Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The tradition that Jesus was betrayed by one of the twelve, Judas Iscariot, is firmly rooted in our early sources and does not seem to be the sort of thing a later Christian would make up (Jesus had no more authority over those closest to him than that?). There has been a lot of speculation about why Judas did what he did: Was he eager for a political rebellion and disappointed that Jesus was uninterested in starting one? Did he think he could force Jesus’ hand to call out to the crowds to come to his assistance and start the revolt? Did Judas need some cash on the spot? Was he simply a bad apple from the beginning?

  Even more interesting, though, is the question of what it is that Judas betrayed. This gets us to the heart of the matter: is it possible that Judas did more than tell the authorities where they could find Jesus alone, apart from the crowd? Surely this is something they could discover for themselves by having him followed, without shelling out thirty pieces of silver. Did Judas reveal something more, something that the leaders could use in prosecuting Jesus and having him permanently taken out of the way? The answer to this question hinges on one of the key issues of this chapter, the one that I began it with: What did Jesus teach about himself?

  What Jesus Taught About Himself

  Throughout this chapter I have been insisting that Jesus did not teach that he was divine. He taught about God, not, for the most part, about himself. Specifically, he taught about the Kingdom of God that was soon to appear with the coming of the Son of Man in judgment on the earth, an event that Jesus declared would happen within his own generation. He taught the crowds that entering this coming kingdom meant accepting his teaching, which involved turning to God with all one’s heart and loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

  But what did Jesus teach about himself? One reason this question has been so puzzling to so many scholars for so long is that when Jesus is eventually turned over to the Roman authorities and made to stand trial, the charge leveled against him is that he called himself the king of the Jews (Mark 15:2). This is odd because in our earliest sources Jesus never says any such thing about himself in any of his public proclamations. Why did the Roman authorities think this is what he was saying about himself, if in fact it was not what he was saying about himself? And why, when put on trial, didn’t he simply deny the charge and get off the hook?

  One can see why the authorities would take such a claim seriously: claiming to be king when only the Roman Caesar or someone the Romans appointed could be king was an act of political insurgency. This is why Jesus was killed, for fomenting a rebellion against Rome. But it appears from our early sources that he had nothing to do with a political rebellion. So how does one explain these data?

  The answer lies in Jesus’ apocalyptic teaching. He told his disciples that they, the twelve (including Judas), would be the rulers over the “twelve tribes of Israel” in this kingdom that was soon to appear. But who would be ruling over them? Every kingdom has a king. Who would be the king of the coming kingdom, once the Son of Man destroyed the forces aligned against God and established his reign on earth? Of course God would in some sense be the ultimate king, but through whom would he rule? Now it was Jesus who called the disciples and was their master. Would he be their master then?

  I do not think that Jesus publicly declared himself a king during his ministry. Doing so would be an extremely dangerous and criminal act. And he did not think of himself as a king in the present age. But it is well attested that he taught the twelve disciples at greater length in private. And one of the things he taught them was that they would be rulers in the future kingdom.

  All the pieces fall into place if Jesus taught his disciples in private that he would be their master not only now but in the age to come. When the kingdom arrived, he would be the king. In ancient Israel one of the designations of the future king was the term “Messiah,” meaning anointed one of God. Jesus did not call himself the Messiah in public, although others may have thought of him in this way. But when Jesus spoke of himself as the Messiah in private with his disciples, he did not mean that he would drive out the Romans and set up Israel as a sovereign state in the land. He meant that God was going to overthrow the forces of evil and appoint him king.

  That is why after his death his disciples continued to call him the Messiah. Jews at the time did not believe that the Messiah was supposed to die and then be raised from the dead. So even if Jesus’ followers came to believe in the resurrection, this would not be a reason for them to call Jesus the Messiah. They therefore must have thought of him as the Messiah before he died. Why? Because that’s what he had taught them.

  Why did the Romans execute Jesus for calling himself king of the Jews if he never called himself that in public? Because they learned that he actually did think of himself this way. He meant it in a futuristic, apocalyptic sense, but they interpreted it in a present, political sense, and so ordered his execution. And how could they have learned this about Jesus, if it wasn’t public knowledge? Someone must have told them, someone who was privy to his private instructions. It was one of the twelve.

  Judas did not simply tell the authorities where to find Jesus. He told them that Jesus had been calling himself the (future) king of the Jews.

  That is all the authorities needed to hear. From there on it was a done deal. The Jewish leaders, whom Jesus had aggravated by his apocalyptic preaching against them and their authority, questioned Jesus and turned him over to Pilate for trial. He asked Jesus if he was the king of the Jews, and Jesus could not very well deny it. Pilate ordered him crucified, and the sentence was carried out immediately.

