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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  I believe that better arguments will win out, if people approach the question without a bias in favor of one view or another. Maybe I’m too trusting.

  As I indicated earlier, once this book gets published I’m afraid I’ll be getting it from all sides. Mythicists who appreciate the fact that I have made public the scholarly skepticism toward the historical reliability of the Bible will be upset that I don’t side with them when it comes to the question of the historical Jesus, the one question they are most invested in. Conservative Christian readers will be glad that I have taken this particular stand but will still be incensed at the other things I say about Jesus in this book. Consensus scholarship is like that; it offends people on both ends of the spectrum. But scholarship needs to proceed on the basis of evidence and argument, not on the basis of what one would like to think. I am always highly suspicious—completely and powerfully suspicious—of “scholars,” from one side or another, whose “historical” findings just by chance happen to confirm what they already think. This occurs, again, on both sides of the spectrum, from those who breathlessly announce, “Jesus never existed!” to those who strenuously insist, “Jesus was physically raised from the dead—and I can prove it.”

  What I think is that Jesus really existed but that the Jesus who really existed was not the person most Christians today believe in. I will get to that latter point toward the end of this book. For now I want to continue to mount the case that whatever else you may want to say about Jesus, you can say with a high degree of certainty that he was a historical figure. In this chapter I will wrap up my discussion of the historical evidence by stressing just two points in particular. These two points are not the whole case for the historical Jesus. A lot of other evidence that we have already considered leads in precisely the same direction. But these two points are especially key. I think each of them shows beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that Jesus must have existed as a Palestinian Jew who was crucified by the Romans. The first point reverts to Paul, but now we look not at what Paul said about Jesus but at whom Paul knew. Paul was personally acquainted with Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter, and Jesus’s own brother, James.

  Paul’s Associations

  IT IS IMPORTANT TO begin by recalling a couple of important events in the chronology of Paul’s life. As I pointed out earlier, it appears that Paul converted to be a follower of Jesus sometime around 32 or 33 CE, assuming that Jesus died around the year 30. In one of his rare autobiographical passages, Paul indicates that just a few years after his conversion he went to Jerusalem and met face-to-face with two significant figures in the early Christian movement: “Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to consult with Cephas. And I remained with him for fifteen days. I did not see any of the other apostles except James, the brother of the Lord. What I am writing to you, I tell you before God, I am not lying!” (Galatians 1:18–20)

  Cephas was, of course, Simon Peter (see John 1:42), Jesus’s closest disciple.1 James, Paul tells us, was the Lord’s brother. These are two good people to know if you want to know anything about the historical Jesus. I wish I knew them.

  The Disciple Peter

  Peter was not simply a member of the twelve—the disciples who, according to all our Gospel traditions, Jesus chose to be his closest companions (in the final chapters I will show why this tradition is almost certainly historically accurate). He was a member of an even closer inner circle made up of Peter, James, and John. In the Gospels these three spend more time with Jesus than anyone else does during his entire ministry. And of these three, it is Peter, again according to all our traditions, who was the closest. In nearly all our sources Peter was Jesus’s most intimate companion and confidant for his entire public ministry after his baptism.

  In about the year 36, Paul went to Jerusalem to confer with Peter (Galatians 1:18–20). Paul spent fifteen days there. He may not have gone only or even principally to get a rundown on what Jesus said and did during his public ministry. It is plausible, in fact, that Paul wanted to strategize with Peter, as the leader (or one of the leaders) among the Jerusalem Christians, about Paul’s own missionary activities, not among the Jews (Peter’s concern) but among the Gentiles (Paul’s). This was the reason stated for Paul’s second visit to see Peter and the others fourteen years later, according to Galatians 2:1–10. But it defies belief that Paul would have spent over two weeks with Jesus’s closest companion and not learned something about him—for example, that he lived.

  Even more telling is the much-noted fact that Paul claims that he met with, and therefore personally knew, Jesus’s own brother James. It is true that Paul calls him the “brother of the Lord,” not “the brother of Jesus.” But that means very little since Paul typically calls Jesus the Lord and rarely uses the name Jesus (without adding “Christ” or other titles).2 And so in the letter to the Galatians Paul states as clearly as possible that he knew Jesus’s brother. Can we get any closer to an eyewitness report than this? The fact that Paul knew Jesus’s closest disciple and his own brother throws a real monkey wrench into the mythicist view that Jesus never lived.

  The Brothers of Jesus

  I need to say something further about the brothers of Jesus. I pointed out in an earlier chapter that Paul knows that “the brothers of the Lord” were engaged in Christian missionary activities (1 Corinthians 9:5), and we saw there that Paul could not be using the term brothers in some kind of loose, spiritual sense (we’re all brothers and sisters, or all believers are “brothers” in Christ). Paul does frequently use the term brothers in this metaphorical way when addressing the members of his congregations. But when he speaks of “the brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5, he is differentiating them both from himself and from Cephas. That would make no sense if he meant the term loosely to mean “believers in Jesus” since he and Cephas too would be in that broader category. And so he means something specific, not something general, about these missionaries. They are Jesus’s actual brothers, who along with Cephas and Paul were engaged in missionary activities.

