Goldstein, Morris. Jesus in the Jewish Tradition. New York: Macmillan, 1950.
Goodacre, Mark. The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002.
Harvey, Anthony E. Jesus and the Constraints of History. London: Duckworth, 1982.
Herberg, R. Travers. Christianity in Talmud and Midrash. New York: Ktav, 1903.
Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996.
Kloppenborg, John. The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.
Marshall, I. Howard. I Believe in the Historical Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977.
Meier, John. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 4 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1991, 1994, 2001, 2009.
Merz, Annette, and Gerd Theissen. The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.
Sanders, E. P. The Historical Figure of Jesus. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1993.
———. Jesus and Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.
———. Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE. London: SCM Press and Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1983.
Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. First published in German in 1906.
Segal, Alan F. Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism. Leiden: Brill, 1977.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990.
Smith, Morton. Jesus the Magician. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978.
Stanton, Graham. The Gospels and Jesus. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989.
Strauss, David Friedrich. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972. First published in German in 1835–36.
Vermès, Géza. Jesus in His Jewish Context. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
———. Jesus in the Jewish World. London: SCM Press, 2011.
———. Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels. London: Collins, 1973.
Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.
NOTES
Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Mythical View of Jesus
1. Earl Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 2009), vii–viii. This is a much-expanded and somewhat revised edition of Doherty’s earlier book, which is sometimes looked upon as a modern classic in the field of mythicism, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 1999).
2. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, ed. John Bowden (1906; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 478. Quoted with approbation by Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Co., 2004), 166. Harpur realizes that Schweitzer does not mean that Jesus never existed, even though the way he cites the passage may well leave the unwary reader with that impression.
3. For fuller summaries of these early works, see Schweitzer, Quest, chaps. 22 and 23 (he added these chapters on mythicists only after the success of his first edition) and the brief but helpful overview of Archibald Robertson, Jesus: Myth or History? (London: Watts & Co., 1946). See also Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 1.
4. See Schweitzer, Quest, chap. 11.
5. J. M. Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. (London: Watts & Co., 1910).
6. See Schweitzer, Quest, 381–89.
7. Robert Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003); Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011).
8. Frank Zindler, Religions and Scriptures, vol. 1 of Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Won’t Reason (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011).
9. Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
10. A. Robertson, Jesus: Myth or History?, 107.
11. George A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 2nd ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986). See also the following of his writings, most of which do not significantly alter or advance his argument (but see note 20): The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988); The Jesus Legend (Peru, IL: Carus, 1996); Cutting Jesus Down to Size: What Higher Criticism Has Achieved and Where It Leaves Christianity (Chicago: Open Court, 2009); “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?” Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 19–25.
12. A. Robertson, Jesus: Myth or History?, x.
13. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 1:87.
14. I. Howard Marshall does devote a longer footnote to the question, I Believe in the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).
15. Mythicists are taken seriously by the two German New Testament scholars Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 122–23.
16. D. M. Murdock, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited, 1999).
17. Murdock, Christ Conspiracy, 21.
18. Murdock, Christ Conspiracy, 154.
19. Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 2.
20. For a good, direct, and recent statement of the mythicist view, see George A. Wells, “Independent Confirmation.” As will be clear, in one important respect Wells differs from most other mythicists: rather than tracing the invention of the historical Jesus back to the myths about the pagan gods, Wells thinks that it derived from Jewish wisdom traditions, in which God’s wisdom was thought to have been a personalized being who was with him at the creation and then came to visit humans (see, for example, Proverbs 8).
Chapter 2: Non-Christian Sources for the Life of Jesus
1. Robert Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011), 15.
2. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 25, emphasis his.
3. The only indication in the New Testament Gospels that Jesus could write is in the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8, where he writes on the ground while dealing with the woman’s accusers (in the context of saying, “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her”). Unfortunately, this passage was not originally in the Gospel of John but was added later. See my discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005), 63–65. There are only a couple of later legends of Jesus writing, including the famous exchange of letters that he has with King Abgar of Edessa, who sent him a request to be healed, to which Jesus graciously replied in writing. I include a translation of both letters in the book I published with my colleague Zlatko Plese, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 413–17.
4. Throughout this book I will be using the term pagan in the non-derogatory sense used by historians to refer to anyone who subscribed to any of the many polytheistic religions of antiquity—that is, anyone who was neither Jewish nor Christian. The term when used by historians does not have any negative connotations.
5. See the article on “Pontius Pilate” by Daniel Schwartz in the Anchor Bible
Dictionary, ed. David Noel Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:395–401.
6. William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989).
7. Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).
8. On the question of the sources of the Gospels, see my fuller discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), chaps. 8 and 12.
9. For a collection of them, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
10. See the discussion in Hezser, Jewish Literacy, esp. 422–26.
11. For an accessible translation of this letter, along with translations of the other Roman sources that I mention in this chapter, see Robert M. Grant, Second-Century Christianity: A Collection of Fragments, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 3–12.
12. Representative of this view is Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Co., 2004), 162.
13. There is a large literature on Josephus. Of particular use for the topics I will be dealing with in this book, see Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002).
14. See the discussion in John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Reconsidering the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 59–69.
15. See Meier, Marginal Jew, 59–69.
16. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 534; his entire discussion can be found on 533–86.
17. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 535.
18. For two of the more important studies of the apologists, see R. M. Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988), and Eugene Gallagher, Divine Man or Magician? Celsus and Origen on Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1982).
19. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 562.
