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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  This Law was written down and could be found in the five books of Moses, which together are often simply called the Torah, the Hebrew word for law (or direction or guidance or instruction). These books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—describe how God created the world, chose Israel to be his people, guided the lives of their ancestors, saved them from their lives of slavery, and gave them the Law. The Law itself is spelled out in great detail in these books—not just the Ten Commandments, but all the laws showing how to serve God and live with one another. Keeping this Law was widely seen as not only the greatest obligation but also the greatest joy. It included directions about circumcision—the “sign” that the Jews were chosen and distinct from all the nations—kosher food laws, Sabbath observance, festivals, and procedures to be followed in worshipping God.

  The worship of God involved, among other things, sacrifices of animals and other foodstuffs to God at different times and for various occasions. In the days of Jesus it was almost universally thought that these sacrifices had to be performed at the central sanctuary, as dictated in the Torah, which was located in the capital city of the Jews, Jerusalem. This sanctuary was the famous Jewish Temple, originally built by King Solomon but then destroyed by the Babylonian armies in the sixth century BCE and later rebuilt. In the days of Jesus the Temple was an enormous and spectacular structure that played a major social, political, and economic—not to mention religious—role in the lives of Jews, especially those living in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas of Judea. It was run by priests who inherited their sacred duties from their families. One could not aspire to be priest; one was either born into a priestly family or not. Priests ran the Temple and all its functions, including the sacrifices of animals prescribed in the Torah.

  Outside Jerusalem it was not allowed to perform these sacrifices, so Jews from around the world came to Jerusalem, if they could afford the time and expense, to participate in the worship of God at the Temple. This especially happened during the set annual festivals, such as the Passover, a celebration that commemorated God’s deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt back in the days of Moses. This does not mean, however, that Jews outside Jerusalem could not worship God. They certainly did worship, but not through sacrifices. Instead, communities of Jews throughout the Roman world gathered in synagogues, local meetings where they would hear the sacred scriptures (especially the Torah) read and interpreted and where they would offer up their prayers to God. Jews would gather together in synagogues on their weekly day of rest, the Sabbath, a day set apart from all others.

  These are some of the key aspects of what we might call “shared Judaism” in the days of Jesus: the belief in one God; the covenant he had made with them, including the circumcision of male infants; the Law he had provided; the Temple in Jerusalem where sacrifices were to be made; the observance of Sabbath; and synagogues scattered throughout the world where Jews would meet to discuss their traditions and offer prayers to God.

  Different Jews and Jewish groups emphasized different aspects of their shared religion, however, and as is true of almost every large religious group today (Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, you name it) there were wide-ranging and deep disagreements about major points. We know of four such groups in Palestine in the days of Jesus, based on the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, whom we met before as our principal source of knowledge of first-century Palestinian Judaism. Josephus indicates that there were four major Jewish sects in the days of Jesus: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and a group that he calls the Fourth Philosophy. It should not be thought that every Jew belonged to one or another of these groups. On the contrary, most people didn’t belong to any. It is not, then, like modern political parties in America today (“Are you a Democrat, Republican, or Libertarian?”); it is more like civic organizations or secret societies (“Are you a member of the Elks or the Rotary Club? Were you in Skull and Bones?”).5

  The Pharisees

  The Pharisees are probably the best known and least understood of the four Jewish groups mentioned by Josephus. Largely because of the nasty things said about them in parts of the New Testament (for example, Matthew 23), most Christians seem to think that Pharisees’ chief defining characteristic was that they were hypocrites. In fact, in English dictionaries you will often find hypocrite as one of the definitions of Pharisee. I’ve always thought this is rather odd. Pharisees were not required to be hypocritical.

  The Pharisees were a highly religious group that stressed the importance of keeping the Law God had given. There is obviously nothing wrong with that from a religious perspective. If God gave you a law, you are well advised to keep it. The problem with the Law of Moses, however, is that it is not very detailed in places. In fact, it is notoriously vague and ambiguous, not like, for instance, the American legal code. For example, the Ten Commandments indicate that the Sabbath day is to be honored and kept holy, but the Law does not go into great detail about how to do that. The Pharisees were intent on making sure they did what God wanted. But if the Law itself does not say how, then one has to come up with some guidelines.

  Suppose it is agreed that honoring the day of rest means that on that day no work should be done, as the Torah states. Fair enough. But what constitutes work? Is it work to harvest your fields? Yes, probably so. So you should not harvest on the Sabbath. What if you don’t work all day but just go out into the field to harvest enough to have a bite to eat: is that work? Well, yes, that’s virtually the same thing as working all day except you’re not doing it as long. So that too should be forbidden even if the Law does not explicitly say so. What about if you are in your grain fields on the Sabbath and you knock off some of the grain just by walking through? Is that the same as harvesting? That’s the kind of question that does not have an easy answer: some people might say, no way, and others might say, yes indeed. And so different Jewish teachers argued about such things.

