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

he did indeed know about the historical Jesus. He gives us important information about Jesus’s life and quotes his teachings on several occasions. Why then doesn’t he quote him more often, and why doesn’t he give us more information? This is indeed a perennial question asked by scholars of the New Testament, and several possibilities can be considered.

One, obviously, is that Paul didn’t say more about the historical Jesus because he didn’t know much more. This strikes many readers of Paul as implausible: if he worshipped Jesus as his Lord, surely he wanted to know more about him. Wouldn’t he want to know absolutely everything about him? It may seem so. But it is important to remember that when Christians today think about their faith, they often think about the ultimate source of their faith in the New Testament, which begins with Gospels that describe the things Jesus said and did. And so for Christians today, it only makes sense that a Christian is informed about Jesus’s life. But when Paul was writing there were no Gospels. They were written later. It is not clear how important the details of Jesus’s life were to Paul.

In this connection it is important to remember what Paul told the Corinthians about what he taught them when he was with them: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). It was the death of Jesus and his subsequent resurrection that really mattered to Paul. That is why when Paul summarized the matters of “primary importance” in his preaching (1 Corinthians 15:3–5), it consisted of a very short list: Christ died in accordance with the scriptures; he was buried; he was raised from the dead in accordance with the scriptures; and he appeared to his followers (then to Paul). Those are the things—not the Sermon on the Mount—that mattered most to Paul.

The deeper question of why Paul would want to focus more on the death and resurrection of Jesus than on his life is intriguing—it has gripped scholars for many years—but it is not germane to the point I am trying to make here. Paul may have known about the teachings of Jesus found in the Sermon on the Mount, or he may not have. We can’t know. What we can know is that on occasion he found the teachings of Jesus that he did know about useful to his purposes, and so he cited them. Why he didn’t cite them more frequently is a matter of guesswork. Maybe he didn’t know many of them. Maybe he didn’t think they were all that important. Maybe he assumed his readers knew them already. Maybe in his other letters (the many that have been lost) he quoted them all over the map. We will never know.

What we can know is that Paul certainly thought that Jesus existed. He had clear knowledge of important aspects of Jesus’s life—a completely human life, in which he was born as a Jew to a Jewish woman and became a minister to the Jews before they rejected him, leading to his death. He knew some of Jesus’s teachings. And he knew how Jesus died, by crucifixion. For whatever reason, that was the most important aspect of Jesus’s life: his death. And Paul could scarcely have thought that Jesus died if he hadn’t lived.

Conclusion

AS A RESULT OF our investigations so far, it should be clear that historians do not need to rely on only one source (say, the Gospel of Mark) for knowing whether or not the historical Jesus existed. He is attested clearly by Paul, independently of the Gospels, and in many other sources as well: in the speeches in Acts, which contain material that predate Paul’s letters, and later in Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, Jude, Revelation, Papias, Ignatius, and 1 Clement. These are ten witnesses that can be added to our seven independent Gospels (either entirely or partially independent), giving us a great variety of sources that broadly corroborate many of the reports about Jesus without evidence of collaboration. And this is not counting all of the oral traditions that were in circulation even before these surviving written accounts. Moreover, the information about Jesus known to Paul appears to go back to the early 30s of the Common Era, as arguably does some of the material in the book of Acts. The information about Jesus in these sources corroborates as well aspects of the Gospel traditions, some of which can also be dated back to the 30s, to Aramaic-speaking Palestine. Together all of these sources combine to make a powerful argument that Jesus was not simply invented but that he existed as a historical person in Palestine. But there is yet more evidence, which we will examine in the following chapter.

CHAPTER FIVE

Two Key Data for the Historicity of Jesus

ISOMETIMES GET ASKED, USUALLY by supporters, why I do not make a practice of responding to scholars and bloggers who criticize my work and attack me personally. It’s a good question, and I have several answers. For one thing, there are only so many hours in the day. If I responded to all the crazy things people say, I would have no time for my other work, let alone my life. For another thing, I suppose at the end of the day I simply trust human intelligence. Anyone should be able to see whether a point of view is plausible or absurd, whether a historical claim has merit or is pure fantasy driven by an ideological or theological desire for a certain set of answers to be right.

This past year a group of well-funded conservative Christians (at least one of whom was a former student who did not much like what I taught) launched an impressive website, The Ehrman Project. On it one can find short film clips of (very) conservative evangelical scholars responding to just about everything I have written about, thought about writing about, or, well, thought. The