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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Scholars of the Mithraic mysteries readily admit that, as with most mystery religions, we do not know a good deal about Mithraism—or at least nearly as much as we would like to know. The Mithraists left no books behind to explain what they did in their religion and what they believed. Almost all of our evidence is archaeological, as a large number of the cult’s sacred shrines (called mithraea) have been uncovered that include a bull-slaying statue (called a tauroctony). These statues portray what was evidently the central act within the mythology of the group. The cult figure Mithras is astride a kneeling bull, his bent knee on its back, pulling its head toward him while he himself looks away and plunges a knife into its neck. A dog is shown lapping up the blood from the wound, which has an ear of wheat coming out with it; also present is a snake, and a scorpion is seen biting the bull’s scrotum. On either side of the statue is a human torchbearer, one holding his torch upward in the normal position, the other holding his downward.

  There are enormous debates among Mithraic scholars about what all this means. It clearly involves the study of the zodiac, and a number of interesting theories have been propounded. Unfortunately, we do not have Mithraic texts that explain it all to us, let alone texts that indicate that Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25 and that he died to atone for sins only to be raised on a Sunday.26

  As I pointed out earlier, the reason a religion like Mithraism is called a mystery cult by scholars is that the followers of the religion were bound by a vow of secrecy and so never revealed the mysteries of their religion, either their practices or their beliefs.27 It is true that later writers sometimes indicated what, in their opinion, took place in the religion. But these later writers were not involved personally in the cult, and historians are highly reluctant to take them at their word as if they had real sources of information. They, like their modern counterparts, were often simply speculating.

  This is true as well of some of our Christian sources who claim that there were similarities between their own religion and the mystery religions. These later authors, such as the church father Tertullian, started making such claims for very specific reasons. It was not that they had done research and interviewed followers of these religions. It was because they wanted pagans to realize that Christianity was not all that different from what other pagans said and did in their religions so that there would be no grounds for singling out Christians and persecuting them. The Christian sources that claim to know something about these mysteries, in other words, had a vested interest in making others think that the pagan religions were in many ways like Christianity. For that reason—plus the fact that they would not have had reliable sources of information—they generally cannot be trusted.

  Many mythicists, however, take what these later sources say at face value and stress the obvious: Christian claims about Jesus were a lot like those of other cult figures, down to the details. But they have derived the details from sources that—in the judgment of the scholars who are actually experts in this material—simply cannot be relied upon.

  Other Problems with the Parallels

  There are other problems with the mythicists’ claims that Jesus was simply invented as another one of the ancient divine men. In many instances, for example, the alleged parallels between the stories of Jesus and those of pagan gods or divine men are not actually close. When Christians said that Jesus was born of a virgin, for instance, they came to mean that Jesus’s mother had never had sex. In most of the cases of the divine men, when the father is a god and the mother is a mortal, sex is definitely involved. The child is literally part human and part deity. The mortal woman is no virgin; she has had divine sex.

  In other cases the parallels are simply made up. Where do any of the ancient sources speak of a divine man who was crucified as an atonement for sin? So far as I know, there are no parallels to this central Christian claim. What has been invented here is not the Christian Jesus but the mythicist claims about Jesus. I am not saying that I think Jesus really did die to atone for the sins of the world. I am saying that the Christian claims about Jesus’s atoning sacrifice were not lifted from pagan claims about divine men. Dying to atone for sin was not part of the ancient pagan mythology. Mythicists who claim that it was are simply imagining things.

  My main objection to this line of argumentation, however, is the one with which I began. There certainly are similarities between what pagans were saying about their divine men and what Christians were saying about Jesus, as we have seen in the case of Apollonius. But the parallels are not as close and as precise as most mythicists claim. Nowhere near as close. True, some similarities are significant. But that is not relevant to the question of whether there really was a Jewish teacher Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. As we saw earlier with respect to parallels to Old Testament figures, when Christians told stories about Jesus, they shaped the stories in light of stories they already knew.

  Jewish Christians in particular may have been inclined to portray Jesus in Old Testament terms. As soon as Christianity moved outside Judaism, however, and became a religion largely made up of converts from among the pagans, these new converts told stories about Jesus in terms that made sense to them. They increasingly shaped the stories so that Jesus looked more and more like the divine men commonly talked about in the Roman world, men who were supernaturally born because of the intervention of a god, who did miracles, who healed the sick and raised the dead, and who at the end ascended to heaven. If you wanted to describe a son of God to someone in the ancient world, these were the terms you used. You used the vocabulary and conceptions found in the idiom of the day. What other idiom could you use? It was the only language available to you.

  The fact that Jesus was cast in the mold of pagan divine men does indeed create a difficult situation for historians who want to get beyond the idiom of the stories to the historical reality that lies behind them. But the mere fact that the idiom is being used does not mean that there is no reality there. The question of whether Jesus is portrayed as a Jewish prophet or as a pagan divine man is completely independent of the question of whether he existed.

