I am pleased to notify readers that I have uploaded to this website the English translation of Paul-Louis Couchoud’s seminal work The Creation of Christ: An Outline of the Beginnings of Christianity (1939; original French edition: Jésus, Le Dieu fait Homme, 1937).

The expert translation was executed by C. Bradlaugh Bonner and is in two volumes (229 and 241 pages), each in a separate PDF.

I would like to thank Frank Zindler for making the digital translation on two CDs available to me, and also for graciously allowing me to put this important work of Jesus mythicism before the general public. The two PDF’s can be downloaded at the links below and also from the onsite introductory page on P. L. Couchoud.

The French mythicist Georges Ory summarized Couchoud’s view regarding Jesus:

The history of Jesus is the history of the formation of Jesus. It enters the human psyche as do all divine histories, by agreement, council, and fiat. Jesus was declared a historical personage by the ardent outworkings of faith, outworkings whose traces cannot be found before the second century of our era. Jesus is a being constructed by consensus. Such constructed beings are properly termed divinities… [Jesus] was birthed by a cult, grew up with it, did not become god but was so from the start—a savior god, a heavenly king… The true historian of Jesus is not a historicist. He knows how to distinguish facts from ideas which use facts. Jesus is the source only of sterility and irritation when seen from the historicist perspective. That Jesus will reward enquirers with infinite frustration. Such, in the main, was the conception of Paul-Louis Couchoud.

(G. Ory, article on Couchoud in the the Dictionnaire Rationaliste of 1964, my translation.)

The Creation of Christ, vol. 1 (1.1 MB) The Creation of Christ, vol. 2 (1.7 MB)

Neil Godfrey also offers the entire book in segments (scanned from the hardcopy), with his comments, beginning here.

—R.S.