  Their arguments were not meant to make life difficult. They were meant to help everyone know how to keep the Law. Keeping the Law was the main thing. The Pharisees developed a number of interpretations of the Law that were intended to make sure that Jews followed what Moses commanded. These interpretations came to be known as the “oral law.” Pharisees thought that if you followed the oral law (for example, by not walking through your grain fields on the Sabbath), then you were certain not to violate the written law of Moses. And that was the point of the religion, so it was all to the good.

  We don’t know as much about Pharisees in the days of Jesus as we would like since none of them left any writings and we have to use later sources—very critically—to figure out what they stood for. But they are significant in the pages of the Gospels because Jesus is often in conflict with them. Jesus apparently did not think that being overly concerned about keeping the Law to the nth degree is what really mattered to God. He did think it was important to do what God commanded, but not in the ways that mattered to the Pharisees. And so they had some serious fallings-out. But it is important to remember that when Jesus opposed Pharisaic interpretations of the Law—for example, over what could and could not be done on the Sabbath—he was not opposing Judaism. He was simply opposing one interpretation of Judaism. Other Jews as well disagreed with the Pharisees.

  The Sadducees

  The real power players in Palestine in Jesus’s day were not the Pharisees—despite their prominence in the Gospels—but the Sadducees. Again we are handicapped in our ability to know much about the group because we have no writings that clearly come from any of them. What is certain, in any event, is that they had a different set of concerns from the Pharisees and that they were the ones who held power in Judea.

  The Sadducees were closely connected with the priests who ran the Temple cult, and it is widely thought that many of them were themselves priests. Unlike the Pharisees, most Sadducees were apparently wealthy aristocrats. From their number was chosen the “high priest,” who was the ultimate a
uthority for all things religious and civic in Jerusalem. The high priest was the chief liaison with the Roman ruling authorities, and it appears that Sadducees were by and large willing to compromise with the Romans in order to keep the peace and enjoy the freedom of exercising their religious prerogatives. Contrary to what is widely thought, Romans were not much of a physical presence in Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, most of the time during the days of Jesus. The Roman governor, Pilate, had his headquarters on the coast in Caesarea, where he kept his small contingent of troops. The real armies were up in Syria. There was no need for a greater Roman presence in the land so long as there was peace and the taxes kept rolling in.

  As was their wont throughout the provinces, the Romans allowed the Jews of Judea to operate more or less under local rule. Except for instances of capital punishment, Romans appear to have let the local authorities do what needed to be done. The local Jewish council, which was authorized to run the political and civic affairs in Jerusalem, was called the Sanhedrin. It was headed by the high priest and appears to have comprised mainly other Sadducees, since these tended to be the wealthy and well-connected Jews.

  In terms of religious commitments, the Sadducees placed no stock in the oral laws developed by Pharisees. They were instead interested strictly in what the Torah itself commanded, in particular with respect to the worship of God. Their focus was on the Temple in Jerusalem and on properly following the commandments of Moses concerning how the Temple cult was to be run and its sacrifices carried out. As we will see, even though Jesus apparently had a number of controversies with Pharisees during his public ministry, it was the Sadducees who spelled his demise. He openly showed opposition to the Temple and the sacrifices being performed there, and it was the local ruling authorities—the Sanhedrin and its Sadducees—who took greatest offense. They appear to have been the ones who had Jesus arrested and turned over for trial to the Roman governor Pilate, who was in town to keep peace during the incendiary times of the Passover festival.

  The Essenes

  Ironically, the one Jewish group from Jesus’s day that we are best informed about happens to be the one that is not mentioned in the New Testament. We know about the Essenes from Jewish writers such as Josephus but even more important from an entire library of their own writings first discovered by pure serendipity by a wandering shepherd boy in 1947. These are the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of writings from roughly the time of Jesus and the preceding years that was apparently produced by and for Essenes. One group of Essenes lived in a monastic-like community in a place known as Qumran, just west of the northern part of the Dead Sea in what is now Israel.6

  A number of different kinds of books are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some are copies of the Hebrew Bible (older by a thousand years than the copies we had prior to the 1947 discovery); others are commentaries on scripture that indicate that the predictions of the prophets were coming true in the community’s own day; others are books of hymns and psalms used in community worship; others are apocalyptic descriptions of what will happen in the end times; others are manuals that describe and prescribe the behavior of members of the community in their social and religious lives together. I should stress that nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls is directly related to Christianity: Jesus is not mentioned in the scrolls; neither is John the Baptist or any of the early followers of Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish books through and through, with nothing Christian in them. But they are invaluable for understanding Jesus and his early followers because they are writings produced in Jesus’s own day, or in the years immediately preceding, by Jews living in approximately the same location.

  The term Essene never occurs in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But Qumran was located precisely where other ancient sources indicated that there was an Essene community, and the writings of the scrolls coincide well with what we otherwise know about the Essenes. Jews in this community were in serious conflict with both Pharisees and Sadducees. They believed that all other Jews were corrupt and had misunderstood and misapplied the Jewish Law, to the degree that they had defiled the Temple and rendered the worship of God there invalid. To preserve their own holiness, this particular group of Essenes (there were other Essenes, but we know less about them) went off into the wilderness to live a rather monastic life together, maintaining their own purity, removed from the impurity of Jewish society at large.

