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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Is that what Jesus was said to have done? If not, how could he be the messiah?

  Other Jews at the time of Jesus held yet other expectations of the future ruler of Israel. Some Jews had come to think that the messiah would not be a mere earthly king. He would be a cosmic figure, a powerful angelic being sent from God to destroy the enemy and set up God’s kingdom on earth. This figure was often modeled on the “one like a son of man” in the book of Daniel (for example, 7:13–14). In an apocryphal writing known as 1 Enoch, probably from about the same time, comes this prediction about the future messianic Son of Man:

  [The Son of Man] shall never pass away or perish from before the face of the earth. But those who have led the world astray shall be bound with chains; and their ruinous congregation shall be imprisoned; all their deeds shall vanish from before the face of the earth. Thenceforth nothing that is corruptible shall be found; for that Son of Man has appeared and has seated himself upon the throne of his glory; and all evil shall disappear from before his face. (1 Enoch 69)11

  Yet other Jews from about the time of Jesus expected that the future anointed one would be a powerful priest who would rule over the people of Israel with authority given him by God, as he interpreted the sacred laws of Israel and enforced their obedience in the good kingdom to come. The community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls expected two messiahs, one who would be a ruler-king and over him the priestly messiah.12

  In short, ancient Jews at the turn of the era held a variety of expectations of what the future messiah would be like. But all these expectations had several things in common. In all of them the messiah would be a future ruler of the people of Israel, leading a real kingdom here on earth. He would be visibly and openly known to be God’s special emissary, the anointed one. And he would be high and mighty, a figure of grandeur and power.

  And who was Jesus? In all our early traditions he was a lower-class peasant from rural Galilee who was thought by some to be the future ruler of Israel but who instead of establishing the kingdom on earth came to be crucified. That Jesus died by crucifixion is almost universally attested in our sources, early and late. We have traditions of Jesus’s bloody execution in independent Gospel sources (Mark, M, L, John, Gospel of Peter), throughout our various epistles and other writings (Hebrews, 1 Peter, Revelation), and certainly in Paul—everywhere in Paul. The crucifixion of Jesus is the core of Paul’s message and is attested abundantly in his writings as one of the—if not the—earliest things that he knew about the man.

  Who would make up the idea of a crucified messiah? No Jew that we know of. And who were Jesus’s followers in the years immediately after his death? Jews living in Palestine. It is no wonder that Paul found their views so offensive. They were claiming that Jesus was God’s anointed one, the one who stood under God’s special favor, the great and powerful ruler over all Israel. Jesus—the man who was executed for sedition against the state? He’s the one blessed of God, his powerful solution to the plight of the chosen people? A crucified criminal? That’s worse than being crazy. It’s an offense against God, blasphemous. Or so thought Paul. And so he persecuted this tiny sect of Jews and tried to destroy them.

  It is hard today to understand just how offensive the idea of a crucified messiah would have been to most first-century Jews. I try to illustrate it to my class by giving an analogy. What would you think if I tried to convince you that David Koresh was God’s chosen one through whom he is going to rule the earth? David Koresh? The leader of the Branch Davidians at Waco, who stockpiled guns and abused children, who was killed by the FBI? He’s God’s chosen one? Yes, he is the Lord of all. What are you, completely nuts? (I get in trouble with my students every time I use this illustration. At the end of term I invariably get a comment or two from students who can’t believe that Ehrman thinks David Koresh is the Lord….)

  If it is hard to imagine Jews inventing the idea of a crucified messiah, where did the idea come from? It came from historical realities. There really was a man Jesus. Some of the things he said and possibly did make some of his followers wonder if he could be the messiah. Eventually they became convinced: he must be the messiah. But then he ran afoul of the authorities, who had him arrested, put on trial, and condemned to execution. He was crucified. This, of course, radically disconfirmed everything his followers had thought and hoped since he obviously was the furthest thing from the messiah. But then something else happened. Some of them began to say that God had intervened and brought him back from the dead. The story caught on, and some (or all—we don’t know) of his closest followers came to think that in fact he had been raised. This reconfirmed in a big way the hopes that had been so severely dashed by his crucifixion. For his reinspirited followers, Jesus truly is the one favored by God. So he is the messiah. But he is a different kind of messiah than anyone expected. God had a different plan from the beginning. He planned to save Israel not by a powerful royal messiah but by a crucified messiah.

  Since no one would have made up the idea of a crucified messiah, Jesus must really have existed, must really have raised messianic expectations, and must really have been crucified. No Jew would have invented him. And it is important to remember that Jews were saying that Jesus was the crucified messiah in the early 30s. We can date their claims to at least 32 CE, when Paul began persecuting these Jews. In fact, their claims must have originated even earlier. Paul knew Jesus’s right-hand man, Peter, and Jesus’s brother James. They are evidence that this belief in the crucified messiah goes all the way back to a short time after Jesus’s death.

  A Suffering Messiah?

