Earl Doherty has finally released Jesus: Neither God Nor Man; The Case for a Mythical Jesus, his long-awaited second edition of The Jesus Puzzle.

He has revised and expanded it to 814 pages and around a half-million words, and he devotes whole chapters to subjects like "according to the flesh" (kata sarka), "born of woman" (Galatians 4:4), the Epistle to the Hebrews and its Cosmic Christ, etc.

He also discusses Hellenistic pagan and Jewish views of the spiritual world, the early Christian apologists, the Gospels as extended allegories, Gnosticism, parallels between Jesus Christ and various pagan savior gods, etc.

He is very thorough, discussing putative outside references to Jesus Christ from Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, Thallus and Phlegon, Mara bar Serapion, and various Jewish sources, including the authors of the Toledoth Yeshu ( "Generations of Jesus" ). He concludes that they do not really tell us anything about a possible historical Jesus Christ.


I don't know if I'll be able to get this book anytime soon, but I did get his original book, and if you want to see a good positive case for Jesus mythicism, it is worth reading.

Yes, it is a positive case, one that features a scenario for how a myth of Jesus Christ had gotten started. In it, he was originally a sort-of god who got reinterpreted as having had a human existence, and Earl Doherty discusses a wide range of issues related to it.


If you don't feel up to the task of reading that tome, you can check out his site, http://www.jesuspuzzle.com/

It contains some short summaries of his case, like

Quick Assembly of the Jesus Puzzle
The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins