Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Ignatius, then, provides us yet with another independent witness to the life of Jesus. Again, it should not be objected that he is writing too late to be of any value in our quest. He cannot be shown to have been relying on the Gospels. And he was bishop in Antioch, the city where both Peter and Paul spent considerable time in the preceding generation, as Paul himself tells us in Galatians 2. His views too can trace a lineage straight back to apostolic times.

  1 Clement

  The letter of 1 Clement was written by the Christians in Rome to the church of Corinth in order to straighten out what was to them an unsatisfactory turn of events. The leaders of the Corinthian church had been ousted from power and replaced by others, and the Roman Christians, at least those responsible for the letter, did not like the situation. The letter is meant to urge the church in Corinth to return their “elders” to their rightful place.

  It is a long letter filled with warnings against jealousy and the thirst for power. It is attributed by tradition to the fourth bishop of Rome, Clement, even though the letter itself does not claim to be written by him. Clement is never even mentioned in the letter. Be that as it may, there are compelling reasons for thinking that the letter was written sometime during the 90s CE, that is, some twenty years before Ignatius and at about the time some of the later books that made it into the New Testament.8 The letter quotes extensively from the Greek Old Testament, and its author explicitly refers to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But he does not mention the Gospels of the New Testament, and even though he quotes some of the sayings of Jesus, he does not indicate that they come from written texts. In fact, his quotations do not line up in their wording with any of the sayings of Jesus found in our surviving Gospels.

  It is all the more impressive that the author of 1 Clement, like Ignatius and then Papias, not only assumes that Jesus lived but that much of his life was well known. Among the many things he says about the historical Jesus are the following:

  Christ spoke words to be heeded (1 Clement 2.1).

  His sufferings were “before your eyes” (2.1).

  The blood of Christ is precious to the Father, poured out for salvation (7.4).

  The blood of the Lord brought redemption (12.7).

  Jesus taught gentleness and patience; the author here quotes a series of Jesus’s sayings similar to what can be found in Matthew and Luke (13.1–2).

  The Lord Jesus Christ came humbly, not with arrogance or haughtiness (16.2).

  Jesus came from Jacob “according to the flesh” (32.2).

  The Lord adorned himself with good works (33.7).

  Another quotation of “the words of our Lord Jesus” (46.8, comparable to Matthew 26:24 and Luke 17:2).

  Those who experience love in Christ should do what Christ commanded (49.1).

  Out of his love, the Lord Jesus Christ “gave his blood for us, his flesh for our flesh, his soul for our souls” (49.6).

  Here again we have an independent witness not just to the life of Jesus as a historical figure but to some of his teachings and deeds. Like all sources that mention Jesus from outside the New Testament, the author of 1 Clement had no doubt about his real existence and no reason to defend it. Everyone knew he existed. That is true of the writings of the New Testament as well, outside the four Gospels that we have already considered.

  Canonical Sources Outside the Gospels and Paul

  IT IS A LARGE mistake to think that when it comes to the New Testament, only the Gospels attest to the historical existence of Jesus. This is sometimes claimed, or at least implied, by mythicists intent on narrowing down our sources for Jesus to just a few—or even to just one, the Gospel of Mark. So far as we can tell, all the authors of the New Testament knew about the historical Jesus. One exception might be the writer of the letter of James, who mentions Jesus only twice in passing (1:1 and 2:1) without saying anything about his earthly life. But even in a letter as short as Jude, we find the apostles of Jesus mentioned (verse 17), which presupposes, of course, that Jesus lived and had followers. The one book that talks at length about these apostles is the book of Acts, which was written by the author of the Gospel of Luke but which preserves traditions about the life of Jesus that are both independent of anything said in the Gospel and, in the judgment of most critical historians, based on traditions in circulation before the production of the Gospel.

  The Book of Acts

  The Acts of the Apostles provides a narrative of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire in the years after Jesus’s death. Whereas in the Gospel of Luke Jesus is the principal figure, in this, the author’s second volume, it is Jesus’s followers who take center stage. In particular, the author is interested in the missionary activities of Peter (mainly in chapters 1–12) and Paul (chapters 13–28). In his account he shows how the Christian movement went from being a small group of Jesus’s followers immediately after his death to becoming a worldwide phenomenon, a religion that was open not only to Jews like Jesus himself and his disciples but also to Gentiles, as God (according to the narrative) used the apostles to spread the good news of Jesus “to the ends of the earth” (1:18).