  Robert Price and the Mythic Hero Archetype

  Robert Price in his recent book, The Christ-Myth Theory, uses parallels to pagan divine men in a more sophisticated way. Price argues that an ideal archetype of the “mythic hero” was “shared by cultures and religions worldwide and throughout history.”28 This ideal type comprises twenty-two characteristics, many of which apply to Jesus. Like many of these other figures from around the world, Jesus was made up according to type.

  I do not need to belabor my criticism of this view since many of the points I made earlier apply here as well. I can say, though, that when social scientists talk about an “ideal type,” they are not referring to an actually existing entity but to a scholarly construct that is useful for classifying phenomena. Anyone who is “true to type” is not necessarily “made up” to fit the type. This is significant because some of the figures that Price uses to establish the type were certainly actual persons, such as the famous Peregrinus discussed by the ancient author Lucian of Samosata (as Price admits in Chapter 2: Eyewitness Accounts?). Jesus too could be true to type and be a real person. Here again, then, we need to differentiate between two questions: (a) How was Jesus talked about and portrayed by his later followers, and (b) did he really exist as a historical figure?

  Price knows that these are separate questions, and he anticipates the objection by claiming that unlike other figures who really lived, such as Peregrinus, with Jesus we have no “neutral” information about his life. In Price’s view, “Every detail [of the Gospel stories] corresponds to the interest of mythology and epic.” And so the whole thing looks like it is made up.

  This is another place where I seriously part company with Price. It simply is not true that all the stories in the Gospels, and all the details of stories, promote the mythological interests of the early Christians. The claim that Jesus had brothers named James, Joses, Judas,
and Simon, along with several sisters, is scarcely a mythological motif; neither is the statement that he came from the tiny hamlet of Nazareth or that he often talked about seeds.

  Price goes on to say that one other thing that makes historical figures stand out from those who are completely true to type is that they have left a “footprint on…profane history.” That is, we have records of Caesar Augustus and Apollonius of Tyana, who are mentioned in other (profane) sources.

  The first thing to stress by way of response is that it really is not fair to use Caesar Augustus as the criterion by which we evaluate whether one of the other sixty million people of his day actually existed. If I wanted to prove that my former colleague Jim Sanford really existed, I would not do so by comparing his press coverage to that of Ronald Reagan. Moreover, in the ancient context I do not even know what the term profane (as opposed to sacred) is supposed to mean. The ancient world did not divide the sacred from the profane or even imagine these as discrete categories. And even if they had, why would a profane historical source be more valuable than a nonprofane one (whatever that is)? And which of the two is Philostratus, our chief source of information about Apollonius? Philostratus clearly sees Apollonius as an important religious figure, and he holds deep religious convictions about him. Does that mean Philostratus is not a valuable source? The same could be said about many of the sources for Augustus, who was widely seen as a superhuman being who eventually came to be deified.

  Here again, however, my biggest problem with this mythicist approach is the question of relevance. Yes, early Christians told stories about Jesus in light of what they thought about other divine men in their environment—or used to think before they converted. Modern critical historians have noted these parallels, which are nowhere near as numerous as the mythicists have typically contended. And scholars have long discussed why the parallels create problems for knowing exactly what Jesus really said and did. The early storytellers shaped their stories about Jesus according to the models available to them, making up details—and sometimes entire stories—or altering features here and there. But the fact they did so does not have any bearing on whether Jesus really existed. That has to be decided on other grounds.

  Or to put the matter more concretely: what if it were true, historically, that the followers of Mithras portrayed him as having been born on December 25, as wearing a halo, and as having followers who were headed by a pope on Vatican Hill? What does that have to do with whether there lived a Jewish preacher from Nazareth named Jesus who was crucified by Pontius Pilate? This entire set of arguments, as with those that I noted earlier, is simply not relevant to the question of whether or not there was a historical Jesus.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mythicist Inventions: Creating the Mythical Christ

  TEACHING COURSES ON THE New Testament in the Bible Belt is a real honor and pleasure. For one thing, one never needs to worry about getting enough enrollment. My classes are always bursting at the seams, with dozens of students who cannot get into the course desperately begging to be let in. And it’s not because of me. It’s because of the subject. I’ve known some truly awful teachers in my time at universities in the South, professors of biblical studies who still had full classes every term. Students in this part of the world are eager to study the New Testament—both Christians who want to learn about it from a different perspective than what they absorbed in church and Sunday school and non-Christians who realize just how important the Bible is for their society and culture.

