(Note: this preliminary critique of Bart Ehrman's approach to the gospels is slightly updated from an early chapter in Jesus is No Myth: Fingerprints of God on the Gospels, by David Marshall, 2016. Subsequent chapters criticize (one might sometimes even say "mock") the parallels Ehrman attempts to draw between Jesus and to the traveling 1st Century Greek guru, Apollonius of Tyana, and to the magical early modern Polish rabbi, Baal Shem Tov. My first and only substantive critique of Ehrman in this forum covered a few of the same bases in some detail ten years ago. You will notice a lack of substance among critiques of that article in the comments section: hopefully his supporters will offer more factual details, if they choose to defend him again. Of course Ehrman is also welcome to join the debate.)
Bart Ehrman projects, for millions of Americans, the face and voice of respectable, informed, calm and judicious Jesus-scholarship. Author, co-author, or editor of more than two dozen books, including several New York Times best-sellers, Ehrman often “gives his testimony” about how he converted to evangelical Christianity, then de-converted as his education progressed, and doubts crept in. In lectures and books, he argues that Jesus did not see himself as the “Son of God,” rather as an end-times prophet. Ehrman has crossed swords with mythicists like Richard Carrier by arguing forcefully that there is a solid core of historical truth to the gospels, and with numerous Christian scholars by arguing that Jesus was not much as the gospels depict.
I won’t attempt to survey or evaluate all of Ehrman’s books, still less ideas, in this chapter. I shall continue to focus on questions we have pursued thus far: “Who was Jesus? Can we trust the gospels to give an accurate portrait of him? Can we find any genuine parallels?” Other aspects of Ehrman’s critique of early Christianity will arise as we consider how he tries to answer these key questions.
Ehrman believes he has found several
valid parallels to the life of Jesus, which he describes in books and
debate. His anthology Lost Scriptures
is a collection of “gospels,” hagiographies, and other early “Christian
literature” that was left out when the New Testament was compiled. But Ehrman most often compares the gospels to
a work already mentioned: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana.
Apollonius of Chapel Hill
Ehrman begins How Jesus Became God,
which Anne Rice is quoted as praising in Chapter One, by relating how he
introduces Jesus to undergraduate students at the University of North
Carolina. Where should one start to talk
about the man everyone has been talking about for two thousand years? With Paul, author of more books in the New
Testament than anyone else? (Though not,
of course, the “bulk” of the New Testament as Aslan claimed.) With the gospels, which relate Jesus’
life? No, Ehrman concludes, to introduce
Jesus one should first nudge his contemporary Apollonius onto the stage to take
a bow. Why should anything in the
gospels shock us after reading how much of the Christian story also appears in
the life of a First Century pagan thinker?
“Before he was born, his mother had a
visitor from heaven who told her that her son would not be a mere mortal but in
fact would be divine. His birth was
accompanied by unusual divine signs in the heaven. As an adult he left his home to engage on an
itinerant preaching ministry. He went
from village to town, telling all who would listen that they should not be
concerned about their earthly lives and their material goods; they should live
for what was spiritual and eternal. He
gathered a number of followers around him who became convinced that he was no
ordinary human, but that he was the Son of God.
And he did miracles to confirm them in their beliefs: he could heal the
sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead.
At the end of his life he aroused opposition among the ruling
authorities of Rome and was put on trial.
But they could not kill his soul.
He ascended to heaven and continues to lives there till this day. To prove that he lived on after leaving this
earthly orb, he appeared again to at least one of his doubting followers” (12).
The reader may suspect by now that I
will have words to say about Ehrman’s methodology. Ehrman is lining up “parallels” like ducks in
a row to shock students and readers into an instant of satori: a blast
of ground-shaking, faith-toppling relativistic enlightenment. His thesis is that Jesus did not claim
divinity, but had it imposed on him after the fact. Rather than set in advance a balanced menu of
traits and then compare them objectively, however, he selects alleged facts
that seem to support his point, shooing what would obscure, or more accurately gut,
skin and roast that thesis over a flame-fired barbecue, into the bushes.
