The four Gospels depict Jesus as a man living in Roman Palestine in the first century. This presents a problem for those who would like to say he was nothing but a mythological figure, and they argue that the Gospels are not really the biographies they appear to be. Instead, Mythicists claim that they are allegorical works that only have the appearance of historical narrative.
Often, they will say that the Gospels contain rewritten stories from the Old Testament that are allegorically applied to the figure of Jesus. Originally, it was known that the Gospels were not works of history, they claim, but this knowledge was lost, and people came to regard them as biographies.
The Bible does contain passages that are allegorical rather than historical, such as the parables told by Jesus. A parable is an allegorical story used to teach spiritual lessons, but it is not a historical account. If Jesus says, “There was a father who had two sons,” it is the wrong question to ask, “Ooh! What were their names?”
The Bible even contains whole books that are allegorical. For example, Judith is an extended parable about God’s deliverance of his people. We know this because the author of Judith communicates this to his audience. The first verse says that the story took place “in the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh.” But this is a dead giveaway. Everyone in the ancient world knew that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of the Babylonians, not the Assyrians, and that he reigned in Babylon rather than the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. The author is thus intentionally combining the two great nations that had conquered God’s people.
In 721 B.C., the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and in 587 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar conquered the southern kingdom of Judah. By combining the two in the very first verse, the writer of Judith immediately telegraphs that what his audience is about to read is an allegory. The story then centers on a conflict between a general sent by Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians, and a woman called Judith, whose name means “Lady Jew” and who is thus a symbol of the Jewish people.
This would be like reading a story in which a heroine named Miss America fights a general sent by Adolf Hitler, king of the Russians. You would know immediately that it was an allegory about America and its historic enemies.
Ancient authors made clear to their audience what kind of literature they were reading. So if Mythicists wish to claim that the Gospels are allegories, they will need to provide evidence that the Gospels signal this to the audience.
They sometimes argue that events in the Gospels are rewritten accounts of things in the Old Testament, so the audience would have recognized that they were allegories. For example, Matthew presents Jesus as a new Moses. Both figures
- had to be rescued as children from a death order given by a king,
- spent time in Egypt,
- came out of Egypt,
- encountered notable bodies of water (the Red Sea in Moses’ case and the Jordan river in Jesus’),
- spent time in the wilderness (forty years in Moses’ case and forty days in Jesus’), and
- delivered God’s law from a mountain (Sinai in Moses’ case and in the Sermon on the Mount in Jesus’ case).
These parallels are not in dispute, and they’ve been recognized for centuries. The question is: why does Matthew include them? The answer is obvious: he’s telling his audience that Jesus is the prophet like Moses that God promised in Deuteronomy 18. That is the message Matthew is trying to send.
He’s not paradoxically combining elements in historically impossible ways to signal an allegory, like the author of Judith. He’s sending a simple and straightforward message: Jesus is the promised prophet like Moses. Just because the authors of the Gospels are sending a message, that doesn’t mean that the message is “This is an allegory.”
Let’s look at another example. Mythicists have claimed that the story of Jesus healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law in Mark 1 is based on the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath in 1 Kings 17. But how similar are these stories?
In 1 Kings 17, there is a drought in the land, which has caused a famine. God tells Elijah to leave Israel and go to a pagan woman living in Zarephath, who will feed him. When he meets the woman, she is gathering sticks, and he asks her for a drink of water. He also asks her for a small cake of bread, but she says she is gathering sticks to build a fire so she can use the last of the flour and oil she has to make food for herself and her son. After that, they will die of starvation. But Elijah tells her that if she feeds him, the supply of flour and oil she has will not run out until God again sends rain. The woman complies, the food miraculously does not run out, and Elijah stays with her and her son many days.
Now let’s look at Mark 1:
And immediately [Jesus] left the synagogue, and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever, and immediately they told him of her. And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her; and she served them.
That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered together about the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him (vv. 29-34).
This is not remotely the same story:
- There is no drought or famine.
- Jesus does not leave Israel.
- Simon’s mother-in-law is a Jew, not a Gentile.
- The Gentile woman is a widow, but Mark doesn’t say anything about Simon’s mother-in-law being a widow.
- Also, she isn’t starving; she’s sick.
- The miracle is one of healing, not the multiplication of food.
- The miracle that Elijah performed was private, and he didn’t miraculously make food for other Gentiles; rather, they brought other sick people to Jesus once he healed Simon’s mother-in-law, and he healed them, too.
There is no way that someone reading about the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law would remember the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath and think, “Oh! This is just a rewritten version of that. The author is writing an allegory!” Mark is writing this story to tell us something, but the message isn’t that his Gospel is allegorical. It’s that Jesus has power over sickness.
This shows the lengths Mythicists go to when interpreting texts. The only real similarity between the two stories is that a prophet helps a woman with a problem. But that happens all the time in the Bible. Jesus himself does it more than once in Mark alone! (See Mark 5:25-34 and 7:24-29.) You need more than that to say that one account is a rewritten version of another and even more to argue that the latter account is an allegorical version of the former.
The Gospels simply do not contain the kind of clues needed to tell the audience that they are reading allegories.
Scholars from the early Church down to today, whether Christian or not, have rejected the Mythicist interpretation of the Gospels. If Mythicists were right, others throughout history would have recognized their allegorical nature. Instead, they have recognized them as what they appear to be: biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, not allegories about a mythological figure.
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