"This myth of Christ hath served us well."

— Pope Leo IX

“The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. “He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.”

—Rev. Dr. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus

“This is the controversial question, Did Jesus really exist? Some readers may be surprised or shocked that many books and essays—by my count, over two hundred—in the past two hundred years have fervently denied the very existence of Jesus.”

—Dr. Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament

“The gospels are not primarily works of history in the modern sense of the word.… [In] my conversations with newspaper writers and book editors who have asked me at various times to write about the historical Jesus, almost invariably the first question that arises is: But can you prove he existed?”

—Dr. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew (1.41, 1.68)

“Apart from the New Testament writings and later writings dependent on these, our sources of information about the life and teaching of Jesus are scanty and problematic.”

—F.F. Bruce, New Testament History

“The only definite account of his life and teachings is contained in the four Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All other historical records of the time are silent about him.”

—The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia

“One would naturally expect that the Lord Jesus Christ would be sufficiently important to receive ample notice in the literature of his time, and that extensive biographical material would be available. He was observed by multitudes of people, and his own followers numbered into the hundreds (1 Cor. 15:6), whose witness was still living in the middle of the first century. As a matter of fact, the amount of information concerning him is comparatively meager. Aside from the four Gospels, and a few scattered allusions in the epistles, contemporary history is almost silent concerning him.”

—Dr. Merrill C. Tenney, New Testament Survey

“[A] graver accusation than that of inaccuracy or deficient authority lies against the writings which have come down to us from the second century. There can be no doubt that great numbers of books were then written with no other view than to deceive the simple-minded multitude who at that time formed the great bulk of the Christian community.”

—Rev. Dr. John A. Giles, Hebrew and Christian Records

“It’s important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous.”

—Dr. Craig L. Blomberg in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ

“Most of the apostles were illiterate and could not in fact write.… They could not have left an authoritative writing if their souls depended on it. Another problem is that writings started to appear that claimed to be written by apostles, but that contained all sorts of bizarre and contradictory views. Gospels were in circulation that claimed to be written by Jesus’s disciples Peter, Phillip and Mary, and his brothers Thomas and James. Letters appeared that were allegedly written by Paul, Peter and James. Apocalyptic writings describing the end of the world or the fate of souls in the afterlife appeared in the names of Jesus’s followers John, Peter and Paul. Some writings emerged that claimed to be written by Jesus himself. “In many instances, the authors of these writings could not actually have been who they claimed to be, as even the early Christians realized.”

—Dr. Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are

“Matthew probably did not write Matthew, for example, or John, John.… In short, there were long, protracted and even heated debates in the early church over forged documents. Early Christians realized that there were numerous forgeries in circulation, and they wanted to know which books were written by their alleged authors and which were not.”

—Dr. Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God

“In essence, if His words were not accurately recorded [in the Gospels], how can anyone know what He really taught? The truth is, we couldn’t know. Further, if the remainder of the New Testament cannot be established to be historically reliable, then little can be known about what true Christianity really is, teaches or means.”

—Dr. John Ankerberg and Dr. John Weldon, Handbook of Biblical Evidences

“With all the differences between Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and with numerous other gospels existing, we have an obvious problem. Each gospel has a particular way of seeing Jesus. How close to the historical facts are they?”

—Dr. John Dominic Crossan, Who Is Jesus?

“If you take the gospels as a factual account of the life of Jesus, they’re not all in sync … there are what we might identify as contradictions in the account.… If we want to read the gospels as eye witness accounts, historical records and so on, then not only are we in for some tough going, I think there’s evidence within the material itself that it’s not intended to be read that way. [The gospels] don’t claim to be eyewitness accounts of his life … we’re concerned about the gospel literature as being shot through with all kinds of tendencies and all kinds of biases and exaggerations.”

—Dr. Allen D. Callahan, “From Jesus to Christ: What Are the Gospels?”

“The crucial question is this: Is it possible that any of the early Christian forgeries made it into the New Testament? That some of the books of the New Testament were not written by the apostles whose names are attached to them? That some of Paul’s letters were not actually written by Paul, but by someone claiming to be Paul? That Peter’s letters were not written by Peter? That James and Jude did not write the books that bear their names? Or … that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Scholars for over a hundred years have known that in fact this is the case.”

—Dr. Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God

[Much] recent Gospel scholarship … has concluded that the Gospels were written more than forty years after Jesus by unknown authors who were not eyewitnesses to him.”

