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

In addition, we have remnants of some of the early traditions of Jesus that were circulating orally, outside the Gospels, and only later written down. We have looked already at the speeches in the book of Acts. These speeches show clear signs of having derived from the earliest Christian communities since their Christological views are so “primitive” in relation to the views of Paul and the later Gospels. In several of these speeches it is clear that the storytellers believed that Jesus had become the Son of God and messiah at the time of the resurrection (not, say, at his baptism or his birth). These speeches must come from exceedingly early times. And in them we find summaries of Jesus’s life and death, where it is clear that he was a Jewish teacher and miracle worker who was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of the Jews (see, for example, Acts 2:22–28; 3:11–26; 13:26–41). This is not a story invented by Mark; it was in circulation from the earliest period of Christian storytelling.

That traditions of Jesus’s life and death were circulating in the early years of the Christian community independently of Mark can also be shown, somewhat ironically, from sources that are even later than Mark. We have already seen that writings unconnected to Mark, such as the letter to the Hebrews and the book of 1 John, stress both the earthly life of Jesus and the fact that he experienced a bloody death, which for these authors functioned as an atonement for sins. Whether or not Jesus’s death was an atonement is a theological question, but the historical fact remains that these authors believed that Jesus both lived and died. Thus they based their exhortations and theological reflections on these historical data and on the stories that conveyed them, all independent of Mark.

Even in the Gospel of Mark there is evidence of traditions that long predate Mark and involve both Jesus’s life and death. This we have seen from the fact that even though Mark was a Greek-speaking Christian, a number of his stories show clear signs of being originally told in Aramaic. And so we have seen that some of the sayings found in Mark make sense only when translated back into Aramaic (for example, “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, therefore the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath”). Even more clearly, it is shown by the fact that some stories were passed down to Mark with their key Aramaic words left untranslated so that Mark, or more likely a predecessor, had to provide Greek speakers with a translation. Notably, this occurs in stories that involve both Jesus’s public ministry (Mark 5:41) and his Passion (Mark 15:34).

There is no reason to think that Mark was the one who first imagined putting a ministry of Jesus together with an account of his death and that all other accounts of Jesus’s life and death are dependent on his. The writings of Paul, speeches of Acts, the Gospel of John, the sources M and L, the comments of Luke, and other pieces of evidence all suggest quite the contrary, that even though Mark is our earliest surviving Gospel, his was not the first such narrative to be propagated. Luke is no doubt right that there were “numerous” such accounts before him, and there were certainly others after him. They are not all dependent, in all their stories, on Mark.

Conclusion

WE HAVE CONSIDERED SUBSTANTIAL and powerful arguments showing that Jesus really existed (chapters 2–5 above). Many of the arguments made by the mythicists, by contrast, are irrelevant to the question (chapter 6); many of the others are relevant but insubstantial or, quite frankly, wrong (this chapter). There was a historical Jesus, a Jewish teacher of first-century Palestine who was crucified by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate.

But knowing this is only part of the story. Historians also want to know more about Jesus, about what he stood for, what he said, what he did, what he experienced, and why he was executed. Once we move from the fact of Jesus’s existence to the question of who he really was, we move from the remarkably firm ground of virtual historical certainty to greater depths of uncertainty. Scholars debate these latter issues roundly. It will not be my purpose in the chapters that follow to solve the problems once and for all to the satisfaction of everyone who has ever thought about them. My goal instead is simply to explain why the majority of scholars who have dealt with these matters over the past century or so have concluded that the Jesus who existed is not the Jesus of the stained-glass window or the second-grade Sunday school class. The Jesus of popular imagination (there are actually a large number of Jesuses in various popular imaginations) is a “myth” in the sense that mythicists use the term: he is not the Jesus of history.

But there was a Jesus of history, and there is good evidence to suggest what he was like. In very broad terms Albert Schweitzer, with whom I started this story, was probably right. Jesus appears to have been a Jewish apocalypticist who expected God to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the forces of evil and to bring in his good kingdom. And in Jesus’s view this would happen very soon, within his own generation. We will see in the following two chapters why this view of Jesus is persuasive.

PART III

Who Was the Historical Jesus?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Finding the Jesus of History

EVERY SPRING SEMESTER AT Chapel Hill I teach my undergraduate course Introduction to the New Testament. My students are smart, interesting, and interested; the majority of them are Bible-believing Christians. We spend a good portion of the semester—over half of it—studying the early Christian Gospels and then the life of the historical Jesus. To most of the students almost everything in the course