Due to the inauguration of the Next Quest of the Historical Jesus and renewed interest in historical materialist approaches to early Christianity (such as the forthcoming volume from Myles and Crossley), the present paper seeks to elucidate the history of one of the most contentious debates in early Christian studies among Marxists: that of the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The article goes through the early debates and discussions on the subject and seeks to correct a number of misunderstandings about the history of this debate and also evaluate some of the present contributions on the matter, to see where Marxist historians generally stand. It starts with the earliest discussions of Jesus’ historicity among figures such as Albert Kalthoff and Karl Kautsky, then discuss­ing where Marxist mythicists gained majority positions in the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China, until reaching the present day and briefly discussing the contemporary interlocutors in this debate.

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This article seeks to provide an analysis of Tolkien’s portrayal of feminine figures by emphasizing the roles of Ungoliant and Shelob, the monstrous spiders which Tolkien codes female, and finding how these sexual and procreative beings fit into Tolkien’s theological and gender essentialist views of women, and then how this reflects on other women within Tolkien’s legendarium, arguing that far from any of Tolkien’s women being empowered, they are instead always subservient to his essentialist understandings of women, that they are biologically and intellectually usually inferior to men and have specific gendered roles in Tolkien’s very Catholic gender binary, and so his literary women are in fact not empowered but fit into his restrictive sense of gender roles between men and women.

As a result of the poor historiographical research that has been done on mythicism (the position that there was no historical Jesus), a particular phenomenon has been somewhat overlooked, that of mythicist Christians. Mythicist Christians occupy a strange space as both being conceptualized as heretics to Christians, and oddities to non-Christians, and their space within mythicist research is, as a result, entirely understudied. This article seeks to provide a starting point for such research by discussing two case examples of mythicist Christians: Eliza Sharples and Thomas L. Brodie. The article then provides a list of other figures and potential starting places for further research on historical Christian mythicists and calls for further study of this phenomenon among contemporary Christian populations.