That Ehrman is cherry-picking, and knows
better, is shown by his parallel description of Apollonius in Did Jesus
Exist, two years earlier. There, he
offers the same arguments, but then adds this tell-tale caution (emphasis added
again):
 |
| One difference in style: Apollonius incited stoning of the marginalized. |
“My view is that even though one can draw a number of interesting parallels between the stories of someone like Apollonius and Jesus (there are lots of similarities but also scores of differences), mythicists typically go way too far in emphasizing these parallels, even making them up in order to press their point.”[1]
Does Ehrman bring these “scores of
differences” up when he is trying to “shock and awe” his students into seeing
Jesus and Apollonius as similar? Apparently
not. He does not seem to give readers or
students the full picture one would expect from so eminent a scholar, a glance
at methodology or a word about any of that “score” of differences. And even more shocking, with some of his alleged
similarities, the eminent Dr. Ehrman comes close to “making things up,” as we
shall see.
Bad
Timing
I once debated Robert Price, one of the
more colorful and better-informed mythicists Ehrman criticizes, on an atheist
web site. Price also brought up supposed
parallels between Jesus and Apollonius, but neglected to mention that the
author of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus, wrote some 150
years after the gospels were produced.
As a member of a powerful literary salon, commissioned to pen Apollonius’
life story by the empress Julia Domna, whose husband and son both actively
persecuted Christians, Philostratus had both opportunity and motive to pilfer
from the gospels, if he felt any Christian motifs might add luster to the chest
of wonders and wisdom he had collected, and allow his guru to better compete
for disciples.
Ehrman refers to that competition, but
like Price, he overlooks the calendar:
“Christian followers of Jesus who knew
about Apollonius maintained that he was a charlatan and a fraud; in response, the pagan followers of
Apollonius asserted that Jesus was the charlatan and fraud. Both groups could point to the authoritative
written accounts of their leader’s life to score their debating points.”[2]
The words “in response” imply that the
Apollonians critiqued Jesus only after the Christians took on their man. But three pages later, Ehrman admits the
point / counterpoint between the two communities actually played in reverse
order. In the early fourth Century, “a
pagan author named Hierocles wrote a book called The Lover of Truth”
comparing Apollonius favorably to Jesus, and deriding Peter and Paul as “liars
and devoid of education and wizards.” (This
was before schools like Hogwarts had been established to provide wizards with
standardized book-learning.) Eusebius fired
back, venturing that while the real Apollonius may have been a “kind of
philosopher,” the hero of Philostratus’ tale was “an ass concealed in a lion’s
suit,” lacking “integrity and good sense.”
So by Ehrman’s own account, followers of Apollonius did not respond to
Christian insults, as Ehrman claimed, rather a Christian responded to Hierocles’
insults. (And Hierocles did more than
insult: he also zealously lobbied for and enacted state persecution of
Christians.)
Was Ehrman’s slip an innocent
misstatement? Then why, like Price, did
he also neglect to point out that Life of Apollonius of Tyana was
written long after the gospels, and commissioned by an opponent of
Christianity? Scholars have an
obligation to note a writer’s dates and such overwhelming biases. Ehrman merely says that Philostratus did “considerable
research” for his book, and notes that the author claimed his Life was
based on eyewitness accounts.
Ehrman accuses followers of both
teachers of seeking to score debating points, but who is more guilty of that
than Ehrman himself? The point he
attempts to score is relativistic. Both
Jesus and Apollonius were wandering sages with similar ministries and teachings
who were elevated after death to deity. (Whether as eternal Creator of all things, or as
a kind of Greek Mr. Incredible.) According
to Ehrman, it was nip and tuck which team would win the competition. Furthermore, “There were a lot of people like
this in the ancient world.”
Why, then, do so many modern scholars
make such a fuss about Apollonius?
We hear about Apollonius of Tyana from
Aslan, Carrier and Ehrman. Robert Price
touts him. He features prominently in
the writings of members of the Jesus Seminar.
Harvard scholar Paula Fredriksen invokes him. John Loftus even speaks for “all atheists” in
saying: “Atheists all agree that the miraculous Jesus
we read in the gospels never existed.
His virgin birth was not unlike Hercules and Plato, and his life had a
very striking resemblance to Apollonius of Tyana.”[3]
Which raises a question. If there
are so many excellent parallels to Jesus in the ancient world (as such skeptics
also often insist), why does everyone concentrate on the same one? And why do they forget to mention that
Philostratus wrote when the gospels were widely available, was sponsored by an
opponent of Christianity, and had every reason to draw on Jesus’ good name? Even if the supposed parallels turned out to
be genuine (we shall see otherwise), this might be like wondering at the
resemblance between Elvis and the impersonators who sway and croon in his
footsteps. As we saw, new religions often
borrow from successful old ones. So when
comparing two famous religious teachers in one civilization, an honest scholar
should carefully note which arrived first and therefore may have influenced the
other.
