If Jesus wasn’t a real historical figure, where did Christian theology come from?
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Anonymous
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GUY RAZ, HOST: It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. There are probably few people in the world who know more about the life of Jesus than Bart Ehrman. He's a New Testament scholar at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where his lectures are among the most popular on campus. And though Ehrman's not a particularly religious man, he's often puzzled by a question he gets asked: Did Jesus exist? So he decided to answer that question in his new book and, fittingly, it's also called "Did Jesus Exist?" Bart Ehrman, welcome to the program. BART D. EHRMAN: Thank you. RAZ: Let's start with the premise of your question because - I hope I'm not giving anything away. Your answer is yes, Jesus did exist. EHRMAN: Yes. That's right. RAZ: You don't have to get to the end of the book to get to that answer. But why did you feel like the question needed to be answered at all? I mean, is it in serious dispute? EHRMAN: The deal is that, every week, I get two or three emails from people asking me did Jesus exist. And as I started to do some looking into the matter, I realized there is a large contingent of people, largely on the Internet but also writing books, claiming that, in fact, Jesus never did exist, that he was completely made up by the early Christians, and I wanted to approach that question as a historian to see whether that's right or not. RAZ: And these are people you call mythicists or I guess they call themselves mythicists. So what is the argument that they make? EHRMAN: Well, there are several arguments. When you just look at them plainly, they look fairly plausible. Jesus is never mentioned in any Roman source of his day. There's no archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed, no physical proof. And the Christian sources are problematic because the Gospels are 20, 40, 50, 60 years later. On the other side of the ledger, they point out that many of the things said about Jesus are said about pagan divine beings or pagan gods. RAZ: That there was this guy, he was a person who was crucified and resurrected. EHRMAN: Who did miracles, cast out demons... RAZ: Walked on water. EHRMAN: ...raised the dead. And, most importantly, they point out that there are pagan gods who are said to die and rise again. And so the idea is that Jesus was made up as a Jewish god who dies and rose again. And so when you simply look at it without any context, it looks like a plausible argument. RAZ: Why do you think it is implausible, then? EHRMAN: A lot of the arguments don't really count for anything. I mean, the fact there's no archaeological evidence for Jesus... RAZ: Doesn't matter. EHRMAN: ...doesn't really matter, because there's not archaeological evidence for hardly anybody who lived in this world. RAZ: Moses, Abraham... EHRMAN: Yeah. And then... RAZ: ...and on and on. EHRMAN: Well - or the 60 million people who lived in Jesus' day. So what I do in the book is I marshal all of the evidence. The Gospels were written 40 or 50 years after Jesus, but they incorporate earlier written sources, and they're all reliant on oral traditions. And you can actually translate some of these Greek traditions in the Gospels back into the original Aramaic of Jesus and they make better sense, which means these were traditions floating around in Palestine probably just a few years after Jesus' death. RAZ: And we should just make it clear. I mean, the Gospels according to scholars, these are not eye witness accounts. I mean, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written long after Jesus died. EHRMAN: That's right. By - they're all anonymous, in fact. It's only about 100 years later that people said they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So they're written by Greek-speaking Christians living decades later. Moreover, we have the writings of the apostle Paul who was writing before the Gospels and who converted to be a follower of Jesus just a year or two after the traditional date of his death. RAZ: He knew Jesus' brother James. EHRMAN: Yeah. Paul knew Jesus' brother James, and he knew his closest disciple, Peter, and he tells us that he did. And if Jesus didn't exist, you would think his brother would know about it. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) EHRMAN: So I think Paul, probably, is pretty good evidence that Jesus at least existed. RAZ: You contend that had he actually been invented by pagans at the time, they would have turned him into this powerful figure of grandeur that was like shooting laser beams out of his... EHRMAN: Yes. RAZ: ...his fingers rather than a man who was crucified. EHRMAN: The Messiah was supposed to overthrow the enemies. And so if you're going to make up a messiah, you'd make up a powerful messiah. RAZ: Like a superhero. EHRMAN: A superhero. You wouldn't make up somebody who was humiliated, tortured and then killed by the enemy. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/149462376 |
Anonymous
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We have four narrative accounts of Jesus’ life and death, written by different people at different times and in different places, based on numerous sources that no longer survive. Jesus was not invented by Mark. He was also known to Matthew, Luke, and John, and to the sources which they used (Q, M, L, and the various sources of John).
