(12 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
Loading...I know that by now I’m supposed to be citing Craig Evans’s best arguments that Jesus was probably given a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea, rather than being left hanging on the cross for a few days in accordance with standard Roman practice. But I’ve realized that before I get to the first of these arguments, I have to say something about how historians need to use their ancient sources. The short answer to that question is that they need to use them … gingerly. And consistently gingerly.
This perspective will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read this blog for a long while and seen how I think we need, consistently, to use the books of the New Testament itself as sources for what actually happened in the past – whether we are considering the Gospels for knowing about what Jesus really said and did, or considering the book of Acts for knowing about the life and teachings of Paul, or considering the letters allegedly, but not really, written by Peter, James, and Jude for knowing the teachings of the historical Peter, James, and Jude – and so on.
But I do need to stress the point to make sense of what I want to say about Josephus, whom I have discussed in previous posts.
Let me make the point by telling an anecdote. This has happened to me a dozen times, but I’ll recount simply one instance.
A couple of years ago I was
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Some may consider this a ridiculous analogy but what if you are a juror in a murder trial for a man accused of murder. What if there is an eyewitness to the murder who also claims to have seen the man accused of murder miraculously heal a policeman injured in the man’s arrest by reattaching the ear. Would you believe anything the witness said about the murder? Shouldn’t we always realize what we are doing is very gross speculation in these topics?
On a totally unrelated topic, do you have any recommendations for a Galapagos trip? Thanks so much for your work on the blog.
My main recommendation is to take one! We did half cruise and half land, and I liked that combination. But the best thing to do is to explore the options and take the one that seems best suited to what you want.
‘“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates.’
Ah, but did he really say that?
The unexamined saying is not worth quoting….
Or as Mark Twain said, “Don’t trust everything you read on the internet.”
Yeah, something like that.
I feel like more people thinking about Biblical history would benefit from reading other ancient primary sources. I was blown away when I read Curtius’s History of Alexander and there’s a digression where Alexander the Great spends 13 nights in the royal bedchamber with the queen of the Amazons. Plutarch is skeptical of that story but he tells us that Alexander was the son of Zeus. It’s amazing what made it into serious, soberly written ancient sources.
I’m curious if Dr. Ehrman has a recommended book that covers historiographical method. I minored in history which means I’ve read a lot (you mentioned Ramsay MacMullen, whose work I really enjoyed, recently) but didn’t spend as much time on how history is done.
There are lots, many of them dense, but you might find The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past by John Lewis Gaddis an interesting place to start.
Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren’t these the same questions as last year’s [physics] final exam? Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.
Albert Einstein
I like to learn what I want to learn, not what others think I should lol
…”we need…to use the books of the New Testament as sources…” Are the noncanonical gospels and writings also valuable? Specifically, using the Gnostic scripture and the proposed Q gospel as sources mainly for what Jesus said? Are the Gnostics less valuable because of the dates they were written?
Historians look crefully at every single surviving source of every kind. But after close analysis, it’s pretty clear that as important as Gnostic Gospels are for understanding later interpretations of Jesus, they are not as a whole very useful for knowing about the historical Jesus. It’s not just the dates, though that matters, but also the character of their presentations, where Jesus is portrayed in a way that cannot be historical for an early-first-century Jew living in Israel.
Hello Bart! Great post. My question today is: were there any writings from the 1st century from people who doubted the resurrection of Jesus and the empty tomb and who put forth arguments such as those that would be commonplace today? Examples – his body was stolen from the tomb, those who have claimed to have seen Jesus after his death were simply making it up or hallucinating. How common were such writings from this time period?
No, there are no references to the resurrecton in non-Christian soucres that doubted it. Of course, there’s only one non-Christia source of the first century that even mentions Jesus (Josephus), and he doesn’t argue against the Christian views.
