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

And so, in one of the definitive commentaries written on Daniel, by Louis Hartman, a leading scholar of the Hebrew Bible (Carrier does not claim to be one; I don’t know offhand if he knows Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages in which the book was written), we read about verse 25:

Although in the preexilic period [the period in Israel before the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE—four hundred or more years before Daniel was written] the Hebrew term masiah, the “anointed one,” was used almost exclusively of kings, at least in the postexilic period [after the people returned to the land years later] the high priest received a solemn anointing with sacred oil on entering his office…. It seems much more likely, therefore, that the “anointed leader” of 9:25 refers to the high priest, Joshua ben Josadak.15

In other words, 9:25 not only is not talking about a future messiah, it is talking about a figure from the history of Israel whom we already know about: the priest Joshua described elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (see, for example, Zechariah 6:11). Verse 26 is referring to someone who lived centuries later, but it too is not referring to a future messiah. As Hartman has argued—along with many, many other Hebrew Bible scholars—the reference to “an” (not “the”) anointed one in 9:26 “almost certainly” refers to another figure known from Jewish history, the high priest Onias III, who was deposed from being the high priest and murdered in 171 BCE, several years before the famous Maccabean revolt broke out, an event recounted in 2 Maccabees 4:1–38.16

The two who are called “anointed” are not future messiahs. They are both high priests who, in that role, were anointed. And they both lived in the past. Most important of all, this passage was never, so far as we know, interpreted messianically by Jews prior to the advent of Christianity. In other words, there were no Jews in the early 30s who would have resonated with the idea of a suffering messiah based on Daniel 9:26. No one thought that this is what the passage was talking about.

What then are we left with? We do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jews prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins—or killed at all—let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews, tortured and crucified in full public view. This was the opposite of what Jews thought the messiah would be. Then where did the idea of a crucified messiah come from? It was not made up out of thin air. It came from people who believed Jesus was the messiah but who knew full well that he had been crucified.

That no Jew would make up such an idea is made crystal clear by Paul himself in one of his letters. When writing to the Corinthians Paul makes the intriguing and compelling statement that the fact that Christians proclaimed a messiah who had been crucified was the single greatest “stumbling block” for Jews (1 Corinthians 1:23) and a completely ridiculous claim to Gentiles (same verse). That is to say, Jews didn’t buy it. And why not? Because for Jews this very claim—the heart of the Christians’ affirmation of their faith—was absurd, offensive, and potentially blasphemous.

Yet this is what a very small group of Jews, sometime before the year 32, were saying about Jesus. Not that he was God. And not that he was the great king ruling now in Jerusalem. He was the crucified messiah. It is almost impossible to explain this claim—coming at this place, at this time, among this people—if there had not in fact been a Jesus who was crucified.

Conclusion

WHAT CAN WE SAY in conclusion about the evidence that supports the view that there really was a historical Jesus, a Jewish teacher who lived in Palestine as an adult in the 20s of the Common Era, crucified under Pontius Pilate sometime around the year 30? The evidence is abundant and varied. Among the Gospels we have numerous independent accounts that attest to Jesus’s life, at least seven of them from within a hundred years of the traditional date of his death. These accounts did not appear out of thin air, however. They are based on written sources—a good number of them—that date much earlier, plausibly in some cases at least to the 50s of the Common Era. Even these sources were not fabricated purely from the minds of their authors, however. They were based on oral traditions that had been in circulation year after year among the followers of Jesus. These oral traditions were transmitted in various areas—mainly urban areas, we might surmise—throughout the Roman Empire; some of them, however, can be located in Jesus’s homeland, Palestine, where they originally circulated in Aramaic. It appears that some, probably many, of them go back to the 30s CE. We are not, then, dealing merely with Gospels that were produced fifty or sixty years after Jesus’s alleged death as the principal witnesses to his existence. We are talking about a large number of sources, dispersed over a remarkably broad geographical expanse, many of them dating to the years immediately after Jesus’s alleged life, some of them from Palestine itself. On the basis of this evidence alone, it is hard to understand how Jesus could have been “invented.” Invented by whom? Where? When? How then could there be so many independent strands of evidence?

But that is just the beginning. The reality is that every single author who mentions Jesus—pagan, Christian, or Jewish—was fully convinced that he at least lived. Even the enemies of the Jesus movement thought so; among their many slurs against the religion, his nonexistence is never one of them. Moreover, this is not a view restricted in the Christian sources to Mark. It is the view of all of our