To be honest, given the negative press it's received in some quarters, to be reading it just now it compares quite favorably. The first 15% of the book or so, before discussing the first positive pieces of information, are a preamble that strikes most of the right notes for someone who is attempting to give a fair shake to the questions of interest. Sure, if someone sees themselves in some of Ehrman's less encouraging remarks, they might come off a bit miffed. But don't we all know that these characters are out there? Ehrman does a lot more than most in giving some credit to Wells and Price (and Carrier, among mostly unnamed others) for being academics who are acting in good faith. Yes, he falls back on some of the notable fallacies, but rhetorically speaking it's hard to fault someone completely for wanting to do so -- you know proponents of the non-historicity of Jesus would mostly be shouting it to the rooftops if they had hegemony.
In any event, I kind of filter that stuff out at this point -- it is completely unprofitable, and I don't like the way it creeps into being the entire discussion. To make a point of it is to hand the game over to the guild and paint one's self into the corner as just another conspiracy theorist, if not keeping a mainstream point of view. The rhetoric never works out in the favor of the contrarian, except of course to people who collect contrary views like postage stamps, in which case that isn't a pretty sight either. It is important always simply to return to the evidence and to the sources; we have nothing else of any relevance.
So what do we have from Ehrman on the positive case?
Pliny = not independent of the Gospels, so apparently useful to trying to date them or their stories
Ehrman just has the edge here, which is notable IMO because this one is rarely argued to be an interpolation (but, then, of course it is... sometimes). Fortunately, he recognizes it basically just puts an endpoint on dating the origin of the Gospel stories.In any event, whatever Pliny knows about Christ he appears to have learned from the Christians who informed him, and so he does not provide us with completely independent testimony that Jesus actually existed, only the testimony of Christians living some eighty years after Jesus would have died. These Christians might have read some of the Gospels, and they certainly heard stories about Jesus. So at the least we can say that the idea of Jesus having existed was current by the early second century, but the reference of Pliny does not provide us with much more than that.
Suetonius = not useful
Ehrman's assessment, once again, looks completely right. Sometimes the supposedly stodgy scholars aren't given enough credit for their acumen and for their attempt, in their way, to be fair, even when considering what they think (in their heart of hearts) is wacky.'In any event, even if Suetonius is referring to Jesus by a misspelled epithet, he does not help us much in our quest for non-Christian references to Jesus. ... mythicists would argue that the “myth” of Christ had already been invented by then, as had the supposed life of the made-up figure of Jesus."
Tacitus = like Pliny, only shows there were Gospel-toting Christians
Ehrman is 0/3 for independent evidence of Jesus, apart from the Gospels. The commendable thing is, it's 0/3 by his own scoring.It should be clear in any event that Tacitus is basing his comment about Jesus on hearsay rather than, say, detailed historical research.
Josephus = like Pliny and Tacitus, cannot do more than show that there were Gospel-toting Christians
And here is where Ehrman truly surprises me with his magnanimity. Calling the shots above as 0/3 concerning the Roman authors is actually the scholarly consensus, to the extent that there is one (see, for example, van Voorst). But to come to Josephus and declare it 0/4 is a bold move. Consider that, in the 1990s, when reporters were pestering J. P. Meier to explain his stance on the historicity of Jesus, he referred them back merely to his case for the authenticity of a pared-down Testimonium and the reference in 20.9.1 as proof sufficient to establish the historicity of Jesus.My main point is that whether the Testimonium is authentically from Josephus (in its pared-down form) or not probably does not ultimately matter for the question I am pursuing here. Whether or not Jesus lived has to be decided on other kinds of evidence from this. And here is why. Suppose Josephus really did write the Testimonium. That would show that by 93 CE—some sixty or more years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death—a Jewish historian of Palestine had some information about him. And where would Josephus have derived this information? He would have heard stories about Jesus that were in circulation. There is nothing to suggest that Josephus had actually read the Gospels (he almost certainly had not) or that he did any kind of primary research into the life of Jesus by examining Roman records of some kind (there weren’t any). But as we will see later, we already know for lots of other reasons and on lots of other grounds that there were stories about Jesus floating around in Palestine by the end of the first century and much earlier. So even if the Testimonium, in the pared-down form, was written by Josephus, it does not give us much more evidence than we already have on the question of whether there really was a man Jesus.
In my view, the approach of Ehrman seems to be as much "pedagogical" as it is strictly logical. I am guessing that Ehrman wants to go beyond the simple reference to Josephus as a way to shut down debate, since there are really a wide range of issues to be addressed, primarily concerning the Christian literature. That's certainly to be admired, and it's better than the approach of Meier, who would have us shut our ears to anyone who teaches of a mythical Christ that is contrary to the good news regarding him found in Josephus.
Part of the reason Ehrman thinks this way is because of his high estimate of what Paul and other things must do regarding the question. Certainly for someone else, with a dim view of the weight of the Christian sources, such a pair of references from Josephus would be more valued, if not dispositive.