  But weren’t there any Jews who expected the messiah to suffer and die? The short answer is that so far as we can tell, there were not. My students often find this hard, even impossible, to believe. They have been raised in Christian churches, where it is taught that the messiah was supposed to suffer, and they are guided to such passages as Isaiah 53, in the Old Testament, as proof:

  He was despised and rejected by others,

  a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity…

  Surely he has borne our infirmities

  and carried our diseases;

  yet we accounted him stricken,

  struck down by God, and afflicted.

  But he was wounded for our transgressions,

  crushed for our iniquities;

  Upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

  and by his bruises we are healed (Isaiah 53:3–5)

  Students sometimes quote these verses to me and then say with a smug smile, “See! The messiah was predicted to suffer!” My response is always the same: I ask them to show me where in the passage the word messiah occurs. The students are typically nonplussed when the see that the word messiah does not appear anywhere in this passage. They protest: “But this sounds just like the crucifixion of Jesus! And so does Psalm 22. And Psalm 69.” And so on. I ask them in each case to see if the author is talking about the messiah. Each of these passages talks about someone suffering, but that someone is never the messiah.

  In Isaiah 53, for example, the sufferer is called not the “messiah” but the “servant of the Lord,” and the passage speaks about his sufferings in the past tense, as something that has already happened at the time of writing (six hundred years before Jesus). As interpreters have long noted, if read in context, the author actually tells us who this servant of the Lord is. In Isaiah 49:3 the prophet declares, “And he said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.’”

  It is Israel who is God’s servant, who has suffered for the sins of the people and so brought healing. Isaiah 53 was written during the Babylonian exile when the Babylonian armies had taken the leaders of Judah hundreds of miles away and forced them to live in Babylon. Isaiah is lamenting the exile but indicating that the suffering will bring atonement for the sins of the people, and God will restore their fortunes. He is not talking about the future messiah.

  An even more important point is this: there were no Je
ws prior to Christianity who thought Isaiah 53 (or any of the other “suffering” passages) referred to the future messiah. We do not have a single Jewish text prior to the time of Jesus that interprets the passage messianically. So why do Christians traditionally interpret it this way? For the same reason they think that the messiah had to suffer. In their view Jesus is the messiah. And Jesus suffered. Therefore the messiah had to suffer. And this must not have come as a surprise to God; it must have all been planned. And so Christians found passages in the Hebrew Bible that talked about someone suffering and said that it referred to the suffering of the future messiah, Jesus. Jews roundly and loudly disagreed with these interpretations. And so the arguments began.

  Before he converted, Paul was on the side of the non-Christian Jews. The idea of a suffering messiah ran so counter to scripture and the righteous expectations of God’s people that it was completely unthinkable, even blasphemous. Paul, though, had a change of mind and later decided that this one who stood under God’s curse—since anyone “who hangs on a tree” is cursed—was in fact the Christ. He was cursed by God not for anything he himself had done but for what others had done. He bore the curse that others deserved and so saved them from the wrath of God. Once Paul was convinced of this, he turned from being a persecutor of the Christians to being their most famous advocate, missionary, and theologian. It was a conversion for the ages.

  A Mythicist Response

  But still, aren’t there any passages that refer to a suffering messiah? Some mythicists realize that this is a problem because if someone wanted to make up a messiah—as they claim Christians made up Jesus—they would never have made one up who suffered since that is what precisely no one expected. One mythicist who addresses the problem is Richard Carrier, whom I mentioned in an earlier context as one of the two mythicists in the world (that I know of) with a graduate degree in a relevant subject, in his case, a Ph.D. in classics from Columbia. He is one smart fellow. But I’m afraid he falls down on this one. Even smart people make mistakes.

  In his recent book, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed, Carrier states that “this idea of a suffering, executed god, would resonate especially with those Jews and their sympathizers who expected a humiliated messiah.”13 This statement is problematic on all counts. For one thing, the earliest Christians from, say, the early 30s CE—as we will see later—did not talk about or think of Jesus as God. Second, we know of no Jews who thought, even in their wildest dreams, that God could be executed. And third, of particular relevance to my argument here, there were none who expected a humiliated messiah.

  Carrier tries to establish his point about the humiliated messiah first by quoting Isaiah 53. But as I’ve shown, Isaiah is not speaking about the future messiah, and he was never interpreted by any Jews prior to the first century as referring to the messiah.

  Carrier’s argument becomes more interesting when he appeals to a passage in chapter 9 of the book of Daniel. This is one of those postdated prophecies so common to the final six chapters of Daniel. By postdated prophecies I mean this: the book of Daniel claims to be written by a Hebrew man, Daniel, in the Babylonian exile, around 550 BCE. In actual fact, as critical scholars have long known (Carrier agrees with this), it was written closer to 160 BCE.14 When the character Daniel in the book “predicts” what is going to happen, the real author, pretending to be Daniel, simply indicates what already did happen. And so it sounds as if the sixth-century prophet knows the future because what he predicted in fact came to pass.

  Daniel 9 is a complicated passage that “predicts” in precise detail what will happen to the people of Jerusalem over the course of “seventy weeks” that have been “decreed for your people and your holy city; to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity.” The weeks are interpreted within the text itself to mean seventy “weeks of years”—that is, one week represents seven years. According to verse 25 there will be seven such weeks of years separating the order to rebuild destroyed Jerusalem and the appearance of “an anointed prince.” Verse 26 then indicates that sixty-two weeks of years later an “anointed one” shall be “cut off and shall have nothing.” Carrier argues strenuously that this shows that the author of Daniel expected that the messiah (the “anointed one”) had to be killed (“cut off”).

