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By Root 1075 0

the Christian Church, who revealed that they were constantly forced by the "Pagan" intelligentsia to defend what the non-Christians and other Christians ("heretics") alike saw as a preposterous and fabricated yarn with absolutely no evidence of it ever having taken place in history. As Rev. Robert Taylor says in The Diegesis, "And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenuously denied." In fact, as Taylor also states:

Those who denied the humanity of Christ were the first class of professing Christians, and not only first in order of time, but in dignity of character, in intelligence, and in moral influence.. . . The deniers of the humanity of Christ, or, in a word, professing Christians, who denied that any such man as Jesus Christ ever existed at all, but who took the name Jesus Christ to signify only an abstraction, or prosopopoeia, the principle of Reason personified; and who understood the whole gospel story to be a sublime allegory ... these were the first, and (it is not dishonour to Christianity to pronounce them) the best and most rational Christians.

Again, this denial of Christ in the flesh is found numerous times in the writings of the day, including the New Testament itself, yet it is ignored by historicizers, believers and evemerists alike. Indeed, in their "exhaustive" research into this allimportant subject, historicizers have either wilfully and unreasonably ignored the great minds of the mythicist school or have never come across them. If we assume that the historicizers' disregard of these scholars is deliberate, we can only conclude that it is because the mythicists' arguments have been too intelligent and knifelike to do away with. Of course, the works of the mythicists have not been made readily available to the public, no doubt fearfully suppressed because they are somewhat irrefutable, so we cannot completely fault the "experts" for having never read them. The arguments of these particular mythicists are, however, the most important work done in this field to date, so any refutation that has not dealt with them properly is neither exhaustive nor convincing.

Those historicizers who have acknowledged the mythicists' contentions, not being able to refute the voluminous amount of evidence as to Christ's mythical nature, are forced to dismiss the mythicists' research and conclusions by claiming their work to be "outdated." Yet, the mythicist argument has existed from the beginning of the Christian era, and there is still no cogent argument that demonstrates it to be "outdated." Also, if it is "outdated" merely because it comes before, how much more outdated is the Bible, which came even more so before?

It is also claimed that the mythicists make too much of the Pagan origins and ignore the Jewish aspects of the Gospel tale. The Jewish elements, argue historicizers, must be historical and, therefore, Jesus existed. Specious and sophistic though it may be, since anyone can interpolate quasi-historical data into a fictional story-and many people have done so, from the composers of The Iliad to those of the Old Testament and any number of other novels-this historicizer argument has conveniently allowed for the dismissal of the entire mythicist school, despite the overwhelming evidence in its favor and absolute dearth thereof in the historical camp.

The fact is that it is historicizing scholars themselves who do not pay enough attention to the Jewish aspects, because if they did, they would discover that these elements are frequently erroneous, anachronistic and indicative of a lack of knowledge about geography and other details that would not have been so, had the writers been indigenous to the era and eyewitnesses to the events.

Massey summarizes the mythicist position:

It can be demonstrated that Christianity pre-existed without the Personal Christ, that it was continued by Christians who entirely rejected the historical character in the second century,