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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Take now a second instance where the heart of the story—as I will argue in a later chapter—is almost certainly historical despite the literary embellishments around it. At the beginning of Jesus’s ministry he is said to have been baptized by John the Baptist. The accounts in the Gospels are clearly amplified beyond historical plausibility: in the earliest version, Mark’s, when Jesus comes out of the water, the heavens are said to rip apart, the Holy Spirit is said to descend upon him as a dove, and a voice comes from heaven: “You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:9–11). The scene, as narrated, is designed to show that here, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is acknowledged by God as his unique son and anointed by the Holy Spirit from heaven to empower him for his preaching and miracles.

  But the embellishments do not mean that the event itself is made up, as we will see later. How does Price explain the appearance of the baptism account in the Gospels? In his view,

  The scene in broad outline may derive from Zoroastrian traditions of the inauguration of Zoroaster’s ministry. Son of a Vedic priest, Zoroaster immerses himself in the river for purification, and as he comes up from the water, the archangel Vohu Mana appears to him, proffering a cup and commissions him to bear the tidings of the one God Ahura Mazda, whereupon the evil one Ahriman tempts him to abandon this call. (67)

  Is this explanation really at the same level of historical probability as the explanation of the triumphal entry? Zoroastrianism? Vohu Mana? Ahura Mazda? These were the influences that determined how the story of Jesus’s baptism were told? For one thing, how can Price say that the entire Gospel is a haggadic midrash on the Old Testament if what he means is that it is a paraphrase of Zoroastrian scripture? Even if it is not historical, the story of Jesus’s baptism must go back to the very earliest Christian communities in Aramaic-speaking Palestine. How many Aramaic-speaking Palestinian Jews were influenced by accounts of Zoroaster’s initiation in the presence of the archangel Vohu Mana?

  In short, many of Price’s explanations of where the Gospel stories came from are simply implausible. But my bigger point is that in many instances they are also irrelevant. Even if later storytellers chose to talk about Jesus’s baptism in light of something that once happened to Zoroaster—which seems highly unlikely, but if they actually did—this has no bearing on the question of whether Jesus existed and, in this case, very little bearing on the question of whether he really was baptized by John the Baptist. Just because a story is molded by a storyteller or author in light of his own interests does not mean that the story at its core is nonhistorical or that the person about whom it is told did not live. There is other, quite abundant, evidence that Jesus lived. And as we will see, there are solid reasons for thinking he was baptized. None of this evidence hinges on whether he began his ministry like Zoroaster.

  Thomas Thompson and the Messiah Myth

  Thomas Thompson recently published a book that advances a view similar to Price’s but approaches the matter from a slightly different angle. In The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, Thompson argues that just as Old Testament notables such as Abraham, Moses, and David were legendary, not historical figures, so too with Jesus, whose stories in the Gospels are not the result of oral traditions dating back to near his own time but are literary fictions invented by the Gospel writers and their predecessors.20

  Thompson is a trained scholar of the Hebrew Bible and is well known in those circles for being what is called a minimalist, meaning that he thinks there is a very small amount of historical information in the Hebrew Bible. I do not need to enter into that debate here, as I am interested instead in how he transferred his understanding of the Old Testament traditions to the Gospel stories about Jesus. His book on Jesus (and David) consists of little more than a close reading of the Gospels, and he argues that the Gospels try to formulate their stories about Jesus in light of traditions found in the Old Testament. In his view the Gospel stories are constructed specifically as literary texts by authors who wanted to put their views of Jesus in written form. They are not, therefore, based on oral traditions that go back to near the time of Jesus himself. This is especially the case because in his view Jesus did not exist but was a literary invention of the early Christians.

  Thompson’s book is not easy for a layperson to follow. It involves a close reading of texts, a reading that at times is excessively thick and virtually impenetrable. Those without training in biblical studies are not likely to be able to follow his argument let alone be persuaded by it. But his basic view is clear. The Gospel stories have literary functions that depend heavily on intertextual influences (meaning they are based on other texts—in this case, those of the Hebrew Bible). To understand these stories, the interpreter has to understand where the stories came from. From this assertion Thompson leaps to the conclusion that since the Jesus traditions are textual and literary, they are therefore not rooted in oral traditions and have no basis in actual history. To read the stories as historical narratives, in his opinion, is therefore to misread them.

  In my judgment this view goes too far (way too far) and is based on a non sequitur. To say that our Gospel stories are based in many instances (he would say all, but that is surely an exaggeration) on earlier literary texts does not necessarily mean that the stories were invented as written traditions instead of existing first as oral traditions. Even people telling stories, as opposed to writing them, could be influenced by earlier writings that were in broad circulation. And it needs to be remembered always that we have solid and virtually incontrovertible evidence that the stories of Jesus were circulated orally before being written down. For one thing, there is no other way to explain how Christianity spread throughout the Roman world, as followers of Jesus converted other people to believe, not by showing them books (almost all of them were illiterate) but by telling stories about Jesus. Moreover, we have a number of authors who explicitly tell us that stories about Jesus were being transmitted orally. Paul says that he is passing on traditions he has heard (1 Corinthians 11:22–24; 15:3–5); Luke indicates that his predecessors based their accounts on oral traditions (1:1–4); the author of the Fourth Gospel indicates that he had an oral source for some of his stories (19:35); and even later the church father Papias indicates that he interviewed people who had been companions of Jesus’s disciples.

