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

San Francisco, 2005), 63–65. There are only a couple of later legends of Jesus writing, including the famous exchange of letters that he has with King Abgar of Edessa, who sent him a request to be healed, to which Jesus graciously replied in writing. I include a translation of both letters in the book I published with my colleague Zlatko Plese, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 413–17.

4. Throughout this book I will be using the term pagan in the non-derogatory sense used by historians to refer to anyone who subscribed to any of the many polytheistic religions of antiquity—that is, anyone who was neither Jewish nor Christian. The term when used by historians does not have any negative connotations.

5. See the article on “Pontius Pilate” by Daniel Schwartz in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:395–401.

6. William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989).

7. Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).

8. On the question of the sources of the Gospels, see my fuller discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), chaps. 8 and 12.

9. For a collection of them, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.

10. See the discussion in Hezser, Jewish Literacy, esp. 422–26.

11. For an accessible translation of this letter, along with translations of the other Roman sources that I mention in this chapter, see Robert M. Grant, Second-Century Christianity: A Collection of Fragments, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 3–12.

12. Representative of this view is Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Co., 2004), 162.

13. There is a large literature on Josephus. Of particular use for the topics I will be dealing with in this book, see Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002).

14. See the discussion in John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Reconsidering the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 59–69.

15. See Meier, Marginal Jew, 59–69.

16. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 534; his entire discussion can be found on 533–86.

17. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 535.

18. For two of the more important studies of the apologists, see R. M. Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988), and Eugene Gallagher, Divine Man or Magician? Celsus and Origen on Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1982).

19. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 562.

20. Ken Olson, “Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999): 305–22.

21. J. Carleton Paget, “Some Observations on Josephus and Christianity,” Journal of Theological Studies 52, no. 2 (2001): 539–624; Alice Whealey, “Josephus, Eusebius of Caesarea, and the Testimonium Flavianum,” in Josephus und das Neue Testament, ed. Christfried Böttrich and Jens Herzer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 73–116.

22. Final judgment on the authenticity of the Testimonium will ultimately depend, in the short term, on the strength of the argument that Olson can make in his doctoral dissertation and especially on the critical reaction to it by experts on both Josephus and Eusebius. However that debate resolves itself, it should be obvious that my case for the historicity of Jesus does not depend on the reliability of Josephus’s testimony, even though I take the passage to be, at its core, authentic.

23. The most conservative estimates put the population under one million. See Magen Broshi, Bread, Wine, Walls, and Scrolls (Sheffield, Eng.: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002).

24. Here I am simply summarizing my discussion in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 62–63. For fuller discussions, see the classic studies of R. Travers Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (New York: Ktav, 1903), and Morris Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1950).

Chapter 3: The Gospels as Historical Sources

1. See my college-level textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), chap. 8, and the bibliography that I offer there.

2. See Robert Kysar, John the Maverick Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).

3. Some scholars think that John knew and used the synoptic Gospels, but I think this is unlikely. Even if he did, he includes many stories unrelated to those of the synoptics, and in these at least there certainly cannot have been any dependence. On the entire question, see D. Moody Smith, John Among the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2001).

4. For a new translation of the Gospel of Thomas by Zlatko Plese, see Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Plese, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 310–35; for a discussion of the contents and character of the Gospel, see my book Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), chap. 3.

5. For translation of the Gospel of Peter, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels, 371–87; for discussion of its contents and character, see Ehrman, Lost Christianities, chap. 1.

6. For a full commentary on the Gospel of Peter, see Paul Foster, The Gospel of Peter (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

7. Translation and brief discussion of Papyrus Egerton 2 in Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels, 245–53.

8. This is a highly fragmentary account in which Jesus is beside the Jordan River, in which he may be described as performing a miracle, possibly to illustrate his parable about the miraculous growth of seeds.

9. See Ehrman, New Testament, chap. 8.

10. For a spirited attempt to dispense with Q and to argue that Matthew was the source of Luke, see Mark Goodacre, The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). As lively as the argument of the book is, it has failed to convince most of the scholars working in the field.

11. Joel Marcus, Mark: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, 2 vols., Anchor Bible Commentary (New York: