THE END OF AN ILLUSION

How Bart Ehrman’s “Did Jesus Exist?”

Has Laid the Case for an Historical Jesus to Rest

Earl Doherty

This publication is an edition with minor revisions of a series

hosted on the Vridar blog March – August 2012

originally titled

“Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism”

Age of Reason Publications

Ottawa    Canada

To Neil

for all his support

despite our occasional

differing views

Copyright © 2012 by Earl Doherty. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, except for review purposes or in a “fair use” context, without the prior written permission of the author or publisher.

Published in 2012 by Age of Reason Publications

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

________________________________________________________

Preface to the E-book edition

Chapter 1:  Introduction

Anticipation of Ehrman’s book and initial reaction to it.  Procedure in this rebuttal.  Ehrman’s Introduction: How did a humble non-divine preacher become God?  Problems with Ehrman’s answer.  His recent discovery of mythicism and an appeal to authority.  Examining the term “myth” and a “mythical Jesus” in the record.  Calling on experts.  Demonizing agendas.

Chapter 2:  An Introduction to the Mythical View of Jesus

Ehrman’s appeal to Schweitzer and the problems faced by both Schweitzer and Ehrman.  The logical improbability of Ehrman’s reconstruction of an historical Jesus.  Ehrman’s appeal to pre-Gospel sources and his failure to notice the problems that will have for his own reconstruction.  Ehrman’s treatment of the history of mythicism and the contradiction his observations present for common claims about mythicism among mainstream scholars.

Chapter 3:  Basic Mythicist and Historicist Positions

The argument from silence and the positive case for mythicism.  Why is Paul so silent on the historical Jesus?  Paul’s “words of the Lord”.  Problematic Gospels and their basis in scripture.  Dependence on Mark / no variety in Passion story.  The question of parallels with pagan salvation myths.  Uncertainty surrounding Jesus’ teachings.

Chapter 4:  Preliminary Remarks

Probability in history and the burden of proof.  Ideal evidence historians want against what they actually have.  Ehrman downplays the problems with the (lack of) evidence.  Unsuccessful comparison with Pontius Pilate.  Absence of eyewitness accounts.  Late date of the gospels.  Ehrman overlooks problems with Luke’s Prologue.  Ehrman overlooks scholarship on origin of the Gospel of Luke.  Ehrman fudges reference to the backbone of New Testament scholarship (Markan priority).

Chapter 5:  A Roman Trio

Pliny the Younger – Letter to Trajan: Information taken from Christians.  Is “Christ” a man or only a god?  “Christo quasi deo” – “as” or “as if”?  Ancient quotes have no “quasi”.

Suetonius – Life of Claudius: “Chrestus” and the expulsion of Jews.  Misleading translation.  Paul and Acts

Tacitus – Annals 15: “Christ” but no “Jesus”.  Tacitus’ source: archive or hearsay?  “Procurator” vs. “Prefect”.  The question of authenticity.  No Christian witness to martyrdom for the Great Fire.  No Roman witness after Tacitus.  Sulpicius Severus (c.400) the first witness.

Chapter 6:  Jewish Sources

Philo of Alexandria

Josephus: the Testimonium Flavianum: entirely interpolation or an authentic residue?  Is an authentic residue “neutral”?  Is the Testimonium intrusive or a digression?  Silence of Christian commentators on the Testimonium before Eusebius.  How could Josephus have felt ‘positive’ or even neutral toward Jesus?  Is the Testimonium’s language the language of Eusebius?  Changes to the Testimonium and its location.  The case of the Antiquities 20 reference to “brother of Jesus, called Christ”.

The Jewish Talmud: Why are there no traditions about Jesus going back to the 1st century?

Chapter 7:  Telling the Gospels Like It Is

Should “faith documents” be treated as legitimate historical sources?  Are the Gospels independently based on oral tradition?  Matthew and Luke’s story is Mark’s story.  Hearing about Nazareth and Jesus.  Should we trust accounts of George Washington but not Jesus?  Equating Luke and Plutarch, or Luke and Philostratus.  Mark as sole source for a life of an earthly Jesus.  Luke and Matthew’s “special material” (“L” and “M”).  John’s dependence on the Synoptics.  Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Egerton as “independent accounts”.

Chapter 8:  The Existence of Non-Existent Sources

Downplaying what scholarship knows.  Oral tradition hypothesis fails the prediction test.  How one story became four.  Luke’s and Matthew’s special sources.  Insupportable claims for Mark and John.  Evolution of Jesus.  Who invented Jesus?

Chapter 9:  Form Criticism and the Sources of the Gospels

The Fallacy of Form Criticism.  The Written Evidence of Common Patterns Versus the Oral Tradition Hypothesis.  Literary Construction out of Scripture, not Oral Traditions.  Traditions in Thomas and Q—not independent.  The Path to Jesus is Paved with Good Assumptions.  How Ehrman Dates the Sources to the Day After Jesus.  The Aramaic Origins of (Some) Oral Traditions.  Aramaic originals?  An Aramaic Son of Man?

Chapter 10:  Listening to the Sounds of Silence

Does anyone on the early Christian scene deny the existence of the Gospel Jesus?  Ignatius’ letters the first to show support for the Gospel story.  Does 1 John reveal the first dispute over an historical Jesus?  Should we expect Celsus to be a New Testament exegete?  Trypho’s “groundless report”.  Silent rabbis on Jesus’ non-existence.  Why do 2nd century apologists not attack the Christ cult of Paul as a heresy?  The process of transition from a heavenly to earthly Christ.  The Logos religion of the 2nd century apologists.  Revisiting Josephus and Tacitus.

Chapter 11:  Three Voices on the Historical Jesus: No.1 – Papias

Papias’ Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord as revealed by Eusebius.  Papias’ uncertain chain of oral transmission.  Had Papias read any Gospels?  Papias’ “Mark” and “Matthew”: not the canonical Gospels, and not read by Papias.  Papias quotes nothing from any version of our Gospels.  The bizarre things Papias gives as sayings of the Lord.  By c.125, no written Gospels have reached the bishop of Hieropolis in Asia Minor

Chapter 12:  Three Voices on the Historical Jesus: No.2 – Ignatius of Antioch

Are the Ignatian letters forgeries?  What does “truly” mean for Ignatius?  Ignatius knows no Gospels in 110 CE or later.  Rumors of an allegorical tale interpreted as history.  No teachings of Jesus, no miracles, no apostolic tradition.  Why did docetism arise in Ignatius’ time?  Two reactions to the historical Jesus.  A Christ myth in Ignatius’ Ephesians.

Chapter 13:  Three Voices on the Historical Jesus: No.3 – 1 Clement (with Addendum on the Epistle of Barnabas)

Issue of authenticity of 1 Clement.  Does 1 Clement know any Gospels?  Christ speaking out of scripture.  Clement knows of the Passion through Isaiah 53.  Christ’s sacrificial ‘blood’ and ‘flesh’ belong in the mythical dimension.  Prophecy in scripture not fulfilled in history.  Epistle of Barnabas: still lacking a written Gospel.  Barnabas points to scripture as his source.  New Testament math: 0 + 0 = ?  A progression from mythical to historical.

Chapter 14:  The Non-Pauline Epistles: I

Apostles with no connection to an historical Jesus.  Pilate in the 2nd century epistle 1 Timothy.  1 Peter knows a suffering Christ through Isaiah 53.  Christ “hung on a tree”.  The “flesh” and “body” of Christ and his “likeness” to men.  The epiphany of Jesus in 2 Peter.  Reading an historical Jesus into the epistles of John.  No historical Jesus in Revelation.

Chapter 15:  The Epistle to the Hebrews – I

God speaking through a Son in a new reading of scripture.  Hebrews’ Son a heavenly entity like the Logos.  Hebrews 101: a sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary.  An event of revelation at the start of the sect.  No words of Jesus on earth to be found.  Another motif of “likeness” to humans.  “In the days of his flesh”: not Gethsemane.  Christ “out of Judah”.  Hebrews’ sacrifice in heaven.  Taking on a “body” in the scriptural world.

Chapter 16:  The Epistle to the Hebrews – II

First smoking gun: 8:4 – a denial that Jesus had been on earth.  Platonic parallels between heaven and earth.  Christ could not be a priest in the same sphere as the earthly priests.  Second smoking gun: 10:37 – “the coming one” has not yet been to earth.  9:27-8 – a “second coming” or a sequence of events?  Jesus “suffered outside the gate”.  Jesus “passing through the heavens”.  The inauthenticity of the epistle’s postscript.

Chapter 17:  Jesus Traditions in the Acts of the Apostles

Ehrman accepts Acts as reliable history.  Acts as a second century product.  Judas treated as an historical figure.  More Aramaic tradition?  The speeches in Acts.  Adoptionism: When Jesus becomes God’s son.  Tracing the sequence of ideas about Jesus.  Syncretizing two separate movements.

Chapter 18:  The Pauline Epistles – I

Born of woman, born under the Law: authentic to Paul?  Jesus ministering to the Jews.  A missing equation: Paul’s Christ = the Gospel Jesus….Romans 1:3 – “of David’s seed kata sarka”.  “Brother(s) of the Lord”: a preliminary look.  “The Twelve”.  Paul’s “Lord’s Supper” a revelation.  “Betrayed by Judas” or “handed over” by God?  Delivered up “at night”.  1 Thessalonians 2:14-16: “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus”.

Chapter 19:  The Pauline Epistles – II

“Words of the Lord”: from earth or heaven?  Why doesn’t Paul quote Jesus more extensively?  The epistles exclude an historical Jesus.  Paul’s conversion chronology.  Paul’s crash course on Jesus from Cephas and James.  How much interpolation in Paul?  Surveying the counterarguments.  Ehrman answering G. A. Wells on the silence in Paul.  Why did Paul not use Jesus’ miracles to prove the imminence of the kingdom?

Chapter 20:  “Key Data” in Proving Jesus’ Historicity – I: Brother of the Lord

The meaning of “brother” in the epistles.  Brethren of a sect?  Who is “the Lord”?  Question begging as methodology.  Why not “brother of Jesus”?  Separating Cephas and James.  G. A. Wells: a Jewish messianic group?  More grammar: genitive vs dative.  Josephus’ James.  Ehrman on Robert Price.  “Brother of the Lord” as a marginal gloss.

Chapter 21:  “Key Data” in Proving Jesus’ Historicity – II: A Crucified Messiah, Pt.1

The conflict between messianic expectation and result.  Assumptions based on the Gospels and Acts.  Why did Paul persecute the early church?  Paul’s gospel vs. Ehrman’s view of early church beliefs.  Christ as “curse” for being “hanged on a tree”.  Paul switching horses in mid-stream.  A new view of Christian origins.  The traditional Jewish Messiah.  Jesus as lower class Galilean peasant.  Who would make up a crucified Messiah?

Chapter 22:  “Key Data” in Proving Jesus’ Historicity – II: A Crucified Messiah, Pt.2

Jesus and David Koresh.  Was a crucified criminal believed to be the messiah?  Ehrman’s “story” of a resurrection.  A story missing in Q and the epistles.  Did Jews invent a crucified messiah?  Did Jews anticipate a suffering messiah?  The sources and nature of Paul’s new messiah.  Ehrman’s summary of his evidence with summary responses.

Chapter 23:  A Problematic Record

Admitting to problematic Gospels.  Gospel authors unknown.  Fallacious analogies: Obama, Clinton, Hitler, Washington.  Discrepancies and contradictions in the Gospels.  Radically different pictures of Jesus.  How much of the Gospels is fictional?  Form criticism and the argument of Robert Price.  The criterion of dissimilarity: is it applicable in the Gospels?

Chapter 24:  The Gospels as Interpretive Paraphrases of the Old Testament

The Gospels constructed out of scriptural midrash.  Jesus’ passion modelled on a traditional Jewish story.  The Gospel of the Old Testament according to Robert Price.  The Gospel Jesus as a new Moses.  A Jesus miracle modelled on Elijah.  What does the midrashic Gospel Jesus symbolize?  Fictional episodes vs. the genuine article.  Thomas L. Thompson and intertextual dependency.  What did Paul mean by “receiving” and “passing on”?  Putting one’s trust in Luke and John.

Chapter 25:  Is Jesus Based on Pagan Precedents?

A cult of parallels between Christianity and the Mysteries.  Comparing Jesus with Apollonius of Tyana.  Kersey Graves as punching bag.  Evaluating a range of different parallels with the mystery cults.  Do Christian fathers give accurate knowledge of the Mysteries?  Cultural differences between Christianity and the Mysteries.  The pre-Gospel record contains no biographical parallels.  Paul’s soteriology dependent on pagan concepts.  The “cult of parallels” only arises with the Gospel story.  Robert Price’s “mythic hero” archetype.

Chapter 26:  Creating the Mythical Christ from the Pagan Mystery Cults

Jesus as a dying and rising god.  Common creations of the religious mind.  The demise of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.  The case for borrowing lies in syncretism.  Jewish and Greek forms of resurrection.  Paul on Jesus’ resurrection as “firstfruits”.  Jonathan Z. Smith’s case against dying and rising gods.  The resurrection of Adonis: did the mysteries copy Christianity?  Gunter Wagner on discrediting the mysteries.  The appeal of the mysteries.  The lack of evidence on the mysteries.  Historicist methodology and a Jewish camouflage.

Chapter 27:  Did the Earliest Christians Regard Jesus as God?

God vs. an emanation of God.  Concepts of the Son and Logos; Paul and Philo.  Epistolary descriptions of the Son.  The Synoptic Jesus: Man or God?  Why Mark’s divinity of Jesus is subdued.  The figure in the Philippians hymn: human or divine?  “Nature” vs. “image” in the Philippians hymn.  Yet another “likeness” motif.  What is the “name above every name”?  “Jesus” vs. “Lord”.  Another smoking gun.

Chapter 28:  Bart Ehrman on G. A. Wells

The (partial) mythicism of G. A. Wells.  The problems in Wells’ interpretation of Paul.  Jewish personified Wisdom as inspiration for Paul’s Christ.  Hellenistic Judaism and the Wisdom of Solomon.  Is Jesus the incarnation of personified Wisdom?  Colossians and the Pre-Pauline christological hymns.  Did Paul see Christ as living in the time of Alexander Janneus?  The chronology of Jesus’ death and rising and the appearances of 1 Cor. 15.  Paul’s “firstfruits” harvested from scripture.  Taking apart Ehrman’s summation against Wells.

Chapter 29:  Bart Ehrman vs. Earl Doherty

Using previous scholarship with a different end result.  Ehrman’s numerous misreadings and misrepresentations of my text.  Platonic (and other) ancient views of the universe.  What was the interpretation of the cultic myths: allegorical or literal, heavenly or earthly, by philosophers and common people?  Revisiting 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16.  Revisiting “the rulers of this age”.  Was the Christ cult Jewish or Greek—or both?  Jewish sectarian thinking moves heavenward.  Was Pauline Christianity “Aramaic rural Palestinian Judaism”?  Must Christ have shed his blood on earth?

Chapter 30:  Did Mark Invent Jesus of Nazareth?

How much did Mark invent in his Gospel?  John’s dependency on the Synoptics.  Lazarus and the Signs Source.  How independent of Mark are Matthew and Luke?  Robert Price on no “M” and “L” sources.  Trusting Luke’s Prologue again.  Ehrman’s fantasy world of “many Gospels” before Mark.  Rehashing arguments which render an historical Jesus “fact”.

Chapter 31:  Scholarly Reconstructions of the Historical Jesus

Consensus scholarly views of the historical Jesus.  The tyranny of the Gospels.  What Q does not tell us about an historical Jesus.  How New Testament scholarship operates.  Conflicting scholarly views about who and what Jesus was.  Finding Jesus in the Q prophets.  An argument for the existence of Q.  Not finding an historical Jesus in the epistles’ Christ.  Ehrman’s criteria for the genuine words and deeds of Jesus.

Chapter 32:  Ehrman’s Case for Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet

Ehrman’s criteria for Jesus as apocalyptic prophet.  Jesus as the Son of Man.  Did Q identify its Jesus with the Son of Man?  “L” and “M” not apocalyptic.  No apocalypticism in Q1 and the Gospel of Thomas.  No apocalypticist in the epistles.  Does Q’s John the Baptist know a human Jesus?  Between the Alpha and Omega lies an apocalyptic Jesus.

Chapter 33:  Ehrman’s Picture of the Apocalyptic Jesus

Preaching the kingdom.  Differing teachings of Jesus and Paul.  Jesus and the Jewish Law.  Salvation: by following the Law or believing in Jesus?  Last Judgment and End of the world.  Two conflicting pictures of the Kingdom.  Q1 as Cynic.  Jesus’ miracle-working.  Jesus’ associates and disciples.  Believing in Judas Iscariot.  Did Jesus aspire to be king in the coming kingdom?  Jesus in the Temple.  Jesus before Pilate.

Chapter 34:  Ehrman’s Conclusion

Are humanists and atheists engaged in a religious exercise?  Humanist and atheist activism against religion.  The humanist self-definition.  Going against received wisdom.  The Jesus “problem” for historicists.  Replacing all the fantasy Jesuses with the ‘real’ one.  Is the mythicist agenda anti-religion and anti-Christian?  Ehrman’s and traditional agendas.  An historical evaluation of religious tradition.

PREFACE TO THE E-BOOK EDITION

The title of this book is intended in two ways. First, we are facing today the end of an illusion which has lasted for some 19 centuries: that the central character of Christianity’s Gospels represents an historical figure who lived and died in the first part of the first century. The non-Gospel record, particularly the New Testament epistles, which in any case have virtually nothing to say about the characters and events of the Gospel story, can at the same time be seen to represent an unrelated expression of faith preceding the Gospels, one not based on an historical figure either.

Recent New Testament scholarship of the “critical” variety has gradually eroded the dependability of the Gospel story as history, until virtually all of its details have been rejected as recording what actually happened, what Jesus specifically said and did. About the only story element still staunchly defended is the fact of the crucifixion itself, carried out by Pontius Pilate and the Romans around 30-33 CE. Critical scholarship judges that, while the figure lying behind the story may have performed what came to be seen as miracles, and while he may have proclaimed some ethical teachings and prophesied future apocalyptic events, none of the depictions in the Gospels of such words and deeds can be relied upon to be factual or accurate.

In fact, the three Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) have been identified as original constructions by those evangelists, working from the Hebrew scriptures, with Matthew and Luke each basing their versions on Mark. Their ‘biography’ of Jesus is a re-writing (called “midrash”) of elements of the Old Testament, fabricating a Jesus character who walks in the footprints of various biblical figures, such as Moses, Joshua, Elijah and Elisha. The Jesus of the Gospel of John, while borrowing the death and rising scenario from the Synoptics, is a separate community’s rendition of a different sort of Son of God and casting him in a very different light.

The second illusion which is now at an end is that traditional mainstream scholarship, in its struggle against “Jesus mythicism”—the theory that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist as an historical person—has effectively discredited that theory, and is still in a position to do so. Modern mythicist writers, myself included, have exposed the claim of past discredit as a fantasy with very little basis. In fact, in the last 50 years, there has been almost no rebuttal offered to mythicism by mainstream scholars, and nothing of a comprehensive nature.

Thus, Bart Ehrman’s announcement in 2011 that he was about to undertake such a comprehensive rebuttal was greeted with much enthusiasm among historicist scholars and supporters. The world was finally to be given a thorough and professional scholarly case for the existence of an historical Jesus and a demolition of the mythicist theory. Regrettably, things did not turn out that way. This second illusion came to an end with the publication of Did Jesus Exist? The present book is a detailed examination of Ehrman’s case and a demonstration of its profound inadequacy.

Note: Because of the immense difficulty in the construction of e-books in converting Greek characters and even special English characters, I have been forced to present all Greek words in transliterated plain italics, and without indication of long vowels.

1

Introduction

Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? has been long-awaited.

First, this particular book was announced over a year before its publication and became much anticipated. As he says in his Introduction, Bart Ehrman had increasingly found himself subjected to queries and challenges concerning the growing idea that there had never been an historical Jesus, and that the Christian story of such a figure was entirely fiction, allegory, or mythology based on other mythological and biblical precedents; that earliest Christ belief, such as by Paul, related only to a heavenly entity who had never been on earth. And so Ehrman decided to devote himself to presenting a definitive case for the historical Jesus and lay so-called “Jesus mythicism” to rest.

Second, it has been almost a century since any mainstream New Testament scholar devoted an entire and substantial book to refuting the theory that Jesus never existed, a theory that is now some two centuries old, championed over that time by often reputable scholars outside the mainstream. Occasionally, shorter attempts at refutation have appeared within other books by various mainstream academics. But a new and comprehensive case against mythicism was not to be had, despite a resurgence of the no-Jesus theory in the last two decades due to renewed attention generated on the Internet and a general broadening of the ‘critical’ element in traditional scholarship since the Jesus Seminar. Bart Ehrman’s book, it was anticipated, would fill that bill and hopefully move toward settling the question once and for all.

What no one would have anticipated, however, was the extent of the furor and negative review of the book within the days and weeks after its publication. The quality and legitimacy of Ehrman’s case has been questioned and condemned by many on blogs and discussion boards across the Internet, by amateurs and professionals alike. As for established scholars in mainstream New Testament academia, a few have offered guarded support for the book, while most have kept quiet. But many from outside the establishment who possess qualifications and knowledge more than sufficient to judge Ehrman’s case (and that includes many of those technically referred to as “amateurs”) have roundly reproached the failings of Ehrman’s case and his less-than-objective treatment of mythicism and mythicists.

The procedure of this response

The procedure I have adopted in this rebuttal will be one of moving along with Ehrman’s text, making a section by section commentary. I will at times quote him, at times paraphrase. I think it is best to dig down in this way to uncover and address not only the nitty-gritty arguments (when such have been provided), but to uncover something about the assumptions and thought processes behind the arguments to evaluate their legitimacy. Ehrman has produced a book addressing the HJ/MJ debate which, more than any other perhaps, reveals it to be not just an academic one, but a highly-charged emotional and personal one, something that has become clear to me over my years of participation on discussion boards, encountering strong viewpoints on both sides. Rules and methodology, treatment of counter-opinions, principles of objectivity in evaluating evidence and drawing conclusions, everything in this discipline places it in its own category from any other in the field of historical research, let alone of scientific investigation generally.

To ignore or pretend that such a dimension does not exist, or that today’s religious culture is not facing a ‘clash of titans’ between the two stances on the origin of Christianity, would be extremely short-sighted. Ehrman entered this ring confident that his opponent would be a pushover, the match a knockout in one or two rounds, but he did so having neglected sufficient training or investigation of his opponent’s abilities and techniques. In most cases, I will include at given points definite arguments (in varying degree of detail) to back up my observations and criticisms of Ehrman, though in other cases those will be left until later points in the book when the same topic comes up in more specific fashion. In some cases, I will regard certain pertinent counter-arguments as fairly well-known to the reader already and needing only a brief reminder or an allusion to. But to include all possible argumentation in favor of mythicism and against Ehrman’s positions would be to rewrite my previous books.

*

How did a humble non-divine preacher become God?

Ehrman begins his book with this traditional question, one which has exercised modern New Testament scholarship from its beginnings:

For the past several years I have been planning to write a book about how Jesus became God. How is it that a scarcely known, itinerant preacher from the rural backwaters of a remote part of the empire, a Jewish prophet who predicted that the end of the world as we know it was soon to come, who angered the powerful religious and civic leaders of Judea and as a result was crucified for sedition against the state—how is it that within a century of his death, people were calling this little-known Jewish peasant God? Saying in fact that he was a divine being who existed before the world began, that he had created the universe, and that he was equal with God Almighty himself? How did Jesus come to be deified, worshipped as the Lord and Creator of all? (p. 1, DJE?)

Stated this way, Ehrman has revealed that historicism is not a slam-dunk. It involves at its heart a major perplexity that is not easily resolved, a fact which calls into question the wisdom of such cavalier and haughty dismissal as that which the mainstream has bestowed upon mythicism. One of the major failings of historicism has been its inability to provide a coherent answer to the above question. Unapologetic apologists fall back on the claim that this is only explainable by an actual event: the physical resurrection of the crucified Jesus from his tomb. Ehrman and many of today’s critical scholars do not allow themselves such an explanation. But there are problems with Ehrman’s question and the answers which scholars like himself think to provide for it.

One is that it was far sooner than “within a century of his death” that an alleged Jewish peasant was called God. In fact, it was virtually immediately. In the epistles widely considered authentic to Paul, as well as in liturgical passages (“Christological hymns”) identified within them as pre-Pauline, Jesus is clearly identified as a part/emanation of God, as possessing divine roles and attributes, as deserving of titles such as “Lord” previously reserved for God alone. The same situation is found in epistles written not too long after Paul’s passing, as well as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which undoubtedly precedes the Jewish War of 66-70 and might even be earlier (except for an added ending) than Paul himself.

Ehrman downplays and misdirects the problem

Ehrman has also softened the problem by not specifically referring to the “people” who came to call Jesus God as “Jews.” This would have pointed up the problem even more sharply, postulating that monotheistic Jews who traditionally had a horror of identifying anything human with God or even portraying him in any human way, were nevertheless converted in significant numbers to such an identification of Jesus of Nazareth. The early record in the epistles makes it quite clear that—if in fact the object of their identification and worship was a man who had lived on earth—such a blasphemy would have to be seen as embraced by Jews, not just by gentiles.

For the moment, Ehrman does not appeal to a common ploy in some critical scholarship which maintains that the earliest followers of Jesus did not consider him divine, and would have used the title “son of God” only in the biblical sense of one who had a special relationship with God and was highly regarded and rewarded by him, somewhat as Moses’ relationship with God would have been seen. This reduced status for Jesus is not supported by the epistles, except by doing great violence to the texts and their interpretation.

On the other hand, Ehrman’s description of Jesus in his opening paragraph above is entirely based on the Gospels (and to some extent on a source for them, in Q), and has no basis in Paul or any other epistle writer. They never identify their Christ Jesus as “an itinerant preacher from the rural backwaters of a remote part of the empire, a Jewish prophet who predicted that the end of the world as we know it was soon to come, who angered the powerful religious and civic leaders of Judea and as a result was crucified for sedition against the state.” Nothing remotely like it. (I might note here that for this reason alone, though there are others, it becomes dubious to try to identify all the Paulines as second-century forgeries, essentially following the Gospels and in some part dependent on them.)

Ehrman’s reaction to mythicism

Ehrman then goes on to discuss his own introduction to the whole phenomenon of mythicism and makes this admission:

I discovered, to my surprise, an entire body of literature devoted to the question of whether or not there ever was a real man, Jesus. (p. 2, DJE?)

It comes as some surprise that a scholar with the high profile of a Bart Ehrman could have been virtually ignorant until very recently of this minority position in the history of scholarly study of the New Testament. In his own lifetime, the books of G. A. Wells alone gained a lot of attention in the 1970s and 1980s (certainly fellow scholars like Graham Stanton, R. G. France, Robert Van Voorst devoted some space in books to refuting Wells). Since the late 1990s a spate of books has steadily appeared promoting or related to the question, from Robert M. Price to Alvar Ellegård to several like myself who, despite being deemed unworthy to put pen to paper, nevertheless have gained much exposure on the internet scene, and even among some mainstream scholars who were curious or courageous enough to poke their heads out of the insulated hothouse of traditional academia. Nor, apparently, did Ehrman ever investigate the historical phenomenon of the early 20th century History of Religions School, elements of which created a fair amount of buzz in its day over the question of Jesus’ existence.

My point here is that, even in the face of this ignorance, when met by this flood of interest in a subject and body of literature about which he admits he knew virtually nothing, Ehrman immediately considered himself a prime candidate to address and rebut it, and promptly announced a forthcoming book. It was not on the basis of being familiar with the field and knowing already that he had a body of rebuttal available as a reliable counter to it, not even on the basis of being familiar with prior rebuttals by scholars past and present from whom he could have drawn. Nor did he wait to actually read up on the work of various mythicists before deciding that he could tackle the task. Not knowing the depth or temperature of the waters, he seems to have simply pinched his nose and jumped in. We get a picture of a frantic reading (skimming?) of various examples of the literature, including my 800-page Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, and finding that he either had to sink or swim. To judge by early comment and dissection of Did Jesus Exist? by competent and knowledgeable investigators of Christian origins, even if largely outside academia’s hallowed halls, Bart Ehrman has struck an iceberg.

Ehrman brings up the fact that none of the writers of mythicist literature are “scholars trained in New Testament or early Christian studies teaching at the major, or even the minor, accredited theological seminaries, divinity schools, universities, or colleges of North America or Europe (or anywhere else in the world).” This is a thinly-disguised appeal to authority, with those authorities defined within a context which would have the least likelihood of ever coming to agree with an outside body of literature so at odds with their own work (often involving confessional interests), let alone of ever choosing to objectively investigate the question themselves. On the other hand, Ehrman does bring himself to acknowledge that some of that body of literature is “highly intelligent and well-informed.” We will see what that amounts to in his actual treatment of the mythicist case.

What is myth?

Ehrman complains in passing about the use and potential ambiguity or wooliness of the term “myth” as in “Jesus was a myth.” I partly sympathize and do not recall that I have ever used that phrase. At the least, it ought to be “Jesus was originally a mythical figure”; we can speak of the “mythical Jesus.” In the context of ancient religious thinking and cosmology, the use of the term in this way ought not to be woolly or misleading, and quite understandable. A “mythical” entity refers to a figure who exists in popular or philosophical thought and religious belief, who is accorded reality within a spiritual or supernatural dimension (or in some cases, in a primordial distant past). The Son of Man expected as an End-time judge is such a “mythical figure,” or the Gnostic redeemer in documents like The Paraphrase of Shem or the Apocalypse of Adam. It is in such a fashion that we can interpret Paul’s Christ Jesus or the Son in the Ascension of Isaiah who descended through the layers of heaven and was hung on a tree by the evil spirits of the firmament. The one who shared God’s nature yet took on the likeness of a human to undergo death and exaltation was celebrated in the hymn of Philippians 2:6-11, as he was in 1 Timothy 3:16, or praised as God’s very image and sustainer of the universe in Hebrews 1:2-3 and Colossians 1:15-20, all with no identification with any incarnated historical human.

I would also agree with Ehrman not to style the Gospel story as a “myth.” That story did not arise out of the same processes as the myths of Attis or Osiris, though elements introduced into them may have been inspired by common mythemes in the traditions of the time attached to savior gods or famous historical figures. “Allegory” and “symbolism” are perhaps the closest terms we could use to style the Gospels, some of it representing sectarian faith and practice in the earthly world, some of it meant to convey new spiritual truths envisioned by the sect, including the processes of salvation taking place in the supernatural world.

Calling on experts: What would your dentist say about all this?

After admitting that a near-unanimous opinion about something by every expert in the field does not automatically bestow truth on that opinion (after all, did not every expert astronomer in the ancient world, with the odd notable dissenter, judge that the universe was earth-centered, and did not most expert physicians up to a couple of centuries ago in the western world have a practice of bleeding sick patients to rid them of harmful humors?), Ehrman then offers us invalid analogies to urge us to accept the work of past experts in New Testament interpretation:

When you make a dental appointment, do you want your dentist to be an expert or not? If you build a house, do you want a professional architect or your next-door neighbor to draw up the plans? (p. 4, DJE?)

But it is one thing to want to use the services of an expert craftsman or surgeon, it is another to be expected to automatically trust the judgment and conclusions of a student of a given belief system or historical process, especially if confessional interests have traditionally been involved. Ehrman does recognize a difference, but then counters it by suggesting that experts in the field of historical research, and in this case of Christian origins, have been properly trained to acquire and use that expertise: the study of ancient languages, the ins and outs of ancient texts and manuscripts, a grounding in the background cultures and philosophies of the time. Of course these are relevant, they are in great part indispensable. An adequate preparation for mythicist writers needs to be a working knowledge of Greek and Latin. Coptic, on the other hand, to study the question of Jesus’ existence, is probably dispensable. Hebrew and Syriac are certainly helpful, though in some cases the careful researcher who cannot work with languages like these can refer to scholars who do. (Sometimes self-training can help solve a deficiency. I myself studied the basics of Hebrew and Syriac on my own, the latter to get as much as I could out of the Odes of Solomon.)

More importantly, it is not simply training in certain expertises which determines who can be trusted to come up with reliable conclusions, especially in a field like this. If that were so, New Testament scholarship as a body would long since have solved the taxing problem of separating out the genuine “historical Jesus” from the Jesus of faith. Scholars are no closer to a solution there, let alone anything resembling unanimity, than ever. Criteria for making judgments about a text and its veracity come and go. Those sworn by in one generation to arrive at a picture of what a real Jesus said and did are exposed as fallacious and rejected by the next. And when one particular type of interpretive theory with legs enough to last for two centuries and counting is vilified and rejected out of hand in clearly subjective and biased fashion, we know that there is something amiss in the self-lauded scholarship of its detractors. Ehrman’s application of the phrase “conspiracy theorists” to mythicists in general, and his equation of mythicism to Holocaust and moon-landing denial and those who believe in a ‘second shooter’ bear witness to everything I’ve just said. (Nor do I believe that Dick Cheney orchestrated 9/11.)

Demonising dissenters

No scholarship worth its name demonizes those who disagree with it. Ehrman, in a Huffington Post article promoting his new book, openly accused mythicists of having a personal “agenda” to destroy Christianity, rendering them devious, dishonest and some kind of devil’s spawn. He repeats the same sentiment, somewhat more muted, at the close of his Introduction:

Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have considered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves.

When one has recourse to this sort of rejoinder—and it’s a common one—to deal with an opposing viewpoint, one only demonstrates that the cupboard is bare and the integrity bankrupt. One wonders, if Ehrman had lived in the 17th century, would he have accused Galileo of having an “agenda” against the Christian Church for maintaining that we live in a sun-centered universe, thereby demonstrating the falsity of the bible and the folly of the Church for presenting an earth-centered cosmos.

*

“But as a historian I think evidence matters,” says Ehrman. Let’s see how he handles evidence, and those who interpret that evidence in a different way.

2

An Introduction to the Mythical View of Jesus

Ehrman begins by quoting the great Albert Schweitzer. On the one hand, says Schweitzer:

There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence.

On the other hand, says Ehrman,

…toward the end of his book he [Schweitzer] showed who Jesus really was, in his own considered judgment. For Schweitzer, Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who anticipated the imminent end of history as we know it.

This of course is a “judgment” dear to Ehrman’s heart, because he himself subscribes to it and has written a book advocating such a picture of Jesus. It is a mantra in New Testament scholarship these days, in agreement with Schweitzer a century ago, that immense difficulties abound in the effort to unearth the real historical man from beneath the Christ of faith. And yet scholar after scholar, from Schweitzer and before him, to Ehrman and no doubt after him, can claim that they have done so, and have usually disagreed with each other on what the result is. Both Ehrman and Schweitzer can acknowledge the difficulty of getting beyond the faith literature—Ehrman and more modern scholarship have benefited from the realization that there is no “history remembered” in the Gospels, and that virtually all of it is midrashic construction out of scripture—and yet both declare certainty in their knowledge that the Jesus character (whatever he was) did indeed exist.

Schweitzer and Ehrman: importing the Gospels into the epistles

On what is that certainty based? We will look at Ehrman’s own justification for it as we go along, but perhaps we might ask a few questions ahead of time. Did either Ehrman or Schweitzer take off their Gospel-colored glasses as they studied the epistles? Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, they say. Paul and most of the other epistle writers were engaged in the same activity, prophesying the impending arrival (not return) of the Son Christ Jesus at the imminent End-time. Did either of them notice that Paul and the others never once refer to their Jesus as having been a prophet on earth foretelling the very same thing? (See later about mainstream scholarly interpretation of Paul’s “words of the Lord” in regard to 1 Thess. 4:15.) Did they not consider it reasonable that we should expect Paul to place himself in Jesus’ line, to appeal to the Son on earth as having begun the prophetic process, to validate his own preaching by pointing to its divine predecessor?

Those who dismiss the argument from silence under any circumstances, no matter how compelling the unfulfilled expectation, are invited to turn to Romans 8:22-3:

Up to the present, we know, the whole created universe groans in all its parts as if in the pangs of childbirth. Not only so, but even we, to whom the Spirit is given as firstfruits of the harvest to come, are groaning inwardly while we wait for God to make us his sons and set our whole body free. [NEB]

Paul is looking ahead to the End-time and he is encouraging his readers to have faith that it is coming. “Up until the present” refers to the past, with its promises of the future birth of the new age. But where is the promise as embodied in Jesus’ own prophetic teaching? What have been the firstfruits of the harvest to come? Solely the Spirit, God’s revelation and gospel about the Son found in scripture. This is the only thing the epistle writers ever appeal to, never the preaching of such promises by the Son on earth. This is not a simple silence, it is an exclusion of any such earthly preaching Son. Both Schweitzer and Ehrman are importing the Gospels into the epistles.

What of Titus 1:3?

Yes, it is eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, and now in his own good time he has openly declared himself in the proclamation which was entrusted to me by ordinance of God our Savior. [NEB]

As I say in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.39),

“There is not a crack in this facade where Jesus could gain a foothold. In the past lie God’s promises of eternal life, and the first action on those promises is the present revelation by God to apostles like Paul who have gone out to deliver the message. Jesus’ own proclamation of eternal life, or whatever he may have proclaimed, has evaporated into the wind. Here is a prime example of the very exclusion of a human, historical Jesus.”

Paul allots to himself “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18-19). God has qualified him “to dispense the new covenant” (2 Cor. 3:5). A role for Jesus here is non-existent; it is de facto excluded.

Ehrman’s bizarre reconstruction of Jesus

Might Ehrman claim that the historical Jesus was solely an apocalyptic prophet and therefore had nothing to say about eternal life and new covenants? What kind of bizarre situation would that create? That a Jewish rebel who had nothing more profound to say than that the apocalypse was upon us and to rise up against the Roman overlords (a message preached by all manner of Zealots and would-be messiahs, most of whom were also slaughtered) was nevertheless turned into a part of God who had risen from his grave and redeemed the world’s sins? That a whole group of apostles who preached the supposed return from heaven of this apocalyptic prophet, along with promises of eternal life and new covenants with God, would never once ‘read back’ their preaching into that of his, never make him into a precursor to their own activities and teachings, never appeal to his authority and their own connections to him? That would show a woeful ignorance of how sects work, let alone human nature.

I am mentioning here only a smattering of the passages in the epistles which provide us with compelling indication that their writers place no historical Jesus in their own past. 2 Cor. 5:5 tells us that as a guarantee of “life immortal,” God has sent “the Spirit,” not Jesus. There is no post-Jesus world evident in Romans 13:11-12 or 1 Cor. 10:11. More will crop up later, such as Hebrews 8:4 which tells us in no uncertain terms that Jesus had never been on earth; or its 10:37 which promises that “the one who is to come” (a prophecy which later Gospel-based Christianity universally applied to the incarnation, not the Parousia) will come, and soon. All of this and much more both Ehrman and Schweitzer have failed to take into account. Their a priori convictions that a Jesus existed have screened it out for them.

Ehrman’s own “primary sources” as lurking icebergs

Ehrman declares:

I agree with Schweitzer’s overarching view, that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish prophet who anticipated a cataclysmic break in history in the very near future, when God would destroy the forces of evil to bring in his own kingdom here on earth. (p. 14, DJE?)

Ehrman is one of that majority of scholars who subscribes to the existence of a Q document (as do I), although I cannot say with how much of the detailed analysis of it he agrees. But if he assumes, as many critical scholars studying Q these days do, that the so-called “Wisdom” stratum—labelled Q1—represents the earliest and most reliable material as belonging to the “genuine” preaching Jesus, he ought to be aware that the content of such a stratum contradicts his contention above. For Q1 has virtually nothing to say of an apocalyptic nature, it contains no prophetic sayings, no mention of the Son of Man as a future judge, no break-up of the world or history. In fact, there is very little if anything of a specifically and exclusively Jewish nature at all. And yet, as we shall see later in his book, Ehrman appeals to alleged early pre-Gospel sources containing not only reliable information about Jesus and his teachings, it supposedly concerns Jewish interests and can even be confidently declared as having existed in the Aramaic language. Q would have to be front-row-center in Ehrman’s body of ‘early witness.’

He should also be aware that the way Q is analyzed these days, the prophetic/apocalyptic stratum of Q—labelled Q2—is generally regarded as a later development, a later addition to the evolving collection. Now, one can admit that this “compositional history” does not have to coincide with “tradition history,” in that some Q2 sayings may go back as early as the Q1 sayings even if not recorded at the same time as those Q1 sayings. But this idea and rationalization has serious problems, which we can get to later. I just want to warn the reader that everything is not so nice and tidy as Ehrman presents it, and that icebergs lie in wait.

Two histories

Ehrman provides a fairly competent summary of the history of the mythicist ‘movement’ over the centuries, which is a bit surprising, given that he admitted only recently to even becoming aware that such a thing existed. Perhaps he sourced it from somewhere else. However, he left out my own and others’ favorite from the 1920s, Paul-Louis Couchoud. In the modern period, he brings in G. A. Wells, Robert M. Price, Frank Zindler, Richard Carrier, and Thomas L. Thompson (Acharya S and Timothy Freke/Peter Gandy he discusses only to dismiss). And he did have the good grace to work in reference to myself as someone

seen by many as the leading representative of the view in the modern period. By his own admission, Doherty does not have any advanced degrees in biblical studies or any related field. But he does have an undergraduate degree in classics [actually, my degree is a combined one of classics and history], and his books show that he has read widely and has a good deal of knowledge at his disposal, quite admirable for someone who is, in his own view, an amateur in the field. (p. 17, DJE?)

How he handles my views and arguments, especially in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, will be seen later.

That history Ehrman supplements with another ‘history’, that of mythicists and their books being ignored or summarily dismissed by mainstream scholars. One of these, John Meier is quoted as saying, a single sentence in a four-volume work on the historical Jesus:

“[G. A.] Wells’s book, which builds its arguments on these and similar unsubstantiated claims, may be allowed to stand as a representative of the whole type of popular Jesus book that I do not bother to consider in detail.” (p. 20, DJE?)

This situation seems to stand in contradiction to the common claim, almost a mantra among historicists, that mainstream scholarship has long addressed the mythicist case and thoroughly demolished it. It is difficult to see “demolition” in the comment by Meier, or in any of the other books which Ehrman mentions as ignoring or dismissing those who theorize that Jesus never existed. For a comprehensive examination of the refutation of mythicism since the beginning of the 20th century, see my 3-part website article “Alleged Refutations of Jesus Mythicism” beginning at: <http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/CritiquesRefut1.htm>

3

Basic Mythicist and Historicist Positions

Before embarking on “the positive evidence that convinces everyone except the mythicists that Jesus existed,” Bart Ehrman provides “a rough idea about why some of the smarter and better informed writers have said he did not exist.”

Positives, negatives and Ehrman’s silence

Ehrman divides the mythicist arguments into negative and positive, claiming the former are “far more” numerous. This I would dispute, and certainly in my own case. Too much stress is laid by historicists on the supposed reliance by mythicists on the argument from silence. Yes, on my website I have a feature titled “The Sound of Silence: 200 Missing References to the Gospel Jesus in the New Testament Epistles.” It is meant to highlight and deal individually with the extensive occurrences of that silence and the perplexity—indeed, the impossibility—of such a situation if an historical Jesus had existed, especially in the face of historicism’s blithe dismissal of it as inconsequential or as ‘explained’ by the weakest and most unworkable excuses.

But in my books and website I spend far more space on presenting the positive aspects of the mythicist case than the argument from silence, laying out the actual picture of the early Christ cult movement which the epistles provide, demonstrating that it not only needs no historical Jesus, it actually excludes one. And in dealing with the Q side of things, I demonstrate that the Q record itself shows that no historical Jesus founder was present at the root of the Kingdom preaching sect, but was only developed and inserted into the Q record as the sect and its document evolved, a common sectarian occurrence.

But that will come later. Ehrman provides a telling description of the fact that no mention of Jesus can be found in any Greek or Roman source for at least 80 years after his death. He also acknowledges the mythicist claim that the two famous references to Jesus in the Jewish historian Josephus are very likely interpolations, without putting up a fuss about it (“If they are right…”)—at least for the moment. He goes on to further acknowledge that mythicists are right to point out that

the apostle Paul says hardly anything about the historical Jesus or that he says nothing at all. This may come as a shock to most readers of the New Testament, but a careful reading of Paul’s letters shows the problems. (pp. 31-32, DJE?)

What he doesn’t add here is that this situation is far from peculiar to Paul. It exists across virtually the entire range of the non-Gospel record from almost the first hundred years of Christianity. One writer’s silence (and peculiar language we will look at) could perhaps be an idiosyncrasy, though still curious; the entire flock of them outside the Gospels showing the same curiosities would be so unlikely as to be rejected out of hand. (Ehrman will later try to get around this by declaring that those other silent authors, such as of 1 Peter, Revelation and Hebrews, nevertheless “clearly indicate that Jesus existed.” I will be demonstrating that he is mistaken—and not by claiming interpolation!)

Paul’s silence: problematic - Ehrman’s silence: misleading

Ehrman asks rhetorically:

But [Paul] says very little indeed about anything that Jesus said and did while he was alive. Why would that be, if Jesus was in fact a historical person? Why doesn’t Paul quote the words of Jesus, such as the Sermon on the Mount? Why does he never refer to any of Jesus’s parables? Why doesn’t he indicate what Jesus did? Why not mention any of his miracles? His exorcisms? His controversies? His trip to Jerusalem? His trial before Pontius Pilate? And on and on. (p. 32, DJE?)

Good questions. Here Ehrman inserts the frequent historicist defence that “Paul on several occasions does appear to quote Jesus,” which is a reference to the so-called “words of the Lord” (usually numbered at four, including Ehrman’s mention of “1 Cor. 11:22-24” concerning what Paul calls the Lord’s Supper). He points out that some mythicists explain these as interpolations. I do not, and I’m not sure that too many mythicists claim the other three as interpolations. However, Ehrman also notes that “other mythicists” explain these sayings as “words the heavenly ‘Jesus’ has spoken through Christian prophets in Paul’s communities.”

Here we can note the first of several times throughout his book in which Ehrman attributes to mythicists a certain interpretation, without noting that such an interpretation is also held in some circles of mainstream scholarship. (For example, mainstream scholars Jean Magne and Winsome Munro have argued that 1 Cor. 11:23-26 is an interpolation or part of a larger interpolation.) This is something he can certainly be faulted on, for he has created for the uninitiated the impression that such an interpretation is something flawed or outlandish, held only by mythicists. This reflects a mindset which seems unwilling to credit mythicism with any arguments that can be used in its favor, even if this is to be accomplished through deception or concealment. And it is hard to believe that Ehrman was not conscious of what he was doing and what he was leaving out in these cases.

There is indeed a traditional thread in modern NT scholarship that such “words of the Lord” reflect a practice in early Christian preaching: apostles like Paul made pronouncements which were perceived as coming to them from the spiritual Christ (“the risen Christ”) in heaven, communicated through personal revelation and not by passed-on tradition. The very example which Ehrman mentions, the Lord’s Supper words in 1 Corinthians, is prefaced by Paul telling us that “For I received from the Lord…” signifying such a personal revelation. Similar language in regard to the other “words of the Lord” passages conveys the same thing. Rudolf Bultmann, Burton Mack, Werner Kelber are only a few of the scholars who maintain this interpretation, though they usually try to qualify the Lord’s Supper one. (See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.30 and note 15.)

Gospel narratives modeled on scripture

Mythicists point, says Ehrman, to the problematic nature of the four Gospels coming several decades after Jesus’ alleged life, to their “contradictions and discrepancies,” their biased approach to their subject. And to the fact that they have modified their stories, if not entirely invented them, particularly the miracle stories. There is no mention here of the recent work of critical scholars like Robert M. Price, who have demonstrated that almost every pericope found in Mark, not just the miracle stories but encompassing both the passion and the ministry, has been constructed out of one or more passages in the Hebrew bible. The blueprint has been scripture, not history remembered, not oral tradition—at least there is no identifiable sign of any such input. No wonder mythicists (and others, too) regard the Gospels to be unreliable as providing any genuine picture of the life of an historical Jesus.

Does Ehrman seriously dispute almost 200 years of NT research?

But Ehrman again misleads the uninitiated reader:

Furthermore, many mythicists insist that the four Gospels ultimately all go back to just one of the Gospels, Mark, on which the other three were based. This means that of all the many writers—pagan, Jewish, and Christian—that we have from the first century (assuming Mark was written as early as the first century), we have only one that describes or even mentions the life of the historical Jesus. How plausible is that, if Jesus actually lived? (p. 33, DJE?)

Is Ehrman denying that Matthew and Luke “ultimately . . . go back to just one of the Gospels, Mark”? Is that just a crazy idea by mythicists? Markan priority is the mainstay of almost two centuries of New Testament research. In fact, it ought to be striking that neither Matthew nor Luke betrays any reliance for their own passion story on anything but its predecessor—and first appearance in the entire record—in Mark. They have not incorporated any differing version that we ought to expect would, by their time, have been developed in their own communities through the diverse transmission of oral tradition or different emphases on those traditions. (The sometimes claimed reliability of oral tradition to transmit exact remembrances even over time and under variegated circumstances, territory and communities, especially in extended narratives, is simply groundless. And besides, there is no indication in the entire non-Gospel and Acts record that any such oral tradition even existed, let alone was being widely and carefully transmitted.)

Between the Gospel passion stories we find no differences in the narrative layouts, no changes of emphases. Any little additions or tweaking of details, such as fleshing out the co-crucified thieves or a background for Joseph of Arimathea, or Luke’s invention of a hearing before Herod (hardly historical if no one else records it, the same thing being true of Matthew’s guards at the tomb), can be put down to the work of the individual evangelist, often patently a reworking of Mark or prompted by scripture. As for John, recent critical scholarship, such as that of Robert M. Price, Lawrence M. Wills, Norman Perrin, C. K. Barrett, Frans Neirynck, M. Sabbe, Hartwig Thyen, M. E. Boismard, Manfred Lang, Udo Schnelle, has demonstrated quite clearly that the longstanding dispute about whether John’s version of the passion was dependent directly or indirectly on a synoptic source has been settled. It was. (See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 445-8.)

Parallels

When Ehrman goes on to mention the mythicist claim that the Gospels are also unreliable because they “are paralleled time and again in the myths about pagan gods and other divine men discussed in the ancient world,” he is making a point which he regards as an Achilles’ heel in popular mythicism. And to some extent he is right. The “parallelomania” which has characterized some mythicist writers past and present has been overblown, uncovering a parallel between the Gospel Jesus and the pagan savior god myths under every rock. But some legitimate parallels do exist and are unmistakable; some others have feasibility even given the uncertainty of the record or the artifact. The virgin birth is a good example of a common mytheme in the culture of the time, and many others could be added. With due caution and qualification, these parallels are a legitimate further argument that elements of the story of Jesus are not history remembered, not genuine biography, but fictional traits given to him to create a picture which will resonate with the popular mythology of the day and support the symbolic significance which the evangelists are bringing to their allegorical tale. Ehrman will revisit the topic of such parallels later in the book.

*

Having outlined the reasons why mythicists do not believe in an historical Jesus, Ehrman proceeds to his “evidence which convinces everyone except mythicists that an HJ existed.” Like most historicist defenders, he chooses to start with the non-Christian witness. I usually take this as a tacit admission that the Christian record itself is a comparatively weak and problematic witness, and indeed Ehrman’s summary of the mythicist reasons for rejecting an HJ has demonstrated why. But is the non-Christian witness any more conclusive?

Admiring the genius of Jesus the teacher

This section is prefaced with a defence of himself against a common accusation levelled against him, by believers more conservative than he, that he is anti-Christian. Ehrman assures the reader that he is an admirer of the bible and that its voice should be listened to, even if imperfect and not inerrant. Some biblical writers, he says, were geniuses (no doubt, as geniuses have been found everywhere and at all times), even if not inspired by God. To those geniuses he adds Jesus.

At the same time, he probably was not well educated. He may have been only semiliterate. But he certainly lived, and his teachings have impacted the world ever since. Surely that is one gauge of genius. (p. 37, DJE?)

The problem is, the catalogue of Jesus’ ‘genuine’ teachings, as judged by critical mainstream scholarship today, is extremely limited and uncertain. The Jesus Seminar tossed out at least three-quarters of the sayings attributed to Jesus found in the early record (canonical and non-canonical), and critical scholarship since has largely followed suit. This leaves a huge majority of the teachings alleged to Jesus as having been spoken by others. How reliable can the attribution of the minority to him be? The tendency has been, of course, to judge as authentic the perceived “best” of those teachings, a subjective choice which in circular fashion identifies Jesus as a singular and charismatic individual to whom we can attribute such outstanding teachings. This process also makes him innovative. Yet when we examine the supposed innovative and laudable teachings of Jesus, we find that in many cases similar sentiments can be found in figures preceding him, from Confucius to Rabbi Hillel to the best of Greco-Roman ethics. If Jesus’ individuality is thereby undermined, then there is less need to claim that the content of the teachings requires a charismatic, unique individual which supposedly strengthens the case that such an individual existed.

The catalogue of sayings that were attributed to Jesus includes many that are not so commendable, not so tolerant and far-sighted, not so different from a lot of the stuff being bandied about at that time. Naturally, these teachings tend today to be rejected as not authentic to him, on the basis that the good teachings have established a figure who was not likely to have spoken the less admirable ones, another part of the circular exercise. But if a mix of good and bad would be relatively normal in any sect, with the good often drawn from broader or previous sources, then it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that a unique founder is unnecessary, and doubly so when that founder is obscure in nature, hard to detect historically, and is even excluded in some pictures of the faith. It certainly becomes difficult to justify the claim that “he must have existed,” other than by wishful thinking. It certainly becomes a travesty to condemn those who claim that the evidence can suggest otherwise as misguided agenda-driven quacks not deserving a moment’s consideration.

How secure is Ehrman’s one dimensional Jesus?

Make no mistake, Ehrman is not a regular, even liberal, Christian. He does not believe in the resurrection. In fact, he declares: “I certainly do not mean to say that I consider myself either a Christian or an apologist for Christian causes. I am neither.” I am sure that we could find some others of similar outlook among today’s critical scholars of Christian origins, even in Religion departments of major universities and still managing to hold onto their tenure. So this puts Ehrman in the position of defending the existence of a Jesus who has been stripped of almost all that traditional Christianity holds dear. Ehrman believes essentially in a one-dimensional Jesus, Jesus the rabbi, with an emphasis on his apocalyptically-oriented prophecy.

But how secure is the support for that single dimension when it is impossible to be sure what sayings in the catalogue are actually his? How can we feel secure when one entire segment of the record doesn’t even declare him to have been a teacher or prophet, or when the paltry number of words supposedly quoted from him sound like perceived revelation? Where is the ‘impact upon the world’ of these allegedly innovative teachings when the whole non-Gospel Christian world shows no sign of having any knowledge of or interest in them?

I don’t know how many Christian preachers I have heard declare as a kind of summation of Jesus’ preaching that “he taught us to love one another.” This may not be that innovative even in the ancient world, but a Jesus without such a teaching in his catalogue should hardly be acceptable in any view of him, past or present. But was it only in Galilee that the early Christians heard of such a thing? We would have to think so in view of James 2:8, or Galatians 5:14, or Romans 13:9, which urge readers to love one another, but fail to appeal to Jesus’ teaching on such a subject. Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4:9 goes so far as to say: “We are taught by God to love one another”! By any rational standard, this belies any knowledge of a teaching Jesus on Paul’s part, let alone any impact on the early Christian world.

Preaching: the lost power needed to raise the dead

Was a mark of Jesus’ “genius” that he could impel some people to turn him into a part of God and have him rise from the grave to redeem the world’s sins? Aside from the incredibility of such a quantum leap, the only feasible link is missing. For Ehrman, Jesus’ genius resided in his teachings. If he did not actually rise from the grave, then the power that impelled such a reaction to him had to have been his preaching career. This was so impressive that everything else, no matter how lofty, proceeded from it. Jesus the man had to impel his transformation to Jesus the god.

But that fuel for lift-off is nowhere to be found in the epistolary record. Jesus the man is in eclipse; miracles as well as important teachings prophetic or ethical are missing, even when they would have related to issues central to the sect. The very location of his career in Galilee, let alone anywhere else on earth, is likewise missing. Ehrman must defend the highly dubious—indeed contradictory and wholly infeasible—proposition that Paul was so impacted by Jesus’ earthly teaching that he turned him into a part of God while promptly losing all interest in the earthly man. And not just Paul, but apparently every writer and community that was converted to him. (The Q community with its sayings collection cannot be included here because it shows no sign of turning its founder figure into something divine—possibly excepting a beginning of it in its very latest addition, the Temptation Story—and nowhere does it give him a death and resurrection or even a soteriological role.)

Ehrman at the very least must dissociate Paul and the epistolary communities from any connection with the Galilee-based Jesus figure and tradition, and regard Paul’s faith and soteriology as not based on a human being. We will see whether he does.

4

Preliminary Remarks

In yet another preface to his discussion of the non-Christian witness to Jesus, Ehrman examines some of the principles involved in historical research. No, it is not like science which can repeat experiments and get observable results.

Technically, we cannot prove a single thing historically. All we can do is give enough evidence (of kinds I will mention in a moment) to convince enough people (hopefully nearly everyone) about a certain historical claim . . . . (p. 38, DJE?)

Burden of Proof

True, all we can really establish is “probabilities” based on judgments about the evidence. And yes, I agree with Ehrman and against Price and some other mythicists that the burden of proof does not lie entirely on the historicist side. As Ehrman quotes E. P. Sanders: “The burden of proof lies with whoever is making a claim.” The problem is, historicists have a habit of maintaining that no burden at all lies on their side, or else (too often) that adequate ‘proof’ is to be garnered simply through majority opinion, the authoritative consensus which scholars past and present have adopted that an historical Jesus existed. When asked to actually present an adequate case for the existence of the Gospel Jesus, the demand is too often brushed aside as ‘already proven’ or by simple dismissal as an axiomatic non-starter, dissented to only by those driven by an “agenda.”

The Kind of Evidence Historians Want

Ehrman asks what kind of evidence historicists look for, and rely upon, to establish the existence of a given person in the past. He enumerates a “wish list.” Hard, physical evidence, such as photographs. Obviously, none of the latter are available for Jesus, but Ehrman goes further and admits that there is no physical evidence of any kind. No archaeological evidence; again, probably not surprising. No contemporary inscriptions, no coins. Fine. No writings: perhaps a little less natural, but perhaps he was illiterate; or if he could read, he could not write, although Ehrman fails to note that there was nothing stopping him from dictating (it wasn’t a far-fetched idea to Eusebius some centuries later who quotes clearly fabricated correspondence between Jesus and an Edessan king).

As a substitute, Ehrman focuses on the most common form of written witness: documents about a person. The more the better, and best that they be independent and corroborative. At this point, he once again fails to make it clear that the four Gospels are anything but independent and corroborative. They are all dependent on Mark, with one reasonably perceivable lost source, the Q document extractable from Matthew and Luke. John, too, is dependent on Mark for his passion story, and where he is not dependent on a Synoptic source, namely in his portrayal of Jesus’ ministry and the content of his teaching, he is not corroborative. For he gives us a drastically different set of teachings by Jesus, thereby casting doubt on the authenticity of any of the teachings of Jesus, for how could John take the liberty of going off on such an alien tangent from the others, totally ignoring them, if the others were real and reliable?

Another preferred feature of written records is proximity in time, the closer the better. Leaving aside efforts by conservative scholars, the standard dating of the Gospels, all of them following soon after the Jewish War, is not close proximity, especially given the disruptive effects of that war on all of Palestine. A considerable number of mythicists prefer to date all the Gospels well into the second century, but even if a compromise is adopted (I and others like G. A. Wells, with demonstrable reasons, would date Mark to around 90, with the rest following over the next two to three decades: see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.400f), we have nothing resembling proximity. And another wish-list preference, disinterest on the part of the writers about their subject, is as far from the actuality of the Gospels as one can get.

The Evidence We Do Not Have: Witness to Jesus in the First Century

Ehrman attempts to address this lack head-on. But he makes observations which are patently a down-playing of the real situation. No Greek or Roman author in the first century makes mention of Jesus? No matter,

the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live. Jesus stands here with the vast majority of living, breathing human beings of earlier ages. (p. 43, DJE?)

I don’t think so. The vast majority of living, breathing human beings of his era were not turned into gods almost immediately upon their deaths. They did not give rise to a faith movement which we find spread across the eastern empire barely a decade later. Ehrman admits that in view of the Gospel picture, it would be incredible if attention was not paid to Jesus; but he counters by noting that one must first demonstrate that the Gospel picture of miracles and fantastic deeds is factual, something which he and most modern critical scholars reject or seriously reduce.

But it matters not what the man may or may not actually have done in his life—though it does matter that no one can reasonably explain the huge discrepancy between a life lived in obscurity and what was made of him after his passing. That posthumous impact should have brought him to the attention of historians, ethicists, satirists, commentators of various sorts. Ehrman earlier spoke of the impact upon the world of Jesus’ teachings, if nothing else. But that impact does not show up until the dissemination of the Gospels, well into the second century. And the impact upon the world and its literate observers of the recent transformation of a humble man into a resurrected redemptive divinity is nowhere in sight outside the Gospel story until the second century. The redemptive divinity part does not even appear in the reputed references—certainly not their claimed ‘authentic’ residues—by Josephus.

Ehrman tries unsuccessfully to convey a similarity between Jesus and Pontius Pilate. The latter was arguably the most influential Roman political figure in Palestine during the first half of the first century. But we have no record of anything written by him; the Roman archives possess no account that has survived of any of his decrees, judicial judgments, accomplishments—the same situation we face with Jesus. And he is for the first and only time mentioned by any Roman historical work in the reference to Christ and Christians early in the second century in the Annals of Tacitus.

Yet it is hardly to be overlooked that Josephus, as Ehrman admits, tells us quite a bit about Pilate’s deeds, as does Philo in his Embassy to Gaius, complaining about Pilate’s disreputable activities as governor. He tells us more even than Josephus does, without there being any identifiable dependence of one writer upon the other. Both also enjoyed a disinterest in their subject in any positive direction. Moreover, coins were issued in Pilate’s governorship, and there survives an archaeological artifact: an inscription on a stone fragment bearing his name and position as prefect. This is far more witness, not to mention reliable witness, than Jesus enjoys, and if this is the best analogy Ehrman could come up with, it only highlights how difficult it is to explain away the dearth of awareness of Jesus by anyone in the first century.

Ehrman really reaches when he notes that no mention survives in the first century of the historian Josephus, as if this overrides Josephus’ extensive mention of himself. Considering that Josephus is the only Jewish historian extant from that time, we can hardly point to other writers who could have mentioned him yet did not. And when mention begins to be made of Josephus in the later second century by Christian writers, it is to comment on what he had to say in his writings. (Regrettably, this did not include any comment on either of his alleged references to Jesus, nor did it include mention of Tacitus’ alleged reference to Christ, Christians and their persecution by Nero for setting the Great Fire.)

Ehrman concludes this section with a summary remark:

It is possible that he simply made too little impact, just like the overwhelming mass of people who lived in the Roman Empire of the first century. Many Christians do not want to hear that Jesus did not make an enormous splash on the world of his day, but it appears to be true. (p. 46, DJE?)

It only “appears to be true” in the eyes of historicists who must come up with some such explanation to account for the utter silence in the contemporary record. But again, this does not solve the discrepancy between such a man and what was immediately made of him, which was not “like the overwhelming mass of people who lived in the Roman Empire of the first century.” And it contradicts Ehrman’s own evaluation that Jesus, at least in his teachings, did have a considerable impact.

Are the Gospels Eyewitness Accounts?

Ehrman gently breaks the news to his readers that the four Gospels are not eyewitness accounts, and not written by the names attached to them. (His language and tone here and elsewhere makes it clear that his primary intended readership is not the scholarly community—which is too bad, because if it were he might not have engaged in some of the dubious antics he is guilty of.) Studies he quotes indicate it is highly unlikely that any of Jesus’ disciples, or figures like Mark and Luke, would have been literate, let alone have the capacity to compose complex narratives. (The literacy rate among Jews in Palestine has been calculated at 3%.) Nor is there any sign of first-person accounts, as though a participant eyewitness were speaking. (The “we” passages in Acts enjoy another explanation.) Then there is the question of language and the quality of the Gospel writing:

The native tongue of Jesus, his disciples, and most people in Palestine was Aramaic. But the Gospels were written not in Aramaic but in Greek. And in very good Greek. Highly proficient Greek. The authors of the Gospels were unusually well-educated speakers and writers of Greek. They must have been from the relatively higher classes, and they almost certainly were from urban areas outside Palestine. (p. 48, DJE?)

Then there is the question of dating. With Mark supposedly around “70 CE or so” and Matthew, Luke and John following up to 95 CE, their authors, Ehrman admits, could not have been followers of Jesus and likely not even followers of the original apostles. He theorizes that they were people who over time “may have” heard stories about Jesus through oral tradition and perhaps had some written sources, finally deciding to write them down in a narrative. He refers to Luke’s Prologue which “explicitly states that he knows of earlier written accounts of Jesus’s life.”

This trust in the accuracy and reliability of the Lukan Prologue ignores a couple of considerations. Luke’s reference to the “many” who have written accounts of Jesus that have been “handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” is hardly to be taken at face value. Considering that Ehrman can enumerate only Mark and Q as records of Jesus accessible to Luke, the “many” would be an exaggeration. It also dubiously suggests that the writer regards his sources as actually the product of eyewitnesses, which would seem to contradict how Ehrman has styled the evangelists’ work and what they were working with.

Alternatively, it actually indicates that Luke (or at the very least this Prologue) comes from a later time than Ehrman’s standard dating; the very words “handed down to us” suggest a period of time when the speaker is separated from long-gone sources. Indeed, some critical scholarship judges that canonical Luke may involve more than one phase of composition: an earlier version (Ur-Luke) which may have been the one Marcion used, and a later version by orthodox church circles, perhaps around the 150s, in which amendments and additions were made, including the Prologue. Either alternative renders the Lukan author or editor anything but accurate and reliable. Ehrman fails to mention this.

Fudging critical scholarship

He also looks to fudge the idea of Markan priority:

Luke explicitly states that he knows of earlier written accounts of Jesus’s life (1:1-4), and there are very good reasons for thinking that both he and Matthew had access to a version of Mark’s Gospel, from which they derived many of their stories. (p. 48, DJE?)

Very good reasons? A strange way to refer to the established backbone of New Testament scholarship for almost two centuries. If it weren’t for Mark, Matthew Luke and John would not exist; most probably no historical Jesus would exist in the Christian mind today. As I said in the original The Jesus Puzzle, “Without Mark’s creation, Paul and the Christ cult he spent his life preaching would have vanished into the sunken pits of fossilized history.”

5

A Roman Trio

Pliny the Younger

After this considerable amount of prefatory material, Ehrman finally arrives at his discussion of the non-Christian references to Jesus. He begins with Pliny the Younger and his famous letter to Trajan in the year 112 CE during his governorship of the province of Bithynia, in which he makes inquiries regarding the prosecution of Christians.

At the outset, Ehrman admits that any information about Jesus that might be gleaned from Pliny could be seen as having been derived from the Christians themselves (indeed, this is a virtual certainty from what he says), and thus is of little if any value in establishing the historicity of Jesus. Nor does Pliny use the name “Jesus,” referring to the Christian object of worship simply as “Christ.”

The information Pliny has collected from the accused about the sect’s activities is pretty innocuous:

- A pre-dawn chant,

- subscription to certain ethics and behavior,

- assembling to “take food of an ordinary, harmless kind.”

We might note that the latter does not suggest the Eucharist ceremony with its eating of the flesh and blood of Christ, whether god or man, and there is no reference to a crucifixion let alone an alleged resurrection.

As if!

But that pre-dawn chant: Pliny says it was “in honor of Christ as to a god [Christo quasi deo].”

Many translations render “quasi” by the words “as if.” Ehrman does not; he leaves out the “if.” Traditionally, it is claimed that the idea of “if” conveys Pliny’s view that Christ was not a god, but that his believers treated him as such; and if he was not a god, what was he? What else but a man? And Ehrman concurs, even without the “if”: “that the songs were offered to Christ ‘as to a god’ suggests that Christ was, of course, something else.”

But does it?

- First we can ask why, if Pliny had learned or already knew that the object of their worship was a man who had been crucified in Judea almost a century earlier, this was not mentioned in his account of the Christians to the emperor.

- It is also curious that he would have used the term “Christ” and not “Jesus,” or failed to make any reference to the meaning of “Christ.” It sounds no more than that Pliny has simply picked up this ‘name’ as that of the god of the Christians. This would make his “Christo quasi deo” a simple statement that “Christ” was their “god.” This would make sense, since “Christ” was not in the regular pantheon of any culture’s gods of the time and would need identifying as such.

- I point out in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.637f) that commentators are divided as to whether Pliny is using “quasi” in its ‘supposal’ sense—i.e., “as if”—which implies that something is not actually the case (“I felt as if I were king of the world”), or simply in a descriptive sense—i.e., “as”—which states an actuality (“He acknowledged his partner as an equal”). An examination of all Pliny’s letters shows that he uses “quasi” in both senses. It is therefore impossible to say from these words alone that Pliny views Christ as having been not a god but a man.

- Besides, had he known this and wanted to convey it, he should have used the man’s name.

We could go so far as to say that if Pliny was not aware of the man and his role in the sect, which is what his letter indicates, he is actually stating a view that the Bithynia Christians worshiped an entirely non-human figure, and thus he could be said to provide evidence that there was no historical Jesus.

Ehrman has ignored these considerations as outlined in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, as well as the observation (p.640) that no text by an ancient commentator contains “Christo quasi deo” when quoting this passage in Pliny.

Tertullian (Apology 2) shows “Christo et Deo” (Christ and God) or sometimes “Christo ut Deo” (Christ as God).

Jerome shows the latter, and Eusebius (H.E. III,33) quotes a Greek translation of Tertullian’s Latin as “ton Christon theou diken” which is “Christ in the manner of God,” suggesting an “ut” in the Latin being translated.

Make of this what you will, but we have no evidence for a “Christo quasi deo” before the printed editions of Pliny in the 16th century.

Forged?

Whether this letter of Pliny is a forgery is also discussed in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.640-2), but need not be gone into here. There are several problems existing in the letter which in fact justify questioning its authenticity, as opposed to Ehrman’s disparaging accusation that mythicists simply declare interpolations when it’s convenient for them, with no justification at all.

I personally am more than willing to accept its authenticity, for by doing so, internal evidence can be used to demonstrate that Pliny is not a witness to an historical Jesus and quite possibly the opposite.

*

Suetonius

Ehrman next addresses the Roman historian Suetonius, who makes a somewhat cryptic reference in his Life of Claudius (25:4) to (literally):

The Jews, being constantly in an uproar due to the instigator Chrestus, he [Claudius] expelled from Rome.

The obvious plain reading

While noting that a significant number of scholars have chosen to read this as a reference to Christ (despite the misspelling) and to Christians (despite the reference being to Jews), Ehrman compromises by suggesting that the situation was that Jews who believed in Jesus as the Messiah were in conflict with Jews who did not, and all got expelled together. The misspelling of the name was Suetonius’ mistake, or else a common mispronunciation of the term perhaps current in Rome in Suetonius’ time. (It was so in later centuries.)

On the other hand, Ehrman acknowledges that the name “Chrestus” was common, and that “since Chrestus itself could be a name, it may well be that there simply was a Jew named Chrestus who caused a disturbance that led to riots in the Jewish community.” This indeed is far more likely the explanation, especially since the Latin sentence contains “impulsore” which means “instigator” as a person, not “instigation.” This makes the usual translation (including by Ehrman) of “at the instigation of Chrestus”—which could be seen to refer to a past founding figure rather than one on the scene—misleading. But it is unlikely that an accomplished historian would, if he knew anything about the subject, place Jesus in Rome at the time of Claudius.

The evidence of Paul and Acts

There is also no suggestion by Paul in Romans that Roman Christians of any stripe had recently been embroiled in large-scale tumults, with Jews or anyone else, leading to the expulsion of the Christian community from Rome.

Ehrman suggests that Acts (18:2) might support his scenario, in that Aquila and Priscilla were said to have recently arrived from Italy because of Claudius’ expulsion of the Jews. But apart from the uncertain sources and reliability of a document most likely written in the second century, the text here could even suggest that the two were not yet Christians. It is also possible to postulate that in the expulsion of Jews from Rome, though the cause entailed no Christian activities, some Christians were caught up in the forced exodus.

Overstatements and contortions

Even Ehrman’s summary statement that the Suetonius passage is “of limited use” is an overstatement. It is of no value at all, and the mere fact that it is regularly inserted for consideration in the “non-Christian witness to Jesus” with all the contorted efforts to interpret it against the natural meaning of the text, is a sign of the desperate need to come up with some kind of witness to Jesus from the outside world.

*

Tacitus

Ehrman calls Tacitus “more promising.” He recounts the tale of the Great Fire of 64 CE in Annals 15, how Nero, himself presumed responsible for the fire, falsely accused the Christians of setting it and inflicted the goriest of punishments upon great numbers of them. Tacitus then says (in Ehrman’s words):

The author of this name, Christ, was put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, while Tiberius was emperor; but the dangerous superstition, though suppressed for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but even in the city [of Rome]. (DJE? p. 55)

Straining to read Jesus into Tacitus

Ehrman says:

Once again, Jesus is not actually named here, but it is obvious in this instance that he is the one being referred to . . . (DJE? p. 56)

But is it really that simple? Tacitus says that the group known as Christians derived their name from Christ. But how do we know that Tacitus was aware of his actual name if he doesn’t give it? It is commonly argued that Tacitus had to use the term “Christ” in order to properly explain the derivation of the term “Christians.” Undoubtedly so, but in making that secondary point he has thereby created the impression that ‘a man named Christ was executed by Pontius Pilate’ (which is quite possibly the way he understood it). To avoid the confusion he could have mentioned both names in a few simple words.

Hearsay or Official Archives?

Similar to the case of Pliny, Tacitus’ evident misunderstanding is best explainable by the fact that he is simply repeating hearsay, perhaps through police interrogations (as Norman Perrin puts it), in which word reached Roman ears from a group which referred to their perceived founder by the term “Christus,” easily assumed to be his name. Had Tacitus consulted a record in the archives (if it were even conceivable that such a thing could be found about a crucifixion in Judea 80 years previously, one of thousands taking place around the empire), it is not likely that such a report would lack the man’s name, or would even use the term “Christ”—unless by way of an explanation about him, assuming Romans back at head office would need to know such an explanation or would understand the concept—especially as early as 33 CE and before Christians even existed.

Ehrman himself admits to the likely scenario that Tacitus was using hearsay, and he is led to this conclusion by the additional fact that Tacitus refers to Pilate as “procurator,” the term in use for a provincial governor in Tacitus’ day, whereas in Pilate’s day it was “prefect.” Despite arguments that the term was “fluid” in the latter’s time (dependent on usages outside Roman historians and writers in Latin), the two terms actually referred to different offices, and it seems to be the case that in Judea both were held by Pilate. “Prefect” was the higher office (military commander as opposed to a financial officer), and is the one given to Pilate on the stone inscription referred to earlier. It would be virtually impossible that any formal report from Pilate would identify him by the inferior term, and thus if Tacitus were consulting an archive he could hardly have made such a mistake.

The Question of Authenticity

But all this may be moot. Once again, Ehrman denigrates mythicists for their alleged practice of simply declaring inconvenient passages as Christian interpolations: they don’t want there to be any references to Jesus, he says, so out they go. But in the case of Tacitus, there is very good reason to do so, and in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man I spend 25 pages presenting an argument in this direction. Ehrman makes not the slightest reference to it, let alone tries to rebut it.

It can be simply stated.

- For the next 300 years, no Christian commentator makes any reference to Nero’s slaughter of the Roman Christians for setting the Great Fire. Not just to Tacitus’ account of such an event, but to the event itself as something known in Christian tradition. That it would not be known is impossible. That it would not be referred to in any connection is almost equally impossible. Christians in those early centuries were fixated on the fact and history of their martyrdom. A great literature of martyrology was produced in that time, even if a lot of it was fiction or exaggeration. Eusebius (the pre-eminent church historian!) can refer to the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul at the hands of Nero, but he fails to include the array of Christian residents of Rome and makes no link of anything to the Great Fire.

- There is in Eusebius, and in the earlier Tertullian whom he quotes, as well as in the odd writer like Melito of Sardis, a vague allusion to Christians in general being put upon by Nero, but never with any specifics given, and certainly nothing even suggesting the scale of the event described in Tacitus.

- Tertullian, a man obsessed with the issue of martyrdom and the only one to suggest that Nero’s persecution of Christians was particularly sanguinary, says that it was “the singular excellence of Christians (which) brought on Nero’s condemnation” (Apology 5). No mention of the Fire, and no details given to illuminate his remark that “Nero was the first who assailed with the imperial sword the Christian sect.” He suggests that the Romans consult the “records” about this which he says they possess in the same breath as mentioning the report of Tiberius becoming convinced of Jesus’ divinity due to information about his death from Palestine (is this the alleged ‘Letter of Pilate’?), and later making reference to the Roman ‘record’ of the world-wide darkness at Jesus’ crucifixion!

These sorts of remarks, some of them so mild as to be unidentifiable with anything resembling Tacitus (see Melito as quoted by Eusebius in H.E. IV, 26), can be put down to either vague traditions of a minor event of persecution under Nero about which no details were remembered, or simply nothing at all but a tendency to regard Nero (who came to be prophesied as the future embodiment of the Antichrist, due to return at the End-time to persecute the faithful) as having been a persecutor in his first life.

On the other hand, the entire tradition may have arisen as a result of Nero’s alleged persecution of Peter and Paul, whose legends of martyrdom in Rome developed around the middle of the second century. (1 Clement at the end of the first is less than precise even about martyrdoms for the two figures, let alone that such took place in Rome.) Indeed, Tertullian conveys this very thing in Scorpiace 15 and elsewhere, that his concept of persecution by Nero is basically limited to the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul and perhaps a few of their companions; and the same is true of Eusebius (H.E. II,22).

The silence of the historians

The record in Roman historians is also curiously silent.

- Cassius Dio at the beginning of the third century has an account of the Fire, but puts the responsibility on Nero, with no mention of Christians or their ghastly persecution.

- Suetonius, in his Life of Nero, details the Great Fire (ch.38) with not a word about the Christians or their responsibility for it, nor about their infamous punishment. Earlier, in chapter 16, amid a list of measures taken by Nero to curb such problems as improper eating in public establishments, chariot drivers who cheated and robbed ordinary citizens, and pantomimic actors who had to be expelled from Rome, Suetonius makes this cryptic statement:

Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.

No word on what that punishment was, or the reason for it. (Actually, the final phrase sounds like the reason.) If it was meant to refer to the fire, why was that point not included in his later description of the fire? If this line is authentic (though it would stand out like a sore thumb from its context if it referred to the Tacitus scene), it would seem Suetonius knew no more about an event of Neronian persecution than Christian writers did. Also, it is curious that he did not draw on Tacitus (a common practice among ancient historians), from his Annals recently published, yet another nail in the coffin of authenticity for the famous passage.

