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

So too the Gospels. Whatever one thinks of them as inspired scripture, they can be seen and used as significant historical sources. With this major comment in view, what can we say about the Gospels and their witness to the life of the historical Jesus?

The Gospels and Their Written Sources

ONCE IT IS CONCEDED that the Gospels can and should be treated as historical sources, no different from other historical sources infused with their authors’ biases, it starts to become clear why historians have almost universally agreed that whatever else one might say about him, Jesus of Nazareth lived in first-century Palestine and was crucified by the prefect of Judea. It is not because “the Gospels say so” and that it therefore must be true (the view, of course, of fundamentalist Christians). It is for a host of other reasons familiar to scholars who work in the field. This opening section will not be convincing to naysayers, for reasons I will explain, but we need to start somewhere, and the place to start is with the surviving witnesses that we have in hand.

We have already seen that historians, who try to establish that a past event happened or that a past person lived, look for multiple sources that corroborate one another’s stories without having collaborated. And this is what we get with the Gospels and their witness of Jesus. Our earliest Gospel account of Jesus’s life is probably Mark’s, usually dated—by conservative and liberal scholars of the New Testament alike—to around 70 CE (some conservatives date it earlier; very few liberals date it much later). Eventually we will consider the question of Mark’s sources; for now we are interested in the brute fact that within forty years or so of Jesus’s (alleged) life, we have a relatively full account of many of the things he said and did and of his death by crucifixion. (How much of it we can trust as historically accurate is another question, which we will deal with at a later stage.)

It is almost (but not quite) universally thought among New Testament scholars that both Matthew and Luke had access to the Gospel of Mark and used it for many of their stories of Jesus. This is almost certainly right, for reasons that don’t need to concern us here but are readily available elsewhere in a wide range of publications on the New Testament.1 Some mythicists—as we will see in chapter 7—have taken this critical conclusion to a faulty end to argue that all of our Gospel accounts (even John, which has very little to do with Mark) ultimately go back to Mark so that we have only one source, not multiple sources, for the life of Jesus. Nothing could be further from the truth. Matthew and Luke did indeed use Mark, but significant portions of both Gospels are not related in any way to Mark’s accounts. And in these sections of their Gospels Matthew and Luke record extensive, independent traditions about Jesus’s life, teachings, and death. So while in their shared material they do not provide corroboration without collaboration, in their unique material they do. These Gospels were probably written ten or fifteen years after Mark, and so by the year 80 or 85 we have at least three independent accounts of Jesus’s life (since a number of the accounts of both Matthew and Luke are independent of Mark), all within a generation or so of Jesus himself, assuming he lived.

But that is not all. There are still other independent Gospels. The Gospel of John is sometimes described as the “maverick Gospel” because it is so unlike the synoptic accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.2 Prior to the narrative leading up to Jesus’s death, most of the stories in John are found only in John, whereas John does not include most of the stories found in the other three Gospels. And when they do share the same stories, John tells them in such a different way that he does not appear to have received his accounts from any or all of them.3 This is especially the case, of course, in those passages (the majority of them) in which John’s stories do not overlap with those of the synoptics. It is equally true of John’s account of Jesus’s death. John is generally considered the latest of our canonical Gospels, dated 90–95 CE. So within the first century we have four independent accounts of Jesus’s life and death (Matthew and Luke being independent in a good number of their corroborative stories; John possibly in all, and certainly in most, of his).

Gospels continued to be written after John, however, and some of these later accounts are also independent. Since the discovery in 1945 of the famous Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, scholars have debated its date.4 Even though some continue to place the Gospel in the first century, possibly prior to all or some of the canonical Gospels, more widely it is thought that in its current form Thomas comes to us from the early second century, say 110–20 CE. Moreover, while some scholars think that Thomas relies on Matthew, Mark, and Luke for some of its sayings—there are overlaps in about half of them—it is more commonly thought that Thomas is independent, that it got its information from other sources. In either event, a good portion of Thomas, if not all of it, does not derive from the canonical texts. To that extent it is a fifth independent witness to the life and teachings of Jesus.

The same can be said of the Gospel of Peter, discovered in 1886. This is a fragmentary account of Jesus’s trial, death, and resurrection.5 Once again, even though there is some similarity in portions of the account to what is found in the canonical Gospels, it is widely thought that Peter preserves an independent narrative, drawn from other, noncanonical, sources. There are protracted debates among scholars about how much material from