title: Christ myth theory

text: In "Jesus Outside the New Testament" (2000), Van Voorst considers references to Jesus in classical writings, Jewish writings, hypothetical sources of the canonical Gospels, and extant Christian writings outside the New Testament. He concludes that non-Christian sources provide "a small but certain corroboration of certain New Testament historical traditions on the family background, time of life, ministry, and death of Jesus", as well as "evidence of the content of Christian preaching that is independent of the New Testament", while extra-biblical Christian sources give access to "some important information about the earliest traditions on Jesus". However, New Testament sources remain central for "both the main lines and the details about Jesus' life and teaching".


title: Christ myth theory

text: Most historians agree that Jesus or his followers established a new Jewish sect that attracted both Jewish and gentile converts. Out of this Jewish sect developed Early Christianity, which was very diverse, with proto-orthodoxy and "heretical" views like Gnosticism alongside each other. According to New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, a number of early Christianities existed in the first century AD, from which developed various Christian traditions and denominations, including proto-orthodoxy. According to theologian James D. G. Dunn, four types of early Christianity can be discerned: Jewish Christianity, Hellenistic Christianity, Apocalyptic Christianity, and early Catholicism.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In "Christ and the Caesars" (1877), philosopher Bruno Bauer suggested that Christianity was a synthesis of the Stoicism of Seneca the Younger, Greek Neoplatonism, and the Jewish theology of Philo as developed by pro-Roman Jews such as Josephus. This new religion was in need of a founder and created its Christ. In a review of Bauer's work, Robert Price notes that Bauer's basic stance regarding the Stoic tone and the fictional nature of the gospels are still repeated in contemporary scholarship.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Doherty notes that, with the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Greek culture and language spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean world, influencing the already existing cultures there. The Roman conquest of this area added to the cultural diversity, but also to a sense of alienation and pessimism. A rich diversity of religious and philosophical ideas was available and Judaism was held in high regard by non-Jews for its monotheistic ideas and its high moral standards. Yet monotheism was also offered by Greek philosophy, especially Platonism, with its high God and the intermediary Logos. According to Doherty, "Out of this rich soil of ideas arose Christianity, a product of both Jewish and Greek philosophy", echoing Bruno Bauer, who argued that Christianity was a synthesis of Stoicism, Greek Neoplatonism, and Jewish thought.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Robert Price notes that Christianity started among Hellenized Jews, who mixed allegorical interpretations of Jewish traditions with Jewish Gnostic, Zoroastrian, and mystery cult elements. Some myth proponents note that some stories in the New Testament reinforce Old Testament prophecies and repeat stories about figures such as Elijah, Elisha, Moses and Joshua in order to appeal to Jewish converts. Price notes that almost all the gospel stories have parallels in the Old Testament and other traditions, concluding that the gospels are not independent sources for a historical Jesus, but "legend and myth, fiction and redaction".


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Doherty, the rapid growth of early Christian communities and the great variety of ideas cannot be explained by a single missionary effort, but points to parallel developments that arose at various places and competed for support. Paul's arguments against rival apostles also point to this diversity. Doherty further notes that Yeshua (Jesus) is a generic name, meaning "Yahweh saves" and refers to the concept of divine salvation, which could apply to any kind of saving entity or Wisdom.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to mainstream scholarship, Jesus was an eschatological preacher or teacher, who was believed by his followers to be exalted after his death. The Pauline letters incorporate creeds, or confessions of faith, that predate Paul, and give essential information on the faith of the early Jerusalem community around James, 'the brother of Jesus'. These pre-Pauline creeds date to within a few years of Jesus' death and developed within the Christian community in Jerusalem. The First Epistle to the Corinthians contains one of the earliest Christian creeds expressing belief in the risen Jesus, namely :


title: Christ myth theory

text: James Dunn states that in Paul "recites the foundational belief", namely "that Christ died". According to Dunn, "Paul was told about a Jesus who had died two years earlier or so." also refers to others before Paul who preached the creed.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado, Jesus' death was interpreted as a redemptive death "for our sins" in accordance with God's plan as contained in the Jewish scriptures. The significance lay in "the theme of divine necessity and fulfillment of the scriptures," rather than the later Pauline emphasis on "Jesus' death as a sacrifice or an expiation for our sins." For the early Jewish Christians, "the idea that Messiah's death was a necessary redemptive event functioned more as an apologetic explanation for Jesus' crucifixion", "proving that Jesus' death was no surprise to God." According to Krister Stendahl, the main concern of Paul's writings on Jesus' role, and salvation by faith, is not the individual conscience of human sinners, and their doubts about being chosen by God or not, but the problem of the inclusion of gentile (Greek) Torah observers into God's covenant.


title: Christ myth theory

text: The appearances of Jesus are often explained as visionary experiences, in which the presence of Jesus was felt. According to Ehrman, the visions of Jesus and the subsequent belief in Jesus' resurrection radically changed the perceptions of his early followers, concluding from his absence that he must have been exalted to heaven, by God himself, exalting him to an unprecedented status and authority. According to Hurtado, the resurrection experiences were religious experiences that "seem to have included visions of (and/or ascents to) God's heaven, in which the glorified Christ was seen in an exalted position", and that may have occurred mostly during corporate worship. Johan Leman contends that the communal meals provided a context in which participants entered a state of mind in which the presence of Jesus was felt.


title: Christ myth theory

text: The Pauline creeds contain elements of a Christ myth and its cultus, such as the Christ hymn of Philippians 2:6–11, which portrays Jesus as an incarnated and subsequently exalted heavenly being. Scholars view these as indications that the incarnation and exaltation of Jesus was part of Christian tradition a few years after his death and over a decade before the writing of the Pauline epistles.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Recent scholarship places the exaltation and devotion of Jesus firmly in a Jewish context. Andrew Chester argues that "for Paul, Jesus is clearly a figure of the heavenly world, and thus fits a messianic category already developed within Judaism, where the Messiah is a human or angelic figure belonging ... in the heavenly world, a figure who at the same time has had specific, limited role on earth". According to Ehrman, Paul regarded Jesus to be an angel, who was incarnated on earth. According to James Waddell, Paul's conception of Jesus as a heavenly figure was influenced by the Book of Enoch and its conception of the Messiah.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Christ myth theorists generally reject the idea that Paul's epistles refer to a historical individual. According to Doherty, the Jesus of Paul was a divine Son of God, existing in a spiritual realm where he was crucified and resurrected. This mythological Jesus was based on exegesis of the Old Testament and mystical visions of a risen Jesus.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Carrier, the genuine Pauline epistles show that the Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul believed in a visionary or dream Jesus, based on a pesher of Septuagint verses and Zechariah 3 and 6, Daniel 9 and Isaiah 52–53. Carrier notes that there is little if any concrete information about Jesus' earthly life in the Pauline epistles. According to Carrier, originally "Jesus was the name of a celestial being, subordinate to God," who came from a tradition of "dying-and-rising" savior gods like Romulus, Osiris, and Zalmoxis. Along with Mithras, these gods were all the children of a higher god, underwent a passion, conquered death, and existed on Earth within human history. According to Carrier "[t]his 'Jesus' would most likely have been the same archangel identified by Philo of Alexandria as already extant in Jewish theology", that Philo knew by all of the attributes by which Paul knew Jesus. According to Carrier, Philo says this being was identified as the figure named Jesus in the Book of Zechariah, implying that "already before Christianity there were Jews aware of a celestial being named Jesus who had all of the attributes the earliest Christians were associating with their celestial being named Jesus".


title: Christ myth theory

text: Raphael Lataster, following Carrier, also argues that "Jesus began as a celestial messiah that certain Second Temple Jews already believed in, and was later allegorised in the Gospels."


title: Christ myth theory

text: Ehrman notes that Doherty, like many other mythicists, "quotes professional scholars at length when their views prove useful for developing aspects of his argument, but he fails to point out that not a single of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis." Ehrman has also criticized Doherty for misquoting scholarly sources as if in support of his celestial being-hypothesis, whereas those sources explicitly "[refer] to Christ becoming a human being in flesh on earth—precisely the view he rejects."


title: Christ myth theory

text: James McGrath criticizes Carrier, stating that Carrier is ignoring the details, adding that "Philo is offering an allusive reference to, and allegorical treatment of, a text in Zechariah which mentioned a historical high priest named Joshua."