We might also note that Pliny’s letter to Trajan all but forces us to conclude that neither one of them knew of the great Neronian persecution. Pliny seems almost ignorant about Christians; and finding them virtually innocuous and inquiring what treatment they should be accorded is hardly consonant with their recent supposed history under Nero and the accusation that they had been guilty of burning down half the city of Rome. Nor is Trajan’s advocation of a ‘go easy’ policy on the Christians.

The testimony of the apocryphal acts

But all this long silence is trumped by a Christian record which goes so far as to rule out the historicity of the Tacitus account. The apocryphal Acts of Paul, from the late second century, in the context of Paul’s martyrdom, has a number of local Christians condemned to execution by fire at the same time as Paul’s beheading. No mention is made of the Great Fire or Christians executed on its account. If such a tradition were known, it is hardly conceivable that any writer would have erased it in favor of the scenario given in the Acts of Paul.

Even more damning is the Acts of Peter, written around the same time. This tale has Nero, following the crucifixion of Peter, planning to “destroy all those brethren who had been made disciples by Peter.” But he is dissuaded by a dream in which he is being scourged and told “you cannot now persecute or destroy the servants of Christ.” An alarmed Nero “kept away from the disciples . . . and thereafter the brethren kept together with one accord . . .” No writer who knew of a wholesale persecution and killing of Christian brethren in the city of Rome by Nero could possibly have constructed this scene, one which effectively rules out any such persecution.

The first witness for Tacitus

When a Christian account of the fire and persecution first appears around the year 400 in the writings of Sulpicius Severus, we find a definite literary connection with the extant account in Tacitus, although we cannot be sure in which direction the dependency lies. And Severus does not include in that common material the reference to Christ as executed by Pilate, though this he could have cut as unnecessary for his readers. Yet Severus does not identify his information as coming from Tacitus or indeed any other source.

Was he drawing on a description of the persecution previously interpolated into the Annals (post-Eusebius) by either a Christian or even a Roman scribe, reflecting the phenomenon known from the later 2nd century on (as in Tertullian) of “blaming the Christians” for every misfortune that befell society? Or did he create the description of the Neronian persecution himself, on which basis a later interpolation into Tacitus was made, along with the reference to Christ himself as a victim under Pilate? (In that case, “Christ” as a name instead of “Jesus” would have been perfectly natural for a Christian scribe.)

*

Other aspects to the question of authenticity in regard to Tacitus’ alleged witness to Jesus are discussed in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. I bring the subject up in some detail here to show that, despite Ehrman’s dismissal of mythicists as compulsive interpolation advocates, there is indeed very good justification for rejecting the much-vaunted reference to an historical Jesus in Tacitus; and to show that Ehrman made no effort to counter or even mention that 25-page argument.

In fact, the only rebuttal offered is once again the old appeal to authority:

I don’t know of any trained classicists or scholars of ancient Rome who think this, and it seems highly unlikely. (DJE? p. 55)

And this is followed by his above-mentioned mud slinging against mythicists.

6

Jewish Sources

Philo of Alexandria

Bart Ehrman, in his survey of the non-Christian witness to Jesus, turns next to the Jewish category. He first dismisses the silence about Jesus in the writings of the philosopher Philo of Alexandria as something unsurprising, since by his death (probably by 50 CE), Christianity had not yet penetrated to Egypt. That may be the case, but this does not mean that a philosopher living in Egypt, just around the Mediterranean corner from Palestine, especially one whose philosophy about God and the mediator Logos was a close antecedent to that of Paul, was completely isolated from news of Judean events, or from new ideas being bandied about in the very field of thought Philo was engaged in.

What we do know from Philo’s writings

Moreover, we know from his writing that Philo was familiar with Pilate and his objectionable activities in Judea. He would not, of course, know about every rebel or criminal executed by the governor, but considering the developments which supposedly followed this particular execution, and considering his interest in the sect known as the Therapeutae to which the early Christian community in Judea would supposedly have borne a strong resemblance, it would not be infeasible for him to have noticed the latter and especially what was presumably being made out of its human founder.

We have writings of Philo up to the year 41 CE, but it could be argued (Ehrman does not) that, even had he taken notice, commenting on that notice was something he simply didn’t get around to doing. The silence in Philo is therefore not overly significant, it is just another void to add to the overall picture.

*

Josephus

But the most important Jewish historian of the era is another matter. Josephus has been a battleground in the ‘clash of titans’ and understandably so. The last half-century of scholarship has focused mainly on whether the passage known as the Testimonium Flavianum in Antiquities of the Jews, Book18 contains an authentic original by Josephus which Christians later made additions to. This is a bandwagon which virtually every New Testament scholar these days has hopped onto, as though the maintenance of an authentic original is seen as crucial to Jesus’ existence.

It should be noted, however, that prior to the Second World War, many scholars were quite willing to postulate that Josephus made no reference to Jesus at all. See, for example, Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History?, p.35 (that both passages can be “suspected of interpolation”); or Charles Guignebert, Jesus, p.18 (“It seems probable that Josephus did not name Jesus anywhere”). The latter, in regarding the Testimonium as a complete forgery, suggested: “It may be admitted that the style of Josephus has been cleverly imitated, a not very difficult matter” (Ibid., p.17).

Curiously, Ehrman says he will deal with Josephus’ two references to Jesus “in reverse order,” gives us a brief description of the Antiquities 20 passage, then “before dealing with” the mythicist claim that it’s an interpolation, he switches over to the Testimonium in Antiquities 18, calling it the “second passage.” One gets an impression more than once in this book that Ehrman simply went with his first draft, and without benefit of editor.

The suspicious passages

Though most of the present readers will know this passage like the back of their hands, I’ll give Ehrman’s rendition of it according to “the best manuscripts”:

At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one should call him a man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. He was the messiah. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. For he appeared to them on the third day, living again, just as the divine prophets had spoken of these and countless other wondrous things about him. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out. (Antiquities 18.3.3) [DJE?, p. 59]

The problem parts of this passage, as Ehrman recounts them, are well known:

that Jesus was more than a man, that he was the messiah, and that he arose from the dead in fulfillment of the scriptures. [DJE?, p. 60]

No Jew, and certainly not Josephus, could have written these clauses. Who did? Obviously,

The majority of scholars of early Judaism, and experts on Josephus, think that . . . one or more Christian scribes ‘touched up’ the passage a bit. [DJE?, p. 60]

Today’s scholarship as a whole tends to accept the above passage, minus the noted impossible parts, as more or less Josephus’ original statement. But “people who receive the truth with pleasure” is surely suspicious as well. Would Josephus have styled Jesus as a speaker of “truth”?

Nothing neutral

And the claim that such a residual passage is “neutral” can hardly be accepted.

For one thing, “startling deeds” in the above translation tries to ‘neutralize’ a phrase better rendered as “wonderful works” (paradoxon ergon). Indeed, Josephus uses paradoxos 20 times in Antiquities, and almost all refer to wonders or favorable events brought about by God. Writers of the time like Philo regularly use it in positive ways.

Moreover, saying that his followers continued to love him after his death contains more than a hint of praise, as does the observation that “the tribe of the Christians” is still going strong.

Most importantly, there can be no reason to think that Josephus could have called Jesus “a wise man,” a phrase he consistently uses for respected figures like Solomon and Elisha. In fact, toward every other popular leader in Palestine during the first century Josephus has nothing but contempt, condemning them as instigators of unrest leading to the catastrophe of the Jewish War. Nor would he have had any reason to regard Jesus, unlike the rest, as an innocent man, something which the Testimonium conveys in its assigning of blame for Jesus’ prosecution to Jewish “leading men.”

Dealing lightly with the arguments

Ehrman chooses to address my own arguments in regard to Josephus as laid out in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, but he hardly does so in any comprehensive fashion. He notes the oft-observed fact that the paragraph on Jesus in Antiquities 18 seems intrusive, with the final sentence of the preceding paragraph (recounting the bloody protests over Pilate’s use of temple funds to build aqueducts) flowing naturally into the first sentence of the succeeding paragraph. The latter reads:

About the same time, another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder.

This hardly follows logically from the paragraph on Jesus, which is in no way portrayed as causing a calamitous disorder, and certainly not for the Jews. Ehrman chooses to use my proviso that, since the ancients did not use footnotes, they had to insert “digressions from their main points” in the body of the text. From this he concludes:

So this argument really does not amount to much. [DJE?, p. 62]

But he has ignored important qualifications to this which undercut such a complacent judgment.

- First, if Josephus had written the paragraph on Jesus as a ‘digression’ from his main focus on the calamities of the time, he would likely not have worded that first sentence (see above) of the succeeding paragraph in the way that he has, looking back beyond the Testimonium as though ignoring it completely and leaving the reader wondering what was sad or calamitous about his Jesus account.

- Second, that succeeding sentence is itself followed by a digression (a scandal involving a con artist, calamitous only to the victim) which delays a recounting of that “another sad calamity.” However, in this case, Josephus announces that he is about to insert a digression, something he does not do for the Jesus paragraph.

So the situation is hardly as innocuous as Ehrman presents it.

As a counter to my argument that no Christian writer before Eusebius makes any reference at all to the Testimonium, Ehrman once again appeals to the “neutral” character of it, which would supposedly have given those writers no reason to quote from it. He says,

The fact that Jesus is said to have been wise or to have done great deeds would not go far in the repertoire of the Christian apologists. [DJE?, p. 62]

The only word for this is nonsense. I have shown above that the TF is anything but neutral, and Ehrman’s own words just quoted provide obvious corroboration. As I say in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.538):

There is so much in that ‘neutral’ reconstructed account which Christians could have put a spin on in defense of themselves and Jesus, so much that could have provided succor, support and even ammunition for what those Christian apologists were attempting to do in their writing.

And I gave a good example in Origen, who is countering Celsus’ accusation that Jesus’ miracles were ‘cheap tricks’ he learned in Egypt. Part of Origen’s counter is that Jesus’ superior miracles were designed to win people over to his commendable ethical teachings. A respected Jewish historian calls Jesus a wise man who did wondrous works and preached “truth,” and Origen—who in his writings cites Josephus 11 times on other subjects—would remain silent if he knew the reconstructed Testimonium? (And we know he had read Antiquities 18 because he cites the passage on John the Baptist.)

Ehrman tries to get around my opinion that Josephus could only have seen Jesus in a negative light, as yet another would-be messiah who drew the wrath of Rome down on Jewish heads. He suggests that, if we read into Josephus’ knowledge of Jesus only what is written in the residual passage—where there is nothing about claiming to be Messiah or preaching a subversive political message—then Josephus would have had no reason to react negatively to him. He was simply “a teacher with followers.”

This, too, is nonsense. If Josephus chose to write any passage about Jesus, he had to have known something about him. If he was willing to call him a wise man and label his teachings as “truth” he had to have some idea of what those teachings were about.

How could Josephus not know?

But in view of the Gospel traditions about Jesus’ teachings, which should have been circulating in Christian circles in Rome by the 90s of the first century when Josephus was writing, how can it be thought that somehow only the “good” teachings among them found their way to him? How would the overturning of the social order, the apocalyptic promises and the prophecy that the Temple would fall, the miracle traditions which included some resembling those essayed by other would-be messiahs, the promise of a new kingdom that would transform the world—how would these have been shielded from Josephus? Moreover, how was he ignorant of the whole cultic view of Jesus in the first century that he was the divine Son of God, called “Lord” and redeemer of the world, views sure to offend the Jew Josephus and prejudice him against any man whose followers—and perhaps the man himself for all Josephus knew—had been guilty of such blasphemy?

And he had been crucified by Pilate. Did Josephus dismiss any thought about why that had been done, or whether there had been any justification for it from the political point of view? Did he really think that Pilate would execute ‘a wise man’ simply on the word of Jewish citizens, whose own reasons Josephus failed to even state?

Clearly, Ehrman has put no thought into this at all, much less attempted to deal with much of my 50-page treatment of Josephus.

Dealing with the case for Eusebian forgery

Returning to the question of the language of the Testimonium, Ehrman notes that I spend a good deal of space in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.550f) discussing the arguments made by Ken Olson that Eusebius himself forged the Testimonium in its entirety:

The basis for the argument is a very careful analysis of the words and phrases used in the Testimonium. Olson argues in case after case that the wording and phrasing of the passage has numerous parallels with Eusebius’s writings but not with those of Josephus. In other words, the vocabulary and style of the passage suggest that it was written by Eusebius. [DJE?, p. 64]

Here Ehrman merely appeals to the names of a couple of scholars who have made a “critical scrutiny” of Olson’s case and found it wanting. He fails to give even a single example from such scholars of how Olson’s observations have been discredited—let alone his own arguments on the matter.

- He does not attempt to counter Olson’s point that Josephus consistently uses “poietes” to mean poet, and not “doer” (as in “doer of wonderful deeds”).

- Nor does he address Olson’s observation (supplemented in my book by Jay Raskin’s extensive study on this feature, which he calls a writer’s “Tell”) that the phrase “up until now” is used regularly by Eusebius to convey a positive marker: anything that survives or continues strongly “up until now, until our own time” enjoys proof of veracity, even divine favor.

- Nor is the precise phrase Eusebius uses (“Eis eti te nun”) found in Josephus, while phrases similar to it are never used in the same type of context as that final sentence of the Testimonium.

- As for “the tribe of the Christians,” the word “tribe” is always used by Josephus in application to an ethnic group, never a religious group, whereas Eusebius uses the term in other imaginative ways, and in History of the Church III,33, we find the phrase “the tribe of the Christians.”

There are other aspects to the question offered in my book which Ehrman ignores. In an early work, Adversus Hieroclem, Eusebius is countering an unfavorable comparison between Jesus and Apollonius of Tyana. Yet here he does not draw on the Testimonium’s favorable designation of Jesus as a “wise man.” Had he not yet discovered this famous passage? In three later works he would call upon the Testimonium to support his arguments about Jesus, though one of these survives only in Syriac. Between the other two, there are a few differences in the Greek wording; the later one, in History of the Church, is the one invariably quoted in all discussions. I make the case that this is hardly a matter of quoting from faulty memory. The best explanation is that Eusebius ‘improved’ the text he had created between his composition of the two works.

Another sign of interpolation

Incidentally, a comment by Eusebius (H.E. I,11) suggests that the position of the Testimonium was not originally what it is in extant manuscripts:

After giving this account of John, in the same part of the work he goes on to speak as follows of our Savior.

This would place the two passages in reverse order to what they are now. Had Eusebius not yet decided where to place his Testimonium, whether in association with the Baptist or with Pilate? An unstable placement is usually a sign of interpolation (as in the case of the ‘Gospel’ passage in the Apology of Aristides).

Suspiciously convenient

It is also more than a little suspicious that the Testimonium is handily available to bolster various arguments (whereas no Christian writer before him had so used it).

- For example, in the Demonstratio III,5 Eusebius is arguing that if Jesus were a deceiver or charlatan, his followers would have abandoned him after his death; it seems quite a coincidence that Eusebius then produced a text in Josephus which records the very fact that Jesus’ followers remained faithful.

- Nor were his miracles to be judged magic or fraud; by further coincidence, he can appeal to Josephus who regarded them as “wonderful works” and anything but fraud from a man who spoke “truth.”

- In History of the Church, following his quotation of the passages on Jesus and John the Baptist, he summarizes that this Hebrew historian has left a record of both, by which “we can condemn the shameless dishonesty of those who forged the Memoranda” (a Roman forged ‘Acts of Pilate’ in Eusebius’ time which disparaged Jesus and John).

Apparently, Eusebius found the Testimonium Flavianum a godsend. Perhaps he gave God a little help.

Considering that Eusebius himself declared in Praeparatio Evangelica, 13 that it was permissible for the good of the faith to use fiction/deception/lies (pseudos), and that the entire early Christian record is replete with forgeries, amendments and invented documents (Eusebius is generally suspected of having created his own bishop lists to fill in missing records, and he either created or made use of the outrageous correspondence between Jesus and Abgar of Edessa), the idea that he could have created a ‘pious fraud’ like the Testimonium to defend his faith is not at all far-fetched.

The brevity of the Testimonium

As a final argument in a very limited corpus, Ehrman suggests:

If a scribe (or Eusebius or anyone else) wanted to insert a strong testimony about the virtues of Jesus into the writings of Josephus (so that the Testimonium is a later interpolation), he surely would have done so in a much more glowing and obvious way. [DJE?, pp. 64-65]

This is not as telling as one might think. In the standard view, a Christian ‘touched up a bit’ an original passage by Josephus. Why didn’t that interpolator take the opportunity to create a more glowing passage about Jesus? One question cancels out the other. Perhaps a cooler head prevailed—particularly understandable if it was Eusebius’ head—and the Testimonium was kept to a reasonable length and not revealing an unrealistic knowledge or interest on Josephus’ part. Moreover, as an original, the authentic residue would be a much less detailed treatment of its subject than we find in the surrounding events, some of which are recounted at greater length.

All this Ehrman ignored in dealing with this point, as he did with the observations that no insertion of the Testimonium is found in the Table of Contents; and that in Jewish War, when Josephus deals with the same crises in Judea under Pilate as he was to do in Antiquities 18, there is no appearance of a passage about Jesus.

Brother of Jesus, called Christ

When introducing Josephus, Ehrman has said that before addressing the mythicist claim that the reference to Jesus in Antiquities 20 was an interpolation he would first deal with the Testimonium. But he never returns to the subject of Antiquities 20. (Who proofread this book?) Thus we cannot know how he would have dealt with the contention that “brother of Jesus, called Christ”—or at the very least, the second phrase of it—is a Christian interpolation into an account of a certain “James” who was executed by the High Priest Ananus. Let me make a few comments on this. (See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.570-586 for a full discussion of the passage.)

- If Josephus did not write “he was the Messiah” in the earlier passage, this would leave “called Christ” hanging in the wind, with no antecedent explanation for it, and hardly a suitable elucidation for the Roman reader of who his “James” was. It would also be the only appearance of the term in his entire work.

- Since many have judged that Josephus was reluctant to discuss on any level the whole subject of Jewish messianism (he doesn’t even use the term when declaring Vespasian as the fulfillment of ‘Jewish oracles’—a declaration, by the way, which would in itself explain why Origen says that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah, even if he made no mention of him), that single appearance in Antiquities 20 is suspicious.

- The phrase “called Christ” is also found in several places in the Gospels: Matthew 1:16, 27:17 and 22, John 4:25, as well as in Justin, indicating a Christian nature, suggesting that it was a common phrase among Christians.

- The passage makes sense if its “Jesus” refers to a different Jesus, probably the one specified a few lines later (“Jesus, son of Damneus”), making “brother of Jesus” original to the text. (Delaying a patronymic or other identification for a character until after his first introduction is far from unknown in Josephus.)

- It is also unlikely that the murder of the Christian James the Just would so incense Jewish elders that they would agitate to have their own High Priest removed.

- Moreover, “James, together with some others” were said to be executed, suggesting that those others were Christians as well; yet there is no record anywhere of a pogrom against Christians at this time in Jerusalem by a bloodthirsty High Priest.

- Finally, in connection with the debate over Antiquities20, three passages in Origen are regularly appealed to as some kind of corroboration. In them, Origen says that Josephus attributes the fall of Jerusalem (70 CE) to God’s punishment on the Jews for the murder of James the Just, supposedly occurring several years earlier. In all three passages he attributes to Josephus the phrase “brother of Jesus, called Christ.” Such a “lost reference” cannot be found in the extant Josephan works, but if it existed, it cannot have been a part of Antiquities 20, not least because it would have conflicted with the rest of the latter’s context. At the same time, neither can it regarded as something Josephus would have believed, let alone written.

- And so it must be judged a Christian interpolation prior to Origen—indeed, prior to Melito around 170, who is the first we can see ‘switching over’ to the view that the Jerusalem fall was due to the crucifixion of Jesus rather than the murder of James. (It is almost impossible to see a Christian view on this as not involving Jesus rather than James right from the beginning, if the crucifixion were historical.)

- But here is the crux of the present matter. Origen’s “lost reference” can in no way serve to witness to the presence of “brother of Jesus, called Christ” in Antiquities 20—quite the opposite. We cannot assume that the interpolator borrowed from the latter passage. In fact, Eusebius, as in the case of the Testimonium, is the first to witness to the Antiquities 20 reference to Christ. In History of the Church II, 23.20-21, he repeats Origen’s remarks about Josephus attributing the fall of Jerusalem to the murder of James, then immediately refers to ‘another account of the death of James’ by Josephus and quotes the Antiquities 20 passage on Ananus as we have it today. No one before him even alludes to it, not even Origen who, though mentioning James and the lost reference three times, is never drawn—as Eusebius was—to calling attention to a similar reference to James and Jesus in Antiquities 20. Moreover, the incompatibility between the ‘lost reference’ idea and the fate of James as described in Antiquities 20, should have been evident to Origen, further leading him to make reference to the latter; he shows no sign of being aware of such a conflict between the two passages.

- We are led to conclude that either Eusebius himself, or a previous interpolator post-Origen, inserted “brother of Jesus, called Christ” (or only the latter phrase) into Antiquities 20. And indeed, whoever was responsible, it may have been innocently done, perhaps as a marginal gloss, to clarify which James Josephus was thought to be referring to.

None of this did Ehrman attempt to address.

After yet another appeal to authority, he then renders the whole Josephus question moot by taking refuge in the observation that it really doesn’t matter what Josephus said or didn’t say. Even if he had written the “pared-down” Testimonium, he would merely “have heard stories about Jesus that were in circulation” and this wouldn’t tell us anything more than “we already know for lots of other reasons and on lots of other grounds.” Alternatively, if he wrote nothing about him,

There is certainly no reason to think if Jesus lived that Josephus must have mentioned him. He doesn’t mention most Jews of the first century. [DJE?, p. 66]

This is where we came in.

*

The Jewish Talmud

If Josephus’s Testimonium “is only marginally relevant to the question of whether Jesus existed,” Ehrman acknowledges that the references to Jesus in the Talmud are completely irrelevant.

They appear centuries after Jesus lived, and are based on unreliable oral reports from earlier times (though none from the first century itself). Ehrman is a little woolly on exactly when certain persons in the Talmud, such as “Ben Panthera,” were first presented as “clear” references to Jesus of Nazareth. My own study, based largely on that of Frank Zindler in The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, has shown that there is no continuous chain of understanding going back earlier than the late Talmuds (4th to 6th centuries). “Ben Panthera” and “Ben Stada” in the previous Mishnah and Tosefta collections originally referred to entirely different characters, and only later, in limited fashion and in reaction to Christian traditions, were recast on the assumption that they could have referred to Jesus.

Far from irrelevant implications

It is not clear from Ehrman’s writing whether he might actually agree with this. But he has certainly failed to see the logical implications.

How could the Jewish rabbis, reasonably competent in oral tradition, not have formulated and preserved some traditions of their own about Jesus the man, if only to counter claims about him being made by Christians? (I have demonstrated in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man that neither Matthew’s concluding ‘guards at the tomb’ line in 28:15, nor the ‘bastard son of a Roman soldier’ slander as supposedly attested to by Celsus, can be sustained.) How could some Jewish writer not have undertaken a literary counter to the whole Christian story? (The Toledoth Yeshu is too late to fill that bill.)

Indeed, the Talmud’s off-the-mark statements about Jesus, such as seeming to accept full Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ ‘hanging’, indicate that they had nothing in their own traditions about those events; they have simply been blind-sided by a Christian story and figure they seem to know next to nothing about. As I say in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.528):

The Christians were playing the game with a highly organized playbook, and the Jews had not even fielded a team—probably because they were unable to remember that they had been notified about the game or what the rules were. Their own past was totally silent and dark on the subject.

Far from being “irrelevant,” the Jewish Talmud actually provides evidence against the existence of an historical Jesus.

7

Telling the Gospels Like It Is

In his Chapter 3, Bart Ehrman says that he will present “common knowledge” about the Gospels which mainstream New Testament scholars “have known for a long time.” He asks how anyone can complain about making the public more knowledgeable on these matters. Mythicists would heartily endorse that thought.

Gospels as Historical Sources?

Ehrman claims that

. . . once one understands more fully what the Gospels are and where they came from, they provide powerful evidence indeed that there really was a historical Jesus who lived in Roman Palestine and who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. (p. 70, DJE?)

In a “Preliminary Comment on the Gospels as Historical Sources,” Ehrman acknowledges that the Gospels “are filled with non-historical material, accounts of events that could not have happened,” that they have “many discrepancies in matters both great and small” and “contradictions all over the map.” On the other hand, there is “historical information in the Gospels,” but “it needs to be teased out by careful, critical analysis.”

To support his contention that the Gospels “can and must be considered historical sources of information,” whether by conservative congregations or by atheists/agnostics who dismiss them as faith documents with no value as history, Ehrman urges that they be recognized as literature, written by human beings in response to the human times they lived in. Such authors had no intention of producing sacred scripture. They “were simply writing down episodes that they had heard from the life of Jesus,” some of which may have been historically accurate, others not. “They had heard reports about Jesus; they had probably read earlier accounts of his life; and they decided to write their own versions.”

Ehrman inserts another reference to the intentions voiced in the Prologue of the Gospel of Luke, a topic I’ve dealt with earlier, pointing out why those statements cannot be taken at face value. Luke and the other evangelists, admits Ehrman, were not disinterested and unbiased, but

they were historical persons giving reports of things they had heard. The fact that their books later became documents of faith has no bearing on the question of whether the books can still be used for historical purposes. (p. 73, DJE?)

No bearing? Hardly. Being documents of faith—and on what grounds is Ehrman claiming they did not begin as such?—may not justify ruling them out as totally valueless, but it is a warning to use extreme care in evaluating whether anything in them is reliable history.

Gospels constructed out of scripture

Does Ehrman regard the Passion in Mark’s Gospel as containing anything ‘historical’ when virtually every part of it, even at the level of individual phrases, can be shown to be dependent on—often a verbal borrowing from—a scriptural passage? (That has been recognized since around 1980, and more will be said on this later.) If there is no “history remembered,” and no external corroboration not dependent on those Gospels, how do we securely perceive an actual historical event behind it? Because “Pilate” and “Caiaphas” are involved? Any fictional story can contain historical elements and characters.

Ehrman’s constant emphasis on “hearing” about what Jesus said and did as the basic channel through which the Gospel content passed is not only curious, it’s quite misleading, especially regarding the later evangelists. The old view that the Gospels are basically a recording of oral traditions circulating in Christian communities is no longer in vogue—indeed, it is untenable. A compromise might have been that Mark was dependent largely on oral tradition, but that the later evangelists essentially redacted Mark (with the exception of John’s ministry), with Matthew and Luke inserting the contents of a written collection of sayings into that redaction.

However, even that can no longer be held now that it is realized that the bulk of Mark is not built out of oral traditions, but as a type of midrashic construction out of scripture. Did oral tradition remember and transmit the miracle of the loaves and fishes by casting it entirely in terms of similar miracles attributed in the Hebrew bible to Elijah and Elisha? Was not a single historical detail of the crucifixion scene available to Mark that he was forced to splice together scriptural lines like “They divided my garments among them and for my raiments they cast lots” (Psalm 22;18), and chopped-up bits of Psalm 22:7-8: “All who see me jeer at me, make mouths at me and wag their heads.” If nothing was remembered with any details, forcing Mark to render things this way, what constituted ‘oral tradition’?

Why only one version?

As noted before, if oral tradition held sway, we should have wildly different Gospels reflecting the oral traditions which reached, were sifted, then cobbled together by different communities. Matthew, Luke, and John in his Passion should not have followed in virtual lock-step with the structure and content created by Mark. The way Ehrman presents it, often with language that looks purposely designed to lead the uninitiated reader down the garden path, the Gospels are essentially independent, each drawing on oral traditions. (I thought he was concerned with letting the public in on what scholars have known for a long time? It certainly isn’t that the Gospels are independent compositions out of oral tradition.)

We have already seen that historians, who try to establish that a past event happened or that a past person lived, look for multiple sources that corroborate one another’s stories without having collaborated. And this is what we get with the Gospels and their witness of Jesus. (p. 75 of DJE?)

Oh yes, and maybe along the way they had a little glance at Mark.

It is almost (but not quite) universally thought among New Testament scholars that both Matthew and Luke had access to the Gospel of Mark and used it for many of their stories of Jesus. (p. 75 of DJE?)

For many of their stories? Matthew and Luke’s story of Jesus is Mark’s story. Since both clearly had Mark open on their writing tables, apparently along with a copy of Q, this is indeed “collaboration,” even if Mark wasn’t around to know what part he played in it. As for the so-called “special material” assigned to both Matthew and Luke (“M” and “L”), there is no good case for regarding it as anything but each evangelist’s own constructions. (In an article in Free Inquiry, Robert Price judges Matthew’s parables to be from his “own hand” while Luke’s parables “share similar narrative features,” indicating that there was no “L” source either.)

Indeed, how could we independently identify what Luke may have “heard” which he then wrote down? The entire non-Gospel record of the first century is silent on virtually all the Gospel material, on any crucifixion of Jesus on earth or by an earthly agency (outside of the widely acknowledged interpolation in 1 Thess. 2:15-16). No oral traditions about Jesus’ Passion are in evidence anywhere before Mark; nor are the characters of his Gospel story: Mary, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, Judas, Joseph of Arimathea, any apostles who are identified as having been disciples of Jesus. Nothing is in evidence to be “heard,” by Luke or any other Gospel writer.

Ehrman singles out the motif of “Nazareth” as Jesus’ home town, criticizing mythicists for denying that Nazareth even existed in Jesus’ day, and “refusing to take Luke’s and the other Gospels’ word for it. . . . But the reality is that Luke inherited oral traditions about Jesus and his connection with Nazareth, and he recorded what he had heard.” One wonders where he ‘heard’ it, because there is no mention of Nazareth outside Mark and his redactors, and there seems to be no archaeological support for Nazareth in the first century. But I apologize on behalf of all mythicists for “failing to take the Gospels’ word for it.”

Jesus and George Washington

Ehrman tries an analogy:

We don’t dismiss early American accounts of the Revolutionary War simply because they were written by Americans. We take their biases into consideration and sometimes take their descriptions of events with a pound of salt. But we do not refuse to use them as historical sources. Contemporary accounts of George Washington, even by his devoted followers, are still valuable as historical sources. To refuse to use them as sources is to sacrifice the most important avenues to the past we have, and on purely ideological, not historical, grounds. (p. 74 of DJE?)

It is hard to believe that Ehrman could possibly think that this analogy is valid, despite slipping in the phrase “devoted followers.” Americans writing about George Washington and the Revolutionary War are not promoting a faith movement. Washington is not touted as a Son of God. I don’t remember any account of the War in which the good General crossed the Delaware—on his feet. And since Ehrman has spoken of early American accounts (plural), we can assume he would acknowledge that many different accounts of the War corroborate each other, without it being the case that all the rest are literarily dependent on the first one written. We can also assume that the first account was not put together by reworking elements of earlier American colonial history. I am sure that all the accounts contained a goodly amount of recognizable “history remembered” from the Revolutionary War itself.

Nor, I think, would a study of all the correspondence of the founding Fathers in the decades following reveal a total void on the actions of George Washington in the War and his subsequent career, speaking about him only in some cosmic fashion with no sign of a life on earth, let alone its details. If all this were true about accounts of Washington, we would have very good historical grounds to set them aside as useful historical sources. Ideology would have nothing to do with it.

Ranking Luke with Plutarch

Ehrman further claims:

Luke’s writings about Jesus carry no more or less weight than the writings of any other ancient biographer (Suetonius, for example, or Plutarch) — or, perhaps a more apt comparison, of any other biographer of a religious person, such as Philostratus and his account of Apollonius of Tyana. (p. 74 of DJE?)

No less weight? If Ehrman thinks that the unknown author of the Gospel of Luke can be placed on the same level as a Plutarch, or a Suetonius, the discipline of historical research is in real trouble. If he regards the Gospels as ‘biography’ in the same category as Lives of the Caesars or Life of Aemilius Paulus, he has crucified the term biography.

As for Philostratus, there are notable similarities between his Life of Apollonius of Tyana and the Gospels, in that both contain supernatural and miraculous claims about their subject, and both contain mythic and romance elements. To the extent that Philostratus contains such things, we are much exercised to extract reliable history from him, just as we are from the Gospels. However, we have reason to know that he used existing biographical sources. Nor did Philostratus fabricate every feature of his ‘biography’ from earlier writings on other topics and figures. Moreover, this author is not anonymous, and we know a fair amount about him, including where and when he wrote, providing some basis on which to judge his writings. In fact, we have other writings of his, other “Lives,” so we can assume a much greater degree of confidence that their subjects did live, however embellished they may have been.

In the end, each case must be judged on its own characteristics. But to merely set one composition of the ancient world against another and declare on a loose basis that they’re both alike, so we can read our estimation of one into the other, is hardly a commendable methodology. Since the Gospels do contain mythemes found in other ancient accounts of gods and heroes who undoubtedly did not exist (like Attis and Hercules), why does Ehrman resist setting them side by side with the Gospels and calling these accounts equivalent?

*

The Gospels and their Written Sources

Having presumed a ‘concession’ that the Gospels should be treated as historical sources like any other sources by biased authors (Plutarch was biased?), Ehrman now proceeds to build a house of assumptions surrounding them.

We nasty mythicists have taken the extensive literary dependence between the Gospels and declared that essentially we have only one story of Jesus, that of Mark: one source, not multiple sources. Ehrman objects:

Nothing could be further from the truth. Matthew and Luke did indeed use Mark, but significant portions of both Gospels are not related in any way to Mark’s accounts. And in these sections of their Gospels Matthew and Luke record extensive, independent traditions about Jesus’s life, teachings, and death. So while in their shared material they do not provide corroboration without collaboration, in their unique material they do. (pp. 75-76 of DJE?)

So somehow Luke had access to a selection of traditions, as found in his ‘unique material.’ Many postulate this “L” as a written source, although Ehrman has been suggesting that Luke has “heard” independent oral traditions about Jesus. But if Luke had his own distinct source channels, why did they not include variants and notably different ‘takes’ on the central components of the Jesus tradition that he took from Mark? Why was his hearing so limited? Why is he dependent entirely on Mark for those central components, simply improving and tweaking what he found in his predecessor? Incorporating Q was his other major source, but this was not part of his ‘unique material’ since it was shared with Matthew.

Consider Luke’s other unique material concerning the Nativity and elements of the death and resurrection scenes. Was his entire pre-natal scene (chapter 1, featuring Mary and Elizabeth, with their respective sons recognizing each other in their wombs) derived from source material, oral or written? I know of no scholar who suggests such a thing. Its scriptural basis is recognizable; the whole business is patently not something that was formed and passed on in oral tradition. When we get to chapter 2, was the world-wide census and travel to Bethlehem, giving birth in a manger, all the features of his nativity unique to Luke, something he gained from a source, one in extensive contradiction to Matthew’s ‘source’? Or was it simply his own construction—as was Matthew’s considerably different version of Jesus: nativity?

What about the hearing before Herod during Jesus’ trial, which no one else records and can be seen as illustrating the ‘prophecy’ of Psalm 2:2? Or the Road to Emmaus appearance of Jesus, utterly unlike any other post-resurrection scene? Were they products of tradition Luke “heard”? Or were they his own literary invention, as is most likely the case with all of the special “L” materials? Certainly Ehrman’s unexamined declaration that they “record independent traditions about Jesus’ life, teachings and death” is completely without supportive justification.

The art of bamboozling

This summary statement is typically woolly and looks meant to mislead:

These Gospels [Matthew and Luke] were probably written ten or fifteen years after Mark, and so by the year 80 or 85 we have at least three independent accounts of Jesus’ life (since a number of the accounts of both Matthew and Luke are independent of Mark) . . . (p. 76 of DJE?)

So Mark, Matthew and Luke are “independent accounts of Jesus’ life,” conveying the implication that those accounts, taken as a whole, are corroborative. But then Ehrman defines “independent accounts” as merely a subset of ‘accounts’—now referring to a number of alleged traditions—presented by Matthew and Luke, namely the “M” and “L” material. Are those subset traditions now supposed to render the “three accounts of Jesus’ life” to be “independent” as a whole? Moreover, those unique subsets of ‘accounts’ are the opposite of corroborative, since they are different between Matthew and Luke, with one showing no sign of the other. Are they attesting to two different lives? Because Matthew and Luke present such diverse material as attesting to the same man, does this constitute a reliable witness to such an alleged historical man? This is all quite unconscionable. Even Ehrman’s lay readership is surely not so unperceptive as to fail to recognize when they are being bamboozled.

An independent John?

To this “independent” pile, Ehrman adds the Gospel of John, since so much of its content before the Passion is unique to itself. This material is certainly “independent,” but here Ehrman has overreached himself. Can we really assume that this material represents a branch of oral tradition about Jesus—the same Jesus as the one in the Synoptics—having nothing in common with them and portraying nothing like the same character traits? John’s teachings of Jesus (he doesn’t really have any, except to proclaim himself) are hardly a witness to the same historical prophet. There is absolutely no corroboration here.

Ehrman claims that John does not appear to have received his accounts from the other three Gospels.

(This) is equally true of John’s account of Jesus’ death. (p. 76 of DJE?)

Well, I and others would beg to differ. The layout of the passion story is essentially that of its original version in Mark; minor differences (such as the day of crucifixion, or the issue of not breaking the legs) can be identified as changes conforming to John’s own scriptural interests and theology. There are Markan fingerprints on John’s Passion, such as Mark’s common device of intercalation as seen in the interrupted “denial by Peter” scene.

And John ‘corrects’ Synoptic elements in his own preferred and obvious way: for Jesus’ silence before Pilate he substitutes a defiant accused; for Mark’s fearful Jesus in Gethsemane asking for removal of the cup of suffering, John’s Jesus declares himself fearless and purposeful; Simon of Cyrene is tossed out in favor of a firm statement that Jesus carried his own cross. And did John ignore Jesus’ establishment of the Eucharist in his Last Supper scene because such a tradition failed to reach his ears? Or did he remove it because he wanted no sacrificial atonement attached to Jesus’ death, a meaning he never gives it? (The “flesh and blood” motif of chapter 6 relates instead to ingested ‘knowledge’ of God which Jesus brings from heaven.) Even in the ministry portion, the occasional dependence on Mark can be demonstrated (see Robert Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, p.227-8).

Unlimited “independent accounts”

L and M

For Ehrman, the Gospel of John gives us “four independent accounts of Jesus’ life and death,” with again a backtracking from the sweeping implication of these words to this confusing qualification: “(Matthew and Luke being independent in a good number of their corroborative stories . . . )”

Yet the unique, ‘independent,’ material in Matthew and Luke is precisely not “corroborative,” since it is unique to each. Again, just because it supposedly refers to the same literary character by two different authors who are building on a single original story is no guarantee that it represents circulating traditions about an historical figure. No element of “M” is corroborated by “L” or vice-versa.

Thomas and Q

The early record, as presented by Ehrman, is replete with further “independent accounts.” The Gospel of Thomas, none of whose sayings content is regarded (I think correctly) as sourced from the Synoptics, stands as Independent Account No. 5, although scholars see some kind of literary relationship to an early form of Q1 (to which extent it is thus not “independent”).

But what is Thomas an “account” of? Certainly not to the life and death of Jesus, for it offers nothing biographical and says not a word about any death or resurrection (the same is true of Q). Thomas’ bare-bones “Jesus said” tags and the odd set-up line placed in the mouth of an apostle are an easily-seen secondary layer to a simple, unattributed sayings collection, which earliest Q also looks to be. Those two “sources” witness only to a collection of sayings.

Gospel of Peter and the Egerton Papyrus

Ehrman claims that the fragmentary Gospel of Peter is “widely thought (to) preserve an independent narrative, drawn from other, non-canonical, sources.”

Widely thought? That’s news to me. J. D. Crossan’s clever attempt to see a pre-Markan original version within the extant portion of Peter has not been accepted by anything like a majority of scholars, who simply see it as an imaginative reworking probably of Matthew, supplying an actual portrayal of the resurrection of Jesus with a sky-high talking cross and enlarging the guards at the tomb scene. (Does Ehrman really imagine that the talking cross speaks to oral traditions circulating about Easter Sunday? Not even the milder post-resurrection scenes in the canonicals corroborate each other.)

For Ehrman, independent sources lurk everywhere. Because the Gospel of Peter handles the scene of Pilate washing his hands differently than Matthew, this must point to a source lying behind them both, rather than Peter simply taking Matthew’s ball and running with it. But since Peter differs in detail from the canonicals, this makes it Independent Account No. 6.

And by bringing in the fragmentary Egerton Papyrus as Independent Account No. 7, since of its four episodes in the life of Jesus one is not found anywhere else, the whole exercise has become almost comical.

The complete illogicality of Ehrman’s presentation can be seen in his summary comment to this section:

. . . even if some of these sources are dependent on one another in some passages — for example, Matthew and Luke on Mark — they are completely independent in others, and to that extent they are independent witnesses. And so it is quite wrong to argue that Mark is our only independent witness to Jesus as a historical person. The other six accounts are either completely or partially independent as well. (p. 78 of DJE?)

But this is assuming that those “independent” passages can be presumed a priori to represent genuine witness-traditions about an historical figure rather than literary inventions of the writers, which is begging the question.

And by now, Ehrman has confused his usage of the word “independent.” He makes it equivalent to “not attested to anywhere else” and then thinks to link this with another meaning of “separate attestations—i.e., corroboration—to the life and death of Jesus,” as though he can move seamlessly from one to the other and ignore the contradiction in terms.

A different addition to a storyline does not automatically make that story factual; the addition of chapter 1 to Luke’s Markan base hardly makes it a corroborative witness to anything. If Mark is the first supposed attestation to an earthly life and death in a movement already decades old, and we see a practice and chain of dependency proceeding from him to include all sorts of variants on his basic story, with additions fabricated from scripture or derived from a lost collection of sayings whose roots remain in obscurity, where is the multiple independent witness to the life of an historical Jesus?

It exists in Ehrman’s imagination.

8

Existence of Non-Existent Sources for the Gospels

Those “sources” of the Gospels

. . . our surviving accounts, which began to be written some forty years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death, were based on earlier written sources that no longer survive. But they obviously did exist at one time, and they just as obviously had to predate the Gospels that we now have. (pp. 78-79)

This is a curious statement. Usually one uses the term “obviously” only after one has indicated the basis for the obviousness. But since any sources of the Gospels would indeed “obviously” predate the Gospels without that point needing demonstration, perhaps Ehrman is taking the obviousness of written sources as equally self-evident.

But our knowledge of such sources is extremely limited. Once again, the Prologue of Luke is appealed to: those “many” earlier authors who had compiled narratives about the life of Jesus. One of them, of course, is indeed “obvious”: the Gospel of Mark. But this is a source that we do have, and so it falls outside the range of those claimed by Ehrman which “no longer survive.” What we are looking for is evidence that written sources of the life of Jesus predated Mark, sources on which the Gospel content is based.

Ehrman does acknowledge a debt to Mark by Luke:

But he certainly liked a good deal of Mark, as he copied many of Mark’s stories in constructing his own Gospel, sometimes verbatim. (p. 79)

Yet once again, we see Ehrman down-playing something well known to scholarship. “[H]e copied many of Mark’s stories” makes it sound like Luke cherry-picked some of these to fit into his own composition, whereas the very heart and spine of Luke’s own Gospel is Mark’s story. Luke has actually used a little over 50% of Mark. (Matthew used almost 90%.) Without those Markan parts, Luke’s (and Matthew’s) story would not exist. There would be nothing to hang their own parts on. This bears repeating: on a fundamental level, Mark and Luke and Matthew do not represent multiple accounts of Jesus’ life, let alone independent ones. They are the same account, with Luke and Matthew each recasting it with editorial changes and additions to fit their own and their community’s agenda.

One of those additions is the one non-surviving source which modern scholarship as a whole has good reason to conclude did exist—although there is a sizeable minority of that scholarship which rejects this conclusion. This is the hypothetical document scholars call “Q” which they can detect lying behind certain common passages in Matthew and Luke which they do not get from Mark. But such a source is simply a sayings collection attributed to Jesus. (There are a couple of larger anecdotes, seen to be constructed at some point out of earlier discrete sayings.) It in no way gives us an account of his life, let alone any mention of a death and resurrection. Jesus as an individual is in fact missing in much of Q, with indications that such a source or founder figure has been introduced only in the course of the sect’s evolution. (Jesus: Neither God Nor Man presents this argument in detail, covering a number of chapters.)

The Oral Tradition hypothesis fails the prediction test

I have touched on this situation earlier. If, as part of a large and notably uncoordinated (the record itself shows this) sectarian movement of the time, Luke’s or Matthew’s community owed its origins to oral traditions about Jesus’ life and death, each would inevitably have formulated its own version of that life and death, each would show its own focuses on features of the Jesus story and how to preserve and tell it. There is also no reason to think that each community would not have created its own written account of that story, with all those unique focuses and literary renditions. (Why should Mark’s community alone have come up with such an idea, impulse or need?) Yet neither Luke nor Matthew presents any such different, let alone unique, foundational version. Each simply took Mark as his starting point, his blueprint, as though he had never known a story, oral or written, about a life of Jesus before he encountered a copy of Mark. And to have two separate evangelists (and John partially) present such a picture, such an infeasible situation in their literary creations, confirms this insight.

How one story became four

What we have here is the opposite of what Ehrman is trying to claim. Mythicists are indeed right. The four Gospels, inasmuch as they purport to tell the story of a man on earth who preached, prophesied, worked miracles and underwent a death and resurrection, are simply one story with differing incidental details and organization. Once that story materialized in the sect’s mind, it would inevitably have been expanded. How? By pulling into its orbit all manner of teachings, prophetic pronouncements, anecdotes about miracles performed by the sect’s prophets, controversies with the establishment, etc., and attaching them to the newly formulated Jesus figure. Some of this took place in Q’s evolution, some of it in the creation of the Gospels.

New Testament scholarship has long recognized this process, this wholesale adoption of Jesus and the attribution to him of disparate elements from truly independent (non-Jesus) sources. What they have not recognized is that this Jesus is an entirely fabricated figure, partly imagined by the sect through common sectarian tendencies, partly utilized by Mark to fashion an allegorical story about the sect as a whole and its new spiritual truths. Those truths also encompassed the entirely separate cultic Christ sect as preached by Paul, with Mark bringing Christ’s heavenly sacrifice to earth and allegorizing it in a tale of crucifixion by Pontius Pilate with the connivance of the Jewish authorities. Syncretism in spades!

Luke’s and Matthew’s “other sources”

As we’ve seen, unlike Price and others, Ehrman opts for regarding Luke’s “L” material not as his own creation but as a separate written source, or group of them, perhaps including oral elements as well. As I asked earlier, why would such an ‘independent’ source be so selective, containing nothing about the other, more important areas of the Jesus story which Luke would surely have chosen to incorporate? (The same goes for Matthew.)

Ehrman undercuts any chance of being taken seriously here by one of the examples he gives of a Jesus story dependent on a source:

But (Matthew) too includes many stories found only in his Gospel: the visit of the wise men to worship the infant Jesus, for example, and the parable of the sheep and the goats at the last judgment. These then must have come from Matthew’s special source(s), which scholars have therefore labeled M. (p. 81)

Now, I have encountered no mainstream scholar who even remotely believes that the visit of the magi is an historical element within an historical nativity, and I would bet any amount of money that Ehrman doesn’t believe it either. But if Matthew is using a made-up element in a made-up tale, there would be no secure way anyone could tell whether the invention was in a previous source Matthew used or whether he was responsible for it himself. If the former is possible, so is the latter, and probably more so. (I have quoted Robert Price who perceives a common hand—the evangelists’ own—in the “special sources” of both Matthew and Luke.) But Ehrman must present only the former scenario, the source idea, because to include the latter would indicate that this element of his “M” material could admittedly have been Matthew’s own creation, thereby opening the door to all of it being his creation.

My money would be on the Nativity as entirely Matthew’s creation. The worship of the ‘holy’ child is a mytheme found in other settings, notably in the Luxor mural, where three figures, representing important officials or dignitaries, pay homage and bring gifts to the Egyptian royal infant, also symbolizing the god Horus. As part of the involvement of Herod in Matthew’s nativity scene, they are also a device to alarm Herod into inquiring about this child and leading him to the slaughter of the innocents, which holds up a mirror to the story of Moses in Exodus. This comparison between Moses and Jesus is a major element of symbolism in Matthew’s Gospel as a whole.

In an example of typical Ehrman fudging, the magi are an integral part of the story, so it is disingenuous for him to say that “the visit of the wise men to worship the infant Jesus” is an example of the content of the “M” material, rather than the nativity scene as a whole. But a complex interwoven story like this cannot be transmitted through oral tradition, and its interests point toward it being Matthew’s creation rather than the creation of some unknown source.

Much the same goes for the second element Ehrman throws our way: the parable of the sheep and the goats at the last judgment (25:31-46). This, too, is something too complex to transmit through oral tradition, and its nature fits very well with the rather bleak fixation on righteousness evinced by Matthew himself. All of this Ehrman has to conceal from his readers, or at least hope they won’t notice. (One wonders just how many nativity scenes were floating around? Did Luke have access to an entirely different one that some unknown source had created? What about the one in the Ascension of Isaiah 11, which has Mary giving birth at home in Bethlehem and not even realizing ahead of time that she was pregnant?)

More insupportable claims for Mark and John

Ehrman champions both oral and possibly written sources for Mark. For John, he posits “an earlier written account of Jesus’ miracles (the so-called Signs Source), at least two accounts of Jesus’ long speeches (the Discourse Sources), and possibly another passion source as well.” He appeals to April DeConick’s study of the Gospel of Thomas, which argues that the core of Thomas goes back to “a Gospel in circulation prior to 50 CE.”

One should note here that Ehrman fails to clarify for the uninitiated reader that the word “Gospel” when applied to a known sayings collection does not mean a Gospel of the narrative kind, like the familiar canonical four. These sayings ‘gospels’—like Thomas and Q—are simply collections of sayings with no overall narrative elements; thus they do not present a “story” of Jesus.

This applies even to the posited sources for John. The “Signs Source” is a collection of miracle tales, the “Discourse Sources” a collection of extended sayings—if either in fact existed. But even if they did (and including sayings collections like Thomas and Q), they do not constitute stories of Jesus, independent or otherwise, for it is difficult to peer behind the curtain of their incorporation into the Gospels (or, in the case of Thomas, into the second century expanded version with the gnostic-like stratum extant today) to be able to identify what form they originally took, or to whom they were previously attributed. We cannot tell what sort of revision was made to these supposed sources used by the evangelists. Consequently, for Ehrman to claim that they not only existed but can be confidently identified as relating to an historical Jesus figure is insupportable and a monumental case of begging the question.

If John’s sources were unique . . . .

Should we, for example, be suspicious of a collection of Jesus’ miracles circulating as far as northern Syria where the community of John is usually located, when not a single reference to any miracle performed by Jesus can be found in the entire epistolary record of the first century? Should we think that someone prior to John created a Discourse document which supposedly recorded traditions about Jesus’ sayings, when the particular voice of Jesus in John is heard absolutely nowhere else? (We have to assume that sayings like “I am the Resurrection and the Life” were completely unknown elsewhere.) Where would such a compiler have garnered this utterly unique set of sayings? It was hardly a case of collecting “oral traditions” circulating about what Jesus said.

Thus, our theoretical compiler would have had to create this body of sayings and discourses out of his own mind, though probably as an expression of some particular outlook or religious philosophy limited to his own community or circle of congregations (the Johannine community is often regarded as a separate and unique expression on the early Christian scene).

But then, this theoretical compiler would not represent an “independent source” about the historical Jesus and his teaching, but rather an isolated phenomenon, and who is to say what sectarian concept this compilation originally represented, or to what sort of Jesus figure it was attached, historical or mythical? Who can say whether these “Signs” were not a record of the community’s own miracles in support of their unique Christology about a heavenly figure? Who can say whether the sayings dimension in John was pre-Johannine, or whether John is simply incorporating into sayings and discourses the ideas and expressions about a spiritual Revealer Son current in his own circle?

The evolution of Jesus in Q and Thomas

Similarly with Q and Thomas. One can trace the evolution of a Jesus founder figure throughout the successive strata in Q (as has been done in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man), pointing to no specific historical figure at the root of the Q sect. And a Gospel of Thomas stripped of its “Jesus said” tags and reduced to its core “wisdom” stratum (equivalent in large part to Q1 and no doubt bearing some literary relationship with it on the first century scene) cannot be securely identified with any historical figure, let alone the one from the Gospels.

Yet Ehrman has simply pointed to all these ‘sources’ and designated them as reflecting the historical figure he is trying to defend, and in the same breath proceeds to make part of that defence the existence of all these independent witnesses to him. A gigantic circular exercise.

Who invented Jesus?

Thus, this summary statement by Ehrman is based on reasoning shot through with fallacy:

We cannot think of the early Christian Gospels as going back to a solitary source that “invented” the idea that there was a man Jesus. The view that Jesus existed is found in multiple independent sources that must have been circulating throughout various regions of the Roman Empire in the decades before the Gospels that survive were produced. Where would the solitary source that ‘invented’ Jesus be? (p. 82)

Once we realize that Ehrman’s concept of “independent” is exceedingly questionable, and that he has not even attempted, let alone proven, a case that all these sources can only be identified with an historical Jesus, his lethal blow against mythicism loses any force it might think to have. The “invention” of the historical Jesus of the Gospels was first begun in the Q sect as an artificial wisdom-preaching apocalyptic prophet who had first spoken the sayings and performed the deeds of the Q preachers themselves. As Q specialist William Arnal admits (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.349-51), he is in Q simply one of a “collective,” indistinguishable as an individual from the body of Q preachers, what they do and what they teach. And thus he becomes something which is undifferentiated from the Q community.

Mark took that ‘symbolic Jesus’ (to what extent he regarded him as entirely symbolic cannot be said) and expanded him in a biographical direction, essentially creating a life for him. And as part of that life, he wedded him, again in symbolic fashion, to the spiritual Christ of the Pauline cult by leading him to a sacrificial death and redeeming resurrection on earth. Magnetic forces drew to this appealing creation over many decades other expressions on the religious scene, so that to speak of a “solitary” source as inventing the historical Jesus is clearly simplistic.

But when one presents only simplistic questions, one can only produce simplistic answers.

9

Form Criticism and the Sources of the Gospels

Form Criticism and Oral Traditions About Jesus

In a section entitled “Form Criticism and Oral Traditions About Jesus,” Ehrman encapsulates the traditional scholarly approach to analysing the content of the Gospels and sets these beside the current views he is espousing. But there are inherent contradictions in his scenario.

The Fallacy of Form Criticism

The “form-critical” approach, or “form criticism,” has sought to understand how the various stories about Jesus took shape as they were being “transmitted orally.” Scholarship has long observed something curious, says Ehrman:

Why is it that so many miracle stories seem to follow the same basic pattern? A person comes up to Jesus, his or her problem (or illness) is described, there is a brief interchange with Jesus, Jesus agrees to heal the person, he does so by a word or by a touch, and all the crowds marvel. Every miracle story seems to have the same elements.

Or take the controversy stories. Jesus or his disciples do something that offends the Jewish leaders; the leaders protest; Jesus has a conversation with them; and the story ends with Jesus delivering a withering one-liner that shows that he gets the better of them. Time after time, same form. (p. 84)

As Ehrman puts it, form criticism has asked: How did the various kinds of stories assume their various forms?

The stories about Jesus came to be shaped in the process of telling and retelling, as they assumed their characteristic forms. This means that the stories were changed, sometimes radically, when they were retold, and thus formed over the years. (p. 84)

Something doesn’t compute here. Ehrman has just told us that all the healing miracle stories, for example, are found in the Gospels in a more or less identical form. But oral transmission over a wide area, within an uncoordinated movement, is not likely to produce conformity. Quite the opposite. When an apostle of the Christ enters a new town, speaks to a new audience or congregation, he does not check back with head office, or refer to his iPad notes, to make sure that he is telling a given story according to some set precedent or pattern.

The Written Evidence Versus the Oral Hypothesis

In fact, Ehrman has just said that the process is one of “telling and retelling,” in which the stories “were changed, sometimes radically, when they were retold.” And yet he wants us to subscribe to a contradictory end result: that these traditions were “shaped” and “formed over the years” into a product that followed only one consistent form. If there was no established centralized record or requirement of how miracle stories passed on by many mouths in many places through oral tradition were to be formulated, arriving at such a consistency would be utterly unlikely. We would arrive at diversity, not conformity. The unexpected conformity has at some stage been imposed.

That stage, logically, is a literary one. And it is most likely at the composing of the Gospels—in most cases that of the first one, Mark. But if that is the case, the entire methodology of form criticism is undercut, because it becomes very difficult to penetrate back beyond the Gospel stage to perceive the nature or form of the antecedent.

Ehrman has made it tougher for himself by laying emphasis on the traditions being oral, though he postulates some written sources. (We will see how successful he is at that.) We don’t even have non-Gospel controls on uncovering or tracing those antecedents, because there is such a dearth of any oral or written traditions of any kind to be found in the epistolary record—an observation which belies Ehrman’s entire emphasis and reliance on the channel of oral tradition.

Form criticism works to some extent in Q because we can trace the evolution of some of its elements through the succeeding strata, a few times with an outside check provided in the Gospel of Thomas. But that tracing leads to a dead end, because something like the Dialogue between Jesus and John (Luke/Q 7:18-35) shows every sign of being a literary construction undertaken at some point by the Q editors, negating any thought of it passing through oral tradition, let alone proceeding originally from a record of Jesus. Matthew and Luke have simply taken over that artificial construction from Q.

Literary Construction out of Scripture, not Oral Traditions

As well, another process of “construction” is revealed at virtually every level throughout the work of the evangelists. Their dependence on scriptural precedents for so much of their text is by now well known, although Ehrman, for now, virtually ignores the whole question.

The elements of a miracle story like the loaves and fishes, for example, are very unlikely to proceed from oral tradition, since we can see its fabrication out of miracle stories from the Hebrew bible, in this case similar miracles by Elijah and Elisha. If Mark had some version come to him through oral tradition about a reputed miracle performed by Jesus, why did he make no use of it? Why do almost all the miracles have the same shape and identifiable models from scripture, with nothing appearing to owe anything to oral tradition or history remembered? Even given a desire to reflect Old Testament motifs, would Mark really have needed to force them all into that same repetitive and artificial mold?

Traditions in Thomas and Q — not independent

Regarding “stories being told about Jesus,” Ehrman says:

If scholars are right that Q and the core of the Gospel of Thomas, to pick just two examples, do date from the 50s, and that they were based on oral traditions that had already been in circulation for a long time, how far back do these traditions go? (p. 85)

But Ehrman surely knows that his designation of Q and the Thomas core (wisdom-type sayings similar to those of Q1) as two independent collections of Jesus’ sayings is misleading, if not outright false. Helmut Koester and others have concluded that

. . . the Gospel of Thomas is either dependent upon the earliest version of Q or, more likely, shares with the author of Q one or several very early collections of Jesus’ sayings. (Ancient Christian Gospels, p.95)

In other words, there is a literary dependence between the two; they are not independent, no more than Matthew or Luke are independent of Mark for their Jesus story, no more than the Q portions of Matthew and Luke are independent collections, since they are the same body of material used by two different writers. Koester has surmised that Q and Thomas both used an ancestral collection, though that, I suspect, is partly based on a desire to posit such a collection, bringing us supposedly closer to a record of the historical Jesus’ teachings. (And there is a problem in Koester’s option which I outline in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.358-9.) In any case, there is no good reason preventing the Thomas sapiential layer from being an offshoot of an early stage of Q, which I have argued.

The Path to Jesus is Paved with Good Assumptions

Ehrman, of course, as do most scholars, simply assumes that whatever collection of sayings may have preceded Thomas and Q, it represents a record of the teachings of Jesus, just as they automatically do for Q1 itself. But that is yet to be established; to assume it is to beg the question.

The wisdom root of Q, and thus of Thomas, could simply be the adopted ethics of the kingdom-preaching sect (some of it looks to derive from Cynic philosophy), long before any founder Jesus was envisioned as the speaker. (And a close study of Q, as I present in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, indicates that this is almost certainly the case.)

But if Ehrman’s assumption is that such collections do go back to Jesus’ preaching, then it’s a simple step, isn’t it, to declare that such material, such witnesses to the historical Jesus, must go back to a very early time following Jesus’ career:

. . . even anyone who just wonders if Jesus existed has to assume that there were stories being told about him in the 30s and 40s. (p. 85)

Thus, lo and behold, through this chain of unproven assumptions, we have arrived at some of Ehrman’s ‘early witness and sources’ of the Gospel traditions, virtually to the year following Jesus’ death as he will shortly claim.

How Ehrman Dates the Sources to the Day After Jesus

Ehrman offers a truly bizarre argument to bolster this tracking down of Jesus traditions to the period immediately after his life:

For one thing, as we will see in the next chapter, how else would someone like Paul have known to persecute the Christians, if Christians didn’t exist? And how could they exist if they didn’t know anything about Jesus? (p. 85)

One begged question is followed by another begged question. All of the sources Ehrman finds behind the Gospels, such as Q and Thomas, special “M” and “L,” John’s Signs Source and Discourses, are declared by fiat to automatically reflect an historical Jesus’ words and deeds. In support of this, he appeals to Paul’s persecution of Christians, as though this persecution has to have been directed at followers of the Gospel Jesus, when there no sign that any such figure or group is on Paul’s radar.

For Ehrman, there can be only one application of the term “Christians.” But if there is any common characteristic to Jesus mythicism, it is that the Christ of early Christian epistle writers like Paul is not based on the Jesus of the Gospels, or any recent historical man. Before even arguing the point, Ehrman claims the orthodox view and makes Paul witness not simply to an historical Jesus but to early traditions about him, traditions, by the way, which he never shows any knowledge of or interest in. On the sayings of Q and Thomas, on special “M” and “L,” on John’s Signs and Discourses, the epistles are totally silent.

Ehrman then gives a passing nod to the mythicist argument that Paul worshiped a divine Christ and not an historical Jesus, and he promises to discredit this later in the book. But even if the epistles were set aside, Ehrman says, we have “ample reason” to conclude that stories about an historical Jesus were circulating “from a very early time.” On what basis? Why, all those “sources (that) are independent of one another.”

From Contradiction and Confusion to Total Chaos

In the same breath as claiming that “They contain strikingly different accounts of what Jesus said and did,” those sources, Ehrman says, “agree on too many of the fundamentals.” Which is it?

John is certainly strikingly different in his teachings of Jesus from the Synoptics, so different that both pictures are virtually incompatible, making at least one of them outright invention.

The Synoptics agree on many of the fundamentals because Matthew and Luke (and John in his Passion) are basically copying from Mark. And where they are not dependent on Mark, Matthew and Luke are not corroborative because their “special” material is different, and their Q material comes from a single document and so they are not “independent.”

Amid all this confusion, Ehrman throws his argument into total chaos by declaring that all the fundamentals everyone agrees on “are based on oral traditions,” sweeping aside the clear literary dependencies inherent in the Gospels and in Matthew and Luke’s use of Q. These are dependencies he has already admitted, though with a minimum of focus on them and a maximum of misleading language to convey that they hardly exist.

He sums up:

Aspects of the surviving stories of Jesus found in the written Gospels, themselves based on earlier written accounts, show clearly both that they were based on oral traditions (as Luke himself indicates) and that these traditions had been around for a very long time—in fact, that they had been around since Christianity first emerged as a religion in Palestine itself. (p. 86)

“Aspects of the surviving stories” is particularly woolly. What “aspects” are these? And outside of Q, Ehrman has failed to provide us with a single “earlier written account” preceding Mark, much less that those earlier written accounts were themselves based on longstanding oral traditions and were not themselves dependent on other sources, such as the Thomas wisdom stratum on Q1 and much of Q1 itself on Cynic philosophy. Ehrman’s naïve reliance on the Prologue to Luke (probably the creation of a mid-2nd century revision of Luke) which lays out this alleged process is quite misplaced, as shown earlier.

And Ehrman’s confident declaration that everything goes back to oral traditions ignores the truly large elephant in the room: the clear construction of pericopes all over the place by Mark, further developed by Matthew and Luke, out of passages in scripture.

*

The Aramaic Origins of (Some) Oral Traditions

An Aramaic Original?

Decades after the virtual abandonment of a fairly wide thread in scholarly opinion that the Gospels might have been originally written in Aramaic, Bart Ehrman revives it in part by suggesting that some of his “oral traditions” lying behind the Gospels circulated in the days immediately following Jesus in the language of Aramaic. This theory is based on a paltry handful of Aramaic words that appear in the Gospels, supposedly indicating that these words are a survival of originally whole Aramaic oral traditions about Jesus. Further, these words are usually translated by the author into Greek, so that his readers will be sure to understand their meaning.

In the miracle of the raising of Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:38-43):

Then, taking hold of her hand, he said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means “Get up, my child.”

Ehrman claims that when this story, originally told in Aramaic, was translated by Mark into Greek, those two Aramaic words were left as is, with a translation provided. But it could equally well be explained as the usage by Mark of a common type of phrase used in faith healing in the Greco-Aramaic culture of the day, including in Q-type practice which Mark would have been a party to, a phrase that might have been more familiar in Aramaic than in anything else.

Bilingual people in our own day tend to intermix phrases from one language into the other, especially if they have a well-used meaning in the other language. If I as a writer (or even speaker) in English use the phrase “raison d’être”, I don’t need to have the reader postulate that I am reflecting a prior source in French, it’s just part of the parlance which English speakers and writers in a bilingual culture often use. (It’s actually handier in the French.) And Mark provides a Greek translation for those of his readers who are not bilingual, maybe gentiles within the movement.

Consider 1 Corinthians 16:22, in which Paul (let’s assume this ending is authentic to the letter) says: “Marana tha!”—Come, O Lord!” This hardly is expected to be from Jesus’ mouth. It is part of the parlance of the prophetic movement of the time (though Paul’s cult was distinct from the Galilean preaching sect). There is no need to imagine that Paul is tapping into some ‘source’ or tradition in Aramaic. Nor is it likely to be from a story about Jesus, being called on to “come.” Paul is simply inserting a well-known phrase within a bilingual culture, common in both languages in his apocalyptic-oriented circles (in a faith where Christ has not yet been to earth).

The very paucity of Aramaic words in the Gospels is argument against Ehrman’s claim. An entire Aramaic phase of preaching and faith, let alone one that went back to Jesus himself, would leave a far bigger trail than this. Can one imagine, in a bilingual society such as Palestine, that a ‘record’ of Jesus’ life would not have been full of preserved words by him in Aramaic, whether authentic or not? And especially in the so-called ‘genuine’ teachings of Jesus supposedly collected at a very early time in Q1—where not a single preserved Aramaic word is to be found?

An Aramaic Son of Man?

Ehrman has an interesting, if convoluted, argument surrounding one of the “son of man” sayings in Mark (2:27-8). “The Sabbath was made for the sake of man and not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is sovereign even over the Sabbath” is the punch line to a story in which Jesus’ disciples, being hungry, picked corn on the Sabbath and were criticized by the Pharisees, to whom Jesus retorted with this saying.

This is one of the “Son of Man” sayings which falls into the non-titular, non-apocalyptic category—or should (see also Mark 2:10 and Luke/Q 9:58). Now, only in English can we make a distinction between “Son of Man” (capitalized) as a title for a future apocalyptic judge which eventually got applied to the Jesus figure, and “son of man” (not capitalized) which was a Semitic euphemism simply for “man,” sometimes used by the speaker as a self-reference. In Greek, both senses employ the same words: ho huios tou anthropou. If this saying in Mark had contemporary currency (and one can imagine the prophets of an anti-establishment sect claiming that sovereignty for themselves), it makes perfect sense.

Ehrman claims it does not, because (a) the Pharisees were criticizing the disciples, not Jesus, so whether Jesus himself was Lord (master) of the Sabbath doesn’t answer the Pharisees’ objection.; and (b) the second part of the verse doesn’t follow from the first part.

The therefore in this case doesn’t make sense. Just because Sabbath was made for humans and not the other way around, what does that have to do with Jesus being the Lord of the Sabbath? (p. 89)

Ehrman is technically right on both counts. But the solution is to take the saying (and the others like it) as originally existing in a context in which “son of man” (non-capitalized) meant simply “man”, so that all Mark 2:27-8 meant is that, if the Sabbath was made for humans and not humans made for the Sabbath, then a human in general (a “son of man”) can consider himself master of the Sabbath and free to do what needs to be done. Wherever these sayings came from, Mark has imported them into his Gospel and made the phrase “son of man” represent a reference to Jesus. This conversion has created Ehrman’s dilemma. Mark has altered the original saying about humans to direct it toward Jesus himself in his role as the “Son of Man” (in the apocalyptic sense). It would not be the first time that a Christian writer or editor redacted a passage or existing saying and created an anomaly.

Ehrman’s solution is quite different. If Mark 2:27-8 supposedly makes no sense in Greek, he suggests that if “son of man” is translated back into Aramaic using the words “bar nasha” this makes it clear that the phrase really is being used as a self-reference, and the confusion between the two understandings in Greek is eliminated. This allegedly indicates that the saying began originally in Aramaic. But if one understands the progress of the saying from the non-titular use in Greek to a titular understanding applied by Mark to Jesus, just described, no ‘back-translation’ need be performed. Mark may have created something confusing, but it might not have seemed so to him. He may not even have noticed, simply carrying over one understanding to the other. (It’s not as if no other Christian writing contains an internal contradiction.)

Of course, it is always feasible that this saying (or the others of its type) did begin in Aramaic, reflecting the bilingual nature of the Palestinian scene. A revolutionary claim like this might have been formulated in Aramaic, though we have no evidence of it. But even if so, there is nothing in evidence which requires us to assign such an Aramaic claim (or even its Greek counterpart) to Jesus. It could as well have been made by the sect itself. Once again, Ehrman is making his argument on the question-begging basis that anything uncovered prior to Mark has to relate to an historical preaching Jesus and thus becomes an early source to be identified with him.

Ehrman undercuts his sweeping claim about Aramaic originals by pointing out that some sayings of Jesus cannot be translated into Aramaic and still make sense. This, he says, is a pointer to such sayings not being authentic to Jesus, who would likely have spoken only Aramaic. But that’s a bit of a self-serving argument. It becomes a device to get around the problem by making the claim unfalsifiable. We’ll postulate an Aramaic original only when it works and serves our need, and reject one when it does not.

*

Conclusion

Ehrman’s “Conclusion” to this chapter simply repeats all the claims he has made throughout in regard to documentary and oral evidence for the existence of Jesus:

- multiple surviving Gospels—seven, no less—completely independent in whole or in part;

- all of them “corroborate many of the same basic sets of data—for example, that Jesus not only lived but that he was a Jewish teacher who was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.”

Well, the latter is not to be found in a vast array of early Christian records outside the Gospels and their auxiliaries, which have nothing to say about an earthly venue or a human agency or a time in history.

Of course, Ehrman is selectively drawing on only cooperative records, and even these he has to twist and distort, and read their predecessors (when he can pull them from the shadows of uncertainty they rest in) as automatically witnessing to an historical Jesus. Q was a major source document for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, yet a Jesus who was crucified by anyone is missing from its reconstructed pages.

Ehrman has a long way to go to dismantle the mythicist case. In fact, he has a long way to go to convince anyone that the historicist case can be defended by anything other than special pleading, fallacious argument and highly questionable methodology.

10

Listening to the Sounds of Silence

Silence: Why did no-one until modern times deny the existence of Jesus?

Ehrman spends a few pages at the beginning of his Chapter Four on the old canard which too many historicists seem to think is a knockout blow against the mythicist theory: that no one in all the documents we possess from the earliest period right up to the 18th century ever suggests, or deals with an accusation, that Jesus never existed. A moment’s reflection ought to reveal why this might be the case. (There are in fact a handful of notable exceptions to this silence that I will go into shortly, which puts the lie to Ehrman’s sweeping statement.)

First of all, if an earthly Jesus had not existed for Christians of the Pauline variety of faith in a sacrificed Savior through almost the first hundred years of the movement, how would we expect to find a denial that he had? No one would have been claiming it.

We also have to ask, who would have been in a position to know that Christians were claiming something that was false? When do we first see that claim surfacing? One can’t point to the Gospels themselves because the very issue in question is whether there is any support for their presentation of a supposedly historical figure and set of events; and their traditional dating is dubious, as is any certainty that they were originally intended to represent history.

The first direct reference by a Christian to an historical man who was crucified by Pilate is found in the letters of Ignatius, which if authentic can be dated no earlier than 107 CE, or if forgeries, some time after that. Is anyone going to be around in Antioch in 107 or later who had been alive in Galilee or Jerusalem three-quarters of a century earlier—with the upheaval and destruction of the Jewish War occurring in the interim—someone who knew everything that happened there in the 10-year period of Pilate’s governorship and was thus in a position to verify that such a figure never existed? A preposterous idea. Christians themselves show no sign of being familiar with the Gospel story, let alone that it had any circulation outside their circles, before the time of Ignatius.

And what reaction would this someone have gotten? A sympathetic ear? A willingness to abandon the new faith? Or a retort like Ignatius’ “mad dogs” and “beasts in the form of men” who deny that Jesus was the son of Mary, baptized by John, and crucified by Pilate.

Sounds amid the Silence

Ignatius
While Ignatius’ language may be marginally ambiguous (though there are scholars such as W. R. Schoedel who doubt that he is only countering docetism), this looks to be one of that handful I spoke of above: a sign that there were people denying new Christian claims that Jesus had lived on earth and suffered in a human incarnation. The basis of that denial would not have been a personal knowledge of the period of Jesus’ alleged life, but the simple fact that such deniers would have been unfamiliar with any such tradition in their own beliefs as Christians up to that time and could not—or, unlike Ignatius, were not willing to—adopt the new fiction as history.

1 John 4:1-4
Another of that handful is 1 John 4:1-4, where the writer is condemning those in his faith circle who deny that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, while he himself represents those who believe that he has. These opposing views, by the way, come to their respective adherents via revelation (“spirits” from God or not from God), with no appeal on either side to history or apostolic tradition, let alone the Gospel story. (Not even Ignatius appeals to apostolic tradition.)

Scholars generally take refuge in the opinion that this dispute too centers on docetism, but that is anything but clear. There isn’t the slightest suggestion of docetism anywhere else in the Johannine epistles, much less a debate over it. And besides, the standard dating of these epistles (which must be placed before the Johannine Gospel) is probably too early—no later than the 90s—to postulate a community grappling with a full-blown gnostic dispute.

Celsus
Ehrman points to Celsus, writing around the 170s (surviving in Origen’s refutation). Celsus clearly is relying on some knowledge of the Gospels. How would he have been in a position to uncover the truth behind them: that they were not in any way historical documents? Did he have access to today’s entire New Testament corpus and other writings of the period to be able to perform some grand feat of exegesis and realize that the early record pointed to no human founder at all? Again, a preposterous expectation, and Ehrman being a knowledgeable textual scholar should have been able to realize that.

Trypho
Finally, there is the question of what is meant by Trypho’s remark in Justin’s Dialogue (ch.8):

But Christ—if he has indeed been born, and exists anywhere—is unknown, and does not even know himself, and has no power until Elias come to anoint him, and make him manifest to all. And you, having accepted a groundless report, invent a Christ for yourselves . . .

As I discuss at length in Appendix 12 of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, the typical historicist argument over this passage is that Trypho “is arguing that Christians invented a false conception of Christ and applied it to Jesus” (so Eddy and Boyd in The Jesus Legend, p.170). But the language is far from that specific. And it is not Trypho who is assuming Jesus existed, but Justin, who is creating the dialogue and putting into Trypho’s mouth what he himself believes and to further the argument he is constructing.

But it does suggest that Justin is countering something that contemporary Jews are claiming, and the quotation is sufficiently ambiguous to suggest even to a committed historicist scholar like Robert Van Voorst (Jesus Outside the New Testament, p.15, n.35) that “This may be a faint statement of a non-existence hypothesis, but it is not developed . . . ” (It is not developed because that is not part of Justin’s purpose.) The “groundless report” may allude to an accusation that the entire Gospel story with its central character was indeed fiction.

Ehrman claims that a document like the Epistle to Diognetus assumes an historical Jesus. He does the same for 1 Clement (which will be dealt with in more detail shortly). If he has in fact read my book, he will know that a very good case can be made that these texts do not show any such thing, and certainly not with the clarity he is claiming.

Golden Silence of the Rabbis

The poor rabbis of the Talmud (who show any assumption of an historical Jesus only in the compilations of the 4th to 6th centuries) are also expected by Ehrman to have preserved and voiced an opinion of Jesus’ non-historicity and use it as ammunition against the Christians. (Does he really think they would do so in the 4th to 6th centuries when rabid patriarchs revelling in unlimited power and their bloodthirsty hooligans were on the rampage against the Jews and pagans generally?)

In fact, as I pointed out in Chapter 6, it is precisely that sort of silence in the earlier centuries, when Jews ought to have been outspoken about who Jesus really had been in opposition to Christian claims about him, which indicates that the Jews and their rabbis knew absolutely nothing about any such figure. (Trypho, tellingly, responds only to Justin’s presentation of a Jesus who is entirely based on the Gospels; he is given no independent or contrary Jesus traditions which he as a representative Jew might have been expected to possess from Israel’s century-old past.)

If they indeed knew nothing, Jews in the mid-second century would have been equally unable to falsify a Gospel story telling of distant alleged events prior to the Jewish War. For mythicism, their silence is golden.

The Silence of Irenaeus, Tertullian and their heretics

While Ehrman does not touch on this question, I will briefly insert here another claim about silences in the second century. Apologists on the internet have brought up the fact that heresiologists like Irenaeus and Tertullian do not tackle the “heavenly Christ cult” of the Pauline variety as a heresy for its denial of an historical Jesus—or simply for its omission of him. Well, we do in fact see such a condemnation in Ignatius. What we can perceive in the letters—whether by himself or by someone shortly after his death, certainly no more than a decade or so—is a period of transition from belief in a spiritual Christ to a belief in an historical one. (I trace evidence of this in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.302-4.)

This kind of picture illustrates how the Christ cult represented in Paul and other NT epistles of the first century morphed from one into the other, a process that took place over the course of the first half of the second century, gradually and unevenly. But it would certainly have been completed before the time (late second century and early third) when Irenaeus and Tertullian came to tackle the great threat of orthodoxy’s rival, Gnosticism. (We have lost all of Justin’s anti-heresy works of a few decades earlier.)

By that time, the sacrificed heavenly Christ of Paul would have been lost sight of, and the whole movement and soteriology surrounding him would have been reinterpreted in terms of orthodoxy’s new historical assumptions based on the Gospels. Besides, even without their preoccupation with Gnosticism, someone like Irenaeus could not possibly have recognized and attacked the heavenly nature of the Christ of Pauline tradition, since this would have entailed the realization that such was the nature of the earliest phase of their own faith movement.