Even more striking, when we analyze Life of
Apollonius of Tyana, we shall find that Eusebius’ phrase, “an ass dressed
up as a lion,” aptly summarizes the real situation. The two men could hardly be more different.
Preliminary Oversights
Not to anticipate my later, more thorough analysis,
but in addition to confusion about time, cherry-picking and failure to mention “scores”
of dis-analogies, which as we will see are of far more significance than his
cherry-picked analogies, many of Ehrman’s facts are baldly wrong. The
visitor at Apollonius’ birth did not come “from heaven.” The “god of Egypt,” Proteus, was the “Old Man
of the Sea” who slept on the island of Pharos in the Nile Delta where the great
lighthouse had been built, shifting shapes to avoid being forced to reveal hidden
truths to mortals. Proteus visited his
mother in the guise of a demon, suggesting that he himself was the son about to
be born. In Odyssey, Menelaus and
three shipmates dress up as seals, wrestle with Proteus, and force him, after
he has appeared as lion, dragon, leopard, boar, film of water, and tree, to
reveal many secrets, including what has happened to Agamemnon and
Odysseus. Rather than “from heaven,” “Out
of Egypt” (the title of Anne Rice’s own book about Jesus) would describe Mrs. “Of
Tyana’s” pre-natal visitor more accurately.
“Unusual divine signs in the heaven” is
also misleading, since there was only one such “sign.” After his mother was led into a field to pluck
flowers, a thunderbolt rose into the sky and disappeared. Scholars should recognize the difference
between singular and plural.
“Itinerate preaching ministry” also
makes the two sagely careers sound more alike than they really were. Apollonius wandered much of the known world,
from Egypt to India, while Jesus stayed mostly (and more plausibly) in Galilee
and Jerusalem. Apollonius was not
particular evangelical, and didn’t often do open-air preaching, since he found
the masses a bore. Ehrman seems to imply
that Apollonius’ message of “living for what is spiritual and eternal” is comparable
to Jesus’ “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!” But nothing could be more different than the spiritual
messages of the two men, as we shall see.
Nor was Apollonius called “Son of God” or even “son of the gods,” so far
as I can tell. And Philostratus does not
really claim that he raised anyone from the dead, as we shall also see. Nor, again, did Roman officials try to kill
him. Since so many skeptics cite
Apollonius as the most credible parallel to Jesus, we shall allot two chapters
to analyzing the alleged parallels, and the vastly more significant differences
Apollonius’ fans often neglect to mention.
We shall see that Bart Erhman has grotesquely and rather shamelessly misrepresented
facts as he accuses mythicists of doing, and in the same cause – to undermine the uniqueness of Jesus. But I will argue that this plan
backfires.
So like Aslan and Carrier, Ehrman is not
content to pick and choose (like Apollonius’ mother in the field of flowers) to
“press his point.” He may not quite be
inventing facts “out of nothing at all,” but he is certainly not representing
sources accurately. At best, he is
trimming, framing, hanging ribbons here, covering with newspapers there, to
make Jesus and Apollonius appear similar enough to startle readers and
students. And of the “scores” of
differences we shall indeed discover lie between the two men, some are so
important that they change everything.
Bart Ehrman is a well-educated,
knowledgeable, and intelligent scholar. So
why does he misrepresent Philostratus’ work so badly? Why not compare these two bodies of works by
means of more careful and systematic methodology?
Perhaps Ehrman feels that on his own
premises, he ought to find numerous analogies to Jesus, and is frustrated that
he can’t locate any good ones.
Exoplanets and False Messiahs
Consider an analogy from astronomy. In 2011, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez wrote
in Faith Seeking Understanding, which I edited, that a little less than
1800 potential exoplanets, worlds circling other suns, had been tentatively located. Five years later, the number has more than
tripled. (2026 update: now over
6200.) But the search for Earth-like
planets circling other stars still lies in its infancy. Living in a galaxy of 300 billion or so
stars, itself one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, we have only begun to poke
around a tiny corner of the cosmos for conditions analogous to Earth, seeking
foreign worlds that might be hospitable to life.