Talmud = too late, too bad
Thus Ehrman goes 0/5 in the non-Christian sources, by his own reckoning, in terms of finding independent evidence for the life of Jesus. Thus he closes chapter two and begins his look at the Christian sources.These Talmudic references to Jesus were written hundreds of years after he would have lived and so are really of very little use for us in our quest.
So Ehrman is impressed by the mere 40 year stretch (on his dating) separating the Gospel of Mark from the events it describes.Our earliest Gospel account of Jesus’s life is probably Mark’s, usually dated—by conservative and liberal scholars of the New Testament alike—to around 70 CE (some conservatives date it earlier; very few liberals date it much later). Eventually we will consider the question of Mark’s sources; for now we are interested in the brute fact that within forty years or so of Jesus’s (alleged) life, we have a relatively full account of many of the things he said and did and of his death by crucifixion.
So Ehrman is impressed with the independence from Mark of traditions found in Luke, Matthew, and John.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 ...
Prior to the narrative leading up to Jesus’s death, most of the stories in John are found only in John, whereas John does not include most of the stories found in the other three Gospels. And when they do share the same stories, John tells them in such a different way that he does not appear to have received his accounts from any or all of them.
So Ehrman is also impressed with the independence from Mark of traditions found in Thomas, Peter, and P. Egerton 2.Moreover, while some scholars think that Thomas relies on Matthew, Mark, and Luke for some of its sayings—there are overlaps in about half of them—it is more commonly thought that Thomas is independent, that it got its information from other sources. In either event, a good portion of Thomas, if not all of it, does not derive from the canonical texts. To that extent it is a fifth independent witness to the life and teachings of Jesus.
.... Once again, even though there is some similarity in portions of the account to what is found in the canonical Gospels, it is widely thought that Peter preserves an independent narrative, drawn from other, noncanonical, sources. ...
... Another independent account occurs in the highly fragmentary text called Papyrus Egerton 2.
So Ehrman is not impressed with the ones that are dated later than the early 2nd century, as he believes they are not independent from Mark (although they do tell various stories that cannot be considered derived from Mark or the other six witnesses above).There are, of course, lots of other Gospels, some forty or so, down to the early Middle Ages, that are not found in the New Testament. These include narratives of Jesus as a newborn and as a young child, where he uses his miraculous powers sometimes for mischief and sometimes for good; narratives of his public ministry; narratives of his death and resurrection. Almost all of these accounts, of course, are highly legendary, and with the passing of time they become less and less valuable as independent, historical sources.
So Ehrman believes in Q and most likely considers it to be relatively early, maybe contemporary to Paul, as most scholars surmise. Ehrman seems to believe that "M" and "L" were one or more written sources, not merely oral, and that they make the witness found in Matthew and Luke older than it would at first appear.One of them I have already mentioned, the no-longer-surviving Gospel account that scholars have called Q. ...
We are talking about at least four sources: Mark, Q, M, and L, the latter two of which could easily have represented several, or even many, other written sources.
Ehrman believes Mark itself relied on existing oral tradition. This is probably his best argument yet; unfortunately, he doesn't really develop the argument much further. Some believe in Q; some don't. Some believe in M and L; some don't. Some believe in this passion narrative; some don't.Many leading scholars of the Gospel of Mark think that it too was compiled not just of oral traditions that had been circulating down to the author’s day but of various written sources. It is often thought that Mark used a passion narrative that had been written years earlier in which the episodes of Jesus’s arrest, trials, death, and resurrection were already put into written form. The most recent and most authoritative two-volume commentary on Mark, by Joel Marcus, contends that Mark used a source, or a number of sources, for his account of Jesus’s words and deeds prior to the passion narrative.
Once again, it would be great if we didn't have to hunt down the scholarly literature arguing for this in order to evaluate Ehrman's argument. (I have read a good chunk of it, personally, but for most of his audience it's relatively obscure.)The Gospel of John too is widely thought to have been based on written sources that no longer survive. As I have indicated, the reason for thinking that John does not rely on the synoptics is that whenever they tell the same story, it is in radically different ways and never in the same words. But scholars have long suspected that John had at his disposal an earlier written account of Jesus’s miracles (the so-called Signs Source), at least two accounts of Jesus’s long speeches (the Discourse Sources), and possibly another passion source as well.
This is possibly one of the better arguments presented so far -- I mean, he's actually cited a specific passage in support, rather than a vague reference to a consensus of scholars working on the issues.In several passages in the Gospels a key word or phrase has been left in the original Aramaic, and the author, writing in Greek, has had to translate it for his audience. This happens, for example, in the intriguing account of Mark 5, where Jesus raises a young girl from the dead. The story begins by describing how the girl’s father, Jairus, comes to Jesus and begs him to heal his very sick daughter. Jesus agrees to come, but he gets interrupted on the way. Before he can get to the girl, the household slaves appear and tell Jairus that it is too late, the girl has died. Jesus is not to be deterred, however. He goes to the house, comes into the girl’s room, takes her lifeless hand, and says to her, “Talitha cumi.” That is not a Greek phrase. It is Aramaic. And so Mark translates it for his readers: “It means, ‘Little girl, I say to you, arise.’” She does so, to much rejoicing.
