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

Jesus and with what we can establish, with good probability, about what he said and did. In earlier chapters I broached these issues more or less in passing. Now I need to address them head-on. What methods do historians use in order to establish the words and deeds of Jesus, either apocalyptic or otherwise?

Methods for Establishing Authentic Tradition

AS I HAVE STRESSED throughout this book, doing history, at least ancient history, means abandoning any hope of absolute certainty. But even though we can rarely be completely certain about a past event, some things are far more certain than others. It is far more certain that Julius Caesar fought the Gallic Wars (he wrote about them and we still have the books) than that Apollonius of Tyana raised a genuinely dead person back to life (apart from the inherent improbabilities of the case—as a miracle—our one source dates from long after the fact and is thoroughly biased). Historians deal for the most part in probabilities, and some things are more probable than others.

Earlier I mentioned the historians’ wish list when it comes to sources of information about the past. This wish list certainly applies to the historical Jesus. To establish the historical probability of a saying, deed, or experience of Jesus, we want a large number of independent sources that can be shown not to be incorporating their own biases in the account in question and that corroborate one another’s reports without showing any evidence of collaboration. And the closer these sources are in time to the events they narrate, the better.

More specifically, the probability that a tradition about Jesus—or anyone else, for that matter—is historically accurate is increased to the extent that it passes the following criteria.

Contextual Credibility

I spent some time in the preceding pages talking about Judaism during the days of Jesus for one principal reason. If there is a story about Jesus—for example, an account of something that he allegedly said or did—that does not fit into his known historical context, then it can scarcely be historically accurate. I should stress that simply because a tradition can be plausibly situated into Jesus’s context does not mean that it is historically reliable. It simply means it is possible. Probability will need to be established on other grounds (that is, those of the following two criteria). But if a tradition does not fit into a first-century Palestinian context, then it almost certainly can be discounted as a later legend.

For example, in an earlier context we saw that scattered throughout the Gospels are sayings of Jesus that at one time must have circulated in Aramaic, Jesus’s native tongue. Sometimes that is because they make better sense when translated back from the Greek of the Gospels into Aramaic (“Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath,” Mark 2:27–28). At other times it is because an Aramaic word or phrase from the original form of the story has been left untranslated, requiring the Gospel writer to explain its meaning (“Talitha cumi,” which translated means, ‘Little girl, arise’” Mark 5:41). Since Jesus lived in rural Palestine, he would have spoken Aramaic, and these sayings can plausibly be connected with him. That does not mean that he said them. But he may have said them.

By contrast, if there is a saying that clearly cannot be translated back into Aramaic, then Jesus almost certainly did not say it. That is true of the example I gave earlier from John 3, where Jesus says that a person must be born anothen to enter the kingdom. Did he mean “from above” or “a second time”? The entire conversation is predicated on the peculiar meanings of the double entendre, which works in Greek but not in Aramaic. So Jesus almost certainly did not have this conversation, at least as recorded, with Nicodemus.

We will see in the next chapter that there are solid reasons for thinking that Jesus was an apocalypticist. Traditions about Jesus that make sense in an apocalyptic context, therefore, have a chance of being authentic. At the same time, we have nothing to suggest that the beliefs embraced by later Gnostic Christians were present in first-century rural Palestine. And so the Gnostic sayings of Jesus found in such Gnostic Gospels as the Gospel of Philip or the Gospel of Mary almost certainly do not go back to Jesus himself but were placed on his lips by his later (Gnostic) followers.

I need to be clear that of the three criteria of authenticity I will be discussing here, this one alone is negative. It shows, not what Jesus probably did say or do, but what he almost certainly did not. If a tradition of Jesus passes this first criterion, it is possible. But it is not necessarily probable. To establish probability, we need recourse to the other two criteria. And a tradition is even more probable if it can pass not just one but both of them.

Multiple Attestation

I have repeatedly stressed that a tradition appearing in multiple, independent sources has a greater likelihood of being historically reliable than a tradition that appears in only one. If a saying or deed of Jesus is found in only one source, then it is possible that the source simply made it up. But if a word or action is found in several sources and they did not collaborate with one another, then none of them made it up; the tradition must predate them. If it is found independently in a number of sources, the probability of its being reliable is increased, assuming, of course, that it is contextually credible.

Any story that is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, of course, is not multiply attested, even though it is found in three of our sources. Matthew and Luke took a number of their stories from Mark, and so a story found in virtually the same words in all three simply comes from Mark, one source alone. But there are