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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  But that is just the beginning. The reality is that every single author who mentions Jesus—pagan, Christian, or Jewish—was fully convinced that he at least lived. Even the enemies of the Jesus movement thought so; among their many slurs against the religion, his nonexistence is never one of them. Moreover, this is not a view restricted in the Christian sources to Mark. It is the view of all of our authors, for example, the authors of the epistles written both before and after Mark, whose views are based not on a reading of the Gospels but on traditions completely independent of Mark. It is also the view of Q and M and L and John and of all of John’s sources. It is the view of the first-century books or letters of 1 Clement, 1 Peter, 1 John, Hebrews—you name it. And it is also the view of the book of Acts, which preserves very primitive traditions in many of its speeches, traditions that appear to date from the earliest years of the Christian movement, even before the followers of Jesus maintained that he was the Son of God for his entire life or even just from his baptism; according to these traditions, he became the son of God at his resurrection. This is the earliest Christology of them all, probably that of the original followers of Jesus, and so stems from the earliest Palestinian Christian communities. Once again we are back in the 30s of the Common Era, and the witness of these sources is unambiguous that Jesus existed.

  The same results obtain by a careful study of Paul’s letters. Paul came to know about Jesus within just a year or, at most, two of his death. Paul too preserves traditions that stem from the early period of his Christian life, right after his conversion around 32–33 CE. There is no doubt that Paul knew that Jesus existed. He mentions Jesus’s birth, his Jewish heritage, his descent from David, his brothers, his ministry to Jews, his twelve disciples, several of his teachings, his Last Supper, and most important for Paul, his crucifixion. Paul indicates that he received some of these traditions from those who came before him, and it is relatively easy to determine when. Paul claims to have visited with Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter, and with his brother James three years after his conversion, that is, around 35–36 CE. Much of what Paul has to say about Jesus, therefore, stems from the same early layer of tradition that we can trace, completely independently, in the Gospels.

  Even more impressive than what Paul says about Jesus is whom he knew. Paul was personally acquainted, as I’ve pointed out, with Peter and James. Peter was Jesus’s closest confidant throughout his public ministry, and James was his actual brother. Paul knew them for decades, starting in the mid 30s CE. It is hard to imagine how Jesus could have been made up. Paul knew his best friend and his brother.

  Paul also knew that Jesus was crucified. Before the Christian movement, there were no Jews who thought the messiah was going to suffer. Quite the contrary. The crucified Jesus was not invented, therefore, to provide some kind of mythical fulfillment of Jewish expectation. The single greatest obstacle Christians had when trying to convert Jews was precisely their claim that Jesus had been executed. They would not have made that part up. They had to deal with it and devise a special, previously unheard of theology to account for it. And so what they invented was not a person named Jesus but rather the idea of a suffering messiah. That invention has become so much a part of the standard lingo that Christians today assume it was all part of the original plan of God as mapped out in the Old Testament. But in fact the idea of a suffering messiah cannot be found there. It had to be created. And the reason it had to be created is that Jesus—the one Christians considered to be the messiah—was known by everyone everywhere to have been crucified. He couldn’t be killed if he didn’t live.

  Jesus certainly existed. My goal in this book, however, is not simply to show the evidence for Jesus’s existence that has proved compelling to almost every scholar who has ever thought about it, but also to show why those few authors who have thought otherwise are therefore wrong. To do that I need to move beyond the evidence for the historical Jesus to the claims made about his existence by various mythicists. I will not try to refute every single point made by every single author who has taken that stand. That would require an enormous book, and trust me, it would not be a pleasant read. Instead I will consider the most important issues and the most interesting and significant arguments. In the next chapter I will deal with several mythicist arguments that are, I will claim, irrelevant to the question of whether or not Jesus actually existed. In the chapter that follows I will then consider several of the best-known mythicist proposals for how Jesus came to be created and argue that they too are thoroughly inadequate to establish the mythicist view.

  PART II

  The Mythicists’ Claims

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Mythicist Case: Weak and Irrelevant Claims

  UP TO THIS STAGE in our quest to see if the historical Jesus actually existed, I have been mounting the positive argument, showing why the evidence is overwhelming that Jesus really did live as a Jewish teacher in Palestine and was crucified at the direction of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. It will be equally important for us to learn what the historical Jesus said and did, since the mere fact of Jesus’s existence does not get us very far. Anyone interested in the history of Jesus very much wants to know the character of his teachings, the nature of his activities, the reasons for his execution, and so on. I will save the exploration of these other critical issues for the end of the book. For now I need to take on a more pressing matter. If Jesus did exist, why do mythicists say that he did not? The present chapter will look at the typical arguments used by mythicists that are, in my judgment, weak and/or irrelevant to the question. In the following chapter I will consider various ways mythicists have reconstructed the original “invention” of Christ and show why these views too are problematic and do not at all compromise the powerful evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus.

