead, have been invented by early story tellers.  He never really lived.

Those who do not think Jesus existed are frequently militant in their views and remarkably adept at parrying counter-evidence that to the rest of the civilized world might seem completely compelling and even unanswerable.  But these writers have answers, and the smart ones among them need to be taken seriously, if for no other reason than to show why they cannot be right about their major contention.  The reality is, whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist.  That is what this book will set out to demonstrate.

I hardly need to stress what I have already intimated, that this is the view of virtually every expert on the planet.   That in itself is not proof, of course.  Expert opinion is, at the end of the day, still opinion.  But why would you not want to know what experts have to say?   When you go to the dentist, do you want him to be an expert or not?  If you build a house, do you want a professional architect to draw up the plans, or your next door neighbor?  One might be tempted to say that in the case of the historical Jesus it is different, since, after all, we are just talking about history and without time machines experts have no more access to the past than anyone else.  That, however, is simply not true.  It may be the case that some of my students receive the bulk of their knowledge of the Middle Ages from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” but is that really the best place to turn?  So too, millions of people have acquired their “knowledge” about early Christianity – about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the emperor Constantine, the Council of Nicea – from Dan Brown, estimable author of the aforementioned Da Vinci Code.  But is that, at the end of the day, such a wise choice?