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

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