William Benjamin Smith (October 26, 1850 – August 6, 1934) was a professor of mathematics at Tulane University, best known as a proponent of the Christ myth theory.

[1][2] In a series of books, beginning with Ecce Deus: The Pre-Christian Jesus, published in 1894, and ending with The Birth of the Gospel, published posthumously in 1954, Smith argued that the earliest Christian sources, particularly the Pauline epistles, stress Christ's divinity at the expense of any human personality, and that this would have been implausible, if there had been a human Jesus.

[3] Evidence for this cult was found in Hippolytus' mention of the Naassenes[4] and Epiphanius' report of a Nasarene sect that existed before Christ, as well as passages in Acts.

[7] Infamously, Smith was also a white supremacy advocate whose book The Color Line: A Brief on Behalf of the Unborn (1905) argued for the racial inferiority of Negroes.

This work was completed by his old Tulane colleague Walter Miller and when published in 1944 was the first English translation in the original dactylic hexameter.