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Hurtado, for Paul and his contemporaries Jesus was a human being, who was exalted as Messiah and Lord after his crucifixion. According to Hurtado, "There is no evidence whatsoever of a 'Jewish archangel Jesus' in any of the second-temple Jewish evidence. ... Instead, all second-temple instances of the name are for historical figures." Hurtado rejects Carrier's claim that "Philo of Alexandria mentions an archangel named 'Jesus'", instead stating that Philo mentions a priestly figure called Joshua, and a royal personage whose name can be interpreted as "rising," among other connotations. According to Hurtado, there is no "Jesus Rising" in either Zechariah nor Philo.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Ehrman notes that "there were no Jews prior to Christianity who thought that Isaiah 53 (or any of the other "suffering" passages) referred to the future messiah." Only after his death were these texts used to interpret his suffering in a meaningful way, though "Isaiah is not speaking about the future messiah, and he was never interpreted by any Jews prior to the first century as referring to the messiah."


title: Christ myth theory

text: Simon Gathercole at Cambridge also evaluated the mythicist arguments for the claim that Paul believed in a heavenly, celestial Jesus who was never on Earth. Gathercole concludes that Carrier's arguments—and more broadly, the mythicist positions on different aspects of Paul's letters—are contradicted by the historical data and that Paul says a number of things regarding Jesus' life on Earth, his personality, family, etc.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Jesus should be understood in the Palestinian and Jewish context of the first century CE. Most of the themes, epithets, and expectations formulated in the New Testamentical literature have Jewish origins and are elaborations of these themes. According to Hurtado, Roman-era Judaism refused "to worship any deities other than the God of Israel," including "any of the adjutants of the biblical God, such as angels, messiahs, etc." The Jesus-devotion which emerged in early Christianity should therefore be regarded as a specific, Christian innovation in the Jewish context.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Wells, in his early years, Doherty, and Carrier, the mythical Jesus was derived from Wisdom traditions, the personification of an eternal aspect of God, who came to visit human beings. Doherty notes that the concept of a spiritual Christ was the result of common philosophical and religious ideas of the first and second century AD, in which the idea of an intermediary force between God and the world were common.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Doherty, the Christ of Paul shares similarities with the Greco-Roman mystery cults. Authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy argue that Jesus was a deity, akin to the mystery cults, while Dorothy Murdock argues that the Christ myth draws heavily on the Egyptian story of Osiris and Horus. According to Carrier, early Christianity was one of several mystery cults that developed out of Hellenistic influences on local cults and religions.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Alvar Ellegård has argued that Paul's Jesus may have lived far earlier, in a dimly remembered remote past. Wells argues that Paul's Jesus did not have a definite historical moment in mind for when he was supposedly crucified.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Price, the "Toledot Yeshu" places Jesus "about 100 BCE", while Epiphanius of Salamis and the Talmud make references to "Jewish and Jewish-Christian belief" that Jesus lived about a century earlier than usually assumed. According to Price, this implies that "perhaps the Jesus figure was at first an ahistorical myth and various attempts were made to place him in a plausible historical context, just as Herodotus and others tried to figure out when Hercules 'must have' lived".


title: Christ myth theory

text: Mainstream scholarship disagrees with these interpretations, and regards them as outdated applications of ideas and methodologies from the "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule". According to Philip Davies, the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed "composed of stock motifs (and mythic types) drawn from all over the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world" but this does not mean that Jesus was "invented"; according to Davies, "the existence of a guru of some kind is more plausible and economical than any other explanation". Ehrman states that mythicists make too much of the perceived parallels with pagan religions and mythologies. According to Ehrman, critical-historical research has clearly shown the Jewish roots and influences of Christianity.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Many mainstream biblical scholars respond that most of the perceived parallels with mystery religions are either coincidences or without historical basis and/or that these parallels do not prove that a Jesus figure did not live. Boyd and Eddy doubt that Paul viewed Jesus similar to the savior deities found in ancient mystery religions. Ehrman notes that Doherty proposes that the mystery cults had a neo-Platonic cosmology, but that Doherty gives no evidence for this assertion. Furthermore, "the mystery cults are never mentioned by Paul or by any other Christian author of the first hundred years of the Church," nor did they play a role in the worldview of any of the Jewish groups of the first century.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Boyd and Eddy criticize the idea that "Paul viewed Jesus as a cosmic savior who lived in the past", referring to various passages in the Pauline epistles that seem to contradict this idea. In , Paul says he met with James, the "Lord's brother"; – refers to people to whom Jesus' had appeared, and who were Paul's contemporaries; and in Paul refers to the Jews "who both killed the Lord Jesus" and "drove out us" as the same people, indicating that the death of Jesus was within the same timeframe as the persecution of Paul.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Van Voorst, "The argument that Jesus never existed, but was invented by the Christian movement around the year 100, goes back to Enlightenment times, when the historical-critical study of the past was born", and may have originated with Lord Bolingbroke, an English deist.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Walter Weaver, the beginnings of the formal denial of the existence of Jesus can be traced to late 18th-century France with the works of Constantin François Chassebœuf de Volney and Charles-François Dupuis. Volney and Dupuis argued that Christianity was an amalgamation of various ancient mythologies and that Jesus was a totally mythical character. Dupuis argued that ancient rituals in Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and India had influenced the Christian story which was allegorized as the histories of solar deities, such as Sol Invictus. Dupuis also said that the resurrection of Jesus was an allegory for the growth of the sun's strength in the sign of Aries at the spring equinox. Volney argued that Abraham and Sarah were derived from Brahma and his wife Saraswati, and that Christ was related to Krishna. Volney made use of a draft version of Dupuis' work and at times differed from him, for example, in arguing that the gospel stories were not intentionally created, but were compiled organically. Volney's perspective became associated with the ideas of the French Revolution, which hindered the acceptance of these views in England. Despite this, his work gathered significant following among British and American radical thinkers during the 19th century.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 1835, David Strauss published his extremely controversial "The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined" ("Das Leben Jesu"). According to Elisabeth Hurt, Strauss "arrived at a Christianity depersonalized and anonymous, reducing Jesus to nothing more than a gifted genius whom legend had gradually deified." While not denying that Jesus existed, he did argue that the miracles in the New Testament were mythical additions with little basis in fact. According to Strauss, the early church developed these stories in order to present Jesus as the Messiah of the Jewish prophecies. This perspective was in opposition to the prevailing views of Strauss' time: rationalism, which explained the miracles as misinterpretations of non-supernatural events, and the supernaturalist view that the biblical accounts were entirely accurate. Strauss' third way, in which the miracles are explained as myths developed by early Christians to support their evolving conception of Jesus, heralded a new epoch in the textual and historical treatment of the rise of Christianity.


title: Christ myth theory

text: German Bruno Bauer, who taught at the University of Bonn, took Strauss' arguments further and became the first author to systematically argue that Jesus did not exist. Beginning in 1841 with his "Criticism of the Gospel History of the Synoptics", Bauer argued that Jesus was primarily a literary figure, but left open the question of whether a historical Jesus existed at all. Then in his "Criticism of the Pauline Epistles" (1850–1852) and in "A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin" (1850–1851), Bauer argued that Jesus had not existed. Bauer's work was heavily criticized at the time, as in 1839 he was removed from his position at the University of Bonn and his work did not have much impact on future myth theorists.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In his two-volume, 867-page book "Anacalypsis" (1836), English gentleman Godfrey Higgins said that "the mythos of the Hindus, the mythos of the Jews and the mythos of the Greeks are all at bottom the same; and are contrivances under the appearance of histories to perpetuate doctrines", and that Christian editors "either from roguery or folly, corrupted them all". In his 1875 book "The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors", American Kersey Graves said that many demigods from different countries shared similar stories, traits or quotes as Jesus and he used Higgins as the main source for his arguments. The validity of the claims in the book have been greatly criticized by Christ myth proponents including Richard Carrier, and are largely dismissed by biblical scholars.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Starting in the 1870s, English poet and author Gerald Massey became interested in Egyptology and reportedly taught himself Egyptian hieroglyphics at the British Museum. In 1883, Massey published "The Natural Genesis", in which he asserted parallels between Jesus and the Egyptian god Horus. His other major work, "Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World," was published shortly before his death in 1907. His assertions have influenced various later writers such as Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Tom Harpur.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In the 1870s and 1880s, a group of scholars associated with the University of Amsterdam, known in German scholarship as the Radical Dutch school, rejected the authenticity of the Pauline epistles and took a generally negative view of the Bible's historical value. Abraham Dirk Loman argued in 1881 that all New Testament writings belonged to the 2nd century and doubted that Jesus was a historical figure, but later said the core of the gospels was genuine.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Additional early Christ myth proponents included Swiss skeptic Rudolf Steck, English historian Edwin Johnson, English radical Reverend Robert Taylor and his associate Richard Carlile.


title: Christ myth theory

text: During the early 20th century, several writers published arguments against Jesus' historicity, often drawing on the work of liberal theologians, who tended to deny any value to sources for Jesus outside the New Testament and limited their attention to Mark and the hypothetical Q source. They also made use of the growing field of religious history which found sources for Christian ideas in Greek and Oriental mystery cults, rather than Judaism.


