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

At one end of the spectrum, fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians often treat the Gospels as literature unlike anything else that has ever been produced because, in their theological opinion, these books were inspired by God. In this view, inspired literature is not amenable to the same kind of historical and critical investigation as other kinds of literature.

I think this is wrong, and not simply because I am an agnostic who does not believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. I thought this approach was wrong even when I was a committed, believing Christian. It is wrong because whatever else you might think about the books of the Bible—whether you believe in them or not, whether you consider them inspired or not—they are still books. That is, they were written by people in historical circumstances and contexts and precisely in light of those circumstances and contexts. There is no God-given way of interpreting God-given literature, even if such literature exists. It is still literature. And it has to be interpreted as literature is interpreted. There is no special hermeneutic handed down from above to direct the reading of these books as opposed to all others. Their authors were human authors (whether or not they were inspired); they wrote in human languages and in human contexts; their books are recognizable as human books, written according to the rhetorical conventions of their historical period. They are human and historical, whatever else you may think about them, and to treat them differently is to mistreat them and to misunderstand them.

At the other end of the spectrum is another group insisting that the books of the Bible need to be given separate treatment. These are certain agnostics and atheists who claim that since, say, the Gospels are part of Christian sacred scripture, they have less value than other books for establishing historical information. As odd as it might seem, the nonbelievers who argue this are making common cause with the fundamentalists who also argue it. Both groups treat the Gospels as nonhistorical, the fundamentalists because the Gospels are inspired and the atheists (those who hold this view) because the Gospels are accepted by some people as sacred scripture and so are not historical.

The (sometime) atheist opinion of the Bible as nonhistorical is no better than the (typical) fundamentalist opinion. The reality is that the authors of the books that became the Bible did not know they were producing books that would later be considered scripture, and they probably had no intention of producing scripture. The Gospel writers—anonymous Greek-speaking Christians living thirty-five to sixty-five years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death—were simply writing down episodes that they had heard from the life of Jesus. Some of these episodes may be historically accurate, others may not be. But the authors did not write thinking they were providing the sacred scriptures for the Christian tradition. They were simply writing books about Jesus.

These authors had nothing to do with later developments, such as that their books were considered inspired and were placed in a canon and called the New Testament. The authors were real, living, breathing, historical persons; they had heard reports about Jesus; they had probably read earlier accounts of his life; and they decided to write their own versions. “Luke” (whoever he really was and whatever name he had) tells us this himself, in the beginning of the third Gospel: “Whereas many have attempted to compile a narrative of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them over to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all these things closely from the beginning, to write for you an orderly account” (1:1–3).

I should stress that I am not saying that Luke and the other Gospel writers were trying to present disinterested accounts of the life of Jesus. These authors were anything but disinterested, and their biases need to be front and center in the critics’ minds when evaluating what they have to say. But at the same time, they were historical persons giving reports of things they had heard, using historically situated modes of rhetoric and presentation. The fact that their books later became documents of faith has no bearing on the question of whether the books can still be used for historical purposes. To dismiss the Gospels from the historical record is neither fair nor scholarly.

Some mythicists, though, do precisely that. As just one example, the Gospel of Luke indicates that Jesus’s hometown was Nazareth. As we will see later in the book, many mythicists deny that Nazareth even existed in the days of Jesus, and they refuse to take Luke’s and the other Gospels’ word for it, not deeming them as reputable historical sources since they are part of the Bible. But the reality is that Luke inherited oral traditions about Jesus and his connection with Nazareth, and he recorded what he had heard. What he heard may have been right or it may have been wrong, but the fact that later Christians long after he was dead placed his book into the canon of the New Testament has nothing to do with it. Luke’s writings about Jesus carry no more or less weight than the writings of any other ancient biographer (Suetonius, for example, or Plutarch)—or, perhaps a more apt comparison, of any other biographer of a religious person, such as Philostratus and his account of Apollonius of Tyana.

Consider an analogy. We don’t dismiss early American accounts of the Revolutionary War simply because they were written by Americans. We take their biases into consideration and sometimes take their descriptions of events with a pound of salt. But we do not refuse to use them as historical sources. Contemporary accounts of George Washington, even by his devoted followers, are still valuable as historical sources. To refuse to use them as sources is to sacrifice the most important avenues to the past we have,