By contrast, the search for Jesus-like
teachers on this planet is now almost two thousand years old. Most surviving ancient books have been surveyed. (I have read hundreds myself.) The spiritual lives of most plausible
candidates have been examined for centuries, if not millennia.
Skeptical scholars point to Apollonius
because other analogies are even worse.
Ehrman does offer other really ancient parallels. Like Carrier, he discusses Romulus, the
legendary founder of Rome. His Lost
Scriptures provides a tantalizing service for those fishing in this derby,
by planting thirteen alternative “gospels” into the easily-fishable pond of one
volume. Unlike Elaine Pagels in the Gnostic Gospels, the Jesus Seminar, Harvard’s
gullible Karen King and others,[4] Ehrman
readily confesses that those works are late, non-Jewish, and of marginal if any
relevance to the historical Jesus.
Still, these alternative Jesus stories show us what a gospel might look
like if it were the product of imagination.
I described numerous telling differences between canonical gospels and Thomas
in my 2007 book, The Truth About Jesus and the ‘Lost Gospels.’ I chastised Ehrman there for (in my view)
falsely identifying Gnosticism as a form of Christianity[5] and for
acting as if orthodoxy were merely one of many equally valid interpretations of
Jesus’ teaching in the ancient world. But
Ehrman does not at least confuse the dubious historical value of so-called “Gnostic
Gospels” with that of Matthew, Mark, or Luke, if not John.
Several more orthodox early
hagiographical works can also be found in Ehrman’s anthology. These tell entertaining tales about the
apostles John, Peter, Paul, Thomas, and a female disciple named Thecla. In one, John orders bedbugs from his hotel
room at night, and they march out, then march back in to resume their “posts”
the next morning. In another, an evil
magician flies around Rome like Bellatrix.
In some, the torture of faithful virgins is told in titillating
detail. These tales show how an early
Christian with a flair for fiction who lived during the age of the budding
Greek novel might relate the story of a Christian hero. Both Gnostic and early Christian works
provide “control groups” to see if the characteristics we find in the gospels
really do demonstrate their historicity.
Ehrman recently offered a fuller
argument for a novel “parallel Jesus” when he debated philosopher Tim McGrew on
Premier Radio’s Unbelievable program in London.
He pointed listeners to Medieval Poland and introduced listeners to the
wandering rabbi, Baal Shem Tov, who helped found Hasidic Judaism, and is said
to have worked many miracles during his ministry. He mentioned him again a year later in Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest
Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior.
But Apollonius remains most popular,
both among scholars and ordinary skeptics like Loftus, because, frankly, nothing
better has shown up. The fact that
responsible, even eminent scholars like Ehrman feel the need to omit or alter
details of timing, affiliation, or origin is telling. And we still find little hint of systematic
method in Ehrman’s comparison. The
Search for a Parallel Jesus often seems more like a holiday in a cherry
orchard, or like the Monkey King’s rampage through the orchard of the peaches
that lend immortality, than a systematic harvesting of the fruits of scholarly
investigation.
Ehrman does offer historical criteria
which may, however, help us judge between historical fact and fiction. We will consider his suggestions later, along
with Carrier’s criticism of such traditional criteria.
Who was Jesus? Ehrman relies on “criteria” to answer that because,
in common with most scholars, he does not accept a straight-forward reading of
the gospels. What are his grounds for rejecting
the portrait those four books draw of Jesus?
A Liberal Creation Myth
Ehrman believes the “real Jesus” was an apocalyptic prophet who thought the end of the world was just around the corner. While the gospels are the best sources we have for his life, and careful application of criteria can extract true historical facts from them, he doubts they are very reliable. That is because the stories of Jesus were not written by his original followers, certainly not by eyewitnesses. In fact, they were passed around the Mediterranean for many years before finally being written down, by people who not only did not personally know Jesus, but had not even met his friends. Thus we need wise critical scholars (Ehrman refers to Dale Allison, John Meier, Paula Fredriksen, E.P. Sanders, and Geza Vermes as important peers, and indeed Fredriksen wrote a blurb for his book) to sort fact from fiction:
”The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.”[6]
Ehrman presses the fact that “you will
not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.” Given that he defines “critical scholarship”
as that scholarship which does not take the gospels “at face value,” and
fundamentalism as the act of doing so, his list of leading scholars becomes a
bit circular. Of course scholars who
take the gospels largely at face value are unlikely to be found leading the
ranks of those who do not take the gospels at face value. Nor would one expect the head of the Steak
Venders of America to be a vegetarian. Ehrman
does not mention scholars like Craig Blomberg, Richard Bauckham, Craig Evans,
Craig Keener, Larry Hurtado, Ben Witherington, or N. T. Wright here, top
scholars who keenly defend a strongly (if not naively) historical read of the
gospels.
