Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  While I was explaining this to my class, with Neely sitting in the back row of the auditorium, something came to my mind from the days when I was an evangelical Christian. At Moody Bible Institute I had taken a course on Christian apologetics, the intellectual defense (Greek apologia) of the faith. In that course we had studied the famous English apologist and scholar C. S. Lewis, in particular his arguments that Jesus must have been divine. In Lewis’s formulation, since Jesus had called himself God, there were only three logical possibilities: he was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. Lewis’s thinking was that if Jesus was wrong in his claim—if he was not God—either he knew it or he did not know it. If he knew that he was not God but claimed he was, then he was a liar. If he was not God but genuinely thought he was, then he was crazy, a lunatic. The only other choice would be that he was right in what he claimed, in which case he really was the Lord.

  Lewis goes on to argue that there are all sorts of reasons for thinking that Jesus was neither a liar nor a lunatic. The inevitable conclusion was that he must have been who he claimed to be. Jesus was the Lord God.

  Back at Moody I had found this line of argumentation completely convincing, and for years I had used it myself in order to convince others of Jesus’ divinity. But that was many years ago, and my thinking had changed drastically. (All of this—Moody Bible Institute, Christian apologetics, C. S. Lewis, Jesus’ identity, my change of thought—all of it flashed through my mind in a split second while I was giving my lecture on John at Chapel Hill.) I had come to see that the very premise of Lewis’s argument was flawed. The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God. I had long ago come to believe that he had not. Only in the latest of our Gospels, John, a Gospel that shows considerably more theological sophistication than the others, does Jesus indicate that he is divine. I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself. And surely if Jesus had really spent his days in Galilee and then Jerusalem calling himself God, all of our sources would be eager to report it. To put it differently, if Jesus claimed he was divine, it seemed very strange indeed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all failed to say anything about it. Did they just forget to mention that part?

  I had come to realize that Jesus’ divinity was part of John’s theology, not a part of Jesus’ own teaching.

  As this flashed through my head in my lecture, I decided on the spot to lay it all out for my students (it’s not part of my normal lecture on John), especially since I knew that a large number of people in the class were involved with Christian groups on campus and had heard this argument about Jesus necessarily being either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. I thought it might be useful for them to hear what historical scholars, as opposed to Christian apologists, might say about the matter. And so I explained, with Neely listening, the standard apologetic line from C. S. Lewis and then pointed out the historical problem: Jesus probably never called himself God. And to make my point, I suggested that in fact there were not three options but four: liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend. Of course I chose the fourth word to maintain the alliteration. What I meant was not that Jesus himself was a legend. Of course not! I certainly believe that he existed and that we can say some things about him. What I meant was that the idea that he called himself God was a legend, which I believe it is. This means that he doesn’t have to be either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. He could be a first-century Palestinian Jew who had a message to proclaim other than his own divinity.

  Neely reported this part of my lecture on the very first page of his article in the Washington Post, and the report can easily be misinterpreted; one could read it as saying that I think Jesus himself was a legend. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  But how can I or any other New Testament scholar or historian know what Jesus actually said about himself or about anything else? This is obviously part of a much bigger question of who Jesus really was, what he really taught, what he really did, and what he really experienced. This is the subject of many, many books, some of them extremely erudite—and very long. I cannot cover the entire water-front in this chapter, but I can deal with the most important issues as they are discussed by historians of early Christianity, and I can give you a taste of what I think we can know about the man Jesus, not just how he is portrayed in this Gospel or that, but what he himself actually was, in history—the historical Jesus.

  OUR EARLY SOURCES OF INFORMATION ABOUT JESUS

  Most people who are not conversant with biblical scholarship probably think that knowing about the historical Jesus is a relatively simple matter. We have four Gospels in the New Testament. To know what Jesus said and did, we should read the Gospels. They tell us what he said and did. So what’s the problem?

  The problem is in part that the Gospels are full of discrepancies and were written decades after Jesus’ ministry and death by authors who had not themselves witnessed any of the events of Jesus’ life.

  To put the problem in perspective, it might be useful to think about the kinds of sources scholars love to have at their disposal if they are writing a historical account of a figure from the past, such as Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, or Shakespeare. The only way to know about any of these figures is if we have some sources of information. We can’t simply intuit what Julius Caesar or Jesus was like. So what kind of sources do scholars need in order to reconstruct the life of an important historical figure?

  If scholars had their wish, they would have lots of sources; the more the better, since some or all of them might give skewed accounts. These sources should be contemporary with the events they describe, not based on later hearsay. They should include reports by disinterested people, not simply biased accounts. The sources are best if they are independent from one another, so that you know their authors haven’t collaborated in coming up with a story. And yet they should be consistent and confirm what the others say, providing corroboration without collaboration.

