Earl Doherty

Earl J. Doherty (born 1941) is a Canadian author of The Jesus Puzzle (1999), Challenging the Verdict (2001), and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (2009). Doherty argues for a version of the Christ myth theory, the thesis that Jesus did not exist as a historical figure. Doherty says that Paul thought of Jesus as a spiritual being executed in a spiritual realm. Quotes [The Mythical Jesus viewpoint is] the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction... Doherty Earl w:Earl Doherty Jesus: Neither God Nor Man - The Case for a Mythical Jesus http://books.google.com/books?id=KD6wQQAACAAJ 2009 Age of Reason Publications 978-0-9689259-2-8 vii–viii [Per writings earlier than Mark] the object of Christian faith [Jesus] is never spoken of as a human man who had recently lived, taught, performed miracles, suffered and died at the hands of human authorities, or rose from a tomb outside Jerusalem. There is no sign in the epistles of Mary or Joseph, Judas or John the Baptist, no birth story, teaching or appointment of apostles by Jesus, no mention of holy places or sites of Jesus’ career, not even the hill of Calvary or the empty tomb. This silence is so pervasive and so perplexing that attempted explanations for it have proven inadequate. Doherty Earl w:Earl Doherty Jesus Puzzle - Quick Assembly http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/puzzle1.htm www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net 10 February 2018 Piece No. 1: A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE [The Epistle to the Hebrews chapter 8, verse 4] contains a grammatically ambiguous statement in the Greek: it says either that “If Jesus were on earth [meaning now], he would not be a priest” or “If Jesus had been on earth, he would not have been a priest.” [...] What my analysis does is show that, within the context of the passage and through deductive reasoning, the present sense, allotting the statement to the present time, cannot be supported; in fact, it can be shown that the author can only be applying it to the past. Doherty Earl w:Earl Doherty Advancing the Cause: Thoughts on the New Atheism and the Myth of Jesus http://www.atheology.ca/montreal2010/long/doherty_earl_long_en.html Atheist Freethinkers 16 September 2017 2 October 2010 [In the Gospels] many elements of the Jesus story [depend] on passages and motifs from the Jewish scriptures. [...] John Shelby Spong (in his Liberating the Gospels) regards the Synoptic Gospels as midrashic fiction in virtually every detail, though he believes it was based on an historical man. Doherty Earl w:Earl Doherty The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins Journal of Higher Criticism Fall 1997 4 2 68-102 https://depts.drew.edu/jhc/jhcindex.html Piece No. 8: The Gospels Not History External links Category:1941 births Category:Authors from Canada Category:Atheists from Canada Category:Criticism of Christianity Category:Living people Category:Christ myth theory