This makes me cringe a little because, even if I believed in a HJ, the last words of Jesus seem almost certainly invented (IMO).And so, for example, at the end of Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus is in his final moments on the cross, he cries out to God in Aramaic, “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani” (Mark 15:34), and Mark then explains what it means in Greek: “which means, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”
It tends to argue against any such example, then (again IMO), rather than make the case.
And this just looks like an author adding words of interest to his story (Rabbi and Messiah) and explaining them to his Greek-speaking audience. The third one is just the name of this person as found in Paul's letters (i.e., Cephas). Does Cephas having a semitic name indicate the HJ? Eh, no.They approach him and say to him “Rabbi,” an Aramaic word that the author translates, “which means, ‘Teacher.’” When Andrew, one of the two, becomes convinced of who Jesus is, he runs off to his brother Simon and tells him, “We have found the messiah.” Messiah is the Aramaic word; John translates it: “which means Christ.” Jesus then speaks with Simon and tells him, “You will be called Cephas.” Once again, it is an Aramaic word, which John translates, “which means Peter.”
Okay, and now Ehrman is undercutting the argument again -- so the movement went back to Palestine. Thereby proving Palestinian Christians.There is very little dispute that some of the Gospel stories originated in Aramaic and that therefore they go back to the earliest stages of the Christian movement in Palestine.
Or making it about Jesus was the original intention of the author, in Greek, and it had no Aramaic origin? After all, the phrase is both used as a way to refer to "man" and a way to make a title out of it.“Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” ...
When it came to be translated into Greek, the translator decided to make it not just about the disciples but also about Jesus.
Unfortunately, Ehrman spends zero time engaging with the interpretations and source theories of those who don't believe in a HJ, in this chapter. Basically moving it from a question of the HJ to a question of all these attendent hypotheses.The vast network of these traditions, numerically significant, widely dispersed, and largely independent of one another, makes it almost certain that whatever one wants to say about Jesus, at the very least one must say that he existed.
For someone who believes that the best evidence and the biggest problem for mythicists is the independent tradition outside of the Gospel of Mark, he spends no time at all actually canvassing the evidence for that, rather than merely stating it. I would imagine that this chapter was the most disappointing for those who were hoping for a scholarly defense of the existence of Jesus in this book.
I didn't really ever find this argument convincing, but at least the premise seemed correct up until recently (or so it seems to me).Many scholars have found this significant. Not even the Jewish and pagan antagonists who attacked Christianity and Jesus himself entertained the thought that he never existed.
This might be one of the most bizarre paragraphs in the book. This is something you forgot to mention? Something you just didn't stress earlier? Rather than insert this awkward paragraph here, wouldn't it make more sense to balance out the discussion found under the headings of Tacitus and Josephus? And, yes, this is a turn-about. Eventually we get to the claim that "Tacitus...provide independent attestation to Jesus's existence from outside the Gospels." On Pliny, who has less detail but also speaks of Jesus as a man, Ehrman said: "These Christians might have read some of the Gospels, and they certainly heard stories about Jesus." On Tacitus: "...by that time Christians were certainly telling stories of Jesus (the Gospels had been written already, for example), whether the mythicists are wrong or right." So how do we establish that Tacitus provides "independent attestation," independent, that is, from the Gospels?What I did not stress earlier but need to point out now is that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the pagan Tacitus or the Jewish Josephus acquired their information about Jesus by reading the Gospels. They heard information about him. That means the information they gave predated their writings. Their informants were no doubt Christians, or—even more likely—(non-Christian) people they knew who themselves had heard stories about Jesus from Christians. It is impossible to know whether these Christians had been influenced by the sources we have already discussed, but it is completely possible that they themselves had simply heard stories about Jesus. Indirectly, then, Tacitus and (possibly) Josephus provide independent attestation to Jesus’s existence from outside the Gospels although, as I stated earlier, in doing so they do not give us information that is unavailable in our other sources.
This is such a valuable report because Eusebius is quoting, and then commenting on, the actual words of Papias. Papias explicitly states that he had access to people who knew the apostles of Jesus or at least the companions of the apostles (the “elders”: it is hard to know from his statement if he is calling the companions of the apostles the elders or if the elders were those who knew the companions. Eusebius thinks it is the first option). When these people would come to his city of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, Papias, as leader of the church, would interview them about what they knew about Jesus and his apostles. Many conservative Christian scholars use this statement to prove that what Papias says is historically accurate (especially about Mark and Matthew), but that is going beyond what the evidence gives us.4 Still, on one point there can be no doubt. Papias may pass on some legendary traditions about Jesus, but he is quite specific—and there is no reason to think he is telling a bald-faced lie—that he knows people who knew the apostles (or the apostles’ companions). This is not eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus, but it is getting very close to that.
