Christ myth theory significant person George Albert Wells
Quest for the historical Jesus
A first quest for the historical Jesus took place in the 19th century when hundreds of biographies about Jesus were proposed. German theologian David Strauss (1808–1874) pioneered the search for the "historical Jesus" by rejecting all supernatural events as mythical elaborations. His 1835 work, Life of Jesus, was one of the first and most influential systematic analyses of the life story of Jesus, aiming to base it on unbiased historical research. The Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, starting in the 1890s, used the methodologies of higher criticism, a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text". It compared Christianity to other religions, regarding it as one religion among others and rejecting its claims to absolute truth, and demonstrating that it shares characteristics with other religions. It argued that Christianity was not simply the continuation of the Old Testament, but syncretistic, and was rooted in and influenced by Hellenistic Judaism (Philo) and Hellenistic religions like the mystery cults and Gnosticism. Martin Kähler questioned the usefulness of the search for the historical Jesus, making the famous distinction between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith", arguing that faith is more important than exact historical knowledge. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), who was related to the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, emphasized theology, and in 1926 argued that historical Jesus research was both futile and unnecessary; however, Bultmann slightly modified that position in a later book. The first quest ended with Albert Schweitzer's 1906 critical review of the history of the search for Jesus' life in The Quest of the Historical Jesus—From Reimarus to Wrede. The first quest was challenged in the 19th and early 20th centuries by authors who denied the historicity of Jesus, notably Bauer and Drews.
The second quest started in 1953, in a departure from Bultmann. Several criteria, the criterion of dissimilarity and the criterion of embarrassment, were introduced to analyze and evaluate New Testament narratives. This second quest declined in the 1970s due to the diminishing influence of Bultmann, and coinciding with the first publications of George Albert Wells, which marks the onset of the revival of Christ myth theories. According to Paul Zahl, while the second quest made significant contributions at the time, its results are now mostly forgotten, although not disproven.The third quest started in the 1980s and introduced new criteria. Primary among these are the criterion of historical plausibility, the criterion of rejection and execution, and the criterion of congruence (also called cumulative circumstantial evidence), a special case of the older criterion of coherence. The third quest is interdisciplinary and global, carried out by scholars from multiple disciplines and incorporating the results of archeological research. The third quest primarily yielded new insights into Jesus' Palestinian and Jewish context rather than the person of Jesus himself. It also has made clear that all material on Jesus has been handed down by the emerging Church, raising questions about the criterion of dissimilarity, and the suitability of ascribing material solely to Jesus rather than the emerging Church.Revival (1970s–present)
Beginning in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the second quest for the historical Jesus, interest in the Christ myth theory was revived by George A. Wells, whose ideas were elaborated by Earl Doherty. With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, their ideas gained popular interest, giving way to a multitude of publications and websites aimed at a popular audience, most notably Richard Carrier, often taking a polemical stance toward Christianity. Their ideas are supported by Robert Price, an academic theologian, while somewhat different stances on the mythological origins are offered by Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas L. Brodie, both also accomplished scholars in theology.George Albert Wells
George Albert Wells (1926–2017), a professor of German, revived interest in the Christ myth theory. In his early work, including Did Jesus Exist? (1975), Wells argued that because the gospels were written decades after Jesus' death by Christians who were theologically motivated but had no personal knowledge of him, a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed.From the mid-1990s onwards, Wells came to accept that the Jesus of the gospel stories was partly based on a historical figure. In The Jesus Myth (1999) and later works, Wells argues that two Jesus narratives were fused into one, namely Paul's mythical Jesus, and a historical Jesus from a Galilean preaching tradition, whose teachings were preserved in the Q source. According to Wells, both figures owe much of their substance to ideas from Jewish Wisdom literature.In 2000 Van Voorst gave an overview of proponents of the "Nonexistence Hypothesis" and their arguments, presenting seven arguments against the hypothesis as put forward by Wells and his predecessors, detailing his criticisms. According to Maurice Casey, Wells' work repeated the main points of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, which are deemed outdated by mainstream scholarship. His works were not discussed by New Testament scholars, because it was "not considered to be original, and all his main points were thought to have been refuted long ago, for reasons which were very well known".