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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Some mythicists, though, do precisely that. As just one example, the Gospel of Luke indicates that Jesus’s hometown was Nazareth. As we will see later in the book, many mythicists deny that Nazareth even existed in the days of Jesus, and they refuse to take Luke’s and the other Gospels’ word for it, not deeming them as reputable historical sources since they are part of the Bible. But the reality is that Luke inherited oral traditions about Jesus and his connection with Nazareth, and he recorded what he had heard. What he heard may have been right or it may have been wrong, but the fact that later Christians long after he was dead placed his book into the canon of the New Testament has nothing to do with it. Luke’s writings about Jesus carry no more or less weight than the writings of any other ancient biographer (Suetonius, for example, or Plutarch)—or, perhaps a more apt comparison, of any other biographer of a religious person, such as Philostratus and his account of Apollonius of Tyana.

  Consider an analogy. We don’t dismiss early American accounts of the Revolutionary War simply because they were written by Americans. We take their biases into consideration and sometimes take their descriptions of events with a pound of salt. But we do not refuse to use them as historical sources. Contemporary accounts of George Washington, even by his devoted followers, are still valuable as historical sources. To refuse to use them as sources is to sacrifice the most important avenues to the past we have, and on purely ideological, not historical, grounds.

  So too the Gospels. Whatever one thinks of them as inspired scripture, they can be seen and used as significant historical sources. With this major comment in view, what can we say about the Gospels and their witness to the life of the historical Jesus?

  The Gospels and Their Written Sources

  ONCE IT IS CONCEDED that the Gospels can and should be treated as historical sources, no different from other historical sources infused with their authors’ biases, it starts to become clear why historians have almost universally agreed that whatever else one might say about him, Jesus of Nazareth lived in first-century Palestine and was crucified by the prefect of Judea. It is not because “the Gospels say so” and that it therefore must be true (the view, of course, of fundamentalist Christians). It is for a host of other reasons familiar to scholars who work in the field. This opening section will not be convincing to naysayers, for reasons I will explain, but we need to start somewhere, and the place to start is with the surviving witnesses that we have in hand.

  We have already seen that historians, who try to establish that a past event happened or that a past person lived, look for multiple sources that corroborate one another’s stories without having collaborated. And this is what we get with the Gospels and their witness of Jesus. Our earliest Gospel account of Jesus’s life is probably Mark’s, usually dated—by conservative and liberal scholars of the New Testament alike—to around 70 CE (some conservatives date it earlier; very few liberals date it much later). Eventually we will consider the question of Mark’s sources; for now we are interested in the brute fact that within forty years or so of Jesus’s (alleged) life, we have a relatively full account of many of the things he said and did and of his death by crucifixion. (How much of it we can trust as historically accurate is another question, which we will deal with at a later stage.)

  It is almost (but not quite) universally thought among New Testament scholars that both Matthew and Luke had access to the Gospel of Mark and used it for many of their stories of Jesus. This is almost certainly right, for reasons that don’t need to concern us here but are readily available elsewhere in a wide range of publications on the New Testament.1 Some mythicists—as we will see in chapter 7—have taken this critical conclusion to a faulty end to argue that all of our Gospel accounts (even John, which has very little to do with Mark) ultimately go back to Mark so that we have only one source, not multiple sources, for the life of Jesus. Nothing could be further from the truth. Matthew and Luke did indeed use Mark, but significant portions of both Gospels are not related in any way to Mark’s accounts. And in these sections of their Gospels Matthew and Luke record extensive, independent traditions about Jesus’s life, teachings, and death. So while in their shared material they do not provide corroboration without collaboration, in their unique material they do. These Gospels were probably written ten or fifteen years after Mark, and so by the year 80 or 85 we have at least three independent accounts of Jesus’s life (since a number of the accounts of both Matthew and Luke are independent of Mark), all within a generation or so of Jesus himself, assuming he lived.

  But that is not all. There are still other independent Gospels. The Gospel of John is sometimes described as the “maverick Gospel” because it is so unlike the synoptic accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.2 Prior to the narrative leading up to Jesus’s death, most of the stories in John are found only in John, whereas John does not include most of the stories found in the other three Gospels. And when they do share the same stories, John tells them in such a different way that he does not appear to have received his accounts from any or all of them.3 This is especially the case, of course, in those passages (the majority of them) in which John’s stories do not overlap with those of the synoptics. It is equally true of John’s account of Jesus’s death. John is generally considered the latest of our canonical Gospels, dated 90–95 CE. So within the first century we have four independent accounts of Jesus’s life and death (Matthew and Luke being independent in a good number of their corroborative stories; John possibly in all, and certainly in most, of his).

  Gospels continued to be written after John, however, and some of these later accounts are also independent. Since the discovery in 1945 of the famous Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, scholars have debated its date.4 Even though some continue to place the Gospel in the first century, possibly prior to all or some of the canonical Gospels, more widely it is thought that in its current form Thomas comes to us from the early second century, say 110–20 CE. Moreover, while some scholars think that Thomas relies on Matthew, Mark, and Luke for some of its sayings—there are overlaps in about half of them—it is more commonly thought that Thomas is independent, that it got its information from other sources. In either event, a good portion of Thomas, if not all of it, does not derive from the canonical texts. To that extent it is a fifth independent witness to the life and teachings of Jesus.

