[My own bias is that it's credible, even to the point of it becoming the wave of the future.
However, I still keep the question of the historical Jesus on the back burner because at any time a discovery could be made of eyewitness testimony from Jesus, his original disciples, or better yet, from hostile sources. In which case Christ Myth theory would be stood on its head.]
Christ Myth - central tenets:
1. There is no unambiguous reference to a historical, or a Gospel Jesus in the earliest known Christian texts, namely, the seven authentic letters of Paul.
2. There are no relevant historical sources for Jesus in non-Christian sources, because these have either been debunked (e.g., the Testimonium Flavianum in its several versions);
or
are simply too late (Pliny-Tacitus, Celsus, etc.). These latter merely explain what their contemporary Christian peers were saying about Jesus, and do not use early sources from Jesus's own lifetime.
3. Thus the historian is thrown back, and narrowly, on Paul.
4. Paul was citing the earliest christology, which was shared by James, John and Cephas, "the Jerusalem Pillars".
5. Pauline christology held that "Jesus" never had a historical existence, but did have a completely real spiritual existence in heaven as an angelic figure.
This is why Paul does not know of, and never cites, the life or example of a historical Jesus.
He had no historical Jesus to cite.
6. Paul says that this celestial figure "emptied himself" (Paul calls it "kenosis") and entered the sphere of the lower heavens, where he was "found" (probably by Satan) to be "in the likeness or form" of a man and of a servant. This is the Pauline "Incarnation", but it happened in the sublunar celestial sphere, not on geophysical earth.
7. The original Gospel or "Good News" was announced via a series of mystical experiences in which Jesus himself made it known that he had "incarnated", suffered, died, had been buried (again, this transpired in the lower heaven, not earth), and then been raised back to his previous position at God's "right hand".
8. The risen Jesus originally did not involve a resuscitation of the corpse of a dead Galilean carpenter-sage, but rather the raising up of a preexistent spiritual Jesus as "heavenly Adam".
If there was ever an empty tomb, it was located in the lower heaven, not in the suburbs of ancient Jerusalem.
9. Heaven was considered to be the grand model of creation, the earth only being a kind of shadowy duplicate of heaven. Heaven had residents, gardens, temples, rivers, and soil (wherein Adam was said to be buried, and where Jesus was temporarily buried prior to his resurrection).
This is supported by the Letter to the Hebrews which depicts the risen Jesus entering the heavenly city of Jerusalem, entering the heavenly Temple with its heavenly sanctuary.
10. Because there was no historical Jesus who died and rose again, there was originally no tradition of a risen Jesus who walked with disciples, broke bread with them, or permitted them to prove his crucifixion wounds.
11. Such material resurrection narratives only arose with the first Gospel, Mark.
12. Mark's Gospel is the first known expression of a process of historicizing an originally heavenly, non-material Christ into a biographical person with a personal history and career. This process of concretization, reification and solidification created the Jesus of the Christ Myth theory out of the spiritual Jesus of the earlier celestial Christ revelations. This process is called "euhemerization".
13. To the commonplace objection by mainstream/historicist exegetes, namely, that "No mainstream scholars accept Christ Myth theory!", mythicists retort that - as has been said of the sciences generally - knowledge proceeds one funeral at a time. That is, the issue is not the popularity of the mythical Jesus model, or about the number of scholars who support it. The issue is only about serious, relentless searching for evidence. So far, no such evidence for a historical or a Gospel Jesus has been disclosed.
What do you think?
How plausible is Jesus's existence in view of Christ Myth claims?
[Recall that Paul never mentions Jesus's supposed miracles, cures, exorcisms, the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the raising of the dead, his Torah teaching, his conflicts with Pharisees, priests, and his own family and disciples, his trial and arrest, etc.]
What would Christianity look like without a historical Jesus?
If you're a Christian, could you, like the ancient Gnostic and Docetic Christians, revere a wholly non-material Christ who never lived on earth "in the flesh"?