  It is an interesting interpretation but highly idiosyncratic. You won’t find it in commentaries on Daniel written by critical Hebrew Bible scholars (those who are not fundamentalists or conservative evangelicals), and for some good reasons. To begin with, the anointed prince of verse 26 is obviously not the same as the anointed one mentioned in verse 25. Are they both princes, that is, traditional messianic figures? It is important to recall that the term anointed one was sometimes used as a technical term to refer to the future ruler of Israel. But it was not always used that way. Sometimes it simply referred to a king (Solomon) or a high priest or anyone who went through an anointing ceremony. That is, it was not only a technical term but also a common term. It is striking in this passage that the figure in verse 26 is not called a prince or “the” anointed one—that is, the messiah.

  And so, in one of the definitive commentaries written on Daniel, by Louis Hartman, a leading scholar of the Hebrew Bible (Carrier does not claim to be one; I don’t know offhand if he knows Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages in which the book was written), we read about verse 25:

  Although in the preexilic period [the period in Israel before the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE—four hundred or more years before Daniel was written] the Hebrew term masiah, the “anointed one,” was used almost exclusively of kings, at least in the postexilic period [after the people returned to the land years later] the high priest received a solemn anointing with sacred oil on entering his office…. It seems much more likely, therefore, that the “anointed leader” of 9:25 refers to the high priest, Joshua ben Josadak.15

  In other words, 9:25 not only is not talking about a future messiah, it is talking about a figure from the history of Israel whom we already know about: the priest Joshua described elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (see, for example, Zechariah 6:11). Verse 26 is referring to someone who lived centuries later, but it too is not referring to a future messiah. As Hartman has argued—along with many, many other Hebrew Bible scholars—the reference to “an” (not “the”) anointed one in 9:26 “almost certainly” refers to another figure known from Jewish history, the high priest Onias III, who was deposed from being the high priest and murdered in 171 BCE, several years before the famous Maccabean revolt broke out, an event recounted in 2 Maccabees 4:1–38.16

  The two who are called “anointed” are not future messiahs. They are both high priests who, in that role, were anointed. And they both lived in the past. Most important of all, this passage was never, so far as we know, interpreted messianically by Jews prior to the advent of Christianity. In other words, there were no Jews in the early 30s who would have resonated with the idea of a suffering messiah based on Daniel 9:26. No one thought that this is what the passage was talking about.

  What then are we left with? We do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jews prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins—or killed at all—let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews, tortured and crucified in full public view. This was the opposite of what Jews thought the messiah would be. Then where did the idea of a crucified messiah come from? It was not made up out of thin air. It came from people who believed Jesus was the messiah but who knew full well that he had been crucified.

  That no Jew would make up such an idea is made crystal clear by Paul himself in one of his letters. When writing to the Corinthians Paul makes the intriguing and compelling statement that the fact that Christians proclaimed a messiah who had been crucified was the single greatest “stumbling block” for Jews (1 Corinthians 1:23) and a completely ridiculous claim to Gentiles (same verse). That
is to say, Jews didn’t buy it. And why not? Because for Jews this very claim—the heart of the Christians’ affirmation of their faith—was absurd, offensive, and potentially blasphemous.

  Yet this is what a very small group of Jews, sometime before the year 32, were saying about Jesus. Not that he was God. And not that he was the great king ruling now in Jerusalem. He was the crucified messiah. It is almost impossible to explain this claim—coming at this place, at this time, among this people—if there had not in fact been a Jesus who was crucified.

  Conclusion

  WHAT CAN WE SAY in conclusion about the evidence that supports the view that there really was a historical Jesus, a Jewish teacher who lived in Palestine as an adult in the 20s of the Common Era, crucified under Pontius Pilate sometime around the year 30? The evidence is abundant and varied. Among the Gospels we have numerous independent accounts that attest to Jesus’s life, at least seven of them from within a hundred years of the traditional date of his death. These accounts did not appear out of thin air, however. They are based on written sources—a good number of them—that date much earlier, plausibly in some cases at least to the 50s of the Common Era. Even these sources were not fabricated purely from the minds of their authors, however. They were based on oral traditions that had been in circulation year after year among the followers of Jesus. These oral traditions were transmitted in various areas—mainly urban areas, we might surmise—throughout the Roman Empire; some of them, however, can be located in Jesus’s homeland, Palestine, where they originally circulated in Aramaic. It appears that some, probably many, of them go back to the 30s CE. We are not, then, dealing merely with Gospels that were produced fifty or sixty years after Jesus’s alleged death as the principal witnesses to his existence. We are talking about a large number of sources, dispersed over a remarkably broad geographical expanse, many of them dating to the years immediately after Jesus’s alleged life, some of them from Palestine itself. On the basis of this evidence alone, it is hard to understand how Jesus could have been “invented.” Invented by whom? Where? When? How then could there be so many independent strands of evidence?