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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Furthermore, many mythicists insist that the four Gospels ultimately all go back to just one of the Gospels, Mark, on which the other three were based. This means that of all the many writers—pagan, Jewish, and Christian—that we have from the first century (assuming Mark was written as early as the first century), we have only one that describes or even mentions the life of the historical Jesus. How plausible is that, if Jesus actually lived?

  Given all these problems, some mythicists insist that the burden of proof rests on anyone who wants to claim that Jesus did in fact exist. Added to these negative arguments is one very important positive one, that the stories about Jesus—many of them incredible, all of them based on late and unreliable witnesses—are paralleled time and again in the myths about pagan gods and other divine men discussed in the ancient world. And so mythicists typically appeal to accounts of other gods or demigods, such as Heracles, Osiris, Mithras, Attis, Adonis, and Dionysus, who were said to have been born on December 25 to a virgin mother, to have done miraculous deeds for the sake of others, to have died (often for the sake of others), and to have been raised from the dead and later departed to live in the divine realm.

  I have already said a few words about such claims, and we will examine them in greater detail at a later point. For now it is enough to stress that mythicists make a two-pronged argument: given the negative argument, that we have no reliable witness that even mentions a historical Jesus, and the positive one, that his story appears to have been modeled on the accounts told of other divinities, it is simplest to believe that he never existed but was invented as another supernatural being. In this reading of the evidence, Christianity is founded on a myth.

  Before countering the claims of the mythicists, I will set out the evidence that has persuaded everyone else, amateur and professional scholar alike, that Jesus really did exist. That will be the subject of the next several chapters.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Non-Christian Sources for the Life of Jesus

  I AM EXPECTING TO GET a very different reaction from this book than from others I have written over the years. Typically, but to my honest surprise, I get accused—or thanked, depending on who is writing me—of being anti-Christian because of the things I say in my books. I find this surprising because I don’t consider myself anti-Christian. When I tell people this, I often get a disbelieving response: of course you’re anti-Christian. Look at all the ways you attack Christianity!

  But I have never seen it this way. In my view, the only thing I attack in my writings (and not even directly) is a fundamentalist and conservative evangelical understanding of Christianity. But to say for that reason that I attack Christianity is like saying that if you don’t like raspberry sherbet you don’t like any kind of ice cream. You can make the case (and you would be right) that sherbet isn’t ice cream at all, so not liking it has nothing to do with ice cream. But even if you think sherbet is close enough to ice cream that you may as well call it ice cream, by saying you don’t like raspberry sherbet you’re simply saying that there is one flavor of it you would rather not eat, given the choice.

  I certainly do not mean to say that I consider myself either a Christian or an apologist for Christian causes. I am neither. But in my writings I have never attacked Christianity itself. I have attacked a particular flavor of it. It is true that in my part of the world, the American South, the flavor I have attacked happens to be the flavor preferred by the majority of practicing Christians. But in a historical and worldwide perspective, highly conservative Protestant Christianity, whether fundamentalism or hard-core evangelicalism, is a minority voice. It is the voice that says that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, with no contradictions, discrepancies, or mistakes of any kind. I simply don’t think this is true. And neither have most Christians over the course of history.

  I do happen to think that the Bible is a great book or set of books. With this I may be disagreeing with many of my atheist, agnostic, and humanist friends who have been cheering me on from the sidelines. But I personally love the Bible. I read it all the time, in the original Greek and Hebrew; I study it; I teach it. I have done so for over thirty-five years. And I don’t plan to stop any time soon. But I don’t think the Bible is perfect. Far from it. The Bible is filled with a multitude of voices, and these voices are often at odds with one another, contradicting one another in minute details and in major issues involving such basic views as what God is like, who the people of God are, who Jesus is, how one can be in a right relationship with God, why there is suffering in the world, how we are to behave, and on and on. And I heartily disagree with the views of most of the biblical authors on one point or another.

  Still, in my judgment all of these voices are valuable and they should all be listened to. Some of the writers of the Bible were religious geniuses, and just as we listen to other geniuses of our tradition—Mozart and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Dickens—so we ought to listen to the authors of the Bible. But they were not inspired by God, in my opinion, any more than any other genius is. And they contradict each other all over the map.

  Even though there are innumerable historical problems in the New Testament, they are not of the scope or character to call seriously into doubt the existence of Jesus. He certainly lived, and in my view he too was a kind of religious genius, even more than the later authors who wrote about him. At the same time, he probably was not well educated. He may have been only semiliterate. But he certainly lived, and his teachings have impacted the world ever since. Surely that is one gauge of genius.

  Since that is the view I am sketching in this book, I can imagine readers who think me anti-Christian taking umbrage at my refusal to toe their line. And Christian readers may well be pleased to see that even someone like me agrees with them on key points (although they certainly won’t like other things I have to say in the book). My goal, however, is neither to please nor to offend. It is to pursue a historical question with all the rigor that it deserves and requires and in doing so to show that there really was a historical Jesus and that we can say certain things about him.