So why should we caucus with the former
set of scholars against the latter and doubt the general historicity of the
gospels? Ironically, Ehrman’s complaint
is in part just the opposite of that which Aslan and Carrier lodge. The problem with the gospels is not that
their authors were poorly-educated, but that they were well-educated and
far-removed from the class consciousness of Jesus’ first followers:
“The followers of Jesus, as we learn
from the New Testament itself, were uneducated lower-class Aramaic-speaking
Jews from Palestine . . . (The authors of the gospels) were highly educated,
Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation. They probably wrote after Jesus’ disciples
had all, or almost all, died. They were
writing in different parts of the world, in a different language, and at a
later time.”[7]
But in fact, the gospels never suggest
that Jesus’ first followers were “uneducated.”
One is described as a tax-collector, and another was married to an
important servant in the high priests’ family.
In pointing to upper-class links, the gospels are credible: sociologist Rodney
Stark argues that most successful new religious movements are founded by members
of the upper classes. Nor is there any
reason to deny that Jesus’ first followers spoke Greek: surely many did, given
their proximity to centers of Greek culture.
Ehrman is engaging in a popular bit of
skeptical parlor magic here, trying to create space between Jesus and the
gospels. One common way to create that
space is by exaggerating the gap between Jesus’ life and the writing of the
gospels. Fredriksen, for instance, wrote
that the Gospel stories were “told and retold” by generations” that died off,
one after the other, before being written down.[8]
And indeed, Ehrman attempted to create chronological space in his debate with
Timothy McGrew:
Bart
Ehrman: "If you want to talk about
the kind of evidence in the New Testament, what we have are documents written
fifty years later, by people who . . . "
Tim McGrew: "I'd put them a bit earlier."
Ehrman: "By people who are not
eyewitnesses."
McGrew: "I'd disagree there, too."
Ehrman: "OK, so let's say they're
written by eye – by people who have gotten their stories 20 years later from
eyewitnesses."
McGrew: "Or who were eyewitnesses themselves."
Several times here, McGrew checks Ehrman as the latter attempts to stretch out space between Jesus and the authors of the gospels. Ehrman assumes a later date than is conventional, at least for Mark – most scholars put the writing of the first gospel from thirty to forty years after the events they record. (A few say ten.) He also assumes that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses. McGrew challenges him on both points, and Ehrman said “OK,” as if he were ready to concede those points for the sake of the argument he was preparing, a “parallel Jesus,” the Polish rabbi, Baal Shem Tov. (The abuse of whose story in Ehrman’s hands we shall describe later.) But having said “OK” to McGrew, and begun the word “eyewitnesses,” Ehrman suddenly remembers that the story he is preparing to tell – of Tov – is actually not by eyewitnesses at all, and so changes in mid-sentence to “by people who have gotten their stories from eyewitnesses.” (Which is also not true in Tov’s case, we shall see.)
How many generations can die out in
three to four decades? Are we talking
about human beings, or mayflies?
Ehrman creates more literal,
geographical space, as well as positing cultural gaps in First Century social
networking. He suggests the following
theory of how the written accounts of Jesus’ life came into being (tripling
Aslan’s estimate of the ancient literacy rate in the process, incidentally,
though in debate with Bauckham he also used the 3% figure):
“These stories circulated. Anyone who converted to become a follower of
Jesus could and did tell the stories. A
convert would tell his wife; if she converted, she would tell her neighbor; if
she converted, she would tell her husband; if he converted, he would tell his
business partner; if he converted, he would tell his wife; if she converted,
she would tell her neighbor . . . And on and on. Telling stories was the only way to
communicate in the days before mass communication, national media coverage, and
even significant levels of literacy (at this time only about 10 percent of the
population could read and write . . . “)[9]
The authors of the gospels had no chance
to check facts before writing, removed as they were from those facts not only
by class and language, but by distance, time and social connections:
“The stories were being told by word of
mouth, year after year, decade after decade, among lots of people in different
parts of the world, in different languages, and there was no way to control
what one person said to the next . . . Eventually, an author heard the stories
in his church – say it was ‘Mark’ in the city of
Rome. And he wrote his account. And ten or fifteen years later another author
in another city read Mark’s account and decided to write his own, based
partially on Mark but partially on the stories he had heard in his own
community. And the Gospels started to
come into existence.”[10]
Elsewhere, Ehrman tells the story this
way:
"You are probably familiar with the old birthday
party game, 'telephone'. . . Invariably,
the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone has a
good laugh . . . Imagine playing 'telephone' not in a solitary living room with
ten kids on a sunny afternoon in July, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire
(some 2,500 miles across!), with thousands of participants, from different
backgrounds, with different concerns, and in different contexts, some of whom
have to translate the stories into different languages over the course of
decades. What would happen to the
stories?"[11]
Like many myths, the charm of Ehrman’s
account of how the gospels came to be lies in its simplicity. I call it a “myth” not just in the
anthropological sense that it is a “story about origins,” but also in the
common sense of “certifiable nonsense.”
