Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (read book .TXT) 📕

“depart into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.” Why? Because “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” They, though, are equally surprised for they too have never seen this king of kings. But he then informs them, “Truly I say to you, insofar as you did not do it to the least of these, my brothers, neither did you do it to me.” And he then sends them “away into eternal punishment,” whereas the righteous enter “into eternal life” (Matthew 25:41–46).

What is striking about this story, when considered in light of the criterion of dissimilarity, is that there is nothing distinctively Christian about it. That is, the future judgment is based, not on belief in Jesus’s death and resurrection, but on doing good things for those in need. Later Christians—including most notably Paul (see, for example, 1 Thessalonians 4:14–18) but also the writers of the Gospels—maintained that it was belief in Jesus that would bring a person into the coming kingdom. But nothing in this passage even hints at the need to believe in Jesus per se: these people didn’t even know him. What matters is helping the poor, oppressed, and needy. It does not seem likely that a Christian would formulate a passage in just this way.

The conclusion? The sayings of the passage probably go back to Jesus. And their message is clear. Anyone who wants to enter into the future kingdom of God must follow the heart of the Torah and do what God commands, when he tells his people to love others as themselves.

Jesus is often thought of as a great moral teacher, and I think that is right. But it is also important to understand why he insisted on a moral lifestyle guided by the dictates of love. It is not for the reasons that people offer today for being moral. Today many people think that we should behave ethically for the good of society so that we can all get along in the long haul. For Jesus, however, there was not going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon, and people needed to prepare for it. The ethics of Jesus’s teaching were not designed simply to make society better. They were designed to convince people to behave in appropriate ways so that when the Son of Man came, they would be among the elect and brought into the kingdom instead of being destined for either eternal torment or annihilation. Jesus’s ethics were driven by an apocalyptic agenda, and anyone who transplants them into a different, nonapocalyptic setting has ripped them out of their own context and pretended that their original context is of no significance to their meaning.

The Imminence of the End

There should be little doubt that Jesus taught that the end of the age, with the appearance of the Son of Man, would occur shortly, within his own generation. As we have seen, in our earliest Gospels he explicitly declares that the kingdom will arrive before some of his disciples “taste death” (Mark 9:1). Elsewhere he indicates that the great cataclysmic events of the end will happen before “this generation” passes away (Mark 13:30). That is why, throughout our early traditions—Mark, Q, M, L—Jesus urges his hearers constantly to “watch” and “be ready.” These exhortations suggest that no one could know exactly when the end would come but that it would be very soon and so people should be on their guard. And so, from our earliest Gospel:

Be awake, keep alert. For you don’t know when that time is. It is like a man on a journey, who leaves his house and gives his slaves authority over their own work, and orders the doorkeeper to watch. Watch therefore—for you don’t know when the master of the house is coming, whether in the evening, at midnight, at the crack of dawn, or in the morning—lest when he comes suddenly he finds you sleeping. But what I say to you I say to everyone: Watch! (Mark 13:33–37)

Similar teachings can be found in Matthew 24:43–44, 48–50; 25:13; Luke 12:36, 39–40, 45–56. The end was coming soon, and people needed to be prepared.

At the same time, Jesus insisted that in a small way, the kingdom of God was already present, in the here and now. This does not contradict the view that it would come with the arrival of the Son of Man. It is instead an extension of Jesus’s teaching about the future kingdom. Those who followed Jesus and did what he said were already experiencing some of what life would be like in the kingdom. In the kingdom there would be no more war, and so Jesus’s followers were to be peacemakers now. In the kingdom there would be no more hatred, and so his followers were to love everyone now. In the kingdom there would be no injustice or oppression, so his followers were to fight for the rights of the oppressed now. In the kingdom there would be no hunger, thirst, or poverty, and so his followers were to minister to the poor and homeless now. In the kingdom there would be no illness, and so Jesus’s followers were to tend to the sick now.

When his followers did what Jesus commanded them to do, based on his reading of the meaning of the Torah, they already began to implement the ideals of the kingdom in the present. That is why the kingdom, for Jesus, was like a tiny mustard seed. Even though it was the smallest of all seeds, said Jesus, when planted it would grow into an enormous bush (Mark 4:30–32). The kingdom was like that: a small inauspicious beginning in the ministry of Jesus and the lives of his followers that would mushroom fantastically