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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The idea that Christians were telling stories of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection before Luke, before Mark, and before Paul is held by virtually all scholars of the New Testament, and for compelling reasons. As I earlier pointed out, the only way the early Christians—starting in the months after Jesus’s death—could have propagated their beliefs, converting first Jews and then Gentiles to believe in Jesus, was by telling stories about him. Before he converted, Paul had heard some of these stories, at least those about Jesus’s crucifixion but almost certainly other stories as well. If he was offended that this Jew in particular was the one being called the messiah, it means he must have known something about Jesus in particular (it is possible of course that all Paul knew was that followers of Jesus were calling him a crucified messiah and that he knew absolutely nothing else, but that does require a bit of a stretch of the imagination). In any event, Paul certainly knew other stories about Jesus soon after he converted in 32–33 CE, as he provides information about Jesus’s birth, teachings, family, ministry, Last Supper, and crucifixion in his later writings, long before Mark wrote.

  In addition, we have remnants of some of the early traditions of Jesus that were circulating orally, outside the Gospels, and only later written down. We have looked already at the speeches in the book of Acts. These speeches show clear signs of having derived from the earliest Christian communities since their Christological views are so “primitive” in relation to the views of Paul and the later Gospels. In several of these speeches it is clear that the storytellers believed that Jesus had become the Son of God and messiah at the time of the resurrection (not, say, at his baptism or his birth). These speeches must come from exceedingly early times. And in them we find summaries of Jesus’s life and death, where it is clear that he was a Jewish teacher and miracle worker who was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of the Jews (see, for example, Acts 2:22–28; 3:11–26; 13:26–41). This is not a story invented by Mark; it was in circulation from the earliest period of Christian storytelling.

  That traditions of Jesus’s life and death were circulating in the early years of the Christian community independently of Mark can also be shown, somewhat ironically, from sources that are even later than Mark. We have already seen that writings unconnected to Mark, such as the letter to the Hebrews and the book of 1 John, stress both the earthly life of Jesus and the fact that he experienced a bloody death, which for these authors functioned as an atonement for sins. Whether or not Jesus’s death was an atonement is a theological question, but the historical fact remains that these authors believed that Jesus both lived and died. Thus they based their exhortations and theological reflections on these historical data and on the stories that conveyed them, all independent of Mark.

  Even in the Gospel of Mark there is evidence of traditions that long predate Mark and involve both Jesus’s life and death. This we have seen from the fact that even though Mark was a Greek-speaking Christian, a number of his stories show clear signs of being originally told in Aramaic. And so we have seen that some of the sayings found in Mark make sense only when translated back into Aramaic (for example, “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, therefore the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath”). Even more clearly, it is shown by the fact that some stories were passed down to Mark with their key Aramaic words left untranslated so that Mark, or more likely a predecessor, had to provide Greek speakers with a translation. Notably, this occurs in stories that involve both Jesus’s public ministry (Mark 5:41) and his Passion (Mark 15:34).

  There is no reason to think that Mark was the one who first imagined putting a ministry of Jesus together with an account of his death and that all other accounts of Jesus’s life and death are dependent on his. The writings of Paul, speeches of Acts, the Gospel of John, the sources M and L, the comments of Luke, and other pieces of evidence all suggest quite the contrary, that even though Mark is our earliest surviving Gospel, his was not the first such narrative to be propagated. Luke is no doubt right that there were “numerous” such accounts before him, and there were certainly others after him. They are not all dependent, in all their stories, on Mark.

  Conclusion

  WE HAVE CONSIDERED SUBSTANTIAL and powerful arguments showing that Jesus really existed (chapters 2–5 above). Many of the arguments made by the mythicists, by contrast, are irrelevant to the question (chapter 6); many of the others are relevant but insubstantial or, quite frankly, wrong (this chapter). There was a historical Jesus, a Jewish teacher of first-century Palestine who was crucified by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate.

  But knowing this is only part of the story. Historians also want to know more about Jesus, about what he stood for, what he said, what he did, what he experienced, and why he was executed. Once we move from the fact of Jesus’s existence to the question of who he really was, we move from the remarkably firm ground of virtual historical certainty to greater depths of uncertainty. Scholars debate these latter issues roundly. It will not be my purpose in the chapters that follow to solve the problems once and for all to the satisfaction of everyone who has ever thought about them. My goal instead is simply to explain why the majority of scholars who have dealt with these matters over the past century or so have concluded that the Jesus who existed is not the Jesus of the stained-glass window or the second-grade Sunday school class. The Jesus of popular imagination (there are actually a large number of Jesuses in various popular imaginations) is a “myth” in the sense that mythicists use the term: he is not the Jesus of history.

  But there was a Jesus of history, and there is good evidence to suggest what he was like. In very broad terms Albert Schweitzer, with whom I started this story, was probably right. Jesus appears to have been a Jewish apocalypticist who expected God to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the forces of evil and to bring in his good kingdom. And in Jesus’s view this would happen very soon, within his own generation. We will see in the following two chapters why this view of Jesus is persuasive.

