Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The Gospels were forged hundreds of years after the events they narrate (26). [In fact, the Gospels were written at the end of the first century, about thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus’s death, and we have physical proof: one fragment of a Gospel manuscript dates to the early second century. How could it have been forged centuries after that?]

  We have no manuscript of the New Testament that dates prior to the fourth century (26). [This is just plain wrong: we have numerous fragmentary manuscripts that date from the second and third centuries.]

  The autographs “were destroyed after the Council of Nicaea” (26). [In point of fact, we have no knowledge of what happened to the original copies of the New Testament; they were probably simply used so much they wore out. There is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that they survived until Nicaea or that they were destroyed afterward; plenty of counterevidence indicates they did not survive until Nicaea.]

  “It took well over a thousand years to canonize the New Testament,” and “many councils” were needed to differentiate the inspired from the spurious books (31). [Actually, the first author to list our canon of the New Testament was the church father Athanasius in the year 367; the comment about “many councils” is simply made up.]

  Paul never quotes a saying of Jesus (33). [Acharya has evidently never read the writings of Paul. As we will see, he does quote sayings of Jesus.]

  The Acts of Pilate, a legendary account of Jesus’s trial and execution, was once considered canonical (44). [None of our sparse references to the Acts of Pilate indicates, or even suggests, any such thing.]

  The “true meaning of the word gospel is ‘God’s Spell,’ as in magic, hypnosis and delusion” (45). [No, the word gospel comes to us from the Old English term god spel, which means “good news”—a fairly precise translation of the Greek word euaggelion. It has nothing to do with magic.]

  The church father “Irenaeus was a Gnostic” (60). [In fact, he was one of the most virulent opponents of Gnostics in the early church.]

  Augustine was “originally a Mandaean, i.e., a Gnostic, until after the Council of Nicaea” (60). [Augustine was not even born until nineteen years after the Council of Nicaea, and he certainly was no Gnostic.]

  “‘Peter’ is not only ‘the rock’ but also ‘the cock,’ or penis, as the word is used as slang to this day.” Here Acharya shows (her own?) hand drawing of a man with a rooster head but with a large erect penis instead of a nose, with this description: “Bronze sculpture hidden in the Vatican treasure of the Cock, symbol of St. Peter” (295). [There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up.]

  In short, if there is any conspiracy here, it is not on the part of the ancient Christians who made up Jesus but on the part of modern authors who make up stories about the ancient Christians and what they believed about Jesus.

  The Jesus Mysteries

  ALSO APPEARING IN 1999 was the (intended) blockbuster work by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? Freke and Gandy have collaborated on a number of books in recent years, most of them uncovering the conspiratorial secrets of our shared past. Like Acharya S, remarkably, they argue that Jesus was invented by a group of Jews who resembled the Therapeutae in Alexandria, Egypt, leading to the invention of a new mystery religion (the Jesus Mysteries), which flourished at the beginning of the third century. In their view, however, Jesus was not a sun-god. He was a creation based on the widespread mythologies of dying and rising gods known throughout the pagan world. And so their main thesis: “The story of Jesus is not the biography of a historical Messiah, but a myth based on perennial Pagan stories. Christianity was not a new and unique revelation but actually a Jewish adaptation of the ancient Pagan Mystery religion.”19

  At the heart of all the various pagan mysteries, Freke and Gandy aver, was a myth of a godman who died and rose from the dead. This divine figure was called by various names in the pagan mysteries: Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Baccus, Mithras. But “fundamentally all these godmen are the same mythical being” (4). The reason that Freke and Gandy think so is that supposedly all these figures share the same mythology: their father was God; their mother was a mortal virgin; each was born in a cave on December 25 before three shepherds and wise men; among their miracles they turned water to wine; they all rode into town on a donkey; they all were crucified at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; they descended to hell; and on the third day they rose again. Since these same things are said of Jesus as well, it is obvious that the stories believed by the Christians are all simply imitations of the pagan religions.

  Real historians of antiquity are scandalized by such assertions—or they would be if they bothered to read Freke and Gandy’s book. The authors provide no evidence for their claims concerning the standard mythology of the godmen. They cite no sources from the ancient world that can be checked. It is not that they have provided an alternative interpretation of the available evidence. They have not even cited the available evidence. And for good reason. No such evidence exists.

  What, for example, is the proof that Osiris was born on December 25 before three shepherds? Or that he was crucified? And that his death brought atonement for sin? Or that he returned to life on earth by being raised from the dead? In fact, no ancient source says any such thing about Osiris (or about the other gods). But Freke and Gandy claim that this is common knowledge. And they “prove” it by quoting other writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who said so. But these writers too do not cite any historical evidence. This is all based on assertion, believed by Freke and Gandy simply because they read it somewhere. This is not serious historical scholarship. It is sensationalist writing driven by a desire to sell books.