  The same logic applies to what Paul has to say in Galatians 1:18–19. When he says that along with Cephas, the only apostle he saw was “James, the brother of the Lord,” he could not mean the term brother in a loose generic sense to mean “believer.” Cephas was also a believer, and so were the other apostles. And so he must mean it in the specific sense. This is Jesus’s actual brother.

  As a side note I should point out that the Roman Catholic Church has insisted for many centuries that Jesus did not actually have brothers. That does not mean that the church denied that James and the other brothers of Jesus existed or that they were unusually closely related to Jesus. But in the Roman Catholic view, Jesus’s brothers were not related to Jesus by blood because they were not the children of his mother, Mary. The reasons the Catholic Church claimed this, however, were not historical or based on a close examination of the New Testament texts. Instead, the reasoning involved a peculiar doctrine that had developed in the Catholic Church dating all the way back to the fourth Christian century. In traditional Catholic dogma Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin not simply when Jesus was born but throughout the rest of her life as well. This is the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.

  In no small measure this doctrine is rooted in the view that sexual relations necessarily involve sinful activities. Mary, however, according to Catholic doctrine, did not have a sinful nature. She could not have had; otherwise she would have passed it along to Jesus when he was born. She herself was conceived without the stain of original sin: the doctrine of the immaculate conception. And since she did not have a sinful nature, she was not involved in any sinful activities, including sex. That is why, at the end of her life, rather than dying, Mary was taken up into heaven. This is the doctrine of the assumption of the virgin.

  Protestants have long claimed that none of these doctrines about Mary is actually rooted in scripture, and from a historian’s point of view, I have to say that I think they are right. The
se are theological views driven by theological concerns that have nothing to do with the earliest traditions about Jesus and his family. But if, for Roman Catholics, Mary was a perpetual virgin and never had sex, who exactly were the so-called brothers of Jesus?

  Catholic thinkers developed two views of the matter, one of which became standard. In the older of the two views, the “brothers” of Jesus were the sons of Joseph from a previous marriage. This made them, in effect, Jesus’s stepbrothers. This view can be found in later apocryphal stories about Jesus’s birth, where we are told that Joseph was a very old man when he became betrothed to Mary. Presumably that is one of the reasons they never had sex; Joseph was too old. This perspective continued to exert its influence on Catholic thinkers for centuries. You may have noticed that in all those medieval paintings of Jesus’s nativity, Joseph is portrayed as quite elderly, as opposed to Mary, who is in the blossom of youth. This is why. I should stress that even if this view were historically right—there is not single piece of reliable evidence for it—James still would have been unusually closely related to Jesus.

  Eventually this view came to be displaced, however, and in no small measure because of the powerful influence of the fourth-century church father Jerome. Jerome was an ascetic, among other things, denying himself the pleasures of sex. He thought that the superior form of Christian life for everyone involved asceticism. But surely he was no more ascetic than the close relatives of Jesus. For Jerome, this means that not only Jesus’s mother but also his father (who was not really his father, except by adoption) were ascetics as well. Even Joseph never had sex. But that obviously means he could not have children from a previous marriage, and so the brothers of Jesus were not related to Joseph. They were Jesus’s cousins.

  The main problem with this view is that when the New Testament talks about Jesus’s brothers, it uses the Greek word that literally refers to a male sibling. There is a different Greek word for cousin. This other word is not used of James and the others. A plain and straightforward reading of the texts in the Gospels and in Paul leads to an unambiguous result: these “brothers” of Jesus were his actual siblings. Since neither Mark (which first mentions Jesus having four brothers and several sisters; 6:3) nor Paul gives any indication at all of knowing anything about Jesus being born of a virgin, the most natural assumption is that they both thought that Jesus’s parents were his real parents. They had sexual relations, and Jesus was born. And then (later?) came other children to the happy couple. And so Jesus’s brothers were his actual brothers.

  Paul knows one of these brothers personally. It is hard to get much closer to the historical Jesus than that. If Jesus never lived, you would think that his brother would know about it.

  Mythicist Views of James

  Mythicists have long realized that the fact that Paul knew Jesus’s brother creates enormous problems for their view, that in fact the otherwise convincing (to them) case against Jesus’s existence is more or less sunk by the fact that Paul was acquainted with his blood relations. And so they have tried, with some futility in my view, to explain away Paul’s statements so that even though he called James the brother of the Lord, he didn’t really mean it that way. The most recent attempt to resolve the problem is in mythicist Robert Price’s comprehensive study, where he cites three possible explanations for how James may not actually be Jesus’s brother. Price has the honesty to admit that if these explanations “end up sounding like text-twisting harmonizations, we must say so and reject them.”3 In the end he doesn’t say so, and he doesn’t reject them. But he doesn’t embrace any of them either, which at least must leave his readers puzzled.