  Preliminary Remarks

  BEFORE I SHOW THE evidence for the existence of Jesus, I need to make a few preliminary remarks about historians and how they go about establishing what probably happened in the past. The first thing to stress is that this is, in fact, what historians do. We have no direct access to the past. Once something happens, it is over and done with. There is no way to repeat a past event all over again. This makes historical evidence different from the kinds of evidence used in the hard sciences. In science you can repeat an experiment. In fact, you have to repeat the experiment. Once an experiment is repeated sufficiently and with the same results, a kind of predictive probability is established that the same results will obtain if the experiment is conducted one more time. An example that I use with my first-year undergraduates: if I want to prove that a bar of iron sinks in lukewarm water but that a bar of Ivory soap floats, all I need are a hundred tubs of water and a hundred bars of each kind. When I start tossing them in the water, the iron will sink every time and the soap will float. This proves what will no doubt happen if I decide to repeat the experiment yet another time.

  With history, though, we don’t have the luxury of being able to repeat an event once it happens, and so we look for other kinds of evidence. How do we know if we’ve proved something historically? Technically, we cannot prove a single thing historically. All we can do is give enough evidence (of kinds I will mention in a moment) to convince enough people (hopefully nearly everyone) about a certain historical claim, for example, that Abraham Lincoln really did deliver the Gettysburg Address or that Julius Caesar really did cross the Rubicon. If you want to demonstrate that either historical event actually occurred, you need to marshal some convincing evidence. In neither of these particular cases, of course, is there really much doubt.

  What about the historical existence of Jesus? It has become somewhat common among mythicists to think that the default position
on the question of Jesus’s existence should be that he did not exist unless someone can demonstrate that he did. This is the position expressed cogently by Robert Price: “The burden of proof would seem to belong with those who believe there was a historical man named Jesus.”1 I myself do not think that is true. On one hand, since every relevant ancient source (as we will see) assumes that there was such a man, and since no scholar who has ever written on it, except the handful of mythicists, has ever had any serious doubts, surely the burden of proof does not fall on those who take the almost universally accepted position. On the other hand, and to be a bit more generous to Price and his fellow mythicists, perhaps the matter should be put more neutrally. As my former colleague, E. P. Sanders, an eminent professor of New Testament studies at nearby Duke University, used to say, “The burden of proof belongs with whoever is making a claim.” That is, if Price wants to argue that Jesus did not exist, then he bears the burden of proof for his argument. If I want to argue that he did exist, then I do. Fair enough.

  Price enunciates another historical principle that I do agree with, however, one that ties in closely with what I just said, that historians cannot repeat the past and so have to base their judgments on evidence that establishes most probably what happened. In Price’s clearly expressed judgment, “The historian does not claim clairvoyant knowledge of the past…. The historian, so to speak ‘postdicts’ based on traceable factors and analogy. But it is all a matter of probabilities.”2 Unlike scientists, who can with almost certain reliability “predict” what will happen based on their knowledge of what does happen, historians “postdict,” that is, they indicate what probably did happen based on their knowledge of the evidence.

  But what kind of evidence is there? This is a basic methodological question: How can we establish with reasonable probability that anyone from the past actually existed, whether our aforementioned Abraham Lincoln and Julius Caesar, or anyone else: Harry Truman, Charlemagne, Hypatia, Jerome, Socrates, Anne Frank, or Bilbo Baggins?

  The Kinds of Sources Historians Want

  HISTORIANS CAN APPEAL TO many different kinds of evidence to establish the past existence of a person. First, there is a real preference for hard, physical evidence, for example, photographs. It is rather hard to deny that Abraham Lincoln lived since we have all seen photos. Of course, the photos could have all been doctored in some insidious plot to rewrite American history. And that is what the conspiracy theorists among us claim (not just about Lincoln but about even better documented events, such as the Holocaust). But for most of us, a stack of good photographs from different sources will usually be convincing enough.

  In addition to physical evidence, we look for surviving products that can be traced with relative certainty back to the person. This might include pieces of construction in some cases: the houses and buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, for example. But in even more cases it would include literary remains, writings. Julius Caesar left us an account of the Gallic Wars. Anne Frank left us a diary. And we have lots of writings that can be traced with some assurance back to a man (also photographed) named Charles Dickens. They all almost certainly existed.

  Finally, historians look to other kinds of evidence not from the person but about the person—that is, reference to, quotations of, or discussions about the person by others. These are of course our most abundant kinds of historical sources, the kinds that we have for the vast majority of persons from the past, especially before the invention of photography. What do we look for in evidence of this kind, especially when dealing with someone like Jesus, a person who lived, if he lived, some two thousand years ago? What kinds of sources do historians need to be convinced of his existence?

