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

Panthera was the name traditionally given to the Roman soldier who was said to have seduced Mary, who in these passages is called a hairdresser. Her child, then, was born out of wedlock. Scholars have long recognized that this tradition appears to represent a subtle attack on the Christian view of Jesus birth as the “son of a virgin.” In Greek, the word for virgin is parthenos, close in spelling to Panthera.

In other references in the Talmud we learn that Jesus was a sorcerer who acquired his black magic in Egypt. Recall the Gospel accounts of how Jesus fled with his family to Egypt soon after his birth and his abilities later in life to perform miracles. He is said in the Talmud to have gathered five disciples and to have been hanged on the eve of the Passover, after a herald proclaimed the charges of sorcery against him for forty days. Here again we may have a biased version of the Gospel accounts, where Jesus is killed during the Passover but with injudicious speed after a very quick trial, his execution occurring some twelve hours after his arrest.

These Talmudic references to Jesus were written hundreds of years after he would have lived and so are really of very little use for us in our quest. By the time they were set down, Christianity was a major force in the Roman Empire, and every single Christian telling stories about Jesus naturally assumed that he had really existed as a historical person. If we want evidence to support the claim that he did in fact once exist, we therefore have to turn to other sources.

CHAPTER THREE

The Gospels as Historical Sources

AT THE BEGINNING OF the last chapter I mentioned one criticism I have received over the years that has surprised me. And here is another. Sometimes in a review or an e-mail a reader will provide a short but hard-hitting laundry list of complaints about one or another book I’ve written, and two items on the list are (a) that I’m needlessly attacking the Bible (I objected to this complaint in chapter 2) and (b) that I am saying nothing new but am merely rehearsing what scholars have known for a long time. I find this two-pronged critique a bit odd for lots of reasons but in particular because the two prongs seem to be at odds with each other. How am I attacking anything if I am simply saying what scholars have long known? I don’t see how a critic can have it both ways.

At the same time, I do understand the critique. Very conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians do not agree with what other scholars have long said about the Bible. And what the critics are objecting to is my decision to make this information public. Fair enough. But in my view, the public has the right to know what scholars have discovered after spending countless hours, days, months, and years grappling with the hard issues. And to discount it all as “saying nothing new” is simply an ad hominem attack. My popular books (as opposed to my scholarly books, which are written for the six people in the world who care) are meant for laypeople and so are designed to show a wider audience, in nontechnical language, the findings of true and intriguing importance that scholars have made. How can anyone complain about making the public more knowledgeable?

The same complaint can well be made about the present chapter. In it I do not advance scholarship or come up with some new theory. What I discuss here is common knowledge among scholars in the field. In fact, most of it is standard information that even my conservative critics will by and large agree with, either to their pleasant surprise or to their dismay. It deals with why our Gospel sources are important for the question of whether Jesus existed, and my claim is that once one understands more fully what the Gospels are and where they came from, they provide powerful evidence indeed that there really was a historical Jesus who lived in Roman Palestine and who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. We will see in the chapters that follow that this is not the only kind of evidence we have for the existence of Jesus. Quite the contrary, there are other compelling data to consider. But the Gospels are the obvious place to start.

A Preliminary Comment on the Gospels as Historical Sources

AS I WILL TRY to show momentarily, the Gospels, their sources, and the oral traditions that lie behind them combine to make a convincing case that Jesus really existed. It is not that one can simply accept everything found in the Gospels as historically accurate. Far from it. The Gospels are filled with nonhistorical material, accounts of events that could not have happened. This is shown, for example, by the many discrepancies they contain in matters both great and small. If you have two contradictory accounts of the same event, both accounts cannot be accurate. And once you read the Gospels carefully, with keen attention to minute details, you will find such contradictions all over the map. Eventually these small details add up to big pictures, which also are sometimes at odds with one another.

At the same time, there is historical information in the Gospels. This historical material needs to be teased out by careful, critical analysis. Before doing so, I need to make a preliminary remark about the Gospels as historical sources. Sometimes the Gospels of the New Testament are separated from all other pieces of historical evidence and given a different kind of treatment because they happen to be found in the Bible, the collection of books that Christians gathered together and declared sacred scripture. The Gospels are treated in this way by two fundamentally opposed camps of readers, and my contention is that both of them are completely wrong. However else the Gospels are used—for example, in communities of faith—they can and