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

Caesar on them, and images were not allowed, especially in the Temple. And so of course there needed to be a currency exchange. This allowed the sacrificial animals to be purchased with Temple coinage.

Jesus apparently took umbrage at the operation and reacted violently to it. We do not know why. Possibly he simply saw it as corrupt, much as the Essenes did, who refused to participate in the worship in the Temple. Or maybe he could not stand the idea of someone making a profit out of the worship of God. Or possibly (these are not mutually exclusive options) Jesus’s actions were meant to be a symbolic gesture.5 If, as seems likely, Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple in the coming judgment, he may have overturned the tables and caused a ruckus as a kind of enacted parable of his apocalyptic message, where his actions were meant to be a metaphor for what would soon happen to the place, a symbolic illustration of his proclamation of the destruction that would affect not only such enemies of God as the Romans but even the religious institutions and leaders of his own people.

This was a radical message indeed, and the leaders themselves appear to have gotten the point. According to our early traditions, they kept their eye on Jesus over the course of the following week, and as he started to amass crowds of Jews listening to his message, they arranged to have him arrested and taken from the public view, possibly to prevent any uprisings during the incendiary times of the Jewish Passover feast.

The Death of Jesus

THE LAST DAYS AND hours of Jesus receive far more attention in our early sources than any other period of his life. Our first Gospel, Mark, devotes ten chapters to Jesus’s ministry in Galilee (we’re not told how long it lasts), and the final six to just his last week. Our last canonical account, John, gives eleven chapters over to a three-year ministry and fully ten to the last week. Unfortunately, a good deal of the material in these chapters does not readily pass our criteria. What we can say is that Jesus was probably betrayed to the Jewish authorities by one of his own followers; these authorities delivered him over to the Roman governor, Pilate, who was in town to keep the peace during the festival; after what was almost certainly a rather brief trial, Pilate ordered him crucified. All of these data make sense when seen in light of Jesus’s apocalyptic proclamation.

The early accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree that Jesus came to Jerusalem a week before the Passover itself. This makes sense, as it was customary: one needed to go through certain rituals of purification before celebrating the festival, and that required attendance in the Temple a week in advance. Jesus reportedly spent most of the week making his apocalyptic proclamation to the gathering crowds, and it is during these days that he is said to have delivered a particularly straightforward message of the coming apocalypse (for example, Mark 13). According to these accounts—unlike John, as we have seen—Jesus celebrated the Passover feast with his disciples, and it is then that he is alleged to have instituted the Lord’s Supper (Mark 14). Even though the event is narrated as well by Paul, it is difficult to see how it can pass our criterion of dissimilarity for Jesus predicts in graphic detail how his body will be broken and his blood shed for the sake of others—a decidedly Christian theme. It is not implausible, however, to think that Jesus suspected that his time was up. It does not take a revelation from God to realize what happens when one speaks out violently against the ruling authorities in this kind of inflammatory context, and there was a long history of Jewish prophets having met their demise for crossing the lines of civil discourse.

There are solid reasons for thinking that Jesus really was betrayed by one of his own followers, Judas Iscariot. It is, of course, recorded in multiple independent traditions: Mark, M, John, and the book of Acts (thus Mark 14:10–11; 43–50; Matthew 27:3–10; John 18:1–11; Acts 1:15–20). Moreover, the tradition seems to pass the criterion of dissimilarity, as it does not seem to be the sort of thing that a later Christian would make up. Jesus had no more authority over his closest followers than that?

We are completely handicapped in knowing why Judas would have done such a thing, even though there have been a plethora of suggestions over the years.6 Maybe he did it for the money. Maybe he had a mean streak (inspired by the Devil, to use the theological language of the New Testament). Maybe he was disenchanted with Jesus’s refusal to assume the public role of the messiah. Maybe he thought he could force Jesus’s hand to compel him to call out for public support. No one really knows.

A more interesting question, in some ways, is, What did Judas actually betray? In the Gospels, of course, he simply betrays Jesus’s whereabouts so that the authorities can arrest him when no one is around. That may be the simplest answer, but it does make one wonder: Why couldn’t the authorities simply have Jesus followed?

Another possibility presents itself, however. I have discussed this issue at length elsewhere and can simply summarize it here.7 What is very strange about the Gospel stories of Jesus’s death is that Pilate condemns him to crucifixion for calling himself the king of the Jews. This is multiply attested in all the traditions, and it passes the criterion of dissimilarity because this is not a title that, so far as we can tell, the early Christians ever used of Jesus. His followers called him the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Lord, the messiah, and lots of other things but not, in the New Testament at least, the king of the Jews. And so they would not have made that up as