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Paul the Persecutor and the Historical Jesus

QUESTION: You mention in your book "Did Jesus Exist?" that Paul started his persecution of Christians in the early 30s. If he was tasked with hunting down Christians by the Sanhedrin he must have had a fairly high position among the Sanhedrin (I don't mean that he was a member). How come he didn't witness the crucifixion or why didn’t he in some way have firsthand knowledge of the events in immediate connection with the crucifixion? RESPONSE: Ah, an interesting question. So, it’s part of a much, much larger issue. Let me explain. We have two sources of information about the life of Paul: his own letters and the book of Acts. There are lots of reasons for thinking that the book of Acts is not always reliable when it comes to describing events in Paul’s life. I may devote an entire post – or maybe even a series of posts – to the question. For now, suffice it to say that whenever you can compare what Paul has to say about his own [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:22:45-04:00July 20th, 2012|Acts of the Apostles, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Q & A with Ben Witherington: Part 4

CONTINUATION! Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, has 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!). His 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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-17T23:45:24-05:00June 13th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters|

More on the Resurrection

As I pointed out in the previous posting, we cannot know that there was an empty tomb three days after Jesus’ death. We also cannot know which of his twelve disciples came to believe that he had been raised from the dead, or when they started to believe it. They later indicated that he was raised on the third day, as Paul, a later Christian who knew some of the disciples, tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. But Paul does not indicate that the disciples of Jesus started to believe that it was three days after Jesus’ death that his disciples started to believe he had been raised –only that that was the day on which he was raised. They may have come to realize it weeks later. The Gospels, written decades after Paul, indicate that the disciples came to believe on the third day. And it indicates that they all (except Judas Iscariot, of course) came to believe. I don’t know if that is historically right or not. There are a lot of Christian [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:45:55-04:00April 28th, 2012|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

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Paul the Persecutor and the Historical Jesus

Q & A with Ben Witherington: Part 4

More on the Resurrection