title: Christ myth theory

text: The work of social anthropologist James George Frazer has also influenced various myth theorists, although Frazer himself believed that Jesus existed. In 1890, Frazer published the first edition of "The Golden Bough" which attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief. This work became the basis of many later authors who argued that the story of Jesus was a fiction created by Christians. After a number of people claimed that he was a myth theorist, in the 1913 expanded edition of "The Golden Bough" he expressly stated that his position assumed a historical Jesus.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 1900, Scottish Member of Parliament John Mackinnon Robertson argued that Jesus never existed, but was an invention by a first-century messianic cult of Joshua, whom he identifies as a solar deity. The English school master George Robert Stowe Mead argued in 1903 that Jesus had existed, but that he had lived in 100 BC. Mead based his argument on the Talmud, which pointed to Jesus being crucified . In Mead's view, this would mean that the Christian gospels are mythical.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 1909, school teacher John Eleazer Remsburg published "The Christ", which made a distinction between a possible historical Jesus (Jesus of Nazareth) and the Jesus of the Gospels (Jesus of Bethlehem). Remsburg thought that there was good reason to believe that the historical Jesus existed, but that the "Christ of Christianity" was a mythological creation. Remsburg compiled a list of 42 names of "writers who lived and wrote during the time, or within a century after the time" who Remsburg felt should have written about Jesus if the gospel accounts were reasonably accurate, but who did not.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Also in 1909, German philosophy Professor Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews wrote "The Christ Myth" to argue that Christianity had been a Jewish Gnostic cult that spread by appropriating aspects of Greek philosophy and life-death-rebirth deities. In his later books "The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus" (1912) and "The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present" (1926), Drews reviewed the biblical scholarship of his time, as well as the work of other myth theorists, attempting to show that everything reported about the historical Jesus had a mythical character.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Beginning in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the second quest for the historical Jesus, interest in the Christ myth theory was revived by George A. Wells, whose ideas were elaborated by Earl Doherty. With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, their ideas gained popular interest, giving way to a multitude of publications and websites aimed at a popular audience, most notably Richard Carrier, often taking a polemical stance toward Christianity. Their ideas are supported by Robert Price, an academic theologian, while somewhat different stances on the mythological origins are offered by Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas L. Brodie, both also accomplished scholars in theology.


title: Christ myth theory

text: The French philosopher Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879-1959), published in the 1920s and 1930s, was a predecessor for contemporary mythicists. According to Couchoud, Christianity started not with a biography of Jesus but "a collective mystical experience, sustaining a divine history mystically revealed". Couchaud's Jesus is not a "myth", but a "religious conception".


title: Christ myth theory

text: Robert Price mentions Couchoud's comment on the Christ Hymn, one of the relics of the Christ cults to which Paul converted. Couchoud noted that in this hymn the name Jesus was given to the Christ after his death, implying that there cannot have been a ministry by a teacher called Jesus.


title: Christ myth theory

text: George Albert Wells (1926–2017), a professor of German, revived interest in the Christ myth theory. In his early work, including "Did Jesus Exist?" (1975), Wells argued that because the gospels were written decades after Jesus' death by Christians who were theologically motivated but had no personal knowledge of him, a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed.


title: Christ myth theory

text: From the mid-1990s onwards, Wells came to accept that the Jesus of the gospel stories was partly based on a historical figure. In "The Jesus Myth" (1999) and later works, Wells argues that two Jesus narratives were fused into one, namely Paul's mythical Jesus, and a historical Jesus from a Galilean preaching tradition, whose teachings were preserved in the Q source. According to Wells, both figures owe much of their substance to ideas from Jewish Wisdom literature.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 2000 Van Voorst gave an overview of proponents of the "Nonexistence Hypothesis" and their arguments, presenting seven arguments against the hypothesis as put forward by Wells and his predecessors, detailing his criticisms. According to Maurice Casey, Wells' work repeated the main points of the "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule", which are deemed outdated by mainstream scholarship. His works were not discussed by New Testament scholars, because it was "not considered to be original, and all his main points were thought to have been refuted long ago, for reasons which were very well known".


title: Christ myth theory

text: Canadian writer Earl Doherty (born 1941) was introduced to the Christ myth theme by a lecture by Wells in the 1970s. Doherty follows the lead of Wells, but disagrees on the historicity of Jesus, arguing that "everything in Paul points to a belief in an entirely divine Son who 'lived' and acted in the spiritual realm, in the same mythical setting in which all the other savior deities of the day were seen to operate". According to Doherty, Paul's Christ originated as a myth derived from middle Platonism with some influence from Jewish mysticism and belief in a historical Jesus emerged only among Christian communities in the 2nd century. Doherty agrees with Richard Bauckham that the earliest Christology was already a "high Christology", that is, Jesus was an incarnation of the pre-existent Christ, but deems it "hardly credible" that such a belief could develop in such a short time among the Jews. Therefore, Doherty concludes that Christianity started with the myth of this incarnated Christ, who was subsequently historicised. According to Doherty, the nucleus of this historicised Jesus of the Gospels can be found in the Jesus-movement that wrote the Q source. Eventually, Q's Jesus and Paul's Christ were combined in the Gospel of Mark by a predominantly gentile community. In time, the gospel narrative of this embodiment of Wisdom became interpreted as the literal history of the life of Jesus.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Eddy and Boyd characterize Doherty's work as appealing to the "History of Religions School". In a book criticizing the Christ myth theory, New Testament scholar Maurice Casey describes Doherty as "perhaps the most influential of all the mythicists", but one who is unable to understand the ancient texts he uses in his arguments.


title: Christ myth theory

text: American independent scholar Richard Carrier (born 1969) reviewed Doherty's work on the origination of Jesus and eventually concluded that the evidence favored the core of Doherty's thesis. According to Carrier, following Couchoud and Doherty, Christianity started with the belief in a new deity called Jesus, "a spiritual, mythical figure". According to Carrier, this new deity was fleshed out in the gospels, which added a narrative framework and Cynic-like teachings, and eventually came to be perceived as a historical biography. Carrier argues in his book "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt" that the Jesus figure was probably originally known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture, which were then crafted into a historical figure to communicate the claims of the gospels allegorically. Those allegories were subsequently believed as fact during the struggle for control of the Christian churches of the first century. Citing the methodological failure of the criteria of authenticity and asserting a failure of the "entire quest for criteria", Richard Carrier writes, "The entire field of Jesus studies has thus been left without any valid method."


title: Christ myth theory

text: American New Testament scholar and former Baptist pastor Robert M. Price (born 1954) has questioned the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including "Deconstructing Jesus" (2000), "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man" (2003), "Jesus Is Dead" (2007) and "The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems" (2011). Price uses critical-historical methods, but also uses "history-of-religions parallel[s]", or the "Principle of Analogy", to show similarities between gospel narratives and non-Christian Middle Eastern myths. Price criticises some of the criteria of critical Bible research, such as the criterion of dissimilarity and the criterion of embarrassment. Price further notes that "consensus is no criterion" for the historicity of Jesus. According to Price, if critical methodology is applied with ruthless consistency, one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus' historicity.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In "Deconstructing Jesus", Price claims that the Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a "composite figure", out of which a broad variety of historical Jesuses can be reconstructed, any one of which may have been the real Jesus, but not all of them together. According to Price, various Jesus images flowed together at the origin of Christianity, some of them possibly based on myth, some of them possibly based on a historical "Jesus the Nazorean", and that the historical Jesus has become obscured behind the dogma. Price concluded that it is plausible that there might have been a historical Jesus, whose story was completely assimilated into the "Mythic Hero Archetype", but that it was no longer possible to be sure there had ever been a real person underneath all the fiction.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In "Jesus is Dead" (2007) Price again stated the possibility that the gospel Jesus is not based on a historical individual, and that the "Christ of faith" is "a synthetic construct of theologians".


title: Christ myth theory

text: In his later contribution, "Jesus at the Vanishing Point", appearing in "The Historical Jesus: Five Views" (2009), Price concludes that the gospel story is a "tapestry of Scripture quotes from the Old Testament." He further states that the gospel story also incorporates many of the recurrent features of the Indo-European and Semitic hero myths—what Price calls the "Mythic Hero Archetype". Price acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Thomas L. Thompson (born 1939), Professor emeritus of theology at the University of Copenhagen, is a leading biblical minimalist of the Old Testament. According to Thompson, "questions of understanding and interpreting biblical texts" are more relevant than "questions about the historical existence of individuals such as ... Jesus". In his view, Jesus' existence is based more on theological necessity than historical evidence. He believes that most theologians accept that large parts of the Gospels are not to be taken at face value, while also treating the historicity of Jesus as not an open question. In his 2007 book "The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David", Thompson argues that the biblical accounts of both King David and Jesus of Nazareth are not historical accounts, but are mythical in nature and based on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek and Roman literature. Those accounts are based on the Messiah mytheme, a king anointed by God to restore the Divine order at Earth. Thompson also argues that the resurrection of Jesus is taken directly from the story of the dying and rising god, Dionysus. Thompson concludes, "A negative statement, however, that such a figure did not exist, cannot be reached: only that we have no warrant for making such a figure part of our history."


title: Christ myth theory

text: Thompson co-edited the contributions from a diverse range of scholars in the 2012 book "Is This Not the Carpenter?: The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus". In the introduction he writes, "The essays collected in this volume have a modest purpose. Neither establishing the historicity of a historical Jesus nor possessing an adequate warrant for dismissing it, our purpose is to clarify our engagement with critical historical and exegetical methods."


title: Christ myth theory

text: Ehrman and Casey have characterized Thompson's position as mythicist, and Ehrman has criticised Thompson, questioning his qualifications and expertise regarding New Testament research. In a 2012 online article, Thompson defended his qualifications to address New Testament issues, and objected to Ehrman's statement that "[a] different sort of support for a mythicist position comes in the work of Thomas L. Thompson." According to Thompson, "Bart Ehrman has attributed to my book arguments and principles which I had never presented, certainly not that Jesus had never existed", and reiterated his position that the issue of Jesus' existence cannot be determined one way or the other. Thompson further states that Jesus is not to be regarded as "the notoriously stereotypical figure of ... (mistaken) eschatological prophet", as Ehrman does, but is modelled on "the royal figure of a conquering messiah", derived from Jewish writings. In response to Thompson's article, Maurice Casey dismissed Thompson as "an incompetent New Testament scholar".