  These oral traditions about Jesus did not arise twenty, thirty, or forty years after the traditional date of his death. On the contrary, as we have seen, they began in Aramaic-speaking Palestine, and we can give reasonably hard dates: at the very latest they started in the early 30s, a year or two after Jesus allegedly died. They almost certainly started even earlier.

  But apart from this question of whether the Gospel stories are purely literary inventions (rather than written accounts of earlier oral traditions), with Thompson as with Price we have to ask whether the view he sets forth is all that relevant to the question of Jesus’s historical existence. It is one thing to say that a story has been shaped in light of an account in the Hebrew Bible. It is another thing to say that the event never happened at all or, even more, that the person about whom the story is told never existed. The fact that stories are molded in certain ways does not necessarily mean that there is no historical information to be found in the stories. That has to be decided on other grounds.

  An analogy may yet again be useful. Today the historical novel is a widely accepted genre of literature. Over the past few years I have read Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay, based on events in France during the Holocaust; A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, about the French Revolution; and Romola, by George Eliot, about Savonarola in fifteenth-century Florence. These books are all shaped as novels. They are not meant to be disinterested historical accounts of the Holocaust, French history, or a famous Italian heretic. But to deny that they have some connection with historical events or the persons involved in these events is to miss a basic literary premise. No one would claim that the French Revolution neve
r happened because it is discussed in a work of fiction created by Charles Dickens or that the Holocaust was made up because there is a novel about it. One instead needs to look for other evidence.

  So too with the Gospels of the New Testament. They do indeed contain nonhistorical materials, many of which are based on traditions found in the Hebrew Bible. And to understand the gospel stories you do indeed need to understand the intertexts on which they are based. But that has little bearing on the question of whether or not Jesus actually existed. It has to do rather with how reliable some of the stories told about him are. To decide whether Jesus existed, you need to look at other evidence, as we have done.

  Claim 4: The Nonhistorical “Jesus” Is Based on Stories About Pagan Divine Men

  THIS FINAL ARGUMENT, UBIQUITOUS among the mythicists, is analogous to the preceding, but now rather than arguing that Jesus was made up based on persons and prophecies from the Jewish Bible, it is claimed that he was invented in light of what pagans were saying about the gods or about other “divine men,” superhuman creatures thought to have been half mortal, half immortal. As was the case with the earlier claim, I think there is a good deal to be said for the idea that Christians did indeed shape their stories about Jesus in light of other figures who were similar to him. But I also think that this is scarcely relevant to the question of whether or not he existed.

  The Claim and Its Exposition

  In my textbook on the New Testament, written for undergraduates, I begin my study of the historical Jesus in a way that students find completely surprising and even unsettling. I tell them that I want to describe to them an important figure who lived two thousand years ago.

  Even before he was born, it was known that he would be someone special. A supernatural being informed his mother that the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. He was born miraculously, and he became an unusually precocious young man. As an adult he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging his listeners to live, not for the material things of this world, but for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples around him, who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired, in no small part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But at the end of his life he roused opposition, and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm. Later some of his followers wrote books about him.

  But, I tell my students, I doubt if any of you has ever read any of these books. In fact, I say, I don’t think you even know this man’s name. He was Apollonius of Tyana, a pagan philosopher, a worshipper of the pagan gods. His story was written by a later follower named Philostratus, and we still have the book today, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana.21

  The followers of Jesus, of course, argued that Apollonius was a fraud and a charlatan and that Jesus was the Son of God. The followers of Apollonius argued just the opposite, that it was Jesus who was the fraud. And these were not the only two divine men in antiquity. A number of divine men were thought to have roamed the earth, some of them in the recent past, people born to the union of a mortal (human) and an immortal (god), who could do spectacular deeds and who delivered amazing teachings, who at the end of their lives ascended to heaven to live with the gods.

  My students, of course, have a hard time getting their minds around the fact that in the ancient world Jesus was not the only one “known” to be a miracle-working son of God. There were others. Mythicists, as you might imagine, have had field day with this information, arguing that since these others were obviously not real historical persons, neither was Jesus. He, like them, was invented.

  But there is a problem with this view. Apollonius, for example, really was a historical person, a Pythagorean philosopher who lived some fifty years after Jesus. I don’t really think that Apollonius’s mother was impregnated by a God or that Apollonius really healed the sick or raised the dead. But he did exist. And so did Jesus. How do we know? We don’t base our judgments on the way later followers made Apollonius and Jesus out to be semi-or completely divine. We base our judgments on other evidence, as we have seen. The fact that Christians saw Jesus as a divine man (or rather, for them, as the only true divine man) is not in itself relevant to the question of whether he existed. Still, since this is a major point among the mythicists, I need to give it some consideration.

