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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The reality is that there was a tradition in some parts of the early church that Thomas really was the twin of Jesus. The Aramaic word Thomas, itself, means “twin.” That Jesus and Thomas were identical twins plays a key role in the Acts of Thomas, in one of its most amusing episodes. While Thomas is en route (reluctantly) to India, his ship stops in a major port city, where the king’s daughter is about to celebrate her marriage to a local aristocrat. Thomas as an outside guest is invited to the wedding, and after the ceremony he speaks to the wedded couple but in a highly unusual way. As a good ascetic Christian, Thomas believes that sex is sinful and that to be fully right with God, people—even married people—need to abstain. And so he tries to convince the king’s daughter and her new husband not to consummate their marriage that night.

  But he is frustratingly unsuccessful in his pleas. He leaves the scene, and the newlyweds enter their bridal chamber. But to their great surprise, there is Thomas again, sitting on their bed. Or at least they think it’s Thomas since he does, after all, look exactly like the man they were just talking with. But it is not Thomas. It is his identical twin, Jesus, come down from heaven to finish the task that his brother had unsuccessfully begun. Jesus, more powerfully persuasive of course than his twin, wins the hearts of the newlyweds, who spend the night in conversation instead of conjugal embrace.

  This tale is predicated on the view that Thomas and Jesus really were twins in a physical, not symbolic or spiritual, sense.

  One wonders how the Christians who told such stories could possibly imagine that Jesus had a twin brother. Wasn’t his mother a virgin? Then where did the twin come from?

  None of our sources indicates an answer to that question, but I think a solution can come from the mythologies that were popular in the period. We have several myths about divine men who were born of the union of a god and a mortal. In some of those stories the mortal woman is also impregnated by her husband, leading to the birth of twins (it is hard to know how they could be identical twins, but anatomy was not the strong suit of most ancient storytellers). This in fact is how the divine man Heracles is born. His mother, Alcmene, is ravished by the king of the gods, Zeus, and afterward she is also made pregnant by her husband, Amphitryon. And so she bears twins, the immortal Zeus and the mortal Iphicles.

  Is it possible that the Christians who told stories of Jesus and his twin brother, Thomas, had a similar idea—that Jesus was conceived while Mary was a virgin, but then her husband also slept with her so that two sons were born? We will never know if they thought this, but it at least is a viable possibility. What does not seem viable, given what the stories about Thomas and Jesus actually say, is that they were unrelated. On the contrary, for these stories they were actual twin brothers.

  Price claims that his view that a mortal could be a special “brother” of Jesus because he so well reflected his views is supported by a range of the Apocryphal Acts.6 He does not cite any of the others, however, only texts that deal with Thomas and James, the two figures in the early church best known precisely for being Jesus’s actual brothers. But as a clinching argument, Price appeals to the nineteenth-century revolutionary leader in China, the so-called Taiping messiah named Hong Xiuquan, who called himself “the Little Brother of Jesus.” Price says this figure provides compelling evidence of his view. In his words, “I find the possible parallel to the case of Hong Xiuquan to be, almost by itself, proof that James’ being the Lord’s brother need not prove a recent historical Jesus.” That is, since Hong Xiuquan was not really Jesus’s brother, the same could be true of James.7

  Now we are really grasping at straws. A nineteenth-century man from China is evidence of what someone living in the 30s CE in Palestine thought about himself? Hong Xiuquan lived eighteen hundred years later, in a different part of the world, in a different social and cultural context. He was the heir of eighteen centuries’ worth of Christian tradition. He has nothing to do with the historical Jesus or the historical James. To use his case to clinch the argument is an enormous stretch, even by Price’s standards.

  Price suggests a third alternative to interpreting “James the brother of the Lord” so as not to require that he was Jesus’s actual sibling. This final view is not worked out as clearly as the other two. Sometimes, Price points out, a person named in the Bible embodies the characteristics of a larger group. And so in the book of Genesis the patriarch Jacob is renamed Israel, and in fact he becomes the father of the tribes of Israel; Ishmael is the father of the Ishmaelites; Benjamin represents the southern tribe of Israel, called Benjamin, and so forth. For Price, these are all fictional characters, and he claims that it could be similar with James. He was the head of a group that came to identify with Jesus. This was a sect within Judaism that, Price suggests, was in fact the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. In order to stress the importance of their group and the closeness of their ties to Jesus, they much later came to claim that James was in fact the brother of the Lord. In fact, for Price he was a high priest of the Dead Sea Scroll community.

