mythicism

Meaning

Noun

• The scholarly opinion that the gospels are mythological expansions of historical data.
• The habitual practice of attributing everything to mythological causes; superstition, the opposite of rationalism, or of realism.
• The creative potential for the creation of mythology; the faculty of mythopoeia.
• The view that a certain figure or event is unhistorical or mythical, chiefly in the context of pseudo-scholarship or conspiracy theories.

Origin

• 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.