The Sound of Transition: from Paul to Orthodoxy

To tie up this aspect of the situation, it must be noted that the bulk of the writers we know as the second century apologists fail to witness to either side of this heavenly-earthly dichotomy and transition process. Unlike Ignatius, they have no faith in an incarnated Son but only in a heavenly Logos. Unlike Paul’s, their heavenly Son figure is not a sacrificed one; there is no atonement doctrine, no redeeming death of the Logos. We saw hints of this in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 Corinthians 11, where Paul is promoting his own version of the Son as a “Christ crucified,” with the strong implication that he is dealing with rivals and other circles of Christ belief which do not believe in a crucified or sacrificed figure, but simply in a spiritual Revealer Son who saves by bestowing knowledge of God. (This Revealer Son survives in the Gospel of John from before the grafting on of the Synoptics’ human Jesus and his crucifixion).

This stream of thought, which probably arose out of the whole intermediary Son/Logos philosophy of thinkers like Philo, seems to have blossomed as a distinct religious expression in the second century, a form of Logos religion:

- Theophilus of Antioch

- Athenagoras of Athens

- Minucius Felix

- early Tatian

All of them present no sacrificial Son of any sort, nor an incarnated one. They believe in the Logos as emanation of God, a channel of knowledge about him. (In Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, Appendix 11, I argue that even the Apology of Aristides belongs here, since the passage containing elements of the Gospels can be shown to be an insertion.) The little-known Discourse to the Greeks, erroneously attributed to Justin Martyr, is a prime example (see JNGNM, p.499) of a Logos religion which can be nothing else, having no connection to a Jesus of either Paul or the Gospels; and the content of its faith can hardly be differentiated from that of the above-listed second century apologists.

Later, just as Paul and the other NT epistle writers did, these apologists entered the orthodox fold through reinterpretation—something that has required to this day infeasible scholarly explanations for why they do not present an historical Jesus in their “detailed” accounts of the faith. The apologist Minucius Felix requires an additional dance to explain away his condemnation of the very idea that his faith would be based on a crucified man and his cross: a true smoking gun in the early Christian record.

Bart Ehrman makes no attempt to counter any of my extensive study of the second century apologists in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, chapter 31.

The Sounds of Diversity: A Logos Religion

Justin Martyr’s faith also looks to have begun as simple belief in a Revealer Logos (as we can perceive in his account of his conversion experience at the beginning of the Dialogue with Trypho), and only by the time he wrote his Apology in the 150s and shortly thereafter the Dialogue, had he encountered some Gospels and adopted their Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos on earth. Tatian seems to have followed suit in his later career. All of these writers moved in philosophical circles similar to pagan religio-philosophical groups, not in ecclesiastical ones. Even Justin has nothing to say about churches and bishops.

As a body, the second century apologists represent this Logos religion, something quite distinct from the Pauline cult and from Gospel orthodoxy. This entire picture, including the varied Gnostic sects which critical scholars now acknowledge did not simply grow out of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, presents us with an “intermediary Son/Christ” movement—we now label the whole of it “Christianity”—which was extremely diverse and uncoordinated. That is, until the juggernaut that grew from the humble Gospel allegory created by the author of Mark overflowed its banks and swamped the entire landscape, establishing the artificial features it would enjoy for almost two millennia.

Completing the Silence: Revisiting Josephus and Tacitus

Ehrman returns briefly to Josephus and Tacitus to make the admission that whatever they knew about Jesus was almost certainly the product of hearsay; they would not have read any Gospels. And it might have been second- or third-hand hearsay. This, however, becomes for Ehrman another source of “independent attestation to Jesus’ existence,” presumably because both would have been repeating Christian opinions attesting to his death under Pilate, and presumably because such opinion was not based on the Gospels.

The latter presumption, of course, cannot be supported, and especially not given Ehrman’s acceptance of traditional scholarly dating for the Gospels, which is that Mark had been around since shortly after 70 and the rest of them by the years 80-100. Even given my own and others’ dating of Mark about 90, there was ample time for Mark, or even Matthew, to have had some impact in Rome by 115 when Tacitus was writing the Annals, although hardly when Josephus was writing the Antiquities by the early 90s.

The other grand assumption which cannot be supported is that the references to Jesus in Josephus and in Tacitus are reliably authentic. I have dealt earlier with the difficulty in claiming an original Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus, along with the “called Messiah” in Antiquities 20, as well as the sheer infeasibility of a genuine Tacitus account of the Neronian pogrom against Christians accused of setting the Great Fire, an event which Christians and later Roman historians alike know nothing about for centuries.

Without a reliable Josephus and Tacitus, the silence on an historical Jesus across the entire swath of the ancient world, Christian, Jewish and pagan, is complete. As I say in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.461):

After the events depicted in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus of Nazareth and the great panoply of characters surrounding him sleep in a silent limbo for many decades. Their resurrection comes only at the beginning of the second century, when Mary and Pontius Pilate steal from the shadows onto the pages of Ignatius of Antioch’s letters. That resurrection is rather a whimper than a bang, for it would be many decades more before the Gospel events emerge fully into the light.

11

Three Voices on the Historical Jesus
No. 1 - Papias

Ehrman now turns to three Christian writers of the late first and early second centuries who “convey information about the historical Jesus and certainly attest to his existence” in alleged ways which are “independent” of the Gospels. The first is Papias, a Christian bishop in Asia Minor writing around 120-130 CE, for whom we rely on Eusebius two centuries later, since Papias’ one known work is lost.

Despite Eusebius’ judgment that Papias was “a man of very small intelligence,” what is quoted from his Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord is supposed to represent good evidence of an historical Jesus. Ehrman quotes from Eusebius’ quote of Papias’ introductory words (History of the Church, III, 39.3-4), in which we learn:

that Papias will give an orderly account “of all the things I carefully learned and have carefully recalled from the elders. . . . Whenever someone arrived who had been a companion of one of the elders, I would carefully inquire after their words, what Andrew or Peter had said . . .”

Juggling Elders, Companions and Disciples

Of key interest here is the question of what Papias meant by these “elders.” Scholars will admit to an ambiguity, that “elders” may not refer to the disciple followers of Jesus subsequently named (as some older scholars have preferred to read it), but only to earlier Christians who themselves had known those disciples of Jesus. (That is, “inquire after their words” refers back to the preceding “elders,” but not to the men he goes on to name, which are two different groups and layers of tradition.) This would give us a chain of:

disciples ’ elders ’ companions of elders ’ Papias

And indeed, such a chain would make better sense given the amount of time between the disciples’ activity supposedly following Jesus’ death and Papias himself.

that Papias enquired of anything said by “Andrew or Peter or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew” or “any of the other disciples of the Lord.” But then he goes on to refer to things said by “Aristion and the elder John, disciples of the Lord.”

This is exquisitely confusing.

While the first seven names coincide with disciples of Jesus of Gospel repute, nothing else is known of “Aristion.” And “the elder John” will hardly be synonymous with the just-mentioned disciple “John” (although some scholars—but not Eusebius—have chosen to interpret them as the same). Yet he and Aristion are labelled in the same way: as “disciples of the Lord.” Either Papias’ listing of the first seven names is not derived from the Gospel story (which in any case would not have included an Aristion), or the phrase “disciples of the Lord” was being used a lot more loosely than we think, perhaps with the same meaning as “brethren of/in the Lord” of Pauline fame.

Are those first seven names legendary early leaders in the movement, who were at some point inducted into the Gospels as followers of Jesus? (The Peter, James and John known by Paul were undoubtedly such before two of them were co-opted by Mark to become members of the Twelve.) And with the phrase “the elder John” not being included with those named seven, this ought to rule out that the term “elder” in Papias’ quote ever refers to a disciple-follower of Jesus himself. In fact, the Greek word for “elder” here is “presbuteros” which is never used elsewhere for the disciples of Jesus. (Bauer’s Lexicon skirts the issue of apparent ambiguity in Papias by simply noting that the meaning of “presbuteros” there is “much-discussed.”) Normally it refers to a prominent and respected official, by reason of his age, holding some leadership capacity in Christian communities.

Thus Papias has presented us with a chain going back no further than seven named individuals who are simply referred to as “disciples of the Lord,” using the same phrase applied to two other individuals who were not followers of the historical Jesus. (The term disciples, mathetes, can be used simply of someone who is a member of the faith community, and not necessarily one who sat at the feet of the master.)

We are thus left wondering whether there could be a difference between what that historical chain originally represented (perhaps with no historical Jesus at its root?) and what Papias and his contemporaries now understood by it.

What had Papias read?

In any case, we need to keep in mind that according to Papias’ introductory words, he has made an extensive and careful inquiry through apostolic tradition of what he evidently interpreted as sayings of Jesus; and we could assume that all of these would have gone into his Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord.

Now Eusebius, quite predictably, took Papias’ words to mean that Papias himself had “received the words of the apostles from those who had been their followers” (as does more than one modern scholar, such as J. Kleist, Ancient Christian Writers, p.105-6), despite the incompatibility of such an interpretation with Papias’ actual words. Ehrman quotes this remark of Eusebius without calling attention to that fact.

Eusebius goes on to say (H.E., 39.11)

[Papias] sets forth other matters that came to him from the unwritten tradition, including some bizarre parables of the Savior, his teachings, and several other more legendary accounts . . .

Whether we can rely on Eusebius’ paraphrase here, he seems to have interpreted Papias as deriving his Expositions content from “unwritten tradition,” ruling out any source that Papias might have identified as the Gospels or any other written document. One wonders, then, and for additional reasons to be seen, why Ehrman can state with such confidence that Papias

had read some Gospels, although there is no reason to think that he knew the ones that made it into the New Testament. (p. 98)

Yet Ehrman seems quite willing to assume that Papias had “read” the two documents which Eusebius reports he referred to, although he does not agree that they can be identified with canonical Mark and Matthew. (If Papias had in fact not read these documents, one wonders just what gospels Ehrman thinks he would have read.)

And how does Eusebius lay out Papias’ own words about the documents he refers to? Eusebius first introduces the matter by setting two statements side by side (op.cit. 39.7):

This Papias . . . acknowledges that he received the words of the apostles from those who had been their followers . . .

. . . and he indicates that he himself had listened to Aristion and the elder John . . . and in his books he sets forth the traditions that they passed along.

Eusebius seems not quite sure what to make of the relationship between the two sources and what they supplied. He assumes that the earlier quoted “John” and “the elder John” are two different people, even if both are called “disciples of the Lord.” It seems evident that Aristion and the elder John were Christians Papias was personally acquainted with, either at the time he was writing or perhaps earlier in his life. And while specifics about the information received from the more distant elders and their companions remain vague, Eusebius lays stress on the fact that Papias “obtained from Aristion accounts of the Lord’s sayings” and similarly also “learned (about such accounts) direct from the elder John.”

Papias’ “Mark” and “Matthew”

Eusebius then proceeds (H.E. III, 39.15-16) to set forth two important examples of these accounts (here in Ehrman’s translation):

And this is what the elder [i.e., the elder John] used to say, ‘When Mark was the interpreter of Peter, he wrote down accurately everything that he recalled of the Lord’s words and deeds—but not in order’ . . .

And this is what he says about Matthew: ‘And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [or translated] them to the best of his ability.’

Though Eusebius is not specific (or perhaps Papias was not) as to who gave the latter information to Papias, one can perhaps assume that it was “the elder John” as well. So however we interpret Papias’ “Mark” and “Matthew,” he knows of them through one or two Christian notables in Papias’ own time, with no direct indication of where they got their information.

Now, Ehrman is quite willing to admit that, despite the preferred opinion of conservative scholars, Papias cannot be

referring to the books that we call Mark and Matthew. In fact, what he says about these books does not coincide with what we ourselves know about the canonical Gospels. He appears to be referring to other writings, and only later did Christians (wrongly) assume that he was referring to the two books that eventually came to be included in scripture. (p. 101)

However, Ehrman fails to point out that it is quite clear from Papias’ words that he himself had not seen the two documents he refers to. He has only been told of them by the elder John. We cannot even be sure that, whatever they were, the elder John himself had personally seen and read these documents. Indeed, Papias has so little to say about them that one wonders if they constituted anything other than unsubstantiated rumors and wishful thinking.

But if we allow some basis for them in reality, we know no more than that there existed somewhere in the Christian world at that time a collection of sayings in Hebrew (this, more likely, being a reference to Aramaic), along with another collection of sayings and anecdotes, both of which were currently being attributed to a source in legendary figures attached to the early faith movement and allegedly recounting words and deeds of an historical Jesus. What in fact those collections were originally about, who they were applied to (the teachings and miracle-working of a kingdom-preaching sect in general is a quite feasible option) cannot be said.

Once again, Ehrman is tracking down some theoretical ‘source’—in this case, even more removed and surrounded by uncertainty than his previous ones, with no knowledge at all of any particular item they contained—and labelled it “testimony independent of the Gospels” to an historical Jesus.

Where are Papias’ quotes from the Gospels?

The other reason why we can be reasonably sure that Papias had not seen these documents is that there is no sign anywhere that he ever included a saying or anecdote from them. (It is astonishing how often modern scholars state, based on nothing, that Papias’ work would have included sayings from the Gospels.) Even Eusebius, having the Expositions open before him, throws a light on nothing which resembles anything in the canonical Gospels, or even anything that might have been in the documents Papias has referred to—unless those documents were quite unlike anything scholars would like to read into his “Mark” and “Matthew.” Following his above-quoted words by Papias about them, Eusebius mentions one saying from Papias ‘catalogue’: “a story about a woman falsely accused before the Lord of many sins.” But this Eusebius identifies as something that is found in the Gospel of the Hebrews.

It is indeed curious that Eusebius can say,

In his own book Papias gives us accounts of the Lord’s sayings obtained from Aristion or learned direct from the elder John. Having brought these to the attention of scholars . . .

Yet what are these “sayings” Eusebius has brought to our attention? What is the end result of all Papias’ “careful learning from the elders” which he has “carefully recalled”? According to Eusebius, these are (using the G. A. Williamson translation):

. . . passages in which he tells us of certain miraculous events and other matters, on the basis, it would seem, of direct information [meaning, one assumes, oral tradition]…Philip the apostle resided at Hierapolis with his daughters: it must now be pointed out that their contemporary Papias tells how he heard a wonderful story from the lips of Philip’s daughters. He describes the resurrection of a dead person in his own lifetime, and a further miracle that happened to Justus, surnamed Barsabas, who swallowed dangerous poison and by the grace of the Lord was none the worse . . .

And:

Papias reproduces other stories communicated to him by word of mouth, together with some otherwise unknown [better translated as “strange” or “bizarre,” as Ehrman does] parables and teachings of the Savior, and other things of a more legendary nature (op.cit. 39.9,11).

There are over a dozen fragments surviving from Papias’ work, and a few other references to him, found in Eusebius and several other 4th and 5th century commentators, such as Philip of Side. With the exception of the floating pericope mentioned above about Jesus rescuing a woman accused of adultery from stoning which, though usually allotted to John after 7:52, has no secure place in any single Gospel, nothing attributed by anyone to Papias could be said to derive from any version of a canonical Gospel.

What Papias does tell us

In fact, as in the examples quoted above, some of them are indeed bizarre and even repugnant, such as the gruesome death of Judas attributed to Papias by Apollinarius. Others relate to fanciful predictions about the coming thousand-year reign of the Messiah on earth. Papias even assures us that some of the dead raised by Christ survived until the reign of Hadrian (117-138)!

One wonders, if Papias truly had access to people who had known companions of Jesus’ apostles, why something of a better quality than all this could not have been gleaned through such a chain of transmission. Should traditions going back to “Andrew, Peter, James and John” not have given us something resembling the Gospel accounts or a few reasonably commendable teachings such as are found in those Gospels?

Or is this failure a sign that the Gospels were not preceded by, or founded upon, an actual historical figure with actual teachings, while Papias’ collection of oddball sayings represents the sort of things that began to be attached willy-nilly to the figure generated by the Gospel story. (Irenaeus reports [fr. 2] that Papias allotted to the Lord a saying closely paralleling a messianic prediction in 2 Baruch!)

It is clear that no Gospels have yet reached Papias

Any basis on which Ehrman can claim that Papias read some Gospel(s) seems non-existent. If anything from “Mark” and “Matthew” appeared in Papias’ Expositions, it is impossible that Eusebius would have passed up mentioning it. And the “sayings of the Lord” which the various fragments show were included makes Papias’ work look like a sensationalist product of a less than rational mind. Upon such a source, mentioning unknown documents Papias had not even seen or read himself, does the only supposed reference to the existence of written accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings rest prior to the time of Justin—or, if one prefers, prior to reports that Marcion slightly earlier was using a version of the Gospel of Luke.

Yes, we can postulate through literary relationships between the Gospels that earliest autographs, or Ur-gospels, probably went back a few decades prior, perhaps to around 90 CE for Mark. But the situation that Papias reveals has implications which Ehrman doesn’t even come close to acknowledging. Around the year 125 CE, the Christian bishop of Hieropolis in Asia Minor has access to nothing resembling a narrative Gospel of Jesus’ life, let alone anything remotely organized into a coherent account; and nothing of the standard of teachings found in our canonicals. This, supposedly 50 some years after the first Gospel was written, with the other three following before the end of the first century!

As we shall see in the case of Ignatius, Gospel elements of a basic sort seem to have filtered out to reach Christians like Papias, but actual copies of written Gospels are hard to perceive, or even to get a suggestion of, until at least three or four decades into the second century.

One explanation is that by Papias’ time, a number of Gospels may have been written, but as yet enjoyed little or no circulation beyond the narrow circle of communities which produced them (in the eastern Mediterranean). This was because they were initially regarded as allegorical stories, with only ‘rumors’ of them, misinterpreted by such as Ignatius as historical accounts, penetrating outward in piecemeal and haphazard fashion. Wide circulation would also have been impeded by the very absence we see within the broader Christian movement of any tradition about an historical founder, on whose life these Gospels ought to have thrown an eagerly sought-after light.

And yet Papias is presented by Ehrman as one of his pillar sources outside the Gospels for the “conveying of information about the historical Jesus and attesting to his existence.”

12

Three Voices on the Historical Jesus
No. 2 – Ignatius of Antioch

Did Ignatius write the Ignatian Letters?

Bart Ehrman seems to assume the authenticity of the story that Ignatius was caught up in a persecution of Christians at Antioch around 107-110 CE, was condemned to death and sent to Rome under military escort to die in the arena. Along the way, he wrote letters to six churches in Asia Minor and one to bishop Polycarp of Smyrna. Many doubt the feasibility of such an enterprise, including the likelihood that the authorities would have undertaken to send him all the way to Rome for execution. But that is the story told in later tradition, and it is to be found within the letters themselves.

I will not go into the arguments for and against authenticity here, but if they are later forgeries (that is, the versions known as the “Shorter Recensions” which have traditionally been considered the originals, with the Longer Recensions coming much later in the century and filled with obvious insertions based on the Gospels), such forgeries cannot have been made much later than a decade or two after Ignatius’ death. (I myself might opt for forgery, but I will continue to refer to the writer as “Ignatius.”)

Arguing for a “true” life on earth

One of the principal purposes of these letters is to attack fellow Christians who espouse doctrines and practices Ignatius cannot countenance. Ignatius makes a set of claims about Jesus which he declares to be true, in opposition to those who deny them. The fullest statement of these claims is found in the epistle to the Smyrneans (as translated by Ehrman):

For you are fully convinced about our Lord, that he was truly from the family of David according to the flesh, Son of God according to the will and power of God, truly born from a virgin, and baptized by John that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him. In the time of Pontius Pilate and the tetrarch Herod, he was truly nailed for us in the flesh. . . [Smyrneans 1-2]

How does Ehrman (and scholarship traditionally) interpret a passage like this? What is Ignatius arguing for and what is the position of those he criticizes? According to Ehrman, the latter are

. . . Christians who insisted that Jesus was not a real flesh-and-blood human. These opponents of Ignatius were not ancient equivalents of our modern-day mythicists. They certainly did not believe that Jesus had been made up or invented based on the dying and rising gods supposedly worshipped by pagans. For them, Jesus had a real, historical existence. He lived in this world and delivered inspired teachings. But he was God on earth, not made of the same flesh as the rest of us. (p. 102)

In other words, Ehrman sees Ignatius’ opponents as docetists (from the verb dokein, to seem), holding the doctrine that Jesus only seemed to be human, only seemed to possess a body of human flesh. In reality, this was only an illusion; he was and remained in spiritual form, so that he did not partake of human nature and did not suffer on the cross.

But is this the meaning that can reasonably be taken from some of Ignatius’ statements?

The word “truly” (bolded above) in the Smyrneans passage (Greek alethos) could fit a docetic scenario, meaning “genuinely” as opposed to something illusory. But it can also fit a claim that something was true in actuality, that it really existed or took place (as in Mt. 14:33: “Truly you are the Son of God”). Note also the declaration that our Lord was “Son of God according to the will and power of God.” This is something that would have no relation to docetism, and can only be a statement of the actuality of the claimed situation.

Consider another passage, from the epistle to the Trallians (9:1-2):

Close your ears, then, if anyone preaches to you without speaking of Jesus Christ. Christ was of David’s line. He was the son of Mary; he was truly (alethos) and indeed born, and ate and drank; he was truly persecuted in the days of Pontius Pilate, and truly and indeed crucified…He was also truly raised from the dead.

That first sentence tells of preachers who do not speak of Jesus Christ, which Ignatius defines as a human born of David’s line, son of Mary, persecuted by Pontius Pilate, crucified and risen. Those opponents are failing to teach such a figure having those historical characteristics. It is not merely a case of teaching such a man while claiming that these features of his life were illusory. Such docetists would not have been claiming that Jesus was not the son of Mary or crucified by Pilate.

The point that Jesus “ate and drank” is usually claimed to point to a docetic issue, in that a phantom or illusory being would not eat and drink. But in the context of this particular passage, the phrase can be seen as having another meaning. In fact, it’s an expression representing the idea that Jesus had led a normal human life, doing the normal things real historical men do. Such a meaning can be found in Luke 17:27: “They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all…” Nothing of docetism there.

William R. Schoedel (Ignatius of Antioch, p.124-5) recognizes that such passages as the above in Trallians 9 suggest that “Ignatius had in mind a denial of the passion more thoroughgoing than our argument has so far indicated.” He acknowledges that what some seem to deny “is the very reality of Christ’s death,” and thus of the incarnation. The opposing view offers not simply a docetic Christ, it offers something which gives Christ “no place in our lives” (Magnesians 9:2).

Another Magnesians passage (11:1) makes this clear:

I wish to warn you not to fall into the snare of stupid doctrine, but to be convinced of the birth, passion and resurrection, which took place at the time of the governorship of Pontius Pilate.

Here the issue is plainly one of historical fact. Why would the latter have been in any doubt, let alone be denied by some, if an actual crucifixion under Pilate had taken place—regardless of whether Jesus was docetic or fully human? Ignatius is making a firm declaration that such events did indeed happen. He is championing the basic Gospel story in the face of those who preach without it or openly deny it.

Ignatius ignorant of a Gospel

Before looking at some of Ignatius’ other remarks, we need to note that in none of his letters, even when putting forward his claims about a human Jesus, does the bishop of Antioch appeal to a written Gospel. He knows a handful of basic biographical ‘facts’ about Jesus, his birth to Mary, baptism by John, crucifixion by Pilate, a rising from the dead, all at an historical time and place (information which seems unknown to the epistle writers). But he gives no sign that he has in his possession a document which is the source of that information. If he had, we can certainly expect that he would appeal to it, point his readers to it, throw it in his opponents’ faces.

A single passage in the letters resembles a Gospel scene. In Smyrneans 3, Ignatius offers a “touch me” post-resurrection scene to ‘prove’ that Jesus rose in the flesh of his former body and was not a phantom. But here, too, he does not point to a document as his source, or even to apostolic tradition. Scholars like Schoedel (op.cit., p.225) tend to judge that he is not deriving it from Luke’s similar scene, nor from John’s ‘doubting Thomas’ scene, but either from something of his own or some Christian prophet’s invention, or from a floating oral tradition.

Ehrman fully acknowledges this lack of derivation from a written Gospel for anything Ignatius says. After all, if Ignatius did not derive his data from a Gospel, then he must know it through separate tradition, and so this constitutes for Ehrman “another independent witness to the life of Jesus.” But consider the implications.

This is the year 110 (or later if the letters are forgeries) in Antioch, a stone’s throw from the Syrian-Galilean region where Jesus conducted his ministry, where the evangelists Mark and Matthew wrote (Matthew is commonly dated c.80 CE with a suggested provenance in Antioch itself!), and yet the bishop of that city does not possess a copy of a written Gospel?

The story of Jesus which this bishop has received is limited to the bare-bones biography he puts forward over six letters. Not once in all of the seven letters is there a reference to a single teaching by Jesus, a single prophecy or a single miracle.

Facing a body of heretics who deny all that he holds dear, it is astonishing that Ignatius has not managed to obtain a copy of an account of Jesus’ life reputedly written almost 40 years before (according to some, even longer). Mark’s passion account alone, with its scene of a tortured Jesus in Gethsemane and the despairing cry from the cross, would have been perfect ammunition against those who were claiming that Jesus did not suffer.

Christians may not have had photocopiers, but the clamor we should expect for the first written account of the figure they all worshiped did not lead to getting a copy to Antioch from Mark’s home town (probably no more than a couple of hundred miles away) by the time 40 years had passed? Even the Israelites did better crossing Sinai!

An Allegory reaches Ignatius as History

Even 20 years or so, if Mark was written around 90, should not have been a stretch. Unless, of course, Mark was originally written as a piece of symbolism, not meant as history, and it took a couple of decades for the story’s basic features to filter out to the surrounding Christian world, through rumor and missionary contact, through expansion and redaction of the story in other nearby communities, eventually to be accepted by some as historical fact—particularly those who would have found it appealing and useful.

Ignatius seems to have received those rumors and reports, and he and others in his circle of communities have swallowed the new fish whole, while having to contend with those who have failed or refused to do so.

No Apostolic Tradition

Not only does Ignatius not possess a copy of a Gospel, he also argues from a position which lacks a few other things. One of them is apostolic tradition, another is an appeal to simple history within his faith movement: the argument that “Christians have believed these things for generations.” Ehrman is quite mistaken when he says:

And he was bishop in Antioch, the city where both Peter and Paul spent considerable time in the preceding generation, as Paul himself tells us in Galatians 2. His views too can trace a lineage straight back to apostolic times. (pp. 103-104)

And just where in Paul do we find views like those of Ignatius, that Jesus was the son of Mary, that he was baptized by John the Baptist, that he was crucified by Pilate? As for tracing a lineage of ideas back through preceding generations, through a chain of apostles and their teaching, this is something which Ignatius never does. Not even the bishops and other community leaders who he urges should be obeyed are appealed to as holding passed-on truths going back to the apostles. (We might note that whatever the dispute in 1 John 4, neither does that writer appeal to a lineage of belief and history, or to the principle of apostolic tradition. In fact, the Johannine community seems at this stage to have nothing that can be traced back to a Jesus, and God is the source of its revelation.)

Ignatius and Docetism

At the same time, we can tell from some passages that Ignatius is also dealing with an issue of docetism, although it seems not to be within any gnostic context. Ignatius’ opponents are members of his own community, and no other doctrines characteristic of Gnosticism contribute to raising his ire. This is a point which scholars usually overlook. If this particular brand of docetism is not part of a wider gnostic outlook, why has it raised its head in Ignatius’ community?

First, let’s look at a couple of representative passages (to which we could add the ‘touch me’ scene of Smyrneans 3 mentioned above):

It is asserted by some who deny God…that his sufferings were not genuine [Trallians 10].

So what is the point of my standing well in the opinion of a man who blasphemes my Lord by denying that he ever bore a real human body? [Smyrneans 5:2]

The whole issue of docetism is a perplexing one. Why, whether here or in a developing gnostic community, would it suddenly appear after almost a century of traditional belief in an historical Jesus, during which no one voiced any objection to believing in a divine son of God who had actually suffered in flesh, who actually partook of human nature? Paul certainly shows no problem with the idea, nor is there any sign that anyone around him did. (Of course, apart from a couple of ambiguous statements, the epistles don’t show the very concept that any human flesh or nature was involved, but let’s consider what the situation would be if it were.)

The traditional view of docetism sees it as a sudden about-face by certain Christian teachers and thinkers, the complete rejection of a presumably universal view of Jesus held for three-quarters of a century as a human being born of a human mother and suffering in human flesh. What would explain this throwing of the Christian faith train into reverse? Why would there be a widespread enough acceptance of such new preaching—or at least a willingness to consider it—that Ignatius must regard it as of the greatest danger to contemporary communities and preach so virulently against it? What established Christian would be ready to subscribe to a dramatic reversal of the faith to such negativity: that Jesus Christ had not been real, had not suffered, had not taken on true humanity?

The solution is to realize that prior to the end of the first century, no one had believed the opposite. Christ was a heavenly figure who suffered, died and rose in the spiritual dimension. But at precisely the time when the first idea that Christ had been on earth arose (largely through an evolution within the Q sect and a misunderstanding of the Gospels which grew out of it) we find the first objections to a human Jesus, a philosophically-based resistance but one dependent on the new claim that the heavenly Son of God had been on earth in a human incarnation.

This is why a type of docetism could arise in a ‘traditional’ Christian community (of the Pauline type) which had nothing to do with Gnosticism, and why it had not arisen earlier. It is why Ignatius cannot appeal to traditional belief, because both outlooks—an historical Jesus and a docetic Jesus—are of recent vintage, competing on the same level playing field.

Reactions to the historical Jesus

In Ignatius’ milieu, we see that the new development of an historical Jesus gave rise to more than one type of push-back.

1. Some were saying, well, if there was a human Christ on earth, he had to have only seemed to be human, since God would not lower himself so far as to take on human nature.

2. Others had a different reaction: they simply denied (as they seem to be doing in 1 John 4 as well) that such a thing had happened, and thus Ignatius had to declare that Jesus Christ, historically speaking, had really been born, really been baptized, had really been crucified by Pilate.

Ignatius’ language in various passages shows that he was dealing with those two different and equally unacceptable positions. (He also tackles those who want to re-establish certain Jewish practices, so scholarship has already recognized that his opponents are of different varieties.)

From the heavenly Christ to the historical Christ

If Ignatius (or his forger, who would have inhabited the same thought-world) straddles the crossover line, one foot in the old cultic heavenly Christ camp and the other in the new historicist camp, we would expect to find indications of both in the letters, a sign of the old morphing into the new. And so there are, notably in Ephesians 19 in which a cultic myth is set in the realm of the stars, with revelations to the heavenly aeons, things such as the conception and birth of Christ as well as his death being hidden from “the ruler of this age” which is an unmistakeable reference to Satan. (Compare the same phrase and concealment motif in 1 Cor. 2:8. Such secret events were “brought to pass in the deep silence of God.” In other words, in a mythical dimension.

None of this is consistent with a life on earth—which failed to deter Ignatius, who craved a human Jesus suffering like himself in flesh. We again meet the idea that “God was manifested/revealed in the likeness of men.” All these motifs and language are familiar from the epistles—akin to the atmosphere of the pre-Pauline Christological hymns—but which are foreign to the Gospels and established historicism.

Upon that highly mythological ‘hymn’ Ignatius has superimposed one obvious Gospel element: the ‘virgin’ to whom the Lord was born was named Mary, an item of information Paul never gives us. It would be the same as if some later Christian had taken chapter 12 of Revelation, with its mythical scene of the heavenly birth of the Messiah to “the woman robed with the sun,” and given her a name out of a later earthly story. Or the “virgin” in the Odes of Solomon, No.19, originally referring to personified Wisdom, being identified with the Gospel Mary—which it has been by some conservative scholars today.

None of this complex and subtle dimension to be seen in the figure and epistles of Ignatius is even remotely recognized by Bart Ehrman.

13

Three Voices on the Historical Jesus
No. 3 – 1 Clement
(with Addendum on the Epistle of Barnabas)

Is 1 Clement in any way authentic?

Despite doubts going back to the Dutch Radicals of the late 19th century, Ehrman accepts the non-canonical epistle 1 Clement as authentic in regard to its ostensible purpose (a letter from the Christian community in Rome urging the settling of a dispute going on in the community in Corinth) and its traditional dating (the last decade of the first century), though its attribution to a Clement reputed to be the fourth bishop of Rome remains highly dubious.

With all of that I would agree, and have defended this degree of authenticity against a more radical view that the work is a much later forgery designed to encourage other Christian communities to acknowledge the hegemony of the Church of Rome. This issue need not be addressed here, except to say that I find the arguments for such a view quite unconvincing and unnecessary. (See the reasons given in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, note 169.) However, I will hereafter refer to the author as “Clement.”

Does 1 Clement know any written Gospels?

Some of those reasons will be evident in the present discussion. Ehrman makes the following admissions for 1 Clement:

The letter quotes extensively from the Greek Old Testament, and its author explicitly refers to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But he does not mention the Gospels of the New Testament, and even though he quotes some of the sayings of Jesus, he does not indicate that they come from written texts. In fact, his quotations do not line up in their wording with any of the sayings of Jesus found in our surviving Gospels.

If we agree on a reasonable dating of the 90s of the first century, or even the first decade of the second, we find here a similar situation to that of the Ignatian letters. At this period, even in Rome, there is no sign of actual written Gospels available in major Christian communities. When we see the same situation existing for Papias even later, we know that there is something wrong with the traditional view of the Gospels as historical documents all written before the first century was complete.

What does Clement know about a life of Jesus on earth?

Despite this situation, Ehrman argues that “the author of 1 Clement, like Ignatius and then Papias, not only assumes that Jesus lived but that much of his life was well known.” The latter two writers may indeed have made such an assumption, but there is little sign that either one of them knew very much about their assumed Jesus’ life or teachings. As for 1 Clement, both of Ehrman’s claims are suspect. Here is what he offers as evidence that the author is speaking “about the historical Jesus” (I’ve altered Ehrman’s order for better efficiency in addressing them):

(1) Christ spoke words to be heeded (1 Clement 2.1).

This is first of all a misleading translation. Literally, it is “you paid attention to his words,” which eliminates the image of Christ standing before one and speaking. In any event, considering that spiritual figures such as Wisdom and the Holy Spirit are often presented as conferring advice and guidance, this statement in any form could easily apply to a spiritual figure.

Christ speaks out of scripture

In fact, 1 Clement shares in a very common type of expression in the epistles, that Christ “speaks” out of scripture (and that he does it in the present tense, not in some past life). In chapter 22, Clement says, quoting Psalm 34:11-17:

For it is Christ himself who summons us through the Holy Spirit, with the words: “Come, children, listen to me, and I will teach you fear of the Lord.”

In 16:15 as well, he portrays Christ as speaking out of scripture (Psalm 22:6-8):

And again he says himself, “But I am a worm and no man, a reproach of men and despised of the people.”

Thus, when Ehrman lists the following –

(2) Jesus taught gentleness and patience; the author here quotes a series of Jesus’ sayings similar to what can be found in Matthew and Luke (13:1-2),

– an alternative source becomes evident. All these examples fit a heavenly Jesus who ‘teaches’ through scripture (“speaking” in the same way that the Holy Spirit in scripture does) or through the voices of preachers who saw themselves as channelling his directives, just as Paul did in offering his “words of the Lord” which he believed he had received through revelation—this being a common scholarly interpretation, as discussed earlier. In the case of the “sayings” in chapter 13, they are commonplace ethical maxims (here simply enlargements on the Golden Rule), of the same sort that were traditionally regarded as given by God, as in the “Two Ways” section of the Epistle of Barnabas. Belief in the Son often led to switching the source of such teachings to him, but still through spiritual channels.

Moreover, Clement of Alexandria quotes an almost identical block of sayings as those in 1 Clement (Stromata, II, 18) but assigns them to God. The epistle of James contains similar maxims with no attribution to a Jesus of any sort. And any similarity found in the sayings in Matthew is much better seen as the next step in converting such general maxims, whether by God or the Son or simply anonymous, into teachings of the Gospel Jesus.

Clement has no Gospel accounts to draw on

The author of 1 Clement, like Ignatius, is another who fails to point to a written document as the repository of these teachings, something which Ehrman admits. But neither is it likely he can be presenting them on the basis of being familiar with a Gospel, for he later (14:14) quotes something strikingly similar to a Beatitude, yet instead of allotting it to Jesus he identifies it as “written,” meaning in scripture, in this case Proverbs 2:21-2. Clement also shows himself to be unfamiliar with the Gospel teachings of Jesus on many other topics discussed in his letter.

But the clincher that 1 Clement knows no Gospel is found in chapter 16. When he comes to describe Jesus’ sufferings, he can only reproduce the Suffering Servant Song of Isaiah 53. He obviously has no oral traditions either about Jesus’ death. His knowledge of the Passion comes from scripture, just as Jesus’ words do. It is only a small step from that to realizing that Clement knows of the ‘event’ of the crucifixion through scripture, just as Paul did, and not as an occurrence he can identify in history. (Barnabas seems to say the same thing, as we shall see.)

(3) Another quotation of “the words of our Lord Jesus” (46.8, comparable to Matthew 26:24 and Luke 17:2).

This saying? “Woe to that man; it would be better if he had never been born, than that he should lead astray one of my chosen ones.” This sounds as though it could have begun as a prophetic utterance in the community, regarded as channelled from the Lord in heaven.

(4) Those who experience love in Christ should do what Christ commanded (49.1).

Another reference to the teaching of the Son through scripture and Spirit.

Other items offered by Ehrman:

(5) His sufferings were “before your eyes” (2.1).

(6) The blood of Christ is precious to the Father, poured out for salvation (7.4).

(7) The blood of the Lord brought redemption (12.7).

(8) Out of his love, the Lord Jesus Christ “gave his blood for us, his flesh for our flesh, his soul for our souls” (49.6).

None of this need speak of a life and death on earth. No effort has been made by Ehrman to engage with the case mythicism puts forward surrounding the epistles’ language of “blood” and “flesh” as a reflection of spiritual world counterparts, despite the extensive discussion presented in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man concerning such terminology and assorted higher world activities by divine figures. (Cicero’s “blood” and “body” of the gods and the “blood” brought into the heavenly sanctuary for Christ’s sacrifice in the epistle to the Hebrews are only two of the features of that discussion Ehrman has ignored.)

(9) The Lord Jesus Christ came humbly, not with arrogance or haughtiness (16.2).

And what does Clement offer as a demonstration of this character trait of Christ? Something from the Gospels or an oral tradition about Jesus’ life, his behavior at his trial and crucifixion? Nothing of the sort. His source is “as the Holy Spirit spoke concerning him,” and he proceeds with his quotation of Isaiah 53. How can Ehrman claim that Clement knows about the historical Jesus and the events of his life when Clement points solely to scripture for everything he says about his Jesus?

Scripture as prophecy or revelation of the Christ event?

One aspect of the view that Christ speaks out of scripture is the question of prophecy. It is regularly maintained that scripture is the repository of prophecies about Christ’s life; the Gospel story represents the fulfillment of those prophecies. But in the epistles, including 1 Clement, no writer gives us the second side of this supposed prophetic equation. Does Clement quote a passage like Isaiah 53, style it a prophecy, and then give us the fulfillment of that prophecy by pointing to an actual earthly event, whether in the Gospel story or in some other historical tradition? Never.

Rather, scripture is the embodiment of the Christ event. That is all that these writers know. (We will shortly see that this situation still exists in the epistle of Barnabas). There is no equation. The first side stands alone, in scripture. Christ is a “revealed” figure, as are his acts of salvation, something which the epistle writers constantly tell us (e.g., 1 Peter 1:20), with their exclusive use of revelation verbs to style knowledge of Christ and his ‘appearance’ in their own time.

(10) The Lord adorned himself with good works [and rejoiced] (33.7).

This reference to “the Lord” can only mean God, since in this chapter Clement has been entirely focused on the Genesis Creation. Compare the “and rejoiced” following on Ehrman’s quotation above, and verse 2’s “For the Creator and Master of the universe himself rejoices in his works.” Ehrman is being absurdly atomistic here, like prophecy-miners past and present, taking words out of context with no regard for their plainly intended application. Finally,

(11) Jesus came from Jacob “according to the flesh” (32.2).

This statement and its context is eerily like that of Paul in Romans 9:5, where he says that Christ is “from (the Israelites) according to the flesh (kata sarka).” This peculiarity of language common to the two is part of the picture that must be examined to recognize how the early Christ cult viewed and styled relationships between human beings and spiritual entities, and cannot be gone into here. It spans more than one chapter in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (chiefly chapter 13 and especially p.167-171), and I recommend it to the reader.

Thus Ehrman’s confident declaration that –

“Here again we have an independent witness not just to the life of Jesus as a historical figure but to some of his teachings and deeds….the author of 1 Clement had no doubt about his real existence and no reason to defend it.”

– has no support in the text when that text is read without Gospel assumptions being forced upon it.

What does the epistle of Barnabas say about an historical Jesus?

Later Ehrman revisits 1 Clement for a few summary comments, at which time he also includes aspects of the Epistle of Barnabas. Usually dated to the first quarter of the 2nd century (though Ehrman and some others prefer a date even later, around 135), the epistle of Barnabas carries us a step further in the development of an historical Jesus idea among the early Christian Fathers.

The writer of Barnabas again shows no knowledge of a written Gospel. For statements about Jesus’ passion he, too, can only draw on scripture (Isaiah and the Psalms). Barnabas actually states that Jesus had been on earth (5:8-11), teaching the people of Israel and performing miracles, though no examples are itemized and no clear historical time is provided. He says that Jesus chose apostles who were “sinners of the worst kind,” something he could hardly have taken from any Gospel portrayal of Jesus’ followers. (Dunces maybe, criminals hardly.) Rather, he bases this on a saying whose source he does not identify: “he came not to call saints but sinners,” showing that biographical information about Jesus’ life on earth is now being produced on the basis of perceived written prophecy. (Nor could this saying be taken from Mark, since the latter’s application of it is toward Jesus’ audience, not his disciples.)

The only other Gospel-like saying Barnabas mentions is in 4:14: “It is written that many are called but few are chosen.” Here the saying is used in application to Israel’s history of falling out of favor with God culminating in their final abandonment in favor of the Christians, with no mention that this was a saying of Jesus. Those opening words indicate he is drawing from something regarded as a sacred writing (we don’t know what it was), but this is hardly a reference to Matthew which at such an early time, though probably written by then, would not yet be known or regarded as scripture.

Besides, any other knowledge of Matthew—or any other Gospel—by Barnabas cannot be perceived. He knows of no teachings of Jesus on the subject of dietary laws (on which he spends an entire chapter), or on what will happen at the End-time. Even for the Matthew-like sayings contained in the “Two Ways” teaching appended to the epistle, there is no attribution to Jesus; in fact, they are referred to as “the precepts of the Lord, as they are set forth in scripture” (21:1), a clear reference to God.

Knowledge of Jesus’ actions based on scripture

Barnabas actually seems to tell us where he gets his ‘knowledge’ about Jesus on earth:

For the scripture concerning him relates partly to Israel, partly to us, and it speaks thus: [Here a quote of two verses from Isaiah 53.] Therefore we ought to give great thanks to the Lord that he has given us knowledge of the past, and wisdom for the present, and that we are not without understanding for the future. [5:2-4]

He even suggests that we know the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death because scripture says so:

So then the Son of God came in the flesh for this reason, that he might complete the total of the sins of those [i.e., the Jews] who persecuted his prophets to death. For this cause he endured. For God says of the chastisement of his flesh that it is from them [the Jews]: “When they shall smite their shepherd, then the sheep of the flock shall be destroyed.” [5:11-12]

Barnabas appeals to more scriptural passages (5:13-14) to illustrate how Jesus suffered. In none of these cases, just as 1 Clement had failed to do, does he offer the second side of an equation between prophecy and fulfillment. While he clearly regards Jesus as having been on earth (a clarity 1 Clement never supplied), he has no independent source of information about the events of that earthly life. He seems to simply assume it took place because scripture is now regarded as a prophecy of Jesus’ theoretical life. Perhaps needless to say, Barnabas makes no reference to any of the characters of the Gospel story, not even to the historical Pilate as the crucifier of Jesus.

Gospels missing in action

Concurrent with Ignatius (or his forger), with Papias, with 1 Clement, the writer of the epistle of Barnabas has no written Gospel to appeal to, despite being near or at the quarter mark of the second century. To that list we could add the other surviving Father, bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, whose single surviving epistle (usually dated 120-130) shares Ignatius’ and Barnabas’ conviction of a life on earth, but fails to make any mention of a written account of it. In referring to Jesus’ passion, he, too, is limited to quoting verses from Isaiah 53.

The point Ehrman seeks to make about the epistles of Barnabas and Clement is that they, like Paul, have virtually nothing to say about details of the life of Jesus, even though they “show clear and compelling evidence that they know about Jesus and understand that he was a real historical figure.” As we’ve seen, that can be disputed in regard to 1 Clement, while needing severe qualification in regard to Barnabas, since the latter shows no sign of knowing about a life of Jesus from any other source than scripture. Thus, Ehrman’s attempt to ‘explain’ the silence in Paul by comparing it to a silence in Clement and Barnabas has no actual basis.

Silence supporting silence

Ehrman, paraphrasing Wells, gives us a truly impressive list of a host of Gospel details on which, like Paul, both 1 Clement and Barnabas are silent, from a birth in Bethlehem to a trial and crucifixion by Pilate. This is typical New Testament math, in which a multitude of zeros adds up to a secure number. And it is based on undemonstrated assumptions that Clement and Barnabas “know” all or most of these things about a real Jesus—from historical tradition and not solely from scripture.

What do such silences show? asks Ehrman. That “these traditions about Jesus were not relevant to their purposes.” The problem is, properly applying the argument from silence shows that this is simply not the case, and such a claim (a virtual mantra through centuries of attempted explanations for the silence in the epistles) ignores elements of the texts which point in the direction of a mythical Jesus who is being gradually historicized.

A picture of progression

Ehrman’s predispositions inure him to a consideration of any other explanation: such as that all three writers, Paul, Clement and Barnabas, are equally ignorant on such life details, but that those three records give us a picture of a progression over time. Paul presents a cultic salvation myth of a heavenly Son sacrificed at the hands of the demon spirits, in its basic form: death, burial, resurrection. It is all known from scripture and revelation, with prophets starting to claim personally revealed “words of the Lord” to guide certain aspects of the movement.

1 Clement a few decades later still lives in that cultic, scripture-based world, but the guidance by the Lord is more comprehensively developed; he is a living force (as Bishop Lightfoot put it), speaking and teaching through scripture. The influence of the Gospel story is yet to be felt. When we reach Barnabas, scripture is still the source of information, but the idea that Jesus had been on earth has taken root, teaching and working miracles, dying and rising, even if no extra-scriptural details are known and the source of the idea is unclear.

Moving sideways to Ignatius (or his forger, either of whom would have been more or less contemporary with Barnabas, though some distance away—from Alexandria to Antioch), a source in the Gospel story can be reasonably postulated, though actual written Gospels cannot yet be sighted among any of these writers. Papias, probably a little later than Barnabas, is less dependent on scripture and betrays some influence from Mark’s allegory, but he is still lacking written narrative Gospels.

What Ehrman and other entrenched historicists cannot recognize is that their presentation of the non-Gospel writers is simply not supported by the documents themselves. It takes a vast amount of ‘reading into’ and twisting of the texts (perhaps that is what Ehrman meant by “teasing out” meanings and evidence from them) to get those documents to support historicism. Whereas, the mythicist analysis works from what the texts actually say and what we can glean from them without presupposition or importation from the Gospels.

In other words, the mythicist exercise is anything but the common accusation of ad hoc, since with it we can create across all of the documents a coherent, consistent picture of the evolution of an historical Jesus.

14

The Non-Pauline Epistles: I

Ehrman’s Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels

There is an astonishing naivete to much of Bart Ehrman’s case for historicism. Perhaps it is aimed at a naïve readership, but it must leave such readers wondering if mythicists do indeed suffer from mental retardation or a simple inability to read texts. After all, the way Ehrman presents things, there can be no question that each and every writer in the early record clearly refers to an historical Jesus. Consider this statement:

But even in a letter as short as Jude, we find the apostles of Jesus mentioned (verse 17), which presupposes, of course, that Jesus lived and had followers. (p. 106, DJE?)

Well, it presupposes no such thing. The epistles contain many references to “apostles” who are not in any way represented as followers of a Jesus on earth. The epistle of Jude is only one of several referring to “apostles” that makes no such identification. These are apostles who are preaching Jesus, with no stated dimension of having been his followers.

Independent Apostles

Paul himself, even in the orthodox view, was such an apostle. His apostleship was the result of a ‘call’ from God (e.g., Romans 1:1) and from ‘seeing’ the Lord Jesus in a vision (1 Cor. 9:1 and 15:8). In 2 Corinthians 11:4-5, in the midst of a diatribe against rival “apostles” who preach a ‘different Jesus’ from his own, he refers to both himself and his rivals as having received their respective kerygmas through the “spirit” (only his own, of course, was the valid one). No connection here to an historical Jesus.

When he goes on in 11:12-15 to condemn those rivals for “masquerading as apostles of Christ” and being virtually agents of Satan, many scholars (such as C. K. Barrett) recognize that this kind of absolute condemnation is not being directed at the Jerusalem group, but other unspecified “ministers of Christ” (12:23) who proselytize independently, and certainly were not followers of a Jesus on earth. Ehrman also conveniently ignores that in the entire body of epistles, not a single statement is made indicating that any apostles of the Christ were followers of a Jesus on earth, or traced any authority or correct preaching back to him.

It is impossible to believe that Ehrman could be ignorant of this wider application of the term “apostles” in the epistles, and only a little less difficult to believe that he is ignorant of mythicism’s arguments in this regard. He is either deliberately misleading his readers, taking advantage of their ignorance, or his own naïve reading of the texts is nothing short of an embarrassment.

*

The epistles are “chock-full of references to a human Jesus” [p. 113, DJE?]

1 Timothy

The first one quoted by Ehrman is 1 Timothy 6:13, which makes a passing reference to Jesus giving witness before Pontius Pilate (the only mention of Pilate in the entire body of epistles). Ehrman admits that this epistle is not by Paul, but by an unknown author writing in Paul’s name. Regrettably, what he neglects to mention is that all three Pastoral epistles are widely regarded by critical scholars as written some time in the early 2nd century. Ehrman’s readership is thus deprived of a possible understanding of this reference to Pilate as based on a knowledge of the Gospel story now beginning to circulate, as in the Ignatian letters around the same time.

There is, besides, some reason to be suspicious of this reference, since mainstream commentators have pointed out that it does not fit its context very well; and there is also reason to suspect a nearby phrase (in 6:3) of interpolation, probably through a marginal gloss. (See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, Appendix 1 for a discussion of the question of authenticity.) Nowhere else do any of the Pastorals show a knowledge of the Gospel story, and there are some passages indicating continuing faith in the mythical Christ of Paul (as in 2 Timothy 1:9-10: See JNGNM, p.261-3).

The epistles of “Peter”

The next “clear” witness to Jesus as “a living, human being” are the epistles of Peter, which Ehrman admits are pseudonymous. He also admits that 1 Peter “shows no familiarity with our Gospels.” But the author says:

For you were called to this end, because Christ suffered for you, leaving an example for you that you might follow in his steps, who did not commit sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth, who when reviled did not revile in return, while suffering uttered no threat, but trusted the one who judges righteously, who bore our sins in his body on the tree, in order that dying to sin we might live to righteousness, for by his wounds we were healed. (2:21-24)

Can the author of 1 Peter, to portray Jesus as a living human being, give us nothing other than a paraphrase of Isaiah 53? Does he possess not a single oral tradition about the crucifixion which might point to history remembered?

Like the great majority of writers outside of Paul, he never uses the word “cross” but rather “tree.” The phrase “(hung) on a tree” is of scriptural derivation, referring to the biblical method of execution, as in Deuteronomy 21:22. 1 Peter, like many others (cf. Ascension of Isaiah 9:14) is viewing the ‘event’ of the heavenly Son’s crucifixion in terms of the biblical image, because scripture is their source of perceived revelation about the sacrificed Son, not history.

The language of “flesh” and “body”

Considering that almost everything about Christ in the documents examined so far points to an unknown venue for the sacrificial event, revealed only in scripture, Ehrman needs to step outside the box and consider applying a different interpretation to some of the epistolary language.

- We have already noted that such language includes the exclusive use of revelation verbs to describe Christ’s ‘arrival’ in the present time of faith;

- we have noted the absence of any language implying that at the Parousia Christ will be ‘returning’ to earth;

- and we have noted the absence of historical equivalents to supposed scriptural prophecy.

The other language feature which needs reinterpretation is wording like “flesh,” “body,” and “blood.” It will no longer do to simply take such words and assume a human application, with no questions asked.

Chapter 13 of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man surveys a whole range of usages of the words “flesh” and “body” in the epistles, some of them unmistakeably applied in mystical, non-human ways. For example, Paul’s concept of the “body of Christ,” in which believers constitute the limbs and Christ the head, is clearly a reference to a mystical-spiritual entity. 1 Corinthians 15:44-49 directly refers to Christ’s “spiritual body,” made of “heavenly stuff” (with no reference to him ever having had a physical body like Adam’s). Ephesians 2:14 speaks of Christ abolishing the Law “in his flesh” and reconciling Jew and gentile “in this one body.” The curtain of the heavenly sanctuary in Hebrews 10:20 is called “his flesh.” None of this is literal human flesh or body.

Thus, in 1 Peter,

For Christ died for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God, having been put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit. (3:18)

Since Christ suffered in the flesh, you also be armed with the same thought. (4:1)

the concept of “flesh” needs to be interpreted in terms of a spiritual equivalent which the Son takes on when he descends to the lower heavens to undergo his sacrifice. Gods in their pure spirit form could not suffer, let alone die. To perform such acts, Christ had to assume something of a nature akin to humans and descend to a realm of corruptibility. Since it is the demons—they also possess a form of “flesh”—who perform the execution, one may assume it took place in their region of the firmament below the moon, part of the “realm of flesh” (as the Ascension of Isaiah 9:13 specifies, and as 1 Corinthians 2:8 implies).

A “likeness” to humans, not an actual one

Thus we have the constant motif (e.g., Romans 8:3, Hebrews 2:14, Philippians 2:6-11), including outside the canon (such as the Apocalypse of Elijah 1:6 and Ascension of Isaiah 9:14), that the Son took on only a “likeness” to human form, a “likeness to men”—a characterization which denies an actual incarnation as a human being. (And a characterization which never appears in the Gospels, or any other literature once an historical Jesus has been established.)

This heavenly venue and the taking on of a spiritual form akin to humans, so that the Son can serve as a “paradigm” and parallel between the spiritual and material, a guarantor for salvation between Deity and humanity, is the central essence of the mythicist case as laid out in my books. Ehrman assures us that he read all 800 pages of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, but so far he has failed to even acknowledge that central case, let alone address it.

Who is “Peter”?

1 Peter, incidentally, nowhere betrays any knowledge of the Gospel story, let alone makes any earthly connection between its alleged author and an historical Jesus. Once again, Ehrman’s superficial reading of the text is in evidence:

And so I admonish the elders among you, I who am a fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of Christ. . . . (5:1)

Here the author makes no distinction of status between his “Peter” and the “elders” he is writing to, let alone identifies him as Jesus’ chief disciple. The author is revealing himself as a prominent figure in some Christian community writing to similar figures in some other community. Or perhaps he is forging a letter for the benefit of the elders of his own community, ostensibly by a famous elder of the past. Clearly, he has no concept of “Peter” as an earthly follower of an earthly Jesus.

(Alternatively, the ascription to Peter may have been something added only later, by an orthodox editor who failed to realize that the letter showed no knowledge of an historical Jesus.)

As for being a “witness of the sufferings of Christ,” the word for “witness” is “martus.” A meaning of ‘eyewitness’ is far less likely than of one who testifies to belief in a matter of faith, even in the face of persecution (thus, martyr and martyrdom). No tradition has it that Peter witnessed any of Christ’s sufferings (according to the Gospels, he had fled the scene). The writer simply has his Peter, a legendary apostle and leader in the initial cultic movement decades earlier (perhaps not yet inducted into Mark’s Gospel) proclaiming a suffering Christ as an article of faith—something he has derived from scripture, as 2:22-24 illustrates.

Transfigured on the Holy Mountain

Moving on to 2 Peter, Ehrman once again admits that this author, too, “does not show clear evidence of any familiarity with the Gospels.” (Considering that this epistle is commonly dated at least a couple of decades into the second century, we once again look in vain for any early dissemination of written Gospels.) But he “clearly knows the tradition recorded in them of the experience of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.”

For not by following sophistic myths have we made known to you the power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of the majesty of that one. For when we received honor and glory from God the Father and the voice was brought to him by the magnificent glory, ‘this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,’ we heard this voice that was brought from heaven to him, for we were on the holy mountain. (1:16-18)

Once again, Ehrman is indulging in a superficial reading, interpreting this passage without question in Gospel terms. But there are significant missing details. No mention is made of the presence of Elijah and Moses, no reference to the brightening of Jesus’ clothes or face. It does not record Peter’s suggestion that a tabernacle be set up. Nor does it supply any setting for this incident, neither in Galilee nor indeed within an earthly ministry of Jesus. All these things have to be read into the passage—and often are.

An Epiphany of the heavenly Son

Taken by itself, with no preconceptions brought to it, this account in 2 Peter sounds like an epiphany, a visionary experience attributed to the apostle Peter and unnamed others. There is no implication they had been with him before, no change in Jesus’ state or appearance. Rather, they have received a vision of the Lord whom they believe in and worship, one whose arrival in glory they are awaiting. The writer offers this vision as ‘proof’ to his readers (who have expressed skepticism) that the divine Son is powerful and blessed by God, that he is present among them and is indeed coming.

Scholars have noticed anomalies.

- Why refer to the Gospel Transfiguration and not to the experience of his resurrection as a demonstration of Jesus’ power and glory?

- The word for “eyewitnesses” is epoptai, which has nothing to do with companions, but is used of the higher grade initiates in the Greek mystery cults who have experienced the perceived presence of the god.

- There is a high scriptural content in this passage as well. The overall atmosphere is of a typical Old Testament theophany of God; the voice from heaven is the well-known verse from Psalm 2; “honor and glory” echo Psalm 8:5; and “on the holy mountain” suggests Psalm 2:6’s “on Zion his holy mountain.”

Not only is the writer describing a revelatory experience attributed to Peter, he must construct it out of scriptural pieces, since he has no history remembered from oral tradition, and presumably because no detailed memory about such a Petrine vision was available.

A continuing dependence on scriptural promise

But the biggest anomaly comes in the succeeding verse (19), and this, too, has perplexed scholars (though not Ehrman, apparently). 2 Peter’s visionary experience of Christ “confirms for us the message of the prophets,” i.e., the biblical prophecies and guarantees about the coming of the Messiah and the kingdom. Why would the Gospel Transfiguration be styled this way? In fact, why wouldn’t the experience of Christ’s own person and life on earth, and especially his rising from the tomb, be appealed to as greater than scripture for inspiring Christian hopes?

The only way this passage makes sense is if this was indeed an epiphany of the Son, confirming his very existence and his power under God, pointing to the promise of his (first) arrival on earth at the Parousia. Scripture would hardly be styled as “a lamp shining in a murky place until the day breaks” if that very Son had already been with them in an earthly life and ministry, bringing his own daybreak, foretelling the kingdom, working miracles which heralded its coming, conquering death itself. (Compare this to Paul’s similar ‘murky’ way of speaking about the coming Parousia in Romans 8:22-3 and elsewhere, with no sense that Christ had already been on earth.)

The Johannine epistles

Ehrman moves on to the epistle 1 John, which he dates to the end of the first century, but allegedly following the Gospel of John. This common view has to be one of the most wrong-headed pieces of exegesis in traditional New Testament scholarship (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, Appendix 5), but one which is becoming more and more outdated, as more scholars opt for a reversal. For Ehrman, the so-called “Prologue” to 1 John shows that

this author too is quite emphatic that when Jesus appeared on earth he was a real human who could be felt, handled, heard, and seen, (p. 115)

and he proceeds to quote its opening verses:

What [the neuter pronoun “ho”] was from the beginning, what [ho] we have heard, what [ho] we have seen with our eyes, what [ho] we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the word of life. And the life was made manifest [the revelation verb “phaneroo”], and we saw and we bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and has been manifest [phaneroo, revealed] to us . . .

Ehrman and others have taken a neuter pronoun, repeated three times, and turned it into a reference to the human Jesus on earth, something for which there is no justification except wishful thinking. This Prologue (which can hardly be a ‘reduction’ of the famous Prologue to the Gospel of John, as scholars who favor the primacy of the Gospel are forced to maintain) describes a revelatory experience—to which the neuter pronouns refer in a decidedly poetic passage—at the sect’s beginning concerning the promise of eternal life. That life resided with the Father and was “revealed.”

There is nothing here about a Jesus on earth as the bringer of eternal life, let alone preaching it. Instead, the Son “dwells with the Father” (1:2) in the sense of being his intermediary emanation in heaven; belief in him guarantees that eternal life. Note also 5:9-11 which has God giving witness to (i.e., revealing) the Son, not Jesus on earth giving witness to himself. In fact, the writer declares that everything his fellow believers know and have received has been given to them by God, at their “initiation” (2:27).

No Gospel story in the epistles

There is nothing of the Gospel story in the Johannine epistles:

- no teaching Jesus (commandments come from God),

- no miracles (“signs source” or otherwise),

- not even the “cross,” though in some way the Son is said to have “laid down his life” (3:16) for humanity as a “propitiation” (2:1).

- Nor is there any reference to a resurrection.

- There are none of the Gospel teachings of John,

- no guiding Paraclete promised by Jesus in the Gospel—even though one of the divisive conflicts behind the epistle is the question of which group has the right revelatory ‘spirit’ from heaven.

- And as noted before, there is no sign of apostolic tradition.

These epistles continue to reflect a spiritual Son whose activities have taken place in the spiritual realm, known by revelation. The Gospel of John coming some time after is the translation of that cultic phase into an historical Jesus phase, though even here it is hard to be sure that John’s Jesus figure, so different from that of the Synoptics and so two-dimensional a mouthpiece, is still anything but a symbolic one.

That 1 John’s Jesus is portrayed as “a real human on earth” is utterly without support in the text. Once again, we have a set of non-Gospel documents in the early record which fit with all the others, giving us a picture which supports the mythicist view that a heavenly figure is in the process of evolving toward an historical one. A clear hint of this surfaces in 1 John 4:1-4, which probably reflects a later development within an evolving document which some scholarship, including my own, regards as containing more than one stratum. (See my website Supplementary Article No. 2: A Solution to the First Epistle of John, at <http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp02.htm>.)

The Jesus of the Book of Revelation

Ehrman claims that Revelation shows that Jesus “was one who ‘lived’ and who ‘died’ (1:18).” It “portrayed Jesus as ‘the lamb who was slain’ for salvation (5:6).” This, of course, is based on the unjustified assumption that any reference to ‘living’ and ‘dying’ can and must only relate to a person on earth in history; gods living and dying in a mythical setting or in the spiritual world is an idea that is simply dismissible, despite all evidence to the contrary in pagan and Jewish sectarian writings of the time, such as Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris and the Ascension of Isaiah. (See JNGNM, chapter 12.)

Besides, Ehrman’s translation of 1:18 is typically misleading. Literally, the verse says:

(I am) the Living One and I became dead, and behold I am (alive) for the ages.

“I am the Living One” (in the present tense) hardly refers to a life on earth. It is a statement declaring the reality of the Son (like “Jesus lives!” or “Osiris lives!”), applying to all time as affirming his existence; it is not a reference to a temporary incarnation in the past on earth, the way Ehrman would have it imply. At one point—never specified as on earth or at a moment in history—this Living One underwent a death, slain as the Lamb (a traditional Jewish motif related to the Passover myth) from which he then returned to his “Living” state.

As for 11:18’s “the city where our Lord was crucified,” even mainstream scholars regard this as not a literal reference to Jerusalem, but as having a symbolic meaning (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.273-4), an expression of the godless world and its forces of evil responsible for Christ’s sacrifice.

A “real Jesus” born in the heavens?

It’s a wonder Ehrman didn’t appeal to chapter 12, to the birth of the Messiah in the heavens by the “woman robed with the sun.” Perhaps even he didn’t feel he could get away with labelling this as a poetic or metaphorical reference to Jesus’ birth from Mary at Bethlehem, as conservative scholars have traditionally been wont to do. There isn’t the slightest nod in this scene toward a life on earth for this Messiah, who as a newborn is merely snatched up to heaven to await the final apocalypse.

That he can even be identified with the Lamb who was slain is debatable, but this hodge-podge of mythical and apocalyptic motifs presented by the author (along with a “son of man” taken directly from Daniel 7 with no association to a Jesus on earth) is something that would be unthinkable in the context of a known Gospel story, whether factual or not. Revelation, datable at the end of the first century, still moves entirely in a mythological world.

When one can simply ride roughshod over the texts and make them say anything one wants them to say, it is no wonder that Ehrman can come up with an inexhaustible supply of documents which provide “independent tradition[s] to the existence of a real Jesus.”

15

The Epistle to the Hebrews - I

Reading an historical Jesus into scripture

Those who have become familiar with my writings over the years will know that I have a soft spot for the epistle to the Hebrews. In many ways it is the most revealing of the New Testament documents.

- It gives us a Son who is entirely known from scripture.

- It presents a heavenly event that could only have been imagined out of a Platonic application of scripture: a sacrifice by the Son, performed in a spiritual sanctuary, in which he offers his own “blood” to God—a blood which can hardly be regarded as being human, hauled up from Calvary.

Indeed, anomalies like this have increasingly forced modern scholars to take refuge in interpreting Christ’s sacrifice in the heavenly sanctuary as intended by the author to be merely a metaphor for the earthly Calvary event—an interpretation for which there is no justification in the epistle. Most significantly, Hebrews contains two verses which make it clear that its Jesus had never been on earth, two smoking guns that would do any mythicist gunslinger proud.

Ehrman, true to form, simply seizes on any and all words and phrases in the epistle which he thinks could have an earthly or human application and declares them as such. He admits that this epistle, too, shows no knowledge of the Gospels—which he ought to have extended to no knowledge of the Gospel story, whether written or oral—but nevertheless “it contains numerous references to the life of the historical Jesus.”

Ehrman itemizes some twenty of them (pp. 116-117, DJE?), beginning with:

- Jesus appeared in ‘these last days’ (1:2).

- God spoke through him (that is, in his proclamation; 1:2).

God speaking through a Son

First of all, the opening verses do not say, in any fashion, that “Jesus appeared.” What has happened “in these last days” is that God, who formerly had spoken through the prophets, has now spoken to us “in a Son.” Ehrman maintains that this ‘speaking’ was through Jesus’ proclamation on earth. But we look in vain throughout the whole of Hebrews for a single word of proclamation by a Jesus on earth. Everything spoken by the Son is from scripture. What the writer is referring to is a new reading of scripture in which the voice of the Son is now being perceived, just as we have seen in epistles like 1 Clement.

The writer is presenting a new speaking by God through a Son, and he goes on to define that Son. If the latter were perceived as a teacher on earth, proclaiming on behalf of God, one would expect the writer’s definition to include some reference to an incarnation and teaching ministry. Not a hint. Instead we get only the cosmic Son familiar from other hymnic passages (such as Colossians 1:15-20):

. . . (a Son) whom he has made heir to the whole universe, and through whom he created all orders of existence: the Son who is the effulgence of God’s splendour and the stamp of God’s very being, and sustains the universe by his word of power. [Hebrews 1:2-3, NEB]

So far no sign of Ehrman’s “life of the historical Jesus.” Immediately thereafter, he lists:

- He ‘made a purification for sins’ (that is, he died a bloody death; 1:3).

Considering that no identification of the Son has been made with an earthly Jesus or his life, this comes up rather suddenly, and is followed immediately in the verse by his taking a seat at the right hand of God. (The throne room looks to be right next door to the heavenly sanctuary where the purification took place.) One gets no sense of a life and events that have covered earth and heaven.

Hebrews’ heavenly sacrifice

By his parenthetical “that is, he died a bloody death,” Ehrman shows himself to be woefully ignorant of the whole soteriology of this epistle. The “purification for sins” does not apply to any death event, but rather to Christ’s (post-death) sacrifice—the offering of his own blood in the heavenly sanctuary. That, for this writer, is the “sacrifice,” not the death, which remains obscurely in the background, unlocated. It is that act in the heavenly sanctuary which makes the “purification for sins.”

This sacrificial offering of his blood on the heavenly altar is in Platonic parallel with, and a permanent replacement for, the traditional sacrifices of the high priests on earth, who have offered the blood of animals to God—first at Sinai, then in the Temple throughout Jewish history—on the Day of Atonement. (All this is Hebrews 101, which almost every scholar of this epistle recognizes, even if they try to compromise it by inserting an historical Jesus into the background.)

So after defining the Son in exclusively heavenly (and very Logos-like) terms, the author has followed this with a reference to a heavenly event: Christ offering his blood in the heavenly sanctuary. Once again, we look in vain for any reference to “the life of the historical Jesus.”

Christ superior to the angels

Nor is that to be found in the remainder of chapter 1, which the author devotes to proving that the Son is superior to the angels. (Such superiority is necessary since, while the angels delivered the Old Covenant, the Son through a superior sacrifice has delivered the New Covenant which supplants it.) This is demonstrated by means of ‘proof-texts’ from scripture, standard stuff such as “Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee,” something God never said to any angel. (No mention of a voice from God out of heaven saying this very thing at Jesus’ baptism by the Jordan.) No claim of superiority is made by virtue of his life on earth, or of his resurrection from the tomb. No “life of the historical Jesus” here.

Incidentally, when in 2:5-9, Christ is said to have been “made a little lower [lit., lesser] than the angels,” applying Psalm 8:4-6 to him, the author is continuing his theme of comparing Christ to the angels. The verb means ‘to make inferior,’ not to place in a lower location. Thus it is not describing an incarnation to an earth which is lower than the angels’ realm. This temporary ‘inferiority’ results from his assumption of corruptibility to undergo death, which could take place in the demons’ realm below the moon (though this, too, is lower than the angels’ location).

A time of revelation

As he did in regard to the Prologue of 1 John, Ehrman offers the event of revelation at the formation of the sect, described at the beginning of chapter 2, as a reference to the historical Jesus’ own preaching. But the ‘hearing’ and ‘confirming’ are of the message of salvation, one provided by God. (The NEB gives us a particularly gratuitous translation which inserts Gospel Jesus implications that are not in the Greek.) In fact, the verse paraphrased by Ehrman (committing the same sin as the NEB),

- God bore witness to him [Jesus] and/or his followers through signs, wonders, various miracles, and gifts of the spirit (2:4)

raises the question of why it would be said that God supported Jesus’ message by miracles, rather than Jesus himself. After all, according to the Gospels, this was the very purpose of Jesus’ miracles. Rather, God is the one supplying the miracles here because it is God who is delivering the message at the time of the community’s formation. This is a thought reinforced later in 9:10, in which the writer locates the inauguration of the New Covenant in the present “time of reformation,” the time of understanding (i.e., by revelation based on scripture), not the historical time of Jesus’ sacrifice.

No words of Jesus on earth

This reading of the revelation event is confirmed by a later passage in the epistle, something which scholars have consistently overlooked or ignored. The account in chapter 2 has said: “. . . how shall we escape, if we ignore so great a salvation which was first spoken through the Lord?” If the latter refers to a preaching historical Jesus, why does 12:25 say: “. . . how much less will we (escape) if we turn away from the one who speaks from heaven?” This is in a context of quoting God from scripture. Shortly thereafter, 13:7 says: “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you.” And back in 5:12, the basics of the faith have been referred to as “the oracles of God.”

Throughout the epistle, any thought of the word of Jesus spoken on earth is utterly absent. Not even in 9:20 does the writer give us the Eucharistic words of Jesus at the Last Supper (see Mark 14:24) to illustrate the establishment of the New Covenant, despite the natural parallel—and this writer is fixated on parallels—this would have made with the similar words he quotes from Moses at the establishment of the Old. (They are similar, of course, because the Gospel scene has been determined by the Exodus passage.) Such a parallel with Moses would never have been passed up, regardless of the ineffectual excuses offered by various modern commentators.

Yet again, Ehrman’s “references to the life of the historical Jesus” have evaporated into the wind.

The same void occurs in another key passage (2:11-18). To illustrate the paradigmatic link between Jesus and his devotees on earth, the writer presents him as acknowledging that the latter are his “brothers.” (Which, of course, does not make them siblings—see Galatians 1:19.) But does he do this by appealing to any of several Gospel sayings which make such a point (as in Mark 3:35, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother”)? No. Once more, the voice of Jesus is from scripture, in three passages from Isaiah and the Psalms (e.g., “I will declare your name to my brothers” [Ps. 22:22]).

Another “likeness” motif

In this same passage, as part of that parallel counterpart relationship which makes Jesus’ redemptive acts a guarantee of salvation, the writer says:

Since the children have partaken of blood and flesh, so he in like manner [paraplesios] shared the same things . . .

No matter what else this epistle lacks in regard to a human Jesus, this verse is seized upon by historicists as absolute proof of earthly incarnation. But we’ve seen it all before. As with other expressions of the “likeness” motif, the word “paraplesios” means “similar to” not “identical with.” And for what purpose does Jesus share in this similarity? So that through his death he could destroy the devil (v.14), so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest before God (v.17). In other words, for his salvific role in the heavenly world—which required only the spiritual equivalent of blood and flesh. There is no mention of taking on literal human flesh and blood in order to a live an earthly life, to preach a ministry in Galilee, to perform miracles and heal the sick, to do anything else that could be associated with an historical man.

As for his being “tempted” (Ehrman refers to 2:18 and 4:15), nothing there suggests anything other than the temptation to refuse to obey God’s will and fail to fulfill his mission of suffering and death. Such ‘tempting’ was limited entirely to activities in the spiritual world.

“In the days of his flesh [en tais hemerais tes sarkos autou]”

There are two peculiarities about this phrase in 5:7, inevitably claimed to refer to Christ’s incarnation on earth.

First is the language itself. What bizarre motivation would have led such a wide range of writers across a whole faith movement to consistently describe Jesus’ life on earth in such awkward terms (and in combination with referring to his arrival on earth by using revelation verbs)? Why would they consistently have avoided more natural phrases, like “lived a life” or “when he was on earth” or “when he became a man among us”? (The NEB illustrates my point by translating the phrase: “In the days of his earthly life.”) Not a single epistle writer uses such natural language. Not ever.

The answer does not need spelling out.

The second ‘peculiarity’—though it is hardly peculiar within Hebrews or the rest of the epistles—is the description of what Jesus did “in the days of his flesh.” Once again, the context is the narrow one of Jesus’ obedience to God in fulfilling his redemptive role. Once again, such details are taken from scripture. “Offering up prayers and supplications” is drawn from Psalm 116:1 (LXX wording), while “with loud cries and tears” is an enlargement on Psalm 22:24 (LXX wording), “when I cried to him, he heard me.”

This ‘event’ is sometimes interpreted as a reference to the Gethsemane scene, but scholars have noted an important incompatibility. There, Jesus prayed that he might be spared the cup of suffering, a prayer that was not answered, whereas in Hebrews he is asking to be delivered from death, i.e., be resurrected from it. And so he was. The Gethsemane scene would have contradicted the writer’s point, which is to present a Son whose prayers are answered by the Father. Besides, Gethsemane is virtually certain to be a literary invention of Mark, and this writer shows no knowledge of written Gospels. With monotonous regularity, Hebrews continues to deny Ehrman any “life of the historical Jesus.”

A tribe and priesthood for a heavenly Son

- He was descended from the tribe of Judah [lit., has arisen out of Judah] (7:14).

This one is a complex point (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.228-231). It entails an analysis of the figure of Melchizedek who appears throughout the middle section of the epistle. While this figure is based on the king and high priest of Salem (probably Jerusalem) in Genesis 14:18-20, the writer also employs him as a heavenly personage akin to an angel (as does one of the Dead Sea Scrolls). In fact, he melds the two. First, historically speaking, Melchizedek was in a line leading to David and could thus be associated with the tribe of Judah. This provided Christ, in being linked with Melchizedek, with a High Priesthood of a different tribe than the Levites of the old priesthood of Aaron—a necessity, as he sees it, to accompany the new covenant and “change of law” (7:12), since the Levites were associated with the old law and covenant.

But because Melchizedek was also looked upon as a heavenly priest (see also 2 Enoch), this could give the heavenly Son a priesthood in heaven, and this the writer bases on Psalm 110:4: “You are a priest forever in the succession of Melchizedek.” (We can see here, as well as in Christ’s heavenly sacrifice, the extent to which a Christian exegete could ‘tease’ out of scripture a revelation of just about any scenario in the spiritual universe he desired.)

Immediately following 7:14, the writer notes:

What we have said is even more clear if another priest like Melchizedek arises, not according to a law about physical requirement, but to the power of an indestructible life . . .

Not only does the writer dismiss physical descent as the basis on which Christ belongs to Judah and enjoys a legitimate priesthood, he derives that legitimacy from scripture. For “the power of an indestructible life” is in no way a reference to his resurrection on earth, but to the above quoted Psalm 110:4, that Christ is “a priest forever,” a promise made by God.

Clearly the writer knows of no life on earth, let alone a descent from David (whom he never refers to), for if Jesus as the new High Priest needed to be of a different tribe, no arcane link to Melchizedek should have been required. An appeal could simply have been made to the historical tradition that Jesus of Nazareth was descended from David and was automatically of the tribe of Judah. Thus, the “it is clear” of 7:14 is a reference to the information provided by scripture, not by “the life of the historical Jesus.”

The sacrifice in heaven

Ehrman entirely skirts the heart of the epistle, chapters 8-9, which describes the sacrifice performed by Christ in the heavenly sanctuary, offering his blood to God on its altar for the propitiation of sins. Perhaps that was because the language conveying the parallel images of earthly sanctuary and heavenly sanctuary, earthly sacrifices by the high priests using the blood of animals and the heavenly sacrifice by Christ himself using his own blood, are so graphic and obvious, so Platonically spelled out, that it would be virtually impossible to interpret any of it as describing events of “the life of the historical Jesus.”

The best that scholars (such as Harold Attridge) can do is label it all a metaphor, despite the gap between metaphor and the thing supposedly being represented. This author is not subtle about his parallels, even when they don’t work (as in 13:11-14: see next chapter). In the entire picture of the sacrifice in heaven, no parallel or comparison is even remotely implied to a death on a cross.

Besides, the writer is so preoccupied with comparing Jesus’ sacrifice with the sacrifices of the high priests on earth, he has no room for any attention to be paid, by himself or his readers, to a presumed Calvary event. In fact, such an earthly event would have fatally compromised his elaborate Platonic parallels. (The “cross” is referred to in passing in 12:2, but not as part of the “sacrifice” which has made a purification for sin. Nor is that cross presented as located on earth.)

On the other hand, it is surprising that Ehrman neglected to bring up this passage (9:24/26) which is consistently given an earthly understanding by scholarship:

For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that is only a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself . . .

. . . but now, once, at the completion of the ages, he has been manifested/appeared [our old friend, the revelation verb phaneroo] to put away sin by his sacrifice.

The latter verse (26b) is invariably interpreted as a reference to his incarnation and earthly death on Calvary. But taking the thought in conjunction not only with verse 24, but the epistle’s entire presentation of the sacrifice, the “appearing” must refer to Christ’s entry into the heavenly sanctuary and the offering of his blood on the altar; this, as always, is what constitutes the “sacrifice” referred to at the end of the above quote. Otherwise, as I say in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.243), the verse would be forced into saying: “Christ appeared on earth in order to offer his blood in the heavenly sanctuary.”

