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Here's an old interview, way back in October 15, 2006, on my book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why." The Interview was done in Bryant Park in New York City during the New York Times Great Read in the park, with C-SPAN2 Book TV. (Ten years ago now! See what a Spring Chicken I look??? Ah to be young again....) Please adjust gear icon for pseudo high-definition.
QUESTION: In your list of the things Paul tells us about the historical Jesus (he was born of a woman, he was a Jew, he had brothers, he had twelve disciples, etc.) one thing you seem to have left out was the fact that he was “betrayed” on the night he had the last supper. 1 Corinthians 11:23 says “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread,24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you…” Why haven’t you included the betrayal as part of the tradition about Jesus that Paul knows? RESPONSE: Ah, good question. Many years ago when I was first teaching I did include that datum as rather important. I don’t do so any longer any more for one particular (and, in my books, very good) reason: I think the word “betrayed” is a mistranslation of the Greek of the [...]
In my previous post I explained what ancient Jews who were expecting the messiah were expecting. I do not want to give the impression (one widely held today) that most Jews *were* expecting a messiah. My sense is that most ancient Jews didn’t spend much time thinking about the matter, any more than most Jews today do. But for those who did expect a messiah, there were certain expectations. In this post I want to explain why those expectations relate to the question about whether Jesus existed. Recall: whatever the specifics of what this, that, or the other Jewish group thought, everyone thought the messiah would be a figure of grandeur and power, one who would be a mighty figure who would rule Israel, the people of God, as a sovereign people under no foreign oppression. The most popular view was that he would be a mighty military leader and political ruler who would overpower the enemy and set up a kingdom for Israel like that of his ancestor David of old. Another popular view [...]
I am now able to finish off this thread dealing with my debate with Robert Price on whether Jesus existed. I have already laid out most of the arguments that I gave during my 30-minute presentation at the debate. As I did in that talk, I now would like to set forth the argument that seems to me to be one of the most convincing of all. Mythicists say that the early Christians invented historical man Jesus, that there never was such a real person. I think that view runs smack up against a brick wall. The early Christians claimed Jesus was the messiah. It was arguably the main thing they said about him – they said it so much that “Messiah” – or “Christ” – became Jesus’ last name. They also claimed, incessantly, that he got crucified. Why would Jews invent a messiah who got crucified? To explain the problem I have to provide a bit of background. That will be this post. Once that is done, in the post to follow, I’ll explain [...]
From time to time I get asked about Gnosticism. What was it exactly? I deal with the issue in a number of my books, as you may know. Here is a summary statement that I published a couple of years ago on this date, based on my rewriting of the section on Gnosticism in my undergraduate textbook, The New Testamen: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ***************************************************************** Major Views of Various Gnostic Groups Despite the many differences among the various Gnostic groups, most of them appear to have subscribed to the following views. (1) The divine realm is inhabited not only by one ultimate God but also by a range of other divine beings, widely known as aeons. These aeons are, in a sense, personifications of the ultimate God’s mental capacities and/or powers (some of them were called such things as Reason, Will, Grace, and Wisdom). (2) The physical world that we inhabit was not the creation of the ultimate God but of a lower, ignorant divine being, who is often identified [...]
QUESTION: It must be difficult going into these types of debates knowing that if Robert Price is actually right, your entire career would be pointless and irrelevant. I certainly don’t believe this, but it must have crossed your mind before? RESPONSE: This question arose from the debate I had a couple of weeks ago with Robert Price, on whether Jesus existed. Price argued, as you know, that there never was a historical man Jesus, but that the earliest “Christians” believed in a cosmic Christ, a mythical figure who lived above in the heavenly realm who was crucified by demons in outer space. This is the Christ attested, for example, he claimed, in Paul. But later Christians invented a historical figure Jesus out of this Christ, and the Gospels portray this fictitious figure that was simply made up. Jesus of Nazareth never existed. And so this question is whether I really can’t entertain this view as an option since, if it were true, I wouldn’t have a career. My career is based on the history [...]
I hope I am not beating a dead horse by going at some length into this discussion of James, the brother of Jesus, in response to the Mythicists, who have a very real stake indeed in saying that he wasn’t really Jesus’ brother, since that would mean Jesus existed. I’m pursuing the matter in part because it is such a key issue and as well to show that it would be possible to argue to all eternity with Mythicists on point after point after point. Some of them are truly inexhaustible. If I wanted to spend my entire life and career doing nothing but answering Mythicists rejoinders to my replies to their responses to my comments on their claims – it could occupy my next twenty years! I am giving a taste of what it involves here. The short story: The historical man Jesus from Nazareth had a brother named James. Paul actually knew him. That is pretty darn good evidence that Jesus existed. If he did not exist he would not have had a [...]