  Jesus Tradition in Acts

  The first important point for our quest to establish the historicity of Jesus is that the author of Acts has access to traditions that are not based on his Gospel account so that we have yet another independent witness. For the writer of Acts, Jesus was very much a man who really lived and died in Judea, as can be seen in the accounts of Jesus’s resurrection in chapter 1 and in the speeches that occur abundantly throughout the narrative. Chapter 1 portrays the disciples meeting with Jesus after the resurrection. They receive their final instructions from him in Jerusalem, where he has just been killed. Among the interesting traditions found in this chapter is a statement by the apostle Peter about the betrayer, Judas Iscariot, who is said to have purchased a field with the money he received for turning Jesus in to the authorities. Judas is said to have fallen headlong on the field and spilled his innards out. It is for that reason, Peter indicates, that the field came to be known as “Akeldama,” an Aramaic word meaning “Field of Blood” (1:16–19).

  One of the reasons this passage is interesting is that in his earlier Gospel account Luke says nothing about the death of Judas. Neither does Mark or John. The most famous account of Judas’s death is in the Gospel of Matthew, where we are told that after he performed the foul deed, he repented of what he had done and tried to return the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests. They refused to take the money, and so he flung it down in the Temple and went out and hanged himself. The priests were unable to put the money into the Temple treasury since it was “blood money” (used to betray innocent blood), and so they used it to buy a field to serve as a cemetery. For that reason the field came to be known as the “Field of Blood” (Matthew 27:3–10).

  These two accounts of Judas’s death cannot be reconciled. In one Judas buys the field, in the other the priests do; in one it is called the Field of Blood because Judas bled all over it, in the other because it was purchased with blood money; in one Judas dies by hanging himself, in the other he falls headfirst and bursts open in the midst. These differences show that Luke had an independent tradition of the death of Judas, which was at least as early as the one in Matthew. There are reasons for thinking that at the heart of both stories is a historical tradition: independently they confirm that a field in Jerusalem was connected in some way both with the money Judas was paid to betray Jesus and with Judas’s death. Moreover, it was known as the Field of Blood. Matthew calls it a “potter’s field.” Is it possible that it was actually a field of red clay used by potters, and so—because of its color—called the Field of Blood, which in one way or another was connected with the death of Jesus’s betrayer?

  However one resolves this issue, two points are of particular importance. One is that Matthew and Acts give disparate accounts of the event so that Acts here is an independent tradition. The other is that the Acts account gives cle
ar evidence of being very early and Palestinian in origin: as happens occasionally in the Gospels, here too a key word is left in Aramaic (Akeldama means “Field of Blood”), the original language of the story. This is a tradition that goes back to the earliest Christian community in Palestine. Luke is not simply recording traditions from his own day, in the 80s CE; he is recording traditions that—some of them, at least—stemmed from as much as half a century earlier.

  Moreover, that Luke has access to sayings of the historical Jesus not recorded otherwise, even in his Gospel, is clear from a passage such as Acts 20:35, where the apostle Paul is recorded as saying, “I have shown you that it is necessary by hard work to help the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that he said ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive.’” It is not necessary to think that the historical Paul—the man himself—really said this. What we have here is a narrative by a later author claiming that Paul said it. Whether Paul himself really knew this saying of Jesus can be argued. But what is clear is that Luke thinks he knew it and, more important for our considerations, that it is a tradition of a saying of Jesus that has no parallel in any of our Gospels. And so the book of Acts provides further evidence from outside the Gospels that Christians from earliest times believed that Jesus actually lived, as a Jew, that he was a moral teacher, and that he was killed in Jerusalem after being betrayed by one of his own followers, Judas.

  The Speeches in Acts

  Even more significant for our purposes are the speeches recorded in the book of Acts, placed on the lips of the apostles at key moments of the narrative. About a fourth of Acts is made up of speeches delivered by Peter in the first third of the book and Paul in the final two-thirds. Scholars have long been intrigued by these speeches. We know from ancient historians such as Thucydides that it was customary for historical writers to invent the speeches of their main characters. There really was no other way to present a speech in an ancient biography or ancient history: the authors were almost never there to hear what was actually said on the occasion, and almost never (if ever) did anyone take notes. And so, as Thucydides indicates, historians came up with speeches that seemed appropriate for the occasion.

  But the speeches in Acts are particularly notable because they are, in many instances, based not on Luke’s fertile imagination but on oral traditions. The reason for thinking so is that portions of these speeches represent theological views that do not mesh well with the views of Luke himself, as these can be ascertained through a careful reading of his two-volume work. In other words, some of the speeches in Acts contain what scholars call preliterary traditions: oral traditions that had been in circulation from much earlier times that are found, now, only in their written forms in Acts. This is important information because, here again, it shows that Acts is not simply a document from the 80s CE. It incorporates much older traditions. And these traditions are quite emphatic that Jesus was a Jewish man who lived, did spectacular deeds, taught, and was executed, as a human, in Jerusalem.

