americanatheists

American Atheists has joined forces with a group of New Testament scholars known as "The Mythicists' Forum" to sponsor a prize of one thousand dollars for the essay that best sheds light on the origins of Christianity while simultaneously supporting the proposition that "Jesus of Nazareth" did not exist as an historical figure. 

"The theory that Jesus of Nazareth is a mythical figure goes back at least as far as Thomas Paine," says former president of American Atheists Frank Zindler—himself a member of the Forum and annotator of the AAP publication Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason Part Three. "The Jesus-Myth theory has been generally scorned by most scholars over the years," he continues, "but it has resurfaced somewhere in America or Europe every few decades since the 1790s." He argues that on each occasion of revival the theory has not been refuted to any convincing degree but merely voted down by scholars whose livelihood depended upon the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth. "Mostly, though," he adds, "the work of mythicists was just ignored and denied publicity. Most of them never got a hearing—fair or otherwise."

According to Zindler, American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O'Hair herself was a "mythicist" and had for some years been working on a book entitled Jesus Christ Superfraud—a book left unfinished at the time of her murder in 1995. His own book The Jesus the Jews Never Knew shows that the ancient Jews not only never heard of any "Jesus of Nazareth," they never heard of Nazareth!

In 2008, American Atheist Press published The Myth of Nazareth: the Invented Town of Jesus, by René Salm. The book reexamines all the archaeological evidence from the place now called Nazareth and concludes that the site was not inhabited when Jesus of Nazareth should have been living there with his family. Zindler is very enthusiastic concerning the importance of this book. "We know there never was a Wizard of Oz, because we know that neither Emerald City nor the Land of Oz ever existed. If there was no Nazareth in which Jesus of Nazareth could have lived, well... you get the point!" he says.

American Atheists is hoping that by awarding a prize for the best "mythicist essay" it will help to assemble a "critical mass" of scholars who will be able to create a genuine science of Christian origins. Although there is only one prize of a thousand dollars to be awarded, at the discretion of the judges one or more runner-up essays will share the honor of being published with the winning essay in a symposium volume to be published by the Mythicists' Forum.