While many students believe that Jesus was a purely mythical being, without actual existence save in the brains of religious Christians, I see no reason to doubt that a certain Jewish rabbi may have come out of the rebellious province of Galilee about the time of Herod. Such messiahs had come before him and such have succeeded him. Some of the messiahs subsequent to Jesus were: one who appeared in Persia in 1138, another in Arabia in 1167, and one in Moravia at the close of the twelfth century. Eldavid proclaimed himself messiah in Persia in 1199, Sabathai Tzevi assumed the title of "King of Kings" in 1666 and was executed at Constantinople by the Sultan. So late as 1829 there appeared in India the eight-year-old son of a peasant who was a wonderful serpent charmer and was called Marayum Powar. It was an ancient belief that the ability to handle serpents unharmed was a proof that one had become perfectly holy--absorbed in God! Therefore, numerous people came to believe Powar a god and in ten months ten thousand followers were about him, baptizing and performing miraculous cures--and his cult seemed well on the road to establishment when, over-confident of his power, he was bitten by a serpent and died. His followers, after vainly awaiting his resurrection, dispersed.
That Jesus' whole career is lost in encircling myth is no proof that the original figure never existed. There is plenty of historical evidence to show that the central portion of Europe was once ruled by a king named Karl, and we do not doubt this simply because a great cloud of myths has been gathered about the name of St. Charlemagne, any more than we feel bound to believe that because he once lived he must now necessarily exist, sleeping in a mountain, until it shall be necessary for him to spring forth and save the German fatherland.
One set of students assert that the Christ was merely the personification of vegetable life, claiming that his death and resurrection typify the death and revivification of vegetation. Others hold that he is the modern phase of the eternal sun-god. To sustain this hypothesis the following allegorical interpretation of his supposed career is offered as an explanation. He was born on the early dawn of the twenty-fifth day of December, the day on which commences the sun's apparent revolution around the earth; his birth was announced by the brilliant morning star; his virgin mother was the pure and beautiful dawn; his temptation was his struggle with the adverse clouds which he dispersed; his trial, execution, and death were emblematic of the solar decline and crucifixion at the beginning of winter; his descent into hell was typical of the three days of the winter solstice; and his resurrection and ascension refer to the return of the sun after its seeming extinction.