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

12. I give some of the evidence, with bibliography, in New Testament, chap. 12.

13. April D. DeConick, The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation (London: T & T Clark, 2006). For the Gospel of Peter, see the less convincing argument of John Dominic Crossan, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1988). Even if one does not accept the extreme views of Crossan about a Cross Gospel that originated before even Mark, which was used by all four of the New Testament Gospel writers, a good case can still be made that the Gospel of Peter is based on written sources.

14. See Edgar McKnight, What Is Form Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969).

Chapter 4: Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels

1. For an introduction to Papias and a translation of all his surviving literary remains, see Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 2:86–119.

2. This and the following excerpts of Papias are taken from Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 85–119.

3. See John 7:53–8:11.

4. See my discussion in Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), 107–10.

5. See Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 107–10.

6. For introductions and translations, see Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:203–321.

7. I have taken translations from Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 203–321.

8. See Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:23–25.

9. This is the oldest form of the baptism scene found in the Gospel of Luke; see my discussion in Bart Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 73–79.

10. See my fuller study, Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011), 79–114.

11. See Ehrman, Forged, 43–78.

12. See chap. 3. To recall: the seven independent Gospel witnesses are Mark, parts of Matthew, parts of Luke, John (in whole or in part), the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas (in whole or in part), and Papyrus Egerton 2 (in whole or in part).

13. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 28.

14. See Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 27 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 705–7.

15. See Victor Paul Furnish, Jesus According to Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).

16. One place where it is sometimes thought that Paul is quoting a prophecy instead of a saying of the historical Jesus is in 1 Corinthians 14:34–37, where he instructs women to be silent in the churches because this is “a command of the Lord.” The problem in this passage is that there are solid reasons, including some manuscript evidence, to suggest that the injunction for women not to speak was not originally part of 1 Corinthians but was added by later scribes. In that case, the command of the Lord would have to do with the passage before 14:34, where Paul urges order in the worship services instead of allowing chaos to reign, as it appears to have been doing in Corinth. One can easily imagine a teaching of Jesus where he instructed his disciples to be harmonious, unified, and orderly rather than self-aggrandizing and disruptive. Some such saying rather than a Christian prophecy may well lie behind Paul’s injunction.

17. I am drawing these examples from Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 19.

18. George A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (Peru, IL: Carus, 1996), 14.

19. George A. Wells, “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus,” Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 22.

Chapter 5: Two Key Data for the Historicity of Jesus

1. Earlier in my career I played with the idea that Cephas and Peter were two different persons, but now I think that’s a bit bizarre—as most of the critics of the idea have pointed out! The most compelling reason for identifying them as the same person is not simply John 1:42 but the historical fact that neither Cephas nor Peter was a personal name in the ancient world. Peter is the Greek word for “rock,” which in Aramaic was Cephas. And so Jesus gave this person—his real name was Simon—a nickname, “the Rock.” It seems highly unlikely that two different persons were given precisely the same nickname at the same time in history when this name did not previously exist.

2. For example, in Paul’s two longest letters, Romans and 1 Corinthians, he uses the name Jesus by itself a total of one time. He frequently, however, speaks of “the Lord.”

3. Robert Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 336.

4. J. M. Robertson, Jesus and Judas: A Textual and Historical Investigation (London: Watts & Co., 1927).

5. George A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 168.

6. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 336–43.

7. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 352.

8. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 349.

9. Price here is building on the imaginative but wildly speculative and widely discredited views of Robert Eisenmann in his book James, the Brother of Jesus (New York: Viking, 1997). For sober evaluations of what scholars think about the Dead Sea Scrolls and their community, see the authoritative and justly acclaimed works of such scholars as Joseph Fitzmyer, Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Paulist Press, 1992); Géza Vermès, The Story of the Scrolls (London: Penguin, 2010); and James Vanderkam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).

10. Translation of R. B. Wright, “Psalms of Solomon,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 2:667.

11. Translation of E. Isaac, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. Charlesworth, 2:49.

12. See John Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

13. Richard Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed (n.p.: Lulu Press, 2009), 34, emphasis his.

14. See John Collins, “Daniel, Book of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 2:29–37.

15. Louis Hartman, The Book of Daniel: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ.