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

evidence of whether he came into the world, and the wording of the birth certificate is irrelevant to the question.

The manuscripts of the New Testament do indeed have large numbers of variations in them: alternative ways of wording a verse or a passage; omissions of words or sentences; additional insertions of words and sentences here and there. But the problem is not of such a scope as to make it impossible to have any idea what the ancient Christian authors wrote. If we had no clue what was originally in the writings of Paul or in the Gospels, this objection might carry more weight. But there is not a textual critic on the planet who thinks this, since not a shred of evidence leads in this direction. And I don’t know even of any mythicist who is willing to make this claim. As a result, in the vast majority of cases, the wording of these authors is not in dispute. And where it is, it rarely has anything at all to do with the question of whether Jesus existed.

We Do Not Know the Authors of the Gospels

It is also true that we do not know who wrote the Gospels. Although they are attributed to two of Jesus’s disciples (Matthew the tax collector and John the beloved disciple) and to two companions of the apostles (Mark the secretary for Peter and Luke the traveling companion of Paul) these ascriptions are almost certainly wrong. Something similar obtains for most of the rest of the New Testament. Of the twenty-seven books found in the New Testament, only eight of them almost certainly go back to the authors to whom they are traditionally ascribed. Either the others are all misattributed to people who did not in fact write them, or they were actually forged, that is, written by authors claiming to be famous people while knowing full well they were someone else.

Again, I have dealt with this issue more fully elsewhere and do not need to go into all the details here.2 The one thing we can say with some assurance about the Gospel writers is that even though Jesus’s own followers were lower-class Aramaic-speaking peasants from rural Galilee, who were almost certainly illiterate, the Gospels were written by highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians who lived outside Palestine. They were not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But once again, this is irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus lived. In 1983 the famous, or rather infamous, Hitler Diaries came to public view, and they were immediately authenticated by experts. But they were soon shown to be forgeries, and the forger, a German scoundrel named Konrad Kujau, was then caught red-handed. He had been paid millions for the volumes and had done it for the money. The fact that he forged these sources about Hitler, however, has no bearing on the question of whether Hitler existed. That has to be decided on other grounds. In the case of the Gospels and Jesus, even though we don’t know who the authors of these books were, we can still use them as historical sources for knowing about Jesus, as I argued in the earlier chapters.3 The Gospels are valuable to this end whether they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John or by Fred, Harry, Sam, and Jeff.

The Gospels Are Filled with Discrepancies and Contradictions

It is absolutely true, in my judgment, that the New Testament accounts of Jesus are filled with discrepancies and contradictions in matters both large and small. Anyone who doubts that simply has to compare very carefully a story found in one of the Gospels with the same story found in another. You can pick any set of stories you like. Compare the genealogy of Jesus found in Matthew with the one found in Luke. They simply cannot be reconciled (they are both genealogies of Joseph, but who is his father, grandfather, great-grandfather?). Neither can the stories of Jesus’s birth (did his parents flee with him to Egypt, as in Matthew, or did they instead return to Nazareth a month after he was born, as in Luke?).4 Neither can those of his death (was he crucified the afternoon before the Passover meal was eaten, as in John, or the morning after it was eaten, as in Mark?) or of his resurrection (were his disciples instructed to go north to Galilee and it was there that they met Jesus raised from the dead, as in Matthew, or were they instructed not to leave Jerusalem so that they stayed put, not only to see Jesus raised but to spend months there, as in Luke?).

Sometimes the discrepancies are not simply about small details but about big issues. Did Jesus call himself God? It seems a rather important issue because if he did, one would have to figure out what to make of his claim. Was he crazy? Hopelessly self-important? Or possibly right? It is striking, however, that of all the Gospels, only John, the last to be written, reports that Jesus called himself God. If the historical Jesus really did spend his ministry revealing his divine identity to his disciples, as he does in John, isn’t it a little strange that Matthew, Mark, and Luke never get around to saying so? Did they think it was unimportant? Or did they just forget that part?

Once again I have dealt with the discrepancies and the contradictions of the New Testament Gospels in another context and so do not need to delve more deeply into them here.5 At this point it is enough to reiterate that these issues are more or less irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus actually lived. The contradictions in our sources will make it difficult, or at least interesting, when we want to know what he really said and did. But the case that I built for the existence of Jesus in the previous chapters does not hinge on the Gospels being internally consistent or free from discrepancy. Again, think of an analogy. You