  One explanation has been most forcefully argued by G. A. Wells, who revives a theory floated without much success by J. M. Robertson back in 1927.4 According to Wells, there was a small fraternity of messianic Jews in Jerusalem who called themselves “the brothers of the Lord.” James was a member of this missionary group. And that is why he can be called “the brother of the Lord.” Wells likens it to the situation that Paul refers to in the city of Corinth, where he calls himself the “father” of the community (1 Corinthians 4:15) and where some of the members of the congregation claim that they are “of Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:11–13). As Wells concludes, “Now if there was a Corinthian group called ‘those of the Christ,’ there could also have been a Jerusalem one called ‘the brethren of the Lord,’ who would not necessarily have had any more personal experience of Jesus than Paul himself. And James, as ‘the brother of the Lord’ could have been the leader of the group.”5 Wells cites as well Matthew 28:9–10 and John 20:17, where Jesus speaks of his unrelated followers as his “brothers.”

  This view sounds reasonable enough until it is examined in greater detail. The first thing to point out is that the final two Gospel passages that Wells cites are irrelevant. They do not refer to a distinct group of people who are zealous missionaries; they refer to the twelve disciples of Jesus, pure and simple. But Wells does not think that James (or anyone else) was a member of that group because he does not think Jesus lived in the recent past and even had disciples. And so the Gospel references to the disciples as Jesus’s brothers does not support Wells’s claim that there was a select missionary group in Jerusalem that included James.

  Neither does it work to claim that there was an analogous situation in the church in Corinth. Paul thinks of himself as the “father” of the entire church of Corinth, not of a specific group within it. Even more important, and contrary to what Wells asserts, we decidedly do not know of a group that called themselves “Those of the Christ.” There were, to be sure, Christians who said their ultimate allegiance was to Christ (not to Paul or Cephas or Apollos). But we have no idea what they called themselves because Paul never tells us. They are not, then, a named group comparable to what Wells imagines as being in Jerusalem, headed by James.

  And what evidence does Wells cite for such a group of zealous messianic Jews in Jerusalem that separated themselves off from all the other Jerusalem Christians? None. At all. What evidence could there be? No such group is mentioned in any surviving source of any kind whatsoever. Wells (or his predecessor, Robinson) made it up.

  And there is a good reason for thinking that such a group did not in fact exist. Throughout our traditions Cephas and James are portrayed as being completely aligned with each other. They are both Jews, believers in the resurrection of Jesus, residing in Jerusalem, working for the same ends, participating in the same meetings, actively leading the home church together. Cephas, moreover, is a missionary sent out from this church. If there was a group called “the brothers of the Lord,” made up of zealous Jewish missionaries in Jerusalem, Cephas himself would certainly be a member. Why is James, then, the one called “the brother of the Lord,” precisely to differentiate him from Cephas?

  Since there is no evidence to support the idea that such a group existed, this explanation seems to be grasping at straws. It is important to review what we know. We have several traditions that Jesus actually had brothers (it is independently affirmed in Mark, John, Paul, and Josephus). In multiple independent sources one of these brothers is named James. So too Paul speaks of James as his Lord’s brother. Surely the most obvious, straightforward, and compelling interpretation is the one held by every scholar of Galatians that, so far as I know, walks the planet. Paul is referring to Jesus’s own brother.

  Price puts forward a different way to interpret Paul’s words so as not to concede that the James that Paul knew was actually related to Jesus. In this second view (which, I need to add, stands at odds with the first), James is said to be the brother of the Lord because he reflected on earth so well the views of Jesus in heaven that he was his virtual twin. For evidence, Price appeals to several apocryphal books from outside the New Testament, including the famous Acts of Thomas. This is the second-century account of the missionary endeavors of the apostle Thomas after Jesus’s resurrection, most famous for its stories of how Thomas was the first to bring the gospel to India. In t
his account Thomas is called the “twin” of Jesus. And why is he Jesus’s twin? For Price it is because Thomas, better than any of the other disciples, has a true understanding of who Jesus is, as indicated in yet another apocryphal book, the Gospel of Thomas (Gospel of Thomas 13). In addition, Price notes several apocryphal works that deal with James of Jerusalem, which also call him Jesus’s brother. Price argues that this is because of his particularly close ties to Jesus and his clear understanding of Jesus and his teaching.

  This last piece of evidence shows where Price’s argument unravels. The reason James is called Jesus’s brother in these other apocryphal works is that it was widely believed in early Christianity that James was in fact his brother. These texts say nothing, not a thing, to counteract that view. They simply assume a sibling relationship.

  So too with the Acts of Thomas. The whole point of the narrative of this intriguing book is precisely that Thomas really is Jesus’s brother. In fact, he is his twin. Not only that: he is his identical twin. This is not because he uniquely agrees with Jesus or understands him particularly well. Quite the contrary, the very first episode of the book shows that Thomas does not agree with Jesus and does not see eye to eye with him in the least. After Jesus’s resurrection, the other apostles instruct Thomas to go to India to convert the pagans, and he refuses to go. It is only when Jesus appears from heaven that he forces his twin brother to proceed against his wishes. It is only in a different book, the Gospel of Thomas, that Thomas is said to understand Jesus better than any of the others. But strikingly, the Gospel of Thomas decidedly does not say that, for that reason, Thomas was Jesus’s brother, let alone his twin.