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The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic and Legacy
This book traces Burton Mack's intellectual evolution, from a creative analyst of ancient texts, to a scholar searching for the motives and interests of Jesus's followers who composed those texts, and for the social logic of "the Christian myths" they created. Mack rejects depictions of Jesus that have emerged from the quest for the "historical Jesus"--peasant teacher, revolutionary leader, mystical visionary or miracle-working prophet--on the grounds that they are based on a priori assumptions about Jesus, and are therefore contradictory. In addition, he argues, these portrayals are untrue to the many images of Jesus produced by the early Christians. Using systematic analysis, Mack seeks to describe and understand the cultural and anthropological influences on the conception and adoption of Christian myths and rituals.
Hardcover
First published September 1, 2003
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About the author
Burton L. Mack
23 books12 followersJohn Wesley Professor of the New Testament at the school of Theology at Claremont
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July 10, 2012
For Burton Mack, the quest for the historical Jesus is a dead end. It presupposes that the gospels were attempts to actually relate a history or biography of Jesus. Instead, Mack shows that the gospels were literay constructs that served a specific purpose for a community engaging in the making of a new religion. Mack believes that this community eventually "won out" in the theological struggles with the original Christians that were the community that wrote Q. So a community that began with a remembering of the teaching of Jesus as given in Q is forgotten and replaced with a community that mythicized Jesus as a supernatural being. Highly reccommended.
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