Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Bart Ehrman (books to read in your 20s txt) 📖

the life of Jesus this account originally contained. The fragment that survives begins in the middle of a sentence during the scene in which Pilate washes his hands of Jesus’s blood (a scene found as well in the Gospel of Matthew, but in Peter it is narrated differently and probably comes from some different source). Some scholars think that the Gospel recounted only Jesus’s Passion, but others, somewhat more convincingly, maintain that in fact it was a complete Gospel with a narrative of Jesus’s ministry as well.6 In either event, since it is in part or in whole different from the other Gospels, in these passages—and probably in its entirety, though this judgment does not affect my argument—this would be a sixth independent Gospel account of Jesus’s life and death.

Another independent account occurs in the highly fragmentary text called Papyrus Egerton 2.7 Here again it is difficult to know how extensive the full Gospel contained in these partial remains originally was; what survives are four episodes from the life of Jesus, one of which has no parallel in the Gospels of the New Testament or in any other known Gospel.8 Here then, at least in the nonparalleled story, but probably in all four, is a seventh independent account.

There are, of course, lots of other Gospels, some forty or so, down to the early Middle Ages, that are not found in the New Testament. These include narratives of Jesus as a newborn and as a young child, where he uses his miraculous powers sometimes for mischief and sometimes for good; narratives of his public ministry; narratives of his death and resurrection. Almost all of these accounts, of course, are highly legendary, and with the passing of time they become less and less valuable as independent, historical sources. But if we restrict ourselves here, as we did earlier, to a hundred years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death, we have at least seven independent accounts, some of them quite extensive. (It is important to recall: even if some of these sources are dependent on one another in some passages—for example, Matthew and Luke on Mark—they are completely independent in others, and to that extent they are independent witnesses.) And so it is quite wrong to argue that Mark is our only independent witness to Jesus as a historical person. The other six accounts are either completely or partially independent as well. For a historian these provide a wealth of materials to work with, quite unusual for accounts of anyone, literally anyone, from the ancient world.

And that is not nearly all. It may be easy to discount these seven witnesses on the grounds that they are not close to the time of the events they narrate (the earliest is four decades removed) and that they are heavily biased toward their subject matter. I will deal with the matter of bias soon. For now it is important to begin moving behind these independent accounts to see from where they found their information about Jesus.

Written Sources for the Surviving Witnesses

WHAT IS SOMETIMES UNDERAPPRECIATED by mythicists who want to discount the value of the Gospels for establishing the historical existence of Jesus is that our surviving accounts, which began to be written some forty years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death, were based on earlier written sources that no longer survive. But they obviously did exist at one time, and they just as obviously had to predate the Gospels that we now have. The opening words of the Gospel of Luke bear repeating: “Whereas many have attempted to compile a narrative of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them over to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all these things closely from the beginning, to write for you an orderly account” (1:1–3).

As we will see more fully in a later context, one needs to approach everything that the Gospel writers say gingerly, with a critical eye. But there is no reason to suspect that Luke is lying here. He knew of “many” earlier authors who had compiled narratives about the subject matter that he himself is about to narrate, the life of Jesus. Since the mid-nineteenth century there has been a wide consensus among scholars concerning what these earlier sources were and what to call them. Again, I do not mean to say that every scholar agrees on every detail. On the contrary, scholars vigorously debate many specific issues. But in broad outline, which is what matters for my purposes here, there is considerable agreement, based on very thorough investigation of all the relevant issues by scholars who have devoted their entire lives to studying the question.

Virtually everyone agrees that Luke had as one of his predecessors the Gospel of Mark. This in itself is a matter of interest since Luke seems to imply, by what he says about the “many” who “attempted to compile a narrative” before him, that he did not consider these earlier attempts successful, that in fact they needed some correcting. That is why he himself (in contrast to them?) wants to provide “an orderly account.” If that is Luke’s implication, we can infer that he did not have a very high view of Mark’s Gospel or at least that he thought it was inadequate for his purposes. And so he produced his own. But he certainly liked a good deal of Mark, as he copied many of Mark’s stories in constructing his own Gospel, sometimes verbatim. But he had other sources as well.

One of them I have already mentioned, the no-longer-surviving Gospel account that scholars have called Q.9 The reason for thinking that this source was written prior to the synoptic Gospels, and that it was available to them, has to do with the literary relationship of Matthew, Mark, and Luke to one another. There is obviously some kind of relationship since they tell many of the same stories, often in the same