Everything in this passage, as it has throughout the account of Christ’s sacrifice, refers to activities taking place in heaven. As for the time reference “at the completion of the ages,” the passage is sufficiently ambiguous in the Greek to allow that the ‘putting away sin’ is what has been accomplished, through the revelation of Christ and his role, at the completion of the ages, meaning in the writer’s own time. Alternatively, perhaps the writer envisions that the sacrifice in heaven has actually taken place in the present period.

Christ takes on a body in scripture

- 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).

Ehrman is being particularly atomistic here if he thinks to label such things the voice of the historical Jesus. These are parts of a quote from Psalm 40:6-8 (LXX), with an introductory line:

That is why, at his coming into the world, he says,

Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire,

But thou hast prepared a body for me.

Whole-offerings and sin-offerings thou didst not delight in.

Then I said: ‘Here I am: as it is written of me in the scroll,

I have come, O God, to do thy will.’ [10:5-7, NEB]

In no way is this presented as words of Jesus on earth. It is yet another example (and an excellent one) of the voice of the Son being heard in scripture. Note the present tense of the introductory line: “he says,” used here and elsewhere, including in other documents like 1 Clement, to present the words of Jesus in scripture. While scholars are generally divided on how to interpret this, Paul Ellingworth nicely regards the “he says” as “a timeless present referring to the permanent record of scripture” [NIGT Commentary: Hebrews, p.499-500]. I would call it a “mythical present,” reflecting the higher world of myth, onto which scripture provides a window.

The “at his coming into the world” must also entail a present sense, ruling out an historical reference to the incarnation. “World” is “kosmos” which can encompass the entire universe, including heavenly spheres. These are perceived words of Christ as he enters the world where he will undergo sacrifice (a lower level of the heavens), where a body has been prepared for him to do this, and where he will obey the will of God.

The source of the Christ event is scripture

Right here, we can see one scriptural source which has led this community to envision a sacrifice for the Son in the supernatural dimension, as revealed in the new reading of the sacred writings: the voice of the Son himself spelling out the sacrifice that will supplant the earthly ones that God no longer wants. It has even revealed that he took on a “body” in order to do so.

When in the following verses the writer discusses certain parts of this Psalm quote, there is no elucidation that such scriptural ‘prophecy’ was fulfilled on earth, on Calvary, or that the “body” was a human one. And further elucidation about the meaning of the sacrifice is in the form of more quotes from scripture. There is no sign of “the life of the historical Jesus” here either.

Next: Hebrews Part Two – Smoking Guns at the NT Corral

16

The Epistle to the Hebrews - II

1 — Telling us that Jesus was never on earth

In addition to a smoking gun, I have called Hebrews 8:4 a “time bomb.” The first half of the verse can be translated in either of two ways:

In a present sense: “If he were on earth [i.e., now], he would not be a priest…” [NIV]

In a past sense: “Now if he had been on earth [i.e., in the past], he would not even have been a priest…” [NEB]

Which “time” does the writer mean?

Some state the general grammatical rule as the following: In a contrafactual (a condition contrary to fact) situation, the same tense of the indicative is used in both parts of the statement; the imperfect tense denotes present time, while the aorist or pluperfect tense denotes past time. In the Greek of Hebrews 8:4, the imperfect tense [en] of “to be” is used in both parts.

Present or Past?

According to the rule, this would place the thought in the present time, such as the NIV translation above. But general rules generally enjoy exceptions, or are seen as not always so clear cut. Paul Ellingworth, appealing to A Greek Grammar of the New Testament by Blass and Debrunner, says (Hebrews, p.405):

The second difficulty concerns the meaning of the two occurrences of en. The imperfect in unreal [contrafactual] conditions is temporally ambiguous (BD §360 [3]), so that NEB ‘Now if he had been on earth, he would not even have been a priest’ (so Attridge) is grammatically possible. However, it goes against the context, in at least apparently excluding Christ’s present ministry, and it could also be misunderstood as meaning that Jesus had never ‘been on earth.’ Most versions accordingly render: ‘If he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all’ (REB, NJB; similarly RSV, TEV, NIV…).

Past or present? But since the statement is meant as a contrafactual one (the “if” clause states something that is or was not the case), the choice is critical. To preserve an historical Jesus in the mind of this writer, we must understand a present sense for 8:4. The problem is, a present understanding makes little if any sense, and a past understanding is required by the context. If it is the past, this “time” bomb blows up in the historicist face.

The time of the context

The verses preceding 8:4 address the subject of the sacrifices performed by the respective high priests, those on earth at Sinai and in the Temple, and the one performed by Jesus the new High Priest in the heavenly sanctuary. In 7:27, a contrast is made: the high priests on earth offer sacrifices daily, as well as special ones once a year on the Day of Atonement, for the sins of the people; but Jesus was required to perform his sacrifice only once for all time, obtaining an eternal redemption. This is a contrast, then, that has application only in the past, for Jesus no longer performs any sacrifice in the present, nor is there any question that he would or could do so.

The parallel between the two is developed further in 8:3:

Now, every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; hence (it is/was) necessary that this one [Jesus] too have (or have had) something to offer.

In the latter half, in regard to ‘being necessary’, the tense is again ambiguous (this time because a verb is lacking in the Greek), though again the NEB notes that it could mean either “must have something to offer” or “must have had something to offer.” But the latter is the only choice possible, for Jesus’ sacrifice has already happened; it need not and cannot happen again. So a present sense is inapplicable, even in theory.

Once Jesus and his sacrifice has been introduced here, the time frame must shift to the past, to a comparison between the high priests on earth and the High Priest in heaven in the past, because that is the only time when the comparison can be applicable. There is not even a theoretical comparison to be made for the present. The idea would be ludicrous, and the writer would have had no reason to offer it.

Each in their own sphere

What does this do to the succeeding verse 4?

If he were/had been on earth, he would not be/have been a priest,
there being ones [i.e., earthly priests] offering the gifts according to the Law . . .

The thought here is rather trivial, but the writer has expanded on verse 3 by stating that each type of high priest, in regard to their respective sacrifices, operated in his own territory, Christ in the heavenly sanctuary and the regular high priests in the sanctuary on earth. The two could not overlap.

Verse 5 goes on to emphatically state this Platonic separation of respective territories, with Christ having operated in heaven and the high priests on earth “in a sanctuary which is only a copy and shadow of the heavenly.” This emphasis not only rules out that the writer is constructing a metaphor for an earthly Calvary, but ought to rule out the very existence of such an earthly event. For a graphic historical crucifixion everyone remembered, one that had started the movement, would surely have compelled him to include it in his picture of the “sacrifice” Christ made (the way most commentators on Hebrews regularly try to introduce it).

But then his Platonic comparison would be foiled throughout. (It would have been foiled even if there had been an earthly crucifixion and the writer chose to ignore it.) For then the blood was not spiritual but human; the sacrifice, being on earth, did not take place in a sanctuary not made by man (8:2), it was not “perfect, spiritual and eternal” (9:14, NEB); the blood of his offering was not heavenly, and could not cleanse heavenly things (9:23). And if it was performed in the same territory as the sacrifices of the earthly priests, this would produce an outright incompatibility with the statement of 8:4.

A present sense makes no sense

That statement, to repeat, says that the sacrifice of Jesus the High Priest could not take place on earth—he could not perform his function as “priest” in regard to sacrifice—because there are already priests on earth performing the function of offering sacrificial gifts. (Such a restriction ought to have been dubious in the context of an historical Jesus.) But this makes no sense in a present understanding. Did not that very situation exist in the past when he was on earth? How could the author make such a denial for the present time when it was actually the case in the past—if a Calvary sacrifice had taken place?

On any basis or for whatever reason, Christ could not be a priest on earth in the present. It simply doesn’t need stating, whether for the reason given in verse 4 or any other. First of all, the “sacrifice” would have to include the Calvary crucifixion if Christ were filling his role as priest on earth. But this would lead us to a nonsensical idea. Christ could not be crucified on earth in the present because he has already been crucified in the past (whether on earth or in heaven) and this was “once for all,” ruling out any further crucifixion in the present or future.

The writer would simply have had no reason, and certainly not a rational one, for making the 8:4 statement with a present understanding. It would have been both irrelevant and a non-sequitur in the context of his argument; essentially, it would be gibberish. Consequently, it must be understood as applying to the past. And in that case, the contrafactual nature of “if he had been on earth” makes it a denial that he had been on earth.

One presumes that the sound and smoke from this ‘smoking gun’ has been so obscuring that it has prevented the entire history of New Testament scholarship from reading the verse in any logical fashion. (Ellingworth, despite a half-hearted suggestion, is, like everyone else, at a loss to explain it satisfactorily.) And from hearing its implications as a bell tolling for the historical Jesus.

(This has been a condensation of a 9-page argument in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.231-9)

2 — The Coming One

In 10:36-37, the readers are being urged to hold fast in the face of the persecution which has recently assailed them, and by way of encouragement the writer quotes Habakkuk 2:3 in the Septuagint version, prefaced by a phrase from Isaiah:

You need to persevere, so that when you have done the will of God you will receive what he has promised. For “in just a little while” [Isaiah 26:20 LXX] “The coming one [ho erchomenos] will come, and will not delay.”

Habakkuk was referring to God by “ho erchomenos,” but in later times this became a prophetic reference to the Messiah, and the phrase was adopted as a title to refer to him. If anything, this is a more immediately obvious passage than 8:4 to tell us that Christ had not been to earth. If “the Coming One” refers to Christ, the Savior figure of this community, and he is someone prophesied in scripture, then if he is still to come it follows that he has not come previously.

One advent or two?

The Jewish scriptures may traditionally have been seen as prophesying the coming of a messiah at the point of the world’s transformation, the apocalyptic End-time, but early Christians are supposed to have reinterpreted that to refer to Christ’s incarnation, and in that context we can assume that the writer of Hebrews would have shared in this reinterpretation.

Consequently, if an historical Jesus existed in the writer’s past, the Habakkuk prophecy should have been applied to that first advent. This is how his readers would have understood it. He could not have passed over that first coming in silence and directed the prophecy at the future Parousia without qualification or explanation. If “the Coming One” had already come, he would have had to specify ‘return’ or ‘again.’ (To read the word “erchomenos” as able to entail a thought of ‘return’ when so determined by the context would here be to beg the question, since, unlike the Gospels, no such context is supplied.)

Moreover, by ignoring the life of Christ on earth, he would have been tacitly dismissing any benefit or encouragement to be found in what Jesus had said or done in that life as a means of giving hope to his persecuted readers. As in 2 Peter noted earlier, the writer would be placing more importance on a bare prophecy in scripture than on the very life of Jesus and the promises and prophecies it contained. Clearly, as the writer has expressed things, the scriptural promise of Christ’s arrival on earth has not yet been fulfilled.

In 1900, witnessing the rise of German militarism under the Kaiser, the Englishman Mr. Smith makes a prediction that “we will one day be at war with Germany.”

In 1930, witnessing the rise of Hitler and Nazism, Mr. Jones says, “soon Mr. Smith’s prediction is going to come true and we will be at war with Germany.”

Mr. Brown objects, “But Mr. Smith’s prediction has already come true. We were at war with Germany only a few years ago.”

“Are you sure?” asks Mr. Jones. “I guess I must have missed it.”

And so have quite a few other writers of the New Testament, who in a similar way seem infected with memory loss.

Paul, at the end of 1 Corinthians entreats the Lord to “come,” Marana tha.

The writer of Revelation, in his closing words, echoes the same prophetic words from Habakkuk that were quoted in Hebrews: “He who testifies to these things says: ‘Yes, I am coming soon’.”

A Second Coming?

Shortly before 10:37, a line at the end of chapter 9 is claimed to be the one ‘clear’ reference to a second coming by Christ to be found in the epistles, and I’m surprised Ehrman did not appeal to it in his list of references to “the historical Jesus.” Of course, such clarity is exaggerated. Here are verses 9:27 and 28:

Inasmuch as it is destined for men to die once, and after that comes the judgment, so also Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, ek deuterou will appear to those awaiting him, not to bear sin but (to bring) salvation.

The “ek deuterou” is usually translated “a second time.” But the phrase, like its sister “to deuteron,” can also mean “second in sequence,” without any thought of repetition of the first item but simply that of “next” or “second in time.” (See Jude 5 and 1 Cor. 12:28.)

Moreover, such a meaning fits the context better. In verse 27, we have not a repetition but a sequence: men dying and afterwards the judgment. The “so also Christ” in verse 28 indicates that the writer is presenting a parallel to verse 27, one which specifies not a repetition of the ‘coming to bear the sins of many’ but a ‘next’ action after that one, namely to bring salvation at the Parousia. Since the “offered once to bear the sins of many” refers to the heavenly sacrifice, there need be no “second time” coming to earth.

Besides, the writer’s sacrifice was a singular action, entering the heavenly sanctuary and offering his blood. The Parousia will also be a single occasion of “appearing,” thus much more suited to be called a “second time”—should we wish after all to give the language any sense of repetition—to the “appearing” for his heavenly sacrifice than to a coming into an incarnated life on earth.

3 — Suffering Outside the Gate

Finally, to complete our survey of Hebrews, this late passage may not quite qualify as a smoking gun, though when properly understood it again points to a heavenly setting. Considering that it is regularly appealed to as a strong indicator of historicism (Ehrman includes it in his list of “references to the life of an historical Jesus”), revealing it to be anything but such a thing can only support the compelling case which the epistle to the Hebrews makes in presenting an entirely spiritual Son and a sacrifice exclusively in heaven. (This passage was dealt with only briefly in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.68-69. For a more detailed examination, which I will summarize here, see my website Supplementary Article No. 14, “The Cosmic Christ of the Epistle to the Hebrews,” Part Three.)

In 13:11-13, the author has the perfect opening to tell us, not only something about Jesus’ sufferings, but where on earth they took place (he supplies neither):

Those animals whose blood is brought as a sin offering by the high priest into the sanctuary, have their bodies burnt outside the camp, and therefore Jesus also suffered outside the gate, to consecrate the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp, bearing the stigma that he bore. [NEB]

Like Hebrews 8:4 earlier, this passage has begged for a more careful analysis which it has never received. The first thing to note is that the writer is once again attempting (“and therefore Jesus also…”) to make a parallel between Jesus’ actions and those of the high priests on earth. The latter are spoken of as taking place “outside the camp” because the author, as much as possible throughout the epistle, has been making his parallels with the biblical accounts in which the first tent of sacrifice was set up outside the Israelite camp in Sinai.

A bad comparison

But this comparison is problematic. It is not really a parallel at all. The burning of the animals’ bodies takes place after the sacrifice of their blood, and is a discarding of their bodies; nor does it cause the animal suffering. Jesus’ suffering and death—with no burning involved—took place before the sacrifice and was an essential prelude to it; and his body was hardly discarded since he was resurrected. This inappropriate comparison is a signal that the writer’s overriding object was to create as many parallels as he could with scripture, even if they didn’t work very well.

Contrary to claims that the passage is governed by history, this shows the opposite: the author’s process, and what he allots to Jesus, is governed by his focus on creating parallels with scripture.

But what of the change from verse 11 to verse 12, the change from “outside the camp” to “outside the gate”? Is that governed by history? Is it a reference to the gate of Jerusalem, as some claim?

Outside what gate?

Not necessarily. In any context, Jesus did not suffer outside any camp, and so a change needed to be made. If it were a reference to Jerusalem, why did the writer switch back to “outside the camp” in the next verse, urging his readers to join Jesus there? In fact, he is presenting his community as being ‘outside the pale,’ alienated from society and suffering persecution. Why not, then, have them join Jesus outside the gate of Jerusalem, a very apt symbolic image, where they could share in his own sufferings, his own “stigma”?

Furthermore, scholars have asked why, if Jesus suffered outside Jerusalem, did the author not make a comparison with Melchizedek, who in 7:1 is presented as king and priest coming out of Salem to greet Abraham and accept a tithe. Would that not have invited a parallel between the two priests (whom the author has paralleled in other ways), officiating outside the gate of Jerusalem?

I suggest that the “gate” is the “gate of heaven.” Jesus had to suffer outside that gate, since suffering and death could not take place within the pure spheres of heaven (where the heavenly sanctuary was located). And since the readers could hardly be enjoined to join Jesus outside the gate of heaven, the writer had to revert to the initial “outside the camp.” The latter may not have been the best solution, but it entailed the all-important image of being “outside” for both Jesus and the community: the community as “outside” the normal precincts of society. And thus it fitted his purposes.

Passing through the heavens

In this connection, I suggest we look at an earlier passage. In 4:14, as a concluding exhortation to hold fast to faith, the author adds this justification:

Since we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold to our confession.

If this is taken as a reference to Jesus’ ascension after his time on earth (as is usually the case), it would serve little or no purpose. The ascension, as conceived by orthodoxy, had no role in salvation, and why it would be a reason for holding fast to faith would be obscure. Besides, in detailing Jesus’ itinerary, why mention the spheres of heaven but not earth itself?

The answer is likely that the act of salvation directly involved this passing through the heavens. This would fit the concept of the descent and ascent of the Son, first descending to the lowest sphere to undergo death, then ascending to the heavenly sanctuary to offer his blood in a new atonement sacrifice to God.

I have made the point before that historicist scholars like Ehrman regularly indulge in and require a superficial reading (or rather, ‘reading into’) of the epistolary texts—with blinders attached—to make their case, whereas a less preconceived examination reveals a depth and dimension too readily overlooked, one pointing directly to mythicism. The epistle to the Hebrews is perhaps the best example of historicism’s very deficient methodology.

4 — A Pauline Postscript

A few words are needed about the ending of the epistle to the Hebrews. Uncertainty about the authenticity of the final verses (their number varies) has been common in scholarship, and particularly of 13:22-25. These constitute a ‘farewell greeting’ which, with its reference to Timothy, places us in the world of Paul. There are scholars, such as Harold Attridge, who maintain authenticity, but there are too many problems with this. In Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, Appendix 4, I discuss them at length, but here I will mention two. (That Appendix also discusses the question of dating, which almost certainly must be judged as pre-Jewish War, since this writer would not have passed up mentioning that the old sacrificial system had indeed been terminated.)

In ancient times, Hebrews came to be attributed to Paul, but this enjoys no support today, not least because the soteriology of the epistle is utterly unlike anything Paul has given us. But if the ‘postscript’ was written by the author of the epistle, this would mean that he moved in Pauline circles, leading us to expect his treatise to reflect at least some of Paul’s thought. On the other hand, the postscript is obviously designed to give the impression that the epistle is by Paul. This was probably done during the mid 2nd century when assorted epistles from around the empire were being collected and organized by a growing orthodox church, eventually to form part of the canon.

That impression also creates a clear contradiction with the epistle itself. The implied Paul of the postscript is ostensibly writing to a community that he is not a part of. His remarks about Timothy point up the fact that he is a wandering apostle, accompanied on his travels by a companion. Yet the epistle itself presents the writer as a member of the community he is addressing (as in 10:24-25). The same incompatibility is suggested in 13:17, which would make that verse a part of the addition as well.

If the Epistle to the Hebrews is truly an independent expression recognizable nowhere else, a unique interpretation of the Savior Christ on the first century scene, we are justified in postulating a Christianity which developed without a single founder or point of origin. It began in diversity, and only later coalesced around a Jesus on earth who seems, all things considered, to be a product of the imagination.

17

Jesus Traditions in the Acts of the Apostles

In the midst of addressing the testimony to an historical Jesus in epistles both canonical and outside the New Testament, Bart Ehrman devotes several pages to the “Jesus Tradition in Acts.” In introducing Acts he fails to enlighten his readers that there is great uncertainty within mainstream scholarship over the historical reliability of the content of this document. Furthermore, he accepts without question that the author of Luke was the author of Acts, and thus what was known to the former was known to the latter.

Is Acts reliable history?

Ehrman fails to question any aspect of this ‘history’ of the spread of the faith. He treats everything from Acts as though it were part of known Christian tradition, and as reliable as anything else. . . .

– No matter that the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is nowhere mentioned in the epistles (despite their focus on inspiration and revelation).

– No matter that the figure and martyrdom of Stephen is nowhere attested to outside Acts.

– No matter that in Acts the settling of the issue of requirements for gentile converts is presented in an Apostolic Council which the authentic Pauline letters seem to know nothing about.

– Nor is the dramatic shipwreck episode at the end of Acts mentioned by early writers who talk about Paul, inviting us to see it as sheer fiction, emulating a popular element in second century Hellenistic romances. (The so-called “we” passages, often alleged to be from a Lukan journal, have also been identified as a common literary feature in recounting travel by sea, such as is found in earlier parts of Acts surrounding such travels.)

When and why was Acts written?

There is also no discussion about the dating of this document. Ehrman places it in the most traditional position, some time in the 80s of the first century, shortly after the most traditional dating of the Gospel of Luke, c.80 CE. No mention is made that much critical scholarship has moved toward a date at least a couple of decades, sometimes more, into the second century (Townsend, Mack, O’Neill, Tyson, Pervo). And, of course, no mention that the first attestation to Acts comes around 175 in Irenaeus, with possibly an allusion to it a decade or so earlier in Justin. That such a ‘history’ could have lain unnoticed for so long if it had been written a century earlier (or more, for those who maintain it was written before Paul’s death), Ehrman does not consider worthy of note.

As long ago as 1942, John Knox (Marcion and the New Testament) presented a compelling case that Acts was not written until the 140s or 150s, an ecclesiastical product to counter Marcion’s appropriation of Paul in which he used the letters to demonstrate that Paul operated independently of the Jerusalem apostles and with a very different view of Jesus. Thus, Acts was written and designed to show the opposite, that Paul immediately upon his conversion subordinated himself to the pillars and subscribed to their teachings, lock, stock and circumcision. Which is why the speeches in Acts, clearly composed by the author, show the identical content between those of Peter and those of Paul. (Neither does Ehrman discuss the considerable discrepancies between Acts and the Pauline epistles.)

Independent witnesses to Judas’ death

Ehrman hardly covers himself in glory with his treatment of the figure of Judas in Acts. According to him,

the author of Acts has access to traditions that are not based on his Gospel account so that we have yet another independent witness. (DJE? p. 107)

Independent from whom? Was Luke the author of the Gospel “independent” of Luke the author of Acts? It seems that for Ehrman every saying or anecdote which can be found nowhere else, or fails to agree with some other version of that saying or anecdote, constitutes an “independent witness” to the historical Jesus.

Ehrman calls “an interesting tradition” the statement in Acts

. . . by the apostle Peter about the betrayer, Judas Iscariot, who is said to have purchased a field with the money he received for turning Jesus in to the authorities. Judas is said to have fallen headlong on the field and spilled his innards out. It is for that reason, Peter indicates, that the field came to be known as “Akeldama,” an Aramaic word meaning “Field of Blood” (1:16-19). (DJE? p. 107)

Ehrman points out that, in addition to Mark and John, not even the Luke of the Gospels mentions the death of Judas. How this helps the case for common authorship is uncertain, but he contrasts the Acts scenario with that of Matthew, who presents a different version of Judas’ death: by suicidal hanging. What is common between them is that both involve a “Field of Blood”: in Acts, the place of Judas’ blood-spilled death; in Matthew, a field purchased as a cemetery by the priests, to whom Judas has returned his 30 silver-piece “blood” money.

This amounts, for Ehrman, to two independent traditions about the death of Judas (and it serves to bring an historical Jesus into those two independent traditions). But this is to ignore two considerations.

One is that hardly a single critical scholar today thinks that Judas is anything but a fictional character created by Mark; even his name is a stereotype for the hated Jew who failed to accept the Christian Jesus. He surfaces nowhere outside the Gospels in early Christian literature. Ehrman fails to mention this to his readers.

Second, if Acts is increasingly seen as a second century product, it follows in the tradition of the Gospels, and once Mark’s Judas gained exposure, he was bound to attract some attention. That writers and preachers would portray him as undergoing a gruesome death as a consequence of his betrayal of Jesus would be a foregone conclusion. Papias is reported to have said (fragment 18) that Judas did not die from his hanging, but went about for a time swollen to a size bigger than a wagon. Is this, too, an independent tradition, another witness to Jesus? Or is it all simply creativity on the part of writers and preachers based on the Gospel story, much of it quite bizarre?

Ehrman himself suggests that the “field of blood” motif common to Matthew and Acts could have been based on a “potter’s field” (mentioned by Matthew) which had a red cast from the red clay used by potters, and that such a place became associated “with the death of Jesus’ betrayer.” He has simply provided more evidence that the human imagination works in wondrous ways, and that once the Gospel story was let loose in the world, it generated all sorts of associations and creative expansions.

More early Aramaic evidence

Not surprisingly, Ehrman uses the presence of the Aramaic word “Akeldama” in Acts to claim that this tradition must be early. This eliminates any ambiguity one might allow to Ehrman on the question of whether he is maintaining that Judas existed, and in essentially the role allotted to him in the Gospels. Here he clearly is, since this ‘early tradition’ must predate Mark. And it is an Aramaic word which could have had no other context in tradition than its Gospel one. (Where the author of Acts derived it is unknown; it is not included by Matthew, who refers to the place in Greek.)

Ehrman has dealt with these ‘Judas traditions’ on a level no higher than the most unabashed and undiscriminating apologist.

Putting Jesus’ words into Paul’s mouth

Ehrman follows with this statement:

Moreover, that Luke has access to sayings of the historical Jesus not recorded otherwise, even in his Gospel, is clear from a passage such as Acts 20:35, where the apostle Paul is recorded as saying, “I have shown you that it is necessary by hard work to help the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that he said ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive.’” (DJE? p. 108)

When the Gospels have been judged to be full of sayings accorded to Jesus which only the most conservative scholars regard as authentic, Ehrman can confidently state that the author of Acts is giving clear evidence of access to genuine sayings of the historical Jesus? This couldn’t possibly be a case of the author putting words in Paul’s mouth which put words in Jesus mouth? Especially since those words served the author’s purpose in his context. It couldn’t possibly be a case of drawing on a saying attributed to Jesus at some time after the Gospels were written?

If we had that saying—quite a memorable one—witnessed to anywhere else as the product of Jesus, Ehrman might have been on more solid ground (though still with no guarantees). As it is, we have no more logical reason to judge authenticity here than for, say, any of the “Sayings of the Lord” by Papias. A second century attribution tells us nothing. (Of course, Ehrman slots it into the first century, datable to shortly after Jesus’ death, on account of Paul allegedly being familiar with it and its single-word Aramaic content.)

The Speeches in Acts

Ehrman now turns his attention to the speeches made by Peter and Paul in Acts. He admits that these speeches, as was the practice in the ancient world, are the product of the author. But he also maintains that they incorporate ideas which go back to earliest views of the historical Jesus, long before the Gospels were written. Those ideas also predate Paul, and what he and others like him made of the human man. In other words, Acts allegedly preserves views of Jesus which did not originally involve the idea of pre-existence or any of the other cosmic features—such as being creator and sustainer of the universe—given to the human Jesus by thinkers like Paul.

We need to inject here that the epistles are totally lacking any indication that such cosmic features were in fact bestowed upon a human man known to those thinkers. That is simply assumed. It’s called importing the Gospels into the epistles. Scholars prefer to call it the “interpretation” of a human man, though that man is never mentioned, let alone designated as being so interpreted.

Did God adopt a human man?

As an example of the pre-Pauline type of view preserved in Acts, Ehrman refers to the doctrine of “adoptionism,” that Jesus was regarded as a man, born in a normal way, but adopted by God as his “son”—which did not mean a divine emanation of him—on the day of his baptism. Ehrman argues that when he was baptized by John,

. . . the heavens opened up, the Spirit of God descended upon him (meaning he didn’t have the Spirit before this), and the voice from heaven declared, ‘You are my son. Today I have begotten you.’ One should not underplay the significance of the word today in this quotation from Psalm 2. It was on the day of his baptism that Jesus became God’s son. (DJE? p. 111)

While Ehrman cautions us not to underplay the “today,” it is possible that he is overplaying it. After all, the word is in the Psalm and would hardly have been dropped, let alone changed. Moreover, Ehrman himself needs cautioning on another point. This “adoption” of a human man by God first appears in the record in the Gospel of Mark, not before. He is thus without warrant in simply telling his readers that the Markan presentation is based on traditions going back to views and ‘story-telling’ by earlier Christians that God had so pronounced at Jesus’ baptism and adopted him as a son. Not only do the Gospels regularly get read back into the epistles, Ehrman is now reading them back into the pre-epistle period, ensconcing them in an alleged oral tradition.

He can even detect such a period within the epistles themselves. This one can be located, he says, even further back than the idea of adoption at baptism. Since Paul, within a handful of years after Jesus’ death, was converted to a “church” which he says preaches the same thing he does (1 Cor. 15:11), a lot of evolution through successive phases must have been zipped through in a very short time!

Ehrman’s ‘earliest phase’ saw Jesus as becoming God’s son only at his resurrection. As he puts it:

It was then that God showered special favor on the man Jesus, exalting him to heaven, and calling him his son, the messiah, the Lord. (DJE? p. 111)

This is derived from a couple of passages in Paul regarded as pre-Pauline creeds or Christological hymns. The one Ehrman points to here is Romans 1:4,

. . . and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness at his resurrection from the dead.

But this does not specify that it was at this point that Christ became the son of God. What happened after the resurrection is that Christ was given power. This “creed” alludes only to verse 8 of Psalm 2:

Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.

Regardless of what verse 7 has said (the original “You are my son, today I have begotten you”), here the focus is on the “power” aspect of being the Son of God. If this creed was meant to reflect adoptionism, there should be no question that it would have worked verse 7 into its content.

In fact, we can support this by looking at the other passage on which Ehrman’s contention is based (though he does not present it here): the hymn of Philippians 2:6-11. Here, too, the consequence of the hymn’s figure undergoing death and being exalted to heaven is not being adopted as God’s son, but being given the name at which every knee in the universe will bow and every tongue confess him as Lord. In other words, the conferring of power, just as in Romans 1:4.

That “name,” by the way, is “Jesus”—something which verse 10 unequivocally states—indicating that this figure was not previously a Jesus known by that name who had begun his existence as a human man on earth. In fact, the very first line of the hymn declares this figure, now to be known as Jesus, to have shared in God’s very form and nature. This is pre-existence, God’s emanation, leaving no room for any subsequent transformation of a human being to an adopted “son of God.” (The longstanding desperate measure of interpreting the “name” here conferred on this divine entity as being the title “Lord” continues to be indulged in by scholarship. This issue will be discussed in a future chapter.)

In verses 7 and 8 of the hymn, we encounter the image of the Son taking on a state of inferiority, the nature of a servant, along with two further statements of a motif recurring throughout the epistles: that he assumed only a “likeness” to humans. Not only does this not speak of actual human incarnation, it repeats the idea three times, apparently to fill in needed lines in the hymn’s chiastic structure. Why, then, was that available space not taken up with some reference to a life on earth, to his original human activity as a prelude to the adoptionist understanding which Ehrman and others claim the hymn entails?

In any case, this ‘phase’ Ehrman has discovered in the epistles is unlike the one in the Gospels. In the latter, a human Jesus on earth is clearly in view. In the epistles it is anything but.

Flipping the sequence

We can clearly see what Ehrman is about. The epistolary record precedes the record surrounding the Gospels and Acts. In the epistles only the cosmic Christ is in view. Somehow, the features of the Gospels and Acts have to be relocated to a time preceding the epistles.

This is accomplished by declaring those features to go back, through an oral tradition process of which there is no sign in the preceding record, to a postulated earliest response to an historical Jesus. Signs of that response are to be located in the speeches and other elements of Acts. This requires an early dating for that document, as well as a dismissal of any possibility that it is a product of the second century having its own agenda based on the Gospels, Gospels which have only recently begun to show up in the wider record.

Ehrman quotes from three of the speeches in Acts. That they

. . . contain very ancient material, much earlier than the Gospels, is significant as well because these speeches are completely unambiguous that Jesus was a mortal who lived on earth and was crucified under Pontius Pilate at Jewish insistence. (DJE? p. 112)

Unambiguous, yes. But in what way is this “very ancient material, much earlier than the Gospels”? His quotes from the speeches Ehrman calls “primitive traditions,” but there is nothing in them that is not found in the Gospels. Not a single phrase in them can support Ehrman’s contention that they are “independent of the Gospels.”

In fact, there are a couple of items which can only be regarded as derived from the Gospels, such as the choosing of Barabbas over Jesus (which no critical scholar regards as a remotely possible event, let alone one instigated by Pilate). These speeches sound like nothing so much as a crude distillation of the basic Gospel story, point by point. Certainly there is nothing in style or content to suggest they represent a throw-back through oral transmission to circulating pre-Gospel traditions.

And in the “ancient material” we do have that is earlier than the Gospels (namely the epistles), there is not a hint of these alleged traditions to be found.

The enigma of Acts

Acts has always been something of an enigma to scholars. Despite Ehrman’s direct pipeline to early oral traditions, they have always lamented that specific sources for Acts cannot be identified. Everything sounds like the voice of “Luke.” No seams can be perceived on the edges of any pre-existing ingredients.

And yet, it is perhaps understandable that when scholarship has compared the content of Acts with the content of the earlier epistles, it has seemed to make sense that its material must in some way represent the Christian movement prior to Paul. It invites interpretation as a more “primitive” state of the movement, representing the first part of a logical sequence of development from man to God.

The problem is, this is not what the actual state of the record shows. Not without the kind of contortion and wishful invention Ehrman is imposing on it. Where is all this oral tradition prior to and contemporary with the epistles, which go right up to and beyond the end of the first century, with Paul himself going back with his cosmic Christ to less than a decade after Jesus’ reputed death? If the earliest movement—squeezed into a handful of years—did not recognize Jesus as part of God, what led Paul and countless others to elevate him almost immediately to such a status while jettisoning all interest in the human man and his life?

Indeed, the impossibility of conceiving such a process has led some modern scholars to reject the traditional interpretation of the epistles and declare that those early apostles and writers did not view Jesus as a part of God, thereby bringing them into some kind of feasible line with the assumed view of the Gospels and Acts. (As we shall see later, to do this requires an extreme reinterpretation of the texts.) Others ask: would the Gospels and Acts have adopted such a reduced conception of Jesus, coming down so far from the lofty cosmic Christ of Paul as the emanation of God and creator of the universe, if it did not in fact represent an earlier response?

Comparing Jewish-Christian sects

Before answering that question, I would point to a similar dilemma often perceived in regard to Jewish-Christian sects like the Ebionites. It is pointed out that such groups did not regard Jesus as a divine figure, but only a human prophet-messiah. But those views are witnessed only for the later second and third centuries; it is difficult to trace a sect like the Ebionites back into the first century, let alone to the Jerusalem group around Peter and James. In other words, the insistence on a merely human Jesus by Jewish-Christians comes only after his humanity on earth has been created by the Gospels. And in fact, fragments from Epiphanius suggest that the Ebionites originally did indeed possess a heavenly Son (“They say that he was not begotten of God the Father, but was created as one of the archangels”).

Such a response to the Gospels by Jewish-Christian sects reveals how impossible it would have been for Jews to make out of an historical man the cosmic divine figure we find in the epistles. But that they could believe in an emanation of God as a separate divinity in heaven (under the influence of Greek philosophy and their own personified Wisdom) is another matter, though even for that the Jewish authorities seem to have persecuted them.

Not a sequence but a parallel merging

The answer to the enigma requires us to step outside the traditional box. Neither the Pauline type of heavenly Christ nor the preaching tradition embodied in Q preceded the other, and did not represent a sequence in either direction. They were independent expressions on the first century scene.

The movement epitomized in Paul, whose faith had nothing to do with an historical man, went on its merry way into the early second century.

Meanwhile, the sect preaching the coming Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, covering Galilee and parts of Syria, evolved during that period into envisioning a founding individual who had first spoken its teachings, performed its miracles and engaged in its controversies with the establishment. (See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, chapters 22 to 27.) Such a view became embodied in the Q document, though it is difficult to be sure to what extent its Jesus figure was seen as historical or as only symbolic of the sect itself.

Mark, as part of this sect, created a narrative ‘biography’ of this imagined founder (it also served to impart lessons to the community through a representative figure, as allegories usually do), with a setting based on oral Q-type traditions (Mark did not possess the document itself) and using scriptural precedents to craft its structure and details. His innovative dimension (it was not part of the Q ethos) of a sacrificial death for the founder figure, now both Messiah and Son of Man, seems to point to some sort of syncretism with the cultic Christ movement, an allegorization of the spiritual Christ’s sacrifice in heaven. But the extent of this syncretism cannot be certain; little else of the Pauline type of thinking can be found in the Gospels. And the death and atonement idea in Mark could have had some derivation from strictly Jewish precedents.

But if, as seems likely, there was some syncretization between Paul’s Christ and the Galilean Jesus, Mark’s Gospel was nevertheless derived mainly from the latter, and it is this figure’s character that predominated. Thus,

- the reduced divinity in comparison with the heavenly Christ,

- adoptionism instead of pre-existence,

- the lack of development in the mystical directions characteristic of Paul,

- the greater simplicity of soteriological theory.

The Synoptics never much rise above their Galilean roots, and as Acts followed in their footsteps, it reflected that more primitive character.

So yes, the Gospels have early roots (most evident in Q) despite being later than the epistles, but those roots were entirely independent from the world of the epistles.

Whatever ‘primitive’ ideas reside in Acts, they simply go back to the creation of a crucified Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, and even further back, for its ministry dimension (with no death and resurrection attached), to the kingdom preaching community reflected in Q.

Paul and his Christ cult were not a part of this sequence until some time into the second century when that movement’s exposure to the Gospels (as in Ignatius) began to call up an association between the two, and Paul and Jerusalem became linked with Galilee. In response to the Gnostic use of Paul, it seems that the church writer who edited Luke some time after 140 was also the one who created the Acts of the Apostles to seal the unification of the two movements, anchoring Paul and his heavenly Christ to the Gospel story.

18

The Pauline Epistles - I

I would like to think that Bart Ehrman could at least have provided a few new insights, some new arguments to explain the silence in Paul on an historical Jesus (and by extension in all the other epistle writers). But once again he disappoints the hungry historicist. This is the same old stale table fare, and it provides no nourishment for those starved of healthy evidence that Paul knew of an historical Jesus.

By way of introduction to his ‘evidence,’ Ehrman appeals to the old bugaboo that mythicists are nothing more than interpolation experts, throwing out inconvenient passages right and left. Not only is this a vast exaggeration (certainly where I myself am concerned), he fails to grapple with mythicist arguments in favor of interpolation when they do occur.

Born of Woman?

The first Pauline passage Ehrman spotlights is one of those cases. Galatians 4:4 allegedly contained the phrase “born of woman, born under the Law.” While it is possible to interpret this in a mythicist context (see below and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, chapter 15, which discusses both the authenticity and inauthenticity options), I now believe interpolation to be the more likely choice. Ironically, Ehrman himself has given us some grounds to consider this. In his (far superior) book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, he points out that in the manuscript record this phrase was a favorite for doctoring by later scribes, who changed the operative participle to supposedly better reflect a fully human Jesus in opposition to Gnostics who were claiming that Christ was docetic.

Taken with the fact that Tertullian seems to indicate that the phrase was lacking in Marcion’s version of Galatians, we are justified in suggesting that the phrase could earlier have been inserted in its entirety for the same purpose. It can also be demonstrated that the idea in the phrase itself serves no practical purpose in the passage. And it has been asked why Paul would have needed to make the obvious statement that an historical Jesus had been “born of woman.”

“Ginomai” vs. “Gennao”

On the authenticity side of the coin, for the word translated as “born” in regard to Jesus (including in Romans 1:3) Paul uses a different verb (ginomai) than that used for every other reference to anyone being born in the New Testament, including by Paul himself only a few paragraphs later, and for Jesus’ birth in the Gospels (gennao and occasionally tikto). What distinction requiring a different verb (one generally meaning “come/become” or “arise”) would Paul have had in mind for Jesus? Possibly a mythical ‘birth’ such as we see in Revelation 12, where the Messiah is born in the heavens to a woman “clothed with the sun”?

It is certainly true that he never tells us the name of this “woman.” Was he simply giving voice to the ‘prophecy’ in Isaiah 7:14 about a young woman about to bear a son, just as he seems to have done in calling Jesus “of David’s seed” on the basis of predictions in the prophets (Romans 1:2-3)? Did he have to understand any of it on a rational basis as long as it was to be found in scripture?

Either way, there is much reason to doubt the reliability of this phrase in Galatians 4:4 as a reference to an historical Jesus, and it hardly deserves to be characterized as simple mythicist interpolation mania.

Ministering to the Jews

Ehrman makes the further point that “born under the Law” indicates that “Jesus’ mission was to Jews.” And this is borne out where? Would this be likely from an apostle whose focus audience is entirely the gentiles and their freedom from the Law; from an apostle who nowhere appeals to Jesus’ preaching to make any point about who his mission was aimed at, or how he might have felt about the requirements for gentiles? Nor does Paul deal with the contrast between Jesus’ supposed ministry to the Jews and his own ministry to the gentiles.

Ehrman has here added another indicator that the phrase in dispute would have had no relevance to Paul’s own mission, much less his argument in Galatians 4. It might even have complicated his message, requiring at least some clarification.

Next Ehrman calls on Romans 15:8 for support:

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.

Again Ehrman is being atomistic, ignoring the context. First of all, if we back up as far as 15:3, we find Paul saying:

For Christ did not please himself, but, as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached thee fell on me.” For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. [RSV]

Here Paul quotes scripture (Psalm 69:9), implying that these words are the voice of Jesus and a reference to himself, something we have encountered all through the epistles. Such words in scripture are given for our instruction, he says, and for our encouragement. No reference is made to any words of Jesus on earth for the purpose of instruction and encouragement. And no specification of an earthly ministry is present; Christ could become a “servant” entirely through spiritual contact.

In fact, the verb usually translated as “became” in 15:8 is actually in the perfect tense, “has become,” suggesting an ongoing condition through such contact, not something relegated to a past on earth. (A few manuscripts show the aorist tense of the verb, which could still refer to service through the spirit, beginning in the recent past, but translators find this variant convenient for rendering the verb in the past and understanding an earthly ministry.)

Was 15:8, quoted by Ehrman (above), offered by Paul in order to make, for its own sake, the statement that Christ ministered to the Jews? No, the thought serves a different purpose. Note that the focus right after this statement is upon how God through scripture has made promises to the gentiles (15:9-12). Paul’s interest here is on anything but Jews and Jesus’ earthly ministry to them, which would have had nothing to do with that focus on the gentiles.

Rather, Jesus’ service to the Jews shows that God kept his promises to the patriarchs, promises which related to the Jewish nation. Christ ‘serving’ the Jews was called upon simply to illustrate the truthfulness of God’s promises. (And to show where his interests really lie, Paul adds: “and at the same time to give the gentiles cause to glorify God for his mercy.”) Paul has brought up the fulfillment of promises to the Jews to lend credence to God’s other alleged promises: those to the gentiles, as embodied in the scriptural passages he quotes.

A missing equation

Ehrman sums up his claim about 15:8 with this statement:

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. (DJE? p. 119)

Here Ehrman has put his finger on precisely the opposite: on a missing equation throughout the entire body of epistles. Paul makes no such “point” anywhere. He never tells us that the man Jesus, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth later to be so identified in the Gospels, “was in fact the Jewish messiah.” Paul refers to his Jesus figure as “Messiah/Christ” but this does not constitute the missing equation, because the other half is lacking. No man on earth is ever identified with Paul’s Christ.

Paul has much to say about “faith” in his letters, faith in Jesus as the path to eternal life, faith that God has raised him from the dead, and so on, but never does he state the primary faith required before all of these, that the man Jesus of Nazareth—or however Paul might have identified him—had been the incarnation of the divine, redeeming Son he is preaching. Important or otherwise, Paul never makes this point about his Jesus. Ehrman is simply reading it into Paul.

Romans 1: Descended from David?

He also says that

Paul insisted that Jesus was a physical descendant of David. (DJE? p. 119)

Well, one (and only one) alleged reference to such a thing is hardly insistence. And in Romans 1:3, Paul clearly identifies the source for this statement: it is to be found in the gospel about God’s son in the prophets. In other words, whatever he understands by the phrase, he is basing it on a perceived announcement about the Son in scripture: the source of everything else he says about his Christ. Historical tradition is not in sight, here or anywhere else.

Ehrman and others regularly translate 1:3 as

descended from David according to the flesh.

But the Greek is not “descended from David.” It is “of David’s seed.”

In other contexts Paul presents figures as being of someone’s “seed” in a non-literal sense, as in Romans 9:6-8 where the gentiles are “seed of Abraham,” which hardly means physical descent. He says that Christ himself is “seed” of Abraham in Galatians 3:16 on the basis of a contorted reading of scripture, with no appeal to actual physical descent (which would have made his job much simpler). Thus, there is no good reason to pontifically deny the possibility of a mystical and scripture-based meaning to 1:3. (See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.167-172.)

As for “according to the flesh” (kata sarka), it should hardly have been necessary to say this in the context of describing a human man’s descent from another human man. On the other hand, if the phrase refers to Christ’s relationship to the realm of flesh and human beings (when he took on the “likeness” of a man to undergo sacrifice in the sphere of the demons), it complements verse 4’s “kata pneuma” detailing what happened, based on Psalm 2:8, when he was resurrected to God in the realm of pure spirit. The two verses also complement one another in that both are derived from scripture, for that is the way verse 2 has introduced them.

Brother(s) of the Lord: a preliminary look

Ehrman makes some preliminary remarks about the phrase “brother(s) of the Lord” while leaving a full discussion of it until a later chapter. But I note an amusing aspect of it here. He points to Paul’s reference to “brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5 in the context of discussing the right of an apostle to bring along a wife on his journeys. Ehrman contends that any claim that this phrase could be a reference to ‘spiritual brothers’ in the sense that “in Christ all men are brothers” (though this is not how I would style it) would make no sense, because Paul next enumerates “the apostles and Cephas,” and this separate enumeration would exclude the latter men from being among such “spiritual brothers.” Thus, “brothers of the Lord” must mean Jesus’ siblings.

What is amusing is that a couple of paragraphs later, when discussing the appearances of Jesus to various believers in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7, Ehrman contends that just because Paul separately enumerates “Cephas” (Peter) and then “the twelve,” this does not mean that Cephas was not included in the twelve. Diametrically opposite conclusions based on the identical occurrence of separate enumeration!

Be that as it may, in the earlier passage Cephas may belong to the “brothers of the Lord” but is being highlighted for emphasis. Or it may be, as I would suggest, that the phrase refers to an original core group within the Jerusalem sect, which has since expanded to include apostles responsible for outside missionary work, and they do not fall under the heading of “brothers of the Lord.” Speculative perhaps, but when feasible alternative interpretations are available, it is unwise to declare that only one understanding is possible.

Ehrman has also declared only one understanding of “the twelve” in 15:5. But since Paul does separately enumerate them from Cephas and later from “all the apostles,” it is feasible that the “twelve” refers not to the Gospel disciples of Jesus but to something else, perhaps an administrative body in the sect, such as is suggested in Acts 6:2. Certainly, Paul nowhere else refers to the ‘twelve apostles.’ Nor does any other epistle writer. And Ehrman is forced to wriggle his way out of a “twelve” which was really only eleven after the exit of Judas.

Galatians 1:19

In regard to Galatians 1:18-20 in which Paul is recounting his first visit to Jerusalem when he met two of the old guard, Ehrman makes an interesting claim that Paul is differentiating the two, Cephas and James, by describing the latter as the brother of Jesus. If the phrase were meant as a ‘spiritual brother,’ or simply one of the ‘brethren’ of the sect, this would be no differentiation, since Cephas, too, should have been such a brother.

But again, Ehrman is seeing only his own preferred understanding. We don’t know if Cephas fell within a core group that might have been known as “brothers/brethren of the Lord.” If he did not, perhaps there is a differentiation involved, in that Cephas was an “apostle” along with the other apostles whom Paul says he did not meet, but James was not, because he didn’t undertake outside missionary work and was in fact part of the original group of resident ‘brethren’. Or, Paul could simply be identifying James as one of the brethren—perhaps because he was less known to his readers than Cephas, and Paul felt he needed such a designation. There are any number of possibilities, including that the phrase began as a marginal gloss by a later scribe, to specify that this James was the sibling of Jesus to differentiate him from the Gospel apostle James.

“I am not lying!”

But there is one curiosity Ehrman touches on. After informing his readers of his visit to Jerusalem and seeing Cephas and James, we hear Paul declaring:

What I write is plain truth! Before God, I am not lying!

Now why would Paul have to be adamant about the fact that he met only Cephas and James? Would anyone be accusing him of lying about that? Is Ehrman trying to convey that Paul thinks his readers would not believe that James was the sibling of Jesus, and thus Paul is emphasizing what Ehrman and historicists wish to see in Galatians 1:19?

Such questions are probably moot. What Paul looks to be claiming as not being a lie is his statement several verses earlier: that he got the gospel he preached from no man (1:11-12). Everything after that seems designed to make this clear. Following his conversion, during which he received a personal revelation from God about the Son, he consulted no one, much less the apostles in Jerusalem, went off to Arabia and then back to Damascus. He admits that after three years he went up to Jerusalem, but all he did there was get to know Cephas, and bumped only into James—he’s one of the brethren of the Lord, you know—and thus . . . well, all this supports his contention that the gospel he preaches is his own, and not derived from any other men. He is not lying about this!

The Lord’s Supper

Ehrman declares that Paul knows that Jesus was a teacher because he quotes several of his sayings. He begins with the most contentious of such claims: Paul’s recounting of Jesus’ words at what he calls “The Lord’s Supper” in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. The passage is introduced this way:

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was handed over took bread, and after giving thanks he broke it and said . . .

What to do with that opening clause? Ehrman tries some sleight of hand:

When Paul says that he ‘received’ this tradition ‘from the Lord,’ he appears to mean that somehow — in a revelation? — the truthfulness of the account was confirmed to him by God, or Jesus, himself. (DJE? p. 122)

So Paul needed confirmation from God or Jesus that the circulating tradition about the Gospel Last Supper was indeed accurate? Talk about contorting a text! Ehrman is right about one thing: those opening words speak of a “revelation.” But a plain reading renders it a revelation from Jesus directly to Paul, revealing to him the words that were spoken on that occasion. There is no ‘confirmation’ of a pre-existing tradition in sight here.

If such a pronouncement were indeed well known through circulating tradition, what impression would Paul be conveying to say that he had been blessed with a confirmation of its accuracy? Talk about him wanting to horn in personally on everything that was known in the Christian world! Talk about being fixated on having everything go through himself! Compare Galatians 1:16: “God revealed his Son to me!” Hadn’t the Son on earth already revealed himself to thousands? Weren’t there other “ministers of the Christ” prowling the same missionary routes as Paul?

Ehrman points out,

But the terminology of ‘received’ and ‘delivered,’ as often noted by scholars, is the kind of language commonly used in Jewish circles to refer to traditions that are handed on from one teacher to the next. In this case, we have a tradition about Jesus’s Last Supper, which Paul obviously knows about. (DJE? p. 122)

But Paul isn’t saying that he knows of the tradition through such processes of transmission. In fact, Ehrman himself, because Paul’s words are so plain, has just floated the idea of “receiving from the Lord” as referring to a confirming revelation. Galatians 1:11-12 has used “received” in both senses of something passed-on from others and personal revelation. And 1 Corinthians 15:3 has Paul introducing his “received” gospel in a way which suggests he got it from scripture (kata tas graphas), which is the only way it would be compatible with his claim in the Galatians 1 passage.

Thus it is anything but supportable from the texts, let alone certain, that this Lord’s Supper scene has to be something known from tradition. And thus it could be an origin myth on the same level as the sacred meal myths of other savior gods, such as Mithras. Whether Paul invented it or someone before him, we don’t know.

Ehrman then makes this outrageous statement:

The scene that he describes is very close to the description of the event in the Gospel of Luke (with some key differences); it is less similar to Matthew and Mark. (DJE? p. 122)

And what are those key differences? For one, the fact that some manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke (something which this textual expert must know) contain almost none of what Paul quotes. All they have in common is “This is my body.” No idea of remembrance, no cup. In fact, there is a general consensus among scholars that the additional parts in Luke are secondary, added later to bring the very spare account in Luke into line with fuller accounts, cribbing from other Gospels and perhaps even from Paul.

Ehrman says that the “on the night he was betrayed” (or “arrested”) found in many translations may suggest Judas’ duplicity, but he admits this needs to be rejected, since the word is really “handed over” and is used of God ‘handing over’ Jesus in Romans 8:32.

But he does appeal to the “at night” which he claims points to a genuine historical event, not “some vague mythological reference.” Well, Ehrman has read very little mythology if he thinks none of it ever contains colorful non-historical elements such as a setting at night. Besides, if the Corinthian communal meal were observed after dark, the origin myth would likely be set similarly; and if Christ’s sacrifice is associated with the Passover sacrifice (1 Cor. 5:7), whose meal is celebrated after sunset, this too could lead Paul to styling the Eucharistic myth “at night.”

The Jews who killed the Lord Jesus

It is difficult to decide what to make of Ehrman’s handling of 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. This is probably the passage in all the epistles enjoying the most support among critical scholars for being judged an interpolation. It denigrates the Jews as killers of Christ, dismisses them as enemies of mankind, and rejoices at the utter destruction (the wrath of God) that has since been visited upon them.

The reasons why scholars suspect interpolation are not difficult to see. Such vitriolic sentiments toward the Jews are hardly characteristic of Paul’s attitudes toward them as expressed elsewhere in his letters, and nowhere else in the first century do Christian letter writers assign to them any responsibility for killing Christ. The final line about God’s retribution having overtaken them “to the utmost” is undoubtedly to be seen as a reference to the destruction of Jerusalem and the sufferings of the Jewish people.

In evaluating this passage, Ehrman is guilty of tactics less than honest. He makes it sound as though I and other mythicists have no other reason to consider interpolation except that authenticity would be “inconvenient” for our theory. And not only does he fail to discuss my arguments for interpolation, he fudges and largely conceals from his readers the fact that a great number of his own scholarly peers hold the same view, based on essentially the same arguments.

Manuscript evidence

We can note that Ehrman himself is drawn to defending the authenticity of the passage for quite dubious reasons—which might suggest that he is the one making judgments based on “convenience.” One reason he gives is the lack of any surviving manuscript without the passage. But as a textual expert he should know that scholars generally do not consider this to be a compelling reason to rule out interpolation. Internal text considerations are more important.

He should also know that a considerable amount of time, even a century, could have passed between interpolation and our earliest extant copy (well into the third century), and that scribes often tended to insert words or passages they were familiar with into places where they were found lacking (as well as to correct ‘erroneous’ or unhappy wording). No scribe familiar with this passage—and it would have been notorious enough to any later second century Christian copyist—would ever have reproduced a copy of 1 Thessalonians lacking it and deliberately neglected to insert it.

Ehrman also attempts to argue that the final verse of the passage, in which God’s wrath has come upon the Jews, is not a reference to a past event but to an ongoing process in the present, and he appeals to Romans 1:18-32 in which God’s wrath is spoken of as manifesting itself in the present day. But such a forced association of the two passages cannot override the clear use of an aorist tense in 1 Thessalonians 2:16, which speaks to an entirely past event.

Ehrman contorts not just Paul

Finally, Ehrman is required to fudge his own words. Having declared that Paul wrote the unequivocal “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus,” he then has recourse to phrasing things this way:

What this means, then, is that Paul believes that it was the Jews (or the Judeans) who were ultimately responsible for killing Jesus, a view shared by the writers of the Gospels as well. (DJE? p. 124)

So now the Jews are only “ultimately” responsible, as in the Gospels, where they only spur the Romans to kill him, not do the deed themselves. Too bad Paul wasn’t equally capable of such nuance in his own description of things. Ehrman says further:

Paul is quite emphatic throughout his writings that Jesus was crucified. He never mentions Pontius Pilate or the Romans, but he may have had no need to do so. His readers knew full well what he was talking about. Crucifixion was the form of punishment used by Romans and could be used on criminals sentenced by Roman authorities. (DJE? pp. 124-125)

One wonders why Paul “had no need” to mention Pontius Pilate or the Romans in 1 Corinthians 2:8, but preferred instead to identify the crucifiers of Christ as “the rulers of this age,” which ancient commentators, presumably familiar with current terminology, consistently took as referring to the demon spirits.

One also wonders what, in light of the unjust execution of an innocent Jesus by the ruler Pilate, they thought Paul was talking about when in Romans 13:3-4 he declared:

For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong….(The ruler) is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

19

The Pauline Epistles - II

The Teachings of Jesus in Paul

In this category, Bart Ehrman has precious little to work with. (He has actually referred to the two parts of Jesus’ Eucharistic pronouncement at the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 as “two sayings,” an attempt at padding I’ve never seen before!) Now his focus is on the two “words of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 7:10 and 9:14. Not only are these precious little, they are of paltry substance compared to the great ethical teachings of the Gospels, on which Paul and every other epistle writer has not a word to say.

The first is given by Ehrman as:

But to those who are married I give this charge—not I, but the Lord—a woman is not to be separated from her husband (but if she is separated, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and a man should not divorce his wife.

Ehrman refers to this as a paraphrase of

. . . a saying of Jesus [as in Mark 10:11-12] in urging believers to remain married; that this is a saying tradition going back to Jesus is shown by the fact that at this point Paul stresses that it is not he who is giving this instruction but that it was already given by the Lord himself. (DJE? p. 125)

Ehrman would do well on the staffs of New Testament publications like the NEB who regularly wear Gospel-colored glasses when doing their translations. His “it was already given by the Lord himself” nicely conveys a saying delivered by Jesus in the past, which Paul knows through oral tradition. But if those glasses are set aside, one gets a very different impression. And one that fits what the text actually says:

To the married, I enjoin—not I, but the Lord . . .

The words are saying that the Lord enjoins you now: ‘It is not I who enjoins you this way, but the Lord who enjoins you this way.’ In the present, not the past. How is the Lord doing this in the present? Through Paul as his spokesperson.

From earth or from heaven?

Ehrman makes only a cursory reference to a prominent thread in mainstream scholarship over the last several decades which sees Paul and other Christian apostles/prophets proclaiming words which they believe they have received directly from the Lord in heaven. Werner Kelber (The Oral and the Written Gospel, p.206) says:

These sayings could have come from Jesus, but they could just as well have been prophetically functioning sayings of the Risen Lord.

Rudolf Bultmann (History of the Synoptic Tradition, p.127) refers to certain prophetic sayings in the Gospels:

The Church drew no distinction between such utterances by Christian prophets and the sayings of Jesus in the tradition, for the reason that even the dominical sayings in the tradition were not the pronouncements of past authority, but sayings of the risen Lord, who is always a contemporary for the Church.

There was no distinction because no sayings of Jesus in the epistles are identified as sayings of an earthly Jesus, while the few coming from the mouths of prophets like Paul are consistently recognizable as “sayings of the risen Lord.” No one actually appeals to “past authority” in regard to Jesus’ sayings on earth, and even sayings supposedly “in the tradition” are regarded as contemporary words of an ever-present Christ.

That this scholarly opinion is justified here can be further seen from what Paul says following these “words of the Lord.” Immediately after, in verse 12, Paul gives a further ruling which “I say, not the Lord.” Again, the present tense: ‘I tell you, not the Lord tells you.’ Then in 7:25, Paul says:

Now concerning virgins [i.e., celibacy among men] I have no command of the Lord, but I give an opinion as one who by the mercy of the Lord is trustworthy.

“I have no command of the Lord” conveys a category of things Paul is accustomed to having for himself, through personal reception. There is no suggestion of any such “words of the Lord” being part of a wider community knowledge or inheritance from tradition.

Ehrman goes on to quote the second of the 1 Corinthian directives from Jesus (9:14):

For thus the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the Gospel should get their living from the gospel.

He points to a similar saying in Matthew and Luke, the latter being (10:7) “The worker is worthy of his wages.” Here the language has more ambiguity, but since it is similar to that of 7:10, it is natural to allow the conclusion about the first to be applicable to the second. And a few chapters later, Paul discusses prophetic practice and concludes (14:37):

If anyone claims to be inspired or a prophet, let him recognize that what I write has the Lord’s authority.

This is the milieu of Paul’s pronouncements: a context of revelation, ecstatic utterance, inspiration from God and authority from the Lord Jesus, personally bestowed. Here the “authority” he has received is through his role as an inspired prophet. No statement is ever made in any epistle that Jesus was a teacher or prophet on earth. And since it is clearly the case that Paul says he received the “words of the Lord” in 11:23f through direct revelation from the Lord himself, the principle should be seen to apply in those two directives he gives from the Lord in 7:10 and 9:14.

Ehrman goes as far as to acknowledge that the other passage in the category of “words of the Lord,” 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 about what will happen to believers when the Lord comes—not returns—from heaven (the principal source of today’s lunatic evangelical belief in the Rapture), could very well be something Paul thought he received directly from Jesus in heaven. So he has opened the door to allowing all the “words of the Lord” to be of the same nature.

And yet Ehrman’s naivete is still in view in his summary remark:

When Paul claims that the Lord said something, and we have a record of Jesus saying almost exactly that, it is surely most reasonable to conclude that Paul is referring to something that he believed Jesus actually said.

But what more natural source for many of the sayings put into Jesus’ mouth in the Gospels than communications which early Christian prophets like Paul imagined they had received from the spiritual Christ in heaven? We certainly know that many sayings were indeed put into his mouth, from sources extending from the Hebrew bible and words formerly attributed to God (such as 1 Thessalonians 4:9: “We are taught by God to love one another”), to general moral maxims such as we find in documents like the epistle of James or the “Two Ways” collections in the Didache and the epistle of Barnabas (which the latter refers to as the oracles of God).

Instead of Paul quoting Jesus, we may well have Jesus quoting Paul.

Why doesn’t Paul quote Jesus more extensively?

Ehrman calls this “a thorny issue.” Helmut Koester (Ancient Christian Gospels, p.68) says:

It is surprising that there is no appeal [in 1 Timothy] to the authority of Jesus,

and he makes a similar observation in regard to Paul’s arguments over his Corinthians rivals.

Graham Stanton (Gospel Truth, p.130-1) admits:

Paul’s failure to refer more frequently and at greater length to the actions and teaching of Jesus is baffling. . . In a number of places in his writings Paul fails to refer to a saying of Jesus at the very point where he might well have clinched his argument by doing so.

How does Ehrman deal with this “baffling” state of affairs? He fails to distinguish between two questions:

- Why didn’t Paul tell us more about the historical Jesus if he knew of him? And,

- Why does Paul not mention the historical Jesus, his words and deeds, at points when such reference would be invited, indeed almost compelled, to support his discussions and debates?

In answer to the first question, Ehrman draws on the old tired excuse that the epistles are ‘occasional’ writings, and Paul’s purpose in them was not to tell the story of Jesus’ life; rather, he is dealing with problems that have arisen in his congregations. True, but the objection to this answer lies in the second question above. Those occasional writings do indeed deal with problems: ones to which Jesus’ words and deeds would have been directly pertinent, indeed a veritable solution.

And we should also keep in mind that such words and deeds need not have been authentic. We see from the Gospels that all sorts of words and actions were subsequently attributed to Jesus which critical scholars today do not regard as authentic. Thus, given those discussions and debates which were creating discord in various Christian communities, the natural tendency would have been to create sayings and deeds of Jesus which would resolve them—just as the evangelists attempted to do.

Yet we see nothing of the sort: on the issue of circumcision and other requirements for gentiles, or even of preaching to them; on the cleanness of foods, on the continued relevance of the Law, and so on. We see no drawing on the example of Jesus’ life to resolve disputes. If Paul urges that people either marry or do not marry, why is no mention made of whether Jesus was married or not? On the issue of circumcision, should no one have brought up the fact that Jesus himself was circumcised? If all things to do with the “flesh” are evil, or at least wholly negative in Paul’s view, why was no qualification made for the case of Jesus’ human flesh and the example he provided? And so on.

Ehrman gives himself as an example of Paul’s silence. He has written, he says, many letters over the years dealing with religious issues and could probably collect seven of those and find not a single reference to Jesus’ words or deeds. Well, this selected “seven” indicates that in other letters he did refer to such things. We have no such ‘control’ group giving us knowledge of what Paul knew. And one can hardly pretend that the atmosphere surrounding the quoting of Jesus today, even in scholarly circles, is the same as it was on the missionary trail that Paul was travelling, with the life of the recent historical man he and many others were supposedly preaching still alive and vivid.

A threadbare collection

As his second indicator that we need not worry about Paul’s relative silence on the life of Jesus, Ehrman simply enumerates the elements of Jesus’ life which he does tell us about. Of course, this is the same hoary old list of reputed ‘life of Jesus’ mentions in Paul that mythicism has long neutralized: descendant of David, brother of James, the twelve, that he said those “words of the Lord,” that the Jews instigated to have him killed (the 1 Thessalonians interpolation), that he died by crucifixion.

Ehrman’s list, of course, does nothing to explain the bafflement over the mountain of remaining silences. It does nothing to explain a third question that should be added to the two listed earlier:

- Why do Paul and other epistle writers not only not mention words and deeds of an historical Jesus, but on occasion even present a picture which amounts to an exclusion of an historical Jesus?

Excluding an historical Jesus

1. Why does 2 Corinthians 5:5 say: God has shaped us for life immortal, and as a guarantee of this he has sent the Spirit. How could Paul not have said that to give us life everlasting, God had sent Jesus?

2. Why does Romans 1:2 say that God had “pre-announced” [NEB] (proepeggeilato) Paul’s gospel about Jesus in scripture, and not that those prophets had foretold the life of Jesus himself?

3. Why is it Paul who has received from God “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18-19), why he whom God has qualified “to dispense the new covenant” (2 Cor. 3:5)? Why is it the splendor of his own ministry that is offered as the parallel to Moses’ splendor in administering the old covenant (2 Cor. 3:7-11), with no mention of Jesus’ own life and ministry anywhere in sight, splendid or otherwise?

4. Why throughout the epistles is it said that God’s secret for salvation, the mystery of Christ, lying unknown through the long ages of history, has now been revealed for the first time through Paul’s gospel, the source of which lies in scripture (as in Romans 16:25-27)?

5. Where can an historical Jesus be fitted into the statement in Titus 1:2-3: It is eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, and now in his own good time he has openly declared himself in the proclamation which was entrusted to me by ordinance of God our Savior. God makes promises long ages ago . . . [then] . . . God now declares himself, for the first time, in the gospel he has entrusted to Paul. Isn’t there something—or someone—missing here?

Similar patterns of exclusion are evident in Romans 3:21-26 and in 2 Timothy 1:9-10.

If all of these passages, and more, do not amount to an exclusion of an historical Jesus, I don’t know what does. If there is one picture the epistles get across, from Paul to Hebrews, it is that what has happened in the present time is the revelation through scripture of the Son and his redeeming actions—which every indication places in the spiritual world—to apostles like Paul. It is never the actions of Jesus himself. This picture is laid out in great detail in both The Jesus Puzzle and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. Ehrman does nothing to address it.

Paul’s chronology

Ehrman revisits the question of where Paul got his “Jesus traditions” and points to a chronology of his conversion which is calculable from his letters. When scholars “crunch” the numbers, he says, they arrive at a date of around 32 or 33, “two or three years after the death of Jesus.” Three years after that, judging by Galatians 1, he visited Cephas and James in Jerusalem for fifteen days. Ehrman suggests that this is the ideal time to surmise when Paul learned the details about Jesus’ life from those who had been his followers.

Apart from the fact that Paul never says that he learned anything about Jesus from the pillars in Jerusalem, whether on this occasion or any other, such a view would contradict what he has said only a few verses earlier, in 1:11-12, that he got his gospel about Jesus from no man, but from revelation. In fact, as I pointed out in the last chapter, Paul seems to be defending that claim by presenting his visit to Cephas and James as something so short and involving only two people—and only after three years had passed—as a way of demonstrating that he couldn’t possibly have learned his gospel through that avenue, and thus he “is not lying!”

Moreover, had these men been the source of his knowledge about Jesus’ life and teachings, could he have dissed those pillars scarcely half a dozen sentences later as undeserving of their “high reputation” (/sarcasm), whose distinctiveness is not recognized by God? And when he goes on to condemn James for insisting that Jews take meals apart from gentiles, saying it was not compatible “with the truth of the gospel,” where is the appeal to what Jesus’ might have said or done in regard to this crucial issue?

Could Paul have learned anything about Jesus traditions when in Jerusalem if he did not learn of Jesus’ opinion and example concerning the issue of Jewish-gentile relations? (Paul very much shows an interest in the reconciling of the two in a mystical way through Jesus’ death, so learning of Jesus’ views on the matter during his life should have been near the top of his priorities.) Could any debate over “the truth of the gospel” be conducted without concern for Jesus traditions?

Ehrman calls it “as clear as day” that Jesus was known to have lived, with traditions about him arising shortly after his death. This, he says, is ‘witnessed’ by the traditions Paul learned from the pillars (which Paul never mentions and shows no actual sign of receiving) and corroborated by what is found in the Gospels, “whose oral sources almost certainly also go all the way back into the 30s to Roman Palestine” (a corroboration which Ehrman, as we have seen, has simply concocted). Ehrman calls this “a powerful confluence of evidence.”

Surveying the arguments and counter-arguments

Ehrman concludes his chapter on the Pauline epistles by focusing on G. A. Wells’ basic argument that the silence on so many things in Paul demonstrates he knew of no recent historical Jesus. The elements of that argument have been mentioned in my own discussions above. By looking at Ehrman’s counter to Wells’ points, such details will be evident without having to quote Wells himself.

After appealing yet again to the fact that no one in the wide range of scholars Ehrman knows, and knows of, thinks Paul was not aware of an historical Jesus (the old appeal to authority), Ehrman raises once more the specter of ‘interpolation fixation’ by mythicists. I personally believe too much emphasis is placed on interpolation in some mythicist circles (which doesn’t make it necessarily wrong), but I am not one to rely on it save for less than a handful of passages where the evidence is clearly supportive, and even where occasionally mainstream scholars might agree. (Ehrman once again accuses us of having “a vested interest” in interpolation, which is a handy way of dismissing any need to even address the possibility in certain cases.)

Why no Gospel interpolations into Paul?

Ehrman does make a valid point in connection with this: if scribes did interpolate into Paul, why did they not insert more passages which clearly referred to the Gospel figure and events: the virgin birth, the miracles, more teachings, the trial, the Calvary scene? In my view, this point admittedly discourages the very idea of wholesale interpolation, especially by post-Gospel orthodoxy. But it does not affect my own very limited list:

- 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 is generally recognized by liberal scholarship for good reasons, so no problem there.

- 1 Timothy’s reference to Pilate does constitute the possible insertion of a Gospel event, early in the second century.

- My preference for seeing Galatians 4:4’s “born of woman, born under the Law” as an interpolation would make sense as occurring at an early time when historicism and docetism were both in a nascent stage and in competition, before the Gospel story gained wide dissemination (as in Ignatius).

- As for “brother of the Lord” (see next chapter), there is no need to claim interpolation here, but its genesis as a marginal gloss by a scribe intent on clarification would make sense and should not be ruled out.

But just as some Christian probably in the latter half of the 2nd century got his hands on the original Ignatian letters and filled them with blatant Gospel references, if the orthodox Church in the same period undertook to insert dozens of interpolations into Paul, as is sometimes claimed, it is highly unlikely that we would not see a good number of clearly Gospel-inspired additions and clarifications. The fact that no such additions were undertaken at that later time suggests that already the Pauline literature was established and respected (as well as misinterpreted). This would argue against the entire invention of the corpus in the second century, a view I do not subscribe to.

Answering Wells

G. A. Wells is of the opinion that the teachings of Jesus, his miracles, the places of Jesus’ life and death, details of the trial and crucifixion (including its where and when), should have been very important to Paul. Ehrman tries to deal with these contentions in various ways. As we’ve seen, it is valid to ask why Paul would not appeal to Jesus’ teachings to settle issues and bolster his own arguments.

- In Romans 8:26, he says that we do not know how to pray. Was he not aware that Jesus had taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer?

- When he praised those who did not marry, would it not have been useful to appeal to Jesus’ praise of those who renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom (Mt. 19:12), let alone to a biographical fact that Jesus had not himself married?

- When Paul urged believers to “bless those who persecute you,” surely this was an important teaching by Jesus which Paul ought to have known and mentioned to strengthen his case.

Ehrman’s counter is to suggest that where Paul does not appeal to a pertinent saying of Jesus it may be because he didn’t know of it. Such an excuse might apply in some cases, particularly if there were instances of a clear appeal elsewhere to sayings of the earthly Jesus, but it is hardly acceptable as a blanket explanation for a total silence. And especially across the entire range of the epistolary literature, not just in Paul.

Ehrman points out that Mark does not include either of the above sayings about the Lord’s Prayer or blessing one’s persecutors. But the difference is that we see no occasion in his Gospel for bringing them up, whereas this is not the case in Paul. Nor did Mark have the Q document from which Matthew and Luke derived these sayings. (One qualification here is that their presence in Q does not necessarily mean that they went back to a Jesus, which could be one reason why Paul did not know of such sayings. In fact, the Didache refers to the Prayer [8:2] as part of the gospel of the Lord, meaning God. See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, Appendix 8.)

Where are the miracles?

Wells’ objects that Paul should have mentioned Jesus’ miracles, since they were supposed to be justification for believing that the messianic age was imminent. Jesus’ miracles could have been used to support Paul’s own gospel message. Ehrman counters that Paul was writing to the already converted; they did not need reminding of such support.

But Ehrman overlooks a few things:

Paul in Romans speaks of preaching his “gospel about Christ” to the gentiles “to bring them into his (Christ’s) allegiance” (15:19). To accomplish this, the subject of Christ’s own miracles would surely been far more persuasive than the unspecified “signs and wonders” Paul mentions that he had performed to win over those gentiles—and which were hardly on the scale of raising the dead or making the lame walk and the blind see.

Hebrews, in recounting the revelation experience at the genesis of the sect (2:1-4), refers to God’s “signs and miracles” in support of that revelation, not to any miracles of Jesus which supposedly accompanied his preaching, the latter being scholarship’s traditional interpretation of what is being recounted in 2:1-4.

The epistle of James urges its readers to pray to God: “The prayers offered in faith will save the sick man, the Lord will raise him from his bed, and any sins he may have committed will be forgiven” (5:14-15). All things which Jesus is reputed to have done but which the author of James cannot bring himself even to allude to.

Even 2 Peter, in trying to convince his readers that Christ will really appear at the Parousia, cannot appeal to Jesus’ miracles, let alone his resurrection, but only, as noted earlier, to a legendary vision of the Son given to Peter on a holy mountain.

Ehrman also overlooks 1 Corinthians 1:22. Paul scoffs at the “Jews (who) call for miracles,” without playing the trump card that Jesus gave them miracles in spades to prove God’s wisdom. (Q shows that the Galilean tradition very early on was attributing miracles to its Jesus.)

Ehrman is reduced to objecting that mythicists are presumptuous enough to think that we know what Paul ought to have said, that we can get inside his mind. Well, most of our objections are based on a reasonable evaluation of human nature, which we have no reason to think has changed dramatically in two millennia.

And from even lower in the barrel, he brings up the observation that there are very many things which Paul does not tell us on other subjects, such as his own background and experiences. But Paul is not preaching himself as a god incarnated to earth, dying for mankind and rising from his tomb, part of a new movement being carried across the empire with Paul as its object of worship. And no one would be expecting—or demanding—to hear about Paul’s biography, whereas that would hardly be the case about Jesus.

Besides, Paul in fact does tell us a lot more about his own character and experiences than ever he does about the man he is supposedly preaching.

20

“Key Data” in Proving Jesus’ Historicity – I

“Brother of the Lord”

In his 5th chapter (approximately halfway through the book), Ehrman says he will “wrap up” his discussion of the historical evidence for Jesus by putting forward two points, two pieces of “Key Data” which confer a “high degree of certainty that (Jesus) was an historical figure.”

The first of these is a favorite of apologists everywhere, because it is so straightforward, so plain. No complex study of a text is required, no knowledge about ancient philosophy or obscure languages is necessary. We merely need to bring an obvious meaning to a five-word phrase, a phrase that is simple even in the original Greek where it is only four words, prefaced by a man’s name: “Iakobon ton adelphon tou kuriou”:

“James, the brother of the Lord”

What could be simpler? We ‘know’ from the Gospels that Jesus had a brother named James. Here Paul is declaring that when he visited Jerusalem three years after his conversion to get to know Cephas, he also saw “James, the brother of the Lord” (Galatians 1:19). How could Jesus have had a brother if he had not lived on earth? Can mythicists not read?

Fortunately, we can. We can read a host of other appearances of the word “brother” (adelphos) in the epistles. Here are a few:

Rom. 16:23 – Greetings also from . . . our brother Quartus.

1 Cor. 1:1 – Paul . . . and our brother Sosthenes

1 Cor. 5:11 – you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is immoral or greedy . . .

1 Cor. 7:12 – If any brother has an unbelieving wife . . .

1 Cor. 8:13 – If food causes my brother to stumble . . . I will not cause my brother to fall.

1 Cor. 16:11-12 – I am expecting (Timothy) along with the brothers. As for brother Apollos, I strongly urged him to go to you with the brothers.

2 Cor. 2:13 – . . . because I did not find my brother Titus there.

2 Cor. 8:18 – We are sending with him the brother who is praised by all the churches . . .

Phil. 2:25 – . . . to send back to you Epaphroditus, my brother and fellow-worker . . .

Col. 4:7 – (Tychicus) is a dear brother and faithful servant in the Lord.

1 Thes. 3:2 – Timothy, our brother and fellow-worker of God in the gospel of Christ.

1 Tim. 3:15 – Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.

1 Pet. 5:12 – Silvanus, the faithful brother . . .

2 Pet. 3:15 – Paul, our friend and brother . . .

Rev. 1:9 – I, John, your brother, who share with you . . .

Brethren of a sect

All of these refer unmistakeably to men who are members of the sect (and there are a handful of occurrences of the word “sister” referring unmistakeably to a female member of the sect). The above amount to 14 out of a total of over 40 in the epistles.

In addition, there are about a dozen which, while ambiguously worded, are also virtually certain to be meant as members of the sect, such as:

1 Cor. 6:6 – Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers [brothers], but one brother goes to law against another, and this in front of unbelievers?

James 2:15 – If a brother or a sister is in rags with not enough food for the day . . .

James 4:11 – He who disparages a brother or passes judgment on his brother disparages the law and judges the law.

1 Jn 2:9 – Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness.

1 Jn 3:10-11 – No one who does not do right is God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love his brother. (The latter means a member of sect, since:) For the message you have heard from the beginning is this: that we should love one another.

And that’s just in the singular. References to “brothers” in the plural also abound in the dozens, with a clear meaning of “brethren” of the sect, such as:

1 Cor. 15:6 – Then he was seen by over five hundred brothers at once.

Heb. 2:11 – . . . for which reason, he [Jesus] is not ashamed to call (the ones made holy, i.e., believers) his brothers.