20. Ken Olson, “Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999): 305–22.
21. J. Carleton Paget, “Some Observations on Josephus and Christianity,” Journal of Theological Studies 52, no. 2 (2001): 539–624; Alice Whealey, “Josephus, Eusebius of Caesarea, and the Testimonium Flavianum,” in Josephus und das Neue Testament, ed. Christfried Böttrich and Jens Herzer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 73–116.
22. Final judgment on the authenticity of the Testimonium will ultimately depend, in the short term, on the strength of the argument that Olson can make in his doctoral dissertation and especially on the critical reaction to it by experts on both Josephus and Eusebius. However that debate resolves itself, it should be obvious that my case for the historicity of Jesus does not depend on the reliability of Josephus’s testimony, even though I take the passage to be, at its core, authentic.
23. The most conservative estimates put the population under one million. See Magen Broshi, Bread, Wine, Walls, and Scrolls (Sheffield, Eng.: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002).
24. Here I am simply summarizing my discussion in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 62–63. For fuller discussions, see the classic studies of R. Travers Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (New York: Ktav, 1903), and Morris Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1950).
Chapter 3: The Gospels as Historical Sources
1. See my college-level textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), chap. 8, and the bibliography that I offer there.
2. See Robert Kysar, John the Maverick Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).
3. Some scholars think that John knew and used the synoptic Gospels, but I think this is unlikely. Even if he did, he includes many stories unrelated to those of the synoptics, and in these at least there certainly cannot have been any dependence. On the entire question, see D. Moody Smith, John Among the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2001).
4. For a new translation of the Gospel of Thomas by Zlatko Plese, see Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Plese, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 310–35; for a discussion of the contents and character of the Gospel, see my book Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), chap. 3.
5. For translation of the Gospel of Peter, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels, 371–87; for discussion of its contents and character, see Ehrman, Lost Christianities, chap. 1.
6. For a full commentary on the Gospel of Peter, see Paul Foster, The Gospel of Peter (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
7. Translation and brief discussion of Papyrus Egerton 2 in Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels, 245–53.
8. This is a highly fragmentary account in which Jesus is beside the Jordan River, in which he may be described as performing a miracle, possibly to illustrate his parable about the miraculous growth of seeds.
9. See Ehrman, New Testament, chap. 8.
10. For a spirited attempt to dispense with Q and to argue that Matthew was the source of Luke, see Mark Goodacre, The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). As lively as the argument of the book is, it has failed to convince most of the scholars working in the field.
11. Joel Marcus, Mark: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, 2 vols., Anchor Bible Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000–2009).
12. I give some of the evidence, with bibliography, in New Testament, chap. 12.
13. April D. DeConick, The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation (London: T & T Clark, 2006). For the Gospel of Peter, see the less convincing argument of John Dominic Crossan, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1988). Even if one does not accept the extreme views of Crossan about a Cross Gospel that originated before even Mark, which was used by all four of the New Testament Gospel writers, a good case can still be made that the Gospel of Peter is based on written sources.
14. See Edgar McKnight, What Is Form Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969).
Chapter 4: Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels
1. For an introduction to Papias and a translation of all his surviving literary remains, see Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 2:86–119.
2. This and the following excerpts of Papias are taken from Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 85–119.
3. See John 7:53–8:11.
4. See my discussion in Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), 107–10.
5. See Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 107–10.
6. For introductions and translations, see Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:203–321.
7. I have taken translations from Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 203–321.
8. See Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:23–25.
9. This is the oldest form of the baptism scene found in the Gospel of Luke; see my discussion in Bart Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 73–79.
10. See my fuller study, Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011), 79–114.
11. See Ehrman, Forged, 43–78.
12. See chap. 3. To recall: the seven independent Gospel witnesses are Mark, parts of Matthew, parts of Luke, John (in whole or in part), the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas (in whole or in part), and Papyrus Egerton 2 (in whole or in part).
13. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 28.
14. See Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 27 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 705–7.
15. See Victor Paul Furnish, Jesus According to Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
16. One
place where it is sometimes thought that Paul is quoting a prophecy instead of a saying of the historical Jesus is in 1 Corinthians 14:34–37, where he instructs women to be silent in the churches because this is “a command of the Lord.” The problem in this passage is that there are solid reasons, including some manuscript evidence, to suggest that the injunction for women not to speak was not originally part of 1 Corinthians but was added by later scribes. In that case, the command of the Lord would have to do with the passage before 14:34, where Paul urges order in the worship services instead of allowing chaos to reign, as it appears to have been doing in Corinth. One can easily imagine a teaching of Jesus where he instructed his disciples to be harmonious, unified, and orderly rather than self-aggrandizing and disruptive. Some such saying rather than a Christian prophecy may well lie behind Paul’s injunction.
17. I am drawing these examples from Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 19.
18. George A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (Peru, IL: Carus, 1996), 14.
19. George A. Wells, “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus,” Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 22.
Chapter 5: Two Key Data for the Historicity of Jesus
1. Earlier in my career I played with the idea that Cephas and Peter were two different persons, but now I think that’s a bit bizarre—as most of the critics of the idea have pointed out! The most compelling reason for identifying them as the same person is not simply John 1:42 but the historical fact that neither Cephas nor Peter was a personal name in the ancient world. Peter is the Greek word for “rock,” which in Aramaic was Cephas. And so Jesus gave this person—his real name was Simon—a nickname, “the Rock.” It seems highly unlikely that two different persons were given precisely the same nickname at the same time in history when this name did not previously exist.
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