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

the leaders of Judah hundreds of miles away and forced them to live in Babylon. Isaiah is lamenting the exile but indicating that the suffering will bring atonement for the sins of the people, and God will restore their fortunes. He is not talking about the future messiah.

An even more important point is this: there were no Jews prior to Christianity who thought Isaiah 53 (or any of the other “suffering” passages) referred to the future messiah. We do not have a single Jewish text prior to the time of Jesus that interprets the passage messianically. So why do Christians traditionally interpret it this way? For the same reason they think that the messiah had to suffer. In their view Jesus is the messiah. And Jesus suffered. Therefore the messiah had to suffer. And this must not have come as a surprise to God; it must have all been planned. And so Christians found passages in the Hebrew Bible that talked about someone suffering and said that it referred to the suffering of the future messiah, Jesus. Jews roundly and loudly disagreed with these interpretations. And so the arguments began.

Before he converted, Paul was on the side of the non-Christian Jews. The idea of a suffering messiah ran so counter to scripture and the righteous expectations of God’s people that it was completely unthinkable, even blasphemous. Paul, though, had a change of mind and later decided that this one who stood under God’s curse—since anyone “who hangs on a tree” is cursed—was in fact the Christ. He was cursed by God not for anything he himself had done but for what others had done. He bore the curse that others deserved and so saved them from the wrath of God. Once Paul was convinced of this, he turned from being a persecutor of the Christians to being their most famous advocate, missionary, and theologian. It was a conversion for the ages.

A Mythicist Response

But still, aren’t there any passages that refer to a suffering messiah? Some mythicists realize that this is a problem because if someone wanted to make up a messiah—as they claim Christians made up Jesus—they would never have made one up who suffered since that is what precisely no one expected. One mythicist who addresses the problem is Richard Carrier, whom I mentioned in an earlier context as one of the two mythicists in the world (that I know of) with a graduate degree in a relevant subject, in his case, a Ph.D. in classics from Columbia. He is one smart fellow. But I’m afraid he falls down on this one. Even smart people make mistakes.

In his recent book, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed, Carrier states that “this idea of a suffering, executed god, would resonate especially with those Jews and their sympathizers who expected a humiliated messiah.”13 This statement is problematic on all counts. For one thing, the earliest Christians from, say, the early 30s CE—as we will see later—did not talk about or think of Jesus as God. Second, we know of no Jews who thought, even in their wildest dreams, that God could be executed. And third, of particular relevance to my argument here, there were none who expected a humiliated messiah.

Carrier tries to establish his point about the humiliated messiah first by quoting Isaiah 53. But as I’ve shown, Isaiah is not speaking about the future messiah, and he was never interpreted by any Jews prior to the first century as referring to the messiah.

Carrier’s argument becomes more interesting when he appeals to a passage in chapter 9 of the book of Daniel. This is one of those postdated prophecies so common to the final six chapters of Daniel. By postdated prophecies I mean this: the book of Daniel claims to be written by a Hebrew man, Daniel, in the Babylonian exile, around 550 BCE. In actual fact, as critical scholars have long known (Carrier agrees with this), it was written closer to 160 BCE.14 When the character Daniel in the book “predicts” what is going to happen, the real author, pretending to be Daniel, simply indicates what already did happen. And so it sounds as if the sixth-century prophet knows the future because what he predicted in fact came to pass.

Daniel 9 is a complicated passage that “predicts” in precise detail what will happen to the people of Jerusalem over the course of “seventy weeks” that have been “decreed for your people and your holy city; to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity.” The weeks are interpreted within the text itself to mean seventy “weeks of years”—that is, one week represents seven years. According to verse 25 there will be seven such weeks of years separating the order to rebuild destroyed Jerusalem and the appearance of “an anointed prince.” Verse 26 then indicates that sixty-two weeks of years later an “anointed one” shall be “cut off and shall have nothing.” Carrier argues strenuously that this shows that the author of Daniel expected that the messiah (the “anointed one”) had to be killed (“cut off”).

It is an interesting interpretation but highly idiosyncratic. You won’t find it in commentaries on Daniel written by critical Hebrew Bible scholars (those who are not fundamentalists or conservative evangelicals), and for some good reasons. To begin with, the anointed prince of verse 26 is obviously not the same as the anointed one mentioned in verse 25. Are they both princes, that is, traditional messianic figures? It is important to recall that the term anointed one was sometimes used as a technical term to refer to the future ruler of Israel. But it was not always used that way. Sometimes it simply referred to a king (Solomon) or a high priest or anyone who went through an anointing ceremony. That is, it was not only a technical term but also a common term. It is striking in this passage that the figure in verse