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

authors, for example, the authors of the epistles written both before and after Mark, whose views are based not on a reading of the Gospels but on traditions completely independent of Mark. It is also the view of Q and M and L and John and of all of John’s sources. It is the view of the first-century books or letters of 1 Clement, 1 Peter, 1 John, Hebrews—you name it. And it is also the view of the book of Acts, which preserves very primitive traditions in many of its speeches, traditions that appear to date from the earliest years of the Christian movement, even before the followers of Jesus maintained that he was the Son of God for his entire life or even just from his baptism; according to these traditions, he became the son of God at his resurrection. This is the earliest Christology of them all, probably that of the original followers of Jesus, and so stems from the earliest Palestinian Christian communities. Once again we are back in the 30s of the Common Era, and the witness of these sources is unambiguous that Jesus existed.

The same results obtain by a careful study of Paul’s letters. Paul came to know about Jesus within just a year or, at most, two of his death. Paul too preserves traditions that stem from the early period of his Christian life, right after his conversion around 32–33 CE. There is no doubt that Paul knew that Jesus existed. He mentions Jesus’s birth, his Jewish heritage, his descent from David, his brothers, his ministry to Jews, his twelve disciples, several of his teachings, his Last Supper, and most important for Paul, his crucifixion. Paul indicates that he received some of these traditions from those who came before him, and it is relatively easy to determine when. Paul claims to have visited with Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter, and with his brother James three years after his conversion, that is, around 35–36 CE. Much of what Paul has to say about Jesus, therefore, stems from the same early layer of tradition that we can trace, completely independently, in the Gospels.

Even more impressive than what Paul says about Jesus is whom he knew. Paul was personally acquainted, as I’ve pointed out, with Peter and James. Peter was Jesus’s closest confidant throughout his public ministry, and James was his actual brother. Paul knew them for decades, starting in the mid 30s CE. It is hard to imagine how Jesus could have been made up. Paul knew his best friend and his brother.

Paul also knew that Jesus was crucified. Before the Christian movement, there were no Jews who thought the messiah was going to suffer. Quite the contrary. The crucified Jesus was not invented, therefore, to provide some kind of mythical fulfillment of Jewish expectation. The single greatest obstacle Christians had when trying to convert Jews was precisely their claim that Jesus had been executed. They would not have made that part up. They had to deal with it and devise a special, previously unheard of theology to account for it. And so what they invented was not a person named Jesus but rather the idea of a suffering messiah. That invention has become so much a part of the standard lingo that Christians today assume it was all part of the original plan of God as mapped out in the Old Testament. But in fact the idea of a suffering messiah cannot be found there. It had to be created. And the reason it had to be created is that Jesus—the one Christians considered to be the messiah—was known by everyone everywhere to have been crucified. He couldn’t be killed if he didn’t live.

Jesus certainly existed. My goal in this book, however, is not simply to show the evidence for Jesus’s existence that has proved compelling to almost every scholar who has ever thought about it, but also to show why those few authors who have thought otherwise are therefore wrong. To do that I need to move beyond the evidence for the historical Jesus to the claims made about his existence by various mythicists. I will not try to refute every single point made by every single author who has taken that stand. That would require an enormous book, and trust me, it would not be a pleasant read. Instead I will consider the most important issues and the most interesting and significant arguments. In the next chapter I will deal with several mythicist arguments that are, I will claim, irrelevant to the question of whether or not Jesus actually existed. In the chapter that follows I will then consider several of the best-known mythicist proposals for how Jesus came to be created and argue that they too are thoroughly inadequate to establish the mythicist view.

PART II

The Mythicists’ Claims

CHAPTER SIX

The Mythicist Case: Weak and Irrelevant Claims

UP TO THIS STAGE in our quest to see if the historical Jesus actually existed, I have been mounting the positive argument, showing why the evidence is overwhelming that Jesus really did live as a Jewish teacher in Palestine and was crucified at the direction of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. It will be equally important for us to learn what the historical Jesus said and did, since the mere fact of Jesus’s existence does not get us very far. Anyone interested in the history of Jesus very much wants to know the character of his teachings, the nature of his activities, the reasons for his execution, and so on. I will save the exploration of these other critical issues for the end of the book. For now I need to take on a more pressing matter. If Jesus did exist, why do mythicists say that he did not? The present chapter will look at the typical arguments used by mythicists that are, in my judgment, weak and/or irrelevant to the question. In the following chapter I will consider various ways mythicists have