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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  This is the view, of course, that the Gospel writers inherited from the oral and written traditions on which they based their accounts. Jesus is not called God in Q, M, L, or any of the oral accounts that we can trace from the synoptic Gospels. But we can go yet earlier than this. As I pointed out, we have very primitive views of Jesus expressed in such pre-Pauline traditions as the one he cites in Romans 1:3–4, where Jesus is said to have become the son of God (not God) at his resurrection. That is, at Jesus’s resurrection God adopted him into sonship. So too with the speeches of Acts, which we examined earlier (see Acts 2:36; 13:32–33). God exalted Jesus and made him his son, the Christ, at the resurrection.

  This is in all probability the earliest understanding of Jesus among his followers. While he was living they thought that perhaps he would be the future messiah (who also, as we have seen, was not God). But this view was radically disconfirmed when he was arrested by the authorities, put on trial, and then tortured and crucified. This was just the opposite fate from the one that the messiah was supposed to enjoy. For some reason, however, the followers of Jesus (or at least some of them) came to think that he had been raised from the dead. This reconfirmed in a major way what they had thought of Jesus—that he was someone special before God. But it also forced his followers to rethink who he was. Some began to think of him as the messiah who had to suffer for sins, who had gone obediently to his death knowing that God wanted him to do so, but who was raised by God from the dead to show that he really was the one who enjoyed God’s special favor. And so God exalted him to heaven, where he is now waiting to return in order to bring in God’s kingdom as the coming messiah.

  One passage that mythicists often appeal to, however, may on the surface seem to suggest that Paul, writing before the Gospels, understood Jesus as God who died and rose again (comparable to dying and rising pagan deities). This is the much-debated “hymn”—as it is called—found in Philippians 2:6–11. There is probably no other passage in the entire New Testament, and certainly none in the writings of Paul, that has had as much interpretive ink spilled over it. Scholars have written large books just on these six verses alone.11 Even though mythicists typically treat it as unambiguous evidence of their views, the reality is that there is almost nothing unambiguous in the passage. Every word and phrase has been pored over and debated by scholars using the most sophisticated tools of analysis that are available. And still there is no consensus on what the passage means. But one thing is clear: it does not mean what mythicists typically claim it means. It does not portray Jesus in the guise of a pagan dying and rising god, even if that is what, on a superficial reading, it may appear to be about.

  First I need to quote the passage in full. (It is important to recognize that scholars have heated and prolonged debates about even how to translate many of the key terms.)

  Have this mind in yourselves which is also in Christ Jesus,

  who although he was in the form of God,

  did not regard being equal with God something to be seized.

  But he emptied himself,

  taking on the form of a slave,

  and coming in the likeness of humans.

  And being found in the appearance as a human

  he humbled himself

  and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

  Therefore also God highly exalted him [literally: hyperexalted him],

  and gave to him the name

  that is above every name.

  That at the name of Jesus,

  every knee should bow

  of things in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.

  And every tongue should confess

  that Jesus Christ is Lord

  to the glory of God the Father.

  Here then is one of the most intriguing accounts of Christ in the New Testament. I cannot even begin to give a full interpretation of the passage here. But I can say something about the passage, broadly, before making a couple of key interpretive points.

  There is wide agreement that the passage appears to be poetic—possibly some kind of hymn (this is what everyone used to think) or a creed (this is more plausible)—and that Paul appears to be quoting it rather than composing it. But even this is debated, as scholars dispute whether it was written by someone else before Paul drafted this letter to the Christians in Philippi or whether Paul himself was its author.12 It is debated how to divide the passage. In my translation I have divided it in half, with the first half consisting of three stanzas of three lines, each talking about the descent or humbling of Christ, and the second half consisting of three stanzas of three lines, each talking about the ascent or exaltation of Christ. That is one possibility. Many, many others have been proposed by fine scholars, many of whom have studied this passage far more than I have, even though I have studied, thought about, ruminated on, and read about this passage for well over thirty years.13

  For the purposes of my discussion here I simply want to make a couple of very basic points. One interpretation of the passage—the one that will strike many first-time readers as the only obvious one—is that it portrays Christ as a preexistent divine being who came to earth, was crucified, and was then exalted back to heaven. That may be the right way to read the passage, but as I’ve said, it is hotly debated. Even if that is the best way to read the passage, however, it does not support the idea that originally Christ was seen as a dying-rising god, for several reasons.

  First, even though it says that before humbling himself Christ was in the “form of God,” that does not mean that he was God. Divinity was his “form,” just as later in the passage he took on the “form” of a “slave.” That does not mean that he was permanently and always a slave; it was simply the outward form he assumed. Moreover, when it says that he “did not regard equality with God something to be seized,” it is hotly debated whether that means that he did not want to “retain” what he already had or to “grab” something that he did not have. In favor of the latter interpretation is the fact that after he humbled himself, Christ is said to have been hyperexalted, that is, exalted even higher than he was before. That must mean that before he humbled himself he was not already equal with God. Otherwise, how could he later be exalted even higher? What would be “higher” than God? That would suggest that even though he was originally in God’s form, he was not fully God at the beginning; being fully God was something that he refused to grasp.

