Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (ebook reader browser .TXT) 📗

Christian or an apologist for Christian causes. I am neither. But in my writings I have never attacked Christianity itself. I have attacked a particular flavor of it. It is true that in my part of the world, the American South, the flavor I have attacked happens to be the flavor preferred by the majority of practicing Christians. But in a historical and worldwide perspective, highly conservative Protestant Christianity, whether fundamentalism or hard-core evangelicalism, is a minority voice. It is the voice that says that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, with no contradictions, discrepancies, or mistakes of any kind. I simply don’t think this is true. And neither have most Christians over the course of history.

I do happen to think that the Bible is a great book or set of books. With this I may be disagreeing with many of my atheist, agnostic, and humanist friends who have been cheering me on from the sidelines. But I personally love the Bible. I read it all the time, in the original Greek and Hebrew; I study it; I teach it. I have done so for over thirty-five years. And I don’t plan to stop any time soon. But I don’t think the Bible is perfect. Far from it. The Bible is filled with a multitude of voices, and these voices are often at odds with one another, contradicting one another in minute details and in major issues involving such basic views as what God is like, who the people of God are, who Jesus is, how one can be in a right relationship with God, why there is suffering in the world, how we are to behave, and on and on. And I heartily disagree with the views of most of the biblical authors on one point or another.

Still, in my judgment all of these voices are valuable and they should all be listened to. Some of the writers of the Bible were religious geniuses, and just as we listen to other geniuses of our tradition—Mozart and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Dickens—so we ought to listen to the authors of the Bible. But they were not inspired by God, in my opinion, any more than any other genius is. And they contradict each other all over the map.

Even though there are innumerable historical problems in the New Testament, they are not of the scope or character to call seriously into doubt the existence of Jesus. He certainly lived, and in my view he too was a kind of religious genius, even more than the later authors who wrote about him. At the same time, he probably was not well educated. He may have been only semiliterate. But he certainly lived, and his teachings have impacted the world ever since. Surely that is one gauge of genius.

Since that is the view I am sketching in this book, I can imagine readers who think me anti-Christian taking umbrage at my refusal to toe their line. And Christian readers may well be pleased to see that even someone like me agrees with them on key points (although they certainly won’t like other things I have to say in the book). My goal, however, is neither to please nor to offend. It is to pursue a historical question with all the rigor that it deserves and requires and in doing so to show that there really was a historical Jesus and that we can say certain things about him.

Preliminary Remarks

BEFORE I SHOW THE evidence for the existence of Jesus, I need to make a few preliminary remarks about historians and how they go about establishing what probably happened in the past. The first thing to stress is that this is, in fact, what historians do. We have no direct access to the past. Once something happens, it is over and done with. There is no way to repeat a past event all over again. This makes historical evidence different from the kinds of evidence used in the hard sciences. In science you can repeat an experiment. In fact, you have to repeat the experiment. Once an experiment is repeated sufficiently and with the same results, a kind of predictive probability is established that the same results will obtain if the experiment is conducted one more time. An example that I use with my first-year undergraduates: if I want to prove that a bar of iron sinks in lukewarm water but that a bar of Ivory soap floats, all I need are a hundred tubs of water and a hundred bars of each kind. When I start tossing them in the water, the iron will sink every time and the soap will float. This proves what will no doubt happen if I decide to repeat the experiment yet another time.

With history, though, we don’t have the luxury of being able to repeat an event once it happens, and so we look for other kinds of evidence. How do we know if we’ve proved something historically? Technically, we cannot prove a single thing historically. All we can do is give enough evidence (of kinds I will mention in a moment) to convince enough people (hopefully nearly everyone) about a certain historical claim, for example, that Abraham Lincoln really did deliver the Gettysburg Address or that Julius Caesar really did cross the Rubicon. If you want to demonstrate that either historical event actually occurred, you need to marshal some convincing evidence. In neither of these particular cases, of course, is there really much doubt.

What about the historical existence of Jesus? It has become somewhat common among mythicists to think that the default position on the question of Jesus’s existence should be that he did not exist unless someone can demonstrate that he did. This is the position expressed cogently by Robert Price: “The burden of proof would seem to belong with those who believe there was a historical man named Jesus.”1 I myself do not think that is true. On one hand, since every relevant