  EXCURSUS: THE RESURRECTION AND OTHER MIRACLES IN THE LIFE OF JESUS

  I have said nothing particularly new or unusual in this chapter, except my claims about what Judas actually betrayed to the authorities, which is a more unusual interpretation. Otherwise, the views I’ve laid out are fairly standard fare. Different scholars will disagree on this point or that, of course. That’s why there is always more and more scholarship. But my views of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet are the ones I learned in seminary. They are the views of the majority of scholars in North America and Europe and have been for something like a century.9 They are the views taught in leading institutions of higher learning in the country, including seminaries and divinity schools. They are the views that most mainline Christian pastors are taught, even if they tend not to be the views these pastors teach their own parishioners.

  I want to close this chapter on a final issue of real importance to both the casual Bible reader and the scholar of early Christianity. According to the Gospels, Jesus’ story does not end with the crucifixion but with the accounts of his resurrection from the dead.

  There was nothing miraculous about the crucifixion per se. Lots of people were being crucified, probably every day, throughout the Roman Empire. The only miraculous aspect of Jesus’ death involves its theological interpretation, that Jesus died “for the sins of the world.” A historian qua historian cannot pass judgment on this interpretation. We have no historical record that can prove why, from God’s point of view, Jesus died. Historians have no access to God, only to what goes on here on earth, for which we have historical records. And there is nothing historically problematic about Jesus getting crucified.

  There is something historically problematic with his being raised from the dead, however. This is a miracle, and by the very nature of their craft, historians are unable to discuss miracles. That is my thesis in this final section. This thesis seems counterintuitive to some people: if something actually happened, even a miracle, isn’t it subject to historical investigation? Isn’t the refusal to consider the possibility of a miracle an antisupernatural bias? Do you think atheists are the only ones who can do history?

  The answer to all these questions is no. What I want to show is that because of the very nature of the historical disciplines, historians cannot show whether or not miracles ever happened. Anyone who disagrees with me—who thinks historians can demonstrate that miracles happen—needs
to be even-handed about it, across the board. In Jesus’ day there were lots of people who allegedly performed miracles. There were Jewish holy men such as Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the circle drawer. There were pagan holy men such as Apollonius of Tyana, a philosopher who could allegedly heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. He was allegedly supernaturally born and at the end of his life he allegedly ascended to heaven. Sound familiar? There were pagan demigods, such as Hercules, who could also bring back the dead. Anyone who is willing to believe in the miracles of Jesus needs to concede the possibility of other people performing miracles, in Jesus’ day and in all eras down to the present day and in other religions such as Islam and indigenous religions of Africa and Asia.

  But for now I want to focus on the miracles of Jesus. His resurrection wasn’t the only miracle. According to the Gospels, Jesus’ entire life was filled with miracles. He was born of a woman who had never had sex. As an adult he performed one miracle after the other—healing the blind, the lame, the deaf, the paralyzed; casting out demons; restoring to life those who had previously died. And at the end of his life came the biggest miracle of all: he was raised from the dead, never to die again.

  Despite the prominence of miracles in the Gospel traditions, I don’t think historians can show that any of them, including the resurrection, ever happened. This is not because of an antisupernatural bias. I’m not saying that miracles by definition cannot happen. That is what a lot of people do say, but it is not what I’m saying here. For the purpose of the argument, I’m willing to concede that maybe what we think of as miracles do happen.

  And I am not saying that we cannot demonstrate that miracles happened merely because our sources of information are not completely trustworthy. To be sure, that, too, is true. Our first records of any of Jesus’ public miracles were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after the fact, by people who had not seen any of these things happen, who were basing their stories on oral traditions that had been passed down for decades among people trying to convince others to believe in Jesus. And these records are absolutely filled with discrepancies, especially the resurrection narratives themselves. None of the accounts of Jesus’ miracles can pass the criterion of dissimilarity.

  But that is not why historians cannot show that miracles, including the resurrection, happened. The reason instead has to do with the limits of historical knowledge. There cannot be historical evidence for a miracle.

  To understand why, we need to consider how historians engage in their craft. Historians work differently from the way natural scientists work. Scientists do repeated experimentation to demonstrate how things happen, changing one variable at a time. If the same experiment produces the same result time after time, you can establish a level of predictive probability: the same result will occur the next time you do the experiment. If I want to prove scientifically that bars of Ivory soap float in lukewarm water and that bars of iron sink, I simply need a hundred tubs of lukewarm water and a hundred bars of both soap and iron. When I toss the bars in, the soap will always float; the iron will always sink. That gives us a good sense of probability that I will get the same result when I do it the 101st time.

  Historians have to work differently. Historians are not trying to show what does or will happen, but what has happened. And with history, the experiment can never be repeated. Once something happens it is over and done with.

  Historians work with all kinds of evidence in order to show what probably happened in the past. You can never know for sure, although in some instances the evidence is so powerful that there is no doubt. There is no doubt in my mind that my basketball team, the Carolina Tar Heels, lost in the Final Four to the Kansas Jayhawks last month. I hate to admit it and I wish I were wrong, but the evidence (videotapes, newspaper reporting, eyewitness testimony) is simply too strong. Some people in Kansas might think that the results were miraculous, and some in Carolina might think that they were the result of evil cosmic powers, but the results themselves seem clear.