Interesting. When are the earliest writings we have from non-Christians who doubted the claims made by the Christians and what sort of arguments did they put forward to defend their beliefs? Certainly Jews would have doubted Christ’s claim to divinity as a matter of principle, but what about Pagan authors who did believe in divine men and multiple gods – when do we begin to see their writings in opposition to Christianity?
The first pagan author who attacked Christianity and whose work (kind-of) survives is named Celsus, writing in the 170s. We don’t have his actual book but we have a lengthy refutatoin of it by Origen, a few decades later; Origen actually quotes Celsus’s attacks at length and repeatedly, so we can reconstruct what Celsus said. Joseph Hoffmeier produced a book that gave just Celsus’s side of the argument, that is worth looking up if you’re interested.
Bart,
Your student heard what many of us did when we were young church attenders (and maybe still hear). A preacher said, “The Bible is the Word of God — everything in it is truth.” The Catholic church as well as fundamentalist ones still teach this belief. The reason we read your books and postings and buy your recorded lectures is because we agree with almost all of what your research has led to “preach” in an academic way to us. You agree that many of the events described in the NT did happen, and I suspect that most of us agree that the birth stories and many others are fiction. For years I have pondered how Jesus, who — like most of his followers — was not educated as a youth the way we are today, gained the knowledge and beliefs he had (e.g., some of his and Buddha’s teachings match). I suspect when he was a teenager he joined a caravan as a camel tender, went to India, and stayed for years in a welcoming Jewish settlement. At some point he felt “chosen by God” to return to Galilee and gather followers.
Bill Steigelmann
I fully understand your point on importance of scholarly historical understanding of what scholars think was accurate, my argument is I’m just a human trying figure if the gospel are actually the world of god or not, i want know if I should believe the gospel or not, what’s important to me is, if Jesus was apocalyptic, and really said the kingdom of heaven will come in his lifetime and his followers lifetime, and then it didn’t happen, then I don’t care about if anything else is historical accurate or not in the other gospel of Jesus. That’s enough proof for me, that the other gospel all evolved over time as humans started making their own narratives and wasn’t based on t true words of Jesus or god.
It’s unbelievable that people simply do not get this. I have a hardcore fundamentalist Christian coworker, who often tells me stories about saints and church fathers of the Greek orthodox tradition, and these almost always feature some spectacular metaphysical event, some sort of a miracle. And I have tried, numerous times, to explain to him that, just because this story comes from tradition does not mean it is true in all its details, and he just won’t understand!
By the way, you deserve a lol of credit for not losing it completely with this student of yours! It must have been quite disheartening, at the very least, to realize she didn’t understand at all what you were doing for all these weeks!
Yeah, after she left I went out of the classroom holding my forehead….
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Me again with off-topic questions!
I have the Bible online Croatian version and NRSV and I encounter a discrepancy in the OT.
In the NRSV, after Ezra and Nehemiah comes Esther, but in the Croatian version before Esther are Tobias and Judith, which is not in the NRSV???
After Esther in the Cro version come Maccabees 1 and 2, which is not in the NRSV. Then the Bibles are arranged from Job to the Song of Solomon. Then the Cro version has the Book of Wisdom and the Book of Sirach, which is not in the NRSV.
And then Isaiah goes and until the end the Bibles agree with the exception that in the Cro version there is Baruch before Ezekiel, which is not in the NRSV.
What’s the point!!??
I am particularly interested in where I can find the “book of wisdom” in English!??
This isn’t a discrepancy in the Bible per se, but in the decision by modern Christains about which books should *be* in the Bible. The Croatian Bible is incluing the (Jewish) Apocrypha, which is considered canonical in the Roman Catholic tradition. Some Bibles have these additional books at the end, as a kind of appendix ot the OT. The book of wisdom wod be the Wisdom of Soloon.
The Apocrypha section in my RSV Bible is after the Book of Revelation.
