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

He was descended from the tribe of Judah (7:14).

He taught, about God: “You have not desired or taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (10:8).

He said, “I have come to do your will” (10:9).

He suffered “outside the gate” (that is, outside Jerusalem; 13:12).

He endured abuse (13:13).

In sum, according to this unknown author, based on oral traditions that he had heard, Jesus was a real man who lived in the past, a flesh-and-blood human being, a Jew from the line of Judah who was tempted like all other people, suffered in obedience to God, and was crucified, dying without any solace that God could have provided. Here again is an independent witness to the life and death of Jesus. Thus we have not only the seven independent Gospel witnesses for knowing that Jesus existed; we have also the speeches of Acts, some of which are rooted in early Palestinian traditions, the narrative of Acts, the epistles of the New Testament, and three church fathers—all of them evidently independent of one another.12

The Witness of Paul

THE APOSTLE PAUL IS our earliest surviving Christian author of any kind. Many readers of the Bible assume that the Gospels were the first books of the New Testament to be written since they appear first in the New Testament and discuss the life of Jesus, who obviously started it all. But Paul was writing some years before the Gospels. His first letter (1 Thessalonians) is usually dated to 49 CE; his last (Romans?) to some twelve or thirteen years after that. It is commonly said among mythicists that Paul does not speak about the historical man Jesus and has no understanding of the historical man Jesus. This simply is not true, as an examination of his writings shows full well. Apparently one reason mythicists want to make this claim is precisely that Paul is our earliest available witness, writing within twenty years of the traditional date of Jesus’s death. If Paul knew nothing about the historical Jesus, then maybe he did not exist. A second reason for the claim is related: mythicists want to argue that Paul, rather than thinking of Jesus as a human who lived a few years earlier, believed in a kind of mythical Christ, who had no real historical existence but was a divine being pure and simple, like the dying and rising gods allegedly worshipped by pagans. I will be dealing with that view in chapter 7. For now I want to look at the evidence that Paul understood Jesus to be a historical figure, a Jew who lived, taught, and was crucified at the instigation of Jewish opposition.

One way that some mythicists have gotten around the problem that this, our earliest Christian source, refers to the historical Jesus in several places is by claiming that these references to Jesus were not originally in Paul’s writings but were inserted by later Christian scribes who wanted Paul’s readers to think that he referred to the historical Jesus. This approach to Paul can be thought of as historical reconstruction based on the principle of convenience. If historical evidence proves inconvenient to one’s views, then simply claim that the evidence does not exist, and suddenly you’re right.

The Life of Jesus in Paul

The reality is that, convenient or not, Paul speaks about Jesus, assumes that he really lived, that he was a Jewish teacher, and that he died by crucifixion. The following are the major things that Paul says about the life of Jesus.

First, Paul indicates unequivocally that Jesus really was born, as a human, and that in his human existence he was a Jew. This he states in Galatians 4:4: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his son, born from a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law….” This statement also indicates that Jesus’s mission was to Jews, a point borne out in another letter of Paul’s, in Romans 15:8: “For I say that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show the truthfulness of God, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs.” This claim that Jesus’s ministry was to and for Jews, to fulfill what was promised in the scriptures, hints at one of the most important points Paul makes about Jesus, that he was in fact the Jewish messiah. So firmly rooted in Paul is this belief in Jesus as the messiah that the phrase Jesus Christ, which means “Jesus the messiah” (since the Greek word Christ is a literal translation of the Hebrew word messiah), is exceedingly common in Paul, as is the reversed sequence Christ Jesus, and the simple term Christ is used as an appellative. In other words, Paul was so convinced that Jesus was the Jewish messiah that he used the term Christ (messiah) as one of Jesus’s actual names.

That in part is why Paul insisted that Jesus was a physical descendant of David. It was widely thought that the “son of David” would be the future ruler of the Jews; for Paul, that was Jesus. We have already seen the key passage in Romans 1:3–4, where Paul refers to “the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh.” Jesus, then, was a fleshly being, even if he was God’s son, and he was one of David’s physical descendants.

When Jesus was born, he naturally came into a family. We have seen that Paul obliquely mentions Jesus’s mother when he indicates that he was “born of a woman.” In another place he mentions the brothers of Jesus, who after Jesus’s death became missionaries along with their wives. This Paul states in 1 Corinthians 9:5, where he is pointing out that he too should have the right to take along a spouse on his missionary journeys but chooses not to do so (because, as he indicated two chapters earlier, he was not married): “Do we not have the right to take