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

My students, of course, have a hard time getting their minds around the fact that in the ancient world Jesus was not the only one “known” to be a miracle-working son of God. There were others. Mythicists, as you might imagine, have had field day with this information, arguing that since these others were obviously not real historical persons, neither was Jesus. He, like them, was invented.

But there is a problem with this view. Apollonius, for example, really was a historical person, a Pythagorean philosopher who lived some fifty years after Jesus. I don’t really think that Apollonius’s mother was impregnated by a God or that Apollonius really healed the sick or raised the dead. But he did exist. And so did Jesus. How do we know? We don’t base our judgments on the way later followers made Apollonius and Jesus out to be semi-or completely divine. We base our judgments on other evidence, as we have seen. The fact that Christians saw Jesus as a divine man (or rather, for them, as the only true divine man) is not in itself relevant to the question of whether he existed. Still, since this is a major point among the mythicists, I need to give it some consideration.

I will be dealing with a very similar point in the next chapter, where I consider arguments of the mythicists that do strike me as highly relevant to the question of Jesus’s existence. There I will ask whether Jesus was invented like one of the dying-rising gods of the ancient world. Here, however, I am more interested in the mythological parallels to the traditions of Jesus (his birth, his miracles, his ascension, and so forth) and their relevance to the question of whether he existed. My view is that even though one can draw a number of interesting parallels between the stories of someone like Apollonius and Jesus (there are lots of similarities but also scores of differences), mythicists typically go way too far in emphasizing these parallels, even making them up in order to press their point. These exaggerations do not serve their purposes well.

A terrific example of an exaggerated set of mythicist claims comes in a classic in the field, the 1875 book of Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Christianity Before Christ. Early on his “study” Graves states his overarching thesis:

Researches into oriental history reveal the remarkable fact that stories of incarnate Gods answering to and resembling the miraculous character of Jesus Christ have been prevalent in most if not all principal religious heathen nations of antiquity; and the accounts and narrations of some of these deific incarnations bear such a striking resemblance to that of the Christian Savior—not only in their general features but in some cases in the most minute details, from the legend of the immaculate conception to that of the crucifixion, and subsequent ascension into heaven—that one might almost be mistaken for the other.22

Grave goes on to list thirty-five such divine figures, naming them as Chrisna of Hindostan, Budha Sakia of India, Baal of Phenicia, Thammuz of Syria, Mithra of Persia, Cadmus of Greece, Mohamud of Arabia, and so on. Already the modern, informed reader sees that there are going to be problems. Buddha, Cadmus, and Muhammad? Their lives were remarkably like that of Jesus, down to the details? But as Graves goes on:

These have all received divine honors, have nearly all been worshiped as Gods, or sons of Gods; were mostly incarnated as Christs, Saviors, Messiahs, or Mediators; not a few of them were reputedly born of virgins; some of them filling a character almost identical with that ascribed by the Christian’s Bible to Jesus Christ; many of them, like him, are reported to have been crucified; and all of them, taken together, furnish a prototype and parallel for nearly every important incident and wonder-inciting miracle, doctrine, and precept recorded in the New Testament, of the Christian’s savior.23

This is certainly an impressive statement, and one can see how an unwary reader may easily be taken in. But note, for starters, the exaggeration of the last two lines (“nearly every important incident…”). Such sensationalist claims are repeated elsewhere throughout the book, as when, for example, we are told that pagan sources provide parallels for “nearly every important thought, deed, word, action, doctrine, principle, precept, tenet, ritual ordinance or ceremony…. Nearly every miraculous or marvelous story, moral precept, or tenet of religious faith [told about Jesus].”

Graves then sets out these fantastic (not to say fantastical) parallels in forty-five chapters, including discussions of such things as messianic prophecies, immaculate conceptions, virgin mothers, the visit of angels, shepherds, and magi to see the newborn infant, birth on December 25, crucifixions, descents to hell, resurrections, ascensions, atonements, doctrines of the trinity, and on and on. Possibly the most striking thing about all of these amazing parallels to the Christian claims about Jesus is the equally amazing fact that Graves provides not a single piece of documentation for any of them. They are all asserted, on his own authority. If a reader wants to look up the stories about Buddha or Mithra or Cadmus, there is no place to turn. Graves does not name the sources of his information. Even so, these are the kinds of claims one can find throughout the writings of the mythicists, even those writing today, 140 years later. And as with Graves, in almost every instance the claims are unsubstantiated.

Just to pick a more recent example, I might mention the assertions of Frank Zindler, in his essay “How Jesus Got a Life.”24 Zindler is not as extreme as Graves, but he does make unguarded claims without providing the reader any guidance for finding the supporting evidence. In Zindler’s view, Christ’s biography started as a set of astrological and comparative mythological speculations in a pagan mystery cult, based to a large extent on the ancient “mystery religion” of Mithraism. According