Earl Doherty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Earl Doherty (born 1941), currently living in Canada, is the author of The Jesus Puzzle, a work published in 1999 by Canadian Humanist Publications 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 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.

[edit] Books

• The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (1999) ISBN 0-9689259-1-X (Age of Reason Publications edition, 2005)
• Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-examination of Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" (2001) ISBN 0-9689259-0-1

[edit] References

This article does not cite any references or sources. (March 2008) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

[edit] External links

• Doherty's web site
• More articles by Earl Doherty
• Fear and Loathing in a Lost Gospel by Chris Zeichman, criticising Doherty's positions on the Q document
• "Fear and Loathing of Doherty's Use of Q by Earl Doherty, a response to Chris Zeichman's critique
• Did Jesus Exist? "Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity", a review of The Jesus Puzzle by Richard Carrier
• Taking Apart "The Jesus Puzzle"
• The Christ Myth Revisited by Frank Zindler
• A Magdalene Triptych by Earl Doherty, a comparative study of Robert M. Price's The Da Vinci Fraud, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Ki Longfellow's The Secret Magdalene.