  This view of who James really was, Price contends, explains “the otherwise puzzling rivalry between partisans of the Twelve and those of the Pillars (led by James).”8

  Now we are getting even more wildly speculative. There are compelling reasons for thinking that the Dead Sea Scroll community had no direct ties to later Christian groups and for thinking that the historical James had no connections with the Dead Sea Scroll community, let alone that he was a high priest.9 What ancient sources ever say any such thing? None at all. The sources that mention the Christian James, such as Paul, the book of Acts, and the later Christian books known as the Pseudo-Clementine writings, are unified in portraying him as the head of the church in Jerusalem from its early days; most of them (along with Mark and Josephus) indicate that he was Jesus’s actual brother. He is not at all like Israel, Ishmael, or Benjamin. These were understood to be the fathers of the tribes or groups that descended from them and to have been related to them by blood. No one thinks that James’s group in Jerusalem was made up of his children and grandchildren. Price does not cite any analogies for what he understands to be the reasons for calling James the “brother of the Lord” as the head of a special group in Jerusalem. And he is certainly wrong to claim that this theory explains any rivalry between the “twelve” and the “pillars.” This latter term is used by Paul in Galatians to indicate the leaders of the Jerusalem church, Peter, James, and John—two of the three were members of the twelve. It is hard to know how these groups were in such rivalry. Unless, of course, Peter and John were just internally conflicted.

  Price again is honest in his conclusion in saying that “we must guard against…a hell-bent adherence to a hobbyhorse of a theory” in order to explain away Paul’s references to James as the brother of the Lord. But that is precisely what he appears to be doing. Paul came to know James around 35–36 CE, just a few years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death. He calls him the brother of the Lord. In other traditions that long predate our Gospels it is stated that Jesus had actual brothers and that one of them was named James. Josephus too names James as a brother of Christ. Jesus, then, appears to have had a brother named James. And Paul personally knew him, starting in the mid-30s CE. Once again we are driven back to a time very near when Jesus must have lived. Surely James, his own brother, would know if he lived.

  The Crucified Messiah

  AS I INDICATED AT the outset, I am devoting this chapter to two pieces of evidence that argue with particular cogency that there must have been a historical figure of Jesus. There is a good deal of other evidence that has proved compelling to just about everyone who has ever considered it with a dispassionate eye, wanting simply to know what happened in the past, wherever the evidence leads. But these two points are especially compelling. And they are not dependent on one another but are completely separate. The first had to do with whom Paul knew: Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter, and his blood brother James, sometime companions of Paul from th
e mid-30s CE in Palestine. The second has to do, by contrast, with what Paul knew even earlier. And not with just what Paul knew but with what everyone among the early followers of Jesus knew. These early Christians from day one believed that Jesus was the messiah. But they knew that he had been crucified.

  For reasons that may not seem self-evident at first, claiming that Jesus was crucified is a powerful argument that Jesus actually lived. It is important to begin by recalling an element from the chronology of Paul’s life. According to both the book of Acts and the narrative that Paul himself provides in his letters (Galatians 1), before Paul came to believe in Jesus he had been a violent persecutor of Jesus’s followers. Since he converted around 32 or 33 CE, his persecution activities would have taken place earlier in the 30s.

  As a zealous Jew persecuting Christians, Paul himself says that he was intent on “destroying” the “church of God” (Galatians 1:13). Obviously the followers of Jesus were saying things, or at least something, that Paul considered both colossally wrong and dangerous. Unfortunately, Paul never tells us what that something was, but it is not hard to figure out once one knows Paul’s later teachings and the standard Jewish expectations of the messiah.

  Before detailing these, let me stress that Paul necessarily had close, personal contact with the people he was persecuting, on one level or another, and what little he knew about Jesus at the outset of his outrage (in say 31–32 CE or so) would have been augmented by these contacts. These people themselves would have come to know what they knew about Jesus before Paul persecuted them. And so we can say with virtual certainty that there were Christians with information about Jesus from within a year or two, at the very latest, of the traditional date of his death and that Paul knew at least something about what these people were saying about Jesus.

  As we will see in greater detail in a later chapter, these Christians were not calling Jesus a dying-rising God. They were calling him the Jewish messiah. And they understood this messiah to be completely human, a person chosen by God to mediate his will on earth. That is the Jesus Paul first heard of. But there was nothing blasphemous about calling a Jewish teacher the messiah. That happened on and off throughout the history of Judaism, and it still happens in our day. In itself the claim that someone is the messiah is not blasphemous or, necessarily, problematic (though it may strike outsiders—and usually does—as a bit crazed). What Paul appears to have found offensive was that Jesus in particular was being called the messiah. The reason that was offensive is that Paul and everyone else knew that Jesus had been condemned to death by crucifixion. Jesus could scarcely then have been the messiah of God, for reasons that Paul would have found altogether compelling before changing his mind and becoming a follower of Jesus.

  First it is necessary to see that Paul himself hints at the problem in his letter to the Galatians, which he wrote much later in his life, long after his conversion and early missionary work. In a particularly poignant passage in Galatians, Paul quotes a passage of scripture that must have been important to him even in his pre-Christian days, Deuteronomy 21:23: “Everyone who hangs on a tree is cursed.” In its original context in Deuteronomy, this is referring to the practice of hanging a human corpse on a tree as a public statement of shame and humiliation. Centuries later, when Romans were executing the most heinous criminals and lowlifes by crucifying them, this verse was taken to be equally applicable. Obviously anyone who was killed in this way stood under God’s curse.