Okay, this is a good point, and it's surprising to me that Papias has had such a small role to play in the mythicist controversies.
Ignatius, then, provides us yet with another independent witness to the life of Jesus. Again, it should not be objected that he is writing too late to be of any value in our quest. He cannot be shown to have been relying on the Gospels.
I found this surprising because, if you open most introductions to the New Testament, you'll find Ignatius usually cited as one of the most important external witnesses for the dating of the Gospel of Matthew. If Ehrman disagrees with this view, he doesn't explain why.
Unlike Papias, Ignatius suspiciously does not say how he learned any of these things. Why not appeal to the authority of Peter to refute them, if he could? He is supposedly the bishop of Antioch who would have known Christians there who would have known Peter at some point, if the picture painted in Galatians and Acts is correct (and refers to a Peter who knew Jesus). Instead we find somewhat mystifying statements, like this:
“Now the virginity of Mary was hidden from the prince of this world, as was also her offspring, and the death of the Lord; three mysteries of renown, which were wrought in silence by God.”
This hearkens back to 1 Corinthians and the statement that the rulers of this world did not know the divine plan underway, or else they would not have crucified this Lord of Glory. It also recalls Mark 16:8 and the messianic secret. But how far did this mystery and silence extend, for Ignatius? Who knows?
Christ spoke words to be heeded (1 Clement 2.1).
His sufferings were “before your eyes” (2.1).
The blood of Christ is precious to the Father, poured out for salvation (7.4).
The blood of the Lord brought redemption (12.7).
Jesus taught gentleness and patience; the author here quotes a series of Jesus’s sayings similar to what can be found in Matthew and Luke (13.1–2).
The Lord Jesus Christ came humbly, not with arrogance or haughtiness (16.2).
Jesus came from Jacob “according to the flesh” (32.2).
The Lord adorned himself with good works (33.7).
Another quotation of “the words of our Lord Jesus” (46.8, comparable to Matthew 26:24 and Luke 17:2).
Those who experience love in Christ should do what Christ commanded (49.1).
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).
Take one of these:
The Church of God which sojourneth in Rome to the Church of God which
sojourneth in Corinth ...
For ye did all things without respect of persons, and ye walked after
the ordinances of God ...
1Clem 2:1
And ye were all lowly in mind and free from arrogance, yielding
rather than claiming submission, more glad to give than to
receive, and content with the provisions which God supplieth. And
giving heed unto His words, ye laid them up diligently in your
hearts, and His sufferings were before your eyes.
1Clem 2:2
Thus a profound and rich peace was given to all, and an insatiable
desire of doing good. An abundant outpouring also of the Holy Spirit
fell upon all;
1Clem 2:3
and, being full of holy counsel, in excellent zeal and with a pious
confidence ye stretched out your hands to Almighty God, supplicating
Him to be propitious, if unwillingly ye had committed any sin.
This is being spoken of, regarding the Corinthian church. So "His sufferings were before your eyes" -- the Corinthian church. And thus they received the holy spirit. This is precisely parallel to Galatians 3:1, where Christ is set forth as crucified, clearly, to the Galatians. And it is the kind of thing that sounds awkward on the usual paradigm -- I don't think most people would say that "His sufferings were before your eyes" to their Christian friends, and that is precisely the literal sense that Ehrman quotes it, even when it doesn't quite fit.
Ehrman raises some interesting questions -- the reference to "flesh" and descent from Jacob "according to he flesh" -- which would make a good topic for another post. The whole of 1 Clement is, I think, a bit more important than people let on; it tends to fall into the background, after Paul, without much direct attention paid to it.
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.
This kind of error is not worthy of a scholar of Ehrman's stature and tends to support the criticisms that he didn't take this as a very serious project.
These differences show that Luke had an independent tradition of the death of Judas, which was at least as early as the one in Matthew. There are reasons for thinking that at the heart of both stories is a historical tradition: independently they confirm that a field in Jerusalem was connected in some way both with the money Judas was paid to betray Jesus and with Judas’s death. Moreover, it was known as the Field of Blood. Matthew calls it a “potter’s field.” Is it possible that it was actually a field of red clay used by potters, and so—because of its color—called the Field of Blood, which in one way or another was connected with the death of Jesus’s betrayer?
Or there was some area known as the "Field of Blood" and the author of Acts got this from gMatthew. The awkward position of the story in Acts, instead of the gospel itself, might be taken as minor support of an early Luke.