In my previous post explaining why I think the Mythicist position – that there never was a man Jesus – is simply untenable, I pointed out that among the things Paul says, none is more specifically relevant than the fact that he indicates that he was personally acquainted with Jesus’ own brother James (along with Jesus’ disciples Peter and John). When Paul mentions knowing and spending time with James, it is decidedly not in order to prove that he knew him. The comments he makes are completely incidental, explaining to people who already know about James how it is that he, Paul, met with him on a couple of important occasions. One of these occasions was just three years after Paul converted – so in about 36 CE. At that time Paul paid a visit to Jerusalem to meet with Cephas and James, the leaders of the church there. Paul is reluctant to mention that he had gone there, since the entire point he is making is that he did not learn anything of relevance [...]
I have pointed out that the information provided us by Paul shows that he, at least, understood Jesus to have been a real flesh-and-blood human being (even while acknowledging that he was also a divine being). He really was born, was a Jew, had brothers, and so on. The reason all this matters is that many Mythicists claim that Paul thought no such thing, that for him Christ was a cosmic being, not a human being, and that he had been crucified in outer space by demonic powers. I don’t think a careful reading of Paul could lead to those conclusions. There are two things in particular that Paul says that make it virtually impossible for me to ascribe to a Mythicist view. The first (I’ll deal with the second in later posts) is the fact that Paul actually knew at least a couple of Jesus’ earthly disciples, Peter and John the son of Zebedee, and even more impressive, his brother James. There can be no doubt about that. Paul himself describes two meeting he [...]
In this thread I have been talking about what I discussed in my thirty-minute presentation at the Mythicist Milwaukee conference, in my debate with Robert Price. After pointing out a couple of problems with typical Mythicist arguments I devoted the bulk of my time to laying out the positive evidence for my view that whatever else you might want to say about him, Jesus of Nazareth certainly existed as a real human being. In my last post I stressed the value of the Gospels, and their written and oral sources of information. There were lots and lots of sources, from the early days of the Christian movement, some of them coming straight out of Aramaic-speaking Palestine. It is almost impossible to explain how you could have so many independent sources saying similar things about the man Jesus unless he really was a historical figure. But there is much more. Next in my talk I moved to the apostle Paul, obviously a key figure in the debate. There are thirteen letters written in Paul’s name in [...]
QUESTION: Would you mind expanding on the issue of presuppositions, either in an article or in the readers mail bag? What are presuppositions? Why we all have them. And how do we make sure we have the right ones, or at least good ones. Having come out of Fundamentalist circles I heard so much about “presuppositions”, “worldviews”, “presuppositional apologetics” and so on. Seems the argument goes “Well, we all have presuppositions. No one is free of them. Therefore it is just as valid to come to historical and scientific issues with the presupposition that the claims are all true. Just as unbelievers come to the evidence with the presuppositions that there are no such things as miracles.” RESPONSE: This is a huge question (and a very important one), and requires a long answer. I can’t answer it any better than I already tried to do in my book How Jesus Became God. This is what I say there, in response to a particular issue, of how presuppositions can or should affect our ability to [...]
On October 6, 2016 I gave a lecture at the University of Michigan on "Jesus, the Law, and the New Covenant. This was keynote address for the Mendenhall Symposium, in honor of the eminent scholar of the Hebrew Bible, George Mendenhall. The symposium focused on issues on the law and covenant in the the Ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, and second-temple Judaism, with prominent scholars in these fields presenting papers on key aspects of the subject. Here is the video of my talk. Please adjust gear icon for high-definition.
Jesus existed. In yesterday’s post, I began to show how Jesus is the best attested Palestinian Jew of the first century if we look only at external evidence. Josephus is better attested because we have his own writings. I am also not including Paul because I’m talking only about Jews from Palestine; he was from the Diaspora. The Gospel Sources We have four narrative accounts of Jesus’ life and death, written by different people at different times and in different places, based on numerous sources that no longer survive. Jesus was not invented by Mark. He was also known to Matthew, Luke, and John, and to the sources which they used (Q, M, L, and the various sources of John). All of this was within the first century. Non-New Testament & Non-Gospel Sources - We Have Many! This is not to mention sources from outside the New Testament that know that Jesus was a historical figure – for example, 1 Clement and the documents that make up the Didache. Or -- need I say it? [...]
If you have only thirty minutes to build a case that Jesus of Nazareth really existed, how do you do it? That was the problem I was confronted with this past Friday at the Mythicist Milwaukee conference, in my debate with Robert Price. Rather than mount a lot of arguments and say very little about each one of them (what we used to call “the shotgun approach” when I was in high school), I thought it would be better just to make a few points and pack them up with evidence and reasoning. The first and most obvious point, to me, is this. Jesus is one of the two best attested Jews living in Palestine in the entire first century. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in some way connected with Palestine at the time Only one is better attested than Jesus (with a proviso, which I’ll explain). That one is the Jewish historian Josephus. The reason he is better known than Jesus is because he has left us a large number of writings [...]