—Dr. Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision.”

—The Catholic Truth Society, The Gift of Scripture

“The brief mentions of Jesus in the writings of Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius have been generally regarded as not genuine and as Christian interpolations; in Jewish writings there is no report about Jesus that has historical value. Some scholars have even gone so far as to hold that the entire Jesus story is a myth.”

—The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia

“[There] are very few sources for knowledge of the historical Jesus beyond the four canonical Gospels. Paul and Josephus offer little more than tidbits. Claims that the later apocryphal Gospels and the Nag Hammadi material supply independent and reliable historical information about Jesus are largely fantasy. In the end, the historian is left with the difficult task of sifting through the Four Gospels for historical tradition.”

—Dr. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew

“So we are right to assume that even the Gospels have no value as witnesses to the historicity of Jesus. The question remains: Are there are any historical proofs that Jesus existed?”

—Dr. Solomon Zeitlin, “The Halaka in the Gospels”

“We may now proceed to examine directly the actual documentary evidence for the life of Jesus. This evidence may be divided into two classes: non-Christian and Christian. Of the former, next to nothing exists. In all, this evidence mounts up to some twenty-four lines, not a single one of which is of admitted authenticity.”

—Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Twilight of Christianity

“And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.”

—Justin Martyr, First Apology

“As well as the danger of relying on texts which do not exist, there is the massive problem of known texts which have been ‘lost’ (such as the declarations of loyalty to Diocletian from every town and city in the empire) and the enormous quantity of texts which Christian scholars and the Christian Church admit to being forgeries. Between the destruction of important texts and inscriptions, and the admitted dishonesty for Christian texts, a scholar is faced with the unedifying task of investigating a religion which, down to its roots, is riddled with lies and fakery.”

—John Bartram, “Mani and Authorship of the Canonical Gospels”

“According to these men, neither was the Word made flesh, nor Christ, nor the Saviour (Soter).… For they will have it, that the Word and Christ never came into this world; that the Saviour, too, never became incarnate, nor suffered.… But according to the opinion of no one of the heretics was the Word of God made flesh.”

—Bishop and Saint Irenaeus, Against Heresies

“The Israelites, who at first were as polytheistic as the other nations of the ancient Near East, in the end merged the gods of their progenitors and ended up worshipping one God, Yahweh, who remained closely related to the elohim, ‘the gods’ or ancestors of their progenitors.”

—Dr. Temba L.J. Mafico, The Bible in Africa

“As a rule, ancient Near Eastern religions were polytheistic, and the religions of Judah and Israel were no exception.… “Since life in Syria-Palestine depended on rainfall, the most important role within the panthea was held by the weather god, who was responsible for the lives of human beings, animals and vegetation.… Well-known names of the weather god included Baal, Addu/Haddu and also YHWH. The female companion of the weather god was conceived as a mother goddess: here the goddesses Hepat, Shala and Asherah can be named. “Other important deities included Dagan, a god of the underworld and of grain; Rashpu, who was responsible for pestilence and also for protecting against pestilence; the sun god or sun goddess, who was the god of justice and righteousness; and the moon god, who was responsible for all aspects of fertility. Deities of minor rank included artisan gods, messenger gods, spirits and demons, and also the kings who underwent divinization after their death. “The king was believed to be the son of the highest god and, as such, functioned as the deity’s earthly governor.”

—Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou and Rev. Dr. John Barton, Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah

“And he received the gold at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made a molten calf; and they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’”

—Exodus 3:24

“The Lord will bring you, and your king whom you set over you, to a nation that neither you nor your fathers have known; and there you shall serve other gods, of wood and stone.”

—Deuteronomy 28:36

“And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold, you are about to sleep with your fathers; then this people will rise and play the harlot after the strange gods of the land, where they go to be among them, and they will forsake me and break my covenant which I have made with them.’”

—Deuteronomy 31:16

“They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods; with abominable practices they provoked him to anger. They sacrificed to demons which were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come in of late, whom your fathers had never dreaded.”

—Deuteronomy 32:16–7

“Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River, and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.”

—Joshua 24:14

“And yet they did not listen to their judges; for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed down to them; they soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the commandments of the Lord, and they did not do so.”

