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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  I need to reemphasize that both of these latter criteria—multiple attestation and dissimilarity—are best used in a positive way to establish traditions that most probably can be accepted as reliable. They are not as useful when used negatively. That is, just because a tradition is found in one source and one source only does not necessarily mean that it is unreliable. But if there is no corroboration elsewhere, it is at least suspect. And if it does not pass the criterion of dissimilarity, it is doubly suspect. So too, if a tradition does not pass the criterion of dissimilarity, that does not necessarily mean it is inaccurate, but it should at least raise doubts. If it is not widely attested as well, it simply cannot be relied on. And as we have seen, in some instances there are solid historical reasons for arguing that a tradition that does not pass the criterion of dissimilarity should be seen not only as less probable but as almost certainly legendary—as in the case of the census that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem or Matthew’s account of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

  All of the traditions about Jesus, in short, need to be considered in detail on a case-by-case basis to determine if they pass the various criteria and to see if there are other historical grounds for either affirming or denying their historical probability. The likelihood of Jesus having brothers, for example, is increased by the fact that the apostle Paul knew one of them. Conversely, the likelihood of Jesus entering into Jerusalem straddling two donkeys and with the crowd shouting out that he was the messiah is decreased by the circumstance that had such an event really happened (unlikely as it is on its own terms), Jesus would no doubt have been arrested by the authorities on the spot instead of a week later.

  The Early History of Jesus

  I WOULD LIKE TO conclude this chapter by pointing out what we can say, with some good degree of probability, about Jesus’s life before he began his public ministry as an adult.

  To begin with the negatives: there is no way a historian can say that Jesus was probably born of a virgin. Quite apart from the question of implausibility (which I think is extraordinarily high), there is the fact that the two sources that mention it each explains the reason for the miraculous birth, and these explanations tip the authors’ hands.8 In Matthew Jesus is born of a virgin because it was predicted in the prophet Isaiah. Or at least that is how Matthew reads Isaiah. In the Hebrew text of Isaiah 7:14 the prophet indicated that a “young woman” would conceive and bear a son. Matthew, however, read the prophet in the Greek translation, which says that a parthenos would conceive. Parthenos is a Greek word that often, though not always, refers to a young woman who has never had sex. That is not the meaning of the Hebrew word originally used in the passage (alma), but Matthew probably did not know this. For him, Jesus had to be born of a virgin to fulfill prophecy, and so he was. At the very least, this makes the birth story of Matthew historically suspect.

  Luke has Jesus born of a virgin for a different reason. In his account Jesus really is the Son of God because the Spirit of God is the one who made Mary pregnant. As she herself learns from the angel Gabriel (none of this passes any of our criteria, of course), “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; for that reason, the one born of you will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Luke is invested in showing that Jesus is uniquely God’s son, and the virgin birth is the proof.

  In any event, historians have no means at their disposal to render a judgment about the virginity of Jesus’s mother other than the general probabilities of the case and the fact that the two stories that mention the tradition do so for different, but completely interested, reasons. The stories were almost certainly invented to heighten the importance of Jesus at his birth.

  We also have good reasons for doubting that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Not only is the tradition rooted in the belief that the messiah was to come from the city of David, but the two accounts of how it came about hopelessly contradict each other, as we have seen. What the sources do agree on (at least the ones that mention anything of relevance) is that Jesus came from Nazareth. This is multiply attested, and it passes the criterion of dissimilarity.

  Jesus then was born and raised Jewish. His parents lived in rural Galilee. Archaeological work on Nazareth indicates that it was a small hamlet with no evidence of any wealth whatsoever.9 And so Jesus was almost certainly raised in relative poverty. He had brothers and probably sisters (although these are mentioned in just one passage, Mark 6:3). His family was working class. Our earliest account indicates that Jesus was a tekton (Mark 6:3), a word normally translated “carpenter,” although it can refer to anyone who works with his hands, for example, a stonemason or blacksmith. It was a lower-class occupation. In that part of the world it meant a hand-to-mouth existence. If it does mean that Jesus worked with wood instead of stone or metal, he would have done so to make, not fine cabinetry, but roughly hewn stuff such as gates or yokes needed in the rural community. Other traditions indicate that it was his father who was the tekton (Matthew 13:55). Even if that is correct, it is completely plausible that the oldest son was apprenticed so that Jesus may have applied that craft himself.

