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

16. Hartman, Book of Daniel, 252.

Chapter 6: The Mythicist Case

1. See Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005).

2. See Bart Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010).

3. The difference, of course, is that no one would use the Hitler Diaries as historical sources for the life of Hitler, as my student Stephen Carlson has pointed out to me. But that is because we have so many other sources, including those used by Kujau to construct his forgeries. If we did not have these other sources, though, a careful study of his forgeries could help us reconstruct his sources, and to that extent the Hitler Diaries would be like the Gospels: they would be evidence of earlier historical accounts. But my main point is that what matters is not the name of a book’s author (real or false) but the nature of its contents.

4. Luke indicates that Mary and Joseph returned to Nazareth after they had completed the necessary rites of purification. This is a reference to the law found in Leviticus 12, which indicates that thirty-two days after giving birth the woman was to make an offering to God for cleansing.

5. Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, chap. 2.

6. See Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 29–39.

7. Robert Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011); Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).

8. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, ed. John Bowden (1906; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), chaps. 22 and 23.

9. Frank Zindler, “Where Jesus Never Walked,” Through Atheist Eyes, vol. 1 (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011), 27–55. I do not mean to say that Zindler does not cite evidence for his view. He claims that the name Jesus in Mark 1:9 does not have the definite article, unlike the other eighty places it occurs in Mark, and therefore the verse does not appear to be written in Markan style. In response, I should say that (a) there are two other places in Mark where the name Jesus does not have the article; (b) if the problem with the entire verse is that the name Jesus does not have article, then if we posit a scribal change to the text, the more likely explanation is that a scribe inadvertently left out the article. Nazareth has nothing to do with it; and (c) there is not a single stitch of manuscript evidence to support his claim that the verse was interpolated into the Gospel. This latter point is worth stressing since it is the reason that no serious scholar of the textual tradition of Mark thinks that the verse is an interpolation.

10. George A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 2nd ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), 146.

11. René Salm, The Myth of Nazareth (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2008).

12. Salm, Myth of Nazareth, xii.

13. As I have learned from my UNC colleague Jodi Magness, one of the premier archaeologists of Roman Palestine in the world today.

14. Stephen J. Pfann, Ross Voss, and Yehudah Rapuano, “Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997–2002): Final Report,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 25 (2007): 16–79.

15. René Salm, “A Response to ‘Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997–2002): Final Report,’” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 95–103. The responses were compelling (based in part on their communications with Alexandre): Stephen J. Pfann and Yehudah Rapuano, “On the Nazareth Village Farm Report: A Reply to Salm,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 105–8; and Ken Dark, “Nazareth Village Farm: A Reply to Salm,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 109–11.

16. Pfann and Rapuano, “Nazareth Village Farm Report,” 108.

17. Pfann and Rapuano, “Nazareth Village Farm Report,” 108.

18. Ken Dark, “Review of Salm, Myth of Nazareth,” in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008), 145.

19. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 34.

20. Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

21. A convenient abbreviated version of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana can be found in David Cartlidge and David Dungan, Documents for the Study of the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).

22. Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Christianity Before Christ (1875; repr., New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 29.

23. Graves, Sixteen Crucified Saviors, 30–31.

24. Frank Zindler, “How Jesus Got a Life,” Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Won’t Reason (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011), 1:57–80.

25. Zindler, “How Jesus Got a Life,” 66.

26. For interesting works of real scholarship, see Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), and the speculative but fascinating work of David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).

27. The literature on the mystery cults is extensive. For a most recent and accessible introduction by an authority in the field, see Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010).

28. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 44–46.

Chapter 7: Mythicist Inventions

1. On Kersey Graves, see the previous chapter. For more recent discussions, see Robert Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 16. The details of the transformation from dying-rising god to the historical Jesus are worked out differently, of course, by different mythicist authors. As two popular examples, see Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Co., 2004), and Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999).

2. See the discussion, for example, in Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 4.

3. Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of the Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient