(19 votes, average: 4.79 out of 5)
Loading...Nine years ago, Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist, especially in light of criticism I have received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!). I am reposting the interview, since it’s on such an important topic.
Ben’s blog is widely read by conservative evangelicals, and he has agreed to post the questions and my answers without editing, to give his readers a sense of why I wrote the book, what I hoped to accomplish by it, and what I would like them to know about it. He has graciously agreed to allow me to post my responses here on my blog, which, if I’m not mistaken, has a very different readership (although there is undoubtedly some overlap). It’s a rather long set of questions and answers – over 10,000 words. So I will post them in bits and pieces so as not to overwhelm anyone. The Q’s are obviously his, the A’s mine.
Some of Ben Witherington’s most popular books are The Jesus Quest, and The Problem with Evangelical Theology, among others.
–
Q. It seems that mythicists place a lot of weight on arguments from silence (e.g. no public records that Jesus existed), but as you point out 99% of all ancients do not show up in records or the literature of the first century, and this tells us nothing about whether they existed or not. Why do you think it is that they refuse to accept the old dictum that absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence? This especially puzzles me about someone like Robert Price who should know better.
A. My sense is that some mythicists think that everyone who believes in Jesus’ historical existence accepts a “believing Christian” view of Jesus, namely, that if Jesus existed he really was the miracle-working son of God who really did feed the multitudes with a few loaves, who really did cast out demons, and heal the sick, and raise the dead, and that if there really were a person like that who lived in the first century, somebody from his own day would have mentioned him. On one level, that’s a good point – you would indeed expect such a God-on-earth to be mentioned by someone living at the time. But the fact is that we don’t have a single reference to Jesus from someone living at his time – friend or enemy. We have only documents written by people living later, and almost always by people who believe in him
Wanna keep reading? It’s easy to join the blog, and every nickel of your small membership fee goes to charity. So why not?? Click here for membership options
As I understand it, the Mythicists claim that Paul thought of Jesus as some kind of heavenly figure.
Entirely heavenly, never having walked the Earth.
To me, one of the most convincing refutations of the Mythicist point of view is to show that no,
that is not at all what Paul says. And of course you argue that in your book.
What still leaves me a little uncomfortable is that I find Paul extremely confusing.
Could another reason that Jesus was not mentioned very much in non-Christian sources be that he was a crucified criminal and non-Christian writers could not fathom why anyone would follow such a dreg of society? If anything Jesus should be forgotten not worshipped.
That and the fact the had never heard of his followers, since in fact he was not a well-known person himself!
1. “Paul must have converted to believe in Jesus” Paul was the notorious persecutor of the followers of Jesus. Acts 9:26 confirms that the disciples never believed him. Paul never converted. He started a different religion, contrary to the religion of Jesus. There are at least twenty serious contradictions about Paul’s journey “on the road to Damascus.” which can be classified as hopelessly unreliable. Can a man of such background qualify to be a self-proclaimed apostle?
2. “Jesus existed as a Jewish teacher in Palestine in the 20s CE” You are right Jesus was a teacher and was respected as son of God figuratively and not literally as understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
3. I refer to your statement “… little evidence there is for Jesus outside the Christian sources.” Another source would be Quran revealed by God to His last prophet Muhammad, the direct descendant of Abraham via his eldest son Ishmael whom God had blessed as mentioned in Genesis 17:20. Would you like to consider Quran where Jesus is mentioned 25 times with vital information confirming his existence?
1. I think you are making two different points in this point. I don’t think the accuracy of Acts has any bearing on what happened to the historical Paul. And the views he promoted were promoted before he arrived on the scene. 3. No I don’t think the Qur’an provides us any independent information about Jesus. It is information previously acquired from Christian sources.
Every Muslim I’ve ever met seems to have the same strategy and mindset. Whether openly or surreptitiously, they criticize the accuracy of the new testament in order to promote the Quranic understanding of Jesus and his supposed successor, thus ‘proving’ Islam to be the ‘true’ religion.
Luke 6:42 comes to mind.
I”ve known plenty who don’t do that, but I do wonder why any does. It doesn’t make any sense that if the NT is problematic then Islam is true.
It’s very funny that so many Muslims apparently love your work— because they think it somehow proves Islam is true!
It’s certainly an unusual argument. It’s easiest to think of analogies: if an article in one newspaper is not accurate about how it reports an event, why would that mean that a report about the same event in some other newspaper *is* correct?