1 Pet. 5:9 – You know that our brotherhood throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.

And at this point we need to note the reference in 1 Corinthians 9:5 to “the brothers of the Lord” which is regularly paired with Galatians 1:19 as allegedly referring to siblings of Jesus.

Plain meanings

In the singular, I have been able to locate in the epistles and Revelation only two usages of the word “brother” having the clear meaning of “sibling”: a reference in 1 John to Cain as the murderer of his brother Abel, and the ascription heading the epistle of Jude: “Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James.” In the plural there is technically one, in 1 Timothy 5:2. As far as the world of the epistle writers is concerned, a “plain meaning” of “brother” equals the sense of “brethren” in a religious group; it is at least as natural as the sense of sibling. We in the 21st century rarely employ that sense, so to impose our idea of ‘plain meaning’ on theirs is an unjustified anachronism.

But the apologist objects: “Your examples don’t refer to any of these ‘brothers’ in relation to Jesus!”

1. Who is “the Lord”?

Well, first of all, neither does Galatians 1:19 or 1 Corinthians 9:5. James and the others are not stated as the brothers of Jesus, but brothers of the Lord. Since “Lord” is applied to both Father and Son in the epistles, can we even be sure which Lord is meant here? Consider 1 Thessalonians 3:2 noted above:

Timothy, our brother and fellow-worker of God in the gospel of [i.e., about] Christ.

Here Paul refers to Timothy as a worker for God, a theocentric focus very common in the epistles, and the work they do is to spread the gospel about Christ, who is regularly said to be revealed (using various revelation words) in scripture. We cannot assign the “gospel” to Christ himself, because Paul calls his gospel the “gospel of God” found in scripture (as in Rom. 1:2, 16:25), as well as assigning just about everything else to God. It is God who does the calling, the disclosing, who sends the Spirit. It is “God’s act of redemption” (Rom. 3:24); it is God “who began the good work” (Phil. 1:6). “It is all God’s doing,” says Paul (2 Cor. 1:21). So if this passage seems to suggest a brother in the sect as being linked with God, doing his work on behalf of God, not Jesus, this may give us an indicator of who “the Lord” is in Galatians 1:19 and 1 Corinthians 9:5.

2. The battle of the prepositions

Second, there are in fact—in answer to the apologist’s objection—a number of further cases in which the word “brother” is linked with “the Lord” (never Jesus). While they, too, are ambiguously worded, if they were to be interpreted in terms of Christ we would nevertheless have a clear reference to a sect member, or members, in that linkage.

Eph. 6:21 – “Tychicus, the dear brother and faithful servant in the Lord.” (Cf. Col. 4:7 above)

Phil. 1:14 – “…most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged to speak the word of God…”

What separates this phrase, in singular and plural, from the “brother of the Lord” in Galatians 1:19 and “the brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5? A single preposition (in English; in the Greek it is the difference between the genitive case entailing “of” and the dative case with the preposition “en”). Historicists are convinced that this single difference makes the meanings absolutely unrelated: one means siblings, the other means devotees. Well, I’d hate to have to put money on it.

With this survey in view, we can now consider what Ehrman has to say on the matter.

Question-begging as methodology

In approaching the famous passage in Galatians, Ehrman links Cephas (whom he identifies with the Peter of the Gospels) with James, whom Paul calls (if these are authentically his words) “the brother of the Lord.” Ehrman regards Cephas/Peter as Jesus’ “most intimate companion and confidant for his entire public ministry.” When Paul says that he went up to Jerusalem three years after his conversion, Ehrman admits that he might have gone there to “strategize” with him about his own gospel to the gentiles and other aspects of the movement. However,

But it defies belief that Paul would have spent over two weeks with Jesus’s closest companion and not learned something about him—for example, that he lived.” (DJE? p. 145)

This is undoubtedly the most ludicrous statement Bart Ehrman makes in the entire book. Has he not heard of the concept, the logical fallacy, of “begging the question”? He even begs a question within that statement. If Paul spent time with a man who was Jesus’ closest companion—and knew that (and how could he not?)—then he didn’t need to learn from Peter that Jesus had lived. But there is a second additional fallacy here, in that if Paul was himself preaching a cosmic Christ who had been a Jesus on earth, he had to know that as well, so there was doubly no question about learning from Cephas that Jesus had lived. (Or . . . maybe this is the solution to the traditional Pauline problem! Paul learned about the cosmic Son from scripture, but wasn’t aware that he had been on earth, so naturally he knew nothing about that earthly life and could hardly have referred to anything in it! Peter clued him in about the incarnation to earth!)

But apart from the internal illogic of the statement itself, Ehrman is writing a book about mythicism and the arguments against it. In other words, the existence of Jesus is the subject of the book and the end result sought in the debate. Is Ehrman going to demonstrate that the Galatians passage proves the existence of Jesus by claiming that Paul must have learned about the historical Jesus from Peter since the latter had been his chief disciple and confidant (thus assuming that existence), and that Paul could not have spent two weeks with him without learning the details of his life and even the fact that he had existed?!

The term “begging the question” is almost inadequate to characterize this absurd line of argument.

Why not “brother of Jesus”?

And there’s more. Moving on to James, Ehrman admits that Paul calls him “the brother of the Lord,” not “brother of Jesus.”

But that means very little since Paul typically calls Jesus the Lord and rarely uses the name Jesus (without adding “Christ” or other titles). (DJE? p. 145)

So now we are not permitted to claim that “the Lord” does not mean the human Jesus, says Ehrman, because Paul typically calls (the human) Jesus “the Lord.” The words in brackets here have to be intended by Ehrman, otherwise his claim that this “means very little” would have no force. But that very thought in brackets makes this another blatant case of begging the question. And since it is indeed true that Paul rarely uses “Jesus” without “Christ” or other titles like “the Lord,” this would indicate that for him even the name “Jesus” has no discernible human-man implication, but is part of the terminology for his heavenly Christ and Lord.

But let’s consider another aspect of the question. Ehrman is quite sure that “the Lord” refers to the human Jesus, as are other historicists, and ridicules the idea that it could be anything else. But let’s consider for a moment what Paul would have in mind. If he was indeed speaking of James as a sibling, there is certainly no question that to say “brother of Jesus” would have been the most natural and most fitting way to express it.

It has been suggested that in Greek letter-writing, a respected figure was often addressed, such as a father by a son or a politician by a citizen, as “Lord” rather than by his personal name. It was a mark of deference. True enough. But there is surely a significant difference here. What, for Paul, was the connotation of his term “Lord” in regard to his Jesus? A simple father or respected figure? Let’s consider a few passages:

1 Cor. 8:6 – There is . . . one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through him.

Rom. 14:9 – Christ died and returned to life, so that he might be Lord over the dead and the living.

1 Cor. 2:8 – The rulers of this age [which the ancients understood as demon spirits] would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Eph. 5:29 – (from the Pauline school) . . . but he feeds and cares for it, just as the Lord does the church, for we are members of his body.

Col. 1:15f – (from the Pauline school) (the Son) who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. . . . He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

The latter passage does not use the term “Lord” but it could certainly be applicable here. This is what Paul, and those who wrote soon afterward in his name, understand by “the Lord,” the figure they worship. Now, in a context of referring to a sibling of the human incarnation on earth of this cosmic figure, would Paul have been likely to call James “brother of the Lord”? Given the associations with this term which are constantly in Paul’s mind, it would be like saying: James the brother of the creator and sustainer of the universe, James the brother of the head of the body which is the church and of which we ourselves are the limbs, James the brother of the Lord of glory.

Given the exclusively cosmic associations of “the Lord” in the epistles, it is quite legitimate for mythicists to question whether Paul would ever have said “the sibling of the Lord.” Such a juxtaposition would be quite jolting. Moreover, Paul is constantly referring to his Christ Jesus as the son of God the Father (and clearly not in the mild biblical sense), as in 2 Corinthians 11:31. Would “sibling of the Lord” not conjure up an image of James as a son of God in the same way as well? As Ehrman points out, Paul is capable of referring to the name “Jesus” by itself, though it is a relative rarity. There should have been no impediment or reluctance to referring to James as the “sibling of Jesus.”

If Paul had anywhere given us a sense that he thought about Jesus on the scale of a human man, someone who had experiences on earth, a family and friends, a mother whom he could name, talked of him walking the sands of Galilee, facing the ordinary trials of life, if he had mentioned the sites of his ministry, had talked about what it meant for the Son of God to live in human flesh and the challenges that presented, then perhaps we could be comfortable with him stating that his “Lord” had a sibling. But in the face of that void, the phrase as so interpreted rings anything but true. In the face of that void, the historicist’s smugly insistent claim that Galatians 1:19 can only mean one thing becomes highly dubious and quite unprovable.

(By later in the second century, we find the phrase “brother of the Lord” in reference to James the Just common, but this is building on the earlier occurrence of it; it is the reinterpretation of a traditional phrase which had begun with a different meaning. It now has Gospel-level associations to the term “Lord” which Paul shows no sign of. By now the Christian mind would have envisioned the term much closer to earth, and there would be no sense of anomaly.)

And so in the letter to the Galatians Paul states as clearly as possible that he knew Jesus’s brother. Can we get any closer to an eyewitness report than this? The fact that Paul knew Jesus’s closest disciple and his own brother throws a real monkey wrench into the mythicist view that Jesus never lived. (DJE? pp. 145-146)

What is the “monkey wrench” that Ehrman has thrown into the mythicist view? Why, the declaration that Paul knew Jesus’ closest disciple and his own brother, two assumptions that Ehrman has in no way proven from Paul’s text, preferring simply to beg the question. (One might as well say that we know the Bible is true because God wrote it.)

If a noted New Testament scholar can engage in the illogical argumentation and special pleading we have seen thus far—and such tactics are far from limited to Ehrman—it is no wonder that mythicism can make little headway in winning over hearts and minds within academia. Especially minds.

The brothers of the Lord

Ehrman now moves sideways to consider the phrase “the brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5. He has already noted, he says, that this could not be referring to brothers “in some kind of loose, spiritual sense” (which I essentially agreed with in the way he phrased it previously). But he now presents it this way:

Paul does frequently use the term brothers in this metaphorical way when addressing the members of his congregations. (DJE? p. 146)

Well, we have noted above that Paul, not just frequently, but consistently uses the term in application to fellow believers, fellow apostles, and members of Christian congregations. He actually never uses it in the sense of sibling, though this, of course, does not of itself preclude such a meaning in Galatians 1:19 or 1 Corinthians 9:5. It just puts a damper on Ehrman’s egregious claims.

Separating Cephas and James

In regard to the latter passage, Ehrman repeats his argument that by separating out Cephas and himself from those “brothers of the Lord” Paul is denying to both whatever status the phrase represents, and thus it could not be the status of being a believer or Christian apostle. Well, as I pointed out previously, Ehrman himself in another passage (15:5-7) does not deny Cephas the status of apostle just because he is named separately from a reference to “the twelve” (under the assumption that this means the Gospel disciples) and to “all the apostles.” Ehrman has made two opposite claims from the same kind of linguistic situation.

In turn, Ehrman thinks to apply his 9:5 claim to the Galatians passage. If Paul mentions Cephas, then says he only saw James, the brother of the Lord, and meant a member of the sect, this would constitute an exclusion of Cephas from being a brother of the Lord in that sense. First of all, this by no means follows from Paul’s statement. There is no necessary differentiation or comparison intended. The two thoughts are separate.

Paul went to Jerusalem to get to know Cephas and spent fifteen days with him. Then he adds that while he was there he did not see any of the other apostles except James, and he identifies him as “(the/a) brother of the Lord.” The fact that, for whatever reason, he made such an identification for James but had not made a similar one for Cephas does not have to imply an intention to differentiate. To claim such an intention (which Ehrman does) is not even valid if we were to understand the phrase to mean sibling of Jesus, for why would Paul be concerned with implying that Cephas was not a sibling of Jesus? The phrase would have been simply a way of identifying James. Thus, playing the differentiation card is a red herring.

But if Paul included the descriptive “brother of the Lord” as a way of identifying James, we may then ask: if it meant a member of the sect, why might that identification have been included and why was Cephas not given the same identification? Reasonable possibilities present themselves.

- From 1 Corinthians we get the impression that Cephas was a well-known figure in the cult’s circles;

- he may have needed no identification as one of the “brethren”;

- or Paul may simply not have thought to include it at that point.

James, on the other hand, is mentioned only in this part of Galatians and as part of the “seeing” traditions enumerated in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7. Perhaps when Paul got to his mention of James, he felt a need to supply such an identification.

I made the point in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.62) that one cannot place any significance on the definite article “the” before “brother of the Lord.” Grammatical practice encouraged its insertion, even if only an indefinite-article sense was in mind (Greek had no indefinite article). So claiming a singling out of James by Paul with the implication that no one else enjoyed the same status of “brother” is entirely unjustified. On that basis, too, we can set aside this being an implied reference to James as the leader of the sect.

Context also is against Ehrman. Paul in that letter (let alone anywhere else) gives us no hint that James enjoyed any privileged position due to a sibling relationship with an historical Jesus, and only a few verses later (2:6) he disparages the whole Jerusalem lot as of no importance, not even recognized by God as important. That lack of privilege and connection to Jesus is clinched in 2:7-8 when Paul says that Peter (and presumably the other ‘pillars’) were given their responsibility by God, not by Jesus or by virtue of their association with him, for carrying the gospel to the Jews. Such a context, and the wider one throughout all the epistles which never make any such associations, does not support Ehrman’s preferred reading of “brother of the Lord” as “sibling of Jesus.”

Wells: A Jewish messianic group?

Ehrman now addresses an argument by G. A. Wells, which brings us back to a consideration of “the brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5. Wells, reflecting J. M. Robertson in 1927, suggested—as have I—that there was a fraternity of messianic Jews in Jerusalem who called themselves “brothers of the Lord.” This explains the term of identification as applied to James, for whatever reason Paul felt it necessary. But Ehrman asks:

And what evidence does Wells cite for such a group of zealous messianic Jews in Jerusalem that separated themselves off from all the other Jerusalem Christians? None. At all. What evidence could there be? No such group is mentioned in any surviving source of any kind whatsoever. Wells (or his predecessor, Robinson) made it up. (DJE? p. 150)

Ehrman confuses a lack of external corroboration with a lack of justification for making a reasonable interpretation of something, especially when there are problems with the preferred alternative and the record as a whole would accommodate it well (which would disallow the accusation of “ad hoc”). If there is no evidence in the epistles that any figures mentioned were physically related to Jesus, that they enjoyed privilege and respect on such a basis, or owed authority and precedence to having sat at his feet, that Jesus himself had appointed anyone to be apostles, or that anyone connected to Jesus—or for that matter to the entire Gospel story—existed within the movement (historicists ignore all these considerations as though they don’t exist), then it is reasonable to postulate other meanings for seemingly ambiguous phrases.

One of those is the one I’ve put forward, perhaps an expansion on that of Wells: that the Jerusalem sect began as a community of monkish Jews who called themselves “brothers of the Lord,” which could even have been a reference to God. This title stayed even when the group expanded its ideas and activities, and its membership.

In fact, we can see an indication of such an expansion in the 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 “appearances” tradition. The sect was already formed when those visions of the Son were experienced. We cannot be sure what the nature of their belief was prior to these pivotal experiences, but the latter may have produced faith in the existence of the Son and his role (just as happened with Paul in Galatians 1:16), and been the catalyst for prompting a new proselytizing undertaking. In other words, this “brothers of the Lord” sect may have embarked on apostleship to preach their dying and rising Christ, and this may have attracted new members to augment the ranks of “apostles,” members who were not part of the original group and thus did not fall under the appellation that applied to the original members.

In any case, there is no need on the basis of the text of 9:5 to deny Cephas membership in the original group. He may well have been added for emphasis by Paul, singled out from the “brothers of the Lord” because of his importance. As I said, Ehrman, in the case of 15:5, makes exactly that sort of denial of exclusion from a separately stated group.

Genitive vs. Dative

Do we have other indicators that “brother(s) of the Lord” may be a devotee and not a sibling designation? We certainly do. I itemized above the occurrence of both singular and plural phrases which link “brother(s)” to “the Lord” differing only by a preposition. Leaving that difference aside for the moment, consider what Ehrman has said. No such group of ‘messianic Christians’ enjoys evidence in the record. Well, what does he think Philippians 1:14’s “brothers in the Lord” refers to? (It certainly doesn’t refer to siblings.) Moreover, it has the ring of a group name, just as the 1 Corinthians 9:5 “brothers of the Lord” does.

The fact that in one case a dative construction with the preposition “en” is used while in another case the genitive is employed is hardly evidence that there is an unbridgeable divide between the two forms of expression. Linguistic practice often has multiple ways of putting the same thing. “The Founding Fathers” and “Fathers of Confederation” hardly entail two distinct groups, let alone two vastly different meanings. (Here, too, we do not have “fathers” used in the sense of physical progenitors, but in a metaphorical sense—just as “brothers in the Lord” is metaphorical.)

Nor is it significant that later apocryphal works universally assume that James was Jesus’ sibling. What else would Ehrman expect, given the tradition by that later time? But he once again begs the question by itemizing four “independent traditions” of such a view which include not only both Mark and John (the latter could well have been dependent on Mark, since John shows a clear general dependence on the Synoptics), but Paul himself. One cannot simply declare a correspondence with other passages on the part of the very passages which are the subject of the debate.

Josephus’ James

Ehrman also throws Antiquities 20, with its “brother of Jesus, called Christ,” onto the pile as an “independent tradition” of the phrase. I have dealt with this passage in Chapter 6, as I did very thoroughly in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. Ehrman failed to address any of it, especially the point that, like the Testimonium, Eusebius is the first to witness to the presence of that phrase in Antiquities 20.

Naturally, Josephus would hardly have said “brother of the Lord,” nor would Eusebius, or some other interpolator, have made the glaring mistake of making him do so, but Ehrman can hardly appeal to it as a tradition supporting “brother of the Lord” in Galatians 1:19 precisely because it is not the same wording. To declare that both have the same meaning is once again to beg the question. And it illustrates the point that “brother of Jesus” would indeed have been the more natural way to express the idea.

Besides, “brother of Jesus” may even have been written by Josephus, but referring to another Jesus (the son of Damneus mentioned immediately after), with only “called Christ” added by a Christian.

Ehrman and Robert Price

Ehrman spends a lot of space dismissing various possibilities put forward by Robert M. Price for understanding how James could be a brother of Jesus without an understanding of sibling. Ehrman regards these as a bit of a “stretch,” especially as applicable in the time of Paul, but my point would be that we don’t need to ‘stretch’ to come up with an understanding of the phrase as a reference to being a devotee of “the Lord,” whichever deity that referred to.

Could it have been a marginal gloss?

Finally, there is always the feasible possibility that the whole thing began simply as a marginal gloss by a later scribe which got inserted into the text. Here it would have meant sibling and been a case of differentiation: not with Cephas, but with the fictional Gospel apostle James, son of Zebedee. Again, when one considers the epistolary record as a whole, with its absolute silence on anyone said or claiming to be associated with a human Jesus, it is unwise to rule such a possibility out. I’m happy to be on the fence to that one.

Ehrman as beggar

To bring us full circle to his starting strategy of begging the question, Ehrman sums up:

In other traditions that long predate our Gospels it is stated that Jesus had actual brothers and that one of them was named James. (DJE? p. 156)

And what are those “other traditions” predating the Gospels? Why, 1 Corinthians 9:5 and Galatians 1:19, of course. Too bad they could not have been set beside the ascriptions to the epistles of James and Jude, which curiously failed to receive or mention the same tradition. James is simply called “the servant of Jesus Christ.” Jude is called the same, but he is also stated as a “brother of James.” This identification would have been made to clarify who Jude was and to increase the authority of a letter from him by reason of him being a brother of James the Just. Normally, this would also have made him the brother of Jesus, a relationship far more effective for creating authority. But nothing in the New Testament record reflects the “normal” run of things.

The point is not that mythicism has made an airtight case that “brother(s) of the Lord” cannot under any circumstances refer to siblings or that it must refer to devotees. The point is that historicist appeals to the phrase as some kind of slam-dunk proof of an historical Jesus can easily be shown to be simplistic, often fallacious, and anything but a giant-killer.

*

Addendum

In the Comments section appended to this Installment of the original series appearing on the Vridar blog, I added a further discussion of the comparison between the phrase “brothers in the Lord” in Philippians 1:14, and “brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5, along with its famous companion “brother of the Lord” in Galatians 1:19. What follows is an edited version of my comments:

I am going to switch to “sisters” in the following analogies, just to get away from entrenched associations with the epistle texts.

We can postulate a situation in prehistoric times (some anthropologists see a matriarchal phase involving moon worship before the patriarchal worship of the sun, so let’s go with that). A female society at that time says:

We are sisters in (our worship of) the moon.

This would be equivalent to the group mentioned in Philippians 1:14 saying, We are brothers in (our worship of) the Lord. If we parsed the latter, we could say that in the context of our worship of the Lord, we are brothers. In my analogy, the women are sisters in the same way, in the context of their worship of the moon. No siblings involved. But there could be another way these “sisters” would put it.

We are sisters of (sister) moon.

The moon herself is their sister, due to the relationship they have with her, and by association, her worshipers are themselves sisters to each other: in the fellow-believer way, not as actual siblings. It would be equivalent to 1 Corinthians 9:5’s “the brothers of the Lord.” The object of those brothers’ worship is the Lord (either the Father or the Son, we can’t be sure). Through their sharing in that worship, the group being referred to are themselves “brothers.”

Let’s carry this alternative way a little further. The women might say, “The moon has revealed to us that she is our sister; she governs our cycles and our lives.” There is certainly no meaning of sibling here. This is a mystical sisterhood. Do we have a corresponding ‘statement’ in the epistles in regard to a brotherhood? What about Hebrews 2:11-12:

That is why the Son does not shrink from calling men his brothers, when he says, “I will proclaim thy name to my brothers…”

So now we have a divine entity (as our analogous moon is) informing his devotees that they are “brothers” to him. This does not render the relationship between the Son and those on earth a sibling one. Now, if someone, hearing Hebrews 2:11-12, were to ask those devotees, “Who are you ‘brothers’ of?” how would they respond? It could well be: “We are brothers of the Lord.” Would they be saying, in stark contrast to Phil. 1:14, that they are siblings?

Hebrews, of course, was not written by Paul. But even with no close connection between the two, we can see a commonality in mindset and expression on many points across the uncoordinated Christ cult movement of the first century. Paul’s circles could have envisioned their Christ as having declared himself a brother to them.

But as interesting as that analogy might have been, there is something available that is much simpler. When I was a boy, I took piano lessons from a Sister Agnes Teresa of the “Sisters of St. Joseph” whose convent was around the corner. I daresay that in Greek, the saint’s name would have been expressed with a genitive. I’ve even heard of an order called “Sisters of the Cross.” In either case, I doubt that what was meant was that these “sisters” were siblings either of St. Joseph or of a wooden cross, no matter how holy. “Sisters of St. Joseph” means ‘sisters under the patronage of St. Joseph’ or ‘sisters having a spiritual relationship with St. Joseph.’ I am not aware that they ever referred to themselves as “Sisters in St. Joseph” or “Sisters in the Cross” but it would probably make equal sense to anyone. And we know that those Christian devotees did refer to themselves as “brothers in the Lord” with a non-sibling understanding.

Sisters of the moon…Sisters of St. Joseph…Brothers of the Lord.

Now, it happens that after several good years of studying piano under Sister Agnes Teresa, she was transferred and I fell into the clutches of Sister Mary G., a real b—h (as nuns could often be in those days), and after a few months I stopped my lessons, though kept things going on my own. Now, let’s say I later reported that situation to a friend in a letter. I might have put it to him like this:

“After all those years of studying with Sister Agnes Teresa, I switched to Sister Mary G., a Sister of St. Joseph, but was unhappy with her.”

Let’s say he was familiar with Sister Agnes Teresa (well known as a prominent piano teacher in the neighborhood) and knew of my lessons with her, but he had never heard of Sister Mary G. I didn’t need to inform him that the former was a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, but since he was unfamiliar with Sister Mary G., I threw in a clarification that she, too, was a Sister of St. Joseph. (Please remember that I pointed out there is no necessary meaning of “THE” Sister of St. Joseph on account of the Greek definite article.) Am I excluding Agnes Teresa from that membership, or making any other differentiation between the two? Am I calling Mary G. a sibling of St. Joseph?

Now let’s say that I became a piano teacher but, unlike the Sisters, I was not allowed by law to put out a shingle advertising that at my front door. I complain to the city bureaucrats:

“Am I not a piano teacher? Did I not take the exam? Have I no right to put out a shingle, like the Sisters of St. Joseph, and Sister Agnes Teresa?”

The latter is not excluded from being one of the Sisters of St. Joseph, I have simply added her for emphasis since she is the most famous of the piano-teaching Sisters and well known to the city bureaucrats.

21

“Key Data” in Proving Jesus’ Historicity – II

The Crucified Messiah – Pt.1

A conflict between expectation and history

To introduce his second piece of “Key Data” which confer a “high degree of certainty that (Jesus) was an historical figure,” (p. 144) Bart Ehrman offers this:

These early Christians from day one believed that Jesus was the messiah. But they knew that he had been crucified. (p. 156)

This is a good example of what happens when one’s thinking is stuck firmly inside the box. The point Ehrman is making is that the concept of the “messiah,” the expectation of what he would be and what he would do, conflicted with the fact that Jesus had been crucified. In other words, historical expectations were at odds with (alleged) historical events. But if that is indeed one’s starting assumption, and if it is wrong, then it will lead us down all sorts of problematic garden paths and into conclusions which are not only erroneous but unnecessary.

The first part of this assumption, entirely based on the Gospels and Acts, is that certain people made judgments about a certain historical man. If that were the case, then an anomaly would certainly have existed between traditional ideas about the messiah and what the life of that man actually entailed. Why, then, the question arises, did those people come to such a judgment when it conflicted so much with standard messianic expectation?

But all we have to do is ask: what if—and certainly if we were to judge by the non-Gospel record—no judgment was initially made about any historical man? Everything that follows would then be entirely different, and perhaps more amenable to understanding how Christianity began and showing a conformity to what the majority of the texts themselves are telling us.

Paul’s persecution of the church

For reasons that may not seem self-evident at first, claiming that Jesus was crucified is a powerful argument that Jesus actually lived. (p. 156)

Ehrman’s route to supporting this statement is a complicated one. He first calls attention to Paul’s persecution of the church in Judea prior to his conversion. He notes that Paul says nothing specific about what the beliefs of that early church were, or on what particular grounds it was subjected to persecution by the authorities, with himself acting as their agent. Nothing daunted, Ehrman steps into that breach. But because he has made the initial assumption that an historical man was interpreted as the messiah, he embarks on a chain of speculation which not only contains problems, but also looks to be completely off the path of reality.

To begin with, Paul refers to those persecuted as “the church of God” (Gal. 1:13), whereas if this were a movement proceeding out of belief in and reaction to a human man, we might expect it to call itself “the church of Jesus.” Then to set the scene of his argument, Ehrman slips into the same kind of question-begging as he did in the first part of the chapter dealing with “brother of the Lord.” From his inevitable contact with the people he was persecuting, Ehrman surmises that Paul must have learned about Jesus from them. No doubt. But what sort of “Jesus” was that? Ehrman simply assumes the very issue under debate: that it was the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels, the human man who had been crucified only a few years earlier.

What Paul “learned” about Jesus

And what were they saying about this Jesus?

These Christians were not calling Jesus a dying-rising God. They were calling him the Jewish messiah. And they understood this messiah to be completely human, a person chosen by God to mediate his will on earth. That is the Jesus Paul first heard of. (p. 157)

I guess Ehrman hasn’t read Paul and the other epistles lately, which is the only early record extant. Perhaps he’s forgotten Paul’s gospel as laid out in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4: that Christ died, was buried, and rose to life on the third day. Perhaps he’s lost sight of Romans 6:1-6 as well, in which believers were baptized into his death, lay buried with him, and will as a consequence be one with him in a resurrection like his. So far, it’s pretty much all dying and rising, something which provided salvation, a very un-Jewish concept especially in regard to the traditional expected messiah. And there are a host of other references throughout Paul and the other epistle writers to Jesus’ suffering and death (though never in any recognizable correspondence to the Gospel story, let alone located on earth), and to his rising.

Would this be “calling (Jesus) the Jewish messiah”? Obviously, there is an anomaly here between what, according to Ehrman, “Paul first heard” about Jesus from the earliest Christians, and what his stated set of beliefs about him are in his surviving letters. How does Ehrman deal with that dramatic anomaly?

An “offensive” doctrine

Ehrman has just identified Jewish messianic expectation as something that was at odds with the fact of Jesus’ crucifixion. In other words, Jewish expectation did not include a dying and rising for its messiah, salvific or otherwise. According to Ehrman, Paul learned from the Jewish believers he persecuted that the man Jesus was the messiah, although this was something that would not have been blasphemous to Jews, some of whom had the occasional habit of declaring this or that person to be the messiah.

But then why were these people with their non-blasphemous beliefs being persecuted by the authorities? Ehrman suggests that Paul, and presumably those authorities, were “offended” by the idea that a crucified man could be declared the messiah. All of this, of course, is pure speculation on Ehrman’s part. There is nothing, not a hint in the early record, that anyone was declaring a recently crucified man as the messiah and that the authorities were offended by this. (It isn’t even in Q, the supposed earliest reference to Jesus, which never refers to their perceived founder figure as the messiah, or even to his death.)

We might particularly note that such a thing is entirely missing in 1 Corinthians 1:18-24 which says that the “doctrine of the cross,” the concept that the Christ had been crucified, was a “stumbling block to Jews and a folly to Greeks.” There is nothing said (though it is always, of course, read into the text) about a human man who was crucified being the messiah. Now, considering that in this same epistle (8:6) Paul is clearly seen to regard his Christ Jesus as a part of God, the 1 Corinthians passage must entail the idea that this “Christ crucified” which Paul preaches is a divine figure—even if it were the case that he had formerly been a human being.

But in that case, the Jews’ “stumbling block” over a crucified messiah would have been vastly overshadowed by their apoplexy at the blasphemy that Paul and his fellow Christians had identified a human man with God. Paul makes no defence of this blasphemy because there is no sign that such an objection has been raised by anyone. And there is certainly no sign, here or anywhere else, that Paul felt any need to explain why his own view of Jesus has been carried so vastly further, and in such a new and blasphemous direction, than the Jewish church he formerly persecuted and to which he was converted.

Christ as a “curse”

Ehrman points to Galatians 3:13 as an indication of the ‘offensiveness’ that would have been caused by those Jews adopting a crucified man as the messiah:

Christ bought us freedom from the curse of the law by becoming for our sake an accursed thing; for scripture says, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” [Deut. 21:23].

Ehrman links this ancient view with the Roman method of execution by crucifixion, thinking to cast light on why Paul was offended. But it would have been useful if anywhere in his letters Paul had actually spelled out that he had been offended by hearing that an historical man ‘cursed for being hanged on a tree’ was thought of as the messiah. It would have been useful had he anywhere even intimated that it was information like this which he had learned from the people he persecuted. Certainly he makes no such connection in Galatians 3:13. Neither does the writer of 1 Peter in 2:22-24 who speaks of Christ hanged on a tree while giving us, by way of ‘biography’ about that event, simply a paraphrase of verses from Isaiah 53; that was his apparent source of such a biography.

Paul switching Jesuses in mid-stream

Ehrman now has to face that anomaly head-on. He has postulated that before his conversion, Paul found offensive the idea that a crucified man was the messiah, but this was “before changing his mind and becoming a follower of Jesus.” And what a change of mind! Ehrman has embroiled himself in all sorts of contradictions here. The Jewish followers of Jesus whom he was persecuting were, by Ehrman’s measure, traditional Jews innocent of blasphemy who did not regard Jesus as divine, just the messiah. One wonders, then, what this “church of God” who believed a crucified man was the messiah thought this unorthodox messiah had been good for. Had he overthrown the Romans? Had he elevated the Jews to supremacy? Had he inaugurated the Kingdom?

How could any group of Jews possibly have imagined that, quite unlike their traditional expectations and regardless of what scripture had led them to expect, it had really been God’s plan to send his messiah to earth on a preliminary visit: to be ignominiously killed, but with the promise of coming again, and then he would fulfill the expectations that the messiah was famed for. Nor would those Jews have thought the reason for his death on the first visit was to redeem the world’s sins, since Ehrman assures us that, contrary to the atonement doctrine later Christians were to adopt (they read it into passages like Isaiah 53), traditional Jewish outlook contained no such concept.

But wait a minute. What, then, was Paul ‘converted’ to? The belief that a human man who was not a part of God had been the messiah? That he was not a dying and rising savior, but simply “a person chosen by God to mediate his will on earth”? The former would have been a pagan idea, and Ehrman tells us that this was a group governed entirely by Jewish principles. Another pagan idea would have been the concept of the believers joining themselves with the savior, becoming a ‘part’ of him and he of them, so presumably Ehrman has ruled this out as well.

An impossible contradiction

The problem is, most of Paul’s beliefs, as far as we can see, were the direct opposite of what he had allegedly learned from the Judean church he converted to. His Christ did die and rise. He saved through his death and resurrection. Romans 6:1-6 speaks of joining with the Son, being “baptized into union with Christ Jesus,” of being “buried with him,” of “becoming one with him in a resurrection like his.” Paul puts forward the concept of the spiritual “body of Christ” of which believers are a part. Paul’s Christ was a part of God; as I’ve said before, to claim otherwise is to perform extreme violence on the texts (or ignore them altogether), as with 1 Corinthians 8:6, or Colossians 1:15-20. Absolutely none of this can be identified as traditional Jewish principles or expectation.

Is Ehrman saying that Paul was converted to the non-blasphemous variety of faith, and then subsequently did another about-face and betrayed all the principles of the church he had converted to, adopting a blasphemy it would have roundly condemned? Where is the evidence of such a conflict with and divorce from the ‘church of God in Judea,’ especially if the latter were in any way connected to the Jerusalem pillars, which is often suggested? (In fact, Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 15:11 that he and the latter proclaim the same thing.) Where is the record, even an implication, of this double conversion by Paul?

Indeed, such a thing has to be ruled out. In Galatians 1:23, Paul declares that

Christ’s congregations in Judea . . . heard it said, “Our former persecutor is preaching the good news of the faith which once he tried to destroy.”

But Paul’s gospel of a dying and rising part of God was, according to Ehrman, precisely not the faith of the Judaean church he persecuted. Yet that church, according to Paul, remarked that he now did preach their faith. This is an unresolvable contradiction. Moreover, would Paul, in the course of his supposed second about-face, switch from a focus that was entirely on a human man to one which focused exclusively on a heavenly deity with no reference to or interest in its human predecessor? That lack of interest has become so profound that he dismisses the human man entirely, portrays the faith movement as impelled by God and the Spirit, makes no room for a recently incarnated Jesus in the course of salvation history, and takes for himself the role of inaugurating the new covenant in parallel with Moses’ dispensation of the old.

That’s not a ‘change of mind.’ It’s a brain transplant.

And no one called him on any of it!

Revising Christian origins from outside the box

Ehrman cannot see that this convoluted mess he is presenting to his readers is far less likely—indeed it is ludicrous—than the obvious alternative: that the earliest form of the faith Paul persecuted and then was converted to had nothing to do with a human man who had been crucified, but with a Son and sacrificial Savior who, as Paul and others regularly say, was discovered in scripture after lying unknown for long ages until God and the Spirit revealed him (as in Romans 16:25-27). Either he lived at some unknown time in the past (the view of G. A. Wells), or he lived, died and was resurrected entirely in a non-material dimension, in the supernatural heavenly world.

But not a single epistle writer ever offers us a statement that he had lived on earth at an unknown time in the past. They never show the slightest inclination to speculate on any details of that unknown life (they certainly could have consulted scripture for such things, as the evangelists were later to do). And the occasional human-sounding language can easily be understood in the context of Platonic philosophy and cosmology—with the occasional passage or document, such as 1 Corinthians 2:8 and the Ascension of Isaiah, not to mention Hebrews’ picture of a heavenly sacrifice, actually placing it in a spiritual dimension. Thus the Wellsian type of theory should be rejected in favor of the heavenly alternative.

The traditional ‘Anointed One’

Ehrman now digresses to give us a capsule summary of the history of the Jewish concept of messiah. Originally it simply enjoyed its literal meaning of “Anointed One,” referring to the practice of anointing a king or high priest, or one enjoying God’s special favor. It was the mark of a special representative of God. This, when Israel lost its independence under a succession of foreign overlords, led to the concept that there was a unique “Messiah” promised by God who at some point in the future would restore the nation to its independent kingship under a descendant of David. One of the Psalms of Solomon most thoroughly encapsulates this complex of expectations, one in which there was no thought of redeeming the world or its sinners.

Ehrman also gives us alternative concepts about a messiah existing at the same time. One—or rather a duality of concepts—is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in their expectation of “two messiahs, one who would be a ruler-king and over him the priestly messiah.” Then there was this:

[The messiah] would be a cosmic figure, a powerful angelic being sent from God to destroy the enemy and set up God’s kingdom on earth. This figure was often modeled on the “one like a son of man” in the book of Daniel (for example, 7:13-14). In an apocryphal writing known as 1 Enoch, probably from about the same time, comes this prediction about the future messianic Son of Man:

[The Son of Man] shall never pass away or perish from before the face of the earth. But those who have led the world astray shall be bound with chains; and their ruinous congregation shall be imprisoned; all their deeds shall vanish from before the face of the earth. Thenceforth nothing that is corruptible shall be found; for that Son of Man has appeared and has seated himself upon the throne of his glory; and all evil shall disappear from before his face (1 Enoch 69). (p. 162)

The Jewish sect represented in 1 Enoch (in the section known as the Similitudes of Enoch, probably from some time in the first century) has envisioned for itself a spiritual messiah who is a cosmic figure and powerful angelic being residing entirely in heaven and whose arrival they await on the day of judgment; with this Messiah/Son of Man/Elect One the righteous on earth identify themselves, and from him they receive certain future guarantees. (None of 1 Enoch contains the concept of a sacrificial messiah, or a death and rising for him.)

Why not, then, another Jewish sect which has envisioned out of scripture a figure they see as God’s own Son, in the spirit of the Logos or personified Wisdom; only this one also underwent a sacrifice at the hands of evil angels, but came back to life as a guarantee of eternal life for the devotees who have joined themselves with him through faith and ritual? All the concepts of the time were available to create such a perceived ‘revelation’ of a hitherto hidden truth. Like the Similitudes of Enoch, this was a transformation of the traditional idea of an earthly messiah into a spiritual and Platonically-based version, one taking on a dimension of divinity.

He, too, would be a judge and establisher of the Kingdom. And when he came into contact with an imagined sage who had preached in Galilee and came to be identified with a different group’s expectation of a similar End-time figure they called the Son of Man—though this one, too, had no death and rising dimension—a fusion took place, and the heavenly Son fell to earth to join with his composite partner to create, under Mark’s hand, a powerful symbol of an entire religious trend: Jesus of Nazareth.

The Jewish messiah and the crucified Jesus

In his attempt to accommodate the crucified man Jesus to the concept of the Jewish messiah, Ehrman makes a number of unsupportable declarations. The first is

In all our early traditions (Jesus) was a lower class peasant from rural Galilee . . . (p. 163)

I hardly need to point out that no such thing is witnessed in the early traditions that are contained in the epistles. Even if Ehrman has postulated (on dubious grounds) oral traditions, including Aramaic ones, which he claims go back to immediately following Jesus’ death, he can hardly claim that “all” early traditions make Jesus out to be a peasant from rural Galilee. Even if the epistolary view of Christ were claimed to be a subsequent development, we would hardly see in such a wide range of documents and writers, only a decade or two after his death, an utter absence of any sign of its supposed predecessor.

Then there is this declaration:

That Jesus died by crucifixion is almost universally attested in our sources, early and late. We have traditions of Jesus’s bloody execution in independent Gospel sources (Mark, M, L, John, Gospel of Peter), throughout our various epistles and other writings (Hebrews, 1 Peter, Revelation), and certainly in Paul — everywhere in Paul. The crucifixion of Jesus is the core of Paul’s message and is attested abundantly in his writings as one of the — if not the — earliest things that he knew about the man. (p. 163)

Once a question-beggar, always a question-beggar. I’ve already dealt with the claim that all those “Gospel sources” are to be seen as independent. As for all those non-Gospel writers, including Paul, to which we can add many non-canonical documents, crucifixion is indeed the centerpiece. What is not part of that centerpiece, however, is its location on earth, or the fact that a recent human man was involved, or that he was crucified by human agencies. Indeed, some of them specify the agents to be the demon spirits, and one or two actually give a location in the heavens. It’s one thing to beg a question; it’s another for that question to be allowed to stand in blithe contradiction to a major part of the evidence.

Who would make up a crucified messiah?

Ehrman now asks the question that many historicists consider something of a slam-dunk. Would any first century Jew make up the idea of a crucified messiah—meaning out of nothing, out of no historical event, as mythicists claim? But once again, Ehrman is doing his thinking from inside the box. What if the question, based on the non-Gospel record and asked from outside the box, were:

What would have led certain Jewish thinkers, influenced by Greek ideas and widespread religious trends, to survey scripture and find that it told of a part of God who had undergone a sacrifice in the supernatural world at the hands of evil angels, some of those thinkers seeing this as a way of overcoming the demons and rescuing present and future souls of the Jewish righteous from Sheol, others broadening their view and seeing it as a way of redeeming the sins of the entire world?

What a different picture of the origins of Christianity Ehrman might have come up with then!

Unfortunately, Ehrman does not ask that question.

22

“Key Data” in Proving Jesus’ Historicity – II

The Crucified Messiah – Pt.2

Jesus as an ancient David Koresh

Bart Ehrman tells us of putting a question to his university students:

What if I told you that David Koresh of the Branch Davidians, attacked and killed some years ago in Texas by the FBI as a dangerous rebel, was really God’s Chosen one, the Lord of all? (DJE? p. 163)

He was making the point that for the followers of Jesus to declare that a man who had just been executed as a rebel was really God’s prophesied messiah would indeed have been equivalent to survivors of the Branch Davidians making a similar declaration of David Koresh today.

Ehrman is now faced with a major challenge. He must answer the question: How could any Jew judge a man who fulfilled none of the expectations the nation held about the messiah, a man whom society would have regarded as a “crucified criminal,” ignominiously despatched by the very overlords he was supposed to overthrow, to be the fulfillment of all those prophecies in scripture about God’s agent for Israel’s salvation?

The traditional Christian answer and Ehrman’s “story” substitute

Ask that question of an evangelical Christian today and you will get a stock answer: the actual resurrection of Jesus convinced his followers that he was God’s Son and Messiah. I suppose if I had been around at that time and saw a dead man walk, I too would have let that override whatever negative reaction I had to seeing him die on the cross. But Ehrman hasn’t allowed himself that option. And yet, he appeals to much the same thing, just a weaker version of it.

If it is hard to imagine Jews inventing the idea of a crucified messiah, where did the idea come from? It came from historical realities. There really was a man Jesus. Some of the things he said and possibly did made some of his followers wonder if he could be the messiah. Eventually they became convinced: he must be the messiah. But then he ran afoul of the authorities, who had him arrested, put on trial, and condemned to execution. He was crucified. This, of course, radically disconfirmed everything his followers had thought and hoped since he obviously was the furthest thing from the messiah. But then something else happened. Some of them began to say that God had intervened and brought him back from the dead. The story caught on, and some (or all—we don’t know) of his closest followers came to think that in fact he had been raised. This reconfirmed in a big way the hopes that had been so severely dashed by his crucifixion. For his reinspirited followers, Jesus truly is the one favored by God. So he is the messiah. But he is a different kind of messiah than anyone expected. God had a different plan from the beginning. He planned to save Israel not by a powerful royal messiah but by a crucified messiah. (DJE? p. 164)

So now instead of an actual resurrection, with followers seeing Jesus again in the flesh and placing their hands upon him to confirm that he was indeed alive, Ehrman posits a “story” of a resurrection which “caught on.” I’m not so sure that I myself, back then, would have been convinced by a “story.” It hasn’t got quite the same force as actually seeing the dead live, right in front of you. Maybe getting a sworn assurance from someone else who claims he actually did see the dead man alive again might have substituted. But a story? And what did that story say? That he had actually been seen in the flesh? Or that he had been taken up to heaven immediately, leaving no witnesses behind? Was it a resurrection in flesh, or one in spirit? Did the story offer any proof? Ehrman does not say.

Searching for Ehrman’s “story”

Let’s see if there is any evidence for this scenario in the early record. We can start with the collection of sayings known as Q. Ehrman believes this hypothetical document existed (as do I). Majority mainstream scholarship regards it as the earliest witness to the historical Jesus’ words and deeds. Is there any sign of such a ‘story’ in Q? Scholars have not even been able to uncover a reference to Jesus’ death, let alone a reputed resurrection. (Luke/Q 14:27 does not refer to Jesus’ own cross, and is probably simply a proverb—so Bultmann—about the perils of discipleship.)

Certainly there is no sign that the movement was in disarray after a crucifixion, and if a ‘story’ arose and began to circulate to convince people that Jesus was an unorthodox messiah, Q gives no hint of it. The very subject of the messiah, the very term itself, is missing in Q. We can’t even be sure that the Jesus figure who eventually shows up in Q is identified with the apocalyptic judge the sect expected, the Son of Man.

What about the epistolary record? Ehrman may have in mind the “seeings” of the risen Christ listed in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7. That’s not really a story. They seem to be visionary experiences, or simply convictions of Christ’s presence, with Paul himself sharing in the identical thing. His appeal “Did I not see Jesus our Lord?” in 9:1 also ranks his own experience in a common category with those of the others. But here, too, as well as in the epistles generally, there is no dimension of an initial disillusionment at the crucifixion followed by a reversal through witnessing a dead man returning or even through a belief in his resurrection in spirit.

Moreover, there is not a trace in the entire body of epistles of a disjunction between traditional messianic expectations and what Jesus actually delivered. The Jewish authorities, or non-believers generally, never challenge a Christian apostle like Paul on the basis of Jesus’ failure to live up to expectations of what the messiah would accomplish. The epistle writers are silent on any such issue. Moreover, if the crucifixion would indeed have left Christians open to ridicule in their claims about Jesus, surely apostles like Paul would at least have tried to compensate by playing up commendable teachings by him, his powerful miracles, his prophecies of the future—whether authentic or not.

Ehrman’s picture points up the very thing that is missing from all the epistles. If the crucial issue at the start of Christianity was: How could this crucified man have been the messiah?, then there would have been no possibility that apostles like Paul could abandon all interest in the human man and focus exclusively on the heavenly Christ. “Faith” would have had as its central focus and starting point the faith that the man Jesus had really been God’s son and messiah, with all the attendant arguments about that man to justify such an unorthodox belief. The point is never raised anywhere in the epistles.

The epistles fail to support Ehrman’s picture

It almost goes without saying that the epistles’ presentation of a Son who is known through scripture, one who lay undisclosed in God’s secret plan for long generations, bears no relationship whatever to Ehrman’s crucified man who failed to live up to messianic expectations and required a recasting of what God’s plan and the nature of the messiah had really been. Yes, those expectations do surface in one respect. Paul gives us a glimpse of them in 1 Corinthians 1:18-24: a ‘crucified messiah’ is a stumbling-block and a folly. But no argument surfaces about a crucified human being and what his former followers have made of him. There is no appeal to his innocence, no justification by virtue of what he had done in his life. And no argument justifying his deification, which the Jews could not have failed to condemn.

And what is the ‘different Jesus’ set up against Paul’s “Christ crucified” whom Paul’s rivals are championing? Paul is arguing the fact of his Jesus “having been crucified,” not some interpretation of it which others disagree with. Could his rivals be preaching a non-crucified Jesus? Not if the Jesus common to them both had lived in history and had actually been nailed to a cross. But they could if both of those rival views were derived from scripture.

In fact, in 2 Corinthians 11:4, Paul’s Jesus and the “another Jesus” his rivals preach are said to be products of the spirit, i.e., they are known through revelation. These other “apostles of the Christ,” no doubt equally dependent on scripture and influenced by contemporary philosophy and popular religion, seem to be going about telling of a Jesus who was not crucified, one who was a Revealer Son (an advance on the old idea of personified Wisdom), bestowing knowledge of God which itself enabled salvation. We see other evidence of such a non-sacrificial Revealer Son elsewhere, as in the Odes of Solomon, and even in the Gospel of John, whose ‘Son descending from the Father to bring the bread of life (knowledge of God)’ sits in poor conjunction with the crucified Jesus borrowed from the Synoptics and stripped of any atonement role.

Inventing a crucified messiah

Ehrman thinks to deliver the coup de grace:

Since no one would have made up the idea of a crucified messiah, Jesus must really have existed, must really have raised messianic expectations, and must really have been crucified. No Jew would have invented him. (DJE? p. 164) [Incidentally, compare Ehrman’s “really” language—which would be rendered in Greek as “alethos”—with that of Ignatius in his own declaration that a human Jesus had really (alethos) lived on earth. Here neither one is talking about docetism.]

No Jew would have invented him? But under Ehrman’s scenario, that is precisely what they did. The followers of Jesus, whom Ehrman regards as a human man and not the messiah, turned their crucified master into the messiah, crucifixion and all. In other words, out of that human non-messiah who died on a cross, those Jews invented a crucified messiah. Out of an executed criminal whose mission (whatever it was) had failed, in the face of a hostile establishment and a scornful population with all of the stigmas attached to such an accursed fate for the fledgling movement’s leader, those followers did not do what we might expect would be the natural thing and simply disband and accept that their master had not been what they had hoped. Instead they recast their entire concept of the messiah to accommodate what had happened to him. Again, they invented a crucified messiah out of a human man. They did what Ehrman declares no Jew would ever have done.

Still, I would opt for believing that Ehrman is in fact right. No Jew ever would have invented a messiah out of a crucified human being, one who had not come close to fulfilling messianic expectations. Ehrman has thus presented us with a powerful argument that the Gospel picture of a crucified man turned into the messiah has no basis in reality.

I also find hard to believe Ehrman’s suggestion that a human Jesus’ followers before his death had become convinced he was the messiah. On what basis? A few laudable teachings? Ehrman, as one who rejects supernaturalism, cannot even postulate that his historical Jesus had actually performed powerful miracles (note that he hedges with “things he said and possibly did”) which might have raised his followers’ messianic hopes. Would a man who actually did nothing extraordinary have been interpreted by his followers as being God’s very messiah promised in scripture? If any faint suspicion in that direction had arisen, it would surely have been smothered for good and all by his crucifixion (one not followed, as Ehrman admits, by a physical resurrection).

But that is not what happened at the movement’s genesis. Other forces were operating to come up with the crucified Christ which Paul believed in and preached. It was the invention of a crucified messiah of a much different sort and from a much different direction.

The source of Paul’s messiah

Paul had that Son revealed to him by God (Galatians 1:16). He found a gospel by God about him in the prophets (Romans 1:2). Scripture told of his death, burial and rising (1 Corinthians 15:3-4 with its “kata tas graphas” when read in light of Galatians 1:11-12). The concept of joining oneself to a divine savior had a precedent in the mystery cults, and in the linking of nations to angelic overseers in Judaism. The principle of paradigmatic parallelism, wherein a heavenly figure served as a counterpart to devotees on earth, sharing qualities and conferring guarantees, had been a development in both Jewish sectarian thinking and pagan salvation theory. And of course, a suffering messiah subsequently coming to life again fit into the same general category as the long Near Eastern tradition of dying and rising gods.

That was the type of invention of a crucified messiah which did occur, and Jews were quite capable of doing it, thank you very much.

A suffering messiah

Ehrman stresses the fact that even simply a “suffering” messiah was never anticipated by the Jews. Thus, mythicists are wrong to suggest that the earliest Christians merely made up their mythical suffering messiah, no matter what the sources and influences. But the more Ehrman insists that Jews could never have countenanced such a figure, the deeper a hole he digs for himself, because he must maintain that there were Jews at the beginning of the movement who did accept such a thing, who did create, out of the suffering crucified master they followed, a suffering crucified messiah. Since he does not postulate an actual resurrection which could have impelled those Jews to go so dramatically against their traditional expectations and mindsets, Ehrman is left with insufficient fuel to launch his own scenario into orbit.

Ehrman assures us that not even Isaiah 53, which definitely presents some kind of suffering (and perhaps even dying) figure, was interpreted by any Jewish commentator with a messianic association. As for believing that the crucified Jesus had been a part of God, as Paul clearly did, that God could be executed, Ehrman simply states that the earliest Christians did not believe such a thing. (He will defend that position later in the book, at which time we can examine its feasibility.)

Ehrman reiterates:

We do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jews prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins—or killed at all—let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews, tortured and crucified in full public view. This was the opposite of what Jews thought the messiah would be. Then where did the idea of a crucified messiah come from? It was not made up out of thin air. It came from people who believed Jesus was the messiah but who knew full well that he had been crucified. (DJE? p. 170)

It is at this point that Ehrman appeals to the passage I discussed earlier: 1 Corinthians 1:23, with its “Christ crucified” as a “stumbling block.” But not only do we have a group of Jews after Jesus’ death who supposedly did not regard it as a stumbling block, we have the Jew Paul himself who—even though he had not been a follower of Jesus with any preconceived notions about him (quite the opposite!)—simply ‘changed his mind’ and readily adopted Jesus as a crucified messiah. Not only Paul but—to judge by the rapid spread of Christianity with the inclusion of many Jews in the ranks of the converts—countless other Jews who had never even heard of the crucified man back in Judea, let alone had been his followers, readily adopted a crucified messiah on some proselytizing apostle’s word.

If we look at the hole that Ehrman has dug for himself over a Jewish anathema regarding a crucified messiah, it is impossible to reconcile all this supposed Jewish acceptance of that very thing.

The new messiah

How, then, do we resolve all these contradictions and incompatibilities? By adopting the mythicist viewpoint: that no early Christians followed a human Jesus, regarded him as the messiah, and thus did not have to go against their principles and expectations by coming up with the idea that he was a new type of messiah.

The actual “new type of messiah” was the spiritual heavenly one that Paul and others found in scripture, putting him together out of discrete pieces with no doubt a heavy dependence on Isaiah 53. This was a messiah who had given himself in a sacrificial redemption. They could well have been influenced by the salvation cults of the Greek mysteries, with their dying and rising gods. The concept of suffering and redeeming saviors was in the air around them. Pagans joined popular religions which granted eternal life to those who linked themselves with those dying and rising gods. Some Jews, already heavily influenced by Hellenistic culture since the time of Alexander, wanted in on the action; they searched scripture for signs of their own God’s similar plan of salvation and imagined they received revelation about it from him. The Son and Logos concept was also in the air, the idea of subordinate divine entities who filled intermediary roles, channels to and from the highest God. Jewish cosmology reinforced by Platonic philosophy gave them a heavenly world where counterpart figures and their relationships with humans created parallels and paradigms. Pauline soteriology and christology has clear links with all these precedents.

But this new heavenly messiah did indeed possess a conquering dimension, one quite prominent in certain parts of the record, and even in Paul. Through his sacrifice Christ conquered the demon spirits (see 1 Cor. 2:6-8, Col. 2:15, Ascension of Isaiah 10:12-13, etc.) Those spirits were regarded as greater enemies to human welfare than the Romans (cf. Eph. 6:12), even barring access to heaven. This new heavenly conqueror reunited a universe divided by the demons (cf. Eph. 1:10). These “rulers of this age” were indeed passing away, thanks to the new Jewish savior god.

Yes, a great many Jews did not like the idea of a crucified messiah, whether earthly or heavenly. But what they would have liked far less was the idea that a man had been deified. And as we can see from the epistles, no one was objecting to any such blasphemy, even in the face of a faith which presented its Christ Jesus as a heavenly figure, a veritable emanation of God who shared in his nature and was his agent, not just in salvation, but in creating and sustaining the universe. The religious establishment no doubt did not approve of a subordinate deity beside the One God, which is probably why they persecuted the new cult, but this objection would hardly have been on the same level as disapproving of a man’s promotion to part of the Godhead. (We will deal later with the scholarly trend to de-deify the historical Jesus in the eyes of those who supposedly began the movement.)

Ehrman’s Conclusion

In the concluding pages of this chapter, and of his case for the “evidence of an historical Jesus,” Ehrman summarizes the arguments he has made. Let’s let him remind us of some of those arguments, to which I will append a few of my own summaries:

The evidence is abundant and varied. Among the Gospels we have numerous independent accounts that attest to Jesus’s life, at least seven of them from within a hundred years of the traditional date of his death. (DJE? p. 171)

Well, Ehrman’s concept of “independent” is one which has hardly stood up to examination.

They [the Gospels] are based on written sources—a good number of them—that date much earlier, plausibly in some cases at least to the 50s of the Common Era. . . . They were based on oral traditions that had been in circulation year after year among the followers of Jesus. . . . some of them, however, can be located in Jesus’s homeland, Palestine, where they originally circulated in Aramaic. It appears that some, probably many, of them go back to the 30s CE. (DJE? p. 171)

No case has been made to support pre-Markan written sources other than Q, which had nothing to say about a messiah, or a death and resurrection. Nor is there any actual evidence of oral traditions being transmitted, and certainly not in the earliest extant record, the epistles.

The reality is that every single author who mentions Jesus—pagan, Christian, or Jewish—was fully convinced that he at least lived. Even the enemies of the Jesus movement thought so; among their many slurs against the religion, his non-existence is never one of them. . . . It is the view of all of our authors, for example, the authors of the epistles written both before and after Mark, whose views are based not on a reading of the Gospels but on traditions completely independent of Mark. . . . It is the view of the first century books or letters of 1 Clement, l Peter, l John, Hebrews—you name it. (DJE? pp. 171-172)

One’s enemies can hardly be expected to deny a claim one has not made. And by the time that claim was being made, no one was in a position to be able to dispute it. As for claiming that all those first century epistles held the view that an historical Jesus had lived, Ehrman has simply read that into texts which are far from making such a thing clear. If anything, as we have seen, they show the opposite. (Ehrman’s basis for including 1 John is not from anything the epistle says, but because it is erroneously assumed that the Gospel of John was written previous to it and its content must therefore have been known to the epistle writer.)

There is no doubt that Paul knew that Jesus existed. He mentions Jesus’s birth, his Jewish heritage, his descent from David, his brothers, his ministry to Jews, his twelve disciples, several of his teachings, his Last Supper, and most important for Paul, his crucifixion. (DJE? p. 172)

Almost all of those “mentions” by Paul are problematic, and all of them have been dealt with by mythicism. Besides, they pale in number to the host of indicators in the epistles that their authors do not know of any Jesus who lived on earth. As for Paul mentioning Jesus’ crucifixion, to simply assume that this must automatically mean a crucifixion of a human man on earth is naive apologetics of the crudest sort.

Paul indicates that he received some of these traditions from those who came before him, and it is relatively easy to determine when. (DJE? p. 172)

Well, no he does not. Paul never states that he received any of what he preaches through a human source, and occasionally specifically declares the opposite. None of his “words of the Lord” can be identified as traditions of a human Jesus; and his language suggests otherwise. And determining the “when” is dependent on begging the question surrounding his visit to Peter and James.

And it is also the view of the book of Acts, which preserves very primitive traditions in many of its speeches, traditions that appear to date from the earliest years of the Christian movement, even before the followers of Jesus maintained that he was the Son of God for his entire life or even just from his baptism; according to these traditions, he became the son of God at his resurrection. This is the earliest Christology of them all, probably that of the original followers of Jesus, and so stems from the earliest Palestinian Christian communities. (DJE? p. 172)

It is difficult to see how an Acts written well into the second century, which is fast becoming the favored dating, could have preserved untouched traditions from a century earlier. Rather, those ‘primitive’ views of Jesus reflect, not some pristine pre-epistolary phase, but the world of the Gospels with their more mundane christology arising out of the Q background. Nor is it clear that Acts advocates that Jesus became son of God at his resurrection (which would be at odds with the Gospel of Luke, presumably by the same author, or at least by a later editor of Luke). In fact, Ehrman has himself previously identified that christology as something to be found in the epistles, though there he has misinterpreted it.

Paul claims to have visited with Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter, and with his brother James three years after his conversion, that is, around 35 -36 CE. Much of what Paul has to say about Jesus, therefore, stems from the same early layer of tradition that we can trace, completely independently, in the Gospels. (DJE? p. 172)

Again, such a correspondence is only achieved by begging the question. Even though Paul never mentions receiving any information about Jesus from Peter and James (and in fact seems keen to deny such a thing), Ehrman simply assumes that this is what they must have talked about. And since he already thinks to have identified early historical Jesus traditions preceding the Gospels, such a conversation between Paul and the two Jerusalem pillars provides him with corroboration for those alleged traditions, and vice-versa. One assumption is used to support another assumption, and all go round in circles.

Paul was personally acquainted, as I’ve pointed out, with Peter and James. Peter was Jesus’s closest confidant throughout his public ministry, and James was his actual brother. Paul knew them for decades, starting in the mid 30s CE. It is hard to imagine how Jesus could have been made up. Paul knew his best friend and his brother. (DJE? p. 173)

Another howling case of begging the question.

The single greatest obstacle Christians had when trying to convert Jews was precisely their claim that Jesus had been executed. They would not have made that part up. They had to deal with it and devise a special, previously unheard of theology to account for it. And so what they invented was not a person named Jesus but rather the idea of a suffering messiah. (DJE? p. 173)

That obstacle only shows up in the second century, after the historical Jesus idea had begun to circulate and some Christians were preaching a crucified man (though not most of the second century apologists, who had no human Logos at all, crucified or otherwise). Paul, as I’ve pointed out, did not identify the “crucified messiah” who was a stumbling block to Jews as an earthly man. But they did “make that part up.” They made up their crucified messiah because they wanted a dying and rising god in a Jewish version who would confer salvation, and because they thought they could perceive such an entity within scripture, aided by divine revelation. Some had even imagined they experienced an epiphany of him.

This was a markedly different concept of messiah, and those holding it did not need to buck traditional expectations of a conquering hero who would send the Romans to hell. This messiah acted in an entirely different world, he was of an entirely different nature. His invention was not designed to accommodate a problematic historical event. Ehrman has failed to identify a single indicator in the epistolary record which would illuminate such a claim. And it certainly is not to be found in Q, which is the only other pre-Gospel source we can confidently identify, although parts of the Gospel of Thomas may be contemporary with Q—while having no crucified messiah either.

The rest of Ehrman’s pre-Gospel sources seem to be a figment of his imagination.

23

A Problematic Record

“The present chapter will look at the typical arguments used by mythicists that are, in my judgment, weak and/or irrelevant to the question.”

With that, Ehrman embarks on a direct attempt to discredit some of the arguments on which mythicists like myself base their contention that Jesus did not exist.

Problematic Gospels as Historical Sources

After allowing that the great number of manuscripts of the New Testament documents we possess, as compared to copies of other ancient writings, has nothing to do with whether they are reliable or not, Ehrman makes a pretty heavy set of admissions:

- we do not have the original texts of the Gospels, and there are places where we do not know what the authors originally said;

- the Gospels are not authored by the persons named in their titles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) but were written by people who were not followers of Jesus but lived forty to sixty years later in different parts of the world;

- the Gospels are full of discrepancies and contradictions;

- the Gospels report historical events that can be shown not to have happened.

Moreover,

. . . even though the Gospels are among the best attested books from the ancient world, we are regrettably hindered in knowing what the authors of these books originally wrote. The problem is not that we are lacking manuscripts. We have thousands of manuscripts. The problem is that none of these manuscripts is the original copy produced by the author (this is true for all four Gospels—in fact, for every book of the New Testament). Moreover, most of these manuscripts were made over a thousand years after the original copies, none of them is close to the time of the originals—within, say, ten or twenty years—and all of them contain certifiable mistakes.

But in Ehrman’s view,

for the question of whether or not Jesus existed, these problems are mostly irrelevant.

Inconsistent and contradictory Gospels

Well, let’s see. The Gospels do not agree in their wording, or in the inclusion of certain passages in all the extant copies? “So what?” Ehrman asks. It doesn’t matter, for example, if some copies of John are missing the pericope of the woman taken in adultery, this hardly has any bearing on whether Jesus existed or not.

Taken individually or even as an illustration of a principle, he may be largely right. But what if the overall picture of many types of inconsistencies indicates that each evangelist had his own agenda, and the singular pericopes which his Gospel contains look to be his own invention? What if the vast majority of pericopes are built on identifiable Old Testament precedents with no identifiable history remembered? What if pericopes limited to only some manuscripts of a Gospel would indicate a practice of adding to earlier versions willy-nilly? What if many pericopes are significantly changed from one Gospel to another, suggesting a picture of extensive revision to a documentary record upon which we have no eyes at all for the first century and more of its existence? What does the vast freedom of redaction indulged in by each successive evangelist say about their overall concern for history? Such things are hardly “irrelevant.”

This type of “problem” does indeed undermine the fundamental reliability of these accounts, not excepting the existence of their central character. If writers in the early days could play so fast and loose with ‘history’ and sources, with no word or deed of that central character spared revision, what does that say about the stability and reliability, the basic roots, of any supposed traditions these stories are supposedly based upon?

Obama’s birth certificate

As an example of the totally inapplicable analogies Ehrman often offers, he suggests that some problem in the wording of President Obama’s birth certificate would not undermine the knowledge that he was born. Of course not. That’s because I’ve seen Obama myself on television many times, as have millions of others. There are indeed separate evidences for his existence that are completely reliable. And his birth certificate can be examined contemporaneous with his life.

But if no one alive at some point in the future had actually seen Barack Obama, and they had copies of his alleged birth certificate which came from a century or more after the presumed original, and those copies contained huge discrepancies one from another and could moreover be set beside histories of the 21st century which made no mention of him, well . . . I think we could see that the situation would be quite different.

Gospel authors unknown

Ehrman admits that the attributions of the four Gospels are certainly false, and of the other books of the New Testament only eight are considered written by their named authors. (Seven, of course, he attributes to Paul. He doesn’t identify the eighth, though I can’t imagine which one he has in mind. Revelation?) This is a case of “misattribution” or deliberate forgery. He does note that Jesus’ followers were probably illiterate peasants, whereas the Gospels were written by “highly-educated, Greek-speaking Christians from outside Palestine.”

But it is difficult to accept that a situation in which we have a set of documents constituting our basic witness to an historical Jesus all lacking a time and place and author that we can attach to them is irrelevant to the question of existence for those documents’ central character, especially when the rest of the New Testament authors give us virtually no corroboration for the Gospel story, let alone for that central character. Why indeed do we not have any biographical writings by those closest to an historical Jesus? Not a single disciple could have sat down on his front porch in older age and penned or dictated his eyewitness memoirs? (The apologetic canard that they all died for their faith is not borne out in the record.) No critical scholar I know of credits later Christian tradition that Mark ultimately goes back to Peter’s recollections, or that Acts was written by a companion of Paul. If that sort of thing were actually the case, it is hard to imagine that such a tradition, if known at the time of writing and even if false, would not have found expression in the documents themselves.

Hitler’s Diaries

Ehrman is not the first to use the analogy of the “infamous Hitler diaries,” initially declared authentic by experts, then exposed as forgeries. That, however, says Ehrman, has no bearing on whether Hitler existed or not. But how do we know that, how can we make such a statement? Because we otherwise know that Hitler existed. I do wish apologists would stop offering analogies which involve the principle of begging the very question under debate. The Hitler diaries as forgeries do not cast doubt on Hitler’s existence, it is claimed; therefore the Gospels as forgeries—not only in regard to their authors, but in regard to their details whose reliability as actual history has shrunk to virtually nothing—do not in themselves cast doubt on Jesus’ existence.

That’s fallacious nonsense. If we had no reliable historical evidence that a Hitler existed, no other documents besides the diaries that testified to him, then we could indeed question whether the diaries were fiction from start to finish. If we had correspondence from Germany penned in the 30s and 40s which provided no information about the involvement of an Adolf Hitler in the events of the period, but referred to him as some kind of inspirational spiritual figure driving the Nazi takeover and conquests, we could then quite legitimately regard the diaries as a fictional or allegorical rendition of that spiritual inspiration.

Discrepancies and contradictions

Ehrman admits that the Gospels are full of discrepancies and contradictions. But again, this is allegedly irrelevant. Ehrman mentions the great discrepancy between Jesus’ declarations about himself in John—labelling himself God—and the Synoptic authors who “seem to have forgotten that part.” But his admission that this is a big discrepancy doesn’t go far enough. Are we to believe that two separate traditions could be so far apart, that the one man supposedly behind them both, especially the virtual non-entity Ehrman and other critical scholars today seem to be opting for, could be presented in two such radically different ways? Is it not more sensible that an idea could enjoy radically different embodiments in various versions of a fictional story, that multiple writers could allow themselves these divergent presentations, precisely because they were not basing them on an historical man about whom anything was known, but one who served as a symbol of the movement itself? That parts of their creation are the allegorization of a spiritual concept in order to illuminate it and provide lessons to the community?

Once again, Ehrman offers a blatantly invalid analogy. If we get widely divergent accounts of Bill Clinton’s presidency, would this speak to his non-existence? (Although I doubt that whatever divergence Ehrman has in mind is as wide as the accounts of Jesus.) I’d prefer an analogy more like: even if we have widely different accounts of a world-wide flood in the epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark, does this mean that we should have doubts about the occurrence of the flood, or the existence of either Utnapishtim or Noah? You’re darn right it does. Of course, when you fashion a proper analogy like this which doesn’t involve begging the question, you are liable to come up with a different answer.

Since we can trace the later Synoptics back to a single genesis of their story in Mark, and John in its basic tale of a Galilean preacher and crucified man also looks to go back to Mark, my analogy is quite apropos, since historians of ancient times tend to see the Hebrew Noah’s Ark tradition as based on earlier Mesopotamian versions like that in Gilgamesh and probably further back on other precedents in the prehistoric Middle Eastern region, such as the flooding of the basin of what is now the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. We have no secure reason to believe that any version of the flood, or their characters, are historical.

Non-historical elements in the Gospels

Nor is Ehrman bothered by the amount of obviously fictional events found in our canonical Gospels. He mentions the account of Jesus’ birth in Luke, with its non-historical world-wide census; or the slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem by Herod otherwise unknown to history; or the ruthless Pilate being said to have released the robber and murderer Barabbas in lieu of Jesus. Perhaps not wishing to alarm his readers too much, Ehrman passes up detailing anywhere near all the Gospel elements which critical scholars today regard as fictional: virtually all of Jesus’ miracles, the cleansing of the Temple; the betrayal by Judas—indeed, his very existence; a burial by Joseph of Arimathea who could well be Mark’s invention, too; the resurrection appearances as a historical return of Jesus in a human body, and so on. Not to mention more than three-quarters of the sayings attributed to him.

Does all this invention of Gospel details have anything to do with the issue of whether Jesus existed or not? According to Ehrman, it does not. But that is clearly blinding oneself to an important consideration. First of all, what can we identify as an actually occurring event in Jesus’ life? Virtually nothing. As far as I can see, Ehrman has not committed himself to pointing to a single Gospel event and declaring it reliably authentic in its Gospel presentation. When pressed, about the only thing critical scholars declare as reliably known is that Jesus was crucified. Not a single event of the ministry can be critically judged as presenting historical memory, no miracle account, not even the baptism. The entire recounting of trial and execution is allowed to be entirely fictional, put together out of scriptural elements. Nevertheless, we definitely know that the crucifixion itself happened.

But does this logically follow, let alone with any assurance? If every detail is invented (or at least we cannot point to any detail we can say was not invented), then we need to answer a few prominent questions. Why did nothing from Jesus’ earthly career survive in the tradition? Why not a single aspect of the crucifixion which had no scriptural basis? Why no miracle tradition, even embodying exaggeration, which does not present itself in a standard literary form and as a recasting of a biblical precedent?

And if no actual tradition survived, requiring everything to be constructed out of scripture, what got the movement off the ground, what kept it going? What was being passed along orally, in proselytizing activity to win over new converts in far-flung places, before a literary life was constructed from scriptural sources? To imagine that every Christian apostle held the same alleged Pauline attitude, ignoring a life on earth and preaching entirely in terms of the revelation of heavenly realities and mystical meanings, would be a ludicrous scenario and simply incredible (though this is precisely what the epistles present).

One would surely have to maintain that oral traditions about Jesus’ life were being bandied about, used in everyday missionary work and ritual observance in established congregations. How could some dusty apostle preaching in the marketplace make any headway without them? Of course, we already know that none of this ground-level tradition shows up in the epistles. But why does none of it show up in the Gospels?

If some amount of ‘history remembered’ had to be the lifeblood of the early movement (otherwise none of it makes any sense), why do apparently ivory-tower evangelists present nothing but rehashed Old Testament material? Why are their different versions of Jesus so two-dimensional? So much like wind-up mouthpieces for their own agendas? Why for the Synoptic authors is he nothing more than a re-channelled Moses with an implausible trial and execution tacked on? Why does John’s Jesus sound like a megalomaniac speaking of himself in grandiose terms, a character no author should have expected would ever be accepted as an historical portrait?

There is virtually no human color, no individuality. Everything about Jesus serves one or another purpose for the evangelists—often contradictory ones. And the same void is present not only in the epistles, but even in Q, the much-touted ‘earliest picture of the genuine Jesus.’ The latter is nothing but a bare-bones collection of teachings not all that original, and a few anecdotes, both of which are no more than representative of what the movement itself is engaged in. (Q specialist William Arnal admits that Q’s Jesus is undifferentiated from the general body of Q prophets). The lack of a Jesus personality is so marked in Q that someone like J. D. Crossan must take refuge in saying that the early movement’s focus was entirely on Jesus’ sayings and not on his person.

Ehrman’s appeal to a handful of Gospel events as “alleged episodes which did not happen” hardly does justice to the void in the entire early record, including the Gospels, on any identifiable elements which did happen. Yet all this is supposed to be “irrelevant” to the question of Jesus’ existence. Once again, what is irrelevant is Ehrman’s analogy with George Washington. Yes, we can point to anecdotes about Washington which are generally believed to be false and apocryphal, such as cutting down the cherry tree. But is his crossing of the Delaware equally apocryphal? What about being elected the first President—can we find no corroboration or basis in history for that event? Such analogies involve the very certainty of existence which Ehrman is trying to give to Jesus by placing him in the same category as the analogous figure. That is a flagrant begging of the question, something which Ehrman clearly and alarmingly does not recognize.

Tackling Robert M. Price

In an opening salvo (the main battle will come in the next chapter) against Robert Price’s contention that the Gospel accounts contain nothing but legendary material, Ehrman declares that this is “only marginally relevant to the question of whether Jesus existed.” And he finds fault with Price’s claim and his methodological approach. By way of background, Ehrman refers to the form criticism of the early 20th century as practiced by the likes of Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius. They envisioned that traditions about Jesus, when passing through early Christian communities, adopted certain forms that were shaped by those communities—their Sitz im Leben—their “situation in life.” Furthermore,

One of the implications of this view is that early Christian communities told stories about Jesus only when these stories were relevant to their own communal life situations.

In other words, such communities did not bother to remember and pass on stories about Jesus which they had no use for in their own “life situations.” They didn’t bother with traditions just for the sake of remembering and passing on something about Jesus. According to the form critics, “communities tell stories only when they advance their own self-interests in one way or another.”

(I can’t pass up a short digression here. If early Christian communities facing communal life situations allegedly appealed to stories about Jesus when they were relevant and useful to those situations, where is the evidence of any such practice in the epistles? In the only body of evidence we have in which we would expect to find such a practice, namely the communities of Paul and other epistle writers who faced very serious and divisive “life situations,” this form-critical principle is shown to be a fantasy, for no appeals to such Jesus stories are anywhere in view.)

The criterion of dissimilarity

Ehrman does not agree with Price’s contention that only relevant Jesus stories were told, and he notes a criterion created by the form critics: the criterion of dissimilarity. In other words, can we identify in the preserved traditions elements which did not conform to a community’s self-interests, so that we might say that such traditions were probably genuine to Jesus more or less as they stand, since they could not be shown to be created or reshaped by the community to serve its needs? If we can identify traditions that are dissimilar to the community’s interests, we can assume they were not its own invention and thus they could be said to go back to Jesus. As Ehrman puts it, “Stories like that were probably told simply because they were stories about Jesus that really happened.”

The problem is,

Price’s modus operandi is to go through all the traditions of the Gospels and show that each and every story of Jesus can be shown to meet some need, concern, or interest of the early Christians, so there are no stories that can be shown to go back to a historical figure, Jesus.

Ehrman disagrees, but he does so on a basis which is self-serving. He has just stated that the criterion of dissimilarity is used to indicate—once a tradition is identified as dissimilar to the community’s interests—that it should therefore be considered probably authentic, a story told about Jesus simply because it really happened. But if Price is right about there being no identifiable examples of dissimilar stories, then he is correct in saying, as Ehrman reports him doing (above), that “no stories can be shown to go back” to an historical Jesus using the criterion of dissimilarity.

But Ehrman objects that this is a misuse of the criterion, for it cannot be used to indicate that Jesus did not say or do something. An example of dissimilarity with the community’s interests can indicate that a certain story or saying could be genuine to Jesus, but another story or saying that is similar to those interests is not thereby proven to be not genuine to Jesus. After all, he might actually have said or done something which was in keeping with the community’s later concerns.

This is quite logical, but it is a misrepresentation of Price’s argument, at least as Ehrman presents him. Price’s point is that nothing in the Gospels can be identified with any surety as being genuine to Jesus, because all of it bears “similarity” to the various communal interests; thus the criterion of dissimilarity cannot come into play. And so all of the Gospel content may be seen as “legendary,” that is, traditions created or shaped by the community and attached to their Jesus figure. Price is not saying that because no dissimilarity appears, this proves that all the traditions have to be inauthentic. Some might theoretically, as Ehrman argues, be genuine by coincidence, happening to coincide with community interests. Price is not claiming certainty, as Ehrman seems to suggest. He is simply saying that genuineness has no visible means of support.

Ehrman wants it both ways. Scholarship has created a criterion that could tend to identify genuine sayings or deeds of Jesus. But if that criterion is found to have no application, this must in no way be allowed to indicate the opposite. It is like the perennial ‘proofs’ of God’s existence never making any allowance for contrary ‘proofs’ that could indicate his non-existence. The handiest form of positive criterion is that which has no negative or falsifiability dimension.

Moreover, what Ehrman fails to understand is that, even if coincidence were theoretically possible, it is up to him and historicist scholarship in general to demonstrate some basis on which we could judge that some of the traditions are coincidentally genuine. Price has not misused the criterion; he has set it aside as proving nothing, and having no effect on the argument that all the traditions of the Gospels could be seen as products of the community; there is nothing to prevent that option from being adopted, since they all bear the supposed “legend” indicator of similarity. Ironically, historicist scholarship has itself created this two-edged piece of methodology.

Ehrman’s examples of ‘dissimilar’ traditions

Having outlined his criterion of dissimilarity, Ehrman now goes on to apply it in ways and with examples that are highly dubious. He begins, as usual, by appealing to his vast array of “independent” sources, such as his “seven surviving Gospels” and “multiple independent witnesses to the life of Jesus.” In such a world of independence, finding a given story present in many sources makes it much more likely to be historically genuine.