  What sources do we have for Jesus? Well, we have multiple sources in the Gospels of the New Testament. That part is good. But they are not written by eyewitnesses who were contemporary with the events they narrate. They were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus’ death by people who did not know him, did not see anything he did or hear anything that he taught, people who spoke a different language from his and lived in a different country from him. The accounts they produced are not disinterested; they are narratives produced by Christians who actually believed in Jesus, and therefore were not immune from slanting the stories in light of their biases. They are not completely free of collaboration, since Mark was used as a source for Matthew and Luke. And rather than being fully consistent with one another, they are widely inconsistent, with discrepancies filling their pages, both contradictions in details and divergent large-scale understandings of who Jesus was.

  How can sources like this be used to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus? It’s not easy, but there are ways.

  The first step is to get a better handle on how the Gospel writers got their stories. If they were living three to six decades after the events they narrate, what were their sources of information? The short answer is that the Gospel writers received most of their information from the oral tradition, stories that had been in circulation about Jesus by word of mouth from the time he died until the time the Gospel writers wrote them down. To figure out how sources of this kind—contradictory accounts written decades later based on oral testimony—can be used by historians to establish what really happened with some degree of probability, we have to learn more about the oral traditions about Jesus.

  The Oral Traditions

  Even though it is very hard to date the Gospels with precision, most scholars agree on the basic range of dates, for a variety of reasons. Without going into all the details, I can say that we know with relative certainty—from his own letters and from Acts—that Paul was writing during the fifti
es of the common era. He was well-traveled in Christian circles, and he gives in his own writings absolutely no evidence of knowing about or ever having heard of the existence of any Gospels. From this it can be inferred that the Gospels probably were written after Paul’s day. It also appears that the Gospel writers know about certain later historical events, such as the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE (possibly Mark, in 13:1; almost certainly Luke, in 21:20–22). That implies that these Gospels were probably written after the year 70.

  There are reasons for thinking Mark was written first, so maybe he wrote around the time of the war with Rome, 70 CE. If Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source, they must have been composed after Mark’s Gospel circulated for a time outside its own originating community—say, ten or fifteen years later, in 80 to 85 CE. John seems to be the most theologically developed Gospel, and so it was probably written later still, nearer the end of the first century, around 90 to 95 CE. These are rough guesses, but most scholars agree on them.

  This means that our earliest surviving written accounts of Jesus’ life come from thirty-five to sixty-five years after his death.

  What was happening during all the intervening years? It is quite clear what was happening to Christianity: it was spreading throughout major urban areas of the Mediterranean region. If the Gospels and Acts are right, immediately after the resurrection of Jesus his followers included maybe fifteen or twenty men and women who had been with him previously, in Galilee, and who came to believe that he had been raised from the dead. By the end of the first century—thanks to the missionary efforts of the apostles and of converts like Paul—the religion could be found in the villages, towns, and cities of Judea, Samaria, Galilee, and Syria; it had moved north and west into Cilicia and throughout Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and Macedonia and Achaia (modern Greece); it had made its way as far as Rome, the capital of the empire, and possibly as far west as Spain. It had also traveled south, possibly to North Africa and probably to parts of Egypt.

  It is not that thousands and thousands of people were converting overnight. But over the years, dozens and dozens of people—probably hundreds—were converting in major urban areas. How did Christians convert people away from their (mainly) pagan religions to believe in only one God, the God of the Jews, and in Jesus, his son, who died to take away the sins of the world? The only way to convert people was to tell them stories about Jesus: what he said and did, and how he died and was raised from the dead.

  Once someone converted to the religion and became a member of a Christian church, they, too, would tell the stories. And the people they converted would then tell the stories, as would those whom those people converted. And so it went, a religion spread entirely by word of mouth, in a world of no mass media.

  But who was telling the stories about Jesus? In almost every instance, it was someone who had not known Jesus or known anyone else who had known Jesus. Let me illustrate with a hypothetical example. I’m a coppersmith who lives in Ephesus, in Asia Minor. A stranger comes to town and begins to preach about the miraculous life and death of Jesus. I hear all the stories he has to tell, and decide to give up my devotion to the local pagan divinity, Athena, and become a follower of the Jewish God and Jesus his son. I then convert my wife, based on the stories that I repeat. She tells the next-door neighbor, and she converts. This neighbor tells the stories to her husband, a merchant, and he converts. He goes on a business trip to the city of Smyrna and tells his business associate the stories. He converts, and then tells his wife, who also converts.

  This woman who has now converted has heard all sorts of stories about Jesus. And from whom? One of the apostles? No, from her husband. Well, whom did he hear them from? His next-door neighbor, the merchant of Ephesus. Where did he hear them? His wife. And she? My wife. And she? From me. And where did I hear them from? An eyewitness? No, I heard them from the stranger who came to town.