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 2012, the Irish Dominican priest and theologian Thomas L. Brodie (born 1943), holding a PhD from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome and a co-founder and former director of the Dominican Biblical Institute in Limerick, published "Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery". In this book, Brodie, who previously had published academic works on the Hebrew prophets, argued that the gospels are essentially a rewriting of the stories of Elijah and Elisha when viewed as a unified account in the Books of Kings. This view led Brodie to the conclusion that Jesus is mythical. Brodie's argument builds on his previous work, in which he stated that rather than being separate and fragmented, the stories of Elijah and Elisha are united and that 1 Kings 16:29 – 2 Kings 13:25 is a natural extension of 1 Kings 17 – 2 Kings 8 which have a coherence not generally observed by other biblical scholars. Brodie then views the Elijah–Elisha story as the underlying model for the gospel narratives.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In response to Brodie's publication of his view that Jesus was mythical, the Dominican order banned him from writing and lecturing, although he was allowed to stay on as a brother of the Irish Province, which continued to care for him. According to Gerard Norton, "There is an unjustifiable jump between methodology and conclusion" in Brodie's book that "are not soundly based on scholarship". According to Norton, they are "a memoir of a series of significant moments or events" in Brodie's life that reinforced "his core conviction" that neither Jesus nor Paul of Tarsus were historical.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In his books "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" (1970) and "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth" (1979), British archaeologist and philologist John M. Allegro advanced the view that stories of early Christianity originated in a shamanistic Essene clandestine cult centered around the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He also argued that the story of Jesus was based on the crucifixion of the Teacher of Righteousness in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Allegro's position was criticised sharply by Welsh historian Philip Jenkins, who wrote that Allegro relied on texts that did not exist in quite the form he was citing them. Based on this and many other negative reactions to the book, Allegro's publisher later apologized for issuing the book and Allegro was forced to resign his academic post.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Alvar Ellegård, in "The Myth of Jesus" (1992), and "Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ. A Study in Creative Mythology" (1999), argued that Jesus lived 100 years before the accepted dates, and was a teacher of the Essenes. According to Ellegård, Paul was connected with the Essenes, and had a vision of this Jesus.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in their 1999 publication "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God?" propose that Jesus did not exist as a historically identifiable individual, but was instead a syncretic re-interpretation of the fundamental pagan "godman" by the Gnostics, who were the original sect of Christianity. The book has been negatively received by scholars, and also by Christ mythicists.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Influenced by Massey and Higgins, Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880–1963), an American Theosophist, argued an Egyptian etymology to the Bible that the gospels were symbolic rather than historic and that church leaders started to misinterpret the New Testament in the third century. Building on Kuhn's work, author and ordained priest Tom Harpur in his 2004 book "The Pagan Christ" listed similarities among the stories of Jesus, Horus, Mithras, Buddha and others. According to Harpur, in the second or third centuries the early church created the fictional impression of a literal and historic Jesus and then used forgery and violence to cover up the evidence.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 2014 Raphael Lataster, a lecturer in religious philosophy at the University of Sydney wrote an opinion piece in "The Conversation" and "The Washington Post", stating that the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth "just doesn't add up" and that "there are clearly good reasons to doubt the existence of Jesus". The articles were met with widespread criticism from the scholarly community.


title: Christ myth theory

text: The Christ myth theory enjoyed brief popularity in the Soviet Union, where it was supported by Sergey Kovalev, Alexander Kazhdan, Abram Ranovich, Nikolai Rumyantsev and Robert Vipper. However, several scholars, including Kazhdan, later retracted their views about a mythical Jesus, and by the end of the 1980s Iosif Kryvelev remained as virtually the only proponent of the Christ myth theory in Soviet academia.


title: Christ myth theory

text: In modern scholarship, the Christ myth theory is considered a fringe theory, and finds virtually no support from scholars, to the point of being addressed in footnotes or almost completely ignored due to the obvious weaknesses they espouse. Common criticisms against the Christ myth theory include: general lack of expertise or relationship to academic institutions and current scholarship; reliance on arguments from silence, dismissal of what sources actually state, and superficial comparisons with mythologies.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to agnostic scholar Bart D. Ehrman, nearly all scholars who study the early Christian period believe that Jesus did exist, and Ehrman observes that mythicist writings are generally of poor quality because they are usually authored by amateurs and non-scholars who have no academic credentials or have never taught at academic institutions. Maurice Casey, an agnostic scholar of New Testament and early Christianity, stated that the belief among professors that Jesus existed is generally completely certain. According to Casey, the view that Jesus did not exist is "the view of extremists", "demonstrably false" and "professional scholars generally regard it as having been settled in serious scholarship long ago".


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 1977, classical historian and popular author Michael Grant in his book "Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels", concluded that "modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory". In support, Grant quoted Roderic Dunkerley's 1957 opinion that the Christ myth theory has "again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars". He also quoted Otto Betz' 1968 opinion that in recent years "no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus—or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary". In the same book, he also wrote:


title: Christ myth theory

text: Graeme Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Classical Ancient History and Archaeology at Australian National University stated in 2008: "Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ—the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming". R. Joseph Hoffmann, who had created the Jesus Project, which included both mythicists and historicists to investigate the historicity of Jesus, wrote that an adherent to the Christ myth theory asked to set up a separate section of the project for those committed to the position. Hoffmann felt that to be committed to mythicism signaled a lack of necessary skepticism and he noted that most members of the project did not reach the mythicist conclusion. Hoffmann also called the mythicist theory "fatally flawed".


title: Christ myth theory

text: Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, wrote, "What you can't do, though, without venturing into the far swamps of extreme crankery, is to argue that Jesus never existed. The 'Christ-Myth Hypothesis' is not scholarship, and is not taken seriously in respectable academic debate. The grounds advanced for the 'hypothesis' are worthless. The authors proposing such opinions might be competent, decent, honest individuals, but the views they present are demonstrably wrong. ... Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity."


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Daniel Gullotta, most of the mythicist literature contains "wild theories, which are poorly researched, historically inaccurate, and written with a sensationalist bent for popular audiences."


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to James F. McGrath and Christopher Hansen, mythicists sometimes rely on questionable and outdated methods like Rank and Raglan mythotypes that end up resulting in misclassifying real historical persons as mythical figures.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Critics of the Christ myth theory question the competence of its supporters. Maurice Casey has criticized mythicists, pointing out their complete ignorance of how modern critical scholarship actually works. He also criticizes their frequent assumption that modern New Testament scholarship is Christian fundamentalism, insisting that this assumption is not only totally inaccurate, but also exemplary of the mythicists' misconceptions about the ideas and attitudes of mainstream scholars.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Robert Van Voorst has written, "Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed [Christ myth] arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely. ... The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question." Paul L. Maier, former Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University and current professor emeritus of its Department of History has stated, "Anyone who uses the argument that Jesus never existed is simply flaunting his ignorance."


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 2000 Van Voorst gave an overview of proponents of the "Nonexistence Hypothesis" and their arguments, presenting seven arguments against the hypothesis as put forward by "Wells and his predecessors":


title: Christ myth theory

text: In 2003, Van Voorst added an eighth "final argument"—that Wells had since accepted the "historical basis for the existence of Jesus".


title: Christ myth theory

text: In his book "Did Jesus Exist?", Bart Ehrman surveys the arguments "mythicists" have made against the existence of Jesus since the idea was first raised at the end of the 18th century. Regarding the lack of contemporaneous records for Jesus, Ehrman notes that no comparable Jewish figure is mentioned in contemporary records either and there are mentions of Christ in several Roman works of history from only decades after the death of Jesus. He adds that the authentic letters of the apostle Paul in the New Testament were likely written within a few years of Jesus' death and that Paul likely personally knew James, the brother of Jesus. Ehrman writes that although "our best sources about Jesus, the early Gospels, are riddled with problems ... written decades after Jesus' life by biased authors", they "can be used to yield historically reliable information". He adds, "With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels (and the writings of Paul)", which he says is "pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind". Ehrman dismisses the idea that the story of Jesus is an invention based on pagan myths of dying-and-rising gods, maintaining that the early Christians were primarily influenced by Jewish ideas, not Greek or Roman ones, and repeatedly insisting that the idea that there was never such a person as Jesus is not seriously considered at all by historians or experts in the field.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Alexander Lucie-Smith, Catholic priest and doctor of moral theology, states that "People who think Jesus didn't exist are seriously confused," but also notes that "the Church needs to reflect on its failure. If 40 per cent believe in the Jesus myth, this is a sign that the Church has failed to communicate with the general public."


title: Christ myth theory

text: Stanley E. Porter, president and dean of McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, and Stephen J. Bedard, a Baptist minister and graduate of McMaster Divinity, respond to Harpur's ideas from an evangelical standpoint in "Unmasking the Pagan Christ: An Evangelical Response to the Cosmic Christ Idea", challenging the key ideas laying at the foundation of Harpur's thesis. Porter and Bedard conclude that there is sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus and assert that Harpur is motivated to promote "universalistic spirituality".


title: Christ myth theory

text: In a 2015 poll conducted by the Church of England, 22% of respondents indicated that they did not believe Jesus was a real person.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Ehrman notes that "the mythicists have become loud, and thanks to the Internet they've attracted more attention". Within a few years of the inception of the World Wide Web (c. 1990), mythicists such as Earl Doherty began to present their argument to a larger public via the internet. Doherty created the website "The Jesus Puzzle" in 1996, while the organization Internet Infidels has featured the works of mythicists on their website and mythicism has been mentioned on several popular news sites.