Back to my debate with Robert Price this past Friday. I started this thread by indicating that the majority of my 30-minute talk was devoted to explaining the positive evidence that I think shows beyond reasonable doubt that there was indeed a man Jesus of Nazareth. I’ll be discussing that evidence later in the thread. I began my talk, however, by pointing out that Mythicists often adduce arguments that simply are not very convincing. At least to me. The first was the topic of my last post, the idea that there was no Nazareth at the time of Jesus, which is both wrong (archaeologists have dug it) and irrelevant (if you wrongly think I was born in Topeka that doesn’t mean I don’t exist). The second is argued with particular vim and vigor by Bob Price himself in several of his publications. This is that virtually all the stories about Jesus (Bob would say all of the stories, I think) can be seen as modeled on stories known to early Christians, especially in the Old [...]
I have had several people ask me about how the debate went with Robert Price this past Friday evening. For those of you who haven’t kept up with the blog or who don’t remember (no reason you should!): I was in Milwaukee to have a debate on the question Did Jesus Exist? The event was sponsored by the Milwaukee Mythicists, a rather unusual group of local folk who are committed to the idea that there never was a man Jesus, but that he was completely made up by early Christians, a myth. Hence their name. Robert Price agrees with that view. The Milwaukee Mythicists are not a chapter of a larger nation-wide organization. They are the only group like that that I know of (if there are others, I’m sure members of the blog will let me know). They are a small group, but vibrant, committed, and, apparently, growing. My view, of course, is that their very raison d’être is problematic, since Jesus, in my view, almost certainly existed. Hence the debate. Despite our differences, [...]
Question: When you say earliest and “best” manuscripts, what do you mean by “best”? Response: This question was asked in response to my statement, with respect to the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8 (where Jesus says, “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her), that we know it was not originally in the Gospel of John in part because it is not to be found in the “oldest and best manuscripts.” And so the question is, “how do we know what the best manuscripts are?” It’s a great question and one that has, as you might imagine, occupied textual scholars for a very, very long time. In fact, for as long as there have *been* textual scholars (i.e., hundreds of years!) The problem, in a nutshell, is this. If we have hundreds, or thousands, of manuscripts (centuries ago we knew of hundreds, now we know of thousands), how do we know which ones are more likely to preserve the “original” [...]
I am interrupting my thread on the relationship of Jesus to the Jewish law (I haven’t gotten very far: I’m still on Marcion!) because of what is most pressing on my mind right now, the debate I’m having this evening with Robert Price. It is here in Milwaukee sponsored by a group called the Milwaukee Mythicists. It’s a small group of people committed to, or (for some of them) at least attracted by, the idea that Jesus was not a real human being but is a myth invented by his later followers. I suppose roughly speaking, most Mythicists are a subgroup of people who are atheist. Originally, for most of these people, Jesus was understood to be a divine being who lived in the heavenly realm (“outer space,” as some of them put it) who was crucified by demonic powers. Later followers of Jesus historicized him and made him, in their myths, into a human being. And then the stories emerged about him that we now have in our Gospels. They are based principally on [...]
Right now, as we speak, I am en route to Milwaukee for my debate with Robert Price, one of the best known Mythicists on the planet (for those of you who don’t know, a Mythicist claims that Jesus was a myth made up by early Christians; there never was a historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth). Of the many thousands of scholars in the world that have a PhD in New Testament or Early Christian studies he is the one, so far as I know, who takes this position. The fact that almost everyone thinks he is wrong does mean that he *is* wrong of course. For a long time the vast majority of the world’s population thought that the earth was the center of the universe and that sun and stars revolved around it. The fact they thought so had no bearing on whether it was true or not. For that reason, Mythicists have often gotten upset with me for pointing out that almost no one with any qualifications in the requisite fields of scholarship [...]
As I’ve been thinking about Marcion over the past couple of days, it has occurred to me that in some ways he is still alive and well among us. I have known Christians over the years who in fact have views in many ways close to what Marcion taught. These people would, of course, deny they have anything like the touch of the heretic about them. But at the end of the day, their views are not so different. Maybe they are not as extreme as him, but they do seem to be dwelling on the fringes of his camp. First, I have known a lot of Christians who think that the Old Testament has a God of wrath and condemnation and the New Testament has a God of love and mercy. Students say this to me with some regularity. The God of the Old Testament gives difficult laws that no one can possibly follow (how, exactly, are you supposed to keep from “coveting” anything??). And then he condemns people for not keeping them. But [...]