mythicism

Meanings

1. The scholarly opinion that the gospels are mythological expansions of historical data.
2. The habitual practice of attributing everything to mythological causes; superstition, the opposite of rationalism, or of realism.
3. The creative potential for the creation of mythology; the faculty of mythopoeia.
4. The view that a certain figure or event is unhistorical or mythical, chiefly in the context of pseudo-scholarship.
5. The opinion that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist.

Etymology

From myth + -icism. In occasional use since the 1840s. The earliest use of the term was in Christian theology, in reference to the "Mythic Theory" of D. F. Strauss (1835). The more general sense appears from the 1870s.