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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The Imminence of the End

  There should be little doubt that Jesus taught that the end of the age, with the appearance of the Son of Man, would occur shortly, within his own generation. As we have seen, in our earliest Gospels he explicitly declares that the kingdom will arrive before some of his disciples “taste death” (Mark 9:1). Elsewhere he indicates that the great cataclysmic events of the end will happen before “this generation” passes away (Mark 13:30). That is why, throughout our early traditions—Mark, Q, M, L—Jesus urges his hearers constantly to “watch” and “be ready.” These exhortations suggest that no one could know exactly when the end would come but that it would be very soon and so people should be on their guard. And so, from our earliest Gospel:

  Be awake, keep alert. For you don’t know when that time is. It is like a man on a journey, who leaves his house and gives his slaves authority over their own work, and orders the doorkeeper to watch. Watch therefore—for you don’t know when the master of the house is coming, whether in the evening, at midnight, at the crack of dawn, or in the morning—lest when he comes suddenly he finds you sleeping. But what I say to you I say to everyone: Watch! (Mark 13:33–37)

  Similar teachings can be found in Matthew 24:43–44, 48–50; 25:13; Luke 12:36, 39–40, 45–56. The end was coming soon, and people needed to be prepared.

  At the same time, Jesus insisted that in a small way, the kingdom of God was already present, in the here and now. This does not contradict the view that it would come with the arrival of the Son of Man. It is instead an extension of Jesus’s teaching about the future kingdom. Those who followed Jesus and did what he said were already experiencing some of what life would be like in the kingdom. In the kingdom there would be no more war, and so Jesus’s followers were to be peacemakers now. In the kingdom there would be no more hatred, and so his followers were to love everyone now. In the kingdom there would be no injustice or oppression, so his followers were to fight for the rights of the oppressed now. In the kingdom there would be no hunger, thirst, or poverty, and so his followers were to minister to the poor and homeless now. In the kingdom there would be no illness, and so Jesus’s followers were to tend to the sick now.

  When his followers did what Jesus commanded them to do, based on his reading of the meaning of the Torah, they already began to implement the ideals of the kingdom in the present. That is why the kingdom, for Jesus, was like a tiny mustard seed. Even though it was the smallest of all seeds, said Jesus, when planted it would grow into an enormous bush (Mark 4:30–32). The kingdom was like that: a small inauspicious beginning in the ministry of Jesus and the lives of his followers that would mushroom fantastically when the Son of Man arrived, bringing in the kingdom for real at the end of the age.

  The Apocalyptic Activities of Jesus

  NOW THAT WE HAVE seen a brief overview of what Jesus proclaimed during his public ministry, what can we say about his activities? What did he do?

  Jesus’s Reputation as a Miracle Worker

  Any attempt to establish beyond reasonable doubt what Jesus did during his ministry is inevitably frustrated by the nature of the accounts that have come down to us. On page after page of the Gospels we are confronted with reports of the miraculous, as Jesus defies nature, heals the sick, casts out demons, and raises the dead. What is the historian to make of all these miracles?

  The short answer is that the historian cannot do anything with them. I have spelled out the reasons at greater length in another context and do not need to belabor the point here.3 Suffice it to say that if historians want to know what Jesus probably did, the miracles will not make the list since by their very nature—and definition—they are the most improbable of all occurrences. Some would say, of course, that they are literally impossible; otherwise we would not think of them as miracles. I do not need to enter into that question here but can simply say that even though the majority of Jesus’s activities in the Gospels involve the miraculous, these stories do not provide much grist for the historians’ mill.

  But in an indirect way, they do provide some limited grist. Even though historians—when speaking as historians (as opposed, for example, to historians speaking as believers)—cannot say that Jesus really did, for example, heal the sick and cast out demons, they can say that he had the reputation of having done so. There is nothing improbable about someone having a reputation as a miracle worker. There are plenty of people in our own day with just that reputation, deserved or not. But the important point for this part of our discussion is that Jesus was widely thought to have been a healer and an exorcist, and that reputation makes particular sense in an apocalyptic setting.

  Like other apocalypticists, Jesus believed that there were forces of evil in this world that were creating pain and misery. This was seen particularly in the lives of people who were crippled, terminally ill, or possessed by demons. (I’m not saying they were really possessed by demons; I’m saying that this is how they were perceived at the time.) Jesus set himself and his message against the forces of evil in this world, as he proclaimed there was an age coming in which there would be no more pain, misery, or suffering—and no more Devil and demons to ruin people’s lives. Moreover, he claimed that those who followed him were already receiving a foretaste of what that kingdom would be like. And so it is no surprise that he was associated with the practices of healing and exorcism, precisely in that apocalyptic context. He was already bringing the kingdom to earth in his public ministry. The healing and exorcism stories, then, are to be understood apocalyptically, not necessarily as things that happened, but as a direct reflection of Jesus’s own proclamation of the coming kingdom of God.

