Dr. Mulvihill's Ph.D. dissertation is entitled The Dependence Between the Gospels and Pagan Literature was published by Lambert Academic. His doctoral work is an extended investigation into the claim that the ancient Jesus biographies called the "gospels" are really Jewish attempts to mix and mimic antecedent pagan mythology.

 

The first third of the work is dedicated to charting the history of what Mulvihill calls the "strong homogeneity thesis" with regard to the gospel accounts. The second section lays out a proposed rubric or method for comparing the gospels to any pagan account to determine approximate causal literary dependence. The last section utilizes Mulvihill's proposed evaluative method to compare salient details of the Jesus narrative, namely death and resurrection, to two proposed allegedly powerfully similar earthbound "deities" and their correlated data.

Included in the conclusion is Dr. Mulvihill's survey of how persuasive this particular critique of the Jesus biographies has been to other professional scholars across the spectrum of theological commitment.