Appeal to a ‘vast array of independent sources’

Moreover, if a given story with “independent” multiple appearances can also be seen as fitting the criterion of dissimilarity, then we have a doubly strong case for genuineness. Ehrman gives us three examples of this combination. The first is the multiple attestation of Jesus’ crucifixion, an event which would not have been a desirable aspect of the faith, since who would want to “make up” a crucified messiah? Thus, in addition to its multiple witnesses, the crucifixion is an element “dissimilar” to the community’s interests. Therefore, it really happened.

But is the Gospel story historical, or only a story? That’s our basic question. All the ‘repetition’ of a story which can be seen as based on the first written version does not constitute multiple independent sources, let alone corroboration. We need external support. But for all of Ehrman’s ‘independent sources’ which allegedly fed into the Gospels, the only one we can reasonably feel secure about, namely Q, ironically fails to provide that support, as it lacks any story of a crucifixion whatsoever. So does a spinoff to early Q, the Gospel of Thomas.

Moreover, the pre-Gospel record which shows no dependency on or connection with Ehrman’s alleged earlier sources for the Gospels, namely the epistles, fails on two accounts. First, it does not corroborate the story of the crucifixion in the Gospels, because it gives us no such story. Not a single detail of the Gospel trial and crucifixion scenes appears anywhere in the first century epistles. Not even a time, place and agency (except for Paul’s demon spirits). Thus Paul does not figure in the ‘multiple attestation’ to that story, as Ehrman claims. (We can also dismiss his inclusion of Josephus and Tacitus in that attestation, since at the very least the latter could be derived from Gospel-based hearsay, and Josephus’ Testimonium cannot be shown to be anything other than a Christian insertion in its entirety.)

Did the crucifixion really “go against the grain”?

Second, is the crucifixion of Christ in the epistles something that can be regarded as “dissimilar” to communal interests? Hardly. Paul is constantly waxing enthusiastically on the wonder of Christ’s sacrifice as “God’s wisdom.” It is the avenue to salvation and the guarantee of eternal life. It is found in holy scripture and revealed by God himself. Is there any suggestion anywhere in the epistles that Christian believers were ever disillusioned or embarrassed by a crucified messiah, something which then required a vast rationalizing and reinterpreting to make acceptable? No. Nor do the Gospels within their story present the crucifixion as an embarrassment, because it has been ‘redeemed’ and made acceptable by the resurrection. And if the whole story is an allegory, the crucifixion serves a purpose which has nothing to do with any concept of embarrassment.

The criterion of dissimilarity in regard to the crucifixion can only be employed by forcing it on the record as a whole in totally unjustifiable ways.

Ehrman’s second example is even weaker. Mark, Paul and Josephus (i.e., in Antiquities 20) “independently” testify to Jesus having a brother named James; John testifies to him at least having brothers, if unnamed. To simply assume that Paul is referring to a “sibling” is to beg the question when there are two available interpretations, and to list Josephus is to ignore the debate over interpolation. So this is anything but clear multiple attestation. But to also maintain that such a reference fits the criterion of dissimilarity because it would not relate to the community’s interests is really pushing the concept. Can there not be ‘neutral’ elements in a story or historical account? Salome’s dance has nothing to do with the faith, but are we thereby required to consider it historical, especially when Josephus has nothing to say about this alleged cause of the Baptist’s beheading?

On the other hand, not even neutral-looking elements are truly neutral. The interests they serve are the interests of the writer in crafting his story. No novelist ever throws in a completely irrelevant item serving no purpose, even if it’s just to provide background color. What is more natural than giving one’s central character a family, which includes brothers? And the anecdote in Mark 6:1-6 which introduces that family and those brothers can indeed be seen to fit Mark’s interests and to “promote his agenda,” for here he is presenting a proverbial event of a prophet not held in honor in his home town and among his kinsmen. Such kinsmen are then introduced with the proper reaction in order to embody the point of the passage. Is James merely a name plucked out of the air, or might Mark have pressed into service the legendary Jerusalem pillar witnessed in Paul who was known as a “brother of the Lord”? Who knows? But this is hardly a case of any meaningful use of the criterion of dissimilarity.

Was an origin in Nazareth ‘dissimilar’?

For his third example, Ehrman points to the tradition that Jesus came from Nazareth. That, too, is allegedly multiple: Mark, Q, John, L, M. Since we have clear literary chains of dependence between all the Gospels and their components (including the apocryphal ones), we can regard this as a single-source element. And the suggestion that Q may have contained an isolated reference to the name “Nazareth” is much debated and problematic.

Was an origin in Nazareth something dissimilar? Ehrman maintains that this was something that needed to be “explained away.” (John pours scorn on the idea of the messiah coming from Nazareth, while Matthew and Luke in their nativity stories still have Jesus home-based in Nazareth even though they need to have him born in Bethlehem because of the prophecy in Micah.)

But once again, Ehrman fails to look at things from within the context of the story first created by Mark. Because of the chain of literary reworking, later evangelists had to cope with an element that had already been established within the story line. Something becomes “dissimilar” to later writers’ interests in regard to an earlier fictional feature. The baptism of Jesus is another good example. Mark seems to have invented it, while evincing no sign that it was dissimilar to his interests. In fact, it would have fit as the symbolic paradigm to the ritual baptism of the community itself (in contrast to Paul, who fails to employ such a useful historical event). Later evangelists had a different take on its suitability.

We all put slants on our accounts of other people, Ehrman suggests, though I hardly think this is tantamount to creating “legends” about them, not on the scale found in the Gospels. He maintains that some Jesus stories have historical cores identifiable by scholarship. “Shaping the story is not the same thing as inventing the story.” But this is merely the statement of preferred principles. Ehrman has yet to convincingly demonstrate that some Jesus stories do have historical cores, or to explain why so much of the early record presents evidence that for a wide range of writers—the ones who really provide a window onto the initial thinking of the movement—no such cores existed.

24

The Gospels as Interpretive Paraphrases of Scripture

Bart Ehrman now tackles perhaps the most momentous development in the entire history of New Testament scholarship, and it is a fairly recent one. While there were murmurs and insights in this direction beforehand, it was only around 1980 that scholars began to realize that the events of the Synoptic Gospels were wholesale reworkings of elements and stories in Hebrew scripture. A seminal work in this area was an article published in the Harvard Theological Review No. 73 (1980) by George Nickelsburg, entitled “The Genre and Function of the Markan Passion Narrative.”

The Gospels under a microscope

Nickelsburg first of all clinched the case that the entire Markan passion story is made up of building blocks extracted from the prophets and the Psalms, in some cases literally ‘chipped out’ of their scriptural settings and set into place in a new composition like a bricks-and-mortar construction.

Cleansing of the Temple

Thus, Hosea 9:15, “Because of their evil deeds I will drive them from my house,” and Zechariah 14:21, “No trader shall be seen in the house of the Lord,” became the literal building blocks of the Cleansing of the Temple scene.

Agony in Gethsemane

Psalm 42:5, “How deep I am cast in misery, groaning in my distress,” supplied Jesus’ agony in the garden of Gethsemane.

Beatings of Jesus

Isaiah 50:6-7, “I offered my back to the lash. . . I did not hide my face from spitting and insult,” was inserted literally and graphically into the picture of the ordeals which Jesus underwent.

Gambling for Jesus’ clothes

At the foot of the cross the soldiers gambled for Jesus’ garments because Psalm 22:18 said: “They divided my garments among them and for my raiments they cast lots.”

And so on. There is scarcely a thread in the entire fabric of the passion story which has not been extracted from the scriptural tapestry. (In The Jesus Puzzle and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man I trace in detail the course of Mark’s passion story through its scriptural and literary sources.)

But it was not only at the nitty-gritty level that Mark used scripture to craft his story. Nickelsburg revealed that the overall shape of it followed a common generic model found in centuries of Jewish writing.

. . . the tale of a righteous individual who is conspired against and falsely accused, who remains obedient to God and puts trust in him, who undergoes trial and suffering, finally to be condemned to death. Usually at the last moment, God intervenes miraculously to rescue the protagonist and he or she is vindicated, shown to have been innocent of the charge. Finally, as a reward for the ordeal, the innocent one is raised or restored to a high position at court or in the community, and the adversaries are discredited. In later versions of the tale, the protagonist actually suffers death, but is exalted in Heaven after death. [Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.450-1]

This generic story is found several times throughout the Hebrew bible and apocryphal documents, from the story of Joseph in Genesis to the Alexandrian Wisdom of Solomon, and was apparently derived from an archetypal tale in pagan tradition called the Story of Ahiqar. Biblical scholarship now refers to it as “The Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One.” In creating his passion tale, found nowhere else in the preceding Christian record, Mark follows the features of this generic literary plot step by step.

Since the 1990s, owing in great part to the work of Robert M. Price who recognized and catalogued a great number of them, such a use of scriptural building blocks and motifs came to be seen as pervasive even in the ministry portion of Mark’s Gospel, to be carried further in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The story of Jesus’ life and death in the Synoptics is a literal mosaic of shaped and colored pieces of scripture.

The question becomes: is that all it is? Are there any pieces of history to be found imbedded in the mortar, or perhaps buried in the underlying base?

A process of midrash

For mythicism, “midrash” has become the principal key to understanding and evaluating the Gospels. As Ehrman puts it,

A number of mythicists argue that the New Testament Gospels are little more than reworkings and paraphrases of passages of the Old Testament applied to an invented figure Jesus. Within Jewish tradition this approach to interpreting a text by paraphrasing, expanding, and reapplying it is called Midrash; if the text is a narrative rather than a set of laws, the Midrash is called haggadic (as opposed to halakhic). And so Robert Price [The Christ Myth Theory and its Problems] has recently argued that “the whole gospel narrative is the product of haggadic Midrash upon the Old Testament. (DJE? pp. 197-198)

By now we can anticipate the type of counter Ehrman will put forward to this:

The fact that a story about a person has been shaped according to the mold of older stories and traditions does not prove that the core of the story is unhistorical. It simply shows how the story came to take its shape. (DJE? p. 198)

As an illustration of this contention, Ehrman describes how Matthew has shaped his story of Jesus to represent him as a “new Moses.” His nativity story is full of Mosaic motifs; Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness as Moses spent 40 years in exile in Midian; Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments are mirrored in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in which he delivers his interpretation of the Law of Moses. And so on. Mark, too, was concerned with creating Mosaic parallels, and his miracle sets, for example, have been shown to have parallels with the miracles in Exodus.

Ehrman claims that Matthew shaping the story in this way has nothing to do with the question of whether or not Jesus existed. And he once again offers analogies which actually work in mythicism’s favor. He points to modern literature which often shapes the stories we tell in typical ways. “We have the rags-to-riches story, the feel-good war story, the downfall-of-the-great-man story.” Such a shape is not related, he claims, to the question of whether the figure in the story actually existed.

Shaping the story of a real person

As an example of the “downfall” genre, Ehrman suggests that the story of the demise of Richard Nixon could be cast as a Shakespearean tragedy. He asks:

Does our ability to shape the story in the way we want mean that Watergate didn’t happen or that Richard Nixon never lived? No, it just means that Nixon’s story is amenable to a certain kind of shape. (DJE? p. 199)

Surely the reader can recognize the flaws in this analogy. First of all, Nixon’s story is amenable to the shape of a ‘downfall of a great man’ tale because Nixon’s actual life itself was the downfall of a great man. We know that. We “want to shape the story” of Nixon as a downfall tale because that is what it was. No one is going to cast Nixon’s biography in the shape of F.D.R.’s presidency in order to portray him as one of the great Presidents, because he was nothing like Roosevelt. (Just as the historical Jesus, in Ehrman’s view, was in reality very little like Moses.)

Ehrman speaks of having facts of Nixon’s life fitting the downfall mold, “and the facts that don’t fit can easily be bypassed or altered to make them fit.” But how much liberty do we really have to portray Nixon in ways and with anecdotes which are not only completely fictional but clearly belong to some former President? Ehrman can hardly be suggesting that a biography of Nixon is going to contain nothing that is recognizably a genuine aspect of Nixon’s life.

Like all of Ehrman’s attempted analogies, this one fails on the “begging the question” flaw, for we know that Nixon existed, and we can identify elements in any biography of him which are historical and enjoy other corroboration. If we did not, and nothing in an alleged biography of him could be verified as authentic, then we might have good reason to question his existence.

Once again, if writings from the period of Nixon’s alleged life did not present him as a human being, did not themselves give us traditions about his administration and actions in an earthly context, if chronicles of the U.S. Presidency failed to make any room for his term of office, or if Watergate and the secret tapes were never mentioned, Nixon mythicists would have every reason to hold their heads high in the face of hostile historical Nixon defenders.

Jesus and Elijah

Ehrman, admitting their close connection as pointed out by Price, compares the account of a miracle by Elijah in 1 Kings 17:17-24 with a miracle by Jesus recounted in Luke 7:11-17, each telling of the raising of a widow’s son. Internal elements, too, are very similar, down to the reaction of the crowd around Jesus resembling the reaction of the widow to Elijah’s miracle. Ehrman points out:

The crowd, in other words, realizes that Jesus has just performed a feat like his predecessor Elijah, and that he too, therefore, is a great prophet of God. (DJE? p. 200)

Yet there is a fly in this ointment. The crowd is fictional, since Luke is not presenting this anecdote as though it really happened as described. Because he has consciously modelled it on the Elijah tradition, he means the anecdote as something symbolic. As Ehrman intimates, the reaction of the crowd represents how Luke wants his readers to react. But if the use of an Old Testament mold has that purpose, the readers must be expected to be familiar with that mold. And if they are, will they not recognize Luke’s anecdote for what it is: a piece of fiction, modelled on an ancient tradition from scripture?

Apparently Luke is not concerned about how his ‘biography’ of Jesus is going to strike his readers. Why is he not worried that, if those readers are given only fictional stuff designed to provoke them into making judgments about his Jesus, they will begin to wonder what the real man in his real life had actually done, and are those judgments justified?

Searching for the real man

Moreover, if Luke is presenting this ‘event’ as a piece of symbolism, how do we know what it symbolizes? A real event and a real man ‘souped up’ in a scriptural direction? Or only a type of event or even a spiritual truth or expectation about the future? If the whole of any Gospel is symbolism, more or less midrash from start to finish, how do we point to the supposed historical man the Gospels are alleged to symbolize? (Does any critical scholar today really think that the Jesus of the Gospel of John is anything but a symbolic figure for whatever idea the writer wants his figure to represent?)

And where does the real man exist in actual evidence? Certainly not in the epistles! Should we think that anyone familiar with Isaiah and the Psalms would have been taken in by Mark’s crucifixion account and not realize that it was nothing but a pastiche of scriptural passages? (Mark, unlike later evangelists, makes no effort to identify his pastiche as fulfillments of prophecies in scripture.) “Where’s the real beef?” many would have asked.

The late Raymond E. Brown, when the extent of midrash in the crucifixion story was first put forward, voiced the opinion that it was “absurd” to think that early Christians acquired absolutely no details about Jesus’ crucifixion which would have been preserved in tradition and found their way into the Gospel account.

It should be equally absurd to think that the evangelists, no matter how they wanted to ‘shape’ the story of Jesus, would not have had available, and not have wanted to include, traditions about him which did not have a close parallel in scripture, or a direct bearing on that desired shape. Would our Nixon biographer deliberately leave out Nixon’s achievements in regard to China simply because they didn’t fit in with a ‘downfall of Tricky Dick’ theme?

And Ehrman himself is in a quandary. If the Gospels are based on a man who, as he and others maintain, was really rather ordinary and did not raise people from the dead (the epistles’ silence on any such wonders should rule out the development of even inauthentic traditions of that nature), whatever would lead the early movement, or the evangelists themselves, to attribute such grand miracles to him? Would Luke and the others not hesitate to portray him as the greatest thing since sliced Moses ever to walk the earth?

But if the Jesus of the Gospels is an allegory (hyperbolic, as many allegories are) about the activities and preaching of the movement itself and its immediate expectations, the evangelists are on less risky ground. Considering that the raising of the dead and other remarkable healings were prophesied in Isaiah as destined to be among the signs of the imminence of the kingdom, authors and readers alike could more easily accept such miracles being included in a basically fictional story with a symbolic character, representing the times that were unfolding.

Similarities and differences

While acknowledging that the raising of the widow of Nain’s son has been modelled on Elijah, Ehrman maintains that some of the other stories of Jesus which Price claims are equally midrashic are actually not so close to their alleged scriptural models. Beside some evident similarities stand other elements which are quite different. But is Ehrman suggesting that in these cases the Gospel anecdote thus constitutes history remembered? If there are some similarities, and if the picture created of the Gospel story as a whole is that it is based in scripture, why not assume that the differences are simply a matter of freedom taken by the evangelist who did not feel it necessary to reflect his model in every detail? In some cases, a scriptural precedent could have served as an inspirational starting point.

Erhman: all fiction / some fiction

Ehrman asks us to compare two stories. The first is Palm Sunday, Jesus riding a donkey (or two, in Matthew) into Jerusalem to the acclaim of the crowd who call him messiah and king. The scriptural sources for this episode are plain, mainly a prophecy in Zechariah (9:9). Ehrman leans toward seeing the whole thing as fiction, since such an entrance to such an acclamation would probably have led to Jesus’ immediate arrest by ever-present Roman soldiers, especially at Passover time when the atmosphere was volatile and their vigilance high.

As a contrast, Ehrman offers the baptismal story. At its heart, the heavens open and a dove descends along with the voice of God declaring Jesus his beloved Son. This is historically implausible, says Ehrman, and was created to represent God adopting Jesus as his son. Its quote of Psalm 2:7 identifies it as created out of scripture. But does this mean that none of it is historical, that no baptism of Jesus took place at all? Ehrman claims it does not—though he says he is leaving his ‘proof’ until later.

I would prefer to point out immediately that neither the epistles nor Q make any mention of Jesus’ baptism. Considering the pertinence it would have had to Paul’s treatment of the ritual of baptism in his own communities, and Q’s focus on the preaching of John the Baptist who prophesies the coming of one who will “baptize with fire” while making no mention of his own baptism of this coming one, these silences on any such event should be the deciding factor in relegating it entirely to Gospel midrash.

Thomas Thompson and intertextual dependency

Thomas L. Thompson is a Hebrew Bible specialist (of the “minimalist” variety) who has closely studied the Gospels and sees them not as based on oral traditions but as literary fictions constructed according to traditions found in the Old Testament. For him, the Gospel Jesus is a literary creation in the same way that Abraham, Moses and others in the Hebrew texts are. To rebut this, Ehrman appeals to two weak contentions: just because the stories of Jesus are made up based on other texts does not “necessarily” mean that they are reflective of no actual historical figure. Taken by itself, this is theoretically true, but it hardly constitutes a counter-argument which addresses Thompson’s case. (And it’s an argument Ehrman has used at every turn.)

His other contention is that he has already provided “solid and virtually incontrovertible evidence that the stories of Jesus were circulated orally before being written down.” Regardless of the dubiousness of this claim (as we have seen), Ehrman has just bypassed the entire mythicist argument he is claiming to discredit. Price and Thompson have been demonstrating that the written-down stories of Jesus are literary creations based on previous texts. This demonstration rules out that those written-down versions were, or could have been, renditions of oral traditions. The literary and intertextual nature they embody could not have been preserved and transmitted through oral channels; they came into being in a literary context.

Thus when Ehrman says that “To say that our Gospel stories were based in many instances on earlier literary texts does not necessarily mean that the stories were invented as written traditions instead of existing first as oral traditions,” he is making a self-contradictory statement. Those written creations “based on earlier literary texts” were, by definition and demonstration, something that could not have “existed first as oral traditions.” Ehrman has in no way even attempted to rebut the case as presented by Thompson and Price; he is simply declaring his own view, one incompatible with that case and containing its own internal contradiction.

And Ehrman once again defends his view by begging the question:

For one thing, there is no other way to explain how Christianity spread throughout the Roman world, as followers of Jesus converted other people to believe, not by showing them books (almost all of them were illiterate) but by telling stories about Jesus. (DJE? p. 206)

The reader may remember that I used a similar observation in an opposite direction. Ehrman’s statement is surely true—if they were preaching an historical Jesus. But then those Jesus stories ought to have shown up not only in the epistles, but in the Gospels; whereas the whole point here is that in the latter they do not. Everything looks like a literary creation process based on scriptural texts and not on oral traditions. Ehrman rejects any alternate explanation put forward by mythicists for the spread of Christianity and, begging the question that early Christian apostles were preaching an historical Jesus, uses that to conclude that oral traditions must therefore have existed and that behind the literary creations of the Gospels must lie those oral traditions—Thompson’s and Price’s demonstrations notwithstanding.

Receiving and passing on

To support his stance on oral tradition, Ehrman points to several passages which indicate that oral traditions were being received and passed on. But in one of these examples, 1 Corinthians 11:23-6, Paul tells us directly that he “received from the Lord” those words of Jesus at the Lord’s Supper—which is a pretty obvious reference to personal revelation. Ehrman’s claim of oral tradition requires the text to be forced into saying something which it clearly does not. But that’s standard practice in traditional scholarship.

Another is Paul’s statement of his gospel in 15:3-4. But “kata tas graphas,” “according to the scriptures,” can mean “as we learn from the scriptures,” which would fit Paul’s claim in Galatians 1:11-12 that he got his gospel from no man but through revelation. To claim that it means “in fulfilment of the scriptures” (though a valid translation per se) in order to allow the “received” to mean through oral tradition from others, sets up a contradiction with the Galatians declaration that has to be ignored. Again, standard practice.

Believing the Lukan Prologue and John’s trustworthy witness

Ehrman also naively accepts the declaration by “Luke” in the Prologue to the Gospel that he is drawing up his account of events “following the traditions handed down to us by the original eyewitnesses,” despite the fact that his Gospel is full of stories—including the one about Mary and Elizabeth which begins right after, followed by a nativity story which is as invented as the one in Matthew—that are clearly not based on eyewitness traditions but are his own constructions out of scripture.

Ehrman’s naivete is in evidence as well in his reference to John 19:35, in which the evangelist, after telling that the soldiers did not break the legs of Jesus but instead stabbed him with a lance, declares that “This is vouched for by an eyewitness, whose evidence is to be trusted.” We can put about as much trust in this statement as we can for any of the other inventions found in John which are incompatible with other Gospels. And no other Gospel has apparently heard of this ‘eyewitness’ feature of John’s crucifixion scene. Considering that the writer has introduced the avoidance of breaking Jesus’ legs on the basis of a scriptural prohibition about breaking the bones of a sacrificial offering, just as he has introduced many other features similarly based on scripture, it is not too much to suspect that 19:35 is, to put it simply, a lie. (Might we give the poor guy an out by suggesting that perhaps the line was added later?)

All this is either naivete on Ehrman’s part, or else a desperate inclusion of anything he can put his hand on for support, no matter how weak or problematic. One of those grasped straws is the lost Papias, who Eusebius reports claimed to have received oral traditions from the companions of Jesus’ disciples. And what traditions!—from the explosion of Judas, to a would-be apostle drinking poison and living, to the survival of people raised by Jesus until the reign of Hadrian. Third-hand hearsay ‘evidence’ of this nature three centuries after the ‘fact’ would be tossed out—indeed laughed out—of any court. Except, of course, in the historicist court convened to prove the existence of an historical Jesus by a panel of pre-committed jurors.

Conviction on other grounds

The Gospels contain fictions. Does this render the character about whom those stories are told entirely fictional? Appealing to the genre of historical novels, real historical people placed in some unreal situations, Ehrman answers no. The fictional Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens does not render the French Revolution a myth. But we know from reliable sources that the French Revolution happened, whereas Dickens’ Tale taken in the absence of any other evidence would not tell us that. But perhaps Ehrman has finally caught on. He admits that the question “has to be decided on other grounds.” He is perfectly correct when he says, “One instead needs to look for other evidence.”

The problem is, the “other evidence” is never allowed to speak for itself. It is consistently forced into the mold created by the preconception of the Gospels as the story of a real man and real events, despite their pervasive nature as Old Testament midrash, and despite the clear voices of the epistle writers who are telling us quite a different story.

25

Is Jesus Based on Pagan Precedents?

Bart Ehrman now addresses what is undoubtedly the most controversial aspect of mythicism, or at least of some expressions of it. It forms very little of my own case for a mythical Jesus and I acknowledge that this whole area must be approached with caution and qualification. One might call it “a cult of parallels.”

As Ehrman puts it,

. . . now rather than arguing that Jesus was made up based on persons and prophecies from the Jewish Bible, it is claimed that he was invented in light of what pagans were saying about the gods or about other “divine men,” superhuman creatures thought to have been half mortal, half immortal. (DJE? p. 207)

Comparing Apollonius of Tyana

He gives as an example the career of Apollonius of Tyana, an ancient sage who was reputed to have had a miraculous birth, gathered disciples, taught a spiritual ethic, healed the sick, was in part divine, and after death at the hands of authorities came back to appear to his followers.

Apollonius is perhaps not the best analogy to offer in these circumstances, since he was a figure who apparently lived not prior to or even contemporaneous with the reputed Jesus, but a little after him (he is supposed to have died 98 CE). So there can be no question of early Christians modelling their Jesus on Apollonius. But he does represent a class of ‘divine man’ (the theios aner) in the ancient world, including much older figures of dubious existence like Heracles, some of whose characteristics the story of Jesus shared.

Ehrman claims quite legitimately that such comparisons with someone like Apollonius of Tyana have little if anything to do with the question of Jesus’ existence. Since Apollonius himself is almost certainly an historical figure (we have a little better attestation to his existence than we do for Jesus), this shows that historical persons can acquire extensive legendary characteristics. But what of those figures who are generally not judged to be historical, more god than man, incarnated to earth in an undefined or primordial past?

Trotting out Kersey Graves

Here Ehrman latches onto the very worst and most notorious expression of parallel-hunting in the history of mythicism: Kersey Graves’ 1875 The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors. Poor Kersey has become the favorite punching bag of historicists, much of it due to his own fault. Ehrman styles his work as “an exaggerated set of mythicist claims” with some justification, but his own remark that

Graves provides not a single piece of documentation for any of them. They are all asserted, on his own authority. (DJE? p. 211)

is itself an exaggeration. Graves’ references are anything but exact or even useful, but he is not quite appealing to his own authority when he says things like: “Their holy bibles (the Vedas and Gita) prophesy of [Chrishna] thus,” and goes on to quote several sentences from those bibles (1960 reprint, p.297). Graves hardly made up these passages himself.

The point is, as inefficient and unreliable as Kersey Graves is, and as doubtful as many of his parallels are, he was part of a school of scholarship around the end of the 19th century which perceived that much of the story of Jesus shows an extensive commonality with pagan precedents, either of the mythic hero and divine man or of the myths of gods or demigods who had come to earth. In dismissing the whole thing as unrelieved poppycock historicism does itself no favor. Others in that field, such as rationalist author John Remsburg in The Christ, did a better job than Graves in pointing to primary sources for many of his examples. It is perhaps telling that of that era of scholarship, Ehrman chose to place only Kersey Graves in the hot seat.

The need for interpretation

The problem with this “cult of parallels” is that many, perhaps most, are based on interpretation. As I say in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, Appendix 3,

The primary sources from which such comparisons are made are a motley uncoordinated array of texts and fragments of texts, artifacts, frescos, uncertain records of traditions and rituals, excavated temples and places of worship that require interpretation and a careful gleaning of their significance. (JNGNM, pp. 664-665)

Ehrman brings up the example of Mithras, noting that the interpretation of Mithraic artifacts (there are no texts) is much debated. An alleged parallel one often encounters is the birth of Mithras being attended by shepherds. The idea comes from several sculptural representations of Mithras’ birth, in which he emerges from the head of a rock, the rock being the cosmos. At the base of the rock are attending figures who have suggested to some the idea of shepherds. (Others reject this in favor of seeing them as the common Mithraic figures of Cautes and Cautopates.) The rock itself, and the known fact of the tradition that Mithras slew the bull in a cave, have suggested that the birth was seen as taking place in a cave, which not only supports the shepherds interpretation, it leads to the ‘parallel’ that Mithras was born in a cave as Jesus was born in an outdoor enclosure (manger).

Such an interpretation is certainly a weak one, and should not be presented as something established. Others are stronger, such as Jesus turning water into wine in imitation of Dionysos, or Jesus as the good shepherd being ultimately derived from Egyptian stylings of Horus. Such parallels need not always be regarded as consciously borrowed (although the Christian turning of the picture of Isis and Horus into the Madonna and Child is an unabashed appropriation and is probably indicative of wider plagiarizing). They are common mythemes in the mythology of the age which early Christians plugged into in their effort to portray their Jesus as possessing the same desirable qualities and features which rival gods and god-men did. To ignore such parallels and claim that Jesus has a unique set of historical features and underwent a unique set of historical experiences is a stance that leaves itself open to ridicule.

Did the Church fathers know the mysteries?

Ehrman now makes a comment which is perhaps as ludicrous as the common apologetic proposal that the mystery cult gods’ features of death and rising were in fact borrowed from Christianity (to be discussed in the next chapter). He dismisses the similarities which Christian fathers like Tertullian and Justin acknowledge between the cults and Christianity as quite possibly mistaken. What, after all, would they have known about “secret” societies? He suggests:

It was because they wanted pagans to realize that Christianity was not all that different from what other pagans said and did in their religions so that there would be no grounds for singling out Christians and persecuting them. The Christian sources that claim to know something about these mysteries, in other words, had a vested interest in making others think that the pagan religions were in many ways like Christianity. For that reason—plus the fact that they would not have had reliable sources of information—they generally cannot be trusted. (DJE? p. 214)

This suggestion fails on more than one count. Even if the cults had a proscription in the direction of secrecy, it is one thing to accept that no writer would openly contravene it by setting forbidden knowledge down on paper (and no one apparently did). It’s another thing to think that no knowledge of what went on, or what the cults believed in, ever came out through word of mouth from the millions over the centuries who had become initiates. Moreover, would Justin or Tertullian be likely to present made-up statements about the mysteries which many pagan readers would have been in a position to deny?

Besides, Origen gives us evidence that Celsus was making the same kind of accusation against the Christians: that their beliefs and practices were nothing new over those of the pagan mysteries and other mythology. And we are not talking here exclusively of the secrets of the cults, but of common mythemes generally.

Justin Martyr would hardly have gone to the extent of accusing the demons of making up counterfeits of Christian ritual ahead of time if he was not speaking of clearly known parallels between the rival faiths. The related apologetic suggestion that Justin didn’t know what he was talking about is a sign of desperation.

When is a parallel not a parallel?

Ehrman also indulges in another apologist tactic. Something that is said to be common between Jesus and a pagan hero or god is not really a parallel at all. In the matter of the “virgin birth” Ehrman points out that this “came to mean that Jesus’s mother had never had sex.” In pagan divine men, on the other hand, impregnation was not by any ‘holy spirit’ but by the god himself in a form which definitely involved sex. “The child is literally part human and part deity.”

But that is precisely what Christians were claiming, part human through Mary, part God. The difference in regard to whatever act produced either one is beside the point. Early Christians were not primarily motivated by a desire to have Mary immaculate; they wanted Jesus to have a divine father, regardless of the process. Considering that Jews were far more sexually inhibited than pagans (Paul’s fixation on sins of the flesh seems pathological), they were not likely to come up with a seduction or rape of Mary by a penis-wielding God in human form.

Although Ehrman does not bring it up here, another parallel that is allegedly not a parallel is the resurrection of Jesus, which is claimed to be unique from those of the pagan savior gods. Osiris was not raised to earth or to his former human body; he simply went to the Underworld to rule over the dead. No other dying god returned to flesh—though a sort of exception is usually made for Dionysos. (A reassembled Osiris even with a false member was alive enough to father Horus on Isis, an accomplishment outstripping anything Jesus did after emerging from his tomb.)

But all this is basically a matter of cultural differences. The Greeks had no fixation on having the dead rise to their former bodily state; the bliss of the soul in the afterlife was what mattered. Their central point was that the god, though killed, was revivified; he conquered death and went on to a life in the spiritual world. This conferred guarantees on the initiates.

Besides, this is precisely the picture created in the epistles, which scholarship has acknowledged. In the thinking of Paul and the other epistle writers, there is no sign of a resurrection for Jesus in any former earthly flesh. He seems to proceed directly to a spiritual rising in heaven; he died, then he came back to life and ascended to take his seat at the right hand of God (sometimes with a detour to Sheol to rescue the dead righteous, or a heavenly sanctuary to offer his spiritual blood). Whether one goes to a high heaven and the other to an underworld makes no difference. It would seem that this is indeed a legitimate parallel between Jesus (even in his later Gospel form) and the mystery cult gods, one which too many scholars have been keen to deny or obscure. (Gunter Wagner in his Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries is a classic case, seconded by Jonathan Z. Smith’s writings on the subject).

Note: This topic and the overall issue of comparison between the mysteries and Jesus is dealt with at length in the next chapter.

Dying for sin

Ehrman makes the point that no pagan savior god was said to die in order to atone for humanity’s sins. Again, a cultural difference, again related to the Jewish obsession with sin and disobedience to their God. I’m not sure what Ehrman thinks to prove by pointing out that there is no pagan parallel to this aspect of Christian soteriology. This is indeed an exclusively Christian feature, though it is hardly one which has to relate to a death on earth; a sacrifice in heaven (as Hebrews demonstrates) could confer salvation just as well. However, this is a soteriological feature that we see little evidence of even in Christianity before Paul’s own gospel (as in 1 Cor. 15:3).

I’ve pointed out earlier that in passages like the pre-Pauline hymn of Philippians 2:6-11 and the Ascension of Isaiah, Jesus’ sacrifice seems to be for the purpose of overcoming the demon spirits or being given power over the universe. His resurrection enables the devotees’ resurrection, but not specifically through forgiving their sins. The focus in Revelation is on the former, with only a brief nod in the direction of the latter.

No doubt early Christian soteriology was in a state of flux as ideas were being formulated and solidified. One Hollywood movie (was it The Robe, or Ben-Hur?) naively had one of Jesus’ followers standing at the foot of the cross and intoning: “He has given his life to forgive the sins of the world,” or words to that effect. Paul was undoubtedly instrumental in the eventual adoption of this central interpretation of the crucifixion.

When the gentiles took over

Ehrman suggests that similarities to pagan precedents appeared only when Christianity moved beyond its Jewish roots and developed features for Jesus that gentiles could relate to. Earlier Jewish-Christians, he claims, tended to portray Jesus in Old Testament terms. Unfortunately, this picture does not work in light of the actual texts. If we presume that the evangelists were essentially gentile and reflected gentile interests (possibly excepting Matthew), there is as much drawing on Old Testament precedents in them as there is on mythemes grounded in pagan traditions.

Moreover—and this is central to our question of parallels—the entire pre-Gospel record is almost devoid of the common type of parallels which are in debate here. The vast majority of such parallels are of a “biographical” nature, but there is no biography of Jesus in the epistles. No virgin birth, no nativity elements, no gathering of disciples, no healing miracles, no details of Christ’s crucifixion, no return from the grave in flesh. Not even echoes of Old Testament figures and events. Ironically, the only things that do parallel previous expressions are the principles of salvation theory, and these are almost exclusively pagan, not Jewish.

Paul’s entire soteriology is made up of Christ’s death and rising, salvation through unity with the god and a sharing in his experiences, a baptismal rebirth, sacred meals commemorating foundational activities of the god, the very concept that there was a son and emanation of the highest Deity—these things are not derived from Jewish precedents. At best, some basics may be present in the philosophy of Hellenistic Judaism.

Paul vs. the evangelists

Why do we not find biographical parallels in Paul and the other epistle writers to elements in pagan savior god and hero mythology? Had they not felt the same urge to portray an historical Jesus in heroic ways, especially since even their audiences and converts had a prominent gentile component, as is evident from the struggle over Jewish principles and whether gentiles had to conform to them? If Jesus had lived on earth in the same way as pagan heroes like Alexander, or was competing with savior gods whose myths had an earthly character since such myths had arisen in settings of a distant or primordial time on earth, why was Paul’s Jesus not subject to the same embellishment and imbedding in an earthly time, place and identity, even if exaggerated and mythologized—especially if he had indeed been incarnated to earth?

The answer, of course, is that the Pauline Christ was formulated not from history and an historical figure, but from scripture and Platonic and Jewish sectarian views of the universe, wherein supernatural entities acted in heaven and generated their guarantees of salvation from the spiritual realm.

But what does this say for the role of the evangelists? Were they building on a real historical man by accreting to him familiar legendary features common in the atmosphere of the day? Was the process they followed a largely unconscious one, as they collected and reworked oral traditions about the recent man they were now calling a Son of God, the Messiah and Son of Man? But they were sitting at their writing desks, crafting literary documents, not preaching in the marketplace. The pervasive midrashic conversion of the Hebrew scriptures into stories of Jesus was hardly unconscious. And the use of common mythemes in putting together those literary creations could hardly have been unconscious either. Moreover, did they purposely leave out any traditions that did not fit those mythemes and heroic characteristics? Did they reject as unusable anything they could not align with Old Testament precedents?

Ehrman may be technically correct in saying that even the conscious introduction of known features and mythemes into their story of Jesus does not in itself prove that he was entirely fictional. But it throws the burden of proof on historicists to show that he was not. Somewhere, somehow, they are going to have to find reliable evidence of a real historical man, and so far Ehrman has produced very little if anything of that nature, either in the Gospels or in the earlier epistolary record which he has been obliged to misrepresent in an effort to force it in that direction.

Robert Price’s Mythic Hero Archetype

Ehrman briefly addresses Robert Price’s contention in The Christ Myth Theory that the story of Jesus in the Gospels closely fits the archetype of the “mythic hero” found throughout antiquity, many of whose 22 characteristics fit Jesus. Regrettably, Ehrman undertakes no detailed refutation of Price’s case. Since a couple of other figures who also fit the archetype were historical persons, he limits himself to claiming that the same principle could be applied to Jesus. Price, however, maintains that in Jesus’ case we have no separate information concerning him, nothing “neutral” about him. “Every detail [of the Gospel stories] corresponds to the interests of mythology and epic.”

Ehrman begs to differ:

It simply is not true that all the stories in the Gospels, and all the details of stories, promote the mythological interests of the early Christians. The claim that Jesus had brothers named James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, along with several sisters, is scarcely a mythological motif; neither is the statement that he came from the tiny hamlet of Nazareth or that he often talked about seeds. (DJE? p. 217)

As I’ve pointed out before, it is not only mythological interests which produce invented details. Mark is writing a story. Something has to be put into that story. Background elements, features of the portrait of its central character which serve purposes within the story, touches of color or elements which advance the course of the plot. Jesus has to come from somewhere, and who knows what led to Mark’s choice of Nazareth (if it was his). If he had chosen Antioch, Ehrman would have claimed that this had to be true because it wasn’t identifiably in the story’s theological interests.

In the introduction to the parable of the sower (4:1-2), Mark provides a detailed set-up beside a lake, with a crowd so large Jesus had to get into a boat and go offshore and preach from there as the people crowded the water’s edge. This is hardly mythological. Does that mean the scene is historically true? As for talking about seeds, Jesus isn’t killing time by giving farming lessons, he is using them in making parables which embody his message, or at least the message that Mark wants to get across through his Jesus character.

Leaving a mark on history

Did Jesus leave a mark on non-religious—or as Price puts it, profane—history? In the sense of leaving a record in one’s own time, Price’s answer is no. Paul & Co. give us no footprint in the earthly sand, only on the pages of scripture and in the minds of Christ’s devotees who envisioned themselves as part of his “body.” And the Gospels, to historicism’s dismay, can show us only marks left by the imprint of the Old Testament and echoes of pagan myth. Even that mark did not surface until later, after the dissemination of Mark’s story, which still lacks any recoverable link with history. To offset that, Ehrman offers us only the odd feature that any novelist would provide.

But there is certainly no doubt that the idea of Jesus left a mark. Two thousand years later we are still dealing with that mark. But Homer, too, left an indelible mark on a thousand years of Greek history, and scholars are quite prepared to consider it possible that he was a non-existent legend who simply represented a class of poets of late Mycenean times. Confucius left a powerful mark on Chinese history, but today the existence of an actual sage of that name has been questioned. So too with Lao-Tze and the Buddha. A known fictional William Tell left his imprint on Swiss nationalistic identity. And for the Romans over a thousand years, Aeneas, Romulus and Remus were as real as their own grandfathers.

But time and effect can be misleading, and no guarantee of the reality we were led to believe produced them.

26

Creating the Mythical Christ from the Pagan Mystery Cults

If there has been one paramount apologetic concern in the long combat against Jesus mythicism, it has been the need to discredit any thought of Christian dependence on the Hellenistic savior god traditions. This has led historicism to adopt a ‘scorched earth’ strategy. Not only must any dependence on the mystery cults be refuted on Christianity’s own turf, the war has been carried further afield in an attempt to eliminate even the alleged sources. Thus, the armies of Christian independence are dispatched to the enemy’s home territory, there to destroy its own precepts.

No longer do the mysteries believe in dying and rising gods; no longer are they based on the cycle of agricultural death and rebirth; no longer do they practice rites which could have resembled and influenced the Christian one; no longer do they even worship such deities. And no longer do ancient Christians contemporary with the mysteries genuinely know anything about them.

But the mysteries knew about Christianity, and they liked what they saw so much that they recast their own ancient beliefs in imitation of the Jesus story.

“Did the Earliest Christians Invent Jesus as a Dying-Rising God, Based on Pagan Myths?”

Having asked that question, Ehrman presents the situation this way:

ONE OF THE MOST widely asserted claims found in the mythicist literature is that Jesus was an invention of the early Christians who had been deeply influenced by the prevalent notion of a dying-rising god, as found throughout the pagan religions of antiquity. The theory behind this claim is that people in many ancient religions worshipped gods who died and rose again: Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Heracles, Melqart, Eshmun, Baal, and so on. Originally, the theory goes, these gods were connected with vegetation and were worshipped in fertility cults. Just as every year the crops die in winter but then come back to life in the spring, so too with the gods who are associated with the crops. They die (when the crops do) and go to the underworld, but then they revive (with the crops) and reappear on earth, raised from the dead. They are worshipped then as dying-rising deities. (DJE?, p. 221)

According to Ehrman, the view of almost all mythicists is that Jesus is an artificial Jewish version of a dying and rising deity of the above type; the significant parallels between the mysteries and the Jesus story prove this claim.

But this is something of a straw man. It envisions that some founder of the movement, or some Jewish study group (a scriptural book review club perhaps?), consciously sat down and ‘invented’ a new version of an old religion by emulating the latter’s features. Occasionally this sort of thing may happen (Ptolemy I deliberately syncretizing two gods into one to create a national-unity religion, or Joseph Smith inventing the whole gold plates business). But more often than not it is ‘in the air’ concepts and expressions that throw up a new set of ideas and interpretations within a break-away group or a particular cultural or sectarian entity.

Common inventions of the human mind

Almost every sect that looks back to a divine event or interaction with a deity develops a sacred meal as a commemorative thanksgiving or ritual reflection. (What is more fitting, or available, to give to a god than food and drink, or more traditionally associated with a god’s own nature and bounty?)

If the most fundamental religious impulse is to find a way to believe in a life after death, this is almost inevitably going to take the form of creating a deity who will bestow such a thing; and given our mystical predilections it should not be surprising that a process many would tend to come up with is the principle of the god undergoing the desired goal himself. It would indeed take a god to conquer death, but if we could just find a way to ride through that formidable barrier on his divine coattails. . . .

This is one mythicist who does not overplay the ‘deliberate borrowing’ principle to explain the origins of Christianity. And we have to keep in mind that those origins are not to be found in the Gospel story. A proper reading of the epistles—which predate the Gospel traditions, despite Ehrman’s efforts to conjure up a reversal—shows that this was no reaction to a crucified preacher, but a diverse interpretation of Jewish scripture inspired by philosophical and religious trends of the day. How much of it was a conscious exercise might be impossible to say. There is much in early Christianity which owes its presence to the Jewish culture it emerged from. But there is also no question that fundamental aspects of the early Christian faith do not have a Jewish character but a Hellenistic one.

So modern historicist scholarship of the last half-century has been forced to adopt a new tack. First, show that the things in pagan religion which allegedly inspired Christianity really didn’t exist. Second, show that the earliest Christians did not believe Jesus was a god, so he couldn’t have been for them a dying and rising deity. (The second of these will be dealt with in the next chapter.)

The Golden Bough goes up in smoke

The first to fall victim to the scorched earth policy is the famous James G. Frazer, whose influential book The Golden Bough around the start of the 20th century set out the picture of a class of dying and rising gods in Near Eastern mythology—Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, etc.—whose life, death and resurrection represented the earth’s seasonal fertility cycles. Frazer’s theories held sway until much later in the 20th century, when, according to Ehrman, they were clobbered by a “devastating critique” and came to be regarded as discredited.

I am not convinced that this ‘discrediting’ has enjoyed widespread acceptance outside New Testament circles, and even Ehrman is forced to admit that

There are, to be sure, scholars here or there [!] who continue to think that there is some evidence of dying and rising gods. But even these scholars, who appear [!] to be in the minority, do not think that the category is of any relevance for understanding the traditions about Jesus.  (DJE?, p. 223)

That last remark shows that Ehrman is indeed speaking of scholars soldiering in the biblical ranks. One prominent researcher in this area, Tryggve D. Mettinger, has argued for a revival of the Frazer scenario in his The Riddle of the Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East. Ehrman challenges Mettinger on two grounds:

- that the actual vocabulary of resurrection (as applied to Jesus, presumably) is rarely found in regard to these gods;

- and that worshiping pagan gods who died and rose lacks any evidence for being present in Palestine in the time of the rise of Christianity.

As for the first objection, I pointed out previously that the concept of resurrection enjoyed diverse cultural interpretations in the ancient world, and consequently the language used in that context could be expected to be diverse as well. Ehrman also points out that the records of such deities are centuries older than Christianity (I am not sure if that works in his favor), and claims that the language itself can be ambiguous. Since Ehrman does not quote anything to demonstrate that ambiguity, we have to wonder if this is simply his preferred reading of whatever the sources quoted by Mettinger.

No borrowing in sight?

Mettinger does not use his case for reviving the dying and rising gods to explain the Christian faith in Jesus. But his grounds for not doing so are hardly conclusive of anything. I have regularly maintained that we don’t need every detail to conform to a source of influence to legitimately postulate a borrowing or derivation. Syncretism is the process of taking certain ideas from one area of thought and combining them with ideas from another area and creating a new synthesis. The Hellenistic gods may ultimately represent cyclical processes in nature, but just because Jesus died only once does not rule out a degree of inspiration from pagan prototypes. (I daresay that devotees of the Attis cult did not view his castration as something that recurred every year—it certainly couldn’t recur for the self-castrated Galli! They, too, could be flexible with their sources.) Nor does the uniqueness of the idea that Jesus died as a vicarious atonement for sin.

As for the claim that there is no evidence anyone in Palestine worshipped a dying and rising god, this would not mean that no one would be familiar with the cults. Jerusalem was not exactly the backwater of the empire; the region, from Alexandria to Antioch, enjoyed a heavy Greek presence and influence.

On the other hand, we might say that there is indeed such evidence available. The epistles, when not read with Gospel-colored glasses, present just such a picture in Palestine. Paul sums it up in his gospel of a dying and rising Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4; and in Romans 6:1-6 he encapsulates the principal features of his soteriology: through initiation and ritual the devotee enters into union with the god; he enjoys a rebirth and the benefits of the experiences they share, including resurrection to the kingdom of God. That’s all Greek to me.

If we allow ourselves to recognize the debt which Paul owes to pagan concepts, it must mean that the latter were in the Palestinian air at the time.

When is a resurrection not a resurrection?

It is at this point that Ehrman brings up the old canard that none of the dying and rising gods was resurrected the way Jesus was resurrected. I’m tempted to quote Ehrman from earlier in his book: “So what?” What they all had in common was a death, followed by an overcoming of that death and coming back to life. To illustrate Jesus’ alleged form of resurrection, Ehrman appeals to Jewish apocalyptic: the expectation of God’s imminent kingdom entailed an accompanying resurrection of dead bodies. But the Greeks had no such future mythology, and thus felt no urge to invent for their savior gods a resurrection back to earth in their former flesh. As Martin Nilsson puts it (The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age, p.130):

The adherents of the Bacchic mysteries did not believe that they would rise up from the dead; they believed that they would lead a life of eternal bliss and joy in the Other World.

By appealing to the Jewish brand of expectation, Ehrman has demonstrated this diversity of cultural views and the reason why there were differences in the idea of resurrection between Christianity’s savior god and those of the mysteries. The trouble is, for Ehrman and others, if there is no exact prototype, there is no prototype at all.

If the ambiguous evidence is interpreted in a certain way (Mettinger’s), the pagan gods who died did come back to life. But that is not really what the early teachings about Jesus were all about. It was not simply that his corpse was restored to the living. It is that he experienced a resurrection. (DJE?, p. 225)

In the context of Jewish apocalyptic expectation, Jesus’ “resurrection” was seen as the prelude to a general resurrection—yet another way, this one relating to context, in which his return to life differed from those of the pagan saviors.

But we know by now that when Ehrman refers to “early teachings about Jesus,” he is referring to the Gospel picture of a rising in flesh, a restored body standing on the same earth it had stood on before, with former followers maintaining that, in some way, they had witnessed him in that restored state. No epistle makes that claim, and even 1 Corinthians 15 can only be so interpreted by reading the Gospels into the passage. To compensate for this, Ehrman has created, through the invocation of his chimerical pre-Markan spirits of oral tradition, a further dimension which contrasts with those of the pagan savior gods, and he assigns it to the very beginnings of Christianity, prior to the epistles.

Pauline “firstfruits”

This, Ehrman contends, is how Paul viewed the importance of Jesus’ resurrection: as the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection. But Paul, like the epistles as a whole, does not view Jesus’ rising in Ehrman’s apocalyptic terms. He has no dimension of a recent Jesus rising in flesh on earth as a prelude to the same sort of resurrection Jews looked for. (If he did, he would never have crafted his argument as he does in 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, failing to introduce an incarnated Jesus with a human body into his pattern, a pattern it would have destroyed.) As shown earlier, all the epistles see Jesus’ rising—from wherever it took place—as in spirit only, to God’s heaven. Critical scholarship now recognizes this (all but Ehrman, apparently).

By calling Jesus’ resurrection the “firstfruits,” Paul is not placing his resurrection in the present time, as the first in a general resurrection he believes is just around the corner. That resurrection, occurring at a timeless point in the heavenly world, can serve the same purpose in view of the fact that it has been revealed in the present time, through the discovery in scripture of the Son and his acts of salvation. This revelation by God is what has triggered the onset of the End-time and the imminence of the general resurrection, making the revealed resurrection of Jesus the “firstfruits” of the coming harvest.

(Jesus’ acts—and indeed Jesus himself, the “secret of Christ”—had been kept hidden for long generations, the benefits of his acts stored in a heavenly bank account until, in the time of Paul and other apostles visited by the spirit, God’s revelation in scripture had opened that account for withdrawals, with believers being issued the PIN number. This system allows the Son’s death and resurrection to have taken place in the heavenly world at any time—or in an essentially timeless setting—which is why the epistle writers are never able to supply a time and place in their countless references to those acts.)

Such a revelation by God through scripture is clearly stated in Romans 16:25-27, and implied in 1 Corinthians 15:12-16 where Paul declares rhetorically that, if apostles like himself are falsely preaching that Jesus rose, they stand “in contradiction to God,” he being the source (in scripture) of the revelation that Jesus rose from death. Moreover, if Christ’s resurrection had just happened, Paul would not have described the present time and its progression toward the kingdom’s arrival the way he does in Romans 8:22-3 and elsewhere, making not even an allusion to Christ’s recent life, let alone giving it any role in that progression.

It was to take a bit of time for some Christians to come to the conviction that in order to guarantee human resurrection, Christ actually (or “truly,” as Ignatius or his forger was to put it) needed to have lived, died and resurrected on earth and in real human flesh. The first century epistles (and some of the second) still lack that need and conviction.

Jonathan Z. Smith and the denial of dying and rising gods

Ehrman does not enlighten the reader as to what scholarship has offered in the wake of Frazer’s alleged discrediting. I’ve noted in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.128) that some scholars have suggested the mysteries were founded on “male rites of passage” in prehistoric societies. Or that they grew out of “cults of dead kings” such as the Pharaohs in Egypt or the Hittite rulers in Asia Minor. Neither of these options seems adequate to explain a religious tradition that so many placed their hopes in and for so long, and neither has gained much traction, certainly not compared to the Frazer scenario which reigned supreme for decades until its overthrow was deemed in the best interests of historicism.

The commanding generals of this new campaign of revisionism have been principally two: Gunter Wagner, in his 1963 (ET: 1967) Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries (extensively reviewed in my website Supplementary Article No. 13C at: http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp13C.htm); and Jonathan Z. Smith, in a 1977 article for the Encyclopedia of Religion, “Dying and Rising Gods,” and his more recent 1991 Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. (The latter has also been given a detailed review toward the end of article “13B” of the above series.)

Ehrman relies heavily on Smith, and quotes this from his 1977 article:

“All the deities that have been identified as belonging to the class of dying and rising deities can be subsumed under the two larger classes of disappearing deities or dying deities. In the first case the deities return but have not died; in the second case the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity.” (DJE?, p. 227)

Robert Price takes on Jonathan Z. Smith

There is not sufficient space here to fully debunk Smith’s case against dying and rising gods, but let me offer first a few quotes by Robert M. Price from my website book review of his Deconstructing Jesus:

Smith’s first error is his failure, as I see it, to grasp the point of an “ideal type,” a basic textbook definition/description of some phenomenon under study. . . . Smith, finding that there are significant differences between the so-called dying-and-rising-god myths, abandons any hope of a genuine dying-and-rising-god paradigm. For Smith, the various myths of Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and the others, do not all conform to type exactly; thus they are not sufficiently alike to fit into the same box—so let’s throw out the box! Without everything in common, Smith sees nothing in common. . . .

Smith’s error is the same as that of Raymond Brown, who dismisses the truckload of comparative religion parallels to the miraculous birth of Jesus: This one is not strictly speaking a virgin birth, since the god fathered the child on a married woman. That one involved physical intercourse with the deity, not overshadowing by the Holy Spirit, and so on. But, we have to ask, how close does a parallel have to be to count as a parallel? Does the divine mother have to be named Mary? Does the divine child have to be named Jesus? Here is the old “difference without a distinction” fallacy. . . .

But what does it mean to say someone has descended to the netherworld of the dead? Enkidu did not deem it quite so casual a commute “to Hell and back” as Smith apparently does: “He led me away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back.” One goes there in the embrace of the Grim Reaper. Similarly, Pausanias: “About the death of Theseus there are many inconsistent legends, for example that he was tied up on the Netherworld until Herakles should bring him back to life.” Thus to abide in the netherworld was to be dead, even if not for good. . . .

Osiris, Smith admits, is said even in very ancient records to have been dismembered, reassembled by Isis, and rejuvenated (physically; he fathered Horus on Isis). But Smith seizes on the fact that Osiris reigned henceforth in the realm of the dead. This is not a return to earthly life, hence no resurrection. But then we might as well deny that Jesus is depicted as dying and rising since he reigns henceforth at the right hand of God in Heaven as the judge of the dead, like Osiris.

The death and rising of Adonis: copying Jesus?

In one of the myths of Adonis, the god is killed by a boar. Ehrman says:

It is only in later texts, long after Ovid and after the rise of Christianity, that one finds any suggestion that Adonis came back to life after his death. Smith argues that this later form of the tradition may in fact have been influenced by Christianity and its claim that a human had been raised from the dead. In other words, the Adonis myth did not influence Christian views of Jesus but rather the other way around.” (DJE?, p. 228)

And so the apologetic specter of the mysteries borrowing from Christianity rears its dreary head yet again. It is hard to know whether Ehrman seriously believes this, or whether he is simply catering to his uninformed readers’ ready acceptance of this popular tactic. On the Adonis question, Gunter Wagner floats the same idea. To that, I responded in my website review of his book:

Wagner acknowledges that “after the beginning of the second half of the 2nd century of the Christian era we hear about the ‘resurrection’ of Adonis being celebrated in connection with the annual mourning festival” [p.198]. . . .

[But he is willing to acknowledge] the idea that “there is much to support the view that the introduction of a celebration of Adonis’ resurrection is to be attributed to the influence of the Osiris cult” [p.200]. . . . this would certainly be the prime and preferred candidate for influence on a new Adonis resurrection idea over that of any Christian influence. . . .

But the major anomaly [in Wagner’s alternate suggestion that Adonis could have borrowed from Jesus] is the idea that the Adonis cult would be struggling to compete with Christianity. The new Christian religion, throughout the 2nd century, was a despised faith, widely persecuted, and we have no evidence that there were huge numbers of Christians in the empire with whom any of the cults had to ‘compete’. . . .

If Adonis, a relatively minor cult throughout the empire, was adopting a resurrection motif from other [Greek] cults, that concept obviously existed in them prior to the mid 2nd century, perhaps at least as early as the 1st century if we can judge by some of the artifacts unearthed at that time and earlier in regard to Attis. Such earlier dates would even more securely rule out Christianity as being the example ‘copied’ from. It simply wouldn’t have exercised that kind of pressure on the pagan cultic organizations. . . .

Celsus has nothing but distaste and condemnation for this young upstart which has borrowed everything from its hallowed predecessors. Could such an outlook in the cults lead to blatantly stealing Christianity’s most prominent feature for themselves when they supposedly never possessed it before? [And would Celsus have been likely to be ignorant of such a development in his own culture, one that could hardly be more than a few decades old?]

The evidence for dying and rising gods

We know from primary sources such as Cicero (De legibus, II, 14, 36) that membership in the mysteries guaranteed benefits in this life and hopes of a happy afterlife in the next. It would otherwise be hard to understand what their appeal was for the countless men and women who became devotees over the centuries, from the ordinary citizen who could afford the costs, to Roman emperors. (Or why a foundation in male rites of passage or a cult of dead kings, rather than in gods who themselves underwent death and rising, would do anything to generate such benefits and hopes.) Walter Burkert (Ancient Mystery Cults, p.21) admits that evidence for “the promise of a privileged life beyond the grave for those who have ‘seen’ the mysteries . . . ranges from the earliest text, the Hymn to Demeter, down to the last rhetorical exercises of the Imperial period.” And yet Burkert holds on to his doubts:

“It is tempting to assume that the central idea of all initiations should be death and resurrection, so that extinction and salvation are anticipated in the ritual . . . but the pagan evidence for resurrection symbolism is uncompelling at best.”

Heaven forbid that we should give in to temptation. This sort of thing conveys nothing so much as an obsession with avoiding at all costs the ‘sin’ of connecting the ideas of the pagan cults with the purity of Christian faith. Burkert laments that the evidence is “uncompelling.” But is the evidence being downplayed? Is it “uncompelling” because that is the way Christian scholars want to see it? Have they placed the bar so high that it becomes quite impossible to see it? Or is it because the gap between the bountiful record left by early Christianity and the meager, deliberately obscure information on the pagan cults is so vast? Should not a degree of dispassionate logic be brought to our evaluation of the mysteries, what they promised to their followers and through what spiritual processes those ends were achieved?

Ehrman echoes Smith by stating

. . . the evidence for such gods is at best sparse, scattered and ambiguous, not abundant, ubiquitous and clear. Such gods were definitely not widely known and widely discussed among religious people of antiquity, as is obvious from the fact that they are not clearly discussed in any of our sources. (DJE?, p. 230)

Well of course the evidence is not abundant, ubiquitous and clear, or clearly discussed. It was forbidden to be so. Nor do we need a wide discussion of the subject. A few clear references, such as we do have, are sufficient. Anyway, what is Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, if not something clearly discussed, even if he avoids a description of the cultic rites? And note that Ehrman slipping in “not widely known” in conjunction with “(not) widely discussed” is an invalid association. The latter does not have to imply the former.

The ancient witness muzzled

Ehrman shares both Wagner’s and Smith’s refusal to let the ancient witness speak for itself. On the one surviving representation of Eleusinian baptism, Wagner declares the portrayal only an “ideal . . . chosen for artistic motives,” and cannot be interpreted as signifying “rebirth.” Even the evidence provided by Tertullian [On Baptism, 5] who says that Eleusinian baptism was meant to produce “regeneration [rebirth] and the remission of the penalties due to their perjuries [a form of ‘atonement for sin’ by means of a rite]” is a case, says Wagner, of the Church Father “putting a Christian construction upon the pagan festivals he mentions.” Elsewhere, he says that “the text from Hippolytus must be set aside.” Clearly, neither the primary nor the secondary evidence from the ancient world is to be accepted as anything but erroneous. Even Christians who were contemporary with the practice of the mysteries supposedly misunderstood them and were guilty of ‘reading into’ them the understandings of their own practice.

Even in the 4th century, Firmicus Maternus’ famous ridicule of the cult of Osiris for imagining the resurrection of their “god of stone,” or his taunt that the devotees are saved because of the god’s own resurrection, are not to be taken at face value. Maternus is simply “reflecting his own values,” says Wagner, and not accurately reproducing the thought of the Osiris cult. Of course, Wagner allows, if we were forced to acknowledge that the cults believed in the resurrection of their gods, they probably got it from Christianity!

Smith, too, toes the party line and declares that the view held by Otto Pfleiderer, Rudolf Bultmann and countless others, that Pauline baptismal thinking was based on pagan precedents, has been proven “wrong” by current opinion in scholarship (as if “opinion” proved anything in New Testament scholarship), although Smith allows a voice like R. C. Tannehill’s (Dying and Rising with Christ: A Study in Pauline Theology, p.32) to be heard: “the question of the relation of this motif [dying and rising with Christ] to the mysteries, then, is not yet settled.”

Even ancient Christian writers, says Smith, were guilty of misinterpreting the mysteries they were contemporary with. In addition, he claims that “in the case of Attis, the mythology gave no comfort,” leaving us to wonder how it became so popular and survived so long. When he repeats the old red herring that Osiris is not a dying and rising god because he retires to the Underworld after death, we know that the whole modern trend to divorce Christianity from the mysteries is one giant apologetics industry. (Perhaps when the farce is fully exposed, James G. Frazer can be welcomed back into the fold!)

Conclusion

In sum, historicist scholars have carried Christian Gospel-based concepts to the mystery cults and set them against the latter’s presentation of ‘resurrection’ and other features; then they ‘expose’ them as not properly conforming, which then ‘proves’ that any resemblance is illusory and that all comparison, along with any suggestion of derivation, is invalid. Quite a methodology!

As I say in my website review of Wagner:

If one assumes this standard scholarly illusion, Christianity must have possessed an undeniably distinctive asset in a savior who had risen from an earthly tomb, to walk the countryside again in a physical body. And he had done this within living memory, whereas the pagan saviors were a distant mythical echo. What a huge selling point! What a knockout piece of superiority! Yet no epistle writer brings up such a difference [including Paul when he condemns those who take part in the “table of demons” in 1 Corinthians 10].

Furthermore, whether Jesus was claimed to have walked out of his tomb (as in the Gospels), or was resurrected only in spirit (as in 1 Peter 3:18), no one, Christian or pagan, ever says that Christians had a monopoly on the very idea of resurrection. Certainly Celsus did not. . . . Justin, in defending Christianity against pagan similarities, never declares: “But we have the only god who was resurrected!” This is one reason why we can say with confidence that the pagan mysteries must have had a resurrection concept for their savior deities, even if it wasn’t exactly equivalent to that of Christianity—although in the first century and the early second, before the Gospels began to circulate, it might have seemed exactly that.

Thus the entire case presented by Ehrman, Wagner and Smith, preceded by earlier scholars like H. A. Kennedy and Arthur Darby Nock, is built on smoke and mirrors. Its purpose can only be to conjure up an argument, no matter how shaky or deceptive, to disassociate Christianity’s initial mysticism from any connection with the pagan mysteries and root it instead in a safe Jewish soil.

Indeed, scholarship since the mid-20th century has in its general study been entirely oriented toward the same end and purpose, to characterize Christianity as essentially if not wholly a child of Israel and bury out of sight the bloody umbilical cord of pre-natal nutrition from pagan influences. This strategy has given scholars the false confidence that they have exploded the problematic mystery cult connection, in much the same way that they assume a false confidence that the idea of Jesus mythicism has been laid to rest.

Note: For much more on the mysteries and the comparison with Christianity, see my four-part website series “The Mystery Cults and Christianity” beginning at: <http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp13A.htm>

27

Did the Earliest Christians Regard Jesus as God?

Was Jesus God?

Bart Ehrman now embarks on what is probably the thorniest problem in New Testament research. How was Jesus regarded, not only by his followers, but by the earliest Christians who spread the faith? Ehrman declares:

the earliest Christians did not consider Jesus God. . . . scholars are unified in thinking that the view that Jesus was God was a later development within Christian circles. (DJE? p. 231)

But what precisely is meant by the phrase ‘Jesus was God’? Much of the problem lies in Ehrman’s semantic woolliness. Later Church Councils declared Jesus fully co-equal with God the Father, of the same substance, two ‘persons’ within the Trinity. I am aware of no critical scholarship, let alone any mythicist, who suggests that this was the view of any segment of earliest Christianity.

But to say that Jesus was an “emanation” of God is something else. The difference between Paul’s Son of God and Philo’s Logos as an emanation of God is largely a matter of personhood. Philo does not personalize his Logos; he calls it God’s “first-born,” but it is not a distinct ‘person’; rather, it is a kind of divine radiant force which has certain effects on the world. Paul’s Son has been carried one step further (though a large one), in that he is a full hypostasis, a distinct divine personage with an awareness of self and roles of his own—and capable of being worshiped on his own.

But an “emanation” is not God per se. That is why Philo can describe him as “begotten” of God. He can be styled a part of the Godhead, but he is a subordinate part. (I have no desire to sound like a theologian, but to try to explain as I see it the concepts that lie in the minds of Christian writers, past and present. They are attempting to describe what they see as a spiritual reality; I regard it as bearing no relation to any reality at all.) Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:28 speaks of the Son’s fate once God’s enemies are vanquished, a passage which exercises theologians because it looks incompatible with the Trinity. For here Paul says that the Son “will be subjected” to God, in the apparent sense of being ‘subsumed’ back into God, who will then become One again—“so that God will be all in all.” There will only be one ‘person.’

The “intermediary Son” concept

There can be little question that the idea of the Son, Paul’s “Christ” and spiritual Messiah, arose from the philosophical thinking of the era, which created for the highest Deity intermediary spiritual forces and subordinate divine entities to fill certain roles and to be revelatory channels between God and humanity. In Judaism, this was the role of personified Wisdom, though her divinity was relatively innocuous and her ‘person’ perhaps as much poetic as real. (She may have been a later scribal compromise when an earlier goddess consort of Yahweh was abandoned). In Greek thinking, the intermediary force was the Logos, though in varied versions (the Platonic Logos and Stoic Logos were quite different), and with an independence and personification less developed than Paul’s.

Thus the “Son” which we find described throughout the epistles is viewed in the sense of an emanation of God, not God himself. He has a personification of his own, and he fills certain roles.

Consider three passages:

- 1 Corinthians 8:6 – For us there is one God, the Father, from whom all being comes, toward whom we move; and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came to be, and we through him.

- Colossian 1:15-20 – [God] rescued us from the domain of darkness and brought us away into the kingdom of his dear Son, in whom our release is secured and our sins forgiven. He is the image [µ¹ºÉ½]of the invisible God; his is the primacy over all created things. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created . . . the whole universe has been created through him and for him. And he exists before everything, and all things are held together in him. . . .

- Hebrews 1:2-3 – . . . the Son whom he has made heir to the whole universe, and through whom he created all orders of existence: the Son who is the effulgence of God’s splendor and the stamp of God’s very being, and sustains the universe by his word of power.

All three passages present the Son as the agent of creation (as was personified Wisdom in Jewish tradition). Two mention his sustaining power by which the universe subsists. They also see this emanation as making the ultimate God ‘visible’: he is the “image” of the Father who is known and communicates with the world through this filial intermediary. In Colossians, his redemptive role is mentioned: through him sins are forgiven and humanity has been released from darkness. (About the only thing never mentioned is the fact of this cosmic Son’s incarnation to earth and his identity in that life, but perhaps this was considered unimportant.)

Though Ehrman will argue against it, there can hardly be any question that these epistle writers viewed the Son as a heavenly figure, a part of God who existed on the spiritual plane. That this was an interpretation of the man Jesus of Nazareth is a post-Gospel rationalization, not to be found in the epistles themselves. That some modern scholarship can go further, as we shall see, and regard the epistolary picture as not indicating a belief in its Jesus as divine—whether equal or subordinate to God—is a travesty.

No Jesus as God in the Gospels?

Second, who exactly constitutes “the earliest Christians” who Ehrman says did not see Jesus as God? Here is where his argument becomes tangled. For rather than consider the situation in the epistles, Ehrman zeros in on the Gospels:

It is striking that none of our first three Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—declares that Jesus is God or indicates that Jesus ever called himself God. Jesus’s teaching in the earliest Gospel traditions is not about his personal divinity but about the coming kingdom of God and the need to prepare for it. This should give readers pause. If the earliest followers of Jesus thought Jesus was God, why don’t the earliest Gospels say so? It seems like it would have been a rather important aspect of Christ’s identity to point out. (DJE? p. 231)

Perhaps as the epistles ought to have pointed out the cosmic Son’s human incarnation as an important aspect of his identity? Be that as it may, Ehrman, as demonstrated earlier in this series, has jockeyed and massaged the evidence—including fabricating some of it—to produce a dubious witness (indeed, many “independent” ones) prior to the epistles, one which supposedly represented an oral tradition phase which later fed into the Gospels. This alleged tradition, he says, reflected the Synoptic presentation of Jesus as anything but cosmic—as apparently nothing other than human.

“Son of God” vs. “son of God”

As the first plank in his case, Ehrman points out that many individuals in the Old Testament, such as Solomon, were referred to as “son(s) of God,” which did not make them God. Rather,

(Solomon) was instead a human who stood in a close relationship with God, like a child to a parent, and was used by God to mediate his will on earth. . . . When the future messiah was thought of as the son of God, it was not because he would be God incarnate but because he would be a human particularly close to God through whom God worked his purposes.

The Synoptic Gospels do indeed downplay the divinity of their Jesus, although there are a few pretty strong suggestions that there is more to being Mark’s “S/son of God” than Ehrman has allowed. Mark in 13:32 says:

But about that day or that hour [the arrival of the End] no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, not even the Son; only the Father.

Here, “the Son” implies a singular spiritual aspect of God (thus needing capitalization, which all translations that I know of give it), inhabiting heaven like the angels. It is not even sure that Jesus is intended to be referring to himself here, just as it hardly seems that he himself is supposed to be the messiah whom he prophesies impostors in the future will be claiming to be. Mark seems to prefer that Jesus think of and refer to himself as the Son of Man, but even this tradition has grown out of a previous expression in the Q tradition wherein such a figure is an apocalyptic one, expected from heaven and thus possessing at least some form of divinity.

Mark’s divinity of Jesus

But then Mark throws off the covers in 14:61-2 before the High Priest’s questioning: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” The latter, of course, means God, and Jesus answers: “I am.” Not only is this reference to “the Son” hardly to be put into Ehrman’s category of a human particularly close to God, the High Priest declares this claim to be blasphemy, for which Jesus needs to be condemned to death. It was hardly blasphemy to announce oneself as the messiah, nor even the apocalyptic Son of Man; and certainly not to call oneself a “son of God” in Ehrman’s sense. It could only be blasphemy if Jesus was declaring himself to be a divine part of God.

We might also wonder at God’s extreme reaction to the crucifixion, both in prodigies of nature and in his abandonment of his Chosen People by splitting the veil of the Temple, if this was only a man he felt a close relationship with. And the centurion’s reaction would have been an ironic understatement if all Mark wanted him to say was: “Truly, this man was one whom the Jewish God felt particularly close to!”

Besides, what was to be the point of Mark’s whole story by including the Passion? Jesus as God’s prophet is one thing: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!” Mark’s ministry—though short on actual teachings, let alone memorable ones—might fit a “son of God” of the Ehrman variety. But a trial, execution and rising from his tomb? Something foretold in scripture (as Jesus constantly tells his disciples), whose purpose was a “redemption for many” (Mk. 10:45)? It is difficult to think that Mark would have created such a tale simply in terms of an individual whom he thought of as merely one among many who had been “sons of God.”

Distinguishing between Gospels and epistles

What Ehrman and historicism fail to take into account is the division between the Gospels and the epistles, representing two quite separate phenomena on the first century scene. I pointed out earlier that the Synoptics grew out of the kingdom preaching movement of which Mark was a part, represented in Q. (The Johannine community later attached itself to their Jesus character and story). Thus Mark and his redactors were creating an allegorical tale based on quite human traditions: the teachings and activities of the Q prophets themselves and an imagined founder figure who had been developed only later as the sect evolved; that founder was given no death and resurrection, let alone a dimension as part of God.

The Passion in Mark’s Gospel was an insertion into that tradition, quite possibly based on a syncretization with some expression of the heavenly Christ cult (though probably not directly from Paul). That amalgamation with Galilee kept the “S/son of God” aspect given to Mark’s Jesus character on a noticeably lower plane than is found in the epistles. Still, Mark could not avoid according his Jesus some measure of divinity, a personal connection to God whose nature is perhaps hard to pin down from the text. Certainly, he was unable to avoid creating anomalies which would bedevil future scholarship.

The situation in Acts

By claiming an oral tradition origin for the Gospels, Ehrman has transferred the later picture created by Mark to a pre-Pauline period and presented it as the earliest view of Jesus. He backs that up by pointing to the speeches in Acts which allegedly portray Jesus of Nazareth according to a pre-Gospel tradition that Jesus was a human being who was only adopted as “son of God” in the sense of ‘a man special to him’—and then only at his resurrection. That Acts maintains the latter point is by no means clear, and it is hardly compatible with Ehrman’s own conviction that Acts was written by the same author who wrote Luke.

Besides, such an adoption only upon resurrection would imply that in his preceding life God did not treat the man Jesus as anyone special. That is hardly a view that would have been held by any early Christian, let alone Jesus’ former followers. Ehrman has failed to demonstrate that Acts could not have been founded entirely in the Gospels themselves (I’ve made that point in an earlier chapter). Given an increasingly popular dating for Acts in the second century, nothing in it can be securely allotted to an initial period of the faith, especially prior to the epistles.

The christological hymn of Philippians 2:6-11

But now Ehrman’s case becomes thoroughly entangled. For he embarks on a consideration of the christological hymn in Philippians 2:6-11. But this is from the epistolary record, and yet he is offering it as an illustration of how he claims early Christians viewed Jesus not too long after his death. He will use this hymn to show that such a view was simply of Jesus as a “son of God” in the ‘special man’ category. That certainly bucks centuries of scholarly interpretation, though he points out that the hymn in just about every one of its lines is “much debated”—as is its very identity as a poetic liturgical piece, one of several in the epistles which are regarded as pre-Pauline creations. Still,

But one thing is clear: it does not mean what mythicists typically claim it means. It does not portray Jesus in the guise of a pagan dying and rising god, even if that is what, on a superficial reading, it may appear to be about.

One wonders how it can be “clear” that it does not portray Jesus as a dying and rising god, while at the same time it “appears” to be just that on “superficial reading.” This alerts us that the “superficial” text is going to need some spin doctoring to overcome that plain reading and render its true meaning “clear.” Nor do mythicists need to overplay the “pagan dying and rising god” claim; Judaism was capable of coming up with its own version which entailed a distinctive character of its own.

Ehrman lays out the entire passage as follows (the first line in brackets is not regarded as part of the hymn):

(Have this mind in yourselves which is also in Christ Jesus,)

[6] who although he was in the form [morphe] of God [alt., being in very nature God (as in NIV)], did not regard being equal with God something to be seized.

[7] But he emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, and coming [lit., becoming] in the likeness of humans.

[8] And being found in the appearance as a human he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, [even the death of the cross].

[9] Therefore also God highly exalted him [literally: hyper-exalted him], and gave to him the name that is above every name.

[10] That at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow of things in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.

[11] And every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

The words in square brackets in verses 6 and 7 are my own, and I have placed brackets around “even the death of the cross” in verse 8 since most scholars, including Ehrman, regard this as a Pauline addition. In Philippians the hymn is presented in prose, but it seems to have had a chiastic structure: the second half being a mirror image of the first half in terms of poetic lines and meter.

Form = nature? Or form = image?

Ehrman first addresses the opening line of the hymn (verse 6), crucial to his contention about the meaning of “son of God.” What does “in the form [morphe] of God” mean? Does it mean being in the image of God in the way that Adam was made, and all humans are said to be? Or does it mean having the nature of God, such as in being an emanation of God, a part of him and sharing in his divine quality? Traditional scholarship has always taken it to mean the latter, that it is a statement of the pre-existence of Jesus, existing with God in heaven from before creation (as had Wisdom in prior Jewish thought). Ehrman acknowledges that this “may be the right way to read the passage,” but he offers qualifications, and will shortly opt for a different understanding. He says,

Christ was in the “form of God,” (but) that does not mean that he was God. (DJE? p. 235)

I am going to assume that by “he was God” Ehrman would allow for the meaning of “he was a part of God,” in the sense of an emanation, though he never makes this clear, or that it is not to be equated with Council decisions in later centuries.

Divinity was his “form,” just as later in the passage he took on the “form” of a “slave.” That does not mean that he was permanently and always a slave; it was simply the outward form he assumed. (DJE? p. 235)

This is certainly woolly. “Divinity was his ‘form’” is particularly obscure. How would one, especially a man, “assume” the outward form of divinity? The line clearly implies that this “form” was his from the first, but perhaps Ehrman is taking this as meaning that the human Jesus had the ‘form/image’ of God in the same way as any other human being, and so to this extent his form (image) was “divine.”

But then we run into trouble. “He assumed the ‘form/image’ of a slave/servant,” supposedly referring to when he became—what? Human? But he was supposedly already human. And “form/image” does not mean “role,” so it is not referring to when he submitted to death, as a slave/servant to God’s will. Besides, a subsequent line repeats a similar idea, saying “becoming in the likeness of men.” Was he not in that ‘likeness’ from the beginning, according to Ehrman?

Ehrman reveals his preference that the solution to the opening of the hymn is that Jesus is seen as being in the “image” of God, as was Adam in the creation account in Genesis. The terms “image” and “form” are sometimes used synonymously in the Old Testament, and so Christ is styled as having been another Adam at the beginning, no more. And here Ehrman attempts some sleight-of-hand. Borrowing another motif from Genesis, he suggests that Christ, in not seeking equality with God in the hymn, is being contrasted with Adam who did want to be “equal with God” and so “grabbed for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

But Adam was not seeking equality with God in any sense that he would become God or even a part of God. The serpent’s temptation hardly went so far. Adam and Eve would simply “become like gods, knowing both good and evil.” That is not the same as achieving “equality with God” per se, but simply enjoying one of his abilities. Nor would the hymnist be making any point about his figure having a motive like Adam’s or being in parallel with him, seeking to acquire the knowledge of good and evil. That would be ludicrous.

