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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  2. For example, in Paul’s two longest letters, Romans and 1 Corinthians, he uses the name Jesus by itself a total of one time. He frequently, however, speaks of “the Lord.”

  3. Robert Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 336.

  4. J. M. Robertson, Jesus and Judas: A Textual and Historical Investigation (London: Watts & Co., 1927).

  5. George A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 168.

  6. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 336–43.

  7. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 352.

  8. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 349.

  9. Price here is building on the imaginative but wildly speculative and widely discredited views of Robert Eisenmann in his book James, the Brother of Jesus (New York: Viking, 1997). For sober evaluations of what scholars think about the Dead Sea Scrolls and their community, see the authoritative and justly acclaimed works of such scholars as Joseph Fitzmyer, Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Paulist Press, 1992); Géza Vermès, The Story of the Scrolls (London: Penguin, 2010); and James Vanderkam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).

  10. Translation of R. B. Wright, “Psalms of Solomon,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 2:667.

  11. Translation of E. Isaac, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. Charlesworth, 2:49.

  12. See John Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

  13. Richard Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed (n.p.: Lulu Press, 2009), 34, emphasis his.

  14. See John Collins, “Daniel, Book of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 2:29–37.

  15. Louis Hartman, The Book of Daniel: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), 251.

  16. Hartman, Book of Daniel, 252.

  Chapter 6: The Mythicist Case

  1. See Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005).

  2. See Bart Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010).

  3. The difference, of course, is that no one would use the Hitler Diaries as historical sources for the life of Hitler, as my student Stephen Carlson has pointed out to me. But that is because we have so many other sources, including those used by Kujau to construct his forgeries. If we did not have these other sources, though, a careful study of his forgeries could help us reconstruct his sources, and to that extent the Hitler Diaries would be like the Gospels: they would be evidence of earlier historical accounts. But my main point is that what matters is not the name of a book’s author (real or false) but the nature of its contents.

  4. Luke indicates that Mary and Joseph returned to Nazareth after they had completed the necessary rites of purification. This is a reference to the law found in Leviticus 12, which indicates that thirty-two days after giving birth the woman was to make an offering to God for cleansing.

  5. Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, chap. 2.

  6. See Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 29–39.

  7. Robert Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011); Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).

  8. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, ed. John Bowden (1906; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), chaps. 22 and 23.

  9. Frank Zindler, “Where Jesus Never Walked,” Through Atheist Eyes, vol. 1 (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011), 27–55. I do not mean to say that Zindler does not cite evidence for his view. He claims that the name Jesus in Mark 1:9 does not have the definite article, unlike the other eighty places it occurs in Mark, and therefore the verse does not appear to be written in Markan style. In response, I should say that (a) there are two other places in Mark where the name Jesus does not have the article; (b) if the problem with the entire verse is that the name Jesus does not have article, then if we posit a scribal change to the text, the more likely explanation is that a scribe inadvertently left out the article. Nazareth has nothing to do with it; and (c) there is not a single stitch of manuscript evidence to support his claim that the verse was interpolated into the Gospel. This latter point is worth stressing since it is the reason that no serious scholar of the textual tradition of Mark thinks that the verse is an interpolation.

  10. George A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 2nd ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), 146.

  11. René Salm, The Myth of Nazareth (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2008).

  12. Salm, Myth of Nazareth, xii.

  13. As I have learned from my UNC colleague Jodi Magness, one of the premier archaeologists of Roman Palestine in the world today.

  14. Stephen J. Pfann, Ross Voss, and Yehudah Rapuano, “Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997–2002): Final Report,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 25 (2007): 16–79.

  15. René Salm, “A Response to ‘Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997–2002): Final Report,’” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 95–103. The responses were compelling (based in part on their communications with Alexandre): Stephen J. Pfann and Yehudah Rapuano, “On the Nazareth Village Farm Report: A Reply to Salm,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 105–8; and Ken Dark, “Nazareth Village Farm: A Reply to Salm,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 109–11.

  16. Pfann and Rapuano, “Nazareth Village Farm Report,” 108.

  17. Pfann and Rapuano, “Nazareth Village Farm Report,” 108.

  18. Ken Dark, “Review of Salm, Myth of Nazareth,” in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008), 145.

  19. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 34.

  20. Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

  21. A convenient abbreviated version of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana can be found in David Cartlidge and David Dungan, Documents for the Study of the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).

  22. Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Christianity Before Christ (1875; repr., New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 29.

  23. Graves, Sixteen Crucified Saviors, 30–31.

  24. Frank Zindler, “How Jesus Got a Life,” Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Won’t Reason (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011), 1:57–80.

  25. Zindler, “How Jesus Got a Life,” 66.

  26. For interesting works of real scholarship, see Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), and the speculative but fascinating work of David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).

  27. The literature on the mystery cults is extensive. For a most recent and accessible introduction by an authority in the field, see Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010).

  28. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 44–46.

  Chapter 7: Mythicist Inventions

  1. On Kersey Graves, see the previous chapter. For more recent discussions, see Robert Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 16. The details of the transformation from dying-rising god to the historical Jesus are worked out differently, of course, by different mythicist authors. As two popular examples, see Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Co., 2004), and Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999).

  2. See the discussion, for example, in Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the R
eligions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 4.

  3. Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of the Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 2001), 217.

  4. Mettinger, Riddle of the Resurrection, 219.

  5. Mettinger, Riddle of the Resurrection, 221.

  6. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005), 4:2535–40.

  7. J. Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” 2535.

  8. J. Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” 2538.

  9. Mark S. Smith, “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising God’ in the Biblical World: An Update, with Special Reference to Baal in the Baal Cycle,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 12 (1998): 257–313.

