Robert M. Price: Story

“In the case of Jesus Christ, where virtually every detail of the story fits the mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over, no "secular," biographical data, so to speak, it becomes arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying back of the myth.”

Robert M. Price

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Christ a Fiction, https://infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html, 27 November 2016, 1997]

Lying , Christ

“Links in the gospels, e. g., with Herod the Great, Joseph Caiaphas, and Pontius Pilate, are so problematical on internal grounds that most critical scholars, never meaning to espouse Mythicism, reject these features of the story as legendary.”

Robert M. Price

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems, https://books.google.com/books?id=qhyzNAEACAAJ, 2011, American Atheist Press, 978-1-57884-017-5, 425, Conclusion: Do You “No” Jesus?]

“If some New Testament miracle stories find no parallel in contemporary experience. they do have parallels, often striking ones, in other ancient writings that no one takes to be anything other than mythical or legendary. …The Gospels come under serious suspicion because there is practically nothing in them that does not conform to this “Mythic Hero Archetype.””

Robert M. Price

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?, https://books.google.com/books?id=GmlB-KXsX8kC&pg=PA21, 2003, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-028-0, 21]

“I realized, after studying much previous research on the question [of Jesus], that virtually every story in the gospels and Acts can be shown to be very likely a Christian rewrite of material from the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides' Bacchae, and Josephus. …A literary origin is always to be preferred to an historical one in such a case. And that is the choice we have to make in virtually every case of New Testament narrative. […] There may once have been an historical Jesus, but for us there is one no longer. If he existed, he is forever lost behind the stained glass curtain of holy myth. At least that's the current state of the evidence as I see it.”

Robert M. Price

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, The Quest of the Mythical Jesus, http://www.centerforinquiry.net/jesusproject/articles/the_quest_of_the_mythical_jesus, Jesus Project - Center for Inquiry, Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, 28 March 2017] [The Quest of the Mythical Jesus first appeared on the Robert M. Price Myspace page.]

Question , Study

“[Per the Gospels] Every single story bears the marks of fiction, with earlier versions ruling out later ones, with extrabiblical parallels providing abundant nonhistorical analogies, while current experience provides no historical parallel. The Gospels certainly do not put us in touch with the faith (whatever it may have been) of the earliest Christians. They do not tell us whether the resurrection of Jesus was even part of the first Christian faith(s). Everywhere we have looked, we have found naught but legend and myth, fiction and redaction.”

Robert M. Price

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?, https://books.google.com/books?id=GmlB-KXsX8kC&pg=PA347, 2003, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-028-0, 347]

Faith , Parting