New Testament scholar Robert M. Price, who argues it is quite likely there never was an historical Jesus in the sense that the Gospel version is in essence a composite character and therefore unable to be reasonably verified as a single historical person,[32] writes that the Jesus myth theory is based on three pillars:

• There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources.
• The Pauline epistles, earlier than the gospels, do not provide evidence of a recent historical Jesus.
• The story of Jesus shows strong parallels to Middle Eastern religions about dying and rising gods, symbolizing the rebirth of the individual as a rite of passage.

Remsburg then went further using David Strauss and John Fiske to explain that there were three kinds of myths: Historical, Philosophical, and Poetical.

• A Historical myth is "a real event colored by the light of antiquity, which confounded the human and divine, the natural and the supernatural. The event may be but slightly colored and the narrative essentially true, or it may be distorted and numberless legends attached until but a small residuum of truth remains and the narrative is essentially false. A large portion of ancient history, including the Biblical narratives, is historical myth. The earliest records of all nations and of all religions are more or less mythical."
• "A Philosophical myth is an idea clothed in the caress of historical narrative. When a mere idea is personified and presented in the form of a man or a god it is called a pure myth. Many of the gods and heroes of antiquity are pure myths."
• "A Poetical myth is a blending of the historical and philosophical, embellished by the creations of the imagination. The poems of Homer and Hesiod, which were the religious text books of the ancient Greeks, and the poetical writings of the Bible, which helped to form and foster the Semitic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, belong to this class."