Did Jesus Exist?

Yes, he did. But you don't have to take my word for it; go read Bart Ehrman's latest book, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperOne, 2012). The title seems intentionally provocative (publishers do like to sell books), but Ehrman makes it clear that there is no question Jesus of Nazareth existed and that the small but vocal group claiming otherwise has little evidence to support their claim.

The first half of the book reviews the historical evidence from non-Christian sources as well as from the gospels and other New Testament writings. It's the last third of the book that might be especially interesting to the average reader, as it offers a short and straightforward summary of the historical Jesus debate as addressed by scholars over the last century or so, starting with Albert Schweitzer's 1906 book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. That debate presupposes the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, then asks what he actually said, taught, and did, as opposed to what later Christian authors wrote about what he might have said, might have taught, or might have done.

That may simply sound like a roundabout way for scholars to criticize scriptural accounts, but read a few of the noncanonical gospels and other uncanonized Christian writing that we still have and you will begin to understand. We don't like a lot of what was written about Jesus, but how do we distinguish reliable from unreliable writings? How did early Christians (who did not have a canonized New Testament to rely upon) distinguish between reliable and unreliable writings? What do we do about contradictory accounts of some events in different New Testament books? You see the problem.

Ehrman summarizes that discussion in about fifty pages. If you want more, Ehrman did a book-length treatment of the topic in his Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (OUP, 1999), which I reviewed in an earlier post that also provided links to discussions of the topic by LDS scholars. I also wrote up a review of Luke Timothy Johnson's book titled The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (1996), which as you might guess critiques the whole discussion and defends traditional reliance on New Testament gospel accounts. If you're serious about the subject, you should go buy a paperback copy of E. P. Sanders' The Historical Figure of Jesus (Penguin Books, 1993). If you're not that serious, just read Ehrman's handy summary in Did Jesus Exist? If the whole issue disturbs you, just keep reading your Bible.

Comments

[ricke]

Thanks for the recommendations. The Teaching Company (teach12.com) offers several lecture series by both Ehrman and Johnson. In fact, it offers complete courses by these professors on the gospels and on Paul's epistles. It's quite interesting to get the perspectives of these two scholars who are generally on opposite poles of any debate.

[Dave]

Yes, it was actually the CD book I listened to for the Johnson book. Makes it really tricky to quote from in a book review though.