  PART III

  Who Was the Historical Jesus?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Finding the Jesus of History

  EVERY SPRING SEMESTER AT Chapel Hill I teach my undergraduate course Introduction to the New Testament. My students are smart, interesting, and interested; the majority of them are Bible-believing Christians. We spend a good portion of the semester—over half of it—studying the early Christian Gospels and then the life of the historical Jesus. To most of the students almost everything in the course is a complete revelation. Even though most of them were raised in the church and attended Sunday school for a good portion of their lives, they have never heard anything like what they learn in this class. That is because rather than teaching about the Bible from a theological, confessional, or devotional perspective, I teach the class—as is only appropriate in a state-supported, secular, research university—from a historical point of view.

  Many of my students are surprised, dismayed, and sometimes even depressed (or, alternatively, liberated!) as they acquire historical knowledge about the New Testament. They hear, often for the first time, that we do not know who the authors of the Gospels actually were other than that they were almost certainly not the Aramaic-speaking lower-class peasants who made up the earthly disciples of Jesus. They learn that the different Gospels present very different portrayals of who Jesus was, what he stood for, and what he preached and that the New Testament tales of Jesus are full of discrepancies in matters both large and small. Many students are especially taken aback when they realize that even though the Gospels appear to be presenting historical accounts of Jesus’s life, much of the material in the Gospels in fact is not historically reliable.

  I do not discuss mythicists in the class since, as I’ve repeatedly indicated, the mythicist view does not have a foothold, or even a toehold, among modern critical scholars of the Bible. But knowing that Jesus really existed is only the beginning of the quest for the historical Jesus. Let’s say that he did exist. What then?
What was Jesus like? What do we know about his life? What did he stand for? What did he preach and teach? What did he do? What kinds of controversies was he involved in? How did he come to be crucified? These are the questions that my students are particularly keen to address once they realize that the Gospels do not preserve completely accurate eyewitness testimonies. And they are the issues that I will be addressing in this chapter and the one that follows.

  Certainties and Uncertainties in the Life of Jesus

  AS I HAVE REPEATEDLY emphasized, different scholars come to radically different conclusions about how to understand the life of the historical Jesus. This is almost entirely because of the nature of our sources. We have seen that these sources are more than ample to establish that Jesus was a Jewish teacher of first-century Roman Palestine who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. As we will see in a moment, they are also ample for knowing a few more things about his life, as virtually every researcher agrees. But they are not ample when it comes to wanting to know more details, in greater depth, about what he actually said, did, and experienced. Some of the sources are sparse to the point of being completely frustrating. How we wish that Josephus, Tacitus, and, say, the letter of James had much more to say! Others are so slanted in their presentation that they have to be handled like an inordinately hot potato. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for example, and the Proto-Gospel of James do not give us much to go on if we want to know about the life of the historical Jesus, even his early life. Paul gives us some good, useful information, but there is not much there if we want extensive descriptions about what Jesus said, did, and experienced. The canonical Gospels are full of information, but they are at odds with one another in one detail after the other, and their overall portrayals of Jesus differ from one another, sometimes radically. As a result, the information they provide needs to be handled with a deft critical touch.

  Even given these problems, there are a number of important facts about the life of Jesus that virtually all critical scholars agree on, for reasons that have in part been shown and that in other ways will become increasingly clear throughout the course of this chapter and the next. Everyone, except the mythicists, of course, agrees that Jesus was a Jew who came from northern Palestine (Nazareth) and lived as an adult in the 20s of the Common Era. He was at one point of his life a follower of John the Baptist and then became a preacher and teacher to the Jews in the rural areas of Galilee. He preached a message about the “kingdom of God” and did so by telling parables. He gathered disciples and developed a reputation for being able to heal the sick and cast out demons. At the very end of his life, probably around 30 CE, he made a trip to Jerusalem during a Passover feast and roused opposition among the local Jewish leaders, who arranged to have him put on trial before Pontius Pilate, who ordered him to be crucified for calling himself the king of the Jews.

  Nearly all critical scholars agree at least on those points about the historical Jesus. But there is obviously a lot more to say, and that is where scholarly disagreements loom large—disagreements not over whether Jesus existed but over what kind of Jewish teacher and preacher he was. Some scholars have said that he is principally to be thought of as a first-century Jewish rabbi whose main concern was teaching his followers how best to follow the Law of Moses. Others have said that he was a Jewish holy man, like those we learn about from Josephus, a kind of shaman reputed to do spectacular deeds because of his unusual powers. Others have maintained that he is best understood as a political revolutionary who was preaching armed rebellion against the Roman Empire. Still others have claimed that he was a social reformer who urged the Jews of his time to adopt an entirely different lifestyle, for example, by embracing new economic principles as a kind of proto-Marxist or different social relationships as a kind of proto-feminist. Yet others have suggested that he is best seen as a Jewish version of the ancient Greek Cynic philosophers, urging his followers to abandon their attachments to the material things of this world and to live lives of poverty, internally liberated from the demands of life. Others have suggested that he is best seen as a magician, not in the sense that he could do magic tricks but that he knew how to manipulate the laws of nature like other workers of magic in his day.

