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[quote=Anonymous][youtube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=43mDuIN5-ww[/youtube]

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[/quote]

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