Decoding the Jesus Myth

by Stephen Bedard

CNN recently republished a 2012 article Decoding Jesus: Separating man from myth, written by John Blake. It is another rehashing of the Jesus myth, the theory that Jesus never existed.

There is nothing much new in this article but it is worth responding to because these questions keep coming up. I’m not going to answer every statement in the article but I will tackle the ones that stood out for me.

Fringe Scholarship

Blake comments: “Some Jesus mythicists say many New Testament scholars are intellectual snobs.” What is meant by this is that mythicists resent the fact that by far the majority of scholars reject the theory and don’t consider it worth responding to. The same kind of comment could be made by flat earthers. Is the problem with those who see the logical conclusions of the evidence or those who hold to a radical skepticism that doesn’t take the evidence seriously. It is worth noting that it is not just evangelical scholars who accept a historical Jesus. Conservatives, liberals, Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheist scholars almost universally accept the evidence for Jesus.