What we have here is a narrative by a later author claiming that Paul said it. Whether Paul himself really knew this saying of Jesus can be argued. But what is clear is that Luke thinks he knew it and, more important for our considerations, that it is a tradition of a saying of Jesus that has no parallel in any of our Gospels. And so the book of Acts provides further evidence from outside the Gospels that Christians from earliest times believed that Jesus actually lived, as a Jew, that he was a moral teacher, and that he was killed in Jerusalem after being betrayed by one of his own followers, Judas.
But how do we know that the "claim" isn't fabrication?
At an even earlier stage of the tradition, before Christians had begun to talk about either Jesus’s preexistence or his virginal conception, they (or some of them) believed that he had become the Son of God by being “adopted” by God to be his son. In this view Jesus was not metaphysically or physically the son of God. He was the son of God in a metaphorical sense, through adoption. At one point Christians thought this happened right before he entered into his public ministry. And so they told stories about what happened at the very outset, 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.”
Okay, but adoptionism isn't really a deal-breaker. What if the spirit descending on the man is the pre-existent son?
Paul holds other ideas about Jesus as the Son of God and expresses them in his own words elsewhere
That might be a good argument that the words in Romans 1 here are interpolated, since there is no attempt to distinguish the ideas from Paul's. Rather, the point is that the ideas are Paul's ideas: they stand at the head of Romans as a description of the faith regarding Christ. If they disagree with Paul's ideas, they most likely weren't a part of the original letter.
You are my son, today I have begotten you
There is a debate regarding whether the Son is begotten or not begotten. The later orthodoxy is "begotten, not made, one in being with the Father" but some also sprung for not begotten (simply co-existent with the Father). Could an earlier heresy have been that he was only an angel, who was exalted to become the only begotten son of God? Well, it's possible. There are references to him as an angel.
One of them is the letter of 1 Timothy, which records the tradition known from so many of our other sources: “I command you before the God who makes all things alive and Christ Jesus, the one who, bearing his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession…” (6:13). We do not know who this author was; we only know that he was not Paul and that he shows no evidence of knowing our Gospels.
Really, though? How likely is it that the author of 1 Timothy had no knowledge of the Gospels? On my view, anyway, they're mid second century and have no chance of being independent.
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)
For Christ died for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God, having 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)
And so I admonish the elders among you, I who am a fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of Christ…. (5:1)
It is a little disappointing, in such a book, that Ehrman doesn't interact with other interpretations of such texts.
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)
I used to agree that this was related to the transfiguration. But lately I am more inclined to view this as a kind of resurrection appearance and a confirmation of exactly the kind of adoptionism Ehrman was just talking about, which is that he was confirmed with a voice from God at his resurrection. Notice that there is also a voice from heaven (and a response from the cross) in an apocryphal resurrection account, the Gospel of Peter. Note also that some resurrection accounts have Christ appearing to the apostles on a mountain (Matthew 28).
Jesus appeared in “these last days” (1:2).
God spoke through him (that is, in his proclamation; 1:2).
He “made a purification for sins” (that is, he died a bloody death; 1:3).
He was told by God, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you,” and was called “son of God” by the Father (1:5).
He was the first to proclaim salvation (2:3).
God bore witness to him and/or his followers through signs, wonders, various miracles, and gifts of the spirit (2:4).
He tasted death “apart from God” (that is, apart from any divine solace; 2:9).
He was made perfect by suffering (2:10).
He partook of flesh and blood (2:14).
He was like his brothers (the Jews? all people?) in all respects (2:17).
He was tempted (2:18) in every way but without sin (4:15).
He was faithful to God (3:2).
He offered up prayers and loud cries and tears to be saved from death (presumably before his crucifixion; 5:7).
He learned obedience by suffering (5:8).
He was crucified (6:5; 12:2).
He was descended from the tribe of Judah (7:14).
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).
He suffered “outside the gate” (that is, outside Jerusalem; 13:12).
He endured abuse (13:13).
Hebrews is a large topic (we've talked about on this forum before), but it's interesting how expansive this list is. Just "faithful to God" is enough? I think we have Earl Doherty and Richard Carrier partly to blame for emphasizing "Platonism" and a kind of sanitized understanding of what a being could do, short of actually being a historical Jesus in Judea crucified under Pilate, per tradition. Perhaps this is a good argument for mythicists to work out amongst themselves, to improve their messaging on the topic and emphasize the views of Wells/Ellegard and the views of Price/Detering and the views that I have been exploring for that matter, as alternatives just as valid to consider.
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. 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. 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.
One point I will stress in a later chapter is that Paul emphasizes that this event happened “on the night in which he was handed over.” ...
But he is clearly referring to a historical event. It is important to note that he indicates this scene happened at night. This is not some vague mythological reference but a concrete historical one. Paul knows that Jesus had a Last Supper with his disciples in which he predicted his approaching death, the very night he was handed over to the authorities.