  What about a game played a century ago? Well, there may be good evidence, but it won’t be as good as the evidence regarding the outcome for the Tar Heels. What about a game played in the Roman Empire two thousand years ago? The outcome of that game would be harder to establish. Not as much evidence.

  Given the nature of things, there is better evidence for some historical events than others, and the only thing historians can do is establish levels of probability. Some things we might as well call certain (UNC’s loss in the Final Four). Others seem to most of us to be just as certain: the Holocaust, for example. Why do some people claim the Holocaust never happened? They argue that the evidence was all doctored. That’s absolutely crazy, I agree. But the fact that otherwise apparently intelligent people can make the claim, and even convince a few others, shows that it is not completely impossible.

  With many other historical events there is much less certainty. Did Lincoln write the Gettysburg address on an envelope? Did Jefferson have a long-term love affair with one of his slaves? Did Alexander the Great drink himself to death after becoming upset when his male lover died? Was Jesus born when Quirinius was the governor of Syria? Make up your own questions: there are billions.

  There is nothing inherently implausible about any of these events; the question is whether they probably happened or not. Some are more probable than others. Historians more or less rank past events on the basis of the relative probability that they occurred. All that historians can do is show what probably happened in the past.

  That is the problem inherent in miracles. Miracles, by our very definition of the term, are virtually impossible events. Some people would say they are literally impossible, as violations of natural law: a person can’t walk on water any more than an iron bar can float on it. Other people would be a bit more accurate and say that there aren’t actually any laws in nature, written down somewhere, that can never be broken; but nature does work in highly predictable ways. That is what makes science possible. We would call a miracle an event that violates the way nature always, or almost always, works so as to make the event virtually, if not actually, impossible. The chances of a miracle occurring are infinitesimal. If that were not the case it would not be a miracle, just something weird that happened. And weird things happen all the time.

  By now I hope you can see the unavoidable problem historians have with miracles. Historians can establish only what probably happened in the past, but miracles, by their very nature, are always the least probable explanation for what happened. This is true whether you are a believer or not. Of the six billion people in the world, not one of them can walk on top of lukewarm water filling a swimming pool. What would be the chances of any one person being able to do that? Less than one in six billion. Much less.

  If historians can only establish what probably happened, and miracles by their definition are the least probable occurrences, then more or less by definition, historians cannot establish that miracles have ever probably happened.

  This is true of the miracles of Mohammed, Hanina ben Dosa, Apollonius of Tyana—and Jesus.

  But what about the resurrection? I’m not saying it didn’t happen. Some people believe it did, some believe it didn’t. But if you do believe it, it is not as a historian, even if you happen to be a professional historian, but as a believer.

  There can be no historical evidence for the resurrection because of the nature of historical evidence.

  Some evangelical Christian scholars argue just the opposite, that given the empty tomb and the eyewitness testimony of those who claimed to see Jesus alive after he was dead, there is good evidence that he was really raised. But to make this claim is fundamentally to misunderstand what historians can and cannot do. Historians can only establish what probably happened in the past. They cannot show that a miracle, the least likely occurrence, is the most likely occurrence. The resurrection is not least likely because of any anti-Christian bias. It is the least likely because people do not come back to life, never to
die again, after they are well and truly dead. But what if Jesus did? If he did, it’s a miracle, and it’s beyond historical demonstration.

  Many Christians don’t want to hear this, but the reality is that there are lots of other explanations for what happened to Jesus that are more probable than the explanation that he was raised from the dead. None of these explanations is very probable, but they are more probable, just looking at the matter historically, than the explanation of the resurrection.

  You could come up with dozens of implausible (but not impossible) explanations yourself. Let me give just two.

  Why was the tomb supposedly empty? I say supposedly because, frankly, I don’t know that it was. Our very first reference to Jesus’ tomb being empty is in the Gospel of Mark, written forty years later by someone living in a different country who had heard that it was empty. How would he know? Anyhow, suppose that it was empty. How did it get that way? Suppose—here is my wild hypothesis—that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in Joseph’s own family tomb, and then a couple of Jesus’ followers, not among the twelve, decided that night to move the body somewhere more appropriate. Only Matthew indicates there was a guard at the tomb; what if there wasn’t? But a couple of Roman legionnaires are passing by, and catch these followers carrying the shrouded corpse through the streets. They suspect foul play and confront the followers, who pull their swords as the disciples did in Gethsemane. The soldiers, expert in swordplay, kill them on the spot. They now have three bodies, and no idea where the first one came from. Not knowing what to do with them, they commandeer a cart, take the corpses out to Gehenna, outside town, and dump them. Within three or four days the bodies have deteriorated beyond recognition. Jesus’ original tomb is empty, and no one seems to know why.