  10. M. S. Smith, “Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods,’” 288.

  11. Most famous is Ralph Martin, A Hymn of Christ: Philippians 2:5–11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1997). See also the useful collection of essays in Ralph Martin and Brian Dodd, eds., Where Christology Began: Essays on Philippians 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).

  12. Few scholars take the latter view, but one who does is Gordon Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, New International Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995).

  13. To get a sense of the richness of the interpretive tradition, see, for example, the commentary by John Reumann, Philippians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Yale Anchor Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2008), 338–83.

  14. For a brief statement of this view, see the essay by James D. G. Dunn, “Christ, Adam, and Preexistence,” in Where Christology Began, ed. Martin and Dodd, 74–83.

  15. See Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977).

  16. See “The Speeches of Acts” in chapter 4, above.

  17. And, of course, in later Christian texts. It remains a significant question whether it is the view of the Philippians hymn. It is important to recognize that views of Jesus did not develop in a straight line in all early Christian communities at the same pace. Some communities began calling Jesus God before others did. But the development we clearly see in the Gospels (starting with Mark and ending with John) replicates the development that happened throughout Christendom at large, in different places and at different times, as Christians went from thinking that Jesus was exalted to be the Son of God at the resurrection (thus the speeches in Acts) to thinking that he was the Son of God at his baptism to thinking that he was Son of God from his birth to thinking that he had existed as Son of God even before his birth.

  18. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus.

  19. Archibald Robertson, Jesus: Myth or History? (London: Watts & Co., 1946), 95.

  20. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 39.

  21. See my discussion in Forged.

  22. See Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 97.

  23. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 18.

  24. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, 33.

  25. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 97.

  26. For example, Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 1999), 5.

  27. Doherty, Jesus Puzzle, 98.

  28. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 101.

  29. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 101; Wells, “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?” Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 23. For Wells, Mark was the first to combine the idea of an earthly Jesus who taught and did miracles with a passion narrative.

  30. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, xi.

  31. See D. Moody Smith, John Among the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2001).

  32. See Robert Kysar, John the Maverick Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).

  33. See “The Aramaic Origins of (Some) Oral Traditions” in chap. 3 above.

  Chapter 8: Finding the Jesus of History

  1. See further my discussion in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), chap. 2, esp. n. 1.

  2. An earlier assertion of this view can be found in Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (1892; repr., Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1995).

  3. For a full exposition of Judaism in the days of Jesus, see E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992).

  4. It needs to be remembered that when scholars use the term pagan it does not have derogatory connotations; it simply refers to people who held to polytheistic religious beliefs, who were not, therefore, either Jewish or Christian.

  5. Josephus indicates that the Pharisees made up the largest group and that they numbered six thousand, the Essenes claimed four thousand, and the Sadducees had far fewer. These numbers should be considered in light of the overall Jewish population at the time, which may have been as many as four million.

  6. For further reading on the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls, see James Vanderkam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

  7. For fuller information, see my discussion in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet. For a comprehensive coverage of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought, see John Collins, ed., Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, vol. 1 (New York: Continuum, 1998).

  8. The story is found only in Matthew and Luke, so in that sense it is multiply attested, but the accounts disagree sharply in their depictions of the event.

  9. See Jonathan Reed, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000).

  Chapter 9: Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet

  1. Pharisees were known to be strong advocates of the apocalyptic doctrine of the resurrection of the dead at the end of the age, in contrast to the Sadducees. See, for example, Acts 23:6–8.

  2. For portions of the following discussions I have relied heavily on my more extensive treatment in Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), chaps. 8–10.

  3. See Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, 193–97.

  4. I assume that the stronger word, “hate,” is original to Jesus rather than “love more than,” as in Matt. 10:37, and that the latter represents a change by Christians who recounted these words of Jesus and were taken aback by their harshness.

  5. This is argued most convincingly in E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 71–76.

  6. See the discussion in my book The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 166–69.

  7. See Ehrman, Lost Gospel of Judas, chap. 10.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE TO THANK a number of people who selflessly helped me in the writing and editing of this book: my brother, classical scholar at Kent State University, Radd Ehrman; one of my closest friends in the field or out of it, Jeffrey Siker at Loyola Marymount University; one of my other closest friends in the field or out of it, Judy Siker at San Francisco Theological Seminary; my esteemed colleague at crosstown rival Duke University, Mark Goodacre; my student and research assistant extraordinaire from the graduate program at Duke, Maria Doerfler; my student and research assistant extraordinaire from the graduate program at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Jason Combs; my unusually perceptive daughter, Kelly Ehrman; and my industrious and sharp-eyed editor and friend at HarperOne, Roger Freet. All of these have carefully read my manuscript and suggested that I make (innumerable) changes. When I have listened to them, the manuscript is much improved; when I have not, the fault is all mine. I would also like to thank the other members of the HarperOne te
am who have made this book possible, especially Julie Burton, Claudia Boutote, and Mark Tauber. It’s an amazing ensemble and I’m privileged to work with them.

  I would also like to thank the attendees of the CIA—the Christianity in Antiquity reading group of faculty and graduate students in New Testament/Early Christianity at both UNC and Duke—for a lively evening of conversation on two of the chapters.

  New Testament translations throughout the text are my own; I have taken translations of the Hebrew Bible from the New Revised Standard Version.

  About the Author

  BART D. EHRMAN is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is a leading authority on the Bible and the life of Jesus. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the New York Times bestselling Misquoting Jesus; God’s Problem; Jesus, Interrupted; and Forged. He has appeared on NBC’s Dateline, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, and History; has been featured in Time, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post; and has been interviewed on top NPR shows. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

  Visit the author online at www.bartdehrman.com.

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  Credits

  Jacket design: Laura Beers Design

  Copyright

  DID JESUS EXIST? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. Copyright © 2012 by Bart D. Ehrman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.