Earl Doherty

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Earl Doherty, currently living in Canada, is the author of The Jesus Puzzle, a work published in 2000 by the Humanist Association of Canada arguing that Jesus never lived. Doherty argues that Paul and other writers of the earliest existing Christian documents did not believe in Jesus as a person that lived on Earth in an historical setting. Rather, they believed in Jesus as a mythical hero who suffered his sacrificial death in the lower spheres of heaven in the hands of the demon spirits, and was subsequently resurrected by God. This Christ myth was not based on a tradition reaching back to a historical Jesus, but on the Old Testament exegesis in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism heavily influenced by Platonism, and what the authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus.

According to Doherty, the Jesus myth was given a historical setting only by the second generation of Christians, somewhere between the first and second century. Doherty claims that even the author of the Gospel of Mark, which he dates, later than most New Testament scholars, after 90 AD, probably did not consider his gospel to be a literal work of history, but an allegorical Midrashic composition based on the Old Testament prophecies. In the widely supported two-source hypothesis, the story of Mark was later fused with a separate tradition of anonymous sayings embodied in the Q document into the other gospels; according to Doherty these became interpreted as the literal history of the life of Jesus. Doherty denies any historical value of the Acts of the Apostles, dismissing it as a late work based on legend.

Doherty has a degree in Ancient History and Classical Languages, and he was introduced to the idea of a mythical origin of Jesus by the work of G.A. Wells, who has authored a number of books arguing a more moderate form of the "Christ myth" theory. Doherty claims to have used his language skills to have studied the original-language versions of the New Testament, and to have come to his views through a critical analysis of these texts.

Doherty's belief that there was no historical Jesus contrasts with the view of secularists who contend Jesus was a real person whose story has been told in the language of myth.

Currently, the position that Jesus never existed is a minority position among scholars and Doherty's arguments have not made a very strong impression on the consensus [1] among the Western scholars. In addition, Christian apologist James Patrick Holding criticized Doherty's works in a number of essays.[2] One must note, however, that this position was much more prevalent in the Eastern block countries during the Cold War, where despite its antitheistic bias, the historical research was known for scholarly rigor. Also, Doherty's position generally stands in the tradition of historical revisionism, and his theory has raised some interest among the scholars in the field. Most recently, his theory (though he is not personally in the film) has been touted (along with fellow historian Richard Carrier, theologian Robert M. Price, and others) in Brian Flemming's documentary film The God Who Wasn't There.