If all Ehrman means is that Jesus possessed the ‘divine form’ of God in the same sense as Adam, that from his birth he had borne this image, why would the hymnist bother making such a point? But as the hymn is constructed, this “form from the first” is meant to present a contrast with the “form” he adopted as a slave. Such as we might say, John was born of the aristocracy but he led his life among the lower class, helping to lift them from their poverty. This and the hymn itself implies a stark, wide contrast, one that would be lost if all the first line meant was that Jesus from birth as a human being was in the “image” of God, no different from Adam or any other human being.

Clearly, the form that was in ‘equality with God’ is set against the inferior form he did take on, namely that of a slave or servant. He took on a nature similar to humans, one by which he could suffer and die; he shared one of their key essences.

There is no sense here of an “image” of anything, and thus by being set against the “form” he was initially accorded in the first verse, that first “form” cannot be understood in the sense of “image.” (In Colossians 1:15-20, as noted above, the word used for “image” is not morphe, but eikon. And the philosophical concept of the Son/Logos as “image” of God is not the same as that of man being made in the image of God.)

Moreover, how could a man be said to take on the image or likeness of men? Rather, sharing in the nature of God is being contrasted with sharing in the nature of the slave/servant who undergoes death. In neither case is he said to be God or to be a man.

Keeping equality with God? Or gaining equality with God?

Moreover, when it says that he “did not regard equality with God something to be seized,” it is hotly debated whether that means that he did not want to “retain” what he already had, or to “grab” something that he did not have. (DJE? p. 235)

Ehrman opts for the latter understanding. But how was a human being to “grab” at equality with God? Why would an early Christian hymnist praise the man Jesus for not grabbing at such equality? Why would such an idea even have been conceivable, let alone formulated so soon after the man’s death? Even being exalted upon resurrection would hardly extend to having this man think he could grab equal status with God.

But if Christ Jesus is a heavenly emanation of God, he is subordinate to him, and thus not his equal—just as the Logos was not to be equated with God or considered an equal. It would be natural for a hymnist to praise this ‘first-begotten’ hypostasis of God for not striving to become God’s equal, especially in light of him being willing to go in the opposite direction: he reduced his status by assuming the form/nature of a slave/servant obedient to God’s wishes—obedient even to death.

Ehrman is assuredly right in saying that if Jesus were already God there was no higher to go, so he must not have already been equal to God. But this inequality does not necessarily spell being human, for a spiritual Son and emanation is by definition less than an equal, something Ehrman has not taken into account. The occasional translation does assume a heavenly equality and understands the “retain” idea, such as the Translator’s New Testament: “he did not consider that he must cling to equality with God.” But this seems more a faith-based assumption dependent on Trinitarian orthodoxy than allowing that such a meaning could be contained in the words themselves. (The NEB offers as an alternative translation: “yet he did not prize his equality with God.” If the hymnist did have such a meaning in mind, it may be that for the purposes of his literary creation he did not bother with the niceties of whether an emanation was exactly equal or not.)

Driving the point home that the Son assumed a “likeness”

Three times does the hymnist make much the same statement:

- he took on the form of a slave/servant,

- becoming in the likeness of men,

- found in fashion as a man.

If this passage is indeed a hymn with metrical lines, this repetition of the same idea was designed to fill in needed lines. But then why not use the available space for some specific reference to a life on earth, to his identity in an incarnation, to some of his activities: teaching, miracle-working, prophesying? Why overwork the “likeness” motif if he became an actual man? Of course, the explanation here is that this descending figure did not become a man or incarnated to earth; he took on a spiritual equivalent—a likeness—to being human in a part of the corruptible heavens in order to undergo his death and rising at the hands of “the rulers of this age.”

Jesus’ exaltation

The second half of the hymn has sparked even greater debate. As a result of his obedience to God in submitting to death, this figure—who so far in the hymn has not been named—is exalted. But when Ehrman carries over his “man like Adam” interpretation into the exaltation phase of the hymn, he is led into further problematic exegesis. (Ehrman also suggests that this second half presents an “adoptionist” scenario, that here the man Jesus is being adopted as God’s son. But there is nothing in the text to suggest that; there is no allusion to Psalm 2:7. The Son is merely given new power and prestige.)

Let’s repeat verses 9-11 here for easy reference:

[9] Therefore also God highly exalted him [literally: hyper-exalted him],

and gave to him the name that is above every name.

[10] That at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow

of things in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.

[11] And every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord

to the glory of God the Father.

[Ehrman has pointed out the “hyper-exalted,” but that works against him. It implies an exaltation greater than the one he enjoyed before. But what ‘exaltation’ would the human man have possessed prior to this? The word clearly refers to the Son being raised even higher, with greater power, than he previously stood when he simply ‘shared in God’s nature’ (verse 6).]

The interpretation of verses 9-11 has always been critical. What is the “name above every name”? The plain reading is that it is “Jesus.” The word “name” in both verses is the same: “onoma.” This descending-ascending figure, who has pointedly not been identified by any name in the hymn before, is now given a name, and at that name, “Jesus,” all in heaven, earth and Sheol bow their knee to him. With that understanding, the case for mythicism has been clinched, for it tells us that no “Jesus” lived on earth with that name before the resurrection.

But scholarship sees one way out: the “name” given to the figure in verse 9 is not “Jesus,” it is something else. And with that other name, the exalted entity who was allegedly already named Jesus receives his new homage. And what is that other “name”? There is only one candidate available. It is “Lord.” But how much sense does this make?

When is a title a name?

First of all, “Lord” is a title, not a name. It is sometimes claimed that the word “onoma” can encompass a title. But this is in the sense of a category designation, such as Ignatius saying that he is persecuted for his “name” in that he is a “Christian.” (See Bauer, def. II.) Even the common phrase “in the name of the Lord” is not making “Lord” itself a name, but refers to the act of calling upon God, referred to by one of his designations, whether Lord or Most High or Father, and so on. It is not identifying those terms as personal “names” but as titles. My father’s name was not “father.” That was a category designation and a form of address. If the hymnist wanted to identify the term given to Jesus as “Lord,” a title designation of God, he should have identified it as a title and not a name.

And what happens if the “name” given in verse 9 is not “Jesus” but some other term? It would be like saying, “He was given the name George, so that at the name of Robert every knee should bow.” There is a rather obvious non-sequitur in these verses that the hymnist should not have felt comfortable with. Is “Jesus” a name that could be called “a name above every name”? It could if it encompassed the meaning of Savior, which it does. This would make it a name greater than any other name of a divine or human entity other than God.

Another smoking gun?

But what if the “name” were “Lord”? Is that “a name above every name”? Since it is a title of God himself it certainly would be, presuming we could take “name” as encompassing a title. But the hymnist would then be creating a confusing picture, one in fact which is not just a non-sequitur but contradictory. In the usual scholarly scenario, Jesus receives obeisance from the entire universe on the basis of being given the “name above every name” in verse 9. In other words, the denizens of the universe are reacting to that name, whatever it is.

But if this “name” is “Lord” then verse 10 isn’t compatible, for there it is said that “at the name of Jesus” every knee shall bow. But it would not be the name “Jesus” which prompts the bending of the knee if it is allegedly the title “Lord.” There is a contradiction here which cannot be resolved. (The statement that “Jesus Christ is Lord” in the final verse need not reflect back on the previous verses, for it could as easily mean that the Son now given the name Jesus has become Lord, beside the Lord God himself.) We must return to seeing verse 9’s “name” as “Jesus,” which brings it into harmony with the statement of verse 10. And brings mythicism onto the gold medal podium.

In sum, would Ehrman really have us believe that such a scenario, such an exaltation, would be created for his simple “son of God,” even if he had consented to crucifixion? What other “son of God” in Jewish history, even a martyr, was ever given God’s own exalted title? What other “son of God” had every knee in the cosmos bent to him? And how would the crucifixion of a man give God the means to forgive humanity its sins? (Though that is not the stated effect in this hymn.) Even the author of Hebrews realized that this required divine blood. And the Gospel Jesus was eventually raised to divinity precisely because it was perceived that only the sacrifice of a god could bestow redemption.

This picture of the heavenly Son is in keeping with the cosmic portrayal of him in the other hymns we looked at earlier, which Ehrman does not address. Could Philippians 2:6-11 be said to offer a dying and rising god? It certainly looks like it. An entity who was divine to begin with, sharing in God’s nature, descends and undergoes death, then rises back to heaven in an exalted state. Ehrman’s admission was right: on “superficial reading” it certainly looks to be a duck.

Beyond belief

Ehrman goes so far as to admit:

This final part of the passage is actually a quotation from Isaiah 45:23, which says that it is to God alone that every knee shall bow and tongue confess. However you interpret the rest of the passage, this conclusion is stunning. Christ will receive the adoration that is by rights God’s alone. That is how highly God exalted him in reward for his act of obedience. (DJE? p. 237)

Well, it is more than stunning. It is beyond credence. Isaiah 45:23 shows the exalted exclusivity Jews allotted to their God. Were the earliest Jewish Christians willing to contravene that paramount monotheism to the extent of elevating a crucified criminal, calling him “the Lord Jesus Christ” with God’s name above every name, to a position beside God himself? Even Ehrman admits that the hymn implies that this man, this “son of God,” was after his resurrection exalted to a position worthy of equal worship with God.” Equal worship! And on what basis? That they liked his teachings (for which there is no evidence in the epistles)? That they ‘came to believe’ based on a rumor, a story, an idea, that he had risen after death—and not even in flesh to earth (as Ehrman will have it)? The whole idea is preposterous.

At this point, Ehrman stands on his wager. The Philippians hymn has Jesus becoming someone ‘worthy to be worshiped,’ and he hedges his description of this new recipient of adoration as someone who was exalted “to a position of divine authority and grandeur,” seemingly to avoid styling him a god. But despite such hymns being thought of as written prior to Paul, whose conversion Ehrman puts at two or three years after the crucifixion, and despite them having a depth and sophistication which could hardly have developed overnight, their sentiments, Ehrman declares, do not constitute the earliest interpretation of Jesus. No, that phase, an entirely human man declared to have been the messiah despite his crucifixion, preceded even the pre-Pauline hymns. Which I guess slots it into the first few weeks after Jesus’ death, soon to be followed by the natural next phase in which he was made into a part of God and given the role of creator and sustainer of the universe.

28

G. A. Wells
1. Did Jewish Personified Wisdom Generate Paul’s Christ Jesus?

2. Was Paul’s Jesus an Unknown Jew Who Lived a Century Before?

The mythicist views of G. A. Wells

In turning once more to the views of G. A. Wells, Ehrman demonstrates that mythicism is not monolithic, for Wells’ views on what earliest Christians like Paul believed in shows that the opinions of mythicists can be almost as varied as those of New Testament scholars who have sought to uncover the ‘genuine’ historical Jesus. (Of course, only the former are scorned for that diversity.)

Wells and two originating strands of Christianity:

Wells, like myself, sees a Christian movement which originated in two essentially separate expressions that only came together in the Gospel of Mark. Since I did not consciously take this from Wells, this illustrates the principle of different individuals or groups coming up with similar ideas based on available evidence or ‘in the air’ concepts but not dependent one on another.

Strand one: Q, Galilee and a founding figure:

Wells accepts the existence of Q as representing one of those expressions: a sectarian movement in Galilee preaching the coming of the kingdom of God; but he came to believe (sometime around 1990) that an historical sage, à la the Jesus Seminar, lies at its root, whereas I see the evidence in Q pointing to a later development for such a founding figure during the evolution of the sect, and that no such founder existed.

Strand two: Paul, Wisdom and the reign of Alexander Janneus:

On the other hand, Wells sees Paul as deriving a non-existent Son/Christ figure from philosophical and scriptural sources, influenced especially by the “personified Wisdom” tradition of the Hebrew bible. But rather than locating him and his acts in a supernatural time and place, Wells interprets Paul as concluding that Christ had been born, lived and died on earth at an unknown time in the past, though he opts for Paul locating this during the reign of Alexander Janneus (103-76 BCE), known to have crucified hundreds of his rabbinic opponents.

Problems with Wells’ theory

There are several problems with Wells’ theory.

1. First of all, Paul (or any other epistle writer) never actually tells us that his Christ had been on earth, let alone living and dying during the reign of Janneus.

2. He and the other epistle writers never make room for a presence of Jesus on earth, even in obscurity, between the ancient promises of God and his first action on those promises through recent revelation and the preaching of the gospel by apostles like Paul.

3. No attempt is ever made by any epistle writer to speculate on the time, place and circumstances of such a life on earth.

4. I also believe that Wells has not taken into account that the occasional human-sounding language on which he seems to base his conviction that the epistle writers regarded Christ as having been on earth fits very well into the context of a heavenly Christ and the principle of paradigmatic parallelism, in which a heavenly figure undertakes to share in certain characteristics of the human world, but only in the “likeness” sense, for the purpose of undergoing sacrifice. For this, he does not need to come to earth or be incarnated.

Personified Wisdom in Jewish tradition

Be that as it may, my intent here is not to take on Wells, but to examine Ehrman’s interpretation of him. He notes that Wells appeals to the “personified Wisdom” tradition in Jewish thought. I, too, believe that this tradition influenced the development of the early Christ cult, but in conjunction with the Greek Logos concept in the Hellenistic tradition of the period. Indeed, even Jewish personified Wisdom by Paul’s time had been influenced by the Greek Logos, as we can see in the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo and an Alexandrian document about to be examined. And if Paul shows a heavy influence of other Greek ideas in his salvation theory, we can hardly think that he would have been immune to influences from Logos philosophy.

Ehrman first quotes Proverbs 8, but he can hardly think that this early expression of Wisdom in the Jewish texts somehow survived in a pristine state to reach Paul, unaffected by intervening Greek thought:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth….

[several verses describing aspects of God’s creation]

Then I was beside him, like a master worker;
And I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.

In fact, Ehrman immediately quotes from another ‘Jewish’ work, the Wisdom of Solomon in the Jewish apocrypha, which is usually dated some time early in the first century, during the lifetime of both Philo and Paul:

She is a breath of the power of God
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty….

For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness….

She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well….

For she is an initiate in the knowledge of God,
and an associate in his works. (Wisdom of Solomon 7 – 8)

This goes beyond the light-hearted and relatively innocuous picture of Wisdom keeping God supplied with iced tea during his labors at creation. Here we have a dramatic presentation of an intermediary entity standing proud beside God in heaven, a dangerously close compromise to strict monotheism. It is cut from the same cloth as Philo’s picture of the Logos. And it bears an undeniable resemblance to similar presentations of the Son throughout the New Testament epistles. (In the last chapter I quoted 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1:15-20 and Hebrews 1:2-3.).

Comparing the Wisdom of Solomon with the New Testament epistles

Indeed, it is astonishing that Ehrman and other historicist scholars can look at this passage in the Wisdom of Solomon, acknowledge that it is not speaking of any human being but of a heavenly entity, and then turn to virtually identical descriptions of the Son in the epistles—which equally do not make any association of what they are describing with a human being on earth—and yet insist that such descriptions are talking about an incarnated man. The ability to compartmentalize powers of judgment according to one’s personal interests is clearly an asset in the discipline known as New Testament scholarship.

In fact, Ehrman now examines Wells’ comparison between the above passage in the Wisdom of Solomon and the very similar passage in Colossians 1:15-20. Wells is maintaining that the Colossians hymn looks to be dependent on the concept of personified Wisdom we see in the Wisdom of Solomon (though we don’t know if the latter document and passage was known to Paul).

I might make the point here that Wells fails to note that the Colossians hymn shows no advance over the Wisdom of Solomon passage in a respect which, if Wells were correct, should have been crucial to Paul. If Paul and his circles believed that the Son talked of in Colossians had actually been incarnated to earth, even if at an unknown time, this dramatic addition to the myth of Wisdom should surely have been included in the Colossians hymn. The hymn saw fit to add the element of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, but no reference to an incarnation to earth. Indeed, the element of incarnation would have been the most dramatic aspect of the new Jesus faith over that of the Logos and personified Wisdom. No hymnist could possibly have left it out.

Ehrman finds fault with Wells’ contention that more than one aspect of the Wisdom of Solomon could have influenced Paul’s thinking about his Christ. The document also contains (2:10-20, 4:7-5:5) an account of the “just man” who is wrongfully accused and condemned to a “shameful death.” (This is not supposed to represent a specific historical individual, but the stereotyped righteous person who suffers at the hands of evil and godless men.) I pointed out earlier that this particular ‘tale’ was one example of the recurring genre in Jewish writing according to which the Passion account in Mark was created: the Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One.

Wells’ view is that Paul, or someone before him, could have reflected on this tale in the Wisdom of Solomon, took a cue from the “shameful death” reference and decided it referred to the crucifixion of an obscure earthly Jesus. Considering that the epistles constantly refer to the revelation of Christ in scripture, and that such scriptural sources would likely have been certain verses in the Suffering Servant Song of Isaiah 53, along with passages in Psalm 22 and Zechariah 12, an added influence from the Wisdom of Solomon would not be infeasible, although as far as we know this document was never regarded as “scripture.”

The Wisdom of God

I have to agree with Ehrman that Wells has read more into the reference to “the wisdom of God” in 1 Corinthians 1:23-24 and 2:6-8 than is merited. Rather than a formal reference to personified Wisdom, Paul seems to be speaking of God’s “wisdom” in reference to the system of salvation he has established through the sacrifice of his Son. Even Paul’s statement that Christ “is the power of God and the wisdom of God” is not calling on personified Wisdom, but stating the principle that the Son is a reflection or the embodiment of certain of God’s qualities and activities, pure Logos-style thought.

Paul has other similar characterizations, such as “the revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” in 2 Corinthians 4:6. This is hardly a reference to the past human face of the Gospel Jesus, but reflects the idea that through knowledge of the spiritual Son, whose ‘face’ has been revealed, we are able to know something about God’s nature.

Wells, then, suggests that for Paul, “Wisdom had become incarnate in Christ,” even if that incarnate life had been lived in obscurity. Ehrman pronounces this idea “riddled with problems,” even though there is a common exegesis of Matthew which sees the evangelist as implying this very thing—although for Matthew it is clearly for the earthly Jesus of his Gospel, whereas Paul presents us with no such earthly oriented scenario. But what are these “problems”?

Ehrman’s objections

Ehrman first makes the rather weak objection that ‘Jesus as Wisdom’ is only one among many characterizations Paul would have been giving his Christ, and by no means the commonest one. True enough, but that in itself hardly makes a minority characterization invalid. After all, scholars can still maintain that Paul was ‘called by Jesus’ (based on the road to Damascus legend or whatever Paul’s vision of Jesus entailed), even though in the vast number of cases Paul states he had been “called by God,” there being only a couple of occasions on which Paul throws in a calling from Christ along with God, as in Galatians 1:1.

Ehrman is a bit more reasonable in objecting that it would be quite odd for Paul to regard his Christ as Wisdom incarnate but to then make her/him the messiah—and crucified to boot. No Wisdom tradition anywhere even suggests such a fate. Not even the Logos was to be, or had been, killed, which may be why Paul’s message was “folly” even to Greeks. However, Paul being nevertheless led to accord to a Wisdom-inspired Son and Messiah a sacrificial death based on a reading of scriptural passages would not be infeasible either. Innovation can hardly be ruled impossible.

But Ehrman goes too far in his objection that we cannot judge Paul’s view by a passage in Colossians, which is regarded as not by Paul but written a little later in his name. He scoffs at the idea that this hymn (Col. 1:15-20) derives from a pre-Pauline tradition (like the other christological hymns in the Pauline corpus), since “Colossians is post-Pauline.”

Pre-Pauline Christological hymns

But whether written by Paul or not, scholarship judges that all of these similar hymns in the Pauline corpus represent the same type of thinking and expression (all, by the way, lacking any reference to or identification with an historical Jesus), and thus could all pre-date Paul, if only because those in the letters judged authentic to Paul (notably Philippians 2:6-11) also look to be quotations by him of earlier hymnic material. Ehrman himself argues for that elsewhere, so on what basis he is rejecting the Colossians hymn as “problematic” because it was written after Paul is unclear.

Besides, is Ehrman going to claim that the pseudo-Paulines (Colossians and Ephesians especially) are completely divorced from Paul’s thought and constitute new and unprecedented ideas? There can be little doubt that these epistles, datable not much later than Paul, represent a ‘school’ of Pauline thought in communities he founded or proselytized, largely based on the apostle’s own views, though the hymns themselves seem to have preceded Paul. (Ehrman has previously tried to maintain that just because Colossians and Ephesians show a preoccupation with heavenly forces of evil, this does not mean that Paul held anything like the same views!)

Ehrman reverts to his old ‘begging the question’ approach. He declares that Christians started out, not postulating an incarnation of Wisdom or any other divinity based on scripture, but facing the historical fact of a human Jesus being crucified, and thus constituting a “crucified messiah.” This automatically rules out any influence from scripture except as supplying prooftexts supporting what they already believed about their earthly Master. Thinking of Jesus as “God’s Wisdom” only came later. Well, we’ve been through the texts themselves in sufficient detail to show that they do not bear out this type of scenario, except through Ehrman’s dubious methodology of creating oral traditions to conveniently precede the epistles.

*

Did Paul’s Jesus live obscurely a century or more earlier?

Ehrman now focuses more closely on Wells’ contention that Paul viewed his Jesus as having lived an obscure life on earth and been crucified over a century before his own time. Wells, incidentally, does not interpret “the rulers of this age” to mean the demon spirits, for he sees the obscure Jesus as crucified on earth at some point in the past. Seemingly, as noted earlier, he has in mind Alexander Janneus. But this, too, entails a problem for Wells. Why one Jewish king over a century in the past would be referred to as “the rulers of this age” or why Paul would feel justified in claiming on this basis that past rulers were on their way to destruction is not at all clear.

Ehrman takes the tack that, while Wells notes correctly that Paul never gives any indication that Jesus had lived in the recent past, it would seem odd that such a time lapse would be seen to have taken place between the obscure Jesus’ death under Janneus and his recent appearances to certain people (including Paul himself) which inaugurated the new revelation and preaching movement.

Ehrman has a point, though it could be neutralized in one way. If Paul and others had really learned about Jesus entirely from scripture and concluded that he had lived on earth, with the period of Alexander Janneus offering itself as the best candidate for time, place and circumstances, then that is what they would have believed. It would be no more invalid for them to accept the longish period before Christ became known than for modern Christians to think it is invalid to accept that the Second Coming is imminent even though two millennia have elapsed after the initial promise of such a return. In either case, it is a matter of people wanting to think that prophecy and its fulfillment is about to land on them, and if that seems to entail an unreasonable lapse of time, this just gets ignored.

Still, Ehrman is justified in querying Wells’ picture, with its century-and-a-half lapse not seeming to be reflected in how Paul presents things. But there is an easy way out, for both of them. There exists no sign of a lapse because Paul’s “death, burial and rising” are not located at any point in the earthly past, whether known, unknown or postulated. Paul fails to ever suggest a time and place for his Christ’s death and resurrection because he does not locate them on earth. They are ‘events’ which have taken place in a supernatural dimension, and there is no time lapse problem involved because they cannot be pinpointed in relation to an earthly chronology. (The best we could say is that they took place some time after Adam or Abraham or the giving of the Law under Moses, but this may simply be the effect of inserting Christ into God’s process of ‘salvation history’ and may not necessitate even that degree of relative chronology for what was a timeless heavenly act. See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, chapter 17: “The When of Christ’s Sacrifice.”)

The sequence of events in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8

The first ‘point in time’ which can be located in the Pauline system is the time of revelation, the ‘appearances’ of Christ to certain people on earth. (For the community of 1 John it is the revelatory experience of 1:1-4, and for Hebrews it is its own revelatory experience in 2:1-4. In neither case is this experience identified with the life of Jesus on earth, despite scholarly attempts to read such a thing into the respective passages.)

On the other hand, it is likely that these appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 were largely ‘confirming’ visions (perhaps with the exception of that of Paul, who desperately wanted to join the club instead of persecuting it). They served to support ideas that had arisen through the study of scripture which, perhaps not long before, had produced the conviction that the Son existed and had acted as God’s agent of salvation—again helped along by contemporary philosophy and existing salvation theory of the time, including the pagan mysteries. Certainly, the impression Paul creates is that the Jerusalem sect had formed prior to those visionary experiences, although we don’t know on the basis of what beliefs, or whether a Son was specifically involved. “Brothers of the Lord,” as noted before, could conceivably have referred to God.

Thus there need be no perceivable problem in regard to a gap between 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 and 15:5-8, just as Scientology recognizes no problem between L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘revelation’ (in the late 60s, I believe it was) that we are all descended from aliens arriving on earth eons ago and that actual alien visitation, since the latter lay in an unperceived limbo until Hubbard received the revelation of its occurrence. Thus, Ehrman’s reading here is simply his own wishful thinking:

No, Paul is expressing a straight chronological sequence of events: Jesus died; he was buried; three days later he was raised; and he then appeared to the apostles. (DJE? p. 249)

Ehrman’s “he then appeared” adopts a language which implies the type of ‘shortly afterward’ sequence he wants to see in the passage. In fact, the Greek text can be seen as presenting not a sequence of events, but a listing of what Paul has previously told (“delivered” to) the Corinthians. He is reminding them (15:1) of that information: his gospel about the heavenly Christ derived “kata tas graphas” and the supporting visions. If the former were not intended to represent events on earth, there need be no temporal relationship implied between verses 3-4 and the rest of the passage, between Christ’s acts and the visions. The latter may not even have been as strong as visions but simply ‘convictions of his presence among them.’ (See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.78, and p.76 on the latter point.)

Ehrman’s straws

Ehrman again voices his objection to Wells using Colossians to understand Paul’s views, since Paul did not write this epistle. But that would be claiming that no movement’s founding ideas ever survive the death of the founder, or that the second generation of a sectarian group never reflects the ideas of the first generation. There is enough in common between Colossians and Ephesians and the genuine letters of Paul to reject such a stance. This is clearly Ehrman grasping at straws.

Another straw effort is in trying to block Wells’ opinion (shared by many others, as we have seen, including mainstream scholars) that 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 with its reference to “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus” is an interpolation. Ehrman reminds the reader that he has addressed—and dismissed—that view earlier. And so he has, and has been dismissed in turn for adopting such a conservative stance and failing to give any weight to the fact that it is the view of many of his scholarly peers, past and present.

It is ironic that mythicists can be roundly criticized for suggesting an alternate reading or an interpolation, accused of maintaining such things simply because they are “convenient,” yet here is Ehrman going against the clear grain of his fellow critical scholars and dismissing interpolation in 1 Thessalonians for reasons which can only be seen as “convenient” for his stance against mythicism.

Then there is the straw that “everyone knew”:

The fact that Paul does not mention that Jesus died in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate is not in the least odd. What occasion did Paul have to mention something that everyone knew? (DJE? p. 248)

What occasion? How about the scores of times Paul refers to Jesus’ death, but never, by chance because it is simply present in his mind or because he felt like it, happens to mention the time, place or agent? (Did he take a vow never to let such a reference pass his lips?) What about in 1 Corinthians 2:8, when he refers to the agents of Jesus’ death not as Pilate or the Jewish authorities but by a phrase that ancient Christian commentators themselves took to be referring to the demon spirits? What about him having in mind a crucifixion by the ruler Pilate which ought to have prevented him from making the statement in Romans 13 that the innocent have nothing to fear from earthly rulers, who are God’s appointees to punish evildoers?

What about him and other epistle writers having in mind the historical event of two decades before, which ought to have led them to insert it between God’s age-old promises and his gospel of the Son in scripture, and the first action by God on those promises and the first revelation of that gospel in the time of Paul? How about according some role for that historical life when Paul sets his own ministry against that of Moses, or proudly accords to himself God’s ministry of reconciliation and the inauguration of the new covenant? If everyone already knew about the historical Jesus, the messiah and Son of God who had lived, taught, died and risen within Paul’s own lifetime, it is hard to believe that at least some would not have wondered why he never showed up in any early writer’s presentation.

Not only does Ehrman have to ignore this void in the alleged “common knowledge” on the part of Paul’s readers, and apparently of Paul himself, he must substitute for it, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat, those Gospel “sources” which “spoke of the historical Jesus already by the early 30s, within at least a year of the traditional date of his death, before Paul was even converted.” (DJE? p. 248)

Paul’s “firstfruits” have sprouted in scripture

Ehrman again brings up the Pauline reference to Jesus’ resurrection as the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection of the dead. But I have made the point before that it is the revelation of Jesus’ resurrection, coming from God in the present time, which has served as the firstfruits; it need not be the act itself. If it were, we should expect from Paul a somewhat more detailed presentation of that recent historical event, instead of numerous bare references to it with no historical setting whatsoever, and with the implication on many occasions that it is not to be located in the recent past or that he doesn’t have any idea when it did occur.

If one historical event determines the imminent occurrence of another, we would have every reason to expect the former to be presented in an unmistakeable fashion. After all, two decades have passed. Wouldn’t some among Paul’s readership—even if they already had “common knowledge” of Jesus’ crucifixion under Pilate—have wondered just how long it was going to be? Or on what grounds Paul could justify a passage of even two decades, or be so sure there was hardly any further time to go?

Ehrman offers this analogy:

After the farmer gathers the firstfruits on the first day of harvest, when does he gather the rest? Does he wait a hundred years [referring to Wells’ theory]? No, he goes out the next day. (DJE? p. 251)

And so he does. The next day. What farmer waits two decades? If I were among the audience of Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians, I might wonder just how long Jesus was going to wait after dying and ascending before returning to earth with his angels and trumpets, and whether I might actually live to see the day. In all the discussion throughout the epistles about the question of when Christ would arrive from heaven (and remember it is never a “return”), no one ever calls attention to how long it has been since he was here and what length of time believers have been waiting.

Remember, too, that for Paul the starting point is always the “time of faith” (as in Galatians 3:23/25). For all the epistle writers the starting point is the time of Christ “being revealed” (all those revelation verbs), the “time of reformation” as in Hebrews 9:10. It is not the time of Christ’s life and actual acts of dying and rising. It is not a time ‘past’ in relation to their apostolic work, but a present period which has begun with their apostolic work in response to revelation. There is no sense of any given time lapse or period between the time of Christ’s crucifixion and rising, and the present time of the apostles. As far as they are concerned, this is “the next day” after the revelation of Christ as the “firstfruits.” They are out working for as big a yield as possible before the imminent harvest by God.

Summarizing his case against Wells

Ehrman persists in distorting and misrepresenting the early record. Here is his summation to Wells:

I should stress that this is the view of all of our sources that deal with the matter at all. It is hard to believe that Paul would have such a radically different view from every other Christian of his day, as Wells suggests. That Jesus lived recently is affirmed not only in all four of our canonical Gospels (where, for example, he is associated with John the Baptist and is said to have been born during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, under the rulership of the Jewish king Herod, and so on); it is also the view of all of the Gospel sources—Q (which associates Jesus with John the Baptist), M, L—and of the non-Christian sources such as Josephus and Tacitus (who both mention Pilate). These sources, I should stress, are all independent of one another; some of them go back to Palestinian traditions that can readily be dated to 31 or 32 CE, just a year or so after the traditional date of Jesus’s death. (DJE? p. 251)

- That Paul should differ from every other Christian is understandably “hard to believe” by those locked into forcing him into the Gospel mold.

- Nor are the rest of the epistle writers who seem to express themselves just like Paul apparently included in “every other Christian of the day.”

- “All four of our canonical Gospels” agree? Not surprisingly, since they are all based on the first one written, whose ‘event’ of Jesus crucified by Pilate can be found nowhere prior to Mark in the extant record.

- Jesus is associated with John the Baptist?

- Not by a single one of the epistle writers, who never once mention the Baptist.

- Not even in Q can John be seen as aware that Jesus was alive at the time he was prophesying the coming of the Son of Man (Lk/Q 3:16-17), let alone that he had baptized him.

- As for the Dialogue between Jesus and John (7:18-35), this extended anecdote has been shown by John Kloppenborg and other Q scholars to be an artificial construction later in Q’s development.

- And of course, any view of Jesus’ death—whether on earth or in heaven, whether by Pilate or by demons—is completely missing in Q.

- Born during the reign of Augustus and Herod? Matthew and Luke are a decade apart in the actual year, both inventing ‘biographical’ details which are as phoney as Washington’s cherry tree, while Mark has not a word to say on a time of birth.

- Luke as a reliable historian? Perhaps to those naïve enough to accept the Prologue as Gospel truth, even though the rest of Luke fails to live up to its claims, including presenting us with a census which never took place.

- Josephus and Tacitus? We know how reliable they are, and how long it was before their alleged references to Jesus showed up in the consciousness of Christian writers.

- And we have seen on just how firm a ground Ehrman’s fantasy sources are based—“independent” all of them—going back to Palestinian traditions datable to the year 31 or 32.

29

Bart Ehrman vs. Earl Doherty

The practice of drawing on previous scholarship

Ehrman calls me “one of the staunchest defenders of a mythicist view of Christ.” That’s almost the only valid statement he makes about me in the entire book. He starts off with a complaint which has often cropped up in criticisms directed against me:

He quotes professional scholars at length when their views prove useful for developing aspects of his argument, but he fails to point out that not a single one of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis. (DJE? p. 252)

First of all, I scarcely think I needed to point that out. What mainstream New Testament scholar subscribes to the mythicist theory, let alone that Paul regarded Christ as sacrificed in the heavenly realm? If any of these scholars I draw on had so believed, does Ehrman think I would not have trumpeted it to the skies? I was hardly concealing what anyone would assume was the historicist orientation of such scholars.

More importantly, does Ehrman or anyone else regard it as illegitimate of me to draw on observations and conclusions on the part of established scholarship if they can be fitted into the context of my own argument? Mainstream scholars do that all the time. All of scholarship builds on the work of predecessors, and all of those predecessors are subject to reinterpretation and the reapplication of their work to the new conclusions of their successors. Besides, many of my references to the views of historicist scholars involve a clear indication that I make use of their observations in different ways than they do, with different end results.

Enough said on that fallacy. Ehrman’s motive in raising it is quite clearly to impugn to me some form of dishonest procedure.

Multiple views of the universe

One of the “problems” Ehrman finds in my book is its main thesis:

One particular piece is especially unconvincing: in Doherty’s view, Paul (and other early Christians) believed that the Son of God had undergone a redeeming “‘blood’ sacrifice” not in this world but in a spiritual realm above it. (DJE? p. 252)

In the course of explaining why he is unconvinced, Ehrman makes a number of egregious misreadings of my text. (I know it is 800 pages, but it is still incumbent upon Ehrman to actually see the words as they stand on the page if he is going to find fault with them.) He says:

Doherty’s reason for this remarkable statement involves what he calls “the ancients’ view of the universe” (was there one such view?). . . . To begin with, how can he claim to have uncovered “the” view of the world held by “the” ancients, a view that involved an upper world where the true reality resides and this lower world, which is a mere reflection of it? How, in fact, can we talk about “the” view of the world in antiquity? Ancient views of the world were extremely complex and varied. . . . (DJE? pp. 252, 254)

This is not simply a misreading, it presents the exact opposite of what I actually say. Included in what I do say are the following:

To understand that setting, we need to look at the ancients’ views [VIEWS, plural] of the universe and the various [i.e., MULTIPLE] concepts of myth among both Jews and pagans, including the features of the Hellenistic salvation cults known as the “mysteries.” [Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.97]

[I]t is clear that much variation existed in the concept of the layered heavens and what went on in them, just as there were many variations in the nature of the savior and how he conferred salvation. [Ibid.,p.126]

Not only has Ehrman misrepresented me as someone who thinks the ancients’ view of the world was monolithic along Platonic lines, he then implies that the Platonic view of the universe, with its upper world of ‘true reality’ and a lower world which is a counterpart reflection of it, is somehow my own invention. Whereas any undergraduate student of ancient philosophy knows full well that this was a widespread (and to some extent even pre-Plato) type of cosmology about the structure of the universe. Unfortunately, much of Ehrman’s readership will not even be undergrads. Ehrman is here being either dishonest or incompetent. Further:

This view of things was especially true, Doherty avers, in the mystery cults, which Doherty claims provided “the predominant form of popular religion in this period.” (This latter claim, by the way, is simply not true. Most religious pagans were not devotees of mystery cults.) (DJE? pp. 252-253)

This is a non-sequitur. A predominant form of a popular practice does not infer that a majority of the population indulges in it. The predominant form of popular illicit drug is cocaine. Does that mean the majority of all men and women use it? Ehrman is guilty of serious logical deficiencies here.

From The Jesus Puzzle to Jesus: Neither God Nor Man

Probably the most unfortunate aspect of my earlier book was a failure of nuance on a key point. Ehrman says:

In the first edition of Doherty’s book, he claimed that it was in this higher realm that the key divine events of the mysteries transpired; it was there, for example, that Attis had been castrated, that Osiris had been dismembered, and that Mithras had slain the bull. In his second edition he admits that in fact we do not know if that is true and that we do not have any reflections on such things by any of the cult devotees themselves since we don’t have a single writing from any of the adherents of the ancient mystery cults. Yet he still insists that philosophers under the influence of Plato—such as Plutarch, whom we have met—certainly interpreted things this way. (DJE? p. 253)

First, although the words say so, I needed to have stressed that it was only in the context of interpretations within the mystery cults themselves, and not those of the common man-in-the-street or the average writer speaking of the traditional myths (such as the historian Tacitus or the geographer Pausanias), that I am claiming that a reorientation to the upper world took place for the activities of the savior gods, under the influence of Platonism. And even that may not have been complete, for the age-old setting of the traditional myths in a primordial time on earth would still have made its influence felt.

Still, even though we have no literature directly addressing the activities of the cults and the interpretations of their myths, there are many indicators in the record we do have to suggest that such a reorientation to a Platonic higher world did take place. (In The Jesus Puzzle, I devoted an Appendix [No.6] to focusing on that evidence, and in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, such discussion was made a part of the main text.)

Thus in The Jesus Puzzle my too-firm claim about the relocation of the cultic mysteries’ myths to the upper world needed to be qualified as “deducible from the evidence,” even if not firmly demonstrated. Ehrman’s claim that I admit that “in fact we do not know if that is true” similarly needs qualification. In both books I have marshalled a great deal of evidence and argument to justify the postulation that, in the minds of the priests and philosophers of the cults and the devotees who had such things explained to them during the secret rituals, the myths were indeed thought of as transpiring in a heavenly dimension. Ehrman fails to address that evidence and argument.

Philosopher vs. man-in-the-street

In this connection, Ehrman has directly reversed what I had to say about the differences between the views of the philosophers and the views of the average devotee of the cults, or simply the common person who was familiar with the traditional myth but not a cult member.

What literature we do possess which addresses the cultic gods and their myths are from a handful of philosophers spanning a few centuries. The most important of these is Plutarch, who wrote his treatise Isis and Osiris around the end of the first century CE. Plutarch’s interpretation of the myth is an allegorical one. He does not regard the myth as representing actual activities of the gods, but as symbolizing forces of nature, of the universe, spiritual processes, etc. But in presenting his own interpretation, he gives us information on the various ways contemporary society regarded such myths, and it is clear that many people held a much more literal view of the Isis-Osiris myth than did a philosopher like himself.

That difference, between philosopher and the average person familiar with the myths (whether a devotee of the cult or not), was made clear in my book. Ehrman, on the other hand, has accused me of the direct opposite:

And it is highly unlikely that adherents of the mystery cults (even if we could lump them all together) thought like one of the greatest intellectuals of their day (Plutarch). Very rarely do common people think about the world the way upper-class, highly educated, elite philosophers do. . . . In the case of someone like Plutarch there is, in fact, convincing counterevidence. Philosophers like Plutarch commonly took on the task of explaining away popular beliefs by allegorizing them, to show that despite what average people naively believed, for example, about the gods and the myths told about them, these tales held deeper philosophical truths. (DJE? p. 255)

This distinction between allegorical and literal understanding is an important one, and it figures in much of my analysis of the mystery cults. How Ehrman could have missed it is hard to say. But what, to a great extent, the philosopher and the average cult devotee probably did have in common, if we take into account those indicators I spoke of, is a concept of the myths taking place, whether allegorically or literally, in a supernatural world rather than in a primordial time in the distant past on earth.

(One myth we can be quite sure of in this respect is Mithras’ slaying of the bull, which has been fairly securely interpreted by modern scholars as representing activities of the god in the heavens in regard to the movement of the stars. In addition, Plutarch gives us an interpretation of the myth of Osiris which relates specifically to heavenly spheres, as do the 4th century philosophers Sallustius and Julian the Apostate in regard to the god Attis.)

But if we can judge by Plutarch’s admonishments—and Ehrman recognizes this in his quote above—members of the cults tended to adopt an outlook of literality on the myths (whether located on earth or in the heavens) which the philosophers felt at pains to correct. This situation is clearly outlined in my book:

Even the traditional religious myths which took shape in ancient society tended to be chaotic and lacking any sense of what we would call the rational and comprehensible (for example, Dionysos born from Zeus’ thigh). Yet such features were still looked upon as ‘real,’ however illogical they may seem to us; they were allegorized only by the intelligentsia. If pressed, average devotees might have been mightily exercised to define exactly how they saw the stories of Attis, Dionysos and Mithras unfolding in their world of myth, let alone to provide a specific location for them. [Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p. 155]

It tells us that in philosophical circles, and from the time of Plutarch, an application of the myths to a primordial earth setting was no longer in vogue. This may or may not give us a definite picture of how all the devotees of the cults looked upon such things, but it demonstrates that the thinking of the era had moved in an upward direction, and we have no contrary evidence to suggest that the interpretation of the myths in the cults as a whole did not follow. [Ibid., p.149]

Ehrman criticizes me (see above) for admitting that we don’t know for sure what the average devotee of the cults believed, since we don’t have any writings from such people on the subject, but then—as though this is a contradiction—he says: “yet he still insists that philosophers under the influence of Plato—such as Plutarch, whom we have met—certainly interpreted things this way” (i.e., seeing the myths as locatable in the heavenly world).

But there is no contradiction here. Ehrman has just agreed that we do not have any writings from the cult devotees explaining the myths and rites. But from philosophers like Plutarch we do possess writings telling us something about how those myths and rites were interpreted, with specific reference to the layers of the heavens. That is why I can state that such philosophers interpreted the myths in the context of a Platonic heavenly setting.

It is one thing to be expected to rebut a critique of one’s case which accurately and adequately represents it. It is quite another thing to know what to do with a critique which has thoroughly misread that case and thinks to deal with it on the basis of a complete misrepresentation of it. One unfortunate side effect of that misrepresentation is that the uninformed reader has no idea that Ehrman has given them a flawed and inaccurate picture of my position. If he had done that to a thesis presented by some mainstream critical scholar, bloody murder would have been raised and Ehrman’s reputation as any kind of reliable reviewer, let alone a scholar with integrity, would be in tatters.

One paragraph from Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.100-1) sums up my position on this whole question:

What we do know is that the philosophers whose writings have come down to us did in fact transplant the myths and it was under the influence of Platonism. They transplanted them from a primordial time to a supernatural dimension, turning them into allegories of cosmic forces and spiritual processes. For them, the religious myths now symbolized things that happened beyond earth. And if that transplanting is the trend to be seen in the surviving writings on the subject, it is very likely that a similar process took place to some degree in the broader world of the devotee and officiant of the mysteries; it cannot be dismissed simply as an isolated elitist phenomenon. In fact, that very cosmological shift of setting can be seen in many of the Jewish intertestamental writings, presenting divine figures and salvific forces operating in the spiritual realm of the heavens, as in the Similitudes of Enoch, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Ascension of Isaiah and other writings to be examined; in the New Testament itself, the Epistle to the Hebrews presents a spiritual sacrifice by Christ in a heavenly sanctuary.

Paul’s Christ in the context of the times

Before leaving this topic for good, I should stress an important aspect of my argument in regard to the mysteries. I have stated that I do not use a Platonic interpretation of the pagan mystery cult myths as the primary evidence, let alone the only evidence, for such an interpretation of Paul and his view of his Christ Jesus. The latter is not reliant on the former.

It is the presentation of the Christ cult itself in the epistles which leads to an interpretation that Paul’s faith centers around a heavenly Jesus acting in a supernatural setting. Naturally, the broader philosophy and cosmology of the time provides us with the background against which we can interpret early Christian thinking (just as mainstream scholarship uses it in many ways), and identifying similar ideas in the mystery cults and their own savior god myths provides us with some corroboration for such an interpretation of the epistles’ world and mindset.

But it is primarily

- the lack of placement of Jesus on earth,

- the void on a recent historical role for him,

- his characterization in spiritual and mystical terms,

- the exclusive appeal to scripture for information about him,

- his state of being “unknown” for long generations and only now “revealed” by God through the sacred writings,

- supported by a mountain of evidence in Jewish sectarian intertestamental writings that even Jews looked to the heavenly world for the activities of divine figures and the source of God’s salvation

—all this and more leads one away from seeing the early Christian Jesus as a recent earthly man and instead to a heavenly paradigm whose reality was a spiritual one and whose temporarily-adopted “likeness” to humanity enabled him to descend and undergo sacrifice at the hands of Paul’s “rulers of this age.”

“The Jews who killed the Lord Jesus”—again

As an argument against my thesis that Paul’s Christ Jesus was an entirely supernatural figure, crucified in the lower heavens at the hands of the demon spirits, Ehrman once more makes this criticism:

Doherty refuses to allow that l Thessalonians—which explicitly says that the Jews (or the Judeans) were the ones responsible for the death of Jesus—can be used as evidence of Paul’s view: it is, he insists, an insertion into Paul’s writings, not from the apostle himself. (Here we find, again, textual studies driven by convenience: if a passage contradicts your views, simply claim that it was not actually written by the author.) (DJE? p. 253)

I refuse to allow? I insist that 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 is an insertion into Paul’s writings? It is my textual studies that are driven by convenience? Once again, this is utterly unconscionable on Ehrman’s part, making it sound to his readers that only irresponsible mythicists have made such a claim regarding this passage, when in fact interpolation is a widespread opinion on the matter among liberal scholars, and has been for at least a century. Is Ehrman going to claim that he is unaware of that widespread opinion?

“The Rulers of this Age”—again

Considering the importance of 1 Corinthians 2:8 for the mythicist theory, one might expect Ehrman would devote some space to it. Here he introduces it:

More telling for (Doherty) is the passage I already quoted above from l Corinthians 2:6-8, which indicates that the “rulers of this age” were the ones who “crucified the Lord of glory.” For Doherty these are obviously not human rulers but demonic forces. Thus for Paul and other early Christians, Christ was not a human crucified on earth but a divine being crucified in the divine realm. (DJE? pp. 253-254)

Once again, the meaning of this phrase is not “obvious” only to me, but to a range of scholars over the last century. As well, of course, to ancient commentators themselves who “obviously” must have been familiar with the contemporary connotation of the phrase.

Now, lest I garner more criticism for an illegitimate appeal to mainstream scholarship, let me make it clear that those scholars who understand the phrase as a reference to the demon spirits, such as S. G. F. Brandon, do not draw the conclusion that Paul actually located that crucifixion in the heavenly realm. Most will simply conclude, as Origen was the first to do, that Paul was speaking of the demons working through human agents on earth, but somehow bearing the primary responsibility.

And yet, that is a superimposed layer of interpretation, one produced, of course, by the Gospels. But the willingness on the part of some mainstream scholars like Brandon to recognize the meaning of the phrase as intended by Paul is a piece of interpretation which a mythicist like myself can make use of with full legitimacy. If the phrase does mean the demon spirits—who do, after all, inhabit the lower reaches of the heavens where they engage in disreputable human-like activities which we have no reason to think could not include a hanging on a tree (views of the heavens as a whole are full of such ‘geomorphic’ envisionings, many of them gruesome)—then this becomes a perfectly valid plank in the mythicist theory.

And just how does Ehrman deal with that plank? Does he nail it down so that it doesn’t trip up historicism’s stroll in the park?

But is this really what Paul thought—the Paul who knew Jesus’s own brother and his closest disciple Peter, who learned of traditions of Jesus just a year or two after Jesus’s death? (DJE? p. 254)

This is Ehrman’s rebuttal? How could it possibly be demons in the heavens who crucified Jesus when Paul knew the historical Jesus’ own brother and closest disciple, and learned all about him within a year or two after Calvary? Who needs logic and counterargument, who needs to rebut one’s opponents’ position, when begging the question is so much easier and so handy? In Jesus: Neither God Nor Man I spent six pages on “the rulers of this age,” plus at other spots touching on certain points about the question, and this is apparently what Ehrman thinks is sufficient to dismiss it.

As for this objection:

Is this why Paul persecuted the Christians—not for saying the (earthly) messiah was crucified by the Romans but for saying that some kind of spiritual being was killed in heaven by demons? And why exactly was that so offensive to Paul? Why would it drive him to destroy the new faith, as he himself says in Galatians 1 that he did? (DJE? p. 254)

Aside from it being unclear why Paul was acting on behalf of the Jewish religious authorities to persecute the new faith, it was hardly on the basis of it claiming that demons in the heavens had killed a spiritual figure they called the messiah. It was far more likely because they were preaching their Christ as a heavenly part of God and compromising the establishment’s strict monotheism.

It is at this point that Ehrman erroneously imputes to me a monolithic view of the cosmology of the ancients. His insistence on mentioning the Stoics and Epicureans as though they had not crossed my mind is yet another reason to suspect that he did not himself read my book, in which I do make mention of rival philosophies to Platonism. (There has been some question about whether he indulged in the scholarly practice of having one’s undergrad students read the material and supply a report on it.)

But there is also no denying that Platonism was the dominant viewpoint of the day where cosmology was concerned, especially in Hellenistic Judaism, and there is no reason to reject a new Jewish-gentile movement whose own cosmology was Platonically oriented. It shows once again that Judaism was not isolated from pagan thought.

Jewish vs. Greek

And yet Ehrman seems to think it was indeed isolated:

Not even Paul was philosophically trained. To be sure, as a literate person he was far better educated than most Christians of his day. But he was no Plutarch. His worldview was not principally dependent on Plato. It was dependent on the Jewish traditions, as these were mediated through the Hebrew scriptures. (DJE? p. 255)

And what would Ehrman say of Philo? His thought-world resided within the Hebrew scriptures, but he brought some very non-Jewish principles to their interpretation, principles which permeated the air of the time. There is scarcely a stronger Middle Platonist in this era than Philo, who in his own mind was thoroughly a Jew.

Paul may not have been the saturated Platonist that Philo was, and his dependence on the scriptures is undeniable, but his christology contains some very un-Jewish ideas. Was the concept of eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ related to Jewish tradition? Not that I’ve heard of. How about the concept of the believer entering into joint carnality with the body of Christ? No connection there with Second Temple Judaism that I know. Dying with Christ through baptism? That was hardly right up the Jewish traditional alley. Says Ehrman,

And the Hebrew scriptures certainly did not discount the events that transpire here on earth among very real humans. For the writers of the Hebrew Bible, the acts of God did not transpire in some kind of ethereal realm above us all. They happened here on earth and were deeply rooted in daily, historical, real human experience. (DJE? pp. 255-256)

Earth vs. Heaven

And so they were. But the Hebrew Bible ended early in the second century BCE. And in its last canonical book, Daniel, we already see the beginnings of a shift to a concern with the heavenly world and God’s activities within it, a focus which was continued and enlarged on in much of the Jewish intertestamental writings. The book of Daniel, in fact, is widely regarded as essentially the birth of Jewish apocalyptic.

The seminal scene in Daniel 7, in which God bestows power and glory on the “one like a son of man” representing the nation of Israel, is not conducted on earth, but in that “ethereal realm above us all.” The literary fascination with seers and prophets receiving guided tours above the earth, ascending through the layers of heaven and learning of their content and preparations for the future, as in the Similitudes of Enoch, the Apocalypse of Zephaniah and the Ascension of Isaiah, shows that some Jewish thought was moving beyond—or ‘higher’ than—any former biblical traditions. The document 2 Enoch contains extended accounts of activities going on in the spiritual layers of the universe.

The Pauline corpus’ obsession with the threat of dark cosmic powers who inhabit the heavens, the period’s fixation on the threat from the demons, has little precedent in the Hebrew bible and marks a new development in Jewish thought, as it did in Hellenistic outlook generally. And inasmuch as Gnosticism is now seen as having had at least a partial origin within radical Jewish circles preceding Christianity, with its center of attention on a heavenly world and the workings of the Godhead, we can see an era-wide development in an interest in the Platonic view of an upper part of the cosmos where divine activities took place.

Even Philo, with his focus on the Logos as emanation of God, as well as his “Heavenly Man” concept—another fixation in the period’s picture of divine realities which shows up in Paul’s concept of Christ as “anthropos” (as in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15)—demonstrates the saturation of earthly thought with heavenly imaginings.

Jewish sectarian trends

Much of these imaginings took place in what we would call Jewish sectarian circles, which the establishment may well have turned a jaundiced eye upon, yet what was Christianity but a sectarian expression? What was Paul’s system, and whatever preceded him as seen in the christological hymns, but the imaginings of a sect? Paul did not even see the kingdom of God (wherever he placed it—1 Thessalonians 4:15-18 suggests it was not on this mundane earth, and other sects envisioned the righteous inheriting thrones and crowns in heaven) as being possessed by normal flesh and blood. All of this hardly fell into the category of “daily human experience.”

Ehrman does his best to ignore any facets of Pauline thought which could not possibly be said to have arisen out of Jewish traditions. Instead, as with most modern scholarship which has pulled in its wagons to circle narrowly defined Jewish sources, he maintains that mystery cult influences cannot be identified as present within “Aramaic-speaking rural Palestinian Judaism of the 20s and 30s of the first century,” as though this is the sum total of the nature of the early church Paul joined.

Did Paul—and even the Jerusalem pillars—move only in rural areas?

Did they speak and write in Aramaic? (Not according to the entire New Testament record they didn’t.)

Did they live their lives wholly in Palestine? If Acts is correct that Paul was from Tarsus, this is far removed from any Aramaic rural Palestine. Tarsus was the center of Mithras worship.

Paul is as at home in Corinth and Ephesus as he is in Jerusalem, and he encounters rival apostles of the Christ all over the eastern empire, some preaching “another Jesus,” who have no connection to the Jerusalem group.

The Christian congregation in Rome later possessed a tradition that it had adopted belief in Christ without benefit of outside preaching, from Jerusalem or anywhere else.

Ehrman’s attempt to restrict the Christ cult’s horizon to something which would exclude every pagan influence is ludicrous.

Ehrman appeals to Paul as having been a Pharisee. “Were Pharisaic Jews influenced by the mystery cults?” he asks. Were they, or the Sadducees, or the Essenes, students of the mysteries? I would agree that they were not. But does this prevent any individual or individuals that might be within these classes from being open to such influences? By way of analogy, an ethnic group might as a rule not marry outside the group, but does that mean that no one within the group ever does? Ehrman obviously does not understand the principle of mutation. Besides, not every Jew was an active Pharisee, Sadducee or Essene.

An influence from the mysteries?

Ehrman maintains:

These mystery cults are never mentioned by Paul or by any other Christian author of the first hundred years of the church. (DJE? p. 256)

Well, Paul makes a pretty clear allusion to at least the sacred meal practices of such pagan cults in 1 Corinthians 10:20-22. And because of the exclusivity the Christ cult adopted, it would be very unlikely to acknowledge any commonality with, let alone derivation from, the ideas of the pagan mysteries. They would have convinced themselves that they were something quite original and the genuine article, helped by the fact that in their Jewish context and derivation from scripture they could be seen as different and unique.

Moreover, Ehrman has not taken note of the fact that I impute to the Christ cult very little direct conscious borrowing from the mysteries of the day. It was simply feeding into ideas which formed the very atmosphere of popular religion and salvation theory of the period. And once Christianity had expanded sufficiently that it attracted attention and opposition from pagan observers, then comparisons of its basic ideas with those of the mysteries and other mythology could not be avoided by its apologetic defenders. If at that point the similarities were undeniable by such as Justin Martyr, and referred to with scorn by such as Celsus, it is highly unlikely that at its inception a century earlier the cult of Christ Jesus the savior god could have been free of any similarities or dependency, conscious or unconscious, on its older cousins.

And Ehrman is simply wrong in this statement:

There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that these cults played the least role in the development of early views of Jesus. (DJE? p. 257)

Quite the contrary, there is plenty of evidence. It is present in the beliefs and practices of the “early views” found in Paul and the other epistle writers, which cannot be derived from Jewish precedents and which bear strong resemblance to concepts native to Hellenistic philosophy and salvation religions. (If Joe’s wife has a child which bears a striking resemblance to Joe’s best friend Bill, should we blithely accept her assurances that she has never been unfaithful?)

Shedding blood on earth

Of course, by “early views of Jesus” Ehrman is largely focusing on the Gospels:

That is not the view of Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John. It is not the view of any of the written sources of any of these Gospels, for example, M and L. It is not the view of any of the oral traditions that later made their way into these Gospels. (DJE? p. 257)

Once again, Ehrman is calling upon his ‘multiple independent sources,’ all of which are derived from a story which has created the picture of a crucifixion for Jesus on earth where it did not exist before. But he also brings in a couple of epistles in support, ironically the two which are in fact least equipped to provide it. Hebrews, as we have seen, excludes from its picture of Jesus’ sacrifice anything earthly and places his activities entirely in heaven, with a source of knowledge about him drawn solely from scripture. Ehrman has him “coming into the world” (10:5) quoting from Psalm 40, while Jesus acts “in the days of his flesh” (5:7) by performing passages from other Psalms.

As for interpreting 10:12’s “But Christ offered for all time one sacrifice for sin” as “making a bloody sacrifice in this world,” this not only ignores the entire Hebrews portrayal of that sacrifice in terms of the offering of his blood in the heavenly sanctuary, it turns a blind eye on the following words: “and took his seat at the right hand of God,” which seems to regard the two locations as next door to one another. There is no “in this world” in sight anywhere in Hebrews’ picture. In fact, Ehrman overlooks 8:4 which states that Jesus had never been on earth (another multi-page discussion in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man which he has ignored).

From 1 John, Ehrman turns neuter pronouns about the revelation of eternal life at the formation of the sect into a hearing and ‘man-handling’ of the preaching Jesus of Nazareth. 1 John also provides evidence that Jesus “shed his blood as an expiation for sin,” though regrettably it does not provide any indication that this shedding took place on earth. And this from an epistle which has to deal with the very question of whether Jesus Christ had actually “come in the flesh” or not, a debate in which both sides were dependent entirely on revelations from the spirit (4:1-4).

More “blood” from Paul also demonstrates for Ehrman that it had to be shed on earth, and he reads into Paul’s references to Jesus’ resurrection that this was a “bodily” one—something which Paul never states and which most critical scholars today now reject. And if the epistle to the Hebrews envisions its blood sacrifice as having taken place on Calvary, it provides no explanation for how that blood was collected (in one of the ‘skulls’ lying around Golgotha perhaps?), or how the dead Christ, ascending in spirit, transported it to the heavenly sanctuary where he offered it to God on the altar.

Problematic arguments

Ehrman appeals to the curious non-sequitur that if Christ appeared to earthlings rather than to heavenly beings after his resurrection, then the latter had to take place on earth. (Hmmm . . . doesn’t the christological hymn in 1 Timothy 3:16 say that after he was resurrected in spirit, he “was seen by angels”? There is no mention of him being seen by earthlings—before or after death; and by Ehrman’s argument, this would have to require that his resurrection was in the angels’ domain.)

There is, naturally, mention of “born of woman, born under the Law” of Galatians 4, which has its own problems and is vulnerable to arguments for interpolation (some supplied by Ehrman himself, as we have seen), though even if authentic it contains curiosities such as Paul’s use of a verb which does not directly convey human birth. These points were discussed earlier.

Ehrman also considers that mention of “on the night he was delivered up” in 1 Corinthians 11:23 assuredly points to an earthly event, without taking into account that myths can enjoy any geomorphic setting required by their subject matter, and that the ancients’ understanding of the nature of the heavenly world was not like our own. His query, “Do they have nights in the spiritual realm?” might well have been answered yes, especially if Paul’s Lord’s Supper myth had a symbolic linking with Passover, whose celebratory meal took place after sundown.

Ehrman states that Paul “stresses” Jesus’ burial (I am not sure if slipping it in between his gospel of dying and rising, both known “kata tas graphas” whereas the burial is not, constitutes ‘stressing’), from which he concludes:

Surely he means he was buried in a tomb, and that would mean here on earth. (DJE? p. 258)

It’s nice to be “sure” of something which is an asset to one’s case, but nowhere in the epistles does anyone refer to a “tomb” for Jesus, much less to any tradition of an “empty tomb” three days later. And if one looks at Romans 6:4, “By baptism we were buried with him,” one can see the probable reason Paul slipped in burial between Christ’s dying and rising: it conformed in paradigmatic fashion with the burial he envisioned for the devotee who died to his old life and emerged into a new one. As G. A. Wells once observed (as have others), the elements of a rite often give rise to a myth which explains it, rather than the myth or alleged historical event producing an imitative rite.

Ehrman’s Conclusion

Paul and others expected Jesus to return from heaven, into this very realm where we dwell now (1 Thessalonians 4-5), leading to the transformation of both us and the world (1 Corinthians 15). Paul thought Christ was to “return” here because he had “left” here. This is where he was born, lived, died, and was raised. It all happened here on earth, not in some other celestial realm. Jesus was killed by humans. The forces of evil may have ultimately engineered this death (although, actually, Paul says God did); the demons (whom Paul never mentions) may have inspired the authorities to do the dirty deed, but it was they who did it. (DJE? p. 258)

In typical Ehrman fashion, things not at all in evidence in the record—in this case, the epistolary one—are simply declared to be:

- The word “return” he presents as though a quote from Paul, whereas no such word is ever used by any epistle writer in reference to Jesus’ coming in glory at the Parousia. It is indeed notably missing.

- Despite the controversy over “rulers of this age” and its common interpretation, especially in ancient times, Ehrman declares that Paul never mentioned them. (The prominent mention of demons in Colossians and Ephesians requires him to dismiss any thought that these pseudo-Pauline epistles owe anything to the ideas of Paul.)

- The ‘birth, life and death’ on earth are likewise missing.

- No such clear, direct language as “when he lived on earth” or “during his life among us” is ever found in the epistles.

But in fact:

The epistles universally characterize the appearance of the Son Jesus in the present period as a “revelation.”

Right after that questionable “born of woman, born under the Law” in Galatians 4 we find Paul stating that God “has sent the spirit of the Son.”

Similarly, as a guarantee of his promises of eternal life, Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:5 says that “God has sent the Spirit.”

Contrary to all the oral traditions claimed by Ehrman about a teaching Jesus in Galilee, Paul can say in 1 Thessalonians 4:9 that “We are taught by God to love another.”

There is often no foothold for an historical Jesus in the picture created of the origin and progress of the early movement, or in the sequence of God’s salvation history.

And so on, into the sunset. There are a host of such indicators throughout the epistles that no “birth, life and death” for a Jesus on earth was envisioned. In the face of all this contrary evidence in the record itself, Ehrman’s declaration that mythicism is flat wrong does not make it so.

30

Did Mark Invent Jesus of Nazareth?

Mark building on Q traditions

In the final section of his critique of individual mythicists, Bart Ehrman addresses the question of whether Mark invented his Gospel character. Insofar as he has my specific position in mind, he doesn’t quite get it right, as usual.

It is widely thought among those who hold such [mythicist] views that the Jesus of the Gospel tradition—the Jewish teacher and prophet of Galilee who did miracles and then was crucified by the Romans—is an invention of our first Gospel, Mark. . . . This view is suggested in several places by Wells and is stated quite definitively by Doherty: “All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one source: the Gospel of Mark, the first one composed. Subsequent evangelists reworked Mark in their own interests and added new material.” (DJE? p. 259)

I do not say that “the Jewish teacher and prophet of Galilee who did miracles” is the invention of Mark, but rather of the Q community which preceded him, although that invention was not in the form of any narrative life story, but simply as the alleged originator of a bare collection of the community’s sayings and a few anecdotes, with no biography, let alone a personality, in view.

Unlike Wells’ acceptance of an historical sage at the origin of this kingdom-preaching movement (which spread over much of Galilee and southern Syria), I maintain, working from the content of Q itself, that such a figure came to be envisioned by some of the community only in the later course of its development. The scope of Mark’s invention was to give this imagined figure a biography, a narrative ministry, and to add to his symbolic life the wholly fabricated event of an earthly crucifixion in an historical setting, probably to allegorize the Christ cult’s heavenly crucifixion of the spiritual sacrificial Son. Thus, it is true to say that the author of Mark invented the literary character we know as Jesus of Nazareth.

Mark supplied the “basic story” without, it seems, having possessed a copy of the Q document which reflected the sect, but he was a party to many of its oral traditions which were recorded in Q. Matthew and Luke, each redacting Mark’s story from different communities within the movement, had copies of the document and filled in Mark’s missing material. John, though introducing much material original to himself or his community, was dependent on the Synoptics for his basic story of an earthly Jesus.

Is John dependent on the Synoptics?

Ehrman chooses to begin his rebuttal on this question. He declares:

[T]here are solid reasons for doubting that the Gospel of John is based on Mark or on either of the other two earlier Gospels, even though the matter is debated among scholars. But the reality is that most of the stories told about Jesus in the synoptic Gospels are missing from John, just as most of John’s stories, including his accounts of Jesus’s teachings, are missing from the synoptics. When they do tell the same stories (for example, the cleansing of the Temple, the betrayal of Judas, the trial before Pilate, the crucifixion and resurrection narratives) they do so in different language (without verbatim overlaps) and with radically different conceptions. It is simplest to assume that John had his own sources for his accounts. (DJE? p. 259)

I beg to differ. Considering that the Gospel of John has a slew of elements which differ, often to a considerable degree, from the Synoptics, as well as his own catalogue of unique features, the “simplest” solution is to assume that John himself is responsible for the changes and innovations. And since those changes and innovations can usually be seen as consistent with an identifiable Johannine agenda and outlook, this hardly speaks to a range of previous sources only he had contact with and which just happened to show that consistency.

Besides, if there are “solid reasons” to maintain something, it is not likely that the matter would still be capable of being “debated among scholars.”

Alterations by John

The day of the crucifixion

To take a primary example, if John has the day of the crucifixion take place on Passover eve rather on the next day as in the Synoptics, is this liable to be a separate tradition—one of the two being erroneous on such a matter as the day of Jesus’ death in relation to the Passover? Or has he purposely changed the Synoptic story so as to have the sacrifice of Christ coincide with the slaughter of the Passover lambs in the Temple, and thus create a piece of symbolism he has an interest in? Many scholars have opted for the latter.

The piercing of Jesus’ side

Does he have the soldiers pierce Jesus’ side because he happened to receive a tradition no one else did? Or—as he himself points out—is this dependent on Zechariah 12:10, “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”? Has he made the point that Jesus did not have his legs broken because he saw several proscriptions in scripture about bones not being broken as applicable to his Jesus?

The missing Gethsemane and Eucharist

And what about Gethsemane, missing in John? Did the evangelist inherit a tradition about the night Jesus was arrested that made no mention of such a scene? Did he receive an account of the Last Supper which left out Jesus’ establishment of the eucharist? Did another tradition include a couple of those eucharistic motifs as part of one of Jesus’ controversies with the Jewish authorities (Jn. 6:30-58)?

The more reasonable explanation is that the snipping of Gethsemane fit better with John’s reluctance to portray his Jesus as in any way possessing doubts or weaknesses, while the eucharistic scene served no purpose in a death which the author did not wish to portray as a sacrificial atonement. The “body and blood” motifs were more relevant to a scene in which John could portray Jesus as the representative of God, the Revealer of the Father. Here the “eating of the bread” represented not Jesus’ material body but the “bread of life,” the knowledge of God brought by the Son; the “drinking of the blood” was another symbolic motif of ‘ingesting’ saving divine knowledge (as we find in the Odes of Solomon, probably somewhat earlier from the same geographical region).

Was all of this the basic Johannine christology of a spiritual Revealer Son who imparts salvation, prior to its adoption and adaptation of the Synoptic historical Jesus probably early in the second century? I have elsewhere suggested that, given the dramatically different nature of the Johannine Jesus, the author of the initial version of John still regarded his Jesus character as symbolic of that earlier christology and not as an historical figure.

The Johannine teachings and miracles of Jesus

Speaking of those dramatic differences, does Ehrman really think that the teachings in John, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to those of the rest of his “multiple independent sources,” were separate traditions by someone or some group who preserved teachings totally unlike every other source of Jesus’ teaching? Would this evangelist never have encountered any Synoptic-like teachings in his array of separate Jesus traditions?

The teachings in John are better seen as the expression of his own community which he has inserted into the Synoptic framework, jettisoning the latter’s teachings of Jesus as of no interest to him or his community. Just as the atonement concept had no application within a Revealer Son christology and salvation system, and why he treats the crucifixion of his Jesus as a “glorification,” not actually a part of his official work on earth (see 17:4).

And what of Lazarus? Is the raising of a man from his tomb after lying dead for four days a tradition none of the Synoptic sources happened to take notice of? Or is it John emulating the Synoptics with a miracle of his own which outdid them all? Perhaps if there was a so-called Signs Source, this was a collection of miracles which the Johannine community itself believed it had enjoyed, witnessing not to the teaching and legitimacy of an historical Jesus, but to its spiritual Son and Logos, the Revealer of God and imparter of eternal life through knowledge (which is why the Fourth Gospel is often seen as proto-gnostic). They would simply have been converted by the evangelist into miracles of the new Jesus character.

(Since scholars have detected an earlier stratum within the Johannine Prologue, they have postulated an earlier Logos hymn which made no mention of John the Baptist or of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Such a hymn would be consistent with faith in an entirely spiritual Revealer Son, prior to the induction of the Synoptic Jesus into the picture.)

Dependence confirmed

Once again, one could ask whether Ehrman actually read Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. There I offered many indicators within John that he is dependent on the Synoptics.

The Markan fingerprint of intercalation: Peter’s denial

A common observation by those scholars who propound such a dependency is the Markan fingerprint found in John’s ‘denial by Peter’ scene during the Passion. In a device known as “intercalation,” Mark has a habit of sandwiching two parts of one anecdote around an intervening anecdote, to make the two interact, to provide a contrast and a moral. His denial by Peter is split into two parts, with Jesus’ interrogation by the Jewish authorities placed in between. John does precisely the same thing. Coincidence? Some scholars doubt it.

John’s literary reactions to Synoptic elements

There are also a few examples of John reacting to Synoptic precedents, making his preferred changes to them. John actually tells us why he rejected Gethsemane: “Should I say, Father save me from this hour? No, for it was for this purpose that I came to this hour!” [12:27] And: “The cup the Father has given me: shall I not drink it?” [18:11] This is a literary response to a literary invention by Mark which John did not approve of. It’s a slap in the Synoptic face.

Similarly, John also repudiates Jesus’ meek silence before Pilate by having him engage in a disputation with the governor. He also rejects Simon of Cyrene because Jesus is quite capable of carrying his own cross all the way, thank you very much. Jesus “carried his own cross,” John declares.

The literary conflict over the baptism of Jesus

And as is often observed, John excises any baptism of Jesus by the Baptist. Yet he can still make use of the Synoptic feature of the descending dove. The latter is not liable to have come by itself through some independent tradition. And since Mark has clearly created his baptism scene out of scripture, including the dove and the voice from heaven (no sign of any baptism for Jesus exists before Mark, even in Q, and certainly not in the epistles), this makes John’s excision of the baptism but his retention of a Markan element from it, once more, a literary response to a literary invention.

Robert M. Price supplies a few more indicators of John’s use of the Synoptics in his Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.447-8). At every turn, we see the fourth evangelist making literary changes to fit his needs. There is no sign of oral tradition at work here, independent or otherwise. As for Ehrman’s fantasy ‘Aramaic source-roots,’ these have been shown in earlier chapters to be dismissible.

Synoptic redactors of Mark

Ehrman hedges his bet on John’s independence by declaring:

Whatever one decides about the Gospel of John, it is clear that Matthew and Luke used narratives of Jesus’s life and death that were independent of Mark. The sources I have called M and L contain accounts, not only of Jesus’s words and deeds but also of his Passion, that differ from those in Mark. (DJE? p. 260)

First of all, M and L, if they were external sources, would be no more “narratives” than Q was. A short ‘narrative’ within a controversy or miracle anecdote hardly makes an overall collection a narrative account in the sense of the Gospel of Mark. However, as I have noted earlier, it is anything but clear that M and L are not simply the respective products of Matthew and Luke themselves. Robert M. Price says:

The new Matthean parables look to me to come from Matthew’s own hand rather than some preexisting “M source,” and the same is true of the uniquely Lukan parables…which all share similar narrative features; in other words, no “L source.” [“The Problem of the Parables,” Free Inquiry April/May 2012]

And Ehrman’s characteristic naivete once more rears its head:

Luke explicitly informs us that “many” authors before him had produced accounts of the things Jesus said, did, and experienced. Mark by itself is not “many.” Other Gospels, in addition to Mark, were produced. It is regrettable that some of Luke’s other predecessors did not survive, but there is no reason to think he is lying when he says that he knows about them. (DJE? p. 260)

So now, on the basis of trust in the Prologue by an alleged author who has apparently lied at many turns about the ‘historical’ nature of his material, Ehrman is forced to postulate that Luke, supposedly written around 80 CE, must have been preceded by other Gospels besides Mark. (He accepts Q, with no Lukan dependence on Matthew, so it cannot be Matthew he is referring to.) As noted earlier, he fails to take into account a relatively common alternate theory regarding Luke: that an original Luke was significantly redacted by an ecclesiastical editor toward the middle of the second century, at which time the Prologue was added (and Acts was written by the same editor).

In fact, the very reference to ‘many preceding accounts’ is one thing which suggests that the Prologue comes from a time when there were indeed many accounts known to the writer, many of them now regarded as apocryphal and no longer extant: in other words, well into the second century. As for this editor’s reference to oral traditions preceding these many Gospels, this simply reflects the beliefs of the time, a century later, about the recording and transmission of traditions about the supposed historical Jesus.

Ehrman’s Summation

Ehrman winds down to the end of the chapter by simply rehashing some of his earlier claims about sources and traditions:

- Stories about the historical Jesus’ life were continually being told right from the earliest times—despite the complete absence of such things in the epistolary record.

- Paul knew Jesus’ own brother and his closest disciple, and so he must have been hearing and passing on those early traditions—a blatant exercise in begging the question.

- Paul received traditions from those who knew Jesus, as in 1 Cor. 11:23-4—despite Paul saying that he received this particular ‘tradition’ from the Lord. He “received” his gospel of dying, burial and rising (1 Cor. 15:3-4) from those who had been followers of Jesus—despite his firm declaration in Galatians 1:11-12 that he received his gospel from no man, but through revelation.

- Acts preserves traditions about Jesus which are very “primitive” and precede Mark—despite there being nothing in Acts’ speeches which could not have been derived from the Synoptics. (Ehrman’s appeal to Acts’ alleged portrayal of Jesus’ adoption to sonship at the point of resurrection is anything but certain from the text, and would make no sense in the context of an authorship by the writer, much less a mid-second century editor, of Luke.)

- Hebrews and 1 John “stress the earthly life of Jesus”—despite the former placing Jesus’ words and deeds entirely within scripture, and having nothing to say about an earthly crucifixion while focusing exclusively on a sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary. (And despite telling us outright in 8:4, and even 10:37, that Jesus had never been on earth.) As for 1 John, only the bare ‘fact’ of him having come in the flesh is stressed (4:1-4)—and that in the face of those who deny it.

- A couple of formulaic phrases in Aramaic found in the Gospels demonstrate that these are remnants of whole anecdotes that were originally told and transmitted in Aramaic, undoubtedly within entire accounts of Jesus’ life in Aramaic. Not much more than wishful thinking here.

With Ehrman at the wheel, even Markan priority as the first Gospel written becomes roadkill.

. . . even though Mark is our earliest surviving Gospel, his was not the first such narrative to be propagated. Luke is no doubt right that there were “numerous” such accounts before him, and there were certainly others after him. (DJE? p. 263)

Does Ehrman genuinely believe all this? Is he merely playing to his gallery? Was this book really peer-reviewed, as he claims?

Postscript

Having thoroughly demolished the mythicist case and pronounced the historicist creed, Ehrman will turn his attention in Part Three to establishing exactly who and what the historical Jesus really was, now that his existence has been demonstrated as “fact.” This is a movement “from the remarkably firm ground of virtual historical certainty to greater depths of uncertainty.” Considering that there have been three extensive quests to resolve this question plus one recently aborted one, all of which have served to accomplish little more than to reveal just how great those depths of uncertainty really are, one wonders at the certitude which has proceeded out of them for the most fundamental question of all.

31

Scholarly Reconstructions of the Historical Jesus

What scholars claim to know about the historical Jesus

Here is Ehrman’s summation of what critical scholarship in general believes about the historical Jesus:

[T]here are a number of important facts about the life of Jesus that virtually all critical scholars agree on, for reasons that have in part been shown and that in other ways will become increasingly clear throughout the course of this chapter and the next. Everyone, except the mythicists, of course, agrees that

- Jesus was a Jew who came from northern Palestine (Nazareth)

- and lived as an adult in the 20s of the Common Era.

- He was at one point of his life a follower of John the Baptist

- and then became a preacher and teacher to the Jews in the rural areas of Galilee.

- He preached a message about the “kingdom of God”

- and did so by telling parables.

- He gathered disciples

- and developed a reputation for being able to heal the sick and cast out demons.

- At the very end of his life, probably around 30 CE, he made a trip to Jerusalem during a Passover feast

- and roused opposition among the local Jewish leaders,

- who arranged to have him put on trial before Pontius Pilate,

- who ordered him to be crucified for calling himself the king of the Jews. (DJE? p. 269)

This is a prime example of what I have called “the tyranny of the Gospels,” for not a single one of these biographical details is to be found in the non-Gospel record of the first century.

Furthermore, the three later Gospels of our canonical four (along with the satellite Acts) seem entirely dependent on Mark for their basic story of “Jesus of Nazareth.” Critical scholarship is essentially deriving its picture of an historical Jesus from the work of one author, at least several decades after the supposed fact.

Now, Mark and his redactors Matthew and Luke did have the Q tradition to draw on (the latter two from an actual document), though not for any portrait of an alleged originator of the sayings. The Q collection gives us nothing in the way of a biographical background, let alone presents a distinctive personality. (Remember William Arnal’s admissions: see below.)

- The opening pericopes of Q do not tell us that he was a follower of John the Baptist, or that the Baptist even knew of his existence.

- The Dialogue of Jesus and John (Lk./Q 7:18-35) comes from a later stratum and is an artificial construction out of previous literary elements which did not link Jesus and John.

- Not even Q has a word to say about his death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

- As for teaching the Jews, the earliest stratum of Q is often claimed to be the teachings of the “genuine Jesus,” but it bears so little relevance to Jewish concerns of the time, and so much resemblance to teachings that can be identified with the Cynics, that the entire character of the earliest record of this branch of what became Christianity is brought into serious question.