  One of the most striking features of several of the speeches in Acts is that they present a view of Jesus that scholars have long thought was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Christian understanding of what it meant to call Jesus the Son of God. Eventually, of course, Christians came to think that Jesus had always been the Son of God, from eternity past, and that he came into the world only to conduct his miraculous ministry and deliver his supernatural teachings for a short while before returning to heaven whence he came. This is the view that can be found in the last of our Gospels, the Gospel of John. But this was not the earliest view of Jesus. Before anyone thought Jesus preexisted as the divine being who created the world (see John 1:1–18, for example), there were Christians who thought Jesus came into existence when he was born of a virgin and that it was because she was a virgin—and the “father” was God himself—that he was the Son of God.

  This view seems to be embodied in the Gospel of Luke itself. Not a single word in Luke mentions Jesus preexisting his life on earth. Instead, his mother conceives of the Holy Spirit, and that is how he comes into being. As the angel Gabriel tells Mary at the Annunciation, informing her of how she will bear a child: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. For that reason the one who is born of you will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Here Jesus is the Son of God because God made his mother pregnant.

  At an even earlier stage of the tradition, before Christians had begun to talk about either Jesus’s preexistence or his virginal conception, they (or some of them) believed that he had become the Son of God by being “adopted” by God to be his son. In this view Jesus was not metaphysically or physically the son of God. He was the son of God in a metaphorical sense, through adoption. At one point Christians thought this happened right before he entered into his public ministry. And so they told stories about what happened at the very outset, when he was baptized by John: the heavens opened up, the Spirit of God descended upon him (meaning he didn’t have the Spirit before this), and the voice from heaven declared, “You are my son. Today I have begotten you.” One should not underplay the significance of the word today in this quotation from Psalm 2. It was on the day of his baptism that Jesus became God’s son.9

  There were yet earlier traditions about Jesus that did not speak of him as the Son of God from eternity past or from his miraculous birth or from the time he began his ministry. In these, probably the oldest, Christian traditions, Jesus became the Son of God when God raised him from the dead. It was then that God showered special favor on the man Jesus, exalting him to heaven, and calling him his son, the messiah, the Lord. Even though this view is not precisely that of Paul, it is found in an ancient creed (that is, a preliterary tradition) that Paul quotes at the beginning of his letter to the Romans, where he speaks of Christ as God’s “son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness at his resurrection from the dead” (1:3–4). One reason for thinking that this is an ancient creed—not the formulation of Paul himself—is that Paul holds other ideas about Jesus as the Son of God and expresses them in his own words elsewhere. But he quotes this creed here, probably because he is writing this letter to get on the good side of a group of Christians, the church in Rome, who do not know Paul or what he stands for, and the creed provides a standard formulation found throughout the churches of his day. It is, in other words, a very ancient tradition that predates Paul’s writings.

  More striking still, a similar tradition can be found in some of the speeches of Acts, showing that these speeches incorporate materials from the traditions about Jesus that existed long before Luke put pen to papyrus. So, for example, in a speech attributed to Paul in Acts 13 (but not really by Paul; Luke wrote the speech, incorporating earlier materials), Paul is reputed to have said to a group of Jews he was evangelizing, “We proclaim to you that the good news that came to the fathers, this he has brought to fulfillment for us their children by raising Jesus, as is written in the second Psalm, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you’” (Acts 13:32–33).

  Note once again the word today. It was on the day of the resurrection, according to this primitive tradition that long predated Luke, that Jesus was made the Son of God. A comparable view is found in an earlier speech delivered by the apostle Peter: “Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty, that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this one whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36).

  In both of these speeches we have, then, remnants of much older pre-Lukan traditions, older not just than the book of Acts but than any of the Gospels and older in fact than any surviving Christian writing. They embody a certain adoptionist Christology where Jesus is exalted by God and made his son at the resurrection. In both of them Jesus is understood to be purely human and to have been crucified at the instigation of the Jews in Jerusalem. Only then did God adopt him into sonship.

  That the speeches of Acts contain very ancie
nt material, much earlier than the Gospels, is significant as well because these speeches are completely unambiguous that Jesus was a mortal who lived on earth and was crucified under Pontius Pilate at Jewish insistence. Consider the following extracts from three of the significant speeches:

  Men of Israel, hear these Words. Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God through miracles and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, just as you know, this one was handed over through the hand of the lawless by the appointed will and foreknowledge of God, and you nailed him up and killed him; but God raised him by loosing the birth pangs of death. (2:22–24)

  God…glorified his child Jesus, whom you handed over and denied before Pilate, who had decided to release him. But you denied the holy and righteous one and demanded a murderer to be given over to you. But you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead, as we are witnesses. (3:13–15)

  For those who live in Jerusalem and their leaders…when they found no charge worthy of death, they asked Pilate to execute him; and when they had fulfilled all the things that were written about him, they took him down from the tree and placed him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead. (13:27–29)

  These primitive traditions from the speeches in Acts are unambiguous about their views of Jesus. They are at least as old as our earliest surviving Gospel stories about Jesus, and equally important, they are independent of them. As was the case in the preceding chapter, here we see that the historical witnesses to Jesus’s life simply multiply the deeper we look into our surviving materials.