  I will be dealing with a very similar point in the next chapter, where I consider arguments of the mythicists that do strike me as highly relevant to the question of Jesus’s existence. There I will ask whether Jesus was invented like one of the dying-rising gods of the ancient world. Here, however, I am more interested in the mythological parallels to the traditions of Jesus (his birth, his miracles, his ascension, and so forth) and their relevance to the question of whether he existed. My view is that even though one can draw a number of interesting parallels between the stories of someone like Apollonius and Jesus (there are lots of similarities but also scores of differences), mythicists typically go way too far in emphasizing these parallels, even making them up in order to press their point. These exaggerations do not serve their purposes well.

  A terrific example of an exaggerated set of mythicist claims comes in a classic in the field, the 1875 book of Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Christianity Before Christ. Early on his “study” Graves states his overarching thesis:

  Researches into oriental history reveal the remarkable fact that stories of incarnate Gods answering to and resembling the miraculous character of Jesus Christ have been prevalent in most if not all principal religious heathen nations of antiquity; and the accounts and narrations of some of these deific incarnations bear such a striking resemblance to that of the Christian Savior—not only in their general features but in some cases in the most minute details, from the legend of the immaculate conception to that of the crucifixion, and subsequent ascension into heaven—that one might almost be mistaken for the other.22

  Grave goes on to list thirty-five such divine figures, naming them as Chrisna of Hindostan, Budha Sakia of India, Baal of Phenicia, Thammuz of Syria, Mithra of Persia, Cadmus of Greece, Mohamud of Arabia, and so on. Already the modern, informed reader sees that there are going to be problems. Buddha, Cadmus, and Muhammad? Their lives were remarkably like that of Jesus, down to the details? But as Graves goes on:

  These have all received divine honors, have nearly all been worshiped as Gods, or sons of Gods; were mostly incarnated as Christs, Saviors, Messiahs, or Mediators; not a few of them were reputedly born of virgins; some of them filling a character almost identical with that ascribed by the Christian’s Bible to Jesus Christ; many of them, like him, are reported to have been crucified; and all of them, taken together, furnish a prototype and parallel for nearly every important incident and wonder-inciting miracle, doctrine, and precept recorded in the New Testament, of the Christian’s savior.23

  This is certainly an impressive statement, and one can see how an unwary reader may easily be taken in. But note, for starters, the exaggeration of the last two lines (“nearly every important incident…”). Such sensationalist claims are repeated elsewhere throughout the book, as when, for example, we are told that pagan sources provide parallels for “nearly every important thought, deed, word, action, doctrine, principle, precept, tenet, ritual ordinance or ceremony…. Nearly every miraculous or marvelous story, moral precept, or tenet of religious faith [told about Jesus].”

  Graves then sets out these fantastic (not to say fantastical) parallels in forty-five chapters, including discussions of such things as messianic prophecies, immaculate conceptions, virgin mothers, the visit of angels, shepherds, and magi to see the newborn infant, birth on December 25, crucifixions, descents to hell, resurrections, ascensions, atonements, doctrines of the trinit
y, and on and on. Possibly the most striking thing about all of these amazing parallels to the Christian claims about Jesus is the equally amazing fact that Graves provides not a single piece of documentation for any of them. They are all asserted, on his own authority. If a reader wants to look up the stories about Buddha or Mithra or Cadmus, there is no place to turn. Graves does not name the sources of his information. Even so, these are the kinds of claims one can find throughout the writings of the mythicists, even those writing today, 140 years later. And as with Graves, in almost every instance the claims are unsubstantiated.

  Just to pick a more recent example, I might mention the assertions of Frank Zindler, in his essay “How Jesus Got a Life.”24 Zindler is not as extreme as Graves, but he does make unguarded claims without providing the reader any guidance for finding the supporting evidence. In Zindler’s view, Christ’s biography started as a set of astrological and comparative mythological speculations in a pagan mystery cult, based to a large extent on the ancient “mystery religion” of Mithraism. According to Zindler, the cult figure of the Mithraists, the Persian god Mithras, was said to have been born on December 25 to a virgin; his cult was headed by a ruler who was known as a pope, located on the Vatican hill; the leaders of the religion wore miters and celebrated a sacred meal to commemorate the atoning death of their savior God, who was said to have been raised from the dead on a Sunday. Sound familiar?

  The cult was centered, Zindler claims, in Tarsus (the hometown of the apostle Paul). But then the astrologers involved with the cult came to realize that the zodiacal age of Mithra was drawing to a close since the equinox was moving into Pisces. And so they “left their cult centers in Phrygia and Cilicia…to go to Palestine to see if they could locate not just the King of the Jews but the new Time Lord” (that is, they invented Jesus).25 Zindler says this in all sincerity, and so far as I can tell, he really believes it. What evidence does he give for his claim that the Mithraists moved their religion to Palestine to help them find the king of the Jews? None at all. And so we might ask: what evidence could he have cited, had he wanted to do so? It’s the same answer. There is no evidence. This is made up.