  But if Christ was in the form of God without being equal with God, what was he? Here scholars have had a field day. One of the most popular interpretations of the passage may not have occurred to you at all. A large number of scholars think that the passage does not imagine Christ existing as a divine being with God in heaven, coming to earth to die, and then being exalted even higher afterward. They think instead that the passage is talking about Christ as the “second Adam,” one who was like the first man, Adam, as described in the book of Genesis, but who acted in just the opposite way, leading to just the opposite result.14

  In the book of Genesis, when God creates “man,” Adam is said to have been made in the “image” of God (Genesis 1:26). The terms image and form are sometimes used synonymously in the Old Testament. Is Christ in the “form” of God the same way that Adam was? If so, what did Adam do? He wanted to be “equal with God,” and so he grabbed for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Christ, by contrast, did not think that equality with God “was something to be grabbed.” His actions were just the opposite of Adam’s. Because of sin, Adam was destined to die—as were all of his descendants. Christ, by contrast, explicitly chose to die for the sake of those who had to die because of Adam. And because he did not grab for equality with God but died out of obedience, God did just the opposite for Christ that he did for Adam. Adam and his descendants were cursed. Christ was highly exalted above all else. So high was he exalted that it is at the name of Jesus that every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess.

  This final part of the passage is
actually a quotation from Isaiah 45:23, which says that it is to God alone that every knee shall bow and tongue confess. However you interpret the rest of the passage, this conclusion is stunning. Christ will receive the adoration that is by rights God’s alone. That is how highly God exalted him in reward for his act of obedience.

  If this interpretation is correct, then the beginning of the passage is describing Christ not as a preexistent divine being but as very much as a human being. But even if it is not correct, the passage begins by describing Christ, not as God, but as a being in the form of God. Another option is that this is describing Christ as a preexistent angelic being. Angels in the Old Testament are God’s messengers who can appear like God, as in passages in the Old Testament where an “angel of the Lord” appears and is actually called God (as in Exodus 3—the passage about Moses and the Burning Bush). In these cases, though, the angels may appear like God (in the “form” of God), but they are not actually God. They are God’s messengers, his angels. It is striking that a number of Jewish traditions speak of an angel being exalted to the level of God, sitting on a throne next to that of the Almighty.15

  However one interprets the beginning of this passage in Philippians, one thing is clear. It does not describe a dying and rising god. Thinking that it does so requires the reader to ignore what the text actually says in the second stanza. What is most significant is that Christ—whether a preexistent divine being, Adam, or an angel (I prefer the final interpretation myself)—“emptied himself” before dying on the cross. That is to say, he deprived himself of whatever status he had when he was in the “form of god,” and he took on a completely different form, that of a “slave.” It is not as a god that he dies, but as a slave. And he is not raised as God. He is exalted to a position worthy of equal worship with God only after he is raised. That is when he is awarded divine attributes and given divine worship. This passage is thus not talking about a god who dies and then is raised, it is talking about the death of a humbled slave and his exaltation to a position of divine authority and grandeur.

  The most important point I want to make, however, is this. Even those scholars who think that Paul inherited this hymn (or creed) do not think that it was the oldest form of belief about Jesus. Even if it predates Paul, it does not represent the earliest Christian understanding of Christ. However we interpret this passage, the earliest Christian traditions point in a completely different direction, emphasizing Jesus’s full humanness and saying nothing at all about his being God. The divinity of Christ is a relative latecomer to the scene of Christian theological reflections.

  The broad views about Jesus in the early Christian traditions are otherwise clear. As I indicated, the earliest view was almost certainly that God exalted Jesus and made him his son when he raised him from the dead (this is roughly the view of the Philippians hymn as well, of course). And so the speeches of Acts, which must date well before any of our Gospels, and almost certainly predate the writings of Paul himself, indicate that it was at the resurrection that Jesus was made the Lord, the Christ, the Son of God (Acts 2:36; 13:32–33).16 That is the view of the creed that Paul quotes in Romans 1:3–4 as well.

  Some Christians were not content with the idea that Jesus was the Son of God only at his resurrection, however, and came to think that he must have been the Son of God for his entire public ministry. And so we have traditions that arose indicating that Jesus became the Son of God at his baptism. That may be the view still found in our earliest Gospel, Mark, who begins his narrative with Jesus being baptized and hearing the voice of God from heaven declaring him his son. In Mark Jesus is certainly not God. In fact, in one passage he clearly indicates that he is not to be thought of as God (Mark 10:17–18; a man calls Jesus “good,” and Jesus objects because “no one is good but God alone”).

  Eventually some Christians came to think that Jesus must have been the Son of God not only during his public ministry but for his entire life. And so they began telling stories about how he was born as the Son of God. We find this view in Matthew and Luke, where Jesus’s mother is in fact a virgin so that he is in a more literal sense the Son of God because the Spirit of God is responsible for making Mary pregnant (see Luke 1:35).