  Irrelevancies in Historical Argument

  ANYONE WHO SPENDS MUCH time dealing with controversial historical issues knows full well that many arguments are simply irrelevant. Just to give an example from the nonmythicist camp—in fact, from the opposite end of the spectrum: it is frequently argued by fundamentalist and conservative evangelical apologists for the Bible that since the New Testament is more frequently attested in ancient sources than any other book from antiquity, it can therefore be trusted. This argument, I’m afraid, contains a non sequitur. It is true that we have far more manuscripts for the books of the New Testament than for Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius—name your ancient author. But that has absolutely no bearing on the question of whether the New Testament books can be trusted. It is relevant only to the question of whether we can know what the New Testament books originally said.

  Look at it this way. Both Das Kapital by Karl Marx and Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler are better attested than, say, the New Testament Gospel of John. Far better attested. There is no comparison. We have far, far more copies of each that were produced closer to the time of the originals than we do for any of the books of the New Testament, including John. Does the fact that both books are extremely well attested have any bearing on whether you can trust what either one has to say? Are the author’s opinions therefore reliable? Are his teachings to be followed simply because we have a lot of copies of his work? The same applies to the Gospel of John or any other book of the New Testament. The fact that we have more copies of John than of, say, Plato’s Republic has no bearing on whether we can trust it more or not. It only has a bearing on the question of whether we can reasonably think that we know what the author originally wrote. Whether what he wrote is right or not has to be judged on other grounds.

  Fundamentalists and conservative evangelical Christians are not the only ones who make irrelevant arguments to score points with the reading public. So too—to return to our original side of the spectrum—do mythicists. In this chapter I will consider several arguments typically made by mythicists in their effort to show that Jesus did not exist. My thesis is that most of these points are weak and some are irrelevant to th
e question.

  Claim 1: The Gospels Are Highly Problematic as Historical Sources

  MYTHICISTS SOMETIMES LIKE TO revel in the historical problems posed by the Gospels: we do not have the original texts of the Gospels, and there are places where we do not know what the authors originally said; the Gospels are not authored by the persons named in their titles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) but were written by people who were not followers of Jesus living forty to sixty years later in different parts of the world; the Gospels are full of discrepancies and contradictions; and the Gospels report historical events that can be shown not to have happened.

  Some scholars may disagree with some of these claims—conservative evangelicals will disagree with all of them—but I personally think they are absolutely right. And I think that these issues create genuine problems for the study of the New Testament, the history of the early Christian church, and the life of the historical Jesus. But I also think they are for the most part irrelevant to the question of whether or not there was a historical Jesus, for reasons I will explain. But first it is important to delve into the issues a bit.

  We Do Not Have the Original Texts of the Gospels

  To begin with, even though the Gospels are among the best attested books from the ancient world, we are regrettably hindered in knowing what the authors of these books originally wrote. The problem is not that we are lacking manuscripts. We have thousands of manuscripts. The problem is that none of these manuscripts is the original copy produced by the author (this is true for all four Gospels—in fact, for every book of the New Testament). Moreover, most of these manuscripts were made over a thousand years after the original copies, none of them is close to the time of the originals—within, say, ten or twenty years—and all of them contain certifiable mistakes.

  I do not need to explicate all these problems here, as I have written about them in more detail elsewhere.1 My point in this context is that for the question of whether or not Jesus existed, these problems are mostly irrelevant. The evidence for Jesus’s existence does not depend on having a manuscript tradition of his life and teachings that is perfectly in line with what the authors of the New Testament Gospels really wrote. Suppose, for example, that it is true that the famous story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery was not originally part of the Gospel of John (the only Gospel in which the story occurs) even though it is found in the vast majority of manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages. What does that tell us? It tells us that the story was probably not originally in John; in turn, that probably means that it is not something that actually happened in the life of Jesus. But so what? That doesn’t mean Jesus didn’t live. It simply means this event never happened, as far as we can tell.

  Think of an analogy. Suppose Barack Obama’s birth certificate turns out to have been altered away from what it really said. (I don’t believe it was, not for a second, but suppose it was.) What relevance would that have for the question of whether Barack Obama was born? One would probably want to look for other evidence of whether he came into the world, and the wording of the birth certificate is irrelevant to the question.

  The manuscripts of the New Testament do indeed have large numbers of variations in them: alternative ways of wording a verse or a passage; omissions of words or sentences; additional insertions of words and sentences here and there. But the problem is not of such a scope as to make it impossible to have any idea what the ancient Christian authors wrote. If we had no clue what was originally in the writings of Paul or in the Gospels, this objection might carry more weight. But there is not a textual critic on the planet who thinks this, since not a shred of evidence leads in this direction. And I don’t know even of any mythicist who is willing to make this claim. As a result, in the vast majority of cases, the wording of these authors is not in dispute. And where it is, it rarely has anything at all to do with the question of whether Jesus existed.

