Held to Have Existed

I have been thinking and reading lately about the question of the “historical Jesus” versus the “mythical Jesus.”  This phrasing is to some degree unfair, in that possibly it assigns the term “myth” to what might be potentially a phenomenon altogether different from what we in modernity call a “myth.”  That is, what we might call a “myth”—a belief directed toward a conceptualized person or thing that does not exist, though it is purported to exist—might in different times and places constitute a belief with much different implications.  "Heaven," for example, is called a myth typically by people who deny an afterlife, but even so by people who understand simultaneously that the proponents of heaven’s existence do not ascribe to heaven some localizable or examinable existence.  The people who claim that heaven exists do not usually claim that the heavens can be climbed to or flown to—regardless of the Genesis reference to the raising of water into the dome of heaven.

Similarly—particularly in view of the quite different time and place of early Christianity’s milieu from our own—it might well be maintained that the “myth” of Jesus was understood by some of his followers to be conceptualized as in—and taking place in—a higher realm than our own.  I imagine, then, that the proper application of the term “myth” to the understanding of Jesus in terms of the early Church—and in terms of those of us who might subscribe to the religious legitimacy of the early Church—has to do with the scope only of claims that he actually walked the earth.  In the twenty-first century, the question of whether Jesus existed is reckoned to be an existential one in regard to Christianity.  To us, if Jesus did not exist, then “his” teachings and story constitute at best an amalgam of philosophy, and at worst a horrid fraud.

This determination to test Christianity by whether or not its founder existed is nonetheless—though it seems eminently logical—poised over a trapdoor.  As others have pointed out with more clarity than I, the postulate of whether or not “Jesus” existed is only by habit or convention connected to any supposed criteria of salience.  It is of arguable substance to claim that “Jesus” never existed, and to claim that his story is pure invention arising from a fraught landscape of religious and political conflict populated by fiery apocalyptic preachers, when in the extremity of the argument one might point simply to that company of preachers and say, “There!  There you have your evidence of the historicity of Jesus!  There is the factual basis from which—no infallible degree of specificity being imposed—the entirety of his story (at least in its temporal facets) might be extracted.”

And so, the question of Jesus’ “existence” is inseparable from the conventions—prevailing in our time and prevailing perhaps differently in other times—about the understood boundaries of the question.  I submit that this connection with “understood boundaries” is far more crucial to our thought processes than is generally recognized, and I contend that defying those “understood boundaries” is crucial in itself to far more fundamental questions (yes, they exist) about religion than whether or not by any particular criteria Jesus might be held to have existed.