Mind you, I agree with Ehrman’s premise
that stories passed from person to person and across cultures are likely to
become corrupted. The historian Polybius
said he “either witnessed events myself, or talked to people who witnessed
them,” for fear of writing “hearsay based on hearsay.”[12]
But consider. As we pass these stories about Jesus from country
to country, editing, inserting, mixing and dosey-doing while engaging in the
world’s longest chain of hearsay whispering (involving thousands of players
over thousands of miles, several decades and multiple languages), how high a
priority would Mark’s church in Rome place on getting names of minor characters
in Palestinian Israel correct? A bit below
“getting signatures from all the Roman gladiators before they left for the
eternal Coliseum in the Sky” but above “visiting sailor bars in all the cities
named for Alexander the Great,” one would think. One would not expect a gospel written in the
haphazard, twenty-rounds of musical-chairs-then-pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey manner
Ehrman describes, to accurately record exact names in use among Palestinian
Jews.
(Indeed, to illustrate this point when
publicly speaking on Jesus is No Myth, I sometimes set audience members
into circles of 10-15 and then sent a message around the mostly-American groups
which included the names of one or more of my Chinese students. Almost inevitably, the part of message that
was most scrambled, were those culturally-unfamiliar names. On Ehrman’s hypothesis, foreign names – not stories
of Jesus’ miracles, not his parables, not his debates with critics, not even
his pithy aphorisms – would have been the first element in the gospels to
suffer degradation.)
And yet, as Cambridge historian Richard
Bauckham shows, the gospels do record 1st Century Palestinian Jewish
names accurately.
Neil Shenvi borrows data provided by Bauckham (Jesus
and the Eyewitnesses, 39-92) to turn Ehrman’s argument on its head. Here is his chart of the most common names in
the gospels and Acts, and as found in ossuaries from that century in Palestine:[13]
So the frequency of the three most
popular male names in the earliest books of the New Testament appear in the
same order as archeological data shows those names did, indeed, appear at that
time in Palestine. Furthermore, the
percentages are remarkably close. In
addition, three of the next five names also appear among the five next most
popular names. Even the respective percentages
are tight. Are we really supposed to
believe some anonymous Matthew, Luke or Mark in Rome ten or twenty rounds of
telephone tag removed from Palestine got all these names correct? Shenvi argues:
“If this analogy really is a good one,
then we could also ask ‘What would happen to the names of people in those
stories?’ The answer would not be: ‘We'd
see 1st century Palestinian names reproduced with the proper frequencies across
all four gospels.’ So I think Bauckham's
work shows fairly definitely that this picture of how we got the gospels is
wrong. Either oral transmission is far
more accurate than Ehrman describes, or the gospels originated close to Jesus,
both temporally and geographically. In neither
case does the 'telephone' analogy seem accurate.”
Ehrman’s objection thus collapses to
dust, and confronts us with the opposite challenge, as Shenvi implies. Evidently the gospels are not the product of
the corrupting processes proposed.
Evidently they transmit data from First Century Palestine with
remarkable fidelity. If rumor was that
reliable on minor details, why not on the main events that the gospels
report?
By making hagiographies easily available
in one “pond,” and by searching for new parallels, Bart Ehrman helps broaden,
then winnow, our search. We shall
examine his claims carefully. Despite
his soft voice and genuine expertise, his arguments tend to be highly biased
against Christianity, sometimes to the point of falsifying or obscuring
important facts. More examples shall
appear in coming chapters.