Ehrman notes that Paul recieved it form the Lord, then recoils on account of the similarity to rabbinic language of passing on from one teacher to the next. Isn't that kind of the point, though? By using this language and saying it is "from the Lord," Paul is underscoring that his authority comes from a revelation, from the Lord, and not from any other source. Ehrman suggests that Paul is doing so "non-ironically," but there's no indication of getting this from other teachers, besides the Lord.
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, “This is my body that is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, whenever you drink, in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:22–24)
I have increasingly come around to suspect that this might be a genuine Pauline passage. The thing that does it for me is that the expression is "received from the Lord." Doherty's right about that being reminiscent of the Galatians claim, to receive revelation from no man. Yes, it's possible that an early interpolation occurred, but without proof of that, we have to wonder what the words might mean if they were Paul's.
I am led to consider the parallel with the Mithras myth: After the arduous bull-hunt and the miracle of the bull-slaying, Mithras completes his stay on earth by banqueting with Sol off the flesh of the bull. This of course is what Doherty appeals to. Unlike Doherty, I cannot follow him in saying this means that it happened in some mythical "the before time," since it's all but certain that these injunctions to repeat and remember are being made to the earliest apostles (not, sadly for Paul, including him - hence the revelation?). And I am led to remember the fact that there are resurrection appearances that feature a meal. Reading the words themselves, it looks more like the new covenant has been established, which would accord with it being a resurrection appearance. This would also agree with the mysteries of Christ being wrought in silence, up until his resurrection. So the conclusion, if we follow this thread, is that Christ died and was raised on the same night. This is possible -- there are the odd clues in Luke, after all -- and it only requires that 1 Cor 15 contain an interpolation, which seems to be a popular idea anyway.
The upshot here is that DJE is not the book we need, to put the Jesus-as-myth ideas to bed. It needs to be treated as a question of research, not as something that provides the material for a quick popular book. While we may not want to give ear to any old crank, what would be wrong with a plain straightforward case for the foundations for much of the rest of the field? Such books are written regarding evolution; let it be the same here, if we want to claim to be scientific.
It is this last sentence that has caused interpreters problems. What could Paul mean that the wrath of God has finally come upon the Jews (or Judeans)? That would seem to make sense if Paul were writing in the years after the destruction of the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans, that is, after 70 CE. But it seems to make less sense when this letter was actually written, around 49 CE. For that reason a number of scholars have argued that this entire passage has been inserted into 1 Thessalonians and that Paul therefore did not write it. In this view some Christian scribe, copying the letter after the destruction of Jerusalem, added it.
... For one thing, what is the hard evidence that the words were not in the letter of 1 Thessalonians as Paul wrote it? There is none. We do not of course have the original of 1 Thessalonians; we have only later copies made by scribes. But in not a single one of these manuscripts is the line (let alone the paragraph) missing. Every surviving manuscript includes it. If the passage was added sometime after the fall of Jerusalem, say, near the end of the first Christian century or even in the second, when Christians started blaming the fall of Jerusalem on the fact that the Jews had killed Jesus, why is it that none of the manuscripts of 1 Thessalonians that were copied before the insertion was made left any trace on the manuscript record?
Maybe because of the orthodox corruption of scripture, the most rapid change being at an early stage, the successful attempt to promulgate a new edition that superceded the previous written materials? Isn't it odd to anyone else how Ehrman shifts from the text critic of fundamentalist nightmares to their stodgy champion? (Ehrman will take the problems of establishing the text and use it to doubt the resurrection; he will refuse to use it to doubt the historicity of Jesus. Are the two strategies so very different? After all, most resurrection apologetics focus on "core facts" found in all the manuscripts.)
As indicated earlier, the mythicist G. A. Wells argues that the sayings of Jesus in Paul’s writings were given to him not from the traditions about the teachings of the historical Jesus but from prophecies delivered in Paul’s churches, direct revelations from the Lord of heaven. In some instances that may indeed have been the case, and this passage in 1 Thessalonians may be one example of it. The reason for thinking so is that we do not have any record of the historical Jesus saying any such thing about what would happen at his return (though see Matthew 24:3–44). So there are two choices here: either Paul knew of a tradition in which the historical Jesus allegedly did discuss this matter or he learned this teaching through a prophecy in one of his churches.
At the end of the day I think it is impossible to decide between these two options.
Good call.
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.
I want the Ehrman of one page ago back...
No, I think I get it. Ehrman seems to think that it might not be historical, and it might be from a revelation, but getting a teaching from the Lord implies Jesus that didn't just communicate through revelations and appearances. The only problem is, he glides over "why" completely. It is almost like he intends to confirm Doherty's refrain that scholars read Paul with "Gospel-colored glasses."
It is only the mythicists, who have a vested interest in claiming that Paul did not know of a historical Jesus, who insist that these passages were not originally in Paul’s writings.