All of this was within the first century. This is not to mention sources from outside the New Testament that know that Jesus was a historical figure – for example, 1 Clement and the documents that make up the Didache. Or — need I say it? – every other author of the New Testament (there are sixteen NT authors altogether, so twelve who did not write Gospels), none of whom knew any of the Gospels (except for the author of 1, 2, and 3 John who may have known the fourth Gospel). By my count that’s something like twenty-five authors, not counting the authors of the sources (another six or seven) on which the Gospels were based (and the sources on which the book of Acts was based, which were different again). If there had been one source of Christian antiquity that mentioned a historical Jesus (e.g., Mark) and everyone else was based on what that source had to say, then possibly you could argue that this person made Jesus up and everyone else simply took the ball and ran with it. But … But how can you make a convincing case if we’re talking about thirty or so independent sources that know there was a man Jesus? These sources are not all living in the same village someplace so they are egging each other on. They didn’t compare notes. They are independent of one another and are scattered throughout the Mediterranean. They each have heard about the man Jesus from their own sources of information, which heard about him from their own sources of information. That must mean that there were hundreds of people at the least who were talking about the man Jesus. One of them was the apostle Paul, who was talking about Jesus by at least the year 32 CE, that is, two years after the date of Jesus’ death. Paul, as I will point out, actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother James and his closest disciples Peter and John. That’s more or less a death knell for the Mythicist position, as some of them admit. I’ll get to Paul in a subsequent note. Here I am simply stressing that the Gospel traditions themselves provide clear evidence that Jesus was being talked about just a few years after his life in Roman Palestine. Christianity did not make a big impact on Aramaic-speaking Palestine. The vast majority of Jews in the homeland did not accept Christianity or want anything to do with it. There were not thousands of storytellers there passing on Christian traditions. There were some, of course, especially in Jerusalem. But the fact that these stories based on Aramaic are scattered throughout our sources suggests that they were in circulation relatively early in the tradition. Most of these are thought to go back to the early decade or two (probably the earliest decade) of transmission. You cannot argue that Jesus was made up by some Greek-speaking Christian after Paul’s letters, for example. https://ehrmanblog.org/gospel-evidence-that-jesus-existed/ |
Anonymous
I love this so much. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Wow. So many lies packed into one post. Impressive for a Sunday morning. Do you get extra heaven points each time you lie? |
Anonymous
Ehrman's press agent is working hard on a Sunday. Doesn't he give you the day off? |
Anonymous
Riiiiiiiight. Did you actually read it? Like I said, the linguistic analysis has shown: - some writings came from approximately that era (Aramaic language) - many people were talking about him (in other writings) - some details about Jewish life in that era were correct (comparing with Jewish texts) No one said someone made him up. |
Anonymous
I just went back 10 pages and still couldn't find my links. Maybe if some nut wasn't obsessively posting irrelevant quotes and images it'd be easier to find. Anyway. Google them. It's not hard to find. |
Anonymous
psh, like Professor Ehrman needs a press agent. Truth never takes a day off. “This unusually vociferous group of nay-sayers maintains that Jesus is a myth invented for nefarious (or altruistic) purposes by the early Christians who modeled their savior along the lines of pagan divine men who, it is alleged, were also born of a virgin on Dec. 25, who also did miracles, who also died as an atonement for sin and were then raised from the dead. … T]here is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world. And it is no wonder why. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.” |
Anonymous
LOL. It gets boring when you guys repeat the same lame arguments over and over ad nauseam. So excuse some light humor. How many times does the following need to be repeated? Honestly. - You claim Bart Ehrman is biased against finding Jesus existed. That's actually hilarious. - You still don't understand how the gospels are used as evidence. Nobody like Bart is taking them as "gospel truth," geez. Instead they look for internal evidence in how they were constructed and linguistic evidence in the text. - Thousands of scholars--"the vast majority of scholars"--claim the evidence of Jesus' existence is strong enough to conclude that he "certainly" existed. You're in a tiny minority, maybe 1-2 scholars out of the thousands who use the word "certainly." So, welcome to the club of Holocaust deniers and the flat earthers. |
Anonymous
Of course you didn't say somebody made Jesus up. It would be embarrassing to say this. The problem is, you're afraid to acknowledge the consequences of your claim that Jesus might not have existed (let's translate your "likely existed" into a 1-10% probability Jesus did not exist). Namely, if there's some chance Jesus didn't exist, then SOMEONE MUST HAVE MADE HIM UP. Does that help? Sorry for the caps, but it seems so necessary in your case. |
Anonymous
Not lies, just light-hearted characterizations of your silly arguments and obstinate refusal to understand the arguments made for Jesus' existence. |
Anonymous
No matter, finding these people were ex-Catholics would actually work against you, just like Bart Ehrman being an atheist already works against you. You're completely unable to produce the missing leap in logic. Namely, why you think somebody with a vested interest in proving Jesus did not exist (fame, fortune, scholarly acclaim) would instead want to prove he does exist. Your argument "because they've studied the New Testament" makes no sense. -- Not the person posting quotes |
Anonymous
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Ehrman says,
“There is so much evidence that….this is not even an issue for scholars of antiquity” “There is no scholar in any college or university in the western world who teaches Classics, Ancient History, New Testament, early Christianity, any related field who doubts that Jesus existed” Ehrman recocognises that “that is not evidence…but if you want to know about the theory of evolution vs the theory of creationism and every scholar in every reputable institution in the world believes in evolution. It may not be evidence, but if you have a different opinion you’d better have a pretty good piece of evidence yourself.” The key piece of evidence for Jesus’ existence? “The reason for thinking Jesus existed is because he is abundantly attested in early sources” “Early and independent sources certainly indicate that Jesus existed” “One author we know about knew Jesus’ brother” “I’m sorry, I respect your disbelief, but if you want to go where the evidence goes…I think that atheists have done themselves a disservice by jumping on the bandwagon of mythicism, because frankly, it makes you look foolish to the outside world” |
Anonymous
why are the quotes irrelevant? |