I’ve definitely moved towards your position on what likely happened with the body of Jesus. What seems to be a barrier for me is the independent attestation of the tomb stories including Paul. Paul also says Jesus was “buried” (and you’ve indicated that the meaning here is likely a typical burial rather than a mass grave). This is getting closer to ground zero if Paul believed he was buried! It’s a fair amount of independent attestation? But I do think you have dissimilarity and contextual aspects on your side. How’s my math on this Professor? What grade would you give me?
By your math, if I were in the major league I’d win the batting title. As to Paul, though, he doesn’t say *when* Jesus was buried. I too think someone must have disposed of his remains, that is, that at some point they were buried.
So are you still leaning towards mass grave or more of an individual burial of some sort?
But either way, certainly only after the body has been up there long enough to be a deterrent to others and probably also scavengers have picked at the body?
Paul’s reference to Jesus being buried also seems to be a quoting of an earlier Christian saying right? So that burial tradition even proceeds Paul right?
Yup, that’s right. The burial tradition does not necessarily precede Paul himself; it precedes the time he taught the Corinthians in the ealry 50s. I certainly think Jesus was buried. Just not on the afternoon of his death.
Dr. Ehrman,
When you say, “I certainly think Jesus was buried.” Do you still posit a mass grave setting as most likely? Crossan has a similar view, but doesn’t consider being thrown in a mass grave a “burial” at all.
I don’t know what the omst likely option is: mass grave, shallow pit, who knows. Going back to Homer though, a “burial” is explicitly as little as having a handful of dirt thrown on the corpse. Most societies dispose of the corpse in some way, though, for health reasons.
Dr. Ehrman,
“…mass grave, shallow pit, who knows…” Ultimately, it’s Paul’s comment in 1 Cor. 15:4 that is the best evidence that Jesus was at least buried in some manner, is that correct?
He’s the first to say it. But he doesn’t specify what the burial entailed.
Were there any prominent people in the Roman Empire, especially during the first couple centuries AD, who were the equivalent of today’s atheists or materialists? That is, they did not believe in any supernatural claims, doubting both the pagan gods and Christianity/Judaism. Or were such atheistic views unheard of during this time. Would someone expressing these views have been ostracized or even punished by the state? Basically how common was Atheism/materialism during the Roman Empire?
True atheism was very rare. The most notorioius “atheists” at the time were Epicureans; they actually did think there were gods, but the gods were completely at peace with themselves and had nothing to do with the world, no involvement at all. And so they just as well didn’t exist.
Thank you!!
I should have figured it out by myself!!!
Dr. Bart Ehrman: Recently I had a conundrum understanding something about in core theology of Christians. I am a former Christian, but I didn’t really notice this before, I was doing an internet search on how the OT laws became obsolete in Christianity: It’s kind of hard to trace back this theology back to Jesus himself at least explicitly. By default, I get quoted Heb 8:13 also I am aware about Pauline thesis about faith in Jesus. My question is doing this theology come from Jesus or else was later developed? On one hand you have the Sermon on Mount saying I’m here to update not replace the laws. One Christian said to me verses like the one on Hebrews can be linked Jesus to himself since he made the apostles “dictate” it after his resurrection. Moreover, I also get quoted in the synoptics Jesus’s last supper (Mark 14:22-24) maybe an indication for replacing the laws- I think it’s ambiguous at best. I want to run this by you, to see if I missed anything. So far it looks it was made-up afterwards, but I want to be certain. Can we link the two ideas together to the man himself?
Jesus himself kept the law and almost certainly simply assumed that all his followers would do so as well. They were all Jews who believed that God had given the Torah and meant for it to be followed. He himself was an interpreter of the Law. It was only later, when Paul started convincing Gentiles that they could be followers ofJesus without keeping the prescriptions for Jews in the Torah that they idea came along that following the law was not important any more for non-Jews.
Dr. Ehrman,
Did people of Paul’s time know about hallucinations?
I guess it depends what you mean. They certainly knew about seeing things that weren’t there, but they didn’t have the psychologial/medical interpretatoin we have.
…and you shouldn’t believe everything you find on the Net, said Abe Lincoln…