This is wrong. The scholarly tradition may be slender (they always get end up being accused of doing "scholarship of convenience" no matter what), but almost all of the passages that have been identified as candidates for interpolation by mythicists have been previously proposed by non-mythicists. (I am not certain that it reaches 100% but it is very close.)
there is no textual evidence that these passages were not originally in Paul
Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't, and sometimes the only textual evidence is in apocryphal texts no longer extent but known only from references (yes, of course I'm talking about you, Apostolikon).
no solid literary grounds for thinking they were not in Paul
One of the most common themes with these passages is that some scholar, who is not a mythicist, had previously found grounds on the basis of the internal evidence for thinking they were interpolations.
it is passing strange that they were not more thorough in doing so, for example, by inserting comments about Jesus’s virgin birth in Bethlehem, his parables, his miracles, his trial before Pilate, and so forth
Their intention wasn't to disprove 21st century mythicists. Their controversies were instead with the dominant force in the mid-second century, the disciples of Marcion, Valentinus, and the other interpreters of Paul, the "apostle of the heretics." These interpreters didn't believe Jesus didn't exist, so that wasn't a focus of the interpolation. Instead they focused on things such as "born of woman, born under the law" -- you know, the zingers that count in the second century debate, rather than the modern one.
With respect to all the silences of Paul, Wells makes one particularly significant methodological point. It is not simply that Paul does not mention some things about Jesus’s life. It is that he does not mention things that would have bolstered precisely the points he was trying to make to his readers. In Wells’s words: “Of course silence does not always prove ignorance, and any writer knows a great many things he fails to mention. A writer’s silence is significant only if it extends to matters obviously relevant to what he has chosen to discuss.”
And... faith in humanity restored. Ehrman really is trying, even if the product is a bit rushed, to give the statement of his opponents a fair portrayal.
What do these silences show? They do not show that these authors did not know about the historical Jesus, because they clearly did. If anything, the silences simply show that these traditions about Jesus were not relevant to their purposes.
My problem with this section is that almost all of his examples are in a disputed column, where the other side of the argument is that they (like Paul) also did not believe in Jesus. It would have been more welcome to examine authors from the late second century or third century or fourth century. I believe there was some kind of consensus that this would be the "sweet spot" for testing the hypothesis (rather than modern, and rather than near-contemporary), since it removes most of the controversies (not sure if radically different situation, not sure if disbelieving in Jesus just as claimed for Paul).
I need to say something further about the brothers of Jesus. I pointed out in an earlier chapter that Paul knows that “the brothers of the Lord” were engaged in Christian missionary activities (1 Corinthians 9:5), and we saw there that Paul could not be using the term brothers in some kind of loose, spiritual sense (we’re all brothers and sisters, or all believers are “brothers” in Christ). Paul does frequently use the term brothers in this metaphorical way when addressing the members of his congregations. But when he speaks of “the brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5, he is differentiating them both from himself and from Cephas. That would make no sense if he meant the term loosely to mean “believers in Jesus” since he and Cephas too would be in that broader category. And so he means something specific, not something general, about these missionaries. They are Jesus’s actual brothers, who along with Cephas and Paul were engaged in missionary activities.
The breezy way in which 1 Cor 9:5 is accepted as a non-literal brother reference practically makes the Wells/Doherty interpretation of Galatians 1:19 acceptable, but in point of fact I tend to opt for the so-called "scholarship of convenience" -- not because I think it is easy, because I think it's actually harder to convince people of interpolation than it is to hold out for dodgy interpretations, but because I think it is true.
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 make 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.
This view is internally consistent, but it doesn't stand out as exceptionally probable. If uniquely among all the failed messianic pretenders, one group of Jews in Palestine can develop a theology overnight to rationalize the idea of a crucified messiah, simply because they felt they had visions of him in the afterlife (Ehrman -- do not forget -- you don't believe in the "Easter event"!) and had no proof of death in the form of a body, then you've already set this up as some kind of improbable event with a weird little twist that got things started.
So why couldn't that weird little twist be some guy off in the desert reading from the Septuagint and getting some ideas? Answer: obviously, just as easily, it could. Once you've already painted yourself in the corner of saying that there was no such expectation and that they had come up with a novel way to interpret the death of a failed messiah, you've claimed a cause that is a black swan. Almost all messianic pretenders did not create a Christianity -- yet Jesus did, you say. Well, if you can have a black swan that invents Christianity, then anyone else can too. You like your black swan event; they like theirs. There's no deciding.
Worse, you're committed to the idea that this was improbable, but then they're arguing that it is probable--if you follow a stream of Judaism where this was first developed in a mythological way. Failed messianic pretenders are unlikely to be declared to be something radically different, but an unusual stream of tradition that eventually lights upon such ideas, from the perspective of the development of the world of ideas, makes a lot more sense. You can then join them in believing there are such weird ideas, and that they were then applied to Jesus, but in that event you've lost the argument for a historical event being the impetus of the ideas.
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.
This is basically seminary school "oh look the paradox of the crucifixion, how cool" 101. Really, if it's so unlikely, Jesus would be unknown today.