  As time went on, even this view failed to satisfy some Christians, who thought that Jesus was not simply a being who came into the world as the Son of God but someone who had existed even before being born. This is a view not suggested by either Matthew or Luke (they appear to think that when he came into existence at conception). And so we come to our final canonical Gospel, the Gospel of John, which indicates that Jesus is the Word of God who existed with God from eternity past, through whom God created the world, who has now become a human (John 1:1–18). But I need to stress: this is a view found only in our last Gospel.17 It eventually became the standard view among Christians and was written into Christian statements of faith: Christ is himself God. But it was not the earliest Christian view, not by a long shot. Christians, then, did not invent Jesus as a dying and rising god. In the oldest form of the faith they did not consider him to be God. That belief developed only later.

  Instead, as we have seen, the earliest Christians considered Jesus to be the crucified messiah. Even though Jesus is never explicitly called God in any of our early Gospels—or in the traditions they were based on or even in Paul—he was almost everywhere called something else. He was called the Christ. Even the Philippians hymn, Paul tells us, is about “Christ Jesus.” So frequently was Jesus called Christ in the oldest Christian traditions that already by the time of Paul, “Christ” had become Jesus’s name (Jesus Christ, not Jesus God). Jesus is called Christ in Paul, Mark, M, L, John, Josephus, Pliny, Tacitus, and so on. It is important to remember what this term meant in ancient Judaism. It referred—however it was interpreted—to a future powerful deliverer of God’s people from their enemies.

  And so the key question to ask of the early traditions is not why the earliest Christians called Jesus God (since they didn’t), but why they called him the Christ. He was, after all, known by everyone to have been crucified, and the messiah—whatever else you might say about him—was not supposed to be crucified. Just the opposite. The early Christians did not ask why God had been crucified. They asked why Christ had been crucified. They did not derive the ideas of Jesus’s death from pagan myth. They knew he had died, and they believed, in Jewish apocalyptic fashion, that he had been raised. But the fact that they called him the Christ shows they did not derive the ideas of his death from Jewish legend and myth either since Jews had no conception of a crucified messiah. Thus the conclusion that has been reached by historians far and wide appears to be the right one: Jesus must have really existed and must have really been crucified. Those who believed in him thought that he was the messiah anyway. And they redefined what the term messiah meant in order to make sense of it. They did not invent the idea of Jesus, however. Had they done that, they never would have invented him as a crucified messiah. They were forced to come up with the idea of the crucified messiah because they knew there really was a man Jesus who was crucified, yet they wanted to maintain that he was the messiah.

  And so Jesus was not invented as a Jewish version of the pagan dying and rising god. There are very serious doubts over whether any pagans believed in such gods. Few scholars wonder if Jews believed in them, however. There is no evidence to locate such beliefs among Palestinian Jews of the first century. But even more important, Christians did not see Jesus as a dying and rising god because they at first did not even see him as God. The divinity of Christ was a later theological development. The earliest Christians saw him as a dying and rising messiah.

  Was Jesus Invented as a Personification of Jewish Wisdom?

  NO ONE HAS BEEN a more enduring spokesperson for a mythicist view of Christ than G. A. Wells. For over thirty-five years Wells has insisted that the Christ of Christian tradition did not exist but was invented. He does not think, however, that the majority of mythicists are right that Christ was invente
d as a Jewish version of some pagan dying-rising gods. In his opinion the myths used to generate Christ were Jewish. Specifically, Christ was created as a personification of the mythical figure known in Jewish texts as “Wisdom.”

  As we will see in greater detail later, Wells also disagrees with most other mythicists because he thinks that there really was a man Jesus. But for Wells, Jesus had very little, or nothing, to do with the myth about Christ. He was not the Galilean preacher and healer of the first century. That figure is the creation of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus was a completely unknown and obscure Jewish figure who lived over a hundred years earlier. Christ, by contrast, was an invention of a Jewish sect of the first century.18

  In rough outline this view is similar to that earlier held by Archibald Robertson, who suggested the following: “May not a solution of the dispute [between those who insist that Jesus did not exist and those who claim he did] lie in recognition of the fact that the two parties are arguing on different subjects—that there are indeed, two different Jesuses, a mythical and an historical, having nothing in common but the name, and that the two have been fused into one?”19 In Robertson’s view, Paul was “a Gnostic missionary who, even if he knew anything of a Messiah executed in Palestine, cared nothing for him or his followers.” For Robertson, it is Mark who effected the fusion of the two Jesuses. And so the historical Jesus did exist. But “we know next to nothing about this Jesus.”

  Wells takes this ball and runs with it, a considerable distance. Wells thinks that the early Christians who invented Christ were particularly influenced by Jewish traditions that spoke of God’s Wisdom as if it existed as an actual divine entity, distinct from but obviously closely related to, God himself. Wisdom preexisted with God and was used by God to create the world. Wells is right that this is indeed a known figure from Jewish traditions, appearing as far back as the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. The most famous passage occurs in Proverbs 8, where Wisdom itself is speaking: