Who was the historical Jesus and why does he matter? The controversy surrounding the existence of a historical person who founded the Christian movement has been raging for centuries – in fact much longer. This article is a very brief introduction to this lengthy subject. We will not focus here on the evidence concerning the [...]

From Faith to History
“Before God and before Christ Jesus who is to be judge of the living and the dead, I charge you, in the name of his appearing and of his kingdom: proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it.” 2 Timothy 4
Believing that Jesus Christ was a radically new kind of [...]

“Many were led astray by reading the allegorical contents of the scriptures literally in the method of the Pharisees and Sadducees” Eusebius, Ecclestical History
I believed in Santa Claus until I was nearly thirteen years old. Like my friends, I’d been brought up to think of him as a real person, who made his rounds on [...]

Finally we get to the crucial question: if Jesus was mythological, how and why did people ever start to imagine that he was a historical person? The answer is accidentally preserved in the biblical “Acts of the Apostles” and in the letters of Paul.
The New Testament is arranged to appear chronological: the four gospels present [...]

A lot of the articles I’ve provided so far have been background information, which is indispensable for first becoming aware of the possibility of the mythological Jesus, and then developing the ability to recognize him within the available evidence. I recognize that the material I’ve provided so far, while educational and fascinating, may still be [...]

In the last article we discovered how many creations myths include the icon of a serpent which divided the polarities – an idea inspired by the constellation Draco spinning over the north pole. In this article, I want to focus on the philosophy of expansion and retraction – how religious traditions portrayed the “fall” with [...]

In the last section we examined how the basic biographical details of Jesus Christ can be traced to an ancient story about the sun. For many Christians, however, the biography of Jesus is not the important part anyway – it is his role as mediator, his divine sonship, and his sacrifice for our sins that [...]

Before King Herod tried to find and kill the infant Christ, who was smuggled safely into Egypt, a Pharaoh tried to kill the infant Moses, who also survived. Both returned to triumph over their adversaries. Before either of them came Horus and many others, all based on the sun myth. In the most recent adaptation [...]

In this article I will provide a basic overview of sun-mythology, including the battle between light and dark, the birth, death and resurrection of a savior, and the triumph over darkness. Next I will give some contemporary examples to show how deeply, and yet unrecognized, the sun story influences our lives, and finally, I will [...]

Conventional wisdom views Jesus Christ as being a novel and revolutionary person, whose message of love and kindness was rejected by the wicked Jews and Pagans, because they were evil and stupid. This is Christian propaganda of the worst kind, and absolutely untrue; the reason that many could not accept Jesus Christ, was because they [...]