  We Do Not Know the Authors of the Gospels

  It is also true that we do not know who wrote the Gospels. Although they are attributed to two of Jesus’s disciples (Matthew the tax collector and John the beloved disciple) and to two companions of the apostles (Mark the secretary for Peter and Luke the traveling companion of Paul) these ascriptions are almost certainly wrong. Something similar obtains for most of the rest of the New Testament. Of the twenty-seven books found in the New Testament, only eight of them almost certainly go back to the authors to whom they are traditionally ascribed. Either the others are all misattributed to people who did not in fact write them, or they were actually forged, that is, written by authors claiming to be famous people while knowing full well they were someone else.

  Again, I have dealt with this issue more fully elsewhere and do not need to go into all the details here.2 The one thing we can say with some assurance about the Gospel writers is that even though Jesus’s own followers were lower-class Aramaic-speaking peasants from rural Galilee, who were almost certainly illiterate, the Gospels were written by highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians who lived outside Palestine. They were not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

  But once again, this is irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus lived. In 1983 the famous, or rather infamous, Hitler Diaries came to public view, and they were immediately authenticated by experts. But they were soon shown to be forgeries, and the forger, a German scoundrel named Konrad Kujau, was then caught red-handed. He had been paid millions for the volumes and had done it for the money. The fact that he forged these sources about Hitler, however, has no bearing on the question of whether Hitler existed. That has to be decided on other grounds. In the case of the Gospels and Jesus, even though we don’t know who the authors of these books were, we can still use them as historical sources for knowing about Jesus, as I argued in the earlier chapters.3 The Gospels are valuable to this end whether they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John or by Fred, Harry, Sam, and Jeff.

  The Gospels Are Filled with Discrepancies and Contradictions

  It is absolutely true, in my judgment, that the New Testament accounts of Jesus are filled with discrepancies and contradictions in matters both large and small. Anyone who doubts that simply has to compare very carefully a story found in one of the Gospels with the same story found in another. You can pick any set of stories you like. Compare the genealogy of Jesus found in Matthew with the one found in Luke. They simply cannot be reconciled (they are both genealogies of Joseph, but who is his father, grandfather, great-grandfather?). Neither can the stories of Jesus’s birth (did his parents flee with him to Egypt, as in Matthew, or did they instead return to Nazareth a month after he was born, as in Luke?).4 Neither can those of his death (was he crucified the afternoon before the Passover meal was eaten, as in John, or the morning after it was eaten, as in Mark?) or of his resurrection (were his disciples instructed to go north to Galilee and it was there that they met Jesus raised from the dead, as in Matthew, or were they instructed not to leave Jerusalem so that they stayed put, not only to see Jesus raised but to spend months there, as in Luke?).

  Sometimes the discrepancies are not simply about small details but about big issues. Did Jesus call himself God? It seems a rather important issue because if he did, one would have to figure out what to make of his claim. Was he crazy? Hopelessly self-important? Or possibly right? It is striking, however, that of all the Gospels, only John, the last to be written, reports that Jesus called himself God. If the historical Jesus really did spend his ministry revealing his divine identity to his disciples, as he does in John, isn’t it a little strange that Matthew, Mark, and Luke never get around to saying so? Did they think it was unimportant? Or did they just forget that part?

  Once again I have dealt with the discrepancies and the contradictions of the New Testament Gospels in another context and so do not need to delve more deeply into them here.5 At this point it is enough to reiterate that these issues are more or less irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus actually lived. The contradictions in our sources will make it difficul
t, or at least interesting, when we want to know what he really said and did. But the case that I built for the existence of Jesus in the previous chapters does not hinge on the Gospels being internally consistent or free from discrepancy. Again, think of an analogy. You will get very different accounts of the presidency of Bill Clinton depending on whom you ask. But the differences have no bearing on whether he existed.

  The Gospels Contain Nonhistorical Materials

  It is true that the Gospels are riddled with other kinds of historical problems and that they relate events that almost certainly did not happen. Think of Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth. Unlike the Gospel of Matthew, Luke indicates that Jesus’s parents lived originally in Nazareth, in the northern part of Galilee (Bethlehem is in the south, near Jerusalem). According to Luke’s story, a tax was imposed on “all the world” by Caesar Augustus, and everyone had to register for a census. Since Joseph’s distant ancestor David was born in Bethlehem, that is where he had to register. While he was there his betrothed, Mary, gave birth.

  There is no way this can be historically correct. There was no worldwide (or even empire-wide) census in the days of Augustus, let alone a census in which everyone in the Roman Empire had to register in the town that their ancestors had come from a thousand years earlier, as I explain in another context.6 And certainly no such census could have happened when “Quirinius was the governor of Syria,” as Luke claims, if Jesus was born when Herod was king: Quirinius did not become governor until ten years after Herod’s death.