  Historians prefer to have lots of written sources, not just one or two. The more, obviously, the better. If there were only one or two sources, you might suspect that the stories were made up (although you would probably want to have some reasons for thinking so; it is not good enough to doubt a source simply because you have a mean, negative, or pessimistic streak and choose to do so). But if there are lots of sources—just as when there are lots of eyewitnesses to a car accident—then it is hard to claim that any one of them just happened to make it all up.

  Historians also prefer to have sources that are relatively near the date of the person or event that they are describing. As time goes on, things do indeed get made up, and so it is much better to have near-contemporary accounts. If our first reports about Moses come from six hundred years after he allegedly lived, those reports are not nearly as trustworthy as reports that can plausibly be dated to six years after he lived. The closer in temporal proximity, the better.

  Historians also like these numerous and early sources to be extensive in scope. If all you have is the mere mention of a person’s name in a source, that is not nearly as good as having long and extensive stories told (in lots of ancient sources). Moreover, it is obviously best if these extensive stories are reported in sources that are disinterested. That is to say, if someone is biased toward the subject matter, the bias has to be taken into account. The problem, of course, is that most sources are biased: if they didn’t have any feelings about the subject matter, they wouldn’t be talking about it. But if we find stories that clearly do not serve the purposes of the persons telling the story, we have a good indicator that the stories are (reasonably) disinterested.

  Moreover, in an ideal situation, the various sources that discuss a figure or an event should corroborate what each of the others has to say, at least in major points if not in all the details. If one ancient source says that Octavian was a Roman general who became the emperor but another source says that he was a North African peasant who never traveled outside his native village, you know that you have a problem, either with Octavian himself or, as in this case, with the source. But if you have multiple sources from near the time that tell many stories about the Roman emperor Octavian—that is, that corroborate one another’s stories—then you have good historical evidence.

  At the same time, it is important to know that the various sources are independent of one another and do not rely on each other for all of their information. If four ancient authors mention Marcus Billius as a Roman aristocrat in Ephesus, but it turns out that three of these authors derived their information from the fourth, then you no longer have multiple sources but only one. Their agreements do not represent corroboration but collaboration, and that is much less useful.

  In short, if a historian were drawing up a wish list of sources for an ancient person, she would want a large number of sources that derive from near the time of the person they discuss; that are extensive in what they have to say about that person; that are disinterested, to some extent, in what they say; and that corroborate one another’s accounts without having collaborated.

  With that wish list in mind, what can we say about the evidence for the existence of Jesus?

  The Sources for Jesus: What We Do Not Have

  IT MAY BE USEFUL to start by considering what we do not have by way of historical records for Jesus, to set the stage for a more detailed consideration in the next chapter of what we do have.

  Physical Evidence?

  To begin with, there is no hard, physical evidence for Jesus (eighteen hundred years before photography was invented), including no archaeological evidence of any kind. This is not much of an argument against his existence, however, since there is no archaeological evidence for anyone else living in Palestine in Jesus’s day except for the very upper-crust elite aristocrats, who are occasionally mentioned in inscriptions (we have no other archaeological evidence even for any of these). In fact, we don’t have archaeological remains for any nonaristocratic Jew of the 20s CE, when Jesus would have been an adult. And absolutely no one thinks that Jesus was an upperclass aristocrat. So why would we have archaeological evidence of his existence?

  We also do not have any writings from Jesus. To many people this may seem odd, but in fact it is not odd at all. The vast majority of people in the
ancient world could not write, as we will see in greater detail. There are debates about Jesus’s literacy, if of course he lived. But even if he could read, there are no indications from our early sources that he could write, and there is no reference to any of his writings in any of our Gospels.3 So there is nothing strange about having nothing in writing from him. I should point out that we have nothing in writing from over 99.99 percent of people who lived in antiquity. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they didn’t live. It means that if we want to show that any one of them lived, we have to look for other kinds of evidence.

  Non-Christian Sources of the First Century?

  It is also true, as the mythicists have been quick to point out, that no Greek or Roman author from the first century mentions Jesus. It would be very convenient for us if they did, but alas, they do not. At the same time, the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live. Jesus stands here with the vast majority of living, breathing human beings of earlier ages.

  Moreover, it is an error to argue, as is sometimes done by one mythicist or another, that anyone as spectacular as Jesus allegedly was, who did so many miracles and fantastic deeds, would certainly have been discussed or at least mentioned in pagan sources if he really did exist.4 Surely anyone who could heal the sick, cast out demons, walk on water, feed the multitudes with only a few loaves, and raise the dead would be talked about! The reason this line of reasoning is in error is that we are not asking whether Jesus really did miracles and, if so, why they (and he) are not mentioned by pagan sources. We are asking whether Jesus of Nazareth actually existed. Only after establishing that he did exist can we go on to ask if he did miracles. If we decide that he did, only then can we revisit the question of why no one, in that case, mentions him. But we may also decide that the historical Jesus was not a miraculous being but a purely human being. In that case it is no surprise that Roman sources never mention him, just as it is no surprise that these same sources never mention any of his uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, or nephews—or in fact nearly any other Jew of his day.