  The same can be said of the Gospel of Peter, discovered in 1886. This is a fragmentary account of Jesus’s trial, death, and resurrection.5 Once again, even though there is some similarity in portions of the account to what is found in the canonical Gospels, it is widely thought that Peter preserves an independent narrative, drawn from other, noncanonical, sources. There are protracted debates among scholars about how much material from the life of Jesus this account originally contained. The fragment that survives begins in the middle of a sentence during the scene in which Pilate washes his hands of Jesus’s blood (a scene found as well in the Gospel of Matthew, but in Peter it is narrated differently and probably comes from some different source). Some scholars think that the Gospel recounted only Jesus’s Passion, but others, somewhat more convincingly, maintain that in fact it was a complete Gospel with a narrative of Jesus’s ministry as well.6 In either event, since it is in part or in whole different from the other Gospels, in these passages—and probably in its entirety, though this judgment does not affect my argument—this would be a sixth independent Gospel account of Jesus’s life and death.

  Another independent account occurs in the highly fragmentary text called Papyrus Egerton 2.7 Here again it is difficult to know how extensive the full Gospel contained in these partial remains originally was; what survives are four episodes from the life of Jesus, one of which has no parallel in the Gospels of the New Testament or in any other known Gospel.8 Here then, at least in the nonparalleled story, but probably in all four, is a seventh independent account.

  There are, of course, lots of other Gospels, some forty or so, down to the early Middle Ages, tha
t are not found in the New Testament. These include narratives of Jesus as a newborn and as a young child, where he uses his miraculous powers sometimes for mischief and sometimes for good; narratives of his public ministry; narratives of his death and resurrection. Almost all of these accounts, of course, are highly legendary, and with the passing of time they become less and less valuable as independent, historical sources. But if we restrict ourselves here, as we did earlier, to a hundred years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death, we have at least seven independent accounts, some of them quite extensive. (It is important to recall: even if some of these sources are dependent on one another in some passages—for example, Matthew and Luke on Mark—they are completely independent in others, and to that extent they are independent witnesses.) And so it is quite wrong to argue that Mark is our only independent witness to Jesus as a historical person. The other six accounts are either completely or partially independent as well. For a historian these provide a wealth of materials to work with, quite unusual for accounts of anyone, literally anyone, from the ancient world.

  And that is not nearly all. It may be easy to discount these seven witnesses on the grounds that they are not close to the time of the events they narrate (the earliest is four decades removed) and that they are heavily biased toward their subject matter. I will deal with the matter of bias soon. For now it is important to begin moving behind these independent accounts to see from where they found their information about Jesus.

  Written Sources for the Surviving Witnesses

  WHAT IS SOMETIMES UNDERAPPRECIATED by mythicists who want to discount the value of the Gospels for establishing the historical existence of Jesus is that our surviving accounts, which began to be written some forty years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death, were based on earlier written sources that no longer survive. But they obviously did exist at one time, and they just as obviously had to predate the Gospels that we now have. The opening words of the Gospel of Luke bear repeating: “Whereas many have attempted to compile a narrative of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them over to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all these things closely from the beginning, to write for you an orderly account” (1:1–3).

  As we will see more fully in a later context, one needs to approach everything that the Gospel writers say gingerly, with a critical eye. But there is no reason to suspect that Luke is lying here. He knew of “many” earlier authors who had compiled narratives about the subject matter that he himself is about to narrate, the life of Jesus. Since the mid-nineteenth century there has been a wide consensus among scholars concerning what these earlier sources were and what to call them. Again, I do not mean to say that every scholar agrees on every detail. On the contrary, scholars vigorously debate many specific issues. But in broad outline, which is what matters for my purposes here, there is considerable agreement, based on very thorough investigation of all the relevant issues by scholars who have devoted their entire lives to studying the question.

  Virtually everyone agrees that Luke had as one of his predecessors the Gospel of Mark. This in itself is a matter of interest since Luke seems to imply, by what he says about the “many” who “attempted to compile a narrative” before him, that he did not consider these earlier attempts successful, that in fact they needed some correcting. That is why he himself (in contrast to them?) wants to provide “an orderly account.” If that is Luke’s implication, we can infer that he did not have a very high view of Mark’s Gospel or at least that he thought it was inadequate for his purposes. And so he produced his own. But he certainly liked a good deal of Mark, as he copied many of Mark’s stories in constructing his own Gospel, sometimes verbatim. But he had other sources as well.

