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

they rose again. Since these same things are said of Jesus as well, it is obvious that the stories believed by the Christians are all simply imitations of the pagan religions.

Real historians of antiquity are scandalized by such assertions—or they would be if they bothered to read Freke and Gandy’s book. The authors provide no evidence for their claims concerning the standard mythology of the godmen. They cite no sources from the ancient world that can be checked. It is not that they have provided an alternative interpretation of the available evidence. They have not even cited the available evidence. And for good reason. No such evidence exists.

What, for example, is the proof that Osiris was born on December 25 before three shepherds? Or that he was crucified? And that his death brought atonement for sin? Or that he returned to life on earth by being raised from the dead? In fact, no ancient source says any such thing about Osiris (or about the other gods). But Freke and Gandy claim that this is common knowledge. And they “prove” it by quoting other writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who said so. But these writers too do not cite any historical evidence. This is all based on assertion, believed by Freke and Gandy simply because they read it somewhere. This is not serious historical scholarship. It is sensationalist writing driven by a desire to sell books.

In any event, as Freke and Gandy work out their scheme, the original “Christ” was a godman like all the other pagan godmen. Only at a second stage was he taken over by Jews and turned into a Jewish messiah who was imagined as a historical figure, thereby creating the Jesus of history. The apostle Paul, on this reconstruction, knew nothing about this historical Jesus, and neither did anyone else in the early church. They worshipped the pagan Christ who had been Judaized before anyone thought to make him into a real person who actually lived and died in Judea. The Gospel by Mark was instrumental in making this actual person come to life; it was he who historicized the myth for the sake of Jews who needed not a divinity but a real historical figure to save them. Freke and Gandy contend that many Christians in the eastern part of the Roman Empire—who, like Paul, were Gnostics—understood that the historicized version of the myth was not a literal truth but a kind of extension of the myth. Only Christians in the western empire failed to realize this. Their center of activity was Rome. And so there emerged the Roman Catholic Church, which took the historicized view of a savior figure literally and came to suppress the original mythological views of the Gnostics. This led to traditional Christianity, with a historical figure of Jesus at its beginning. But he did not really exist. He was an invention modeled on the gods of the pagan mystery religions.

The problems with this thesis are rife, as will become clear in later chapters. For now it is enough to say that what we know about Jesus—the historical Jesus—does not come from Egypt toward the end of the first century, in circles heavily influenced by pagan mystery religions, but from Palestine, among Jews committed to their decidedly antipagan Jewish religion, from the 30s.

Quite apart from the enormous problems with the book’s major contentions, it is hard to take it seriously. In both its detail and its overarching thesis, the book often reads like an undergraduate thesis, filled with patently false information and inconsistencies. When the authors do quote “scholarly” sources, it is almost always extremely dated scholarship, from 1925, 1899, and so on. It is easy to see why. The views they assert may have been believable more than a century ago, but no scholars hold to them today. As an example of inconsistency, consider these two statements made within two pages of one another. First:

Jerusalem Christians had always been Gnostics, because in the first century the Christian community was made up entirely of different types of Gnosticism! (174)

And then, a page later:

The more we looked at the evidence we had uncovered, the more it seemed that to apply the terms “Gnostic” and “Literalist” to the Christianity of the first century was actually meaningless. (175)

So which is it? Were the Jerusalem Christians of the first century Gnostic? Or is the term Gnostic meaningless with respect to the first century? It is hard to have it both ways.

Moreover, as with Acharya, here too the factual errors abound at an embarrassing rate. As some examples, in the order one finds them (this is by no means an exhaustive list):

Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the empire (11). [No, he did not. He made it a legal religion. It was not made the state religion until the end of the fourth century under Theodosius.]

Eleusinian mysteries focused on the godman Dionysus (18, 22). [Not true. These mysteries were not about Dionysus but about the goddess Demeter.]

“Descriptions by Christian authors of Christian baptism are indistinguishable from pagan descriptions of Mystery baptism” (36). [How could we possibly know this? We don’t have a single description in any source of any kind of baptism in the mystery religions.]

The “Gospel writers” “deliberately constructed” the Greek name Jesus out of “an artificial and forced transliteration of the Hebrew name Joshua” so as “to make sure that it expresses” the “symbolically significant number” of 888 (116). [Actually, the Gospel writers did not “construct” the Greek name Jesus at all. It is the Greek name for the Aramaic Yeshua, Hebrew Joshua. It is found in the Greek Old Testament, for example, long before the Gospel writers lived and is a common name in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus.]

The Romans were “renowned for keeping careful records of all their activities, especially their legal proceedings,” making it surprising that “there is no record of Jesus being tried by Pontius Pilate or executed” (133). [If Romans