If I’m right, Dr Ehrman, the main Jesus passage in Josephus is generally believed to have been heavily amended but there is also a reference to Jesus’ brother James, which is probably authentic. If that’s the case then the James’ link is crucially important to establishing Jesus historical existence, particularly when read in conjunction with Paul. This is why I often argue with my Catholic friends that the side-lining of James (via the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity) just plays into the mythicists’ hands.
Yes, the reference to James is in in Book 20 of the Antiquities. My view is that the reference makes snese only if the one in Book 18 is authentic on some level; mythicists would say though that it too (book 20 reference) is an interpolation. Hey, why not! Anything you don’t like is an interpolation!
Dr Ehrman,
You said in above post “And he is almost certainly referred to twice in the Jewish historian Josephus, once in an entire paragraph.”
1. Do you believe that mention of Jesus by Josephus is of the Original Jesus Christ, son of Mary from Nazareth?
2. Is it a reliable reference and not a later on insertion by pious Christian manuscript writers?
3. A certain Jesus also appears in Talmud, could it be taken as authentic reference to our Jesus of Nazareth?
4. Is there any mention of Destruction of Temple 70 AD in Non Roman sources other then Jewish sources and Sibylline Oracles?
regards,
Kashif
1. As opposed to what other Jesus of Nazareth? Yes, it is certainly to the Jesus talked about by the Christians 2. I htink the passage has been altered by later Christian scribes, but for the most part it is authentic. 3. Yes, though they are even more highly legendary than the Xn accounts (in part because they are so much later; in part because they are antagonistic). 4. Do you mean from about that time? Good question. I’m not sure what other source besides Roman, Jewish, and Christian would have had a reason to mention it, but I’ve never thought much about it.
On Q4 there is Mara bar Serapion who is thought to be a 1st century pagan writing c73AD who states:
“the Jews, desolate and driven from their own kingdom, live in complete dispersion.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_bar_Serapion_on_Jesus)
Granted he doesn’t mention the destruction of the temple, but it is an early reference to the disaster the Jews suffered in 70AD.
Ben is surely correct in proposing that many mythicists are a lot more convinced by ‘arguments from silence’ than they ought to be. Though this is far from a failing specific to mythicists; the same can be said for many arguments advanced by conservative Christians, as indeed too for arguments advanced by critics of Christians. Arguments from silence – as in “Paul never says …..” – can never be more than indicative; nothing can be established from silence alone.
So while it is true that Jesus “is not mentioned in any Roman (or Greek, or Syriac, or… whatever – any pagan [i.e., non-Jewish, non-Christian]) source of the entire first century”; this statement must be set in context that the number of such first century sources that survive, and deal with matters Jewish and Palestinian, are minimal. Philo?, but he is too early (and Jewish anyway). Josephus?, but he is Jewish, and in his later first century works appears to refer to ‘Christ’, twice.
Indeed the statement in Josephus, that Christ had been known to have performed “surprising deeds”, is plausibly original to the author; in Geza Vermes speculative reconstruction.
I completely agree.
May I ask an unrelated question?
Aside from the Essenes, do you know of any other second-temple Jewish group who rejected the agency of the Jerusalem temple?
The reason I ask is that as John the Baptist was preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, it seems that by doing so he had rejected the temple where the forgiveness of sins would be effective. That is John believed that the personal sin offerings at the temple or the more collective day of atonement ritual at the temple were not enough to be forgiven for sin, and an alternative was needed – hence his mission.
I’m trying to figure out if this rejection of the Jerusalem temple was only found among the Essenes, or whether it was found among other Jewish groups also. Was John the Baptist unusual in his beliefs over the temple?
Unfortunately we have information on only four “groups”: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and “Fourth Philosophy”; then, Xns for a fifth. Of these only Essenes were known to oppose the workings of the temple. What John thought about the Temple cult is veyr difficult to say; it can onlybe intuited, but one could imagine arugments on both sides.
Any chance the Samaritan’s would fit Lev’s inquiry? They certainly did not see the Jerusalem Temple as sacrosanct given they built their own on Mt. Gerizim? Samaria was smack dab in between the Galilee and Judea and (I always thought John was Galilean).
I suppose they normally aren’t thought of as Jews.