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Derek Murphy, the documentaries "The God Who Wasn't There" (2005) and "" (2007) introduced the Christ myth theory to a larger audience and gave the topic broad coverage on the Internet. Daniel Gullotta notes the relationship between the organization "Atheists United" and Carrier's work related to mythicism, which has increased "the attention of the public".


title: Christ myth theory

text: According to Ehrman, mythicism has a growing appeal "because these deniers of Jesus are at the same time denouncers of religion". According to Casey, mythicism has a growing appeal because of an aversion toward Christian fundamentalism among American atheists.


title: Christ myth theory

text: Since 2005, several English-language documentaries have focused—at least in part—on the Christ myth theory:


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL (named after the book "A Programming Language") is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages.


title: APL (programming language)

text: A mathematical notation for manipulating arrays was developed by Kenneth E. Iverson, starting in 1957 at Harvard University. In 1960, he began work for IBM where he developed this notation with Adin Falkoff and published it in his book "A Programming Language" in 1962. The preface states its premise:


title: APL (programming language)

text: This notation was used inside IBM for short research reports on computer systems, such as the Burroughs B5000 and its stack mechanism when stack machines versus register machines were being evaluated by IBM for upcoming computers.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Iverson also used his notation in a draft of the chapter "A Programming Language", written for a book he was writing with Fred Brooks, "Automatic Data Processing", which would be published in 1963.


title: APL (programming language)

text: As early as 1962, the first attempt to use the notation to describe a complete computer system happened after Falkoff discussed with William C. Carter his work to standardize the instruction set for the machines that later became the IBM System/360 family.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1963, Herbert Hellerman, working at the IBM Systems Research Institute, implemented a part of the notation on an IBM 1620 computer, and it was used by students in a special high school course on calculating transcendental functions by series summation. Students tested their code in Hellerman's lab. This implementation of a part of the notation was called Personalized Array Translator (PAT).


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1963, Falkoff, Iverson, and Edward H. Sussenguth Jr., all working at IBM, used the notation for a formal description of the IBM System/360 series machine architecture and functionality, which resulted in a paper published in "IBM Systems Journal" in 1964. After this was published, the team turned their attention to an implementation of the notation on a computer system. One of the motivations for this focus of implementation was the interest of John L. Lawrence who had new duties with Science Research Associates, an educational company bought by IBM in 1964. Lawrence asked Iverson and his group to help use the language as a tool to develop and use computers in education.


title: APL (programming language)

text: After Lawrence M. Breed and Philip S. Abrams of Stanford University joined the team at IBM Research, they continued their prior work on an implementation programmed in FORTRAN IV for a part of the notation which had been done for the IBM 7090 computer running on the IBSYS operating system. This work was finished in late 1965 and later named IVSYS (for Iverson system). The basis of this implementation was described in detail by Abrams in a Stanford University Technical Report, "An Interpreter for Iverson Notation" in 1966, the academic aspect of this was formally supervised by Niklaus Wirth. Like Hellerman's PAT system earlier, this implementation did not include the APL character set but used special English reserved words for functions and operators. The system was later adapted for a time-sharing system and, by November 1966, it had been reprogrammed for the IBM System/360 Model 50 computer running in a time-sharing mode and was used internally at IBM.


title: APL (programming language)

text: A key development in the ability to use APL effectively, before the wide use of cathode ray tube (CRT) terminals, was the development of a special IBM Selectric typewriter interchangeable typing element with all the special APL characters on it. This was used on paper printing terminal workstations using the Selectric typewriter and typing element mechanism, such as the IBM 1050 and IBM 2741 terminal. Keycaps could be placed over the normal keys to show which APL characters would be entered and typed when that key was struck. For the first time, a programmer could type in and see proper APL characters as used in Iverson's notation and not be forced to use awkward English keyword representations of them. Falkoff and Iverson had the special APL Selectric typing elements, 987 and 988, designed in late 1964, although no APL computer system was available to use them. Iverson cited Falkoff as the inspiration for the idea of using an IBM Selectric typing element for the APL character set.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Many APL symbols, even with the APL characters on the Selectric typing element, still had to be typed in by over-striking two extant element characters. An example is the "grade up" character, which had to be made from a "delta" (shift-H) and a "Sheffer stroke" (shift-M). This was necessary because the APL character set was much larger than the 88 characters allowed on the typing element, even when letters were restricted to upper-case (capitals).


title: APL (programming language)

text: The first APL interactive login and creation of an APL workspace was in 1966 by Larry Breed using an IBM 1050 terminal at the IBM Mohansic Labs near Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the home of APL, in Yorktown Heights, New York.


title: APL (programming language)

text: IBM was chiefly responsible for introducing APL to the marketplace. The first publicly available version of APL was released in 1968 for the IBM 1130. IBM provided "APL\1130" for free but without liability or support. It would run in as little as 8k 16-bit words of memory, and used a dedicated 1 megabyte hard disk.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL gained its foothold on mainframe timesharing systems from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, in part because it would support multiple users on lower-specification systems that had no dynamic address translation hardware. Additional improvements in performance for selected IBM System/370 mainframe systems included the "APL Assist Microcode" in which some support for APL execution was included in the processor's firmware, as distinct from being implemented entirely by higher-level software. Somewhat later, as suitably performing hardware was finally growing available in the mid- to late-1980s, many users migrated their applications to the personal computer environment.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Early IBM APL interpreters for IBM 360 and IBM 370 hardware implemented their own multi-user management instead of relying on the host services, thus they were their own timesharing systems. First introduced for use at IBM in 1966, the "APL\360" system was a multi-user interpreter. The ability to programmatically communicate with the operating system for information and setting interpreter system variables was done through special privileged "I-beam" functions, using both monadic and dyadic operations.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1973, IBM released "APL.SV", which was a continuation of the same product, but which offered shared variables as a means to access facilities outside of the APL system, such as operating system files. In the mid-1970s, the IBM mainframe interpreter was even adapted for use on the IBM 5100 desktop computer, which had a small CRT and an APL keyboard, when most other small computers of the time only offered BASIC. In the 1980s, the "VSAPL" program product enjoyed wide use with Conversational Monitor System (CMS), Time Sharing Option (TSO), VSPC, MUSIC/SP, and CICS users.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1973–1974, Patrick E. Hagerty directed the implementation of the University of Maryland APL interpreter for the 1100 line of the Sperry UNIVAC 1100/2200 series mainframe computers. At the time, Sperry had nothing. In 1974, student Alan Stebbens was assigned the task of implementing an internal function. Xerox APL was available from June 1975 for Xerox 560 and Sigma 6, 7, and 9 mainframes running CP-V and for Honeywell CP-6.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In the 1960s and 1970s, several timesharing firms arose that sold APL services using modified versions of the IBM APL\360 interpreter. In North America, the better-known ones were IP Sharp Associates, Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC), Time Sharing Resources (TSR), and The Computer Company (TCC). CompuServe also entered the market in 1978 with an APL Interpreter based on a modified version of Digital Equipment Corp and Carnegie Mellon's, which ran on DEC's KI and KL 36-bit machines. CompuServe's APL was available both to its commercial market and the consumer information service. With the advent first of less expensive mainframes such as the IBM 4300, and later the personal computer, by the mid-1980s, the timesharing industry was all but gone.


title: APL (programming language)

text: "Sharp APL" was available from IP Sharp Associates, first as a timesharing service in the 1960s, and later as a program product starting around 1979. "Sharp APL" was an advanced APL implementation with many language extensions, such as "packages" (the ability to put one or more objects into a single variable), file system, nested arrays, and shared variables.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL interpreters were available from other mainframe and mini-computer manufacturers also, notably Burroughs, Control Data Corporation (CDC), Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Harris, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Siemens, Xerox and others.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Garth Foster of Syracuse University sponsored regular meetings of the APL implementers' community at Syracuse's Minnowbrook Conference Center in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. In later years, Eugene McDonnell organized similar meetings at the Asilomar Conference Grounds near Monterey, California, and at Pajaro Dunes near Watsonville, California. The SIGAPL special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery continues to support the APL community.


title: APL (programming language)

text: On microcomputers, which became available from the mid-1970s onwards, BASIC became the dominant programming language. Nevertheless, some microcomputers provided APL instead – the first being the Intel 8008-based MCM/70 which was released in 1974 and which was primarily used in education. Another machine of this time was the VideoBrain Family Computer, released in 1977, which was supplied with its dialect of APL called APL/S.