  In no small part they did so because they believed they were living at the end of the age. God would soon send two messiahs to deliver his people, one a priest who would instruct all the faithful about how to follow God’s law and the other a political leader who would run the civic affairs of the people. In the view of the Essenes, a massive war was soon coming in which God and his people would emerge triumphant over the filthy Romans, and God’s kingdom would then come to earth.

  Jesus himself was not an Essene. Nothing connects either him or John the Baptist to the group. In fact, just the opposite. John, as we will see, was concerned not with preserving his own purity but with preaching repentance to sinners to get them to turn from their wicked ways. And Jesus scandalized the highly religious Jews invested in maintaining pure lives removed from the uncleanness of the world around them because he preferred to associate with sinners, just the opposite of the Essenes at Qumran. But Jesus did have something in common with them. He too thought the end of the age was imminent and that God would soon set up his kingdom on earth.

  The Fourth Philosophy

  The final group of Jews mentioned by Josephus is not given a name. He calls it simply the Fourth Philosophy (to differentiate it from the other three). But its overarching views are clear and unambiguous. This was a group made up of Jews who thought that the Roman overlords had wrongfully taken possession of the Promised Land. This group—or these groups, all lumped together by Josephus—believed that God wanted them to take up the sword to oppose the Romans and foment a political and military revolt. This was not a secular movement; it had deep religious roots. In the view of those who adhered to this philosophy, God himself had called for action, and just as he had driven out the foul Canaanites from the land under the leadership of Joshua in the Hebrew Bible (see the book of Joshua), so he would do it again in their own day. God would fight for the faithful Jews, and he would reinstate Israel as a sovereign state in their own land ruled by his own chosen one.

  Members of this Fourth Philosophy, then, were not ultimately concerned about the oral laws being developed by the Pharisees to help them keep the commandments of Moses in precise detail, and they did not care about maintaining their own ritual purity in the face of the uncleanness of the world around them, like the Essenes. They were especially opposed to Sadducees, who were seen as collaborators with the foul Romans who had devastated the land and taken what was not theirs. The chief focus of this Fourth Philosophy was, in fact, the land, promised to Israel by God. The land needed to be retaken, and it was to happen as it had in days of old, by military force.

  Some scholars, as I have pointed out, thought that Jesus too preached an armed rebellion against the Romans. But that does not seem to be the dominant theme throughout the earliest traditions we have about him. It is not that Jesus was a collaborationist like the Sadducees. Quite the contrary, he too opposed both them and their Roman masters. But he did not appear to think that the solution lay in armed resistance. He appears instead to have been an apocalypticist who thought that God himself would overthrow the Roman armies, not by military action but in a cosmic act of judgment in which a divine savior figure would arrive from heaven to destroy the armies of the enemy and to set up a new kingdom here on earth.

  In his apocalyptic views, then, Jesus was probably more like the Essenes than the other Jewish groups. But he was not an Essene, and he held many different views as well. His views were molded, in particular, by his association with John the Baptist, an apocalyptic preacher who anticipated the imminent end of the age. Before discussing that association, we need to learn more generally about Jewish apoc
alypticism, for it was adhered to and proclaimed by a wide range of Jews in the days of Jesus.

  Jewish Apocalypticism

  THE WORLDVIEW THAT SCHOLARS call apocalypticism developed in Jewish history before the time of Jesus, and I have discussed the historical details elsewhere.7 Suffice it to say here that about a century and a half before Jesus was born, a number of Jews became radically distraught with the course of political and military affairs. The nation of Judea had been controlled by foreign powers for centuries—first the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, then the Persians, then the Greeks, and then the Syrians. In resistance to Syrian atrocities, in 167 BCE an indigenous uprising occurred headed by a Jewish family known as the Maccabees. This Maccabean Revolt eventually led to an independent state of Judea, which lasted for nearly a century until the Romans conquered the land in 63 BCE.

  Along with political woes before the revolt came a kind of theological crisis. For centuries certain Jewish prophets had declared that the nation was suffering because God was punishing it for turning away from him (thus prophets such as Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and—well, just about all the prophets of the Hebrew Bible). But in this period, under the Syrians, many Jews had turned back to God and were doing precisely what he instructed them to do in the Torah. And yet they were suffering worse than ever. How could that be?

  Jewish apocalyptic thinking arose in the context. It came to be thought that the suffering of the people of God was not a punishment for sin inflicted by God himself. On the contrary, it was punishment for righteousness, inflicted by forces of evil in the world, which were aligned against God. The first clear literary expression of such a view is found in the book of Daniel, the last book of the Hebrew Bible to be written (around 165 BCE?). The view eventually became widely popular among Jews, as their woes continued. In the days of Jesus it was a view held by Pharisees, Essenes, and prophetic groups such as the one headed by John the Baptist.