Well, now I need to go get another Bart Ehrman book! 🙂
It was very unlikely for the christians to make an entire interpolation about James “the brother of Jesus”
they would rather did it with a story about Peter (never mentioned by Josephus) , but James was the real leader of the Jerusalem church as Paul stated in Galatians, I think that Josephus works and Paul’s letters are much more reliable than the gospels and it’s not a coincidence that link between the first of Paul’s “pillars of the church” and that Josephus passage in Antiquites.
Now my question to Dr Ehrman is “could it be that Luke’s story of the stoning of Stpehen in Acts was inspired in that passage about James in Antiquites 20.9.1 ?” After all as Josephus said James was not alone… ” James, and some of his companions and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered THEM to be stoned”…
Back to the trinity. The Nicene creed reads:
“Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium, et invisibilium.”
(I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.)
From ‘John’: 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being….10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ….14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
My understanding from your posts and elsewhere is that “John” and other high Christologizers testify that the Word/Jesus (“He”/”Him”) created the universe, etc. I get that Jesus is “of the same substance” as the father, but the Creed indicates that the “Father” created all. Is this not a contradiction? Or what? Thanks.
In traditional Christian thinking the Father created the world through the agency of Son, so they both can be called Creators.
It seems that since Jesus apparently had devoted followers before and soon after his death, that would count to some degree as evidence that he existed.
What are/ is “Xns”?
Christians.
1) “And the views he promoted were promoted before he arrived on the scene.”
This is most certainly not true. Paul was the first person to have written the books in NT. His books were written in 50 to 60 A.D. He popularized a new idea about 15 years long before first gospel Mark was written.
Paul promoted the death and resurrection base on the “road to Damascus.” His story displayed very bad contradictions. WORSE STILL, none of his companions confirmed the persecutor’s story to be true. This is extremely vital because the FIRST REPORTED STORY in the Bible about death and resurrection of Jesus was from somebody that cannot be trusted. Paul confirmed in 2 Timothy 2:8 that he initiated it and indoctrinated his theology to the Greeks who later came out with what is now known as Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John respectively.
2) “It is information previously acquired from Christian sources.”
This is 100% not true. Almost all the stories in Quran differ because it came from God to correct all the historical errors. Quran states, JESUS WAS NEVER CRUCIFIED. He was not even on the cross.
Yes. But he became a follower of Christ around 33-34 CE, and there were others proclaiming Christ as the savior 3-4 yars before that. He didn’t make it up.
Paul never says anything about the “Road to Damascus.”
Your statements about Qur’an are matters of faith; for the blog we’d like to keep to issues that can be decided on purely historical grounds. So do try to stay within those parameters.
“It is information previously acquired from Christian sources.”
“Your statements about Qur’an are matters of faith; for the blog we’d like to keep to issues that can be decided on purely historical grounds. So do try to stay within those parameters.”
I was trying to be truthful like the way you emphasized frequently in your debate. My intention was to demonstrate that such belief like Jesus was never crucified simply cannot be from Christian sources as what you had claimed.
Yes, that’s a historical claim that can be examined, not a theological claim about whether the Qur’an is religiously true. And you’re right, all the Christian sources (well, apart froom some Gnostic texts, such as the Gospel of Basilides) do maintain strongly that Jesus was crucified. As do the earliest Jewish and Roman sources. It is one of the most firmly established facts of the period that we have.
Turning for a second to OT predictions of Jesus, I hve been confused by Psalm 22. Of course I know NT writers were seeking OT prophesy as a part of their writing, but many translations of Ps 22:16 talk of “piercing my hands and feet” when talking of the surrounding evil doers. There are others that say “gouging” as if referring to the lions or the dogs or the bulls and others translate “my hands and feet have shriveled” Modern Christianity sees this Psalm as a reference to the crucifixion and there are portions that fit the gospel description of the crucifixion. What is your take on what the appropriate translation of the OT is for PS 22:16 and does it refer to evil doers piercing the afflicted person’s hands and feet, or to that done by animals, or diseased and withering of the body? The Psalm does read much like the passion.
I’m afraid I”m away from home and my books, but even if had them I’m not enough of a semiticist to resolve a debate among experts. But yes, Ps. 22 does sound like the passion of Jesus; but if the authors who told the stories about Jesus’ passion were writing with Ps. 22 in mind, it would not be surprising that their descriptions matched Ps. 22 well!