  The Associates of Jesus

  Jesus’s “good” reputation derived from the traditions that he could do miracles for the benefit of those in need. But his “bad” reputation proceeded from the people with whom he was known to associate—the poor, the outcast, the sinners. Other religious leaders apparently mocked him for preferring the company of lowlifes to that of the pious and upright. And so we find in a number of early traditions the claim that Jesus associated with “tax collectors and sinners” (Mark 2:15–16; Q [Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:29]; M [Matthew 21:31–32]; L [Luke 15:1]). It seems unlikely that Jesus’s later followers would make up the claim that his friends were chiefly outcasts and prostitutes, so this may indeed have been his reputation.

  The term tax collectors refers to employees of the large tax-collecting corporations that raised tribute for Rome from the hard-pressed workers of Galilee. As a group, the tax collectors were despised as collaborators with the Romans and as greedy, moneygrubbing, and dishonest—in part because their own salaries depended on raising more funds than were handed over to the authorities. The term sinners refers to any of the common people who simply did not make a great effort to keep strictly the laws of the Jews. Unlike other religious leaders—say, from among the Pharisees, Sadducees, or Essenes—Jesus associated with such people.

  And it is not hard to understand why, given his apocalyptic message. Jesus proclaimed that in the coming kingdom all social roles would be reversed, that the high and mighty would be taken out of power and the lowly and oppressed would be given places of prominence. Moreover, he declared that the kingdom was already making its presence known in the here and now. And so he associated with the lowlifes to show that it was they who would inherit the kingdom. The kingdom would come not to the stellar exemplars of Jewish piety but to the outcasts who were looked down upon by those in power. It is no wonder that Jesus was not popular with other religious leaders of his day.

  One group that Jesus associated with in particular was the “twelve,” an inner circle of disciples who were evidently handpicked by Jesus. The existence of this group of twelve is extremely well attested in our early sources. It is striking that all three synoptic Gospels speak of the twelve and list their names, but the names differ from one list to the next (Mark 3:14–19; Matthew 10:1–4; Luke 6:12–16). This must show that everyone knew there were t
welve in the group, but not everyone knew who the twelve were. The group is also explicitly mentioned in Paul (1 Corinthians 15:5), John (6:67; 20:24), and Acts (6:2).

  There is one saying of Jesus involving the twelve that almost certainly passes the criterion of dissimilarity. This is the Q saying I mentioned earlier, given in Matthew as follows:

  “Truly I say to you, that you who have followed me, in the new world, when the Son of Man is sitting on the throne of his glory, you will be seated—even you—on twelve thrones ruling the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28).

  That this saying probably goes back to Jesus himself is suggested by the fact that it is delivered to all twelve disciples, including, of course, Judas Iscariot. No one living after Jesus’s death, who knew that he had been betrayed by one of his own (as reported in all our early sources), would have made up a saying in which the betrayer would be one of the rulers of the future kingdom. The saying, then, was generated before the events leading up to Jesus’s death. That is to say, it appears to be something that Jesus actually said.

  One reason this matters is that the saying reveals the apocalyptic significance of Jesus’s decision to call twelve, and specifically twelve, disciples. Why not nine or fourteen? For Jesus the number twelve mattered, probably because in ancient Israel the people of God were formed into twelve tribes. And so too, for him, in the future kingdom there would be twelve tribes, headed not by the patriarchs of old but by the twelve men he had chosen to be his disciples. When Jesus chose an inner group of twelve it was an apocalyptic statement to the world that those who followed him would be the ones who would enter into the future kingdom and that those closest to him would be the rulers of the kingdom.

  And who would rule over them? Jesus himself was their master now. Who would be the ruler of that future kingdom, where the twelve sat on twelve thrones ruling the twelve tribes? Since he “ruled” them now, he would almost certainly still rule them then. What this means is that Jesus probably taught his closest followers that he would be the king of the coming kingdom of God. In other words, at least to those of his inner circle, Jesus appears to have proclaimed that he really was the future messiah, not in the sense that he would raise an army to drive out the Romans, but in the sense that when the Son of Man brought the kingdom to earth, he, Jesus, would be anointed its ruler. No wonder his disciples considered him the messiah. He appears to have told them that himself.

  The Opponents of Jesus

  It is thoroughly attested throughout our early traditions that Jesus was in constant conflict with other Jewish teachers of his day. And so, during his public ministry in Galilee, he is shown as raising the ire of Pharisees, who roundly attacked him for not keeping the Jewish Law to their satisfaction. These confrontations should not be read as meaning that Jesus had abandoned Judaism. Far from it. The controversies involved instead the proper interpretation of Judaism. Jesus stood over against the Pharisees and their oral law, as did many other Jews of the time. In Jesus’s view, a strict observation of Pharisaic law was not what God wanted. He wanted his people to keep the essence of the law in the commandment to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

  We do not have any indication that Jesus entered into direct conflict with the Essenes, although it should be clear that his interpretation of the apocalyptic realities that were bearing down on the world was very different from theirs. Whereas they believed in separating themselves from the rest of society so as to maintain their personal and communal purity, Jesus believed in spending time with the impure, the “tax collectors and sinners,” who would be the ones to be brought into the kingdom. Jesus’s views would have been anathema to the Qumran community.

  One other area of opposition from Jesus’s public ministry involves not a Jewish group but a widespread social entity: the family. As odd as this may seem today to modern proponents of “family values,” who often cite Jesus as one who was simpatico with their views, Jesus appears to have opposed the idea of the family and to have been in conflict with members of his own family. This opposition to family, we will see, is rooted in Jesus’s apocalyptic proclamation.

  Jesus’s opposition to the family unit is made clear in his requirement that his followers leave home for the sake of the coming kingdom. Doing so would earn them a reward:

  Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left a house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and the sake of the good news, who will not receive them all back a hundred fold in this present time—houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and lands, along with persecutions—and in the age that is coming, life that never ends. But many who are first will be last and the last will be first. (Mark 10:29–31)

  His followers are to be concerned for the coming kingdom, not for their families. This is a hard saying in Jesus’s historical context. The men who became his followers by leaving their homes, in most or all instances, would have been the principal breadwinners of their households. By leaving their families high and dry, they almost certainly created enormous hardship, possibly even starvation. But it was worth it, in Jesus’s view. The kingdom demanded it. No family tie was more important than the kingdom; siblings, spouses, and children were of no importance in comparison.

  That is why Jesus is reported as saying (this comes from Q): “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters and even his own life, he is not able to be my disciple” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 10:37).4 A person must “hate” his or her family? The same word is used, strikingly, in the saying independently preserved in the Gospel of Thomas: “The one who does not hate his father and mother will not be worthy to be my disciple” (Gospel of Thomas 55). If we understand hate here to mean something like “despise in comparison to” or “have nothing to do with,” then the saying makes sense.

  And it helps explain Jesus’s own reaction to his own family. For there are clear signs not only that Jesus’s family rejected his message during his public ministry but that he in turn spurned them publicly (independently attested in Mark 3:31–34 and Gospel of Thomas 99). Jesus clearly saw the familial rifts that would be created when someone became committed to his message of the coming kingdom:

  You think that I have come to bring peace on earth; not peace, I tell you, but division. For from now on there will be five people in one house, divided among themselves: three against two and two against three; a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father, a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother; a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. (Luke 12:51–53; Matthew 10:34–46; independently attested in Gospel of Thomas 16)

  And family tensions would be heightened immediately before the end of the age, when “a brother will betray his brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise up against their parents and kill them” (Mark 13:12).

  These antifamily traditions are too widely attested in our sources to be ignored (they are found in Mark, Q, and Thomas, for example), and they show that Jesus did not support what we today might think of as family values. But why not? Evidently because, as I have already emphasized, he was not teaching about the good society and about how to maintain it. The end was coming soon, and the present social order was being called radically into question. What mattered was not ultimately the strong family ties and social institutions of this world. What mattered was the new thing that was coming, the future kingdom. It was impossible to promote this teaching while trying to retain the present social structure. That would be like trying to put new wine into old wineskins or trying to sew a new piece of cloth to an old garment. As any wine master or seamstress can tell you, it just won’t work. The wineskins will burst and the garment will tear. New wine and new cloth require new wineskins and new garments. The old is passing away, and the new is almost here (Mark 2:18–22; Gospel of Thomas 47).

  Jesus and the Temple

/>   In addition to being opposed to other Jewish leaders and to the institution of the family, Jesus is portrayed in our early traditions as being in severe opposition to one of the central institutions of Jewish religious life, the Temple in Jerusalem. Throughout our Gospel traditions we find multiple, independent declarations on the lips of Jesus that the Temple will be destroyed in a divine act of judgment. As we have seen, the Temple was the locus of all religious practice and authority for most Jews in Jesus’s day. It was there, and there alone, that the sacrifices could be made to God as commanded in the Torah. And since the Temple service was such an enormous affair, the Temple stood at the center of all political, economic, and social life in Jerusalem, the capital city of Judea.

  At different periods of ancient history, however, various Jewish prophets believed that the Temple had become corrupted by those who were in charge of it. Some six centuries before Jesus, for example, this was the view of the prophet Jeremiah, whose many rants against the Temple and its leaders led to his abuse and mistreatment by the local authorities (see especially Jeremiah 7). It was also the view of the Essenes living just a few years before Jesus, who separated themselves from the religious life of Jews in Jerusalem, in no small measure because they believed the Temple cult had become defiled and impure. And it was the view of other apocalyptic prophets from the days after Jesus, including one discussed by the Jewish historian Josephus. This was a man who was also called, remarkably enough, Jesus, although this one was the son of an otherwise unknown Ananias. Some thirty years after Jesus’s death, this other Jesus proclaimed that God would soon destroy the city of Jerusalem and the Temple. The Jewish leaders arrested him and placed him on trial as a troublemaker. They had him scourged and released, but he continued making his woeful declarations against the Temple until he was accidentally killed by a catapulted stone during the siege of Jerusalem in the Jewish uprising against Rome in 66–70 CE.