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

this mythicist approach is the question of relevance. Yes, early Christians told stories about Jesus in light of what they thought about other divine men in their environment—or used to think before they converted. Modern critical historians have noted these parallels, which are nowhere near as numerous as the mythicists have typically contended. And scholars have long discussed why the parallels create problems for knowing exactly what Jesus really said and did. The early storytellers shaped their stories about Jesus according to the models available to them, making up details—and sometimes entire stories—or altering features here and there. But the fact they did so does not have any bearing on whether Jesus really existed. That has to be decided on other grounds.

Or to put the matter more concretely: what if it were true, historically, that the followers of Mithras portrayed him as having been born on December 25, as wearing a halo, and as having followers who were headed by a pope on Vatican Hill? What does that have to do with whether there lived a Jewish preacher from Nazareth named Jesus who was crucified by Pontius Pilate? This entire set of arguments, as with those that I noted earlier, is simply not relevant to the question of whether or not there was a historical Jesus.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mythicist Inventions: Creating the Mythical Christ

TEACHING COURSES ON THE New Testament in the Bible Belt is a real honor and pleasure. For one thing, one never needs to worry about getting enough enrollment. My classes are always bursting at the seams, with dozens of students who cannot get into the course desperately begging to be let in. And it’s not because of me. It’s because of the subject. I’ve known some truly awful teachers in my time at universities in the South, professors of biblical studies who still had full classes every term. Students in this part of the world are eager to study the New Testament—both Christians who want to learn about it from a different perspective than what they absorbed in church and Sunday school and non-Christians who realize just how important the Bible is for their society and culture.

Because of where I teach, almost all my students come from conservative Christian backgrounds and already have both a vested interest in and a firm set of opinions about the subject matter. That makes biblical studies unlike almost any other academic discipline in the university, and it is why courses in the field are perfect for a liberal arts education. Students who take courses in other areas of the humanities—classics, philosophy, history, English, you name it—do not usually hold fixed ideas about the subject. As a result, they simply are not shocked by what they learn, for example, about the lives of Plato, Charlemagne, or Kaiser Wilhelm, and they do not come to class with deeply held opinions about other classics, King Lear, Bleak House, or The Brothers Karamazov. But they do have set opinions about the Bible—what it is and how it should be understood. These opinions can be challenged in class, and when they are, students are forced to think. Since one of the goals of a liberal arts education is to teach students how to think, courses in biblical studies are perfect for a liberal arts education, especially in a region such as the South, where the vast majority of students think they already know what the Bible is about.

At a reputable university, of course, professors cannot teach simply anything. They need to be academically responsible and reflect the views of scholarship. That is probably why there are no mythicists—at least to my knowledge—teaching religious studies at accredited universities or colleges in North America or Europe. It is not that mythicists are lacking in hard-fought views and opinions or that they fail to mount arguments to back them up. It is that their views are not widely seen as academically respectable by members of the academy. That in itself does not make the mythicists wrong. It simply makes them marginal.

As we saw in the previous chapter, some of the arguments that mythicists typically offer in support of their view that Jesus never existed are in fact irrelevant to the question. Other arguments are completely relevant but not persuasive. Those are the views that the present chapter will address, each of them involving ways mythicists have imagined, or rather invented, their mythical Christ. I will try to present these views fairly and then show why scholars in the relevant fields of academic inquiry simply do not accept them. I begin with the most commonly advocated view of them all.

Did the Earliest Christians Invent Jesus as a Dying-Rising God, Based on Pagan Myths?

ONE OF THE MOST widely asserted claims found in the mythicist literature is that Jesus was an invention of the early Christians who had been deeply influenced by the prevalent notion of a dying-rising god, as found throughout the pagan religions of antiquity. The theory behind this claim is that people in many ancient religions worshipped gods who died and rose again: Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Heracles, Melqart, Eshmun, Baal, and so on. Originally, the theory goes, these gods were connected with vegetation and were worshipped in fertility cults. Just as every year the crops die in winter but then come back to life in the spring, so too with the gods who are associated with the crops. They die (when the crops do) and go to the underworld, but then they revive (with the crops) and reappear on earth, raised from the dead. They are worshipped then as dying-rising deities.

Jesus, in this view, was the Jewish version of the pagan fertility deity, invented by Jews as a dying and rising god. Only later did some of the devotees of this Jewish deity historicize his existence and begin to claim that he was in fact a divine human who had once lived on earth, who had died and then rose again. Once the historicizing process began, it