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

The Apocalyptic Activities of Jesus

NOW THAT WE HAVE seen a brief overview of what Jesus proclaimed during his public ministry, what can we say about his activities? What did he do?

Jesus’s Reputation as a Miracle Worker

Any attempt to establish beyond reasonable doubt what Jesus did during his ministry is inevitably frustrated by the nature of the accounts that have come down to us. On page after page of the Gospels we are confronted with reports of the miraculous, as Jesus defies nature, heals the sick, casts out demons, and raises the dead. What is the historian to make of all these miracles?

The short answer is that the historian cannot do anything with them. I have spelled out the reasons at greater length in another context and do not need to belabor the point here.3 Suffice it to say that if historians want to know what Jesus probably did, the miracles will not make the list since by their very nature—and definition—they are the most improbable of all occurrences. Some would say, of course, that they are literally impossible; otherwise we would not think of them as miracles. I do not need to enter into that question here but can simply say that even though the majority of Jesus’s activities in the Gospels involve the miraculous, these stories do not provide much grist for the historians’ mill.

But in an indirect way, they do provide some limited grist. Even though historians—when speaking as historians (as opposed, for example, to historians speaking as believers)—cannot say that Jesus really did, for example, heal the sick and cast out demons, they can say that he had the reputation of having done so. There is nothing improbable about someone having a reputation as a miracle worker. There are plenty of people in our own day with just that reputation, deserved or not. But the important point for this part of our discussion is that Jesus was widely thought to have been a healer and an exorcist, and that reputation makes particular sense in an apocalyptic setting.

Like other apocalypticists, Jesus believed that there were forces of evil in this world that were creating pain and misery. This was seen particularly in the lives of people who were crippled, terminally ill, or possessed by demons. (I’m not saying they were really possessed by demons; I’m saying that this is how they were perceived at the time.) Jesus set himself and his message against the forces of evil in this world, as he proclaimed there was an age coming in which there would be no more pain, misery, or suffering—and no more Devil and demons to ruin people’s lives. Moreover, he claimed that those who followed him were already receiving a foretaste of what that kingdom would be like. And so it is no surprise that he was associated with the practices of healing and exorcism, precisely in that apocalyptic context. He was already bringing the kingdom to earth in his public ministry. The healing and exorcism stories, then, are to be understood apocalyptically, not necessarily as things that happened, but as a direct reflection of Jesus’s own proclamation of the coming kingdom of God.

The Associates of Jesus

Jesus’s “good” reputation derived from the traditions that he could do miracles for the benefit of those in need. But his “bad” reputation proceeded from the people with whom he was known to associate—the poor, the outcast, the sinners. Other religious leaders apparently mocked him for preferring the company of lowlifes to that of the pious and upright. And so we find in a number of early traditions the claim that Jesus associated with “tax collectors and sinners” (Mark 2:15–16; Q [Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:29]; M [Matthew 21:31–32]; L [Luke 15:1]). It seems unlikely that Jesus’s later followers would make up the claim that his friends were chiefly outcasts and prostitutes, so this may indeed have been his reputation.

The term tax collectors refers to employees of the large tax-collecting corporations that raised tribute for Rome from the hard-pressed workers of Galilee. As a group, the tax collectors were despised as collaborators with the Romans and as greedy, moneygrubbing, and dishonest—in part because their own salaries depended on raising more funds than were handed over to the authorities. The term sinners refers to any of the common people who simply did not make a great effort to keep strictly the laws of the Jews. Unlike other religious leaders—say, from among the Pharisees, Sadducees, or Essenes—Jesus associated with such people.

And it is not hard to understand why, given his apocalyptic message. Jesus proclaimed that in the coming kingdom all social roles would be reversed, that the high and mighty would be taken out of power and the lowly and oppressed would be given places of prominence. Moreover, he declared that the kingdom was already making its presence known in the here and now. And so he associated with the lowlifes to show that it was they who would inherit the kingdom. The kingdom would come not to the stellar exemplars of Jewish piety but to the outcasts who were looked down upon by those in power. It is no wonder that Jesus was not popular with other religious leaders of his day.

One group that Jesus associated with in particular was the “twelve,” an inner circle of disciples who were evidently handpicked by Jesus. The existence of this group of twelve is extremely well attested in our early sources. It is striking that all three synoptic Gospels speak of the twelve and list their names, but the names differ from one list to the next (Mark 3:14–19; Matthew 10:1–4; Luke 6:12–16). This must show that everyone knew there were twelve in the group, but not everyone knew who the twelve were. The group is also explicitly mentioned in Paul (1 Corinthians 15:5), John (6:67; 20:24), and Acts (6:2).

There is one saying of Jesus involving the