There is another sense in which Ehrman
is more useful than Aslan or Carrier. Ehrman
offers a few positive criteria for telling historical truth from error.
Historical Criteria
Even if the gospels were written by
eyewitnesses or friends, as Bauckham argues, rather than being produced by the
haphazard and distant method Ehrman describes, the question remains: how do we
know that they tell the truth? After
all, some eyewitnesses lie or forget, while even Ehrman and the Jesus Seminar
before him admit quite a bit in the gospels to be historically accurate. Here Ehrman represents the majority of
mainstream scholars in thinking that there are positive criteria by which to
separate historical sheep from mythological goats.
Ehrman emphasizes three criteria. I will describe his argument for two of them
here, then defend those criteria against Carrier’s attacks in a later
chapter. The third criteria, chronology,
will appear in my chapter on the setting of the gospels.
The first criteria Ehrman mentions is independent
attestation. (Also called
multiplicity.) Ehrman notes that John is
usually considered to have been written independently of the other
gospels. So, too, is the material that
Luke and Matthew share in common (so-called Q), and material unique to both
Matthew (M) and Luke (L). Thus we have “numerous
streams of tradition that independently all go back, ultimately, to the life of
Jesus . . . (this is) taken as a fact by almost all critical scholars”
(95). Therefore, one should probably
believe that Jesus really was crucified, as all five sources report, and that
Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, as reported by Mark, John, and “Q.”
Let me repeat a quibble first. When describing a book written within the
plausible lifespan of eyewitnesses (as the gospels were), that shows evidence
of close knowledge of the facts (as we have already begun to see that they do),
one need not use words like “tradition” or “ultimately.” Such loaded terms appear to be another
artificial attempt to distance the gospels from Jesus.
But Ehrman is of course right in
thinking more witnesses are better than few.
That’s even true when we see something remarkable for ourselves. We blink our eyes and ask those around us to
confirm our sighting, “Did you see that king-fisher plunge into the pool?” “Did
she really wink at that scoundrel?” “Did Trump really say what I think he
said?”
Ehrman’s second criterion is commonly
called the criterion of dissimilarity or embarrassment. He writes:
“Any stories that seem to run directly counter to the Christians’ self-interests in telling them, can stake a high claim to being historically accurate . . . Christians would not have made up stories that work against their views or interests” (96).
Ehrman offers the example of Jesus’
youth in Nazareth, which he says passes both criteria:
“Jesus is said to have grown up in
Nazareth in Mark, M, L, and John; so it is multiply attested. But it also is not a story that a Christian
would have been inclined to make up, because it proved to be an embarrassment
to later Christians. Nazareth was a
small town - a hamlet, really – that no one had
ever heard of. Who would invent the idea
that the Son of God came from there?”[14]
We shall ponder Carrier’s critiques of
these two criteria shortly. We will also
consider British historian N. T. Wright’s Double Similarity, Double
Dissimilarity, which fine-tunes the criterion of “dissimilarity” or
“embarrassment” into an even more powerful historical tool. But as we shall see, these few criteria are
just the tip of the iceberg of evidence for Jesus’ authenticity.
Ehrman spoke of “scores” of differences between
Life of Apollonius of Tyana and the gospels. That one can find differences is trivially
true of almost all stories: for instance, Oliver Twist grows up in an orphanage
in London, while Pip grows up, as an orphan, in the home of a blacksmith by the
sea. The question is, what differences
are historically significant? Which are
clues, like DNA extracted from blood on a knife, or fingerprints taken off a
refrigerator door, that point us to what really happened?
In our search for such tell-tale traits, we now
confront the gospels directly, and scrutinize the extraordinary tale they tell between,
as well as within, their lines.
[1]
Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist, 210
[2] Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 13
[3]
John Loftus, “Deconstructing
Christianity,” 12/30/2015
[4] Ariel Sabar, “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’ Wife,” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/485573/
[5] David Marshall, The Truth About Jesus and the
‘Lost Gospels,’ 57
[6] Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God,
88
[7] Ibid, 90
[8] Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews, 20
[9] Bart Ehrman, How
Jesus Became God, 91
[10] Ibid, 92
[11] Bart Ehrman, Jesus:
Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, 51-52
[12] Polybius, Histories, 4.2
[13] Neil Shenvi, http://www.shenvi.org/Essays/EhrmanResponsePart1.htm
[14] Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 97
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