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

indicates that he had an oral source for some of his stories (19:35); and even later the church father Papias indicates that he interviewed people who had been companions of Jesus’s disciples.

These oral traditions about Jesus did not arise twenty, thirty, or forty years after the traditional date of his death. On the contrary, as we have seen, they began in Aramaic-speaking Palestine, and we can give reasonably hard dates: at the very latest they started in the early 30s, a year or two after Jesus allegedly died. They almost certainly started even earlier.

But apart from this question of whether the Gospel stories are purely literary inventions (rather than written accounts of earlier oral traditions), with Thompson as with Price we have to ask whether the view he sets forth is all that relevant to the question of Jesus’s historical existence. It is one thing to say that a story has been shaped in light of an account in the Hebrew Bible. It is another thing to say that the event never happened at all or, even more, that the person about whom the story is told never existed. The fact that stories are molded in certain ways does not necessarily mean that there is no historical information to be found in the stories. That has to be decided on other grounds.

An analogy may yet again be useful. Today the historical novel is a widely accepted genre of literature. Over the past few years I have read Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay, based on events in France during the Holocaust; A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, about the French Revolution; and Romola, by George Eliot, about Savonarola in fifteenth-century Florence. These books are all shaped as novels. They are not meant to be disinterested historical accounts of the Holocaust, French history, or a famous Italian heretic. But to deny that they have some connection with historical events or the persons involved in these events is to miss a basic literary premise. No one would claim that the French Revolution never happened because it is discussed in a work of fiction created by Charles Dickens or that the Holocaust was made up because there is a novel about it. One instead needs to look for other evidence.

So too with the Gospels of the New Testament. They do indeed contain nonhistorical materials, many of which are based on traditions found in the Hebrew Bible. And to understand the gospel stories you do indeed need to understand the intertexts on which they are based. But that has little bearing on the question of whether or not Jesus actually existed. It has to do rather with how reliable some of the stories told about him are. To decide whether Jesus existed, you need to look at other evidence, as we have done.

Claim 4: The Nonhistorical “Jesus” Is Based on Stories About Pagan Divine Men

THIS FINAL ARGUMENT, UBIQUITOUS among the mythicists, is analogous to the preceding, but now rather than arguing that Jesus was made up based on persons and prophecies from the Jewish Bible, it is claimed that he was invented in light of what pagans were saying about the gods or about other “divine men,” superhuman creatures thought to have been half mortal, half immortal. As was the case with the earlier claim, I think there is a good deal to be said for the idea that Christians did indeed shape their stories about Jesus in light of other figures who were similar to him. But I also think that this is scarcely relevant to the question of whether or not he existed.

The Claim and Its Exposition

In my textbook on the New Testament, written for undergraduates, I begin my study of the historical Jesus in a way that students find completely surprising and even unsettling. I tell them that I want to describe to them an important figure who lived two thousand years ago.

Even before he was born, it was known that he would be someone special. A supernatural being informed his mother that the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. He was born miraculously, and he became an unusually precocious young man. As an adult he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging his listeners to live, not for the material things of this world, but for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples around him, who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired, in no small part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But at the end of his life he roused opposition, and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm. Later some of his followers wrote books about him.

But, I tell my students, I doubt if any of you has ever read any of these books. In fact, I say, I don’t think you even know this man’s name. He was Apollonius of Tyana, a pagan philosopher, a worshipper of the pagan gods. His story was written by a later follower named Philostratus, and we still have the book today, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana.21

The followers of Jesus, of course, argued that Apollonius was a fraud and a charlatan and that Jesus was the Son of God. The followers of Apollonius argued just the opposite, that it was Jesus who was the fraud. And these were not the only two divine men in antiquity. A number of divine men were thought to have roamed the earth, some of them in the recent past, people born to the union of a mortal (human) and an immortal (god), who could do spectacular deeds and who delivered amazing teachings, who