—Judges 2:17

“Scholarly doubt about the historicity of Jesus in the early twentieth century seems to have been related to the late nineteenth century’s fascination with comparative mythology. This in turn had probably been encouraged by the archaeological recovery of previously unknown Near Eastern sources dating from Biblical times during the nineteenth century. For example, parallels between the flood story contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was first brought to light in the 1870s, and the flood story in Genesis suggested that Noah was not a real person, but rather a mythical figure drawn from a common fund of Near-Eastern lore. Given this, it is hardly surprising that some should assume the same of Jesus as well. The short-lived but influential History of Religions school of late nineteenth century German seminaries had shown that many non-Christian Hellenistic religions shared such elements with early Christianity as a belief in redemption through the sacrifice of a god.”

—Dr. Alice Whealey, Josephus on Jesus

“By the way, it is quite a big question, whether Jesus Christ has ever lived.”

—Napoleon Bonaparte, as related by Christopher Martin Wieland

“I feel no hesitation to state that the Christos of the Gospels is an imitation of Krishna. It is my honest opinion—nay my belief too—that the story of the life of Krishna went to Alexandria with the Buddhist Missionaries. History tells us that in the time of Emperor Asoka, the preachers of Buddhism were sent to different parts of the world, and some of them went to the city referred to above. Philo, the greatest Jewish historian, testifies to the above statement when he says in one of his works that “there were men of all religions in this monastery; Brahmans from the East who believed in Krishna.”

—Thakur Kahanchandra Varma, The Historicity of Christ Proving That the Christ of the New Testament is a Myth and the Gospels Spurious

“And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.’”

—Genesis 1:14

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.”

—Ecclesiastes 3:1–2

“Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children?”

—Job 38:33

“Mazzaroth [הרזמ/mazzarah]: a) the 12 signs of the Zodiac and their 36 associated constellations.”

—Strong’s Concordance of the Bible

“And he deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places at the cities of Judah and round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations [הלזמ/mazzalah], and all the host of the heavens.”

—2 Kings 23:5

“The Hebrews gave this name [הולזמ/mazzalah] to the twelve signs of the Zodiac … the circles of palaces; these were imagined to be the lodging-places of the sun during the twelve months.”

—Gesenius’s Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures (CCCCLXI)

“There is nothing new under the sun.”

—Ecclesiastes 1:9

“Probably the most provocative issue related to the nature of sun worship in ancient Israel … is the specific claim that Yahweh was identified with the sun.”

—Rev. Dr. J. Glen Taylor, Yahweh and the Sun

Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient Israel (20) “The sun as witness to a contract or oath was known in the Jewish community in the land of Israel from the Bible, which had a central role in synagogue ritual.”

—Dr. Yaffa Englard, Mosaics as Midrash

The Zodiacs of the Ancient Synagogues” “The cult of Sol Invictus, the ‘Invincible Sun,’ became dominant in Rome and in other parts of the empire during the early part of the second second century ad. And evidence abounds that Roman sun cults influenced Christian thought and liturgy.”

—Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi, Signs of the Times

“The result of the Church’s encounter with the sun-cults of antiquity was nothing less than the dethronement of Helios.”

—Dr. Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery

“The symbolism in which Christ’s divinity was clothed after his death came from the Sun. In the contemporary Hellenistic world, both the Greek Sun god Helios and the Persian and Roman Sun god Mithras portrayed the celestial drama of resurrection through the risen Sun, reborn from death every dawn and every midwinter at the winter solstice. As Mithras was called the Sol Invictus, so Christ was to be the new invincible Sun, whose birth was timed (four centuries after he died) to the second century ad. And evidence abounds that Roman sun cults influenced Christian thought and liturgy.” —Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi, Signs of the Times (8) “The result of the Church’s encounter with the sun-cults of antiquity was nothing less than the dethronement of Helios.”

—Dr. Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery

“The symbolism in which Christ’s divinity was clothed after his death came from the Sun. In the contemporary Hellenistic world, both the Greek Sun god Helios and the Persian and Roman Sun god Mithras portrayed the celestial drama of resurrection through the risen Sun, reborn from death every dawn and every midwinter at the winter solstice. As Mithras was called the Sol Invictus, so Christ was to be the new invincible Sun, whose birth was timed (four centuries after he died) to the winter solstice in the image of the reborn Sun—as was the birth of Mithras. Christ’s God was beyond Sun and Moon as the transcendent Creator of the natural world, but the Sun and Moon played a crucial role in the Christian imagination through the complementary figures of Christ and Mary.”

—Dr. Jules Cashford, “Sun and Moon in Christianity,” The Moon