  One of them I have already mentioned, the no-longer-surviving Gospel account that scholars have called Q.9 The reason for thinking that this source was written prior to the synoptic Gospels, and that it was available to them, has to do with the literary relationship of Matthew, Mark, and Luke to one another. There is obviously some kind of relationship since they tell many of the same stories, often in the same sequence and frequently even in the same words. Someone is copying. Even though Matthew and Luke used Mark as one of their sources, they share a number of passages that are not found in Mark, such as the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes. The two later Gospels obviously did not get these passages from Mark since he didn’t include them. And there are solid reasons for thinking that one of them did not derive these materials from a copy of the other. The best solution to the question of where they got these passages, then, is that they derived them from some other shared source.10 The German scholars who most fully developed this theory called this other source the “sayings Quelle,” the sayings source. The word Quelle is shortened in common parlance to Q. Q, then, is the material that Matthew and Luke have in common that is not found in Mark. And it derived from a written Gospel that no longer survives.

  Q appears to have been made up predominantly of the sayings of Jesus, much like the later Gospel of Thomas. In the judgment of most scholars, Q did not include an account of Jesus’s death and resurrection since Matthew and Luke do not share any stories of the Passion not also found in Mark. In my opinion it is very hard to know whether or not Q lacked a passion narrative. It would have been possible, for example, for Matthew to copy some of the stories of the Passion from Q and for Luke not to include those stories. If so, we would have no way of knowing whether the stories found only in Matthew—including some of the passages in the passion narrative—were in fact Q stories that Luke simply decided not to reproduce for reasons of his own.

  Whether or not Q included an account of Jesus’s death and resurrection, it appears that the source must date to a period no later than Mark, and a good number of scholars have dated it earlier, say, to the 50s.

  Luke used other sources as well, as he intimates. He doesn’t tell us how many. A lot of stories are found only in Luke, however, such as Jesus’s parables of the prodigal son and of the good Samaritan. Luke must have gotten these from somewhere else: scholars have long offered good reasons for thinking Luke didn’t just make everything else all up. And so they call this other now-lost source L, for Luke’s special source. L may have been one document; it may have been a large number of documents; or it may have included both written documents and oral traditions about Jesus (I will be talking about oral traditions soon).

  Matthew as well is based on written sources. As pointed out, he used Mark, even more than Luke did, and Q. But he too includes many stories found only in his Gospel: the visit of the wise men to worship the infant Jesus, for example, and the parable of the sheep and the goats at the last judgment. These then must have come from Matthew’s special source(s), which scholars have therefore labeled M. Like L, M may have been a single written document, a number of documents, or a combination of oral traditions and written sources.

  When dealing only with Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the synoptic Gospels, then, we are talking not just about three books written late in the first century. We are talking about at least four sources: Mark, Q, M, and L, the latter two of which could easily have represented several, or even many, other written sources.

  Many leading scholars of the Gospel of Mark think that it too was compiled not just of oral traditions that had been circulating down to the author’s day but of various written sources. It is often thought that Mark used a passion narrative that had been written years earlier in which the episodes of Jesus’s arrest, trials, death, and resurrection were already put into written form. The most recent and most authoritative two-volume commentary on Mark, by Joel Marcus, contends that Mark used a source, or a number of sources, for his account of Jesus’s words and deeds prior to the passion narrative.11 If this is right, then not just our later synoptics but even our earliest surviving Gospel was based on multiple sources.

  The Gospel of John too is widely thought to have been based on written so
urces that no longer survive. As I have indicated, the reason for thinking that John does not rely on the synoptics is that whenever they tell the same story, it is in radically different ways and never in the same words. But scholars have long suspected that John had at his disposal an earlier written account of Jesus’s miracles (the so-called Signs Source), at least two accounts of Jesus’s long speeches (the Discourse Sources), and possibly another passion source as well.12

  I have been speaking so far only of the four canonical Gospels. It cannot be determined with absolute certainty whether any of the later Gospels—say the Gospel of Peter or the Gospel of Thomas—go back to written sources although in both of these cases some scholars have mounted strenuous arguments that they do. The most plausible case has been made for the Gospel of Thomas by April DeConick, who makes a strong argument, based on a careful literary study of the text, that the core of the surviving Gospel of Thomas goes back to a Gospel in circulation prior to 50 CE.13

  All of these written sources I have mentioned are earlier than the surviving Gospels; they all corroborate many of the key things said of Jesus in the Gospels; and most important they are all independent of one another. Let me stress the latter point. We cannot think of the early Christian Gospels as going back to a solitary source that “invented” the idea that there was a man Jesus. The view that Jesus existed is found in multiple independent sources that must have been circulating throughout various regions of the Roman Empire in the decades before the Gospels that survive were produced. Where would the solitary source that “invented” Jesus be? Within a couple of decades of the traditional date of his death, we have numerous accounts of his life found in a broad geographical span. In addition to Mark, we have Q, M (which is possibly made of multiple sources), L (also possibly multiple sources), two or more passion narratives, a signs source, two discourse sources, the kernel (or original) Gospel behind the Gospel of Thomas, and possibly others. And these are just the ones we know about, that we can reasonably infer from the scant literary remains that survive from the early years of the Christian church. No one knows how many there actually were. Luke says there were “many” of them, and he may well have been right. And once again, this is not the end of the story.