  Because of where I teach, almost all my students come from conservative Christian backgrounds and already have both a vested interest in and a firm set of opinions about the subject matter. That makes biblical studies unlike almost any other academic discipline in the university, and it is why courses in the field are perfect for a liberal arts education. Students who take courses in other areas of the humanities—classics, philosophy, history, English, you name it—do not usually hold fixed ideas about the subject. As a result, they simply are not shocked by what they learn, for example, about the lives of Plato, Charlemagne, or Kaiser Wilhelm, and they do not come to class with deeply held opinions about other classics, King Lear, Bleak House, or The Brothers Karamazov. But they do have set opinions about the Bible—what it is and how it should be understood. These opinions can be challenged in class, and when they are, students are forced to think. Since one of the goals of a liberal arts education is to teach students how to think, courses in biblical studies are perfect for a liberal arts education, especially in a region such as the South, where the vast majority of students think they already know what the Bible is about.

  At a reputable university, of course, professors cannot teach simply anything. They need to be academically responsible and reflect the views of scholarship. That is probably why there are no mythicists—at least to my knowledge—teaching religious studies at accredited universities or colleges in North America or Europe. It is not that mythicists are lacking in hard-fought views and opinions or that they fail to mount arguments to back them up. It is that their views are not widely seen as academically respectable by members of the academy. That in itself does not make the mythicists wrong. It simply makes them marginal.

  As we saw in the previous chapter, some of the arguments that mythicists typically offer in support of their view that Jesus never existed are in fact irrelevant to the question. Other arguments are completely relevant but not persuasive. Those are the views that the present chapter will address, each of them involving ways mythicists have imagined, or rather invented, their mythical Christ. I will try to present these views fairly and then show why scholars in the relevant fields of academic inquiry simply do not accept them. I begin with the most commonly advocated view of them all.

  Did the Earliest Christians Invent Jesus as a Dying-Rising God, Based on Pagan Myths?

  ONE OF THE MOST widely asserted claims found in the mythicist literature is that Jesus was an invention of the early Christians who had been deeply influenced by the prevalent notion of a dying-rising god, as found throughout the pagan religions of antiquity. The theory behind this claim is that people in many ancient religions worshipped gods who died and rose again: Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Heracles, Melqart, Eshmun, Baal, and so on. Originally, the theory goes, these gods were connected with vegetation and were worshipped in fertility cults. Just as every year the crops die in winter but then come back to life in the spring, so too with the gods who are associated with the crops. They die (when the crops do) and go to the underworld, but then they revive (with the crops) and reappear on earth, raised from the dead. They are worshipped then as dying-rising deities.

  Jesus, in this view, was the Jewish version of the pagan fertility deity, invented by Jews as a dying and rising god. Only later did some of the devotees of this Jewish deity historicize his existence and begin to claim that he was in fact a divine human who had once lived on earth, who had died and then rose again. Once the historicizing process began, it continued rapidly until stories were told about this God-man, and eventually a whole set of narratives were invented by authors like Mark, the author of our first Gospel. These narratives were not based on real history, however; they were based on myths that have been historicized.

  This view of the invention of Jesus is nearly ubiquitous among mythicists (one who takes a different line, as we will see below, is G. A. Wells). We have already seen it set forth in the book of Kersey Graves of 1875. More recently, Robert Price claims in his just published book that he himself, once a former evangelical preacher, became a mythicist precisely when he realized that there were significant parallels between the traditions of Jesus and the stories of other dying and gods.1

  Problems with the View

  There are two major problems with this view that Jesus was originally invented as a dying-rising god modeled on the dying and rising gods of the pagan world. First, there are serious doubts about whether there were in fact dying-rising gods in the pagan world, and if there were, whethe
r they were anything like the dying-rising Jesus. Second, there is the even more serious problem that Jesus could not have been invented as a dying-rising god because his earliest followers did not think he was God.

  Dying and Rising Gods in Pagan Antiquity

  Even though most mythicists do not appear to know it, the onetime commonly held view that dying-rising gods were widespread in pagan antiquity has fallen on hard times among scholars.

  No one was more instrumental in popularizing the notion of the dying-rising god than Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). Frazer did in his day what Joseph Campbell did in the second half of the twentieth century: he convinced thousands of people that at heart many (or most) religions are the same. Whereas Campbell was principally revered by popular audiences, especially for such books as The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth, Frazer’s studies made their greatest impact upon scholars. Particularly influential was his view of dying and rising gods.

  Frazer’s important book was called The Golden Bough, which went through a number of editions, each time growing larger and larger. Already in the first edition of 1890 Frazer had set out his view of pagan deities who died and then rose again; by the third edition of 1911–15 Frazer devoted all of part 4 to the topic. In it Frazer claimed that Eastern Mediterranean divinities such as Osiris, Dumuzi (or Tammuz), Attis, and Adonis were all dying and rising gods. In each case we are dealing, Frazer averred, with vegetative gods whose cycle of life, death, and resurrection replicates and explains the earth’s fertility. Frazer himself did not draw explicit connections between these divinities and Jesus, but it is perfectly clear from his less-than-subtle ways of discussing these other gods what he had in mind. He thought that the Christians picked up this widespread characterization of the pagans and applied it to their myths about Jesus.2