About the Author: Earl Doherty
Earl Doherty (born 1941), currently living in Canada, is the author of The Jesus Puzzle, a work published in 1999 by Canadian Humanist Publications and which expanded on his earlier "The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins" paper published in the Fall 1997 issue of Journal of Higher Criticism[1] arguing that Jesus never lived. Doherty argues that Paul and other writers of the earliest existing Christian documents did not believe in Jesus as a person that lived on Earth in an historical setting. Rather, they believed in Jesus as a mythical hero who suffered his sacrificial death in the lower spheres of heaven in the hands of the demon spirits, and was subsequently resurrected by God. This Christ myth was not based on a tradition reaching back to a historical Jesus, but on the Old Testament exegesis in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism heavily influenced by Platonism, and what the authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus.According to Doherty, the Jesus myth was given a historical setting only by the second generation of Christians, somewhere between the first and second century. Doherty claims that even the author of the Gospel of Mark probably did not consider his gospel to be a literal work of history, but an allegorical Midrashic composition based on the Old Testament prophecies. In the widely supported two-source hypothesis, the story of Mark was later fused with a separate tradition of anonymous sayings embodied in the Q document into the other gospels; according to Doherty these became interpreted as the literal history of the life of Jesus. Doherty denies any historical value of the Acts of the Apostles, dismissing it as a late work based on legend.Doherty has a degree in Ancient History and Classical Languages, and he was introduced to the idea of a mythical origin of Jesus by the work of G. A. Wells, who has authored a number of books arguing a more moderate form of the "Christ myth" theory. Doherty claims to have used his language skills to have studied the original-language versions of the New Testament, and to have come to his views through a critical analysis of these texts.
Did early Christians like Paul believe in an entirely spiritual Son of God, and was the Gospel Jesus of Nazareth a later fictional character and faith symbol? Every religion throughout history has developed a mythology about what is supposed to have happened at its beginning, and in most cases it's just that-mythology. Find out why Christianity's longstanding view of its origin in an historical Jesus is also a myth, and why the history of western religion needs to be rewritten.