That an entire discipline of historical research can accept the claims that Ehrman enumerates in the face of bizarre, conflicting and non-existent ‘evidence’ like this demonstrates that this is a discipline which operates like no other branch of historical research. It adopts a methodology of a priori conviction, special pleading, contortion of texts, reading one set of documents into another, building straws into skyscrapers, and all of it going back to a raison d’etre traditionally embedded in thoroughly confessional interests, interests which still exist in many quarters of that discipline today. The clincher is the rabid antagonism which the discipline as a whole expresses, even by those who claim to have separated themselves from those confessional interests, toward any challenge against its obsessive line in the sand: the certain existence of the figure who is supposedly ‘proven’ by such problematic and conflicting evidence (and by such dubious antics as someone like Bart Ehrman has been engaged in).That is not how any other branch of historical research, let alone any form of scholarship worthy of the name, operates.

What was the genuine historical Jesus about?

Beyond the basic biography which Ehrman presents above, we all know that further detail about the “certainly existing” historical Jesus enjoys anything but scholarly agreement. In fact, Ehrman provides us with an efficient summation of the abysmal accomplishments of the long and ongoing quest for the real historical Jesus:

But there is obviously a lot more to say, and that is where scholarly disagreements loom large—disagreements not over whether Jesus existed but over what kind of Jewish teacher and preacher he was.

Some scholars have said that he is principally to be thought of as a first-century Jewish rabbi whose main concern was teaching his followers how best to follow the Law of Moses.

Others have said that he was a Jewish holy man, like those we learn about from Josephus, a kind of shaman reputed to do spectacular deeds because of his unusual powers.

Others have maintained that he is best understood as a political revolutionary who was preaching armed rebellion against the Roman Empire.

Still others have claimed that he was a social reformer who urged the Jews of his time to adopt an entirely different lifestyle, for example, by embracing new economic principles as a kind of proto-Marxist or different social relationships as a kind of proto-feminist.

Yet others have suggested that he is best seen as a Jewish version of the ancient Greek Cynic philosophers, urging his followers to abandon their attachments to the material things of this world and to live lives of poverty, internally liberated from the demands of life.

Others have suggested that he is best seen as a magician, not in the sense that he could do magic tricks but that he knew how to manipulate the laws of nature like other workers of magic in his day.

Each of these views has had serious scholarly proponents. But none of them represents the views of the majority of scholars in modern times. Instead, as I have repeatedly noted, most scholars in both the United States and Europe over the past century have been convinced that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who anticipated that God was soon to intervene in history to overthrow the powers of evil now controlling this world in order to bring in a new order, a new kingdom here on earth, the kingdom of God.

This was essentially the view that Albert Schweitzer popularized in his famous book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer was not the first to articulate this view, but he was the first to bring it to wide public attention. And even though there are no scholars who agree any longer with the details of how Schweitzer worked out his views, there is still broad agreement that the fundamental assumption behind them is correct, that Jesus really did anticipate a cataclysmic break in the course of history when God would judge the world and set it to rights, establishing a rule of peace and justice here on earth, sometime, Jesus thought, within his own generation. (DJE? p. 270-271)

There is no doubt that in one way or another each of these scholarly views of Jesus can be extracted—sometimes having recourse to a little bit of imagination—from the Gospel story, particularly (if not entirely) the Synoptics. (John presents nothing that is exclusive to him which is likely to be a reflection of historical reality, neither Jesus’ character nor his words and deeds.)

A few of those scholarly views could even be extracted from Q, though not without facing some problems. Most Q scholars, I would say, accept the basic Kloppenborg stratification within Q: a “wisdom” Q1 stratum as the earliest, followed by a later (in compositional sequence) “apocalyptic/prophetic” Q2 stratum. We often hear (as from the Jesus Seminar and J. D. Crossan) that Q1 is closest to the ‘genuine’ Jesus and what he taught. But if Jesus was basically an apocalyptic prophet, where is that dimension within his teachings supposedly recorded in Q1? It is not there. Yes, there is a “kingdom here on earth” in view, but it is hardly to arrive through apocalyptic events, nor is it preached through any apocalyptic tone or character.

Besides, where is Jesus himself in Q1? There is scarcely a mention of his name. There is good reason to think that even the isolated appearance of that name was added later in constructing the set of three chreiai in Luke/Q 9:57-58 out of earlier elements which did not contain it (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.337-8).

Finding the historical Jesus in the Q prophets

In answer to these observations, scholars will point out the difference between “tradition history” and “literary [compositional] history.” Traditions may exist in the community from earliest times, but not be incorporated into a document until later. Perhaps true—theoretically. But if, as someone like Crossan claims, Q1 represents an interest in Jesus the teacher (despite the lack of any focus whatever on that teacher as an individual), why would such an initial collection of his teachings leave out anything prophetic and apocalyptic, especially if that was his essential nature, as Ehrman and “most scholars” (he says) would claim?

If the very genesis of the Galilean sect lay in John the Baptist, as the opening of Q (part of Q2) declares, with the Baptist preaching the imminent arrival of the apocalyptic Son of Man (with whom he makes no connection to any living person), why does no hint of that Son of Man appear anywhere in Q1, let alone as the originator of its sayings? (The “son of man” who has nowhere to lay his head [Lk./Q 9:58] is not an apocalyptic figure and belongs in a separate category of the phrase, a traditional biblical usage as euphemism for “a man” or “this man.”)

Most of those scholarly interpretations of the historical nature of Jesus can be derived from the various layers of Q:

- the teacher of the Law,

- prophet of the future,

- Cynic-style itinerant sage,

- miracle worker and healer,

- apocalyptic voice for the imminent Kingdom of God.

These are the activities of the Q preaching sect itself.

But I turn once again to William Arnal’s insightful evaluation of the supposed founder figure in Q (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.349-50). Not only is his death “taken for granted”—in other words, it is never mentioned—neither is any resurrection or any other soteriological dimension taken into account in the role he is given. Not even in the all-important theme of traditional Jewish persecution and (alleged) killing of the prophets can Q bring itself to focus on Jesus’ own death as the culminating example. Even in regard to his miracles, which are not played up in Q, the Jesus figure cannot be differentiated from the role and activities of the Q prophets themselves. Across the board, he is “embedded” in, “assimilated to” the “broader ethos of the Q group.” In other words, what scholars think to discover about the nature of Jesus in Q cannot be differentiated from the nature of the group he symbolizes, both in Q and in the Synoptics which have built upon their Q background.

(This, by the way, is a very strong argument for the existence of Q and a Q community. Without either one, we are left with a free-floating picture of what deceptively looks like a variegated preaching sect, apparently influenced by a range of sources and ideas, and culminating in Mark, Matthew and Luke, but which nevertheless would lack any concrete basis. Mark’s creation becomes rootless, with no foundation in an historically real background. Where did it come from? Was Mark a science-fiction writer in addition to being an allegorizer of spiritual truths? Did Matthew and Luke also take up an entirely fictitious account and add their own inventive magic to it? To what end, if the readers could make no connection to a Sitz im Leben they could recognize or relate to, let alone be converted to? Who would be interested in such a thing? Did the evangelists simply have too much time on their hands, taking up a hobby of inventing an entire universe for reasons only they could fathom?)

Not finding the historical Jesus in the epistles

Let’s see what Paul and the other epistle writers of the New Testament, along with various non-canonical writers for almost a century, do not tell us in support of Ehrman’s list.

First, they never make the statement that he was a teacher. Paul claims a handful of “words of the Lord,” but they look to be from direct personal revelation, something on which many scholars agree. Various writers give us Jesus-looking teachings without attributing them to him. Some Jesus-looking teachings are attributed to God.

1 Clement gives us a block of mundane moral precepts he attributes to “the Lord Jesus” which “he spoke in teaching” (Clement of Alexandria presents an almost identical block as coming from God), but he also designates passages in scripture (see ch.16 and 22), as do other early writers such as the author of Hebrews, as the voice of Jesus speaking and teaching—often his sole voice—and the same terminology is used of the Holy Spirit who also “speaks.”

Nor does any first-century epistle writer describe their Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. Considering the importance of the subject to Paul and others, this particular omission is striking.

None call him a rabbi, or a holy man, or any kind of shaman.

No one suggests he had a political or revolutionary agenda, much less that he died because of it; nor is he accorded a social philosophy.

And no one ever makes the slightest suggestion that he performed miracles of any sort.

Not even the epistles of Ignatius (c.110-130 CE, depending on the authenticity question), which supplies the most basic biographical outline of his birth, baptism and death, make any reference to teaching or miracle working. The epistle of Barnabas, probably a little later, makes reference to both, but in theory only, failing to supply any examples. Descriptions of his passion and death are still entirely dependent on scripture (Barnabas implies [e.g., 5:3, 5:12-14] that we know about Jesus through God giving us such information in scripture), as are those of 1 Clement and Hebrews.

For Barnabas, as also for the Didache (which, like 1 Clement, can be shown not to present any historical Jesus: see JNGNM, Appendix 8), the coming Parousia will be that of God, not Jesus.

Paul’s presentation of the present time

Consider this claim by Ehrman:

Jesus is best understood as a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who anticipated that God was soon to intervene in history to overthrow the powers of evil now controlling this world in order to bring in a new order, a new kingdom here on earth, the kingdom of God. (DJE? p. 270)

Now look at what Paul has to say on the subject in Romans 8:

For the created universe waits with eager expectation for God’s sons to be revealed. . . . Up to the present, we know, the whole created universe groans in all its parts as if in the pangs of childbirth. Not only so, but even we, to whom the Spirit is given as firstfruits of the harvest to come, are groaning inwardly while we wait for God to make us his sons and set our whole body free. For we have been saved, though only in hope. [NEB]

Not only is an appeal lacking to any precedent for believing all this through the teachings of the man whom Paul supposedly worships, there is not even a vibration of Jesus’ very presence detectable in the course of salvation history which Paul is describing here. (Compare the very similar impression created by Romans 13:11-12, 1 Corinthians 10:11, 2 Corinthians 6:2.) If recent times have constituted the pangs of childbirth leading to the kingdom’s arrival, Jesus’ life has been scarcely a pre-natal kick.

The “firstfruits” of what is to come have been given by the Spirit, not by Jesus, and it has been given to Paul and the present generation, not in the previous time of Jesus himself. Salvation has been provided “only in hope,” which suggests through faith in the new interpretation of scripture, not in the actual witnessing of the life, death and resurrection of the very divinity whose acts have provided it. (Compare the similar sentiments of 2 Peter 1:19, which says that it is the “message of the prophets” which shines like a lamp in the darkness awaiting the break of day, not the remembered life of Jesus himself. Scholars have been perplexed by that curiosity!)

Finally, I have pointed out in this series the constant reference to the “revelation” of Christ the Son which characterizes the beginning of the movement, not his actual life lived on earth. This is language inconceivable in the context of an historical Jesus who would, among other things, have first announced the imminent arrival of Paul’s looked-for salvation. To think that such a preaching career as Ehrman envisions could possibly have been ignored by every epistle writer who urges his readers to have hope and trust in the coming salvation, is patently ludicrous.

It is only by the most blinkered and closed-minded preconception that scholars like Ehrman can maintain their interpretation and certainty about an historical Jesus in the face of all the contrary evidence that lies outside the Gospels and Acts, before whose altar of tyranny historicist scholarship continues to bow down..

How do we establish what Jesus personally said and did?

Ehrman provides a description of first-century Judaism and its various classes—Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and the Zealot revolutionaries—and their philosophies. (All of it has the tone and content of a “101” university course, not surprising in a university lecturer and one who has admitted that his book is not aimed at established scholars.) This lays the groundwork to justify his picture of the historical Jesus as an “apocalypticist,” one who along with many others believed that the world was presently controlled by evil powers and that God was about to intervene to correct the situation—usually by sending an agent.

The Jewish world at that time was full of such fantasies, and current expectations included the arrival of a messiah or two, or an apocalyptic Son of Man who would judge the world. But I do wish that historicist defenders would realize that presenting accurate pictures of the period and its thought into which they can fit an historical Jesus does nothing to prove that there was an historical Jesus who can be fitted into such pictures. The words that can be put into his mouth can be seen to fit the mouths of many who could have spoken them. (Sometimes those words can be found in previous sources, even long earlier ones.) The activities of his supposed life can be assigned to any group engaged in the same activities.

In presenting widely-accepted scholarly “criteria for detecting historically authentic tradition” in regard to Jesus, Ehrman states two principles. One is that these criteria “apply to any figure of the past described in any kind of historical source.” The other is that we must “abandon any hope of absolute certainty,” and that “historians deal for the most part in probabilities, and some things are more probable than others.” On this, mythicists would certainly agree.

Is it “contextually credible”?

As Ehrman puts it,

But if a tradition does not fit into a first-century Palestinian context, then it almost certainly can be discounted as a later legend. (DJE? p. 288)

He hastens to point out that even if it does fit, this does not guarantee authenticity, but only the possibility of such. Once this state of possibility is established, the other two criteria are brought into play to judge its probability.

But before going on to those criteria, we need to realize that Ehrman is placing himself in a very narrow box.

The question is more complex and subtle than simply: did Jesus say or do this, or is it a pronouncement later placed in his mouth or an action assigned to him based on what later believers would like him to have said or done? What of words and deeds which were initially envisioned within quite different contexts? From Hebrews to 1 Clement to Barnabas, for example, words have been assigned to Jesus as spoken in scripture. Others have come to Christian apostles as revelation from Christ in heaven. There is no “later” or “legendary” dimension entailed here. Other scriptural passages were translated, whether by a Paul or a Gospel writer, into an action or event assigned to the Jesus they believed in, and there may be no criterion involved relating to the question of whether it fitted into a first-century Palestinian context or not.

A certain degree of begging the question is involved in Ehrman’s examples in regard to Aramaic words and possible precedents. He points to Gospel sayings of Jesus which “at one time must have circulated in Aramaic, Jesus’ native tongue.” If certain sayings make “better sense when translated back into Aramaic” (which involves the assumption that they originally were in Aramaic) this would not in itself increase the probability that Jesus said them, since even if they did make better sense in Aramaic they could simply be seen as having had a prior phase in an Aramaic context, spoken by who knows whom. And the couple of brief Aramaic formulas such as “talitha cum” need be nothing more than common parlance in certain activities within a bilingual culture.

Multiple Attestation

Ehrman now turns to his two further criteria which can raise “possibility” to “probability.”

I have repeatedly stressed that a tradition appearing in multiple, independent sources has a greater likelihood of being historically reliable than a tradition that appears in only one. (DJE? p. 290)

And I have repeatedly pointed out that Ehrman’s enthusiasm for “multiple independent sources” cannot be supported. As for Q, it may be ‘independent’ of Mark and his redactors since it precedes them, but they in turn are not ‘independent’ of Q. Scholarship’s M and L are more reasonably products of Matthew and Luke, not separate source collections. For one thing, they show too limited an identifiable content to be judged as constituting independent sources; for another, they contain nothing in common, something less likely in source documents but to be expected if each is the evangelist’s own product. (I also quoted Robert M. Price’s view on the matter in the previous chapter.) Ehrman should be reminded of his own proviso: “some things are more probable than others.”

In order to produce “several sources (that) did not collaborate with one another,” Ehrman has been forced to engage in some very dubious exegesis. The independence of the Gospel of John is one that has been discussed and discredited (see previous chapter). Another is the claim that some of the content in the speeches of Acts precedes Mark; this, too, is highly questionable.

But the worst comes in Ehrman’s handling of the epistles. Wholesale reading of Gospel associations and meanings are imported into Paul & Co. Most blatantly, after applying his “contextual credibility” to the common practice of crucifixion by the Romans, Ehrman declares:

The crucifixion itself is attested (without Pilate) throughout Paul and in a range of other independent sources: 1 Peter, Hebrews, and so on. (DJE? p. 291)

His “without Pilate” is a serious qualification. There are scores of references throughout the first-century epistles to Jesus’ crucifixion, but is Ehrman not going to bat an eyelash at the universal lack of any mention of Pilate or the Romans, let alone a time and place for that crucifixion—with a pretty clear reference by Paul to the agency of the demon spirits offered instead? Is he going to make the naïve assumption that the death of Jesus—especially a Jesus portrayed by the likes of Paul in so thoroughly spiritual and mythological terms, with no identification to any incarnated human figure—could only have taken place on earth? (Of course, that is a common naivete in historicist circles, whether lay or academic.) Making a bow to G. A. Wells’ interpretation of Paul’s Christ, should we not frown on his failure to even consider a crucifixion on earth by unknown rulers in an unknown past?

Ehrman makes separate mention of the reference to Pilate in 1 Timothy (6:13), without acknowledging that the vast majority of critical scholars regard this as a second-century writing. Nor does he acknowledge the puzzling coincidence that this one reference to Pilate appears in a second-century writing when the Gospels had begun to circulate, whereas not a single first-century epistle happens to contain such a thing before they did. Again, what is “more probable” here?

Quite predictably, Ehrman cannot resist another kick at the “brothers” can.

Or take the issue of Jesus’s brothers. As we have seen, in multiple independent sources Jesus is said to have brothers, and most of those sources name one of these brothers as James; this is true of Mark, John (doesn’t name James), Paul, and Josephus. Paul, as we have seen, actually knew James. This establishes reasonably good probability in favor of the tradition. (DJE? p. 291)

I won’t re-kick my own can about “brother(s) of the Lord” being no necessary reference to Jesus’ sibling(s). (Although I will mention a 2008 article by no less an historicist stellar light than R. Joseph Hoffmann, in which in no uncertain terms he argues for Galatians 1:19 being a reference to James as a member of the ‘brotherhood of the Lord’ and not as a sibling of Jesus.) Nor does Josephus mention multiple brothers of Jesus in Antiquities 20. (Ehrman ignores any debate over interpolation here, including the aforementioned article by Hoffmann in which he declares that this reference to Jesus was a Christian insertion and that Josephus was speaking of an entirely different James.)

And in another blatant case of begging the question, Ehrman simply assumes that the “James” whom Paul was acquainted with was the brother of Jesus, which not only serves to ensure that Galatians 1:19 means sibling, it now constitutes another independent source in Paul for the fact that Jesus had brothers. This in turn grants “good probability” to Mark’s mention of Jesus’ brothers (6:3) as being an historical tradition and not simply a means of illustrating the proverbial point being made in the passage, or giving his fictional character a fictional family.

New Testament historicist methodology is certainly a force unto itself. I would love to see its claimed application “to any figure of the past described in any kind of historical source.” Or how regular historians outside the Alice in Wonderland world of New Testament scholarship would react.

The criterion of dissimilarity

Ehrman’s second criterion of probability has been discussed in an earlier instalment: that anything which does not conform to the interests of the movement formed after Jesus’ death is probably to be regarded as authentic. This, of course, has limited application, for it cannot pronounce on words and deeds which could have proceeded from Jesus and yet happen to have coincided with subsequent interests.

But as pointed out before, Ehrman fails to take into account that there are other reasons why ‘neutral’ elements can be inserted by an author creating an allegory or work of fiction. Thus his contention that Mark giving Jesus brothers has no bearing on his theological agenda and thus is likely to be historically accurate is simply not justified.

As a long introduction to his case for judging the real historical Jesus to have been an apocalyptic prophet, this section of the book has been long on what scholars believe about the man, but short on secure reasons for it or on a reliable process for arriving at it. We can only await Ehrman’s more focused evidence in the next chapter for his preferred interpretation of Jesus as apocalyptic prophet.

32

Ehrman’s Case for Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet

The issue of multiple attestation

Bart Ehrman now presents his evidence that

Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who predicted that the end of this evil age is soon to come and that within his generation God would send a cosmic judge of the earth, the Son of Man, to destroy the forces of evil and everyone who has sided with them and to bring in his good kingdom here on earth. (DJE? p. 298)

Referring to his criterion of “contextual credibility,” Ehrman points out that apocalyptic expectation of this sort was widespread in Jesus’ day; and he promises to show that the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus also fit the criterion of dissimilarity. But to begin with, he stresses that

. . . the apocalyptic proclamation of Jesus is found widely throughout our earliest sources. In other words, it is multiply attested, all over the map, precisely in the sources that we would normally give the greatest weight to, those that are our oldest. (DJE? p. 299)

I think the reader by now can detect what is going to happen here. After the sweeping declaration that Jesus as apocalyptic proclaimer is found “throughout our earliest sources . . . all over the map” (we have already seen that this is not the case), Ehrman reduces that map to the narrow world of the Gospels and Acts, and his claim that these or their underlying sources constitute “our oldest”—i.e., “Mark, Q, M and L.”

Jesus and the Son of Man

Ehrman lays out examples of Jesus’ apocalyptic preaching. Let’s look at two of these, one from Mark (this has expanded parallels in Matthew and Luke), and one from Q, using the translations provided by Ehrman:

Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of that one will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels (Mark 8:38)

And you, be prepared, because you do not know the hour when the Son of Man is coming. (Luke/Q 12:39; Matthew 24:44)

The first thing to notice is a curiosity which scholars have long remarked on. (Ehrman will also discuss it shortly.) In these sayings of Jesus, when he refers to the Son of Man he sounds as though he is speaking about someone else, not himself. This is true of the great majority of the Son of Man sayings, in both Q and the Gospels.

Now look at the first quote. This is what Matthew does with it (10:32-3):

Whoever shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father in heaven. But whoever shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father in heaven.

Note that Matthew’s version is expanded into two elements, positive and negative, whereas Mark had only the negative. But Matthew has also eliminated the curiosity. No longer is it the Son of Man who will confess and deny in heaven; rather, “I”—Jesus himself—will do the confessing and denying. There is no mistaking that Matthew’s Jesus is referring to the Son of Man as being himself.

But Matthew’s version is not dependent on Mark. His dual saying is derived from Q, for Luke’s version (12:8-10) has the same duality, positive and negative, although Luke has kept the original ambiguity reflected in Mark; he has not changed “Son of Man” to a pronoun to make a clear identification with Jesus.

The dual saying is judged to be derived from Q rather than Mark because it is highly unlikely both later evangelists would independently have made such an identical expansion on their own. But a Lukan use of Matthew here should be ruled out as well, because if Luke had seen Matthew’s elimination of the ambiguity in Mark, there seems no reason why he too would not have seen the error of Mark’s ways and reproduced Matthew’s alteration. (Perhaps Goodacre would explain this as Lukan “editorial fatigue,” operating across the space of one verse.) This, of course, would fit one of the principal arguments against a Lukan use of Matthew: that he never reproduces Matthean redactions of Mark.

Mark, operating through oral tradition, has either not fully remembered the Q tradition of this saying, or perhaps he has drawn on a simpler version he is familiar with. And because Luke shows the same ambiguous juxtaposition, this has to be regarded as the more primitive version present in Q, which only Matthew chose to clarify. In other words, all of this shows that in the oldest form of the idea, Jesus is made to convey the impression (probably because the tradition so regarded it) that the Son of Man was a figure who was expected but not yet on the scene. An impression created in virtually all the apocalyptic Son of Man sayings.

Ehrman’s response

Now, Ehrman might say, “What’s the problem?” In fact, later in the chapter he claims that Jesus originally did preach the coming Son of Man, not identifying that figure with himself, and that this is the situation reflected in the oldest tradition in the Q community, taken over by Mark, Matthew and Luke. The evangelists have also taken over, at least partly from the Q tradition, a different class of “son of man” sayings which are not apocalyptic and do not refer to a future figure: the already noted ‘biblical euphemism’ type.

In addition, Mark himself goes on to create yet another form of sayings as part of his incorporation of a Passion dimension into his story: the “suffering Son of Man” sayings in which Jesus teaches that scripture has prophesied that he, the Son of Man, must suffer and die—a dimension not found in Q. (This would reflect the Christ cult’s contention that their heavenly Son and his sacrifice had been discovered in scripture.) But by and large, the “future Son of Man” sayings have been left as Q presented them: Jesus seeming to speak of someone else, and Ehrman points to these as coming from Jesus the apocalypticist, who did not regard himself as the Son of Man.

Using the criterion of dissimilarity, Ehrman pronounces these sayings as authentic to Jesus, since “early Christians believed that Jesus himself was the Son of Man,” and thus

surely Christians who thought Jesus was the Son of Man would not make up sayings that appear to differentiate between him and the Son of Man. (DJE? p. 306)

But question-begging is surely evident here. Ehrman is assuming that these sayings were first recorded with a Jesus speaker in mind, whereas taken by themselves they could originally have been at home in the mouths of any preachers prophesying the coming of the heavenly Son of Man. There would have been no question of identification with anyone. Given the nature of Q and its lack of differentiation between the Q prophets and Jesus, there is no compelling reason to make Ehrman’s assumption.

Moreover, there is a puzzling aspect to this point. Even by the end of the Q document’s evolution, before it got into Matthew and Luke’s hands (when several decades would have passed since Jesus’ supposed preaching), all those references to the Son of Man not being identified with the presumed Jesus founder and speaker had still not been changed, despite Q having gone through a number of redactions, with much more complex changes performed on the collection. If, as Ehrman claims, early Christians believed that Jesus himself was the Son of Man and thus would not make up misleading sayings, why would that misleading ambiguity have been left standing for so long, continuing to create an erroneous impression which would have been at odds with Christians’ own view of him? If Matthew occasionally recognized the problem and altered passages to correct it, why not the Q redactors?

Now, it is possible that an actual identification between the Son of Man and their Jesus was made not by the Q people at all, but only by Mark and his redactors, and I have in fact raised that possibility in my own study of Q (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.377-8). But I am not sure how Ehrman would cope with this in view of his claim that early Christians saw Jesus as the Son of Man. It would be curious indeed if that identification was not made through several decades of Christian development and only appeared suddenly in Mark.

Who preached the Son of Man in Q?

In regard to Ehrman’s example of Jesus’ apocalyptic preaching (Mark 8:38 and parallels, quoted above), I once again call on William Arnal’s evaluation of the Q Jesus: one cannot tell the difference between what he says and does and represents, and what the Q prophets themselves are saying and doing. We cannot tell if in fact the original form of Mark and Q’s basic saying did not have a collective reference where the attribution was concerned. Such as:

Whoever is ashamed of us and of our words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of that one will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

In other words, prophets of the kingdom-preaching sect are admonishing those of their audience who reject their message, saying that those people shall be rejected by the Son of Man when he arrives. This would be the original pronouncement of a sect which believed precisely what Ehrman is claiming the historical Jesus believed and preached. When a founder figure was added to the Q community’s outlook, such pronouncements were assigned to that figure. We can see elsewhere in Q that little changes of attribution have been made to earlier discrete elements to work a speaking Jesus into the picture, notably in the Dialogue between Jesus and John or the set of three chreiai in Q1. Little anomalies have also been created in the process, as in leaving the neuter “pleion”—greater (than)—in reference to the new Jesus when he is being compared to Solomon and Jonah (Lk./Q 11:29-32). Kloppenborg, too, has noted the latter.

Incidentally, as ‘proof’ that “early Christians believed that Jesus himself was the Son of Man, the cosmic judge of the earth who would return in glory,” Ehrman appeals to Revelation 1:13—an example of how confining oneself inside the historicist box will skew a reading of the text. Revelation 1:13 says:

And in the midst of the lampstands (I saw) one like a son of man, clothed to the feet . . . etc.

Here the writer is speaking of a vision of Christ who—neither here nor anywhere else in Revelation—is identified with a human Jesus. Moreover, the phrase “one like a son of man,” like its counterpart in 14:14, is not being used as a title, let alone as the designation of an historical man, but in its seminal form in Daniel 7:13 where it describes a heavenly figure. Scholarship generally sees this as an apocalyptic motif drawn directly from Daniel and not mediated through the Gospel usage—of which the author shows no sign of being aware. (Could we possibly think that an apocalyptically-oriented document like Revelation, if it knew of the Gospel Jesus, would fail to draw on “early Christian belief” that the human Jesus was a figure identified as the apocalyptic Son of Man? Of course, neither does a single epistle writer make such an identification, never even using the phrase—an incredible silence given their apocalyptic interests—all of which Ehrman is forced to ignore.)

This somewhat lengthy analysis has served two purposes:

1. to show that Ehrman is on shakier ground than he thinks in identifying a teaching of Jesus and what it says about his nature;

2. to give an idea of the sort of thing involved in a study of Q which points to the introduction of a Jesus/founder figure only in the course of Q’s development.

Of course, there is a lot more evidence for this in Q than the points raised here, and I suggest a reading of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, from Chapters 23 to 26.

“L” and “M” sources

Ehrman next throws in a pericope from Luke (21:34-6) about the coming of the Son of Man which is usually assigned to a postulated “L source.” It ends thus:

. . . Be alert at all times, praying to have strength to flee from all these things that are about to take place and to stand in the presence of the Son of Man. [Note again the curiosity of the Son of Man seeming to be a different figure than the speaker.]

But the point has been made that there is no way to demonstrate that the ‘L source’ is not simply a set of material of Luke’s own invention, building on motifs already within the Q and Synoptic traditions. Certainly, if one takes L or M as a whole, neither one looks like a distinct body of material circulating independently, for many basic elements of Jesus tradition show no sign of being included, to be drawn on by Matthew and Luke.

But Ehrman uses this L pericope about the Son of Man to make the following argument:

The oldest attainable sources contain clear apocalyptic teachings of Jesus, all of them independent of one another. What is equally striking, however, is a subsidiary issue. The apocalyptic character of Jesus’s proclamation comes to be muted with the passing of time. After the writing of these earlier sources, we find less and less apocalyptic material. By the time we get to our last canonical Gospel, John, we have almost no apocalyptic teachings of Jesus at all. Here Jesus preaches about something else (chiefly his own identity, as the one who has come from the Father to bring eternal life). And when we get to still later Gospels, from outside the New Testament, we actually find instances—such as in the Gospel of Thomas—where Jesus argues against an apocalyptic view (Gospel of Thomas 3,113). (DJE? p. 300-301)

First of all, the L source is hardly made up of a majority of apocalyptic material. While not all scholars are in precise agreement about the content of L, we can consider one Christian’s reconstruction of it. Kim Peffenroth [see http://www.christiancadre.org/member_contrib/cp_lukespecmat.html] lists some two dozen separate pericopes (excluding the Nativity and Luke’s unique Passion/Resurrection elements which are generally not regarded as belonging to L). Those which present an unmistakeable apocalyptic motif amount to precisely one: the one quoted by Ehrman (21:34-36). The situation is not much better where Matthew’s “M” is concerned. (Apparently those “earliest sources” were already muted.)

In fact, the vast bulk of L consists of parables (having a structure Robert M. Price regards as suspiciously alike). A parable collection, even if preceding Luke, could have been the product of anyone or any sect in the field of kingdom preaching. A few constitute miracle stories, which again could originally have represented the sect’s own traditions (following on Arnal’s observations). But since a few other L items seem designed by Luke himself to further the progress of the action (such as 9:51-56 and 13:31-33), there is little reason not to see the whole of the material as his own contribution to his redaction of Mark’s Jesus story, including his own supplement to the Q collection.

The bottom line is that neither L nor M supply much of anything for Ehrman’s contention that the “early record” shows Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Nor for his “subsidiary” claim that Jesus traditions exploded out of the starting gate laden with apocalyptic motifs which eventually underwent a muting, allegedly fitting Jesus’ preaching career as an apocalypticist and the gradual fading of its influence as time moved on. Certainly Mark several decades later shows no ‘muting’ of apocalyptic expectation over alleged earlier sources of the Gospels. But pointing to John does little either, for the Fourth Gospel’s focus is entirely on a different portrayal of Jesus (as Ehrman points out), and besides, there remains a clear interest in Jesus as apocalyptic Son of Man and judge in John 5:25-29. And since the Johannine community shows no sign of being part of the kingdom-preaching sect, this element to its Gospel Jesus seems to present another indication that there has been a borrowing from the Synoptics.

The Gospel of Thomas and Q

As for appealing to the Gospel of Thomas, this works against Ehrman. It is true that Thomas has little interest in apocalypticism and even, as Ehrman points out, has Jesus arguing against it. But Thomas as we have it is judged a mid-second century product, and its later gnostic-like stratum is concerned with salvation through knowledge, so it is not surprising that things apocalyptic would tend to have fallen by the wayside and even into discredit. The latter feature is in common with most second century Christian writings, which have begun to play down promises and expectations that have too long gone unfulfilled.

On the other hand, the Gospel of Thomas is a two-edged sword. In finished form it may have a second-century provenance, but it is recognized to contain a stratum which is not only early, it has much in common with Q1. (Crossan calls their similar content the CST: Common Sayings tradition.) You remember Q1, the earliest record of the ‘genuine’ teachings of Jesus, which the offshoot earlier stratum of Thomas corroborates? There isn’t a single apocalyptic saying in the lot, much less about the apocalyptic Son of Man. Here the Kingdom is quite a different animal. As for Q2, if all that apocalypticism goes back to an historical Jesus, we have to ask not only why such an atmosphere is entirely missing in the supposed earliest record of his teaching, but how we can reconcile the incompatibilities between the two. Q2’s apocalypticism is simply not in keeping with the sentiments of Q1. Apparently Jesus must have been profoundly schizophrenic.

Thus, there are two documents with very early strata which belie Ehrman’s claims about the preaching of an historical Jesus. And while there is no doubt that End-time preaching was all the rage until around the end of the first century (it received a shot in the arm from the Jewish War of 66-70), Ehrman can supply no evidence that a specific historical Jesus was engaged in it. Certainly he has ignored the observations of Arnal, even in my references to him in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man.

Apocalypticism in the epistles, but no apocalypticist

Of course, there is a whole other body of early documents which Ehrman quietly ignores here. There is no question that the communities which produced the New Testament epistles and Revelation were intensely interested in apocalyptic matters, even in an arrival of Jesus the Son at the imminent End-time. But this makes it all the more startling that not a single one of those writers refers to the precedent of Jesus’ own preaching on these matters, let alone that Jesus himself was considered the Son of Man. Of course, the epistles show no knowledge of the very figure of the Son of Man. (Scholarship today judges that this interpretation out of Daniel 7 was not a universal one and was limited to specific sectarian groups, Jewish and Christian. But if the founder of the faith and his circle had been one of these groups, it is impossible to understand how that interpretation would have failed to transfer to any segment of the body of communities represented by the epistles.)

The same is true of a range of non-canonical documents.

- 1 Clement presents no apocalyptic prophet (he and the rest of the epistle writers of the first century do not even know of John the Baptist), despite ‘Clement’ throwing everything into his long argument but the kitchen sink.

- The Didache contains no earthly teacher either, except by forcing God as “the Lord” into a select application to Jesus. (See JNGNM, Appendix 8; Crossan calls it a “calculated ambiguity.”) Nor does it show any interest in apocalypticism outside of the final chapter, where “the Lord” (who looks to be God) is expected to arrive, but with no word on him having already been here to preach that arrival.

- Barnabas, too, while speaking in principle about a teaching Jesus, says nothing about his apocalyptic orientation.

- The epistles of Ignatius say nothing about his teaching or apocalypticist character.

- The Son in the Shepherd of Hermas never touches the ground.

- And the Odes of Solomon, often interpreted as a poetic expression of Christian joy in the arrival of the messiah (despite saying nothing about an incarnated Jesus, not even the name), is as gloriously un-apocalyptic as one can find anywhere in the record.

Ehrman’s claim that Jesus as apocalyptic proclaimer can be found “throughout our earliest sources . . . all over the map” is an empty one.

The Alpha and the Omega

Ehrman now crafts an argument which focuses on the beginning and end of Jesus’ public life. The first is the baptism of Jesus by John.

That Jesus associated with John the Baptist is multiply attested in a number of our early sources. It is found in both Mark and John, independently of one another; there are also traditions of Jesus’s early association with John in Q and a distinctive story from M. Why would all these sources independently link Jesus to John? Probably because there was in fact a link. (DJE? p. 302)

Has Ehrman read a reconstructed Q lately? Where in its opening pericopes of the Baptist’s preaching is there any link between the Baptist and Jesus, let alone that the latter had been baptized by the former? (The occasional suggestion that the opening of Q included a baptism scene is a fringe position in Q scholarship, lacking any basis but wishful thinking.)

Where is it made clear that John is even aware of the existence on earth of the “baptizer with fire” he prophesies? (Later he is made aware in the Dialogue pericope, put together courtesy of a Q redactor.) Ehrman has the nerve to quote from the opening of Q even in the face of a void in those verses on any link whatever with Jesus. As for John, the evangelist’s use of a motif in the Synoptic baptism of Jesus is proof of his dependence on Mark (see Chapter 30).

And what is the “distinctive story” from M? Ehrman doesn’t inform us. If it is Matthew’s little addition to the baptism scene (3:14) in which John protests to Jesus that “I need rather to be baptized by you,” Ehrman ought to be well aware that scholars in general regard this as Matthew himself trying to rescue what he perceives as an objectionable Markan episode in having Jesus baptized at all.

Ehrman applies the criterion of dissimilarity to Jesus’ baptism. Since the baptizer was traditionally regarded as superior to the baptized, who would make up a story about the superior being baptized by the inferior? Mark would, if he was only allegorizing, or presenting a scene which served to create a paradigm for the community’s own rite of baptism. He might have, if his lesson was to show that even the greatest needed to undergo the symbol of repentance. Or maybe just because he was less sensitive to the idea than later evangelists were.

For Ehrman, Jesus submitting to baptism by John showed that he considered himself in sync with what John was preaching. (Would that any of our sources could convey the internal workings of Jesus’ mind in the way that Ehrman and indeed many other New Testament scholars have no trouble deciphering.) This becomes, in Ehrman’s view, evidence that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.

Ehrman raises the other bookend: the movement which sprang up in response to the death of Jesus. Lo and behold—it was an apocalyptic one! We can see this in Paul and the other Christian writers, who were

filled with expectations that they—the Christians at the time—would be alive when Jesus returned from heaven as judge of the earth (see, for example, l Thessalonians 4 :13 – 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15). (DJE? p. 303)

One can only shake one’s head at Ehrman’s “returned” from heaven, which of course no epistle writer ever voices. Or at his failure to take into account that almost every sectarian expression on the first-century scene, Jewish or Christian, was basically apocalyptic in nature. Did an historical Jesus inspire 4 Ezra, 1 and 2 Enoch, 2 and 3 Baruch, or the many apocalypses from Abraham to Zephaniah? Even the Zealot movement had its apocalyptic dimension, expecting the intervention of God in their anticipated overthrow of the Romans.

Between these Alpha and Omega bookends, Ehrman places his apocalyptic Jesus:

To explain this beginning and this end, we have to think that Jesus himself was an apocalypticist.  (DJE? p. 304)

In reality, the Alpha and Omega were part of a continuous thread. Apocalypticism was the spirit of the day, evolving to focus itself upon a symbolic individual.

33

Ehrman’s Picture of the Apocalyptic Jesus

Having concluded that Jesus not only existed but was an apocalyptic prophet, Ehrman now discusses what we can assign to Jesus from the Gospels. This is characterized by a high degree of naivete as to what can be depended on in the evangelists’ and Q’s presentations, with contradictions largely ignored.

Preaching repentance and the imminence of the Kingdom

Much of what Ehrman ascribes to Jesus can reasonably be seen as the message of the kingdom-preaching community itself. Mark’s opening words for Jesus (1:15),

The time has been fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.

are mundane enough to be placed in any prophetic mouth of the first century CE. Q2, in fact, attributes similar sentiments to John the Baptist as the originator of such preaching, in a context of no inclusion of Jesus. In fact, note Q’s description of the beginning of the movement, as used by Luke and Matthew:

Until John, it was the law and the prophets; since then, there is the good news of the Kingdom of God, and everyone forces his way in. [Lk./Q 16:16]

From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and violent men are seizing it. [Mt. 11:12]

As I say in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p.347):

. . . When the saying first originated, we can safely regard it as the community looking back over its history; the implied time scale is too great for it to be claimed as an authentic saying of Jesus, or one accorded to him, commenting on the brief span of his own ministry to date. This is Q’s picture of the past, a past of years, perhaps decades. Placing it in Jesus’ mouth has proven problematic. [We might note here that such things indicate the later introduction of a Jesus figure, at which placing the community’s own sayings into his mouth has created some anomalies.]

According to the saying, before the preaching of John the Baptist—now looked upon as a forerunner or mentor to the community’s own—the study of scripture formed the prevailing activity and source of inspiration. Now a new movement is perceived to have arisen at the time of John: the preaching of the coming kingdom of God, and it had inaugurated an era of contention. But why would Jesus himself not have been seen in this role? Surely the Q community would have regarded his ministry as the turning point from the old to the new. The saying would almost certainly have formed around him. At the very least, Jesus would have been linked with John as representing the time of change.

Yet another indicator of the later invention of a founder Jesus. These anomalies, if recognized at all, were not perceived as troublesome by later Q redactors and were left standing; they simply had new understandings read into them. (Just as post-Gospel Christianity read new understandings into the epistles.)

Disjunction between Jesus and Paul

For such preachers as the Q prophets, the kingdom will be established on earth, entailing the continuance of human activities such as eating and drinking, ruling from thrones, etc. Ehrman presents this as the preaching of the apocalyptic Jesus. But all this seems anything but compatible with the picture that Paul creates, in which flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 15:50). This looks look a real disjunction between the preaching of Ehrman’s Jesus and what Paul proclaims.

Could it be that the two teachings have certain basic commonalities but are essentially from two separate expressions on the first-century scene, with Paul drawing nothing from any alleged historical Jesus’ ideas? It would be astonishing indeed to think that if Paul knew of an historical Jesus who was an apocalyptic prophet (and how could he have been ignorant of that role?) he would have had not the slightest interest in discovering what his Son of God had had to say on the matter while on earth.

Future Judgment and Reversal of Fortunes

Ehrman also pronounces as authentic the Gospel Jesus’ teachings on the future judgment. These go hand in hand with the coming of the Son of Man (see previous chapter), and make perfect sense in the mouth of the preaching community itself. Ehrman calls attention to Jesus’ teaching of the “reversal of fortunes” when the mighty shall be laid low and the poor and humble exalted. This is a central motif in Q, but it is curious that the epistles in their own expression of apocalypticism do so little with it, and when they do, as in James 2:5 and 1 Clement 14:4, there is no attribution to Jesus.

Jesus and the Mosaic Law

Ehrman seems to accept Q’s unbending commitment to the Mosaic Law as the words of Jesus: “. . . it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for a single dot of the Law to pass away.” But what does that do to the Gospel Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees for their strict codes of adherence? What does it do to Jesus’ alleged dismissal of Jewish dietary laws, in which he declares that all foods are clean, that none can defile a man (as in Mark 7)? What does it do for Paul’s key gospel about the passing away of the Law, or about gentiles not needing to follow its every “dot”? Mark (10:17f) has Jesus declaring that to gain eternal life one needs to “keep the commandments.” But what of Paul who said that keeping the Law was not necessary for salvation, only faith in Jesus?

Here is where Ehrman gets into trouble. He thinks to apply the criterion of dissimilarity to Jesus’ preaching of salvation through keeping the commandments, but then points out that “early Christians” thought something else:

Quite the contrary, this is a view that the vast majority of Christians rejected. The early Christians maintained that a person had to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus for eternal life. Some . . . argued precisely against the idea that keeping the Law could bring eternal life. If it could, then what was the purpose of Christ and his death? No, it was not the Law but Jesus who could bring salvation. So why is Jesus portrayed in this passage as saying that salvation comes to those who keep the Law? Because that is something that he actually said. (DJE? p. 310)

But wait a minute. Who are these “early Christians”? Is it the sources he claims lie behind the Gospels, going back to the earliest years after Jesus’ death? Yet how could he identify beliefs such as these in the sources of the Gospels if they are not to be found in the Gospels? (Not even Mark 10:45 constitutes “believing in Jesus.”) And they are certainly not in Q, M or L, or in the Gospel of Thomas, the latter offering salvation through an understanding of Jesus’ teachings, not through believing in himself.

The Gospel of John has to be excluded here, because it very much proposes that belief in Jesus as the Revealer Son is required for salvation. But this is a later and unique development (proto-gnostic, from a different branch of the broader Christ cult movement), and John’s teachings do not figure in Ehrman’s picture of the historical Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, since this is not the picture presented in John. Here, for once, Ehrman cannot appeal to “multiple independent sources” for a given tradition, a misleading phrase in many of his usages of it throughout the book when all that the “multiple” consisted of was Mark (Matthew and Luke being dependent on him) and John. This, of course, necessitated Ehrman’s position that John was not dependent on the Synoptics, since in so many cases that would have deprived him of his ‘multiple independence’.

So who is left? Obviously, Ehrman’s “early Christians”—in this case—are Paul and the epistle writers’ communities, who are anything but the “early Christians” he has referred to in other cases. It is they who argue against the view that salvation proceeds primarily from keeping the commandments, and in favor of believing in Jesus. (The one exception is the epistle of James [see 1:21-25], in a document which is almost non-Christian in its strongly Jewish content.) Perhaps it isn’t surprising that Paul & Co. would ride roughshod over Jesus’ own teachings on the matter, since they ignore him and his views on just about everything else in their catalogue.

But Ehrman fails to provide any rationale for how an entire movement, as represented in the epistles, could simply reject Jesus’ teachings as though they never existed, without a word of argument in their own favor for doing so. Nor would it be unreasonable to expect those writers and their circles to justify their viewpoint by reworking—‘spin doctoring’—Jesus’ teachings to support their own view; indeed, we might expect them, in the best Gospel tradition, to simply invent sayings of Jesus in order to corroborate their new stance on achieving salvation. Instead, we get total silence.  (It has been established that Paul’s “words of the Lord” are derived from direct revelation.)

Jesus’ teaching on the Law

Ehrman goes on to acknowledge that “Jesus did not think that what really mattered before God was the scrupulous observance of the laws in all their details.” Is that compatible with Q’s “not a dot of the Law shall pass away”? Ehrman claims that at the heart of Jesus’ preaching lay the advocation of God’s commandments, specifically:

. . . to love God above all else (as in Deuteronomy 4:4-6) and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (as in Leviticus 19:18). This emphasis on the dual commandments to love is found in our earliest surviving Gospel. (DJE? p. 311)

And he quotes Mark 12:23-34. But what he does not quote is the pronouncement of those commandments found in non-Gospel writings:

- James 2:8 appeals to the latter scriptural passage, with no mention that Jesus himself had laid emphasis upon it;

- Paul appeals to both on two occasions (Romans 13:9, Galatians 5:14) but similarly makes no attribution to Jesus;

- And if Ehrman wishes to call up Paul as an “early Christian” who thought faith was more important than keeping the Law, why does he not take him into account in 1 Thessalonians 4:9, where Paul says that “we are taught by God to love one another”?

None of this non-Gospel witness supports Ehrman’s claim that central to Jesus’ teaching was the dual commandment of love.

The Last Judgment

Quite dramatically, Ehrman reviews the “final judgment” scene in Matthew 25, wherein Jesus rewards the good and punishes the wicked on the basis of the social conscience they displayed or did not display on earth: whether they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the imprisoned and the sick. But such a standard for salvation does not conform to the view (now it’s of “later Christians like Paul”) that belief in Jesus determined salvation.

In passing, Ehrman throws the latter bone in the direction of “also the writers of the Gospels”—without giving us a reference for this claim (he may really have only John in mind)—but one is hard pressed to find much of ‘belief in Jesus’ as the avenue to salvation in the Synoptics; and it is certainly not to be found in Q, whose “early” people give to their Jesus no soteriological role whatsoever. This is another indication of the separateness between the movement represented by the widespread Christ cult of Paul and that of Galilean Q and the Synoptics. Failing to perceive this reality has confounded the entire picture of early Christianity which historicists like Ehrman attempt to construct.

By virtue of the criterion of dissimilarity, Ehrman pronounces on Matthew’s picture of the last judgment the verdict of authenticity as representing the teaching of Jesus, since it does not conform to the necessity to believe in Jesus himself to be saved. But once again, we need merely see this outlook on the means to salvation as present in the Galilean/Synoptic movement prior to the introduction by Mark of a Jesus figure who was sacrificed. It was only with the latter that the door was opened to an eventual amalgamation with the Christ cult’s very different soteriological concepts.

Another distinction that Ehrman is incapable of making is that “believing in Jesus” on the part of Paul and the Christ cult, as opposed to the Gospel communities, is a central element precisely because their Christ is an entirely spiritual figure, and it is naturally required that one believe in his existence and what scripture tells of him and his role in salvation. Supposed revelation always requires faith that the revelation is true.

This is the way the world ends . . .

Ehrman makes a valiant attempt to reconcile the two pictures of the coming End which we find in the Gospels, and even in Q. The apocalyptic one, in which all must tremble, wait and prepare for the coming of the Son of Man and a cataclysmic transformation of the world. And the much gentler, humane picture of the kingdom already potentially present if we conduct ourselves accordingly. The two different atmospheres are represented in the two strata of Q, the former in Q2, the latter largely in Q1.

Despite Ehrman’s contention, I doubt very much that the same man could have conceived and preached both, let alone that, working from scratch, the one community would have produced teachings that had such a wide divergence of outlook and a basic incompatibility. There is too much rabid fire-breathing clogging Q2 and too much reasonableness inherent in Q1—not to mention a more universality of application in the latter, which does not fit the thundering prophecy that the powerful and evil, or even one out of two ordinary people lying in the same bed, are destined for destruction.

This is an observation which supports a different provenance for the material in Q1. And since it bears so much resemblance to Cynic philosophy and apostolic practice (see Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.330-4) it seems reasonable to assume that such was indeed the ultimate source. A fledgling sect which preached in basically apocalyptic tones, warning of ultimate judgment and the need for repentance (as was assigned to its declared originator, John the Baptist), might have been incapable of inventing the Q1 ethos for itself. But it might nevertheless adopt it under the influence of exposure to Cynicism, perhaps even using an existing document if it was not simply a body of Cynic oral tradition, and adapt it for themselves as an ideal guide to faith and behavior, regardless of the anomalies it presented with the apocalyptic outlook.

In fact, Ehrman provides a very good rationale for why an apocalyptic sect could adopt a humane and moral code such as we find lying behind Q1, regardless of where it came from. He, of course, puts it in terms of being the product of an historical Jesus. But the source of Q1, whatever it was, could have been seen by the newly forming sect as a code of conduct designed, not to better society or create long-term happiness (neither Jesus nor the sect itself was trying to reform the world), but rather as a recipe precisely for the short term. The end was coming soon, and the ethics of Q1 were seen as appropriate ways for believers to behave right now, so that when the Son of Man came, the sect members would be among the elect and brought into the kingdom instead of being destined for eternal torment or annihilation. Keeping the Law and otherwise acting in an ethical manner involving justice and compassion for others would seem an ideal way for the Q community to conduct itself, even in a setting of apocalyptic expectation and the preaching of doom to an unheeding outside world. At the same time, elements of that code presented the promise of what it would be like to live in the kingdom itself, with its reversal of fortunes.

Jesus and miracle working

Ehrman sets aside the miracles attributed to Jesus as ‘unusable’ by historians. But he accepts that they can tell us that Jesus became reputed as a miracle worker, which supposedly supports his existence, especially in an apocalyptic preaching context where miracles would signal the imminent arrival of the kingdom. Well, tell that to Paul and the rest of the epistle writers. No such reputation is ever suggested by anyone until the epistle of Barnabas at least a couple of decades into the second century, and even he hasn’t a single miracle to give us.

Not even given Paul’s apocalyptic claims, or his reference to (unspecified) “signs and wonders” which he and others have performed in support of the gospel of Christ and the imminence of the kingdom, do we hear of such a reputation. In fact, he must have been entirely ignorant of it, for in 1 Corinthians 1:22 he criticizes the Jews who ask for miracles in order to believe. Was not Jesus on earth reputed to have supplied such miracles in abundance—for that very purpose? (At least Ehrman does not go so far as some other historicist scholars, who admit a personal belief in demons on the basis that Jesus spoke with and miraculously exorcised them in the Gospels.)

Associating with the lowly

Radical sects tend to thumb their noses at the tight-assed opinions and practices of the establishment. And any group which promises the reversal of fortunes is doubly liable to associate with the presently poor and downtrodden, the despised of society such as the prostitute and the tax collector. Associating with “sinners” goes without saying, since the definition of the latter would include those who did not conform to the strict ritual observance of the religious authorities, which is one of the things the sect opposed. So we do not need an individual Jesus to understand a movement which would conduct itself in this manner. Ehrman suggests applying the criterion of dissimilarity here, since

It seems unlikely that Jesus’s later followers would make up the claim that his friends were chiefly outcasts and prostitutes, so this may indeed have been his reputation. (DJE? p. 317)

But this is precisely how a counter-culture, anti-establishment movement would act, and has tended to act throughout history. If the lowly were the ones to be raised and rewarded, it would be natural to associate with them. And besides, it is from their ranks that recruits for an anti-establishment movement would most likely be found.

If a Jesus were introduced onto the scene and into Q’s recorded traditions as representative and founder of the group’s activities, he would automatically be made to adopt their behavior. A founder figure serves as the one who originally set the group’s activities and behavior in motion; he also adds status to the group, both internally and externally, and enables cohesion and lesson-building based on the example of the founder.

If there has been an almost universal characteristic of any sect, even of humans as a whole, it is a tendency to want to impute what they see as innovative and superior principles to one innovative and superior originator, one whose precedent and direction they themselves are now following. There is scarcely a religion, philosophy or social development before recent times which has not eventually looked to a founder as its source and inspiration, often rendering them larger than life.

Jesus’ followers and disciples

Ehrman makes much of “the twelve,” an inner circle of disciples handpicked by Jesus. As usual, he exaggerates the witness to them:

The existence of this group of twelve is extremely well attested in our early sources. (DJE? p. 318)

While Paul makes the sole reference (1 Cor. 15:5) to “the twelve” in the entire body of epistles, it is by no means clear what the term refers to there. (It could be to an administrative body within the sect as may be suggested by Acts 6:2.) As we all know, nowhere does any epistle writer even imply that some select group, even the “pillars” in Jerusalem whom Paul is sometimes at odds with, were once the followers of a human Jesus. In the disputes he has with these and other apostles, Paul, when arguing for his own legitimacy as an apostle, never defends his ‘shortcoming’ in not having been a follower of the human Jesus.

- 1 Corinthians 9:1 more than implies that the standard is in “seeing the Lord,” something Paul claims to have done.

- He tells us (1 Cor. 12:28) that it is God who has appointed apostles, prophets and teachers.

- In Galatians 1 and 2, he calls the Jerusalem group “those who were apostles before me,” with the implication that there was no difference in the quality or origin of their respective apostleships,

- while in 2:8 he declares that God has made Peter an apostle to the Jews just as he made Paul an apostle to the gentiles.

There is a striking absence of the idea of apostolic tradition in the non-Gospel record until well into the second century. Nowhere, not even in disputes over proper teaching, does anyone appeal to the idea of genuine and reliable teachings being passed on by the disciples of Jesus who heard his very words, or were given authority by him to go out and preach. We know that there was a desire by individual apostles like Paul, or groups like that in 1 John, to seek support for the legitimacy of their preaching. But where did they turn? Not to channels going back to followers of Jesus and Jesus himself, but to the Spirit, to their own personal revelations (as in 1 Corinthians 9:1, 2 Corinthians 11:4, and 1 John 4:1-4).

Ehrman calls it “striking” that all three synoptic Gospels speak of the twelve and list their names, but that the names differ from one list to the next (Mark 3:14-19; Matthew 10:1-4; Luke 6:12-16). “This must show,” he says, “that everyone knew there were twelve in the group, but not everyone knew who the twelve were.” Yet, since Matthew and Luke are so dependent on Mark for even the most basic biographical information, is it likely they would have possessed something as esoteric as separate disciple lists? (There certainly was no source in Q, which mentioned none of the disciples of Jesus by name; such contexts and characters had to be added by Matthew and Luke.)

On the other hand, why would they change Mark’s list, why doubt its reliability? The probable answer is that both later evangelists recognized that Mark’s story was just that: a story. Since no one was intending to create actual history (even if they might have believed in some historical figure which their character represented—which is by no means sure with any of the evangelists), changing a couple of names in the list would have been quite kosher and may have served some other agenda.

Sitting on thrones with the betrayer Judas

Perhaps the zenith of Ehrman’s naivete comes with his consideration of the saying by Jesus that his “twelve” followers will sit on twelve thrones as judges in the new kingdom. Now, since this would have included Judas Iscariot, the betrayer, it could not have been formulated after Jesus’ death. Thus it must have been spoken by Jesus during his ministry. Moreover, the number twelve, as being the number Jesus chose to be his immediate disciples, would have been determined by his apocalyptic outlook that the twelve tribes of Israel would be preserved even in the kingdom, and he needed twelve ‘rulers’ for them. And to stretch the exercise in mind-reading even further, because Jesus now ‘ruled’ over his twelve disciples, Ehrman concludes that he considered himself destined to be the chief ruler over them and the kingdom of God when it arrived. He would be “king” in the new kingdom. Ehrman comes dangerously close to rendering his apocalyptic Jesus something of a megalomaniac.

But there is another necessary corollary to Ehrman’s handling of the “twelve thrones” passage. To preserve his application of the criterion of dissimilarity (because of the betrayal of Judas, the saying could not have originated after Jesus’ death), Ehrman is led to suggest something which effectively removes him from the ranks of “critical scholars.” He accepts the existence of Judas. This, in circular fashion, is supported by another use of the criterion (as well as the criterion of embarrassment), in that he can ask: who would make up a betrayer of Jesus from among his immediate disciples? What an embarrassing scandal, reflecting poorly on Jesus himself, and hardly in keeping with later church interests!

Thus do the walls of the box confine the exegetical mind. If Mark is composing an allegorical story, then he may have his own reasons for introducing certain characters, events and plot devices. “Judas” is widely considered among critical scholarship as a fictional symbol for disbelieving and treacherous Jewry (the name itself is an allegorical marker). His actions could be seen to symbolize the treachery that may arise in the community itself, with devastating consequences, and be a cautionary lesson against it. The figure of Judas adds excitement to the story, and serves the plot by facilitating Jesus’ arrest. In conjunction with Mark’s Gethsemane scene, the events leading up to the trial become a literary tour de force. Besides, Mark must have felt obliged to introduce such a figure. He was right there in scripture: “Even the friend whom I trusted, who ate at my table, has lifted up his heel against me” (Psalm 41:9).

The cult vs. family

Ehrman attempts a determined rationalization and justification for Jesus’ ‘anti-family’ stance, his insistence that to be his follower one must abandon—even ‘hate’—one’s father and mother. Brother will betray brother. “I come not to bring peace to the earth, but a sword/division.” All of this might further bring Jesus’ mental stability and moral integrity into question, but it is a relatively common expression of the sectarian cult mentality. When society as a whole does not respond (which is usually the case), the sect retains its conviction of rightness by telling itself that the divisiveness, large-scale and small, which they bring about is proper and inevitable—even necessary. The voice of Jesus is speaking for the sect as a whole.

Jesus and the Temple

Finally, Ehrman accepts that some sort of disturbance was caused by Jesus in the Temple, though nothing on the scale suggested by the Gospels. That would have been impossible for a single man to accomplish, given the size of the place if nothing else. Most critical scholars doubt the historicity of any such event on any scale, for Roman soldiers were on the premises at all times, especially during Passover, and Jesus would hardly have walked away unimpeded. Ironically, Ehrman suggests that in creating the ruckus, Jesus could actually have quoted the scriptural words attributed to him in the Gospel scene:

Is it not written, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it into a den of thieves’ (Mark 11:17).

But it is far more likely that it is Mark who is quoting these scriptural words, placing them in the mouth of his character, Jesus of Nazareth, in a scene those words have inspired. Besides, Mark needed a plot device to trigger the final spur to Jesus’ opponents. This, in fact, is one of the “generic components” in the genre of the tale of the Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One which Mark is following in creating his Passion story: the “Provocation” which induces the protagonist’s enemies to act against him.

The Passion of Jesus

Ehrman runs through the Passion story, admitting that it is difficult to know exactly how much of it could be historical, though he opts for quite a bit, including (as noted earlier) the character and role of Judas. As for Jesus’ exchange with Pilate, he suggests, “It is not difficult to imagine what happened at the trial.” Exercising one’s imagination is certainly a good way to produce a congenial exegesis (a not uncommon approach in New Testament scholarship), especially when one has laid the groundwork in equally imaginative fashion. Ehrman concludes that Pilate condemned Jesus for maintaining that he was a “king,” though Pilate misunderstood: Jesus did not mean that he himself would lead a rebellion to destroy Roman overlordship, but that he would be awarded the throne of the new kingdom when the Son of Man came to establish it on God’s behalf. Had Pilate understood Jesus’ true meaning, he might have committed him to an asylum rather than condemned him to the cross.

Ehrman has now rested his case, but in a Conclusion he devotes his final word to questioning the motives which lie at the base of mythicism. This will be the subject of the final chapter.

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Ehrman’s Conclusion

Ehrman’s reaction to humanism

Similar to his situation in having had little knowledge of Jesus Mythicism before he undertook to write a book in opposition to it, Bart Ehrman seems to have had little contact with or understanding of humanism before being an “honored” guest recently at the national meeting of the American Humanist Association, where he received the Religious Liberty Award. He learned that they “celebrate what is good about being human.” But another aspect of humanism also struck him:

But a negative implication runs beneath the surface of the self-description and is very much on the surface in the sessions of the meeting and in almost every conversation happening there. This is a celebration of being human without God. Humanist is understood to stand over against theist. This is a gathering of nonbelievers who believe in the power of humanity to make society and individual lives happy, fulfilling, successful, and meaningful. And the group is made up almost exclusively of agnostics and atheists. . . . (DJE? p. 332)

Evidently, Ehrman does not realize that the humanist movement arose in great part as a response to religion, as a rejection of its traditional all-encompassing and rigid dictations of what life constituted, how it should be lived, how we should think, and how we should view and treat the world. Having come to realize that this tradition was flawed and even harmful, an ongoing impediment to rationality, science and human rights, many people came together to try to counter these undesirable effects and offer an alternative.

Adopting a stance against religion in all its negative aspects was essentially one raison d’etre. Those who were convinced that religion’s foundation in a belief in God(s) and a supernatural dimension to reality was fundamentally erroneous felt a desire to correct that error in humanity’s thinking—not through force, indoctrination or legislation to impose one view of reality on everyone, such as religion has traditionally tried to do and is inherently ‘set up’ to do—but through reasoned persuasion and education.

But what struck me most about the meeting was precisely how religious it was. Every year I attend meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, conferences on early Christian studies, and the like. I have never, in my recollection, been to a meeting that was so full of talk about personal religion as the American Humanist Association, a group dedicated to life without religion. (DJE? p. 333)

Here Ehrman shows how the religious mind (even an ex-religious mind) can only evaluate other or opposing views in religious terms. It seeks to apply the concepts of religion to the non-religious. Thus, focusing on how one should live one’s life in the humanist way becomes a “religious” activity and fixation. “Life without religion” can only be achieved through “religion.”

But this is a misuse of language and concepts. We can say “he works at his job religiously” because we have broadened the meaning of “religiously” to apply to anything that is undertaken with dedication and faithful attention. This does not make working at that job a religion in the standard sense, because it does not involve belief in a god or the supernatural. Humanism may be promoted by some circles of non-believers quite “religiously” but that does not make humanism a religion. That is simply an attempt by members of actual religions to cast their own net over their opponents. “You criticize us for the qualities we value? You practice the same ones!” But what those respective qualities are used in the service of is quite different.

Humanist and atheist activism

I suppose there was so much talk about religious belief because it is almost impossible in our society to talk about meaning and fulfillment without reference to religion, and humanists feel a need to set themselves over against that dominant discourse. (DJE? p. 333)

Here, again, Ehrman seems to be saying that the very concepts of meaning and fulfillment only enjoy legitimacy, or ultimate reality, within the context of religion, or something given an essentially ‘religious’ interpretation (such as in the woolly and misleading terminology of being ‘spiritual’ so popular in our generation). That is indeed, and has always been, the “dominant” form of discourse in these matters, and it is precisely the rejection of that stance, one based ultimately on theism and supernaturalism, which leads humanists and atheists into actively setting themselves against it.

Modern medicine of the last couple of centuries set itself resolutely (one might say religiously) against the longstanding medical practice of bleeding a patient to release harmful humors causing illness. Is modern medicine a religion? It recognized the harm created by older convictions and practices. Should they have been reluctant to set themselves “over against that dominant discourse,” or be criticized for it? Should the religious belief—based on no evidence whatever—that two cells coming together within moments of conception are infused by God with an immortal soul be allowed to impede the potential cure of human illnesses through stem-cell research? Should the primitivism of two and three thousand-year-old cultures and their writings be allowed to dictate to the modern mind and society on everything from the origin of the world to what constitutes ‘sin’ to one’s fate in an afterlife?

Ehrman, observing that humanist meetings devote much talk to how to deal with family reaction when leaving the faith, or how to oppose the teaching of creationism in science classrooms and so on, laments that humanists situate their humanism in relation to something else, that they often define themselves in terms of what they are not, namely “agnostic” or “atheist” in relation to theism. Again, that is essentially their raison d’etre, and even their positive stances and adopted lifestyles are necessarily ‘set over against’ the traditional ones based on a belief in God and what that belief requires. Given the society in which we live, and its long history, this is inevitable and perfectly acceptable.

When astronomers of Copernicus and Galileo’s day proclaimed a sun-centered world, this was a positive declaration of their view of the universe, based on scientific evaluation of the evidence. But it could hardly be promoted, let alone adopted, without setting itself against the traditional view of a Ptolemaic earth-centered one, a view fiercely adhered to by religious interests based on the bible’s own presentation and on which its inerrancy was seen as dependent.

Modern humanism and atheism is in a similar situation, although it may not be facing the stake for its opposition. (Though that could change if evangelical Dominionists gain the power they seek. Pat Robertson, in the first flush of the Moral Majority’s influence in the 1980s, advocated passing federal laws against “defaming the Lord”—which no doubt would have included Jesus mythicism—although he did not specify the penalty for such a crime.)

Thus, humanism’s self-definition should not come as a surprise to Ehrman, much less something he ought to find fault with:

“Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” (DJE? p. 333)

Considering that religious belief has produced so much which has operated against that greater good, ‘taking on religion’ is a natural and necessary aspect of being a humanist and atheist in most societies around the world (even if a considerable number of humanists have advocated against doing so)—with a few notable exceptions, one of which is unfortunately not the United States of America.

Going against received wisdom

Now, all of this has served as an introduction to the point Ehrman wants to make in his Conclusion. First, there is this claim:

In my view mythicists are, somewhat ironically, doing a disservice to the humanists for whom they are writing. By staking out a position that is accepted by almost no one else, they open themselves up to mockery and to charges of intellectual dishonesty. (DJE? p. 334)

Well, this type of admonition could have been made against almost any individual or group who ever put forward a theory which bucked the going wisdom. Copernicus threw traditional astronomy into disrepute. Darwin was mocked by the religious establishment. Wegener was disowned by the discipline of geology and ridiculed by his colleagues for his theory of continental drift. If innovators and researchers not shackled by received tradition backed away through fear of such reactions we’d still be living in the Stone Age. Yes, we have had our share of new theories deserving rejection (alien visitors to earth as the source of human life is probably one such). But that rejection has usually been backed up by reasoned argument and counter-demonstration. And such rebuttal has had to stand up to scrutiny. Ridicule by itself or appealing to “the way we’ve always thought” doesn’t do the trick.

The Jesus Problem

Before going on to explain why Jesus is a problem for atheists and humanists, Ehrman switches gears and examines why Jesus constitutes a problem for religionists. The problem is that he is “too historical,” by which Ehrman means he is too adaptable to any historical interpretation. Christians at all times, and especially in the modern age, have been able to turn him into anything they wanted in order to suit different agendas, whether of televangelists, free-enterprise capitalists, racial supremacists, advocates of the welfare state, or any of a host of other self-interests. Of course, Ehrman sees the historical Jesus as none of these things, and he takes the opportunity to summarize the apocalyptic preacher he believes Jesus to have been. Then:

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew. When we create him anew we no longer have the Jesus of history but the Jesus of our own imagination, a monstrous invention created to serve our own purposes. But Jesus is not so easily moved and changed. He is powerfully resistant. He remains always in his own time. As Jesus fads come and go, as new Jesuses come to be invented and then pass away, as newer Jesuses come to take the place of the old, the real, historical Jesus continues to exist, back there in the past…. (DJE? p. 336)

Ehrman has summarized modern Jesus scholarship quite well here, and given the perennial failure of repeated quests to find the ‘real’ historical Jesus more and more of our modern New Testament scholars have begun admitting as much.

But what do many of them turn around and do? Just like Ehrman, they claim that they have finally identified the true, real, genuine historical Jesus to properly replace all those “monstrous inventions” of the past. No fad my theory. No problems with my evidence and argument to finally uncover the Jesus of history buried under all that early Christian superstructure and our misguided preceding scholarship. If they live long enough (give it maybe a couple of decades), they get to see their own claims follow onto the scrap heap.

Like the difference between the atheist and the Christian monotheist who rejects the existence of Allah, or Zeus, or any of a thousand other gods humanity has subscribed to, one could say: “But Dr. Ehrman, you’re already a Jesus mythicist; I just believe in one less mythical Jesus than you do!”

The Mythicist Agenda

So now we’ve arrived at the crunch. Regardless of all the arguments pro and con, never mind the credentials business, forget all the misfirings of past historical Jesus quests, mythicism can be rejected as unreliable and discredited simply because…MYTHICISTS HAVE AN AGENDA!

Of course, Ehrman is hardly the first to make such an accusation. It has been an invaluable staple in most dismissals of the mythicist case, going back to its earliest refuters, such as Maurice Goguel (1928) and Shirley Jackson Case (1912). Mythicists are not to be trusted because they are motivated by their own anti-religion and anti-Christian biases.

Even given that alleged disposition, Ehrman wonders why such humanists and atheists do not focus instead on demonstrating that Jesus was not the person that Christian faith makes him out to be. After all, isn’t whether Jesus existed essentially irrelevant to whether a God exists? Why not show, as Ehrman has done (though not with the same motivation), that he was simply a mistaken, misguided apocalypticist, neither right nor divine? Why go so far as to buck historical reality and go for the historical Jesus’ own jugular? Ehrman supplies the answer:

Mythicists are avidly antireligious. To debunk religion, then, one needs to undermine specifically the Christian form of religion. And what easier way is there to undermine Christianity than to claim that the figure at the heart of Christian worship and devotion never even existed but was invented, made up, created? (DJE? p. 337)

But what has Ehrman himself been doing? Is Christianity any more debunked by demonstrating that Jesus did not exist than by demonstrating that he was nothing like the character the Christian faith worships, a failed, somewhat crazy preacher of doom who got himself executed, never to be seen again? Either one would leave it in a “total shambles.” (Personally, if I were a believer I would prefer mythicism, because that would at least leave me in a position to fall back on Paul’s heavenly Christ as an object of faith and salvation, a divinity unaffected by later delusions created by the Gospel writers that he had actually come to earth and been sacrificed there.)

The pot compared to the kettle

Could I not equally accuse Ehrman, in his promotion of a Jesus who was a failed apocalyptic preacher, of having an agenda, since his conclusion would be just as devastating to the Christian faith? After all, he has admitted to being at least an agnostic on the existence of God. Perhaps he is one of those “virulent, militant” agnostics/atheists, but is being a bit more subtle about it. I am sure Ehrman’s response would be to assure us that he is not, that he has good scholarly integrity and is honestly evaluating the evidence as he sees it. After all, he has studied the question of who Jesus was for years. I, for one, would be willing to allow him that honesty, without accusing him of something nefarious. Why is he not willing to do the same for committed mythicists?

And just what are his own motivations? Why is he anxious to educate the world in the reality of who Jesus was, as opposed to what he is convinced Jesus was not? He would probably reply, “In the interests of historical truth.”

An admirable motive. And why is the knowledge of that historical truth preferable to the naïve institutional beliefs of an indoctrinated Christianity, a religion he himself has set aside as erroneous and unacceptable, just as humanists and atheists have? I won’t guess at his exact words, but hopefully his answer would be along the lines that, in principle, a society should not govern itself, should not shape its laws, should not fashion its rights, should not educate its children, should not compromise its science, should not limit its technology, should not encourage superstitions of the supernatural, of angels and demons, of blissful afterlives and hellfire damnation, according to a belief system which can be judged to be based on a fiction.

In other words, Ehrman is surely as motivated by the same concerns about historical reality and its consequences as humanists and atheists are. Each of us has a perception of the truth and a desire to propagate it, perhaps the fundamental impulse of the human intellect. Why is Ehrman on the one hand an honorable and respected scholar, while mythicists on the other hand are a bunch of ignorant agenda-driven charlatans? He may disagree with mythicist arguments and conclusions, but the proper procedure is to approach those arguments and conclusions like a true scholar, with an open-minded eye, evaluate them honestly without prejudice or preconception and measure them against his own. At the same time, he should do his best not to misunderstand, much less misrepresent, the mythicist case. I think we can safely say that he has done none of these things.

The universality of agendas

[T]he mythicists who are so intent on showing that the historical Jesus never existed are not being driven by a historical concern. Their agenda is religious, and they are complicit in a religious ideology. They are not doing history; they are doing theology. (DJE? pp. 337-8)

Here again, mythicism must be seen as a religion, which serves to cast aspersions on its claim to be first and foremost “doing history.” Yet mythicist books are full of that very thing: an often minute analysis of the texts, including in the original languages, a reasoned interpretation of those texts aided by the study of a much wider literature, an examination of ancient history, religion, philosophy and mythology, and their relation to Christian origins and beliefs.

Precious little—other than knee-jerk dismissal and the tired old appeal to authority—has been offered by historicist scholars to discredit such historical exercises, much less to set more reliable alternatives in their place. (Remember Maurice Goguel, who was not going to “bother” addressing actual mythicist arguments in a book dedicated to demolishing them, relying on the same old timeworn ‘proofs’ of the existence of Jesus?) And that a discipline which has been traditionally dedicated to unabashedly “doing theology” in its study of Jesus and the New Testament would accuse humanists of doing the same thing, as though it were some sort of compromising activity on our part, is nothing short of comical.

Religious or not, we all have agendas. The term itself has taken on a derogatory connotation these days, in many contexts. But understood neutrally, it is not a dirty word. Ehrman has his agenda. It can hardly be denied that New Testament scholarship has had its own agenda, though one with variations, particularly as the 20th and 21st centuries have progressed. One of those agendas was and remains in many circles confessional, though increasingly another has been to uncover the historical reality of Jesus the man.

Yet more often than not, those scholars who subscribe to the latter (such as Spong, Crossan, the late Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar) have seen it as opening up some kind of avenue to ‘spiritual’ insight and progress; somehow, the ‘real’ Jesus, even if not the heavenly Son of God, is presented as serving the interests of theism, or at least of something a little more respectable and enlightened than—hummph!—mere science and earthbound reality and understanding humans as humans.

(But perhaps Ehrman’s view signals a new phase: Jesus as misguided doomsayer, warts and all, though one wonders at the fierceness with which the existence of such a figure is defended against those who would call it into question.)

An historical evaluation of religious tradition

Atheism and mythicism are not permitted to join the privileged club of debunkers. Never mind that ‘believing in Jesus’—without whom Paul’s Christ cult would never have survived—has led to untold misery and stagnation for an inordinately long time. The long litany of religious sectarian strife and international wars, of inquisition and pogrom, of conquest of ‘inferior’ cultures in the name of Jesus, of opposition to scientific and social enlightenment and the promotion of human rights, of impediment to investing in this the only world we are sure of having, is disheartening to say the least. Belief in a personal savior has never advanced human progress one iota. The fear created over the centuries, fear of devils and witches, fear of the infidel and non-believers, fear of the pleasures of the human body and intellect, and above all fear of God, of sin, of eternal punishment, has wrecked millions of psyches and stunted millions of lives.

And don’t let anyone tell you that faith in Jesus meek and mild, blood sacrificed for our transgressions, has relieved any of that. If anything, this bizarre primitive doctrine has accentuated the fear and the guilt. If God sent his own Son to earth to undergo such suffering on our behalf, how much more do we owe God and Jesus our allegiance, our every thought, word and action in the service of conforming to their wishes and worship! For every Christian testimonial to how Jesus has changed his or her life, one can supply an atheist testimonial to the intoxicating liberation from fear, guilt and oppression, an opening up of life’s potential once religion was abandoned.

Ehrman, commendably, goes so far as to admit sympathy for much of the concerns which atheists and even mythicists express. He acknowledges:

They look at our educational systems and see fervent Christians working hard to promote ignorance over knowledge, for example, in the insistence that evolution is merely a theory and that creationism should be taught in the schools. They look at our society and see what incredible damage religion has done to human lives: from the sponsorship of slavery to the refusal to grant women reproductive rights to the denial of the possibility of gay love and marriage. They look at the political scene and see what awful political power the religious right yields (sic): from imposing certain sets of religious beliefs on our society or in our schools to electing only those political figures who support certain religious agendas, no matter how hateful they may be toward other (poor, or non-American) human beings and how ignorant they may be about the world at large. (DJE? p. 338)

Much harm has been done, he admits, in the name of Christ, but he offers a ‘counter-balance’ which has become an almost pathetic cliché:

I also see that a tremendous amount of good has been done in his name, and continues to be done, by well meaning and hardworking Christian men and women who do untold good in the world on both massive and individual scales. (DJE? p. 339)

(We’ve hobbled western civilization for centuries, but at least some of us have aided third-world children—while preaching Jesus—and brought hot meals to shut-ins.)

The fallacy here, of course, is that it doesn’t take the influence of Christ, much less all its divisive and superstitious baggage, to do good in the world. Otherwise, atheists—whose numbers are increasing—would be criminals and anti-social misfits, and clogging the jails. Cultures devoted to rival supernatural beings would be in social chaos, too. And non-theist organizations would not be concerned with ethics, social welfare and human rights, as virtually all of them are.

Conclusion

If at the heart of humanist and atheist concerns lies the realization that without any historical Jesus at all, western religion would not have taken the course it did, nor continue to have the negative results it has produced, it is only natural that humanist scholars would have a disposition to focus on this issue. Ehrman notes, as though he has discovered a hand in the cookie jar, that it is only atheists and humanists who seem to be open to the idea that no historical Jesus ever lived. But this is hardly tantamount to being guilty of deliberately fabricating their theory for nefarious ends, or of promoting their own wishful thinking based on no scholarly or legitimate evidence whatever.

Mythicism has too long a history, it has produced too much responsible literature. (I have no hesitation in including my own The Jesus Puzzle and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man in that catalogue.) It has been in the hands of too many able scholars, even if some have been for the most part self-educated, though many have possessed ‘proper’ credentials such as the 19th century Dutch Radical school and some more recent scholars. It has been too persistent and too tenacious. Through today’s Internet, it has won over too broad a constituency, comprising intelligent people who can recognize traditional bias, fallacy, special pleading—as against good argument and often simple common sense—when they see it.

Ehrman’s case for an historical Jesus has been exposed as the weak effort and flawed exercise it truly is, by more than just myself (in this 34-part series on Vridar). Capping it off with the ultimate disreputable tactic of personally attacking the messengers and their integrity makes Did Jesus Exist? a dismal failure and an embarrassment. Ultimately, mythicism will stand or fall on its own scholarly arguments, irrespective of any supposed agenda. Contrary to its longstanding mantra-like claims, traditional scholarship has done little to actually address those arguments, let alone refute them. Bart Ehrman has made the effort and been found wanting.

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