title: APL (programming language)

text: The Commodore SuperPET, introduced in 1981, included an APL interpreter developed by the University of Waterloo.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1976, Bill Gates claimed in his Open Letter to Hobbyists that Microsoft Corporation was implementing APL for the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 but had "very little incentive to make [it] available to hobbyists" because of software piracy. It was never released.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Starting in the early 1980s, IBM APL development, under the leadership of Jim Brown, implemented a new version of the APL language that contained as its primary enhancement the concept of "nested arrays", where an array can contain other arrays, and new language features which facilitated integrating nested arrays into program workflow. Ken Iverson, no longer in control of the development of the APL language, left IBM and joined I. P. Sharp Associates, where one of his major contributions was directing the evolution of Sharp APL to be more in accord with his vision. APL2 was first released for CMS and TSO in 1984. The APL2 Workstation edition (Windows, OS/2, AIX, Linux, and Solaris) followed later.


title: APL (programming language)

text: As other vendors were busy developing APL interpreters for new hardware, notably Unix-based microcomputers, APL2 was almost always the standard chosen for new APL interpreter developments. Even today, most APL vendors or their users cite APL2 compatibility, as a selling point for those products. IBM cites its use for problem solving, system design, prototyping, engineering and scientific computations, expert systems, for teaching mathematics and other subjects, visualization and database access.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Various implementations of APL by APLX, Dyalog, et al., include extensions for object-oriented programming, support for .NET Framework, XML-array conversion primitives, graphing, operating system interfaces, and lambda calculus expressions. Freeware versions include GNU APL for Linux and NARS2000 for Windows (which runs on Linux under Wine). Both of these are fairly complete versions of APL2 with various language extensions.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL has been criticized and praised for its choice of a unique, non-standard character set. Some who learn it become ardent adherents. In the 1960s and 1970s, few terminal devices or even displays could reproduce the APL character set. The most popular ones employed the IBM Selectric print mechanism used with a special APL type element. One of the early APL line terminals (line-mode operation only, "not" full screen) was the Texas Instruments TI Model 745 () with the full APL character set which featured half and full duplex telecommunications modes, for interacting with an APL time-sharing service or remote mainframe to run a remote computer job, called an RJE.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Over time, with the universal use of high-quality graphic displays, printing devices and Unicode support, the APL character font problem has largely been eliminated. However, entering APL characters requires the use of input method editors, keyboard mappings, virtual/on-screen APL symbol sets, or easy-reference printed keyboard cards which can frustrate beginners accustomed to other programming languages. With beginners who have no prior experience with other programming languages, a study involving high school students found that typing and using APL characters did not hinder the students in any measurable way.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In defense of APL, it requires fewer characters to type, and keyboard mappings become memorized over time. Special APL keyboards are also made and in use today, as are freely downloadable fonts for operating systems such as Microsoft Windows. The reported productivity gains assume that one spends enough time working in the language to make it worthwhile to memorize the symbols, their semantics, and keyboard mappings, not to mention a substantial number of idioms for common tasks.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Unlike traditionally structured programming languages, APL code is typically structured as chains of monadic or dyadic functions, and operators acting on arrays. APL has many nonstandard "primitives" (functions and operators) that are indicated by a single symbol or a combination of a few symbols. All primitives are defined to have the same precedence, and always associate to the right. Thus, APL is "read" or best understood from right-to-left.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Early APL implementations ( or so) had no programming loop-flow control structures, such as codice_1 or codice_2 loops, and codice_3 constructs. Instead, they used array operations, and use of structured programming constructs was often not necessary, since an operation could be performed on a full array in one statement. For example, the codice_4 function (codice_5) can replace for-loop iteration: ιN when applied to a scalar positive integer yields a one-dimensional array (vector), 1 2 3 ... N. More recent implementations of APL generally include comprehensive control structures, so that data structure and program control flow can be clearly and cleanly separated.


title: APL (programming language)

text: The APL environment is called a "workspace". In a workspace the user can define programs and data, i.e., the data values exist also outside the programs, and the user can also manipulate the data without having to define a program. In the examples below, the APL interpreter first types six spaces before awaiting the user's input. Its own output starts in column one.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL uses a set of non-ASCII symbols, which are an extension of traditional arithmetic and algebraic notation. Having single character names for single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) vector functions is one way that APL enables compact formulation of algorithms for data transformation such as computing Conway's Game of Life in one line of code. In nearly all versions of APL, it is theoretically possible to express any computable function in one expression, that is, in one line of code.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Because of the unusual character set, many programmers use special keyboards with APL keytops to write APL code. Although there are various ways to write APL code using only ASCII characters, in practice it is almost never done. (This may be thought to support Iverson's thesis about notation as a tool of thought.) Most if not all modern implementations use standard keyboard layouts, with special mappings or input method editors to access non-ASCII characters. Historically, the APL font has been distinctive, with uppercase italic alphabetic characters and upright numerals and symbols. Most vendors continue to display the APL character set in a custom font.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Advocates of APL claim that the examples of so-called "write-only code" (badly written and almost incomprehensible code) are almost invariably examples of poor programming practice or novice mistakes, which can occur in any language. Advocates also claim that they are far more productive with APL than with more conventional computer languages, and that working software can be implemented in far less time and with far fewer programmers than using other technology.


title: APL (programming language)

text: They also may claim that because it is compact and terse, APL lends itself well to larger-scale software development and complexity, because the number of lines of code can be reduced greatly. Many APL advocates and practitioners also view standard programming languages such as COBOL and Java as being comparatively tedious. APL is often found where time-to-market is important, such as with trading systems.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL makes a clear distinction between "functions" and "operators". Functions take arrays (variables or constants or expressions) as arguments, and return arrays as results. Operators (similar to higher-order functions) take functions or arrays as arguments, and derive related functions. For example, the "sum" function is derived by applying the "reduction" operator to the "addition" function. Applying the same reduction operator to the "maximum" function (which returns the larger of two numbers) derives a function which returns the largest of a group (vector) of numbers. In the J language, Iverson substituted the terms "verb" for "function" and "adverb" or "conjunction" for "operator".


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL also identifies those features built into the language, and represented by a symbol, or a fixed combination of symbols, as "primitives". Most primitives are either functions or operators. Coding APL is largely a process of writing non-primitive functions and (in some versions of APL) operators. However a few primitives are considered to be neither functions nor operators, most noticeably assignment.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Some words used in APL literature have meanings that differ from those in both mathematics and the generality of computer science.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL has explicit representations of functions, operators, and syntax, thus providing a basis for the clear and explicit statement of extended facilities in the language, and tools to experiment on them.


title: APL (programming language)

text: A design theme in APL is to define default actions in some cases that would produce syntax errors in most other programming languages.


title: APL (programming language)

text: The 'Hello, world' string constant above displays, because display is the default action on any expression for which no action is specified explicitly (e.g. assignment, function parameter).


title: APL (programming language)

text: Another example of this theme is that exponentiation in APL is written as , which indicates raising 2 to the power 3 (this would be written as in some other languages and in FORTRAN and Python). Many languages use to signify multiplication, as in , but APL chooses to use . However, if no base is specified (as with the statement in APL, or in other languages), most programming languages one would see this as a syntax error. APL, however, assumes the missing base to be the natural logarithm constant e, and interprets as .


title: APL (programming language)

text: Suppose that is an array of numbers. Then gives its average. Reading "right-to-left", gives the number of elements in X, and since is a dyadic operator, the term to its left is required as well. It is surrounded by parentheses since otherwise X would be taken (so that the summation would be of —each element of X divided by the number of elements in X), and gives the sum of the elements of X. Building on this, the following expression computes standard deviation:


title: APL (programming language)

text: Naturally, one would define this expression as a function for repeated use rather than rewriting it each time. Further, since assignment is an operator, it can appear within an expression, so the following would place suitable values into T, AV and SD:


title: APL (programming language)

text: This following immediate-mode expression generates a typical set of "Pick 6" lottery numbers: six pseudo-random integers ranging from 1 to 40, "guaranteed non-repeating", and displays them sorted in ascending order:


title: APL (programming language)

text: The above does a lot, concisely, although it may seem complex to a new APLer. It combines the following APL "functions" (also called "primitives" and "glyphs"):


title: APL (programming language)

text: Since there is no function to the left of the left-most x to tell APL what to do with the result, it simply outputs it to the display (on a single line, separated by spaces) without needing any explicit instruction to do that.


title: APL (programming language)

text: codice_6 also has a monadic equivalent called codice_15, which simply returns one random integer between 1 and its sole operand [to the right of it], inclusive. Thus, a role-playing game program might use the expression codice_16 to roll a twenty-sided die.


title: APL (programming language)

text: The following expression finds all prime numbers from 1 to R. In both time and space, the calculation complexity is formula_1 (in Big O notation).


title: APL (programming language)

text: (Note, this assumes the APL origin is 1, i.e., indices start with 1. APL can be set to use 0 as the origin, so that codice_45 is codice_46, which is convenient for some calculations.)


title: APL (programming language)

text: The following function "life", written in Dyalog APL, takes a boolean matrix and calculates the new generation according to Conway's Game of Life. It demonstrates the power of APL to implement a complex algorithm in very little code, but understanding it requires some advanced knowledge of APL (as the same program would in many languages).


title: APL (programming language)

text: In the following example, also Dyalog, the first line assigns some HTML code to a variable codice_47 and then uses an APL expression to remove all the HTML tags (explanation):


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL derives its name from the initials of Iverson's book "A Programming Language", even though the book describes Iverson's mathematical notation, rather than the implemented programming language described in this article. The name is used only for actual implementations, starting with APL\360.