  In any event, as Freke and Gandy work out their scheme, the original “Christ” was a godman like all the other pagan godmen. Only at a second stage was he taken over by Jews and turned into a Jewish messiah who was imagined as a historical figure, thereby creating the Jesus of history. The apostle Paul, on this reconstruction, knew nothing about this historical Jesus, and neither did anyone else in the early church. They worshipped the pagan Christ who had been Judaized before anyone thought to make him into a real person who actually lived and died in Judea. The Gospel by Mark was instrumental in making this actual person come to life; it was he who historicized the myth for the sake of Jews who needed not a divinity but a real historical figure to save them. Freke and Gandy contend that many Christians in the eastern part of the Roman Empire—who, like Paul, were Gnostics—understood that the historicized version of the myth was not a literal truth but a kind of extension of the myth. Only Christians in the western empire failed to realize this. Their center of activity was Rome. And so there emerged the Roman Catholic Church, which took the historicized view of a savior figure literally and came to suppress the original mythological views of the Gnostics. This led to traditional Christianity, with a historical figure of Jesus at its beginning. But he did not really exist. He was an invention modeled on the gods of the pagan mystery religions.

  The problems with this thesis are rife, as will become clear in later chapters. For now it is enough to say that what we know about Jesus—the historical Jesus—does not come from Egypt toward the end of the first century, in circles heavily influenced by pagan mystery religions, but from Palestine, among Jews committed to their decidedly antipagan Jewish religion, from the 30s.

  Quite apart from the enormous problems with the book’s major contentions, it is hard to take it seriously. In both its detail and its overarching thesis, the book often reads like an undergraduate thesis, filled with patently false information and inconsistencies. When the authors do quote “scholarly” sources, it is almost always extremely dated scholarship, from 1925, 1899, and so on. It is easy to see why. The views they assert may have been believable more than a century ago, but no scholars hold to them today. As an exampl
e of inconsistency, consider these two statements made within two pages of one another. First:

  Jerusalem Christians had always been Gnostics, because in the first century the Christian community was made up entirely of different types of Gnosticism! (174)

  And then, a page later:

  The more we looked at the evidence we had uncovered, the more it seemed that to apply the terms “Gnostic” and “Literalist” to the Christianity of the first century was actually meaningless. (175)

  So which is it? Were the Jerusalem Christians of the first century Gnostic? Or is the term Gnostic meaningless with respect to the first century? It is hard to have it both ways.

  Moreover, as with Acharya, here too the factual errors abound at an embarrassing rate. As some examples, in the order one finds them (this is by no means an exhaustive list):

  Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the empire (11). [No, he did not. He made it a legal religion. It was not made the state religion until the end of the fourth century under Theodosius.]

  Eleusinian mysteries focused on the godman Dionysus (18, 22). [Not true. These mysteries were not about Dionysus but about the goddess Demeter.]

  “Descriptions by Christian authors of Christian baptism are indistinguishable from pagan descriptions of Mystery baptism” (36). [How could we possibly know this? We don’t have a single description in any source of any kind of baptism in the mystery religions.]

  The “Gospel writers” “deliberately constructed” the Greek name Jesus out of “an artificial and forced transliteration of the Hebrew name Joshua” so as “to make sure that it expresses” the “symbolically significant number” of 888 (116). [Actually, the Gospel writers did not “construct” the Greek name Jesus at all. It is the Greek name for the Aramaic Yeshua, Hebrew Joshua. It is found in the Greek Old Testament, for example, long before the Gospel writers lived and is a common name in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus.]

  The Romans were “renowned for keeping careful records of all their activities, especially their legal proceedings,” making it surprising that “there is no record of Jesus being tried by Pontius Pilate or executed” (133). [If Romans were careful record keepers, it is passing strange that we have no records, not only of Jesus but of nearly anyone who lived in the first century. We simply don’t have birth notices, trial records, death certificates—or other standard kinds of records that one has today. Freke and Gandy, of course, do not cite a single example of anyone else’s death warrant from the first century.]

  Many early Christians rejected Mark’s Gospel as noncanonical (146). [Actually, Mark was everywhere accepted as canonical; in fact, every surviving Christian document that refers to it accepts its canonicity.]

  Paul never mentions Jesus in his ethical teachings (152). [As we will see, this is simply wrong; see 1 Corinthians 7:10–11; 9:14; 11:22–24.]

  The original version of Mark “did not include the resurrection at all” (156). [Not true. The original version of Mark does not have an episode in which Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection, but the text is completely unambiguous that Jesus has been raised from the dead. See, for example, Mark 16:6, which was an original part of the Gospel.]

  Ancient Christians “of all persuasions,” including even the famous church historian Eusebius, did not accept the letters of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus as part of their canon of scripture (161). [In point of fact, virtually everyone who mentions these letters accepts them as canonical, including Eusebius, who quotes them repeatedly in his writings.]

  The word for spiritual gifts, charismata, is taken from “the Mystery term makarismos, referring to the blessed nature of one who has seen the Mysteries” (162). [They just made that up. The two words are etymologically unrelated. Charismata comes from the Greek word charisma, which means “gift.” It is not connected with the mystery religions.]

  The Romans “completely destroyed the state of Judea in 112 CE” (178). [This is a bizarre claim. There was not even a war between Rome and Judea in 112 CE; there were wars in 66–70 and 132–35 CE.]

