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

The blood of the Lord brought redemption (12.7).

Jesus taught gentleness and patience; the author here quotes a series of Jesus’s sayings similar to what can be found in Matthew and Luke (13.1–2).

The Lord Jesus Christ came humbly, not with arrogance or haughtiness (16.2).

Jesus came from Jacob “according to the flesh” (32.2).

The Lord adorned himself with good works (33.7).

Another quotation of “the words of our Lord Jesus” (46.8, comparable to Matthew 26:24 and Luke 17:2).

Those who experience love in Christ should do what Christ commanded (49.1).

Out of his love, the Lord Jesus Christ “gave his blood for us, his flesh for our flesh, his soul for our souls” (49.6).

Here again we have an independent witness not just to the life of Jesus as a historical figure but to some of his teachings and deeds. Like all sources that mention Jesus from outside the New Testament, the author of 1 Clement had no doubt about his real existence and no reason to defend it. Everyone knew he existed. That is true of the writings of the New Testament as well, outside the four Gospels that we have already considered.

Canonical Sources Outside the Gospels and Paul

IT IS A LARGE mistake to think that when it comes to the New Testament, only the Gospels attest to the historical existence of Jesus. This is sometimes claimed, or at least implied, by mythicists intent on narrowing down our sources for Jesus to just a few—or even to just one, the Gospel of Mark. So far as we can tell, all the authors of the New Testament knew about the historical Jesus. One exception might be the writer of the letter of James, who mentions Jesus only twice in passing (1:1 and 2:1) without saying anything about his earthly life. But even in a letter as short as Jude, we find the apostles of Jesus mentioned (verse 17), which presupposes, of course, that Jesus lived and had followers. The one book that talks at length about these apostles is the book of Acts, which was written by the author of the Gospel of Luke but which preserves traditions about the life of Jesus that are both independent of anything said in the Gospel and, in the judgment of most critical historians, based on traditions in circulation before the production of the Gospel.

The Book of Acts

The Acts of the Apostles provides a narrative of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire in the years after Jesus’s death. Whereas in the Gospel of Luke Jesus is the principal figure, in this, the author’s second volume, it is Jesus’s followers who take center stage. In particular, the author is interested in the missionary activities of Peter (mainly in chapters 1–12) and Paul (chapters 13–28). In his account he shows how the Christian movement went from being a small group of Jesus’s followers immediately after his death to becoming a worldwide phenomenon, a religion that was open not only to Jews like Jesus himself and his disciples but also to Gentiles, as God (according to the narrative) used the apostles to spread the good news of Jesus “to the ends of the earth” (1:18).

Jesus Tradition in Acts

The first important point for our quest to establish the historicity of Jesus is that the author of Acts has access to traditions that are not based on his Gospel account so that we have yet another independent witness. For the writer of Acts, Jesus was very much a man who really lived and died in Judea, as can be seen in the accounts of Jesus’s resurrection in chapter 1 and in the speeches that occur abundantly throughout the narrative. Chapter 1 portrays the disciples meeting with Jesus after the resurrection. They receive their final instructions from him in Jerusalem, where he has just been killed. Among the interesting traditions found in this chapter is a statement by the apostle Peter about the betrayer, Judas Iscariot, who is said to have purchased a field with the money he received for turning Jesus in to the authorities. Judas is said to have fallen headlong on the field and spilled his innards out. It is for that reason, Peter indicates, that the field came to be known as “Akeldama,” an Aramaic word meaning “Field of Blood” (1:16–19).

One of the reasons this passage is interesting is that in his earlier Gospel account Luke says nothing about the death of Judas. Neither does Mark or John. The most famous account of Judas’s death is in the Gospel of Matthew, where we are told that after he performed the foul deed, he repented of what he had done and tried to return the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests. They refused to take the money, and so he flung it down in the Temple and went out and hanged himself. The priests were unable to put the money into the Temple treasury since it was “blood money” (used to betray innocent blood), and so they used it to buy a field to serve as a cemetery. For that reason the field came to be known as the “Field of Blood” (Matthew 27:3–10).

These two accounts of Judas’s death cannot be reconciled. In one Judas buys the field, in the other the priests do; in one it is called the Field of Blood because Judas bled all over it, in the other because it was purchased with blood money; in one Judas dies by hanging himself, in the other he falls headfirst and bursts open in the midst. These differences show that Luke had an independent tradition of the death of Judas, which was at least as early as the one in Matthew. There are reasons for thinking that at the heart of both stories is a historical tradition: independently they confirm that a field in Jerusalem was connected in some way both with the money Judas was paid to betray Jesus and with Judas’s death. Moreover, it