title: APL (programming language)

text: "APL" is occasionally re-interpreted as "Array Programming Language" or "Array Processing Language", thereby making "APL" into a backronym.


title: APL (programming language)

text: There has always been cooperation between APL vendors, and joint conferences were held on a regular basis from 1969 until 2010. At such conferences, APL merchandise was often handed out, featuring APL motifs or collection of vendor logos. Common were apples (as a pun on the similarity in pronunciation of "apple" and "APL") and the code snippet which are the symbols produced by the classic APL keyboard layout when holding the APL modifier key and typing "APL".


title: APL (programming language)

text: Despite all these community efforts, no universal vendor-agnostic logo for the programming language emerged. As popular programming languages increasingly have established recognisable logos, Fortran getting one in 2020, British APL Association launched a campaign in the second half of 2021, to establish such a logo for APL, and after a community election and multiple rounds of feedback, a logo was chosen in May 2022.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL is used for many purposes including financial and insurance applications, artificial intelligence,


title: APL (programming language)

text: and robotics. It has been argued that APL is a calculation tool and not a programming language; its symbolic nature and array capabilities have made it popular with domain experts and data scientists who do not have or require the skills of a computer programmer.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL is well suited to image manipulation and computer animation, where graphic transformations can be encoded as matrix multiplications. One of the first commercial computer graphics houses, Digital Effects, produced an APL graphics product named "Visions", which was used to create television commercials and animation for the 1982 film "Tron". Latterly, the Stormwind boating simulator uses APL to implement its core logic, its interfacing to the rendering pipeline middleware and a major part of its physics engine.


title: APL (programming language)

text: The first implementation of APL using recognizable APL symbols was APL\360 which ran on the IBM System/360, and was completed in November 1966 though at that time remained in use only within IBM. In 1973 its implementors, Larry Breed, Dick Lathwell and Roger Moore, were awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It was given "for their work in the design and implementation of APL\360, setting new standards in simplicity, efficiency, reliability and response time for interactive systems."


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1975, the IBM 5100 microcomputer offered APL\360 as one of two built-in ROM-based interpreted languages for the computer, complete with a keyboard and display that supported all the special symbols used in the language.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Significant developments to APL\360 included CMS/APL, which made use of the virtual storage capabilities of CMS and APLSV, which introduced shared variables, system variables and system functions. It was subsequently ported to the IBM System/370 and VSPC platforms until its final release in 1983, after which it was replaced by APL2.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1968, APL\1130 became the first publicly available APL system, created by IBM for the IBM 1130. It became the most popular IBM Type-III Library software that IBM released.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL*Plus and Sharp APL are versions of APL\360 with added business-oriented extensions such as data formatting and facilities to store APL arrays in external files. They were jointly developed by two companies, employing various members of the original IBM APL\360 development team.


title: APL (programming language)

text: The two companies were I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA), an APL\360 services company formed in 1964 by Ian Sharp, Roger Moore and others, and STSC, a time-sharing and consulting service company formed in 1969 by Lawrence Breed and others. Together the two developed APL*Plus and thereafter continued to work together but develop APL separately as APL*Plus and Sharp APL. STSC ported APL*Plus to many platforms with versions being made for the VAX 11, PC and UNIX, whereas IPSA took a different approach to the arrival of the personal computer and made Sharp APL available on this platform using additional PC-XT/360 hardware. In 1993, Soliton Incorporated was formed to support Sharp APL and it developed Sharp APL into SAX (Sharp APL for Unix). , APL*Plus continues as APL2000 APL+Win.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1985, Ian Sharp, and Dan Dyer of STSC, jointly received the Kenneth E. Iverson Award for Outstanding Contribution to APL.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL2 was a significant re-implementation of APL by IBM which was developed from 1971 and first released in 1984. It provides many additions to the language, of which the most notable is nested (non-rectangular) array support. The entire APL2 Products and Services Team was awarded the Iverson Award in 2007.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1972, APLGOL was released as an experimental version of APL that added structured programming language constructs to the language framework. New statements were added for interstatement control, conditional statement execution, and statement structuring, as well as statements to clarify the intent of the algorithm. It was implemented for Hewlett-Packard in 1977.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Dyalog APL was first released by British company Dyalog Ltd. in 1983 and, , is available for AIX, Linux (including on the Raspberry Pi), macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms. It is based on APL2, with extensions to support object-oriented programming, functional programming, and tacit programming. Licences are free for personal/non-commercial use.


title: APL (programming language)

text: In 1995, two of the development team – John Scholes and Peter Donnelly – were awarded the Iverson Award for their work on the interpreter. Gitte Christensen and Morten Kromberg were joint recipients of the Iverson Award in 2016.


title: APL (programming language)

text: NARS2000 is an open-source APL interpreter written by Bob Smith, a prominent APL developer and implementor from STSC in the 1970s and 1980s. NARS2000 contains advanced features and new datatypes and runs natively on Microsoft Windows, and other platforms under Wine. It is named after a development tool from the 1980s, NARS (Nested Arrays Research System).


title: APL (programming language)

text: APLX is a cross-platform dialect of APL, based on APL2 and with several extensions, which was first released by British company MicroAPL in 2002. Although no longer in development or on commercial sale it is now available free of charge from Dyalog.


title: APL (programming language)

text: GNU APL is a free implementation of Extended APL as specified in ISO/IEC 13751:2001 and is thus an implementation of APL2. It runs on Linux (including on the Raspberry Pi), macOS, several BSD dialects, and on Windows (either using Cygwin for full support of all its system functions or as a native 64-bit Windows binary with some of its system functions missing). GNU APL uses Unicode internally and can be scripted. It was written by Jürgen Sauermann.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, was an early adopter of APL, using it to write a text editor as a high school student in the summer of 1969.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL is traditionally an interpreted language, having language characteristics such as weak variable typing not well suited to compilation. However, with arrays as its core data structure it provides opportunities for performance gains through parallelism, parallel computing, massively parallel applications, and very-large-scale integration (VLSI), and from the outset APL has been regarded as a high-performance language – for example, it was noted for the speed with which it could perform complicated matrix operations "because it operates on arrays and performs operations like matrix inversion internally".


title: APL (programming language)

text: Nevertheless, APL is rarely purely interpreted and compilation or partial compilation techniques that are, or have been, used include the following:


title: APL (programming language)

text: Most APL interpreters support idiom recognition and evaluate common idioms as single operations. For example, by evaluating the idiom codice_48 as a single operation (where codice_49 is a Boolean vector and codice_50 is an array), the creation of two intermediate arrays is avoided.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Weak typing in APL means that a name may reference an array (of any datatype), a function or an operator. In general, the interpreter cannot know in advance which form it will be and must therefore perform analysis, syntax checking etc. at run-time. However, in certain circumstances, it is possible to deduce in advance what type a name is expected to reference and then generate bytecode which can be executed with reduced run-time overhead. This bytecode can also be optimised using compilation techniques such as constant folding or common subexpression elimination. The interpreter will execute the bytecode when present and when any assumptions which have been made are met. Dyalog APL includes support for optimised bytecode.


title: APL (programming language)

text: Compilation of APL has been the subject of research and experiment since the language first became available; the first compiler is considered to be the Burroughs APL-700 which was released around 1971. In order to be able to compile APL, language limitations have to be imposed. APEX is a research APL compiler which was written by Robert Bernecky and is available under the GNU Public License.


title: APL (programming language)

text: The STSC APL Compiler is a hybrid of a bytecode optimiser and a compiler – it enables compilation of functions to machine code provided that its sub-functions and globals are declared, but the interpreter is still used as a runtime library and to execute functions which do not meet the compilation requirements.


title: APL (programming language)

text: APL has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) working group X3J10 and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 22 Working Group 3. The Core APL language is specified in ISO 8485:1989, and the Extended APL language is specified in ISO/IEC 13751:2001.


title: Chanté Adams

text: Chanté Adams (born December 16, 1994) is an American actress. She starred in the 2017 biopic "Roxanne Roxanne", for which she received the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Performance.


title: Chanté Adams

text: Adams was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She began acting as a student at Cass Technical High School. She received her bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama, after which she moved to New York to pursue an acting career.


title: Chanté Adams

text: One month after moving to New York, Adams was invited to audition for the lead role in a biopic about rapper Roxanne Shanté. She was cast in the role and filming began eight days later. For her performance in "Roxanne Roxanne", Adams received the Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Performance at 2017 Sundance.


title: Chanté Adams

text: Adams has appeared in the films "Monsters and Men" (2018), "Bad Hair" (2020), and "The Photograph" (2020).


title: Chanté Adams

text: In 2021, Adams starred opposite Michael B. Jordan in the romantic drama "A Journal for Jordan", directed by Denzel Washington. She co-stars in the 2022 Amazon television adaptation of "A League of Their Own" along with D'Arcy Carden, Abbi Jacobson, Roberta Colindrez, Kelly McCormack, and Priscilla Delgado.


title: Vandal Savage

text: Vandar Adg of the Blood Tribe, more widely known as Vandal Savage, is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. He is said to be a Cro-Magnon warrior who gained immortality and advanced healing abilities after encountering a strange meteorite during prehistoric times. For over 50,000 years, he plagues the Earth as a villain and occasional conqueror, sometimes using different names but most often calling himself Vandal Savage. He is a brilliant and sadistic tactician with immense knowledge in various sciences and forms of combat, able to fight effectively against many heroes despite not having any superhuman powers beyond his ability to survive and heal from lethal wounds. Throughout history, his most frequent enemies are immortal or reincarnating heroes such as Immortal Man, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, and Resurrection Man. He is also a recurring foe of the Justice Society and the Justice League and occasionally works as a member of super-villain organizations such as the Injustice Society and the Legion of Doom.


title: Vandal Savage

text: The character made his live-action debut in the Arrowverse crossover event "Heroes Join Forces" between the television series "The Flash" and "Arrow", played by Casper Crump. Crump later reprised the role in the television series "Legends of Tomorrow".


title: Vandal Savage

text: Vandal Savage first appeared during the Golden Age of Comic Books in "Green Lantern" #10 (December 1943), created by writer Alfred Bester and artist Martin Nodell. In the story, he has pointed, demonic ears and reveals he is a million-year-old Cro-Magnon man who was made ageless when he was exposed to gas from an exploding meteor. The story ends when the Green Lantern (Alan Scott) causes Savage to fall into a seemingly bottomless pit. Four years later, he made his second appearance in "All Star Comics" #37 (1947), wherein he was recruited to join the original Injustice Society, a team of villains that battled the Justice Society of America. The story featured Savage targeting Hawkman, who decades later would be established as one of Savage's most frequent enemies.


title: Vandal Savage

text: During the Silver Age of Comic Books, DC rebooted its universe of superheroes, altering some character histories while also creating new versions of familiar characters. The Silver Age version of the Flash (Barry Allen) and his contemporaries were later said to live in the universe of Earth-One. The Golden Age Flash, Golden Age Green Lantern, and the Justice Society of America were retroactively said to be inhabitants of Earth-Two, where their stories took place. This made Vandal Savage an inhabitant of Earth-Two as well.


title: Vandal Savage

text: Sixteen years after his second comic book story, Vandal Savage returned in "The Flash" #137 (June 1963). This comic established he was closer to 50 thousand years old than 1 million years old, and also revealed that his original name had been Vandar Adg. After this, he became a recurring enemy to the heroes of Earth-Two and Earth-One, sometimes crossing the dimensional barrier between the two realities. Frequently, he battled the Flashes and Superman. In "Action Comics" #515-516 (1981), the story indicated Vandal Savage was no longer just ageless but could also heal from any physical injury, even near disintegration. The story shows Savage seemingly reduced to ash by a meteorite, but Superman concludes the villain will still return. In "Action Comics" #542 (1983), this is proven correct, and Savage reveals his body was able to heal and reform even from near total destruction.


title: Vandal Savage

text: Two years after Vandal Savage's return to comics in the Silver Age, "Strange Adventures" #177 (1965) introduced a hero called the Immortal Man. Whenever the Immortal Man died or was killed, his powerful amulet allowed him to quickly materialize in a new body elsewhere on Earth, without having to literally be born again and with his memories intact. The Immortal Man initially appeared in four stories, then disappeared from comics for seventeen years. He returned in a two-part story in "Action Comics" #552–553 (1984), written by Marv Wolfman with art by Gil Kane. In this story, it was said the Immortal Man and Vandal Savage were archenemies across history and had been since before they had gained their powers. The Immortal Man's amulet was also revealed to be a piece of the same meteorite that made Savage immortal. The same story featured the Immortal Man forming a team of Forgotten Heroes to fight Savage.


title: Vandal Savage

text: During the crossover "Crisis on Infinite Earths", the Immortal Man seemingly died, giving up his reincarnation energy to help save reality. As a result of this crossover, the histories of Earth-One and Earth-Two were merged and revised into a new, unified DC Universe, altering some character histories in the process. The crossover was followed by "History of the DC Universe", a two-part mini-series intended to establish the basic history of the new timeline (although within a few years, several parts of it were already dismissed and contradicted by new stories). "History of the DC Universe" #1 established for the first time that Vandar Adg's people were known as the Blood Tribe (while the Immortal Man came from the Bear Tribe). The same issue showed that the meteor which made Vandal Savage immortal also enhanced his intelligence and altered his body, explaining why he resembled a modern "Homo sapiens" when other stories claimed he was originally Cro-Magnon.


title: Vandal Savage

text: Over time, new revelations were made about Vandal Savage, such as the fact that he kept track of his children and descendants in case he needed to harvest them for organs and replacement parts, since his ability to heal has weakened over time. The comic book series "Resurrection Man" said Savage and the Immortal Man were not made immortal by radiation or gases from the meteorite they encountered but by sub-atomic robots it carried called "tektites" that entered their bloodstreams. The same comic book series revealed that along with the Immortal Man, Savage has also regularly fought Mitchell Shelley, the Resurrection Man, across history. Likewise, it was revealed that Vandal Savage had regularly fought the reincarnating heroes Hawkman and Hawkgirl across many of their lives, sometimes being responsible for their deaths. The crossover "Final Crisis" depicts characters believing Vandal Savage is the inspiration for the story of Cain from the Bible.


title: Vandal Savage

text: In 2011, DC rebooted its history again with the "New 52" timeline. In the "New 52" series "Demon Knights", it was said that Vandal Savage worked alongside several heroes and warriors during the Dark Ages, fighting evil rather than causing it. During these days, Savage is a mirthful, often drunk warrior who enjoys a fight as a break from boredom. In 2016, "DC Rebirth" restored much of the Pre-"New 52" history while making some new changes. The 2017 comic book "Dark Days: The Forge" and the 2018 series "The Immortal Men" established that Vandal Savage and the Immortal Man were part of a larger group of primitive humans who all became immortal as a result of encountering the meteor, the Council of Immortals.


title: Vandal Savage

text: In his debut story, Vandal Savage has pointed, demonic ears, but this is not seen again in subsequent stories. Vandal Savage manipulates the Green Lantern and his secret identity Alan Scott into helping his schemes, later revealing he knows they are the same person. Vandal Savage explains that he is "one million years old" and was once a Cro-Magnon man who was the chief of his tribe. When a meteor exploded above him, strange gases affected him. He was left in a comatose state for months, then woke up as an immortal "barring accidents", no longer aging but still vulnerable to injury. Savage does not reveal his original name to the Green Lantern, but claims that over the years he has lived under many identities, including an ancient king of Sumer, the Egyptian architect Cheops, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan. When he realized he could still die from injury, he decided to no longer act as a public man of power and instead would serve as an advisor to powerful leaders such as Napoleon, gaining resources and political influence while others could be the target for assassination. Now in the modern-day, he wishes to become a powerful figure in the government and war industry. In the end, he is defeated when Green Lantern opens a seemingly bottomless pit beneath him, causing him to fall out of sight.


title: Vandal Savage

text: Years later, he is revealed to be alive and recruited to the original incarnation of the Injustice Society, a group dedicated to defeating the heroic Justice Society of America. During this adventure, he targets and captures JSA member Hawkman. The Justice Society proves victorious, however, and Vandal Savage is imprisoned.


title: Vandal Savage

text: By the early 1950s, the Justice Society members largely retire. Years later, Jay Garrick, the Flash (a founding member of the Justice Society), is visited by Barry Allen, the Flash of a parallel universe and a founding member of the Justice League. Barry designates his own home as Earth-One and the world of the Justice Society and Injustice Society as Earth-Two.


title: Vandal Savage

text: After 16 years of prison, Vandal Savage has his freedom again and lures the Justice Society members out of retirement, capturing them. He accidentally attracts the attention of Barry Allen, who aids the older heroes against the villain. As a result of the adventure, the Justice Society decides to return to semi-active duty. Starting in this same story, Vandal Savage is now said to be 50,000 years old rather than one million, and his original name is revealed to be Vandar Adg. The stories now say the meteor that mutated him did so through radiation rather than exotic gases, and that it did not actually explode but warped through space and time. A later story reveals that a fragment of the same radioactive meteor is recovered by a caveman named Klarn of the Bear Tribe, an enemy of Vandar Adg, who then makes it into an amulet. With this amulet, Klarn gains a unique reincarnation ability; every time he is killed or died, he quickly reappears elsewhere on Earth in a new body, fully clothed, and with his memories of all past lives intact. Becoming one of Savage's most frequent enemies over the millennia, he is known to many as the Immortal Man.


title: Vandal Savage

text: Following his failure to hold the Justice Society prisoner, Vandal Savage realizes he is not only aging but completely losing his immortality. He learns that the meteor that made him immortal in the first place did not explode into ash as he thought but actually warped through space and time, crossing through dimensions and into Limbo. Savage manipulates Jay Garrick and Barry Allen into helping him free the meteor back into Earth's atmosphere, hoping another exposure will recharge his immortality. Instead, it seemingly destroys him. Since Savage was shifting between the dimensions of Earth-One and Earth-Two just before the meteor impacted with him, he is now stuck in a partial existence between both worlds, only able to achieve tangibility in one while only being a shadow form in the other. He also temporarily gains the ability to project messages and images into the minds of others. Though he regains his full state of physical being later and returns to Earth-Two, he still fails to regain his immortality. Later on, he uses the Superman of Earth-Two as a power source to recharge his immortality. Savage hopes to also take all of Superman's power, but Earth-Two's heroes arrive and foil the scheme.