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

who do evil, and they will cast them into the furnace of fire. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun, in the kingdom of their father. (Matthew 13:40–43)

From L

But take care for yourselves so that your hearts are not overcome with wild living and drunkenness and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you unexpectedly, like a sprung trap. For it will come to all those sitting on the face of the earth. Be alert at all times, praying to have strength to flee from all these things that are about to take place and to stand in the presence of the Son of Man. (Luke 21:34–36)

I could quote many other verses, but here I want to make a very simple point. The oldest attainable sources contain clear apocalyptic teachings of Jesus, all of them independent of one another. What is equally striking, however, is a subsidiary issue. The apocalyptic character of Jesus’s proclamation comes to be muted with the passing of time. After the writing of these earlier sources, we find less and less apocalyptic material. By the time we get to our last canonical Gospel, John, we have almost no apocalyptic teachings of Jesus at all. Here Jesus preaches about something else (chiefly his own identity, as the one who has come from the Father to bring eternal life). And when we get to still later Gospels, from outside the New Testament, we actually find instances—such as in the Gospel of Thomas—where Jesus argues against an apocalyptic view (Gospel of Thomas 3, 113).

Why would Jesus be portrayed as an apocalypticist in our earliest sources but as nonapocalyptic or even antiapocalyptic in our later sources? Evidently Jesus came to be deapocalypticized with the passing of time. And it is not hard to understand why. In our earliest sources Jesus is said to have proclaimed that the end of the age would come suddenly, within his own generation, before the disciples themselves died. But over the course of time, the disciples did die and Jesus’s own generation came and went. And there was no cataclysmic break in history, no arrival of the Son of Man, no resurrection of the dead. What were later Christians to do with the fact that Jesus predicted that “all these things” would take place in his hearers’ lifetimes when in fact the predictions did not come true? They took the obvious next step and changed the tenor and content of Jesus’s preaching so that he no longer predicted an imminent end of the age. Over time, Jesus became less and less an apocalyptic preacher. This move to deapocalypticize Jesus was enormously successful. Down through the Middle Ages and on to today, the vast majority of people who have considered Jesus have not thought of him as an apocalyptic preacher. That is because the apocalyptic message that he delivered came to be toned down and eventually altered. But it is still there for all to see in our earliest surviving sources, multiply and independently attested.

There is an even more compelling general reason to think that the historical Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist. It is that we know how he began his public ministry, and we know what happened in its wake after he died. The relatively certain beginning and the relatively certain ending are keys to understanding what happened in the middle—the proclamation of Jesus itself.

The Beginning and the End as Keys to the Middle

There is little doubt how Jesus began his public ministry. He was baptized by John the Baptist. That is significant for understanding Jesus as an apocalypticist.

That Jesus associated with John the Baptist is multiply attested in a number of our early sources. It is found in both Mark and John, independently of one another; there are also traditions of Jesus’s early association with John in Q and a distinctive story from M. Why would all these sources independently link Jesus to John? Probably because there was in fact a link.

Moreover, the baptism of Jesus appears to pass the criterion of dissimilarity. The early Christians who told stories about Jesus believed that a person who was baptized was spiritually inferior to the person who was doing the baptizing, a view most Christians still hold today. And so who would make up a story about Jesus being baptized by someone else? That story would suggest that John was Jesus’s superior. Moreover, why was John baptizing? According to our early traditions, it was after people repented, for “the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). Did Jesus have sins that needed to be forgiven? Who would make up such a tale? The reason we have stories in which Jesus was baptized by John is that this is a historically reliable datum. He really was baptized by John, as attested in multiple independent sources.

That is a crucial finding. What did John stand for, and why would Jesus associate with him as opposed to someone else—a Pharisee, for example, or the Essenes? John the Baptist is known to have preached an apocalyptic message of coming destruction and salvation. Mark portrays him as a prophet in the wilderness, proclaiming the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah that God would again bring his people from the wilderness into the Promised Land (Mark 1:2–8). The Q source gives further information, for here John preaches a clear message of apocalyptic judgment to the crowds that come out to see him: “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance…. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:7–9).

This is an apocalyptic message. The chopping down of trees is an image of coming judgment, people who did not live as God desired would be “thrown into the fire.” And when will that day of judgment come?