Students sometimes quote these verses to me and then say with a smug smile, “See! The messiah was predicted to suffer!” My response is always the same: I ask them to show me where in the passage the word messiah occurs.
I don't think this follows. Vast parts of the Hebrew Bible was not written with a "Messiah" belief in mind at all. What we have to wonder about is how people ended up interpreting it, not how it was originally intended. Should we say that Christians alone, of all Jews, looked to passages other than those where the word "messiah" appears, to be interpreted as of a messiah? First, no that's nonsense, and second, if so there would be no Christians, since any disciples of Jesus would have first been Jews. Vague inklings that a man may have been seen after his death does not change the fundamental theological orientation of a few fisherman and a tax collector out of Galilee. The whole idea is some kind of "internalized Christianity" (if I can be forgiven such a phrase) that some secular scholars still carry around with them (that the scriptures were made clear after the resurrection--found in the Gospel of Luke, itself).
But there is more. As it turns out, another discovery was made in ancient Nazareth a year after Salm’s book appeared. It is a house that dates to the days of Jesus. The discovery was reported by the Associated Press on December 21, 2009. I have personally written the principal archaeologist, Yardena Alexandre, the excavations director at the Israel Antiquity Authority, and she has confirmed the report. The house is located on the hill slopes. Pottery shards connected to the house range from roughly 100 BCE to 100 CE (that is, the days of Jesus). There is nothing in the house to suggest that the people inhabiting it over this time had any wealth: there are no glass items or imported products. The vessels are made of clay and chalk.
Ehrman may be right about the archaeology on Nazareth. I've made no special study of it.
Moreover, we have a number of authors who explicitly tell us that stories about Jesus were being transmitted orally. Paul says that he is passing on traditions he has heard (1 Corinthians 11:22–24; 15:3–5); Luke indicates that his predecessors based their accounts on oral traditions (1:1–4); the author of the Fourth Gospel indicates that he had an oral source for some of his stories (19:35); and even later the church father Papias indicates that he interviewed people who had been companions of Jesus’s disciples.
This is an interesting point. At least by the time of Luke 1:1-4 and John 19:35, as well as Papias, we have claims of oral tradition. This speaks to intent; the authors at least wanted things to be seen as historical. It might raise the bar for those who want to argue that the earliest Gospel intended something different.
The entire enterprise of philosophical reflection on ancient mythology was rooted precisely in the widely accepted fact that common people did not look at the world, or its myths, in the same way the philosophers did.
This actually seems like a decent point, against Doherty. We might claim a subset of Christianity for Doherty's portrait of it, but there had to be simple people as well, who hadn't the philosophical training to believe in platonic realities.
Paul leaves little doubt about that. Jesus had a last meal with his disciples on the “night” in which he was handed over to his fate. Do they have nights in the spiritual realm? This is a description of something that happened on earth. But even more, Paul stresses that Jesus was buried between his death and his (earthly) resurrection.
He also makes a good point that these actions seem more likely to have taken place on the earth or under the earth. Also, theoretically, isn't it more poetic to have the descent and ascent go through every sphere, not stopping short of earth and the underworld? Just a thought.
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.
True. It's not of great value "apologetically."
Jesus did exist, whether we like it or not.
Ehrman gives no room to those who might "like" for there to have been a historical Jesus, yet who have found that claim to be problematic for reasons that are not "theological" -- he judges them by their popular representatives, who are "militantly" this or that. But couldn't the same just as easily be said of the majority who believe in Jesus, for theological reasons? No matter -- at the end of a long book, he gets to take a couple swipes.
This is a better book than I would have expected, based on the reviews, but a lesser book than I would have hoped, given the author. Considering some of the other reporting, which goes much deeper on the rhetoric than Ehrman does, I have to give him kudos for sticking to the argument for the majority of the book and for having the brass ones to claim to have the evidence and to list it.
Sometimes it is limited to listing (like the "independence" question for sources later than Mark), but he also gets some decent, lengthy arguments in. Two of his favorites clearly were Galatians 1:19 and the crucified messiah, given the attention lavished on them. I'd also say that this takes the pulse of the academy in general--they tend to view that verse as a knockout punch, and they also really like the idea that a crucified messiah concept was a unique invention in response to the Easter event.
Future discussion could focus more on developing a few points raised by Ehrman:
* The "crucified messiah" -- is this the best way to describe it? And is what we find in Paul, explicable from existing theological currents?
* Letters like 1 Clement and Hebrews -- can we clarify which column they belong in?
* The question of interpolation -- can we move beyond the reflexive dismissal, to settle it with the best arguments?
* The "oral tradition" -- how do we explain this, and does it point to a historical Jesus?
* The writing of John -- can we show how John used Mark to create a story? And what did the author intend?
* The writing of Mark -- can we determine what the intent of the author was?
Just some thoughts.