  While it is useful to provide a taste of the sensationalist claims that one can find in this literature, I do not think that the serious authors who have pursued a mythicist agenda (for example, G. A. Wells, Robert Price, and now Richard Carrier) can be tarnished with the same brush or be condemned with guilt by association. Their work has to stand or fall on its own, independent of the foibles and shortcomings of the sensationalists. Those who have done research do indeed make a case that Jesus did not exist. Although they use some of the same arguments, they do not use the total package as those I’ve just mentioned. I will be dealing with these arguments at greater length later. First, however, I want to show the positive evidence that convinces everyone except the mythicists that Jesus existed. But to make sense of that evidence, I need at the very least to give a rough idea about why some of the smarter and better informed writers have said he did not exist.

  The Basic Mythicist Position

  THE CASE THAT MOST mythicists have made against the historical existence of Jesus involves both negative and positive arguments, with far more of the former.20

  On the negative side, mythicists typically stress that there are no reliable references to the existence of Jesus in any non-Christian sources of the first century. Jesus allegedly lived until about the year 30 CE. But no Greek or Roman author (or any other non-Christian author, for that matter) mentions him for over eighty years after that. If Jesus was such an important figure—or even if he wasn’t so important—wouldn’t there be a reference to him in some of our many surviving sources from the first century? We have the writings of historians, politicians, philosophers, religion scholars, poets, and scientists; we have inscriptions placed on buildings and personal letters written by average people. In none of these non-Christian writings of the first century is Jesus ever mentioned, not even once.

  It is typically argued by those who hold to Jesus’s historical existence that he is, in fact, mentioned by one author: the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote a number of surviving books near the end of the first century. Mythicists, however, claim that the two references to Jesus in Josephus’s book Jewish Antiquities (these are the only two mentions of Jesus in all of Josephus’s abundant writings) were not written originally by Josephus but were inserted into his writings by later Christian scribes. If they are right, this would mean that we don’t have a single reference to Jesus in non-Christian texts before the writings of Pliny, a Roman governor of a province in what is now Turkey, in 112 CE and in the writings of the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius a few years later. Some mythicists claim that these references too were inserted into these writings, that they are not original. We will be looking at all of these references soon; for now it is enough to note that mythicists argue that it is hard to believe that Jesus would not be talked about, argued with, commented on, or even mentioned by writers of his own day or in the decades afterward if he really existed.

  In addition, they typically claim that the historical Jesus does not appear prominently even in early Christian writings apart from the New Testament Gospels. In particular, they maintain that the apostle Paul says hardly anything about the historical Jesus or that he says nothing at all. This may come as a shock to most readers of the New Testament, but a careful reading of Paul’s letters shows the problems. Paul has a lot to say about Jesus’s death and resurrection—especially the resurrection—and he clearly worships him as his Lord. But he says very little indeed about anything that Jesus said and did while he was alive. Why would that be, if Jesus was in fact a historical person? Why doesn’t Paul quote the words of Jesus, such as the Sermon on the Mount? Why does he never refer to any of Jesus’s parables? Why doesn’t he indicate what Jesus did? Why not mention any of his miracles? His exorcisms? His controversies? His trip to Jerusalem? His trial before Pontius Pilate? And on and on.

  Here again defenders of Jesus’s historicity point out that Paul on several occasio
ns does appear to quote Jesus (for example, 1 Corinthians 11:22–24). Some mythicists argue that these quotations, like those of Josephus, were not originally in the writings of Paul but were inserted by later scribes. Other mythicists argue that Paul is not quoting the words of the historical Jesus but is quoting the words the heavenly “Jesus” has spoken through Christian prophets in Paul’s communities. For both kinds of mythicist, Paul did not know or think about a historical person Jesus. For him Christ was a heavenly being of mythical proportions. How, you might wonder, could a nonhistorical person die? Mythicists have an explanation for that too, as we will see. For now it is enough to know that they generally insist that Paul did not refer to the historical Jesus, and they point out that this would be very strange if in fact he knew that he existed. The same can be said of the other writings of the New Testament, outside the Gospels.

  This means that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are our only real sources for knowing about the historical Jesus, and mythicists find these four sources highly problematic as historical documents. For one thing, they were written near the end of the first century at best, four or five decades or more after Jesus allegedly lived. If he really did live, wouldn’t we have some earlier sources? And how can we rely on such hearsay from so many years later?

  Moreover, mythicists typically point out that the Gospels cannot be trusted in what they do say. Their many accounts of what Jesus said and did are chock-full of contradictions and discrepancies and so are completely unreliable. The Gospels are thoroughly biased toward their subject matter and so do not present anything like disinterested history “as it really was.” They can be shown to have modified the stories they relate, and in some places they obviously have made up stories about Jesus. In fact, virtually all—or even all—of the stories may have been invented. This is especially the case with the so-called miracles of Jesus, narrated by the Gospel writers to convince others to believe in him but incredible to the point that, well, they are literally incredible—not to be believed.