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

indication in which of the many centuries between David and Paul” that Jesus lived.23 Wells argues that 1 Thessalonians 2:15 cannot be used to establish Paul’s views of a recent Jesus, when the text speaks of the Judeans “who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and are displeasing to both God and all humans.” In Wells’s view, this passage is an insertion into Paul’s letter, not something Paul himself wrote—a view that I discussed (and dismissed) earlier.

In short, for Paul, Jesus lived a completely unknown and obscure life over a century earlier. He was executed during the reign of the ruthless Jewish king Jannaeus (ruled 103–76 BCE), who was known to have crucified some eight hundred of his Jewish opponents. Paul knew nothing of Jesus’s life and did not care to know anything of his life. All he knew was that Jesus had now, in recent times, begun to appear to people, showing that he was alive again. Those who believed in him could be united with him by mystical baptism in light of the approaching end. It was twenty-five to thirty years after Paul that the story of Jesus began to be historicized into Gospel traditions, as eventually written down first by the Gospel of Mark.

For Wells, if Paul had thought Jesus had died recently, he surely would have mentioned something about a crucifixion in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. Indications that Paul did not think that Jesus had lived recently can be found in such passages as Colossians 1:15, which speaks of Christ as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” For Wells, “such passages do not read like allusions to a near-contemporary being.”24

There are numerous problems with this view. To begin with, as we have seen, Paul did not write the letter to the Colossians. It can scarcely be used to establish Paul’s views. But even if we thought that Paul wrote it, the passage in question says nothing at all about when Christ existed as a human, whether in the recent or the distant past. This is the kind of weak assertion that Wells typically makes. He provides no solid ground for thinking that Paul imagined Jesus to have lived in the remote past—certainly nothing to suggest that his life ended during the reign of King Jannaeus. The fact that Paul does not mention that Jesus died in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate is not in the least odd. What occasion did Paul have to mention something that everyone knew? That this was common knowledge should be clear from our Gospel sources, which did not begin to historicize Jesus two or three decades after Paul but spoke of the historical Jesus already by the early 30s, within at least a year of the traditional date of his death, before Paul was even converted, as we have seen.

There are solid reasons for thinking that Paul understood Jesus to have died recently. I can start with that basic confession of faith that Paul lays out in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, a confession that was passed along to him by those who came before, as he himself states: “For I delivered over to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve.”

Several points are worth emphasizing here. This ancient creed is a neatly balanced, poetical statement, with two halves. In both halves it makes a claim about Christ (he died; he was raised), indicates that the claim is “in accordance with the scriptures,” and then offers an empirical proof: that he died is proved by the fact that he was buried; that he was raised is proved by the fact that he appeared to Cephas (Peter) and then to the twelve (apostles).

The reason the passage is highly relevant to our discussion here is that Paul gives no indication at all that a hundred years or more passed between Jesus’s resurrection and his appearance to the apostles. Quite the contrary; to insert a century-long hiatus into the formulation seems to be a bizarre interpretive move. What in the statement could possibly make one inclined to do so? No, Paul is expressing a straight chronological sequence of events: Jesus died; he was buried; three days later he was raised; and he then appeared to the apostles.

In Wells’s view Jesus died over a century earlier and presumably was raised then, since Paul does say that the resurrection took place three days (not a century) after the death. But quite apart from this view being completely ungrounded and counterintuitive, it works precisely against the logic involved in Paul’s view of the resurrection of Jesus. For Wells, the fact that Jesus has started to appear to people now, a century later, shows to Paul that the end of the age is drawing to a close. But what is the logic in that? Why would the sudden appearance of a long-dead man show Paul anything other than that he was seeing things? By contrast, if the death and burial and resurrection and appearances were all recent, then Paul’s theological understanding of the resurrection makes perfect sense.

Paul’s theology in fact was very much based on the fact (for him it was a fact) that Jesus was raised, and raised quite recently (not that he simply started appearing recently). If you were to ask Christians today what the significance of the resurrection of Jesus was, you might get a wide range of answers, from the rather uninformed “you can’t keep a good man down” to the more sophisticated “it shows that he really was the Son of God.” If you were to ask the apostle Paul the question, he would give a response that almost no one today would give. For Paul, the fact that Jesus was (recently) raised