  This is how Christianity spread, year after year, decade after decade, until eventually someone wrote down the stories. What do you suppose happened to the stories over the years, as they were told and retold, not as disinterested news stories reported by eyewitnesses but as propaganda meant to convert people to faith, told by people who had themselves heard them fifth-or sixth-or nineteenth-hand? Did you or your kids ever play the telephone game at a birthday party? The kids sit in a circle, and one child tells a story to the girl sitting next to her, who tells it to the next girl, who tells it to the next, and so on, until it comes back to the one who first told the story. And it’s now a different story. (If it weren’t a different story the game would be a bit pointless.) Imagine playing telephone not among a group of kids of the same socioeconomic class from the same neighborhood and same school and of the same age speaking the same language, but imagine playing it for forty or more years, in different countries, in different contexts, in different languages. What happens to the stories? They change.

  Is it any wonder that the Gospels are so full of discrepancies? John heard different stories than did Mark, and when he heard the same stories he heard them differently. The Gospel writers themselves evidently changed the stories of their sources (remember how Luke changed Mark’s account of Jesus going to his death). If things could change that much just from one writer to the next, imagine how much they could change in the oral tradition.

  One might be tempted to despair at establishing anything historical about Jesus, given the chaotic state of affairs. With sources like these, how can we know anything at all about the historical Jesus?

  Despair may be a bit premature at this stage. There may be ways to apply rigorous methods of analysis to the sources to get around all the problems they present. One approach is to see whether there are any other sources of information about Jesus outside the Gospels that can be thrown into the mix. As it turns out, there are some sources—but they are not of much use.

  Other Sources for Reconstructing the Life of Jesus

  If you’ve watched enough Hollywood movies about Jesus, you may think that Jesus was one of the most talked about figures in the Roman Empire. After all, the Son of God who heals the sick, casts out demons, and raises the dead does not come along every day. And evidently the Roman authorities were fearful enough of his power to want to do away with him, fearful of this God-man in their midst. Possibly the orders actually came down from on high, from Rome itself.

  Unfortunately, all that is pure fantasy. What I am about to say seems quite odd to most of us, since, after all, Jesus is by all accounts the most significant person in the history of Western Civilization. But he was not the most significant person in his own day. Quite the contrary, he appears to have been almost a complete unknown.

  What do Greek and Roman sources have to say about Jesus? Or to make the question more pointed: if Jesus lived and died in the first century (death around 30 CE), what do the Greek and Roman sources from his own day through the end of the century (say, the year 100) have to say about him? The answer is breathtaking. They have absolutely nothing to say about him. He is never discussed, challenged, attacked, maligned, or talked about in any way in any surviving pagan source of the period. There are no birth records, accounts of his trial and death, reflections on his significance, or disputes about his teachings. In fact, his name is never mentioned once in any pagan source. And we have a lot of Greek and Roman sources from the period: religious scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, natural scientists; we have thousands of private letters; we have inscriptions placed on buildings in public places. In no first-century Greek or Roman (pagan) source is Jesus mentioned.

  Scholars have never been sure what to make of that. Most simply suppose that Jesus wasn’t all that important in his day. But whether or not that is right, the reality is that if we want to know what Jesus said and did, we cannot rely on what his enemies in the empire were saying. As far as we know, they weren’t saying anything.

  The first time Jesus is mentioned in a pagan source is in the year 112 CE. The author, Pliny the Younger,
was a governor of a Roman province. In a letter that he wrote to his emperor, Trajan, he indicates that there was a group of people called Christians who were meeting illegally; he wants to know how to handle the situation. These people, he tells the emperor, “worship Christ as a God.” That’s all he says about Jesus. It’s not much to go on if you want to know anything about the historical Jesus.

  A bit more information is provided by a friend of Pliny’s, the Roman historian Tacitus. In writing his history of Rome in the year 115, Tacitus mentions the fire, set by Nero, that took place in Rome in 64, for which the emperor blamed “the Christians.” Tacitus explains that the Christians get their name from “Christus…who was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius” (Annals 15.44). He goes on to say that the “superstition” of Christianity first appeared in Judea before spreading to Rome. Here at least is some confirmation of what we already knew from the Gospels of Jesus’ death at the hands of Pilate. But Tacitus, like Pliny, gives us nothing to go on if we want to know what Jesus really said and did.

  If we cast our net over all surviving Greek and Roman (pagan) sources for the first hundred years after Jesus’ death (30–130 CE), these two brief references are all we find.1

  In addition to pagan sources of the first century, we have non-Christian Jewish sources, though not nearly as many. But there is one, and only one, that does mention Jesus. This is the famous Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, who around 90 CE wrote a twenty-volume history of the Jewish people from the time of Adam and Eve down to his own day. In this lengthy book he does not talk about Jesus at great length, but he does refer to him twice. In one reference he simply identifies a man named James as “the brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah” (Antiquities of the Jews, 20.9.1).