  Each of these views has had serious scholarly proponents.1 But none of them represents the views of the majority of scholars in modern times. Instead, as I have repeatedly noted, most scholars in both the United States and Europe over the past century have been convinced that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who anticipated that God was soon to intervene in history to overthrow the powers of evil now controlling this world in order to bring in a new order, a new kingdom here on earth, the kingdom of God. This was essentially the view that Albert Schweitzer popularized in his famous book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer was not the first to articulate this view, but he was the first to bring it to wide public attention.2 And even though there are no scholars who agree any longer with the details of how Schweitzer worked out his views, there is still broad agreement that the fundamental assumption behind them is correct, that Jesus really did anticipate a cataclysmic break in the course of history when God would judge the world and set it to rights, establishing a rule of peace and justice here on earth, sometime, Jesus thought, within his own generation.

  In my discussion here I will not go into great depth either to show why this view of Jesus is so widely seen to be correct or to explicate all the details of Jesus’s life that fit so well this way of understanding him. I have already discussed the matter at greater length in my earlier book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Here I will simply provide a brief overview to accomplish three major tasks: (a) I will show what we can know about ancient Jewish apocalyptic thinking in the days of Jesus since Jesus was not the only apocalypticist of his time (far from it), and we need to know about Jesus’s historical context if we expect to learn anything about his life; (b) I will discuss the various criteria that scholars use to determine which of the many traditions about Jesus are probably historically reliable (I have begun doing this already in the earlier chapters); and (c) I will provide an overview of what the rigorous application of these criteria yield, explaining the most important features of Jesus’s life that we can know about with relative certainty. The first two tasks will take up the rest of the present chapter; the third will be the topic of the next.

  Unity and Diversity in First-Century Judaism

  TO MAKE SENSE OF the apocalyptic perspective that appears to have been so prominent among Jews in the days of Jesus, we first need to situate ourselves more broadly in the first-century Jewish world. As we will see, there were wide-ranging differences among Jews around the time of Jesus. Even so, some very basic things can be said about Judaism as a whole.3

  To begin with, almost all Jews were monotheists. This does not seem like an extraordinary thing in our day, but in the ancient world it is one of the main features of the Jewish religion that made it so unlike the other religions in the Roman Empire. All other religions were polytheistic; pagans recognized many gods living in all sorts of places and serving all sorts of functions.4 There were the great gods of the empire (mainly the ones we know about from Greek and Roman myth); there were gods of the different cities, towns, and villages; gods of a field, a forest, a stream, a house, and a hearth. There were gods who controlled the weather, gods who controlled the crops, gods who controlled childbirth and health; there were gods of war, gods of love, gods of personal welfare. All these gods, and many others, deserved worship, and since there were so many of them none of these gods, at least in the period we are talking about, was thought to be jealous of another, in the sense that they alone were to be worshipped. People worshipped all the gods that they wanted and chose to. But not in Judaism. Jews had only one God, and this made Jews different from all other peoples.

  The God of the Jews was believed by the Jews (and them alone) to have created the world and ultimately to be sovereign over it. Jews did not insist th
at other people worship this God, but he was the only God for them. Among the first of the commandments given to the Jews by this God was “You shall have no other gods before me.” Jews by and large did not deny that other gods existed, but they were not to be worshipped by the Jews themselves.

  In no small measure this was because Jews believed that their God not only created all things but also chose them, the Jewish people, to be uniquely related to him. He was their God, and they alone were his people. God had shown that he chose them way back in the days of Moses when he miraculously brought the children of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt, destroyed their enemies, and then gave them his Law, the Law of Moses delivered on Mount Sinai (see Exodus 1–20 in the Hebrew Bible). Jews believed that in those days God had made a kind of covenant (or peace treaty) with them. The covenantal agreement, at its heart, was very simple. God had chosen Israel. He would be their God, and they would be his people. They showed they were his people by doing what he commanded in the Law he had provided.

  The Law was given to the Jewish people not as some kind of onerous burden that they had to bear—as so many Christians today seem to think—but for the opposite reason: to provide guidance to God’s people about how they should worship him and relate to one another in their communal lives together. The Law was the greatest gift God had given his people, instructions from on high by the Almighty himself about how to live. What could be greater? People today wonder about how to act, how to behave, what is right to do and what is wrong; people wonder about ultimate reality, the meaning of life, the purpose of existence. Ancient Jews believed that God had told them. It was in the Law that God had given.