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

of God. He was the son of God in a metaphorical sense, through adoption. At one point Christians thought this happened right before he entered into his public ministry. And so they told stories about what happened at the very outset, when he was baptized by John: the heavens opened up, the Spirit of God descended upon him (meaning he didn’t have the Spirit before this), and the voice from heaven declared, “You are my son. Today I have begotten you.” One should not underplay the significance of the word today in this quotation from Psalm 2. It was on the day of his baptism that Jesus became God’s son.9

There were yet earlier traditions about Jesus that did not speak of him as the Son of God from eternity past or from his miraculous birth or from the time he began his ministry. In these, probably the oldest, Christian traditions, Jesus became the Son of God when God raised him from the dead. It was then that God showered special favor on the man Jesus, exalting him to heaven, and calling him his son, the messiah, the Lord. Even though this view is not precisely that of Paul, it is found in an ancient creed (that is, a preliterary tradition) that Paul quotes at the beginning of his letter to the Romans, where he speaks of Christ as God’s “son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness at his resurrection from the dead” (1:3–4). One reason for thinking that this is an ancient creed—not the formulation of Paul himself—is that Paul holds other ideas about Jesus as the Son of God and expresses them in his own words elsewhere. But he quotes this creed here, probably because he is writing this letter to get on the good side of a group of Christians, the church in Rome, who do not know Paul or what he stands for, and the creed provides a standard formulation found throughout the churches of his day. It is, in other words, a very ancient tradition that predates Paul’s writings.

More striking still, a similar tradition can be found in some of the speeches of Acts, showing that these speeches incorporate materials from the traditions about Jesus that existed long before Luke put pen to papyrus. So, for example, in a speech attributed to Paul in Acts 13 (but not really by Paul; Luke wrote the speech, incorporating earlier materials), Paul is reputed to have said to a group of Jews he was evangelizing, “We proclaim to you that the good news that came to the fathers, this he has brought to fulfillment for us their children by raising Jesus, as is written in the second Psalm, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you’” (Acts 13:32–33).

Note once again the word today. It was on the day of the resurrection, according to this primitive tradition that long predated Luke, that Jesus was made the Son of God. A comparable view is found in an earlier speech delivered by the apostle Peter: “Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty, that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this one whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36).

In both of these speeches we have, then, remnants of much older pre-Lukan traditions, older not just than the book of Acts but than any of the Gospels and older in fact than any surviving Christian writing. They embody a certain adoptionist Christology where Jesus is exalted by God and made his son at the resurrection. In both of them Jesus is understood to be purely human and to have been crucified at the instigation of the Jews in Jerusalem. Only then did God adopt him into sonship.

That the speeches of Acts contain very ancient material, much earlier than the Gospels, is significant as well because these speeches are completely unambiguous that Jesus was a mortal who lived on earth and was crucified under Pontius Pilate at Jewish insistence. Consider the following extracts from three of the significant speeches:

Men of Israel, hear these Words. Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God through miracles and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, just as you know, this one was handed over through the hand of the lawless by the appointed will and foreknowledge of God, and you nailed him up and killed him; but God raised him by loosing the birth pangs of death. (2:22–24)

God…glorified his child Jesus, whom you handed over and denied before Pilate, who had decided to release him. But you denied the holy and righteous one and demanded a murderer to be given over to you. But you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead, as we are witnesses. (3:13–15)

For those who live in Jerusalem and their leaders…when they found no charge worthy of death, they asked Pilate to execute him; and when they had fulfilled all the things that were written about him, they took him down from the tree and placed him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead. (13:27–29)

These primitive traditions from the speeches in Acts are unambiguous about their views of Jesus. They are at least as old as our earliest surviving Gospel stories about Jesus, and equally important, they are independent of them. As was the case in the preceding chapter, here we see that the historical witnesses to Jesus’s life simply multiply the deeper we look into our surviving materials.

The Non-Pauline Epistles

The epistles of the New Testament are chock-full of references to a human Jesus, who really lived and died by crucifixion. There is no need to provide a detailed analysis here; I can simply cite some of the outstanding passages in books that were written by a range of authors, none of whom knew each other’s works or the writings of the Gospels.

Among the writings that circulated under the