  Jesus too was crucified, as everyone knew—or at least said. And that was probably what led Paul, in the early 30s, to decide to persecute the Christians. They were saying that Jesus was God’s special chosen one, his beloved son, the messiah. But for the pre-Christian Paul it was quite clear: Jesus was not anything like God’s chosen one, the one selected to do his will on earth. Jesus did not enjoy God’s blessing. Just the opposite: he was under God’s curse. Evidence? He was hung on a tree.

  But why would that be a problem? Wasn’t the messiah supposed to suffer horribly for the sins of others and be raised from the dead? Not according to ancient Jews. On the contrary, the messiah was not supposed to be killed at all. It is at this point that we need to consider what ancient Jews, including the pre-Christian Paul, thought about the messiah.

  Ancient Views of the Messiah

  The first thing to state, and to state emphatically, is that no Jew ever thought the messiah would be God. The only reason this point has to be raised is that today many Christians appear to think that this is what the messiah was supposed to be, God the savior come to earth. But this is not and never was a Jewish view. It is a Christian view only because Christians have always called Jesus the messiah and most Christians, still today, consider Jesus God. If Jesus is the messiah, the unspoken assumption goes, and if Jesus is God, then the messiah must be God. But this is Christian theology with no support in ancient Jewish thinking. The messiah was not God. He was one appointed by God or sent by God. There is only one God, and the messiah is the one God has “anointed” to be his special representative and to do his special work.

  The word messiah is Hebrew and means “anointed one.” As I pointed out earlier, the Greek translation of the term is christos so that Jesus Christ literally means “Jesus the Messiah.” The origin of the term goes back into the ancient history of Israel, to the time when the nation was ruled by kings, who were said to have been specially favored, “anointed,” by God. In fact, the king was literally anointed during his inauguration ceremonies, when oil was poured on his head as a way of showing that he was specially favored by God, as seen in such passages as 1 Samuel 10:1 and 2 Samuel 23:1. Other persons thought to be God’s special representatives on earth, such as high priests, were sometimes anointed as well (see Leviticus 4:3, 5, 16). Even outside the Hebrew Bible, in the Jewish tradition we have records of such anointing ceremonies showing that a person stood under God’s special favor (for example, 2 Maccabees 1:10; the Testament of Reuben 6:8). In fact, any leader who was specially used by God could be called his anointed one; even the Persian king Cyrus, who was one of Israel’s conquerors, was said by the prophet Isaiah to have been God’s instrument, and is explicitly called his “messiah” (anointed one; Isaiah 45:1).

  Most commonly, however, the term was applied to the king of Israel. Within the ancient Israelite traditions there developed the notion that God would always favor the nation by constantly ruling them through his chosen king. A prophecy was given to Israel’s greatest king, David, in 2 Samuel 7:11–14, that he would always have a descendant on the throne—that in perpetuity an anointed one would rule the nation. That promise, however, did not come to fruition. In the year 586 BCE, the Babylonian armies under King Nebuchadnezzar invaded the land of Judah, destroyed the city of Jerusalem, burned the Jewish Temple, and removed the king from the throne. For the next several centuries the Jewish people were ruled by foreign powers: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, then the Syrians.

  Some Jewish thinkers, however, recalled the original promise to David that an anointed one, a messiah, would always sit on the throne, and they came to think that the promise would be fulfilled in days to come. In some future time, possibly soon, God would remember his promise and bring a future king like David to rule his people. This future ruler was naturally enough referred to simply as the “messiah.” He would be a human, like David, Solomon, and the other kings. But he would be raised up by God to overthrow the enemies of the Jews and establish Israel once again as a sovereign people in the land God had promised them.

  Around the time of Jesus there lived some Jews who expected such a messiah. At that period the Jews in Palestine were ruled by the Romans. But it was sometimes thought that God would intervene and raise up a great warrior who would destroy these pagan enemies and reinstate the kingdom of Israel. One of the clearest expressions of this kind of messianic expectation is in a Jewish writing known as the Psalms of Solomon, written probably during the first century BCE. Its powerful expectation of what the coming messiah would b
e is worth quoting at length:

  See, Lord, and raise up for them their king,

  the son of David, to rule over your servant Israel

  in the time known to you, O God.

  Undergird him with the strength to destroy the unrighteous rulers,

  to purge Jerusalem from gentiles

  who trample her to destruction;

  in wisdom and in righteousness to drive out

  the sinners from the inheritance;

  to smash the arrogance of sinners like a potter’s jar;

  to shatter all their substance with an iron rod;

  to destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth;

  at his warning the nations will flee from his presence;

  and he will condemn sinners by the thoughts of his heart….

  And he will have gentile nations serving him under his yoke….

  And he will purge Jerusalem

  and make it holy as it was even from the beginning….

  And he will be a righteous king over them, taught by God.

  There will be no unrighteousness among them in his days,

  for all shall be holy,

  and their king shall be the Lord Messiah.10

  Obviously we are not dealing here with the expectation of a messiah who would be tortured to death by his enemies the Romans. Quite the opposite: the messiah would destroy the enemy and set up his throne in Jerusalem, where he would rule his people with power, grandeur, and justice.