The mythical reading: are the Gospel miracle narratives myth rather than either report or misunderstood fact?

David Friedrich Strauss, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The supernatural narratives are myth: unconscious poetic production by a community that already held Jesus to be the Messiah, cast in the forms the Hebrew scriptures had made available.12345

Sources

  1. For of the miracles of Moses and the prophets in the Old Testament, why should only the charitable and beneficial, and not the numerous miracles of vengeance, have been imitated, except because the spirit of Christ was a different spirit from that of Moses and Elias?
    A New Life of Jesus, The Life of Jesus for the People Vol 1, pp. 206–207
  2. Jesus might have had it and yet have been an enthusiast, and in respect of the declarations about his own dignity, a swindler and an impostor. 25. THE IDEA OF MYTH. In my former work I offered the idea of the Myth as tho key to the miraculous narratives of the Gospel, and much else that in the accounts of the Gospels is opposed to an historical view.
    A New Life of Jesus, The Life of Jesus for the People Vol 1, pp. 201–202
  3. If we pass from these grounds for the origination of a nar rative of this description, grounds existing in the very nature of the heroic legend, and from those, more special, existing in * Antiq. v. 10, 4. f Ignat. Epist. ad Magnes. 3. VOL. II.
    A New Life of Jesus, The Life of Jesus for the People Vol 2, p. 98
  4. It is obvious, that the case is pretty nearly the same with regard to both representations. If the latter had an individual author, it was his opinion that the historical statement could be accounted for only upon the supposition of a communication with a superior being; as it was that of Livy, that its explanation must lie in political views.
    The Life of Jesus Critically Examined
  5. Or, lastly, as psychical? But blindness is something so independent of the mental life, so entirely corporeal, that the idea of its removal at all, still less of its sudden removal by means of a mental operation, is not to be entertained.
    The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

Where the argument is made

  • Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (1835–36
  • Eliot's English translation of the 4th edition, 1846), especially the Introduction and the treatment of the infancy, transfiguration and resurrection narratives
  • Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet (1864)

How the argument was received

The founding claim of the discipline, still contested in its strong form and largely absorbed in its weak one.