  If he did, he would have lived a lower-class existence, with little promise for future advancement. After Jesus began his public ministry, we have reports that the people of his hometown had trouble understanding what happened to him, how he could suddenly seem so wise and insightful into the religious traditions of Israel (Mark 6; Luke 4). This suggests that he was not a wunderkind growing up but an altogether average person. It is widely debated among scholars whether he was literate. For reasons I suggested earlier, it seems most probable that he was not writing-literate, and in fact we have no early record of him writing anything or even knowing how to write. Whether or not he learned to read is an interesting and difficult question. The older view among scholars that Jewish boys were almost always taught how to read has been shown to be wrong. Most were not, and literacy rates in Roman Palestine were shockingly low. But if, as seems probable, Jesus was widely seen among his followers as an expert interpreter of the Torah, this may suggest that he could read and study the texts. Possibly a local teacher taught him on the side. At the end of the day, it is very hard to know.

  In any event, these are not the issues that most people interested in the historical Jesus really care about. Of much greater interest, generally, are questions about Jesus’s life as an adult. Who was he, really? What did he stand for? What can we say about his public ministry? What did he do? What did he say? And why was he executed by the Romans? I will address these questions in the next chapter, as I explain in greater detail why Jesus is best understood to have been an apocalyptic preacher who anticipated that the end of the age was coming within his own generation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet

  MOST OF THE UNDERGRADUATE students who take my classes on the New Testament or the historical Jesus seem to learn a lot and to enjoy the experience. Or so they say on their end-of-the-year course evaluations. I regularly do get one complaint from students, however: that I do not present “the other side” of the story. Students learn in class that the early Gospel sources contain historically reliable traditions but also legends about Jesus (what mythicists would call “myths”); they learn that each of the Gospels has a different point of view and presents Jesus in a distinctive way; they hear all about early Jewish apocalypticism; and they see the evidence that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptical Jewish preacher. But students wish that I would also present “the other side.”

  I sympathize with the concern, but I also recognize why it is a problem. The semester lasts only fifteen weeks. How can we cover everything that various scholars have said about this, that, and the other thing? To my students’ surprise and dismay, I emphasize in class that there is no such thing as “the” other side for any of the topics we discuss. There are lots of other sides. That’s the nature of scholarship.

  With respect to Jesus being an apocalyp
ticist, what would “the” other side be? I could present the evidence that other scholars offer for seeing Jesus as something else. But which other side would I choose: that Jesus was a political revolutionary? A proto-Marxist? A proto-feminist? A countercultural hero? A Jewish holy man? A Jewish Cynic philosopher? A married man with children? The students who want to hear “the” other side, of course, mean that they want me to spend at least half the class presenting their own views about Jesus rather than the scholarly consensus. In almost all instances, here in the South, it means they want me to present a conservative evangelical view. But even within my classes, lots of other views are represented, as I have students who are Jewish, Muslim, Roman Catholic, Mormon, atheist, and so on.

  For my class I do have the students read scholars who represent other views. But instead of spending class time discussing Jesus from all these other sides, I present the view that appears to be the most widely held by critical scholars in the field, the one first popularized, as we have seen, by Albert Schweitzer: that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who predicted that the end of this evil age is soon to come and that within his generation God would send a cosmic judge of the earth, the Son of Man, to destroy the forces of evil and everyone who has sided with them and to bring in his good kingdom here on earth.

  Evidence for Jesus as an Apocalypticist

  IT IS, OF COURSE, contextually credible that Jesus was an apocalypticist, as we have evidence that apocalyptic thinking was widespread in his day—among Pharisees,1 the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writers of the various Jewish apocalypses of the time, and prophetic leaders such as John the Baptist, about whom I will soon say a few words. We will also see clear instances in which apocalyptic teachings of Jesus pass the criterion of dissimilarity. At the outset, however, I want to stress that the apocalyptic proclamation of Jesus is found widely throughout our earliest sources.2 In other words, it is multiply attested, all over the map, precisely in the sources that we would normally give the greatest weight to, those that are our oldest. And so, for example, we find the following apocalyptic teachings on Jesus’s lips in our four earliest accounts of his life: Mark, Q, M, and L.

  Early Independent Sources

  From Mark

  Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of that one will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels…. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come in power. (Mark 8:38–9:1)

  And in those days, after that affliction, the sun will grow dark and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the sky will be shaken; and then they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send forth his angels and he will gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of earth to the end of heaven…. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place. (Mark 13:24–27, 30)

  From Q

  For just as the flashing lightning lights up the earth from one part of the sky to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day…. And just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating, drinking, marrying, and giving away in marriage, until the day that Noah went into the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all. So too will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:24; 26–27, 30; cf. Matthew 24:27, 37–39)

  And you, be prepared, because you do not know the hour when the Son of Man is coming. (Luke 12:39; Matthew 24:44)

  From M

  Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the culmination of the age. The Son of Man will send forth his angels, and they will gather from his kingdom every cause of sin and all who do evil, and they will cast them into the furnace of fire. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun, in the kingdom of their father. (Matthew 13:40–43)

  From L

  But take care for yourselves so that your hearts are not overcome with wild living and drunkenness and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you unexpectedly, like a sprung trap. For it will come to all those sitting on the face of the earth. Be alert at all times, praying to have strength to flee from all these things that are about to take place and to stand in the presence of the Son of Man. (Luke 21:34–36)

  I could quote many other verses, but here I want to make a very simple point. The oldest attainable sources contain clear apocalyptic teachings of Jesus, all of them independent of one another. What is equally striking, however, is a subsidiary issue. The apocalyptic character of Jesus’s proclamation comes to be muted with the passing of time. After the writing of these earlier sources, we find less and less apocalyptic material. By the time we get to our last canonical Gospel, John, we have almost no apocalyptic teachings of Jesus at all. Here Jesus preaches about something else (chiefly his own identity, as the one who has come from the Father to bring eternal life). And when we get to still later Gospels, from outside the New Testament, we actually find instances—such as in the Gospel of Thomas—where Jesus argues against an apocalyptic view (Gospel of Thomas 3, 113).

  Why would Jesus be portrayed as an apocalypticist in our earliest sources but as nonapocalyptic or even antiapocalyptic in our later sources? Evidently Jesus came to be deapocalypticized with the passing of time. And it is not hard to understand why. In our earliest sources Jesus is said to have proclaimed that the end of the age would come suddenly, within his own generation, before the disciples themselves died. But over the course of time, the disciples did die and Jesus’s own generation came and went. And there was no cataclysmic break in history, no arrival of the Son of Man, no resurrection of the dead. What were later Christians to do with the fact that Jesus predicted that “all these things” would take place in his hearers’ lifetimes when in fact the predictions did not come true? They took the obvious next step and changed the tenor and content of Jesus’s preaching so that he no longer predicted an imminent end of the age. Over time, Jesus became less and less an apocalyptic preacher. This move to deapocalypticize Jesus was enormously successful. Down through the Middle Ages and on to today, the vast majority of people who have considered Jesus have not thought of him as an apocalyptic preacher. That is because the apocalyptic message that he delivered came to be toned down and eventually altered. But it is still there for all to see in our earliest surviving sources, multiply and independently attested.

  There is an even more compelling general reason to think that the historical Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist. It is that we know how he began his public ministry, and we know what happened in its wake after he died. The relatively certain beginning and the relatively certain ending are keys to understanding what happened in the middle—the proclamation of Jesus itself.

  The Beginning and the End as Keys to the Middle

  There is little doubt how Jesus began his public ministry. He was baptized by John the Baptist. That is significant for understanding Jesus as an apocalypticist.

  That Jesus associated with John the Baptist is multiply attested in a number of our early sources. It is found in both Mark and John, independently of one another; there are also traditions of Jesus’s early association with John in Q and a distinctive story from M. Why would all these sources independently link Jesus to John? Probably because there was in fact a link.

  Moreover, the baptism of Jesus appears to pass the criterion of dissimilarity. The early Christians who told stories about Jesus believed that a person who was baptized was spiritually inferior to the person who was doing the baptizing, a view most Christians still hold today. And so who would make up a story about Jesus being baptized by someone else? That story would suggest that John was Jesus’s superior. Moreover, why was John baptizing? According to our early traditions, it was after people repented, for “the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). Did
Jesus have sins that needed to be forgiven? Who would make up such a tale? The reason we have stories in which Jesus was baptized by John is that this is a historically reliable datum. He really was baptized by John, as attested in multiple independent sources.

  That is a crucial finding. What did John stand for, and why would Jesus associate with him as opposed to someone else—a Pharisee, for example, or the Essenes? John the Baptist is known to have preached an apocalyptic message of coming destruction and salvation. Mark portrays him as a prophet in the wilderness, proclaiming the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah that God would again bring his people from the wilderness into the Promised Land (Mark 1:2–8). The Q source gives further information, for here John preaches a clear message of apocalyptic judgment to the crowds that come out to see him: “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance…. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:7–9).

  This is an apocalyptic message. The chopping down of trees is an image of coming judgment, people who did not live as God desired would be “thrown into the fire.” And when will that day of judgment come? It is right around the corner. The ax is already set at the root of the tree. The chopping will commence any moment now.