Bart Ehrman on Jesus & The Claim of Resurrection
You might not believe what this atheist New Testament scholar concedes!
This post features highlights of a longer piece titled “Outside the Gospels, What Can We Really Know About Jesus?” Click here for the full article.
According to atheist New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, “It is a large mistake to think that when it comes to the New Testament, only the Gospels attest to the historical existence of Jesus.” Outside the Gospels, Ehrman argues that the strongest evidence for the life of Jesus is actually found in other parts of the New Testament itself—a fact that is recognized by historians and New Testament scholars around the world, even among hardcore secular thinkers and atheists.
In his book, Did Jesus Exist, Bart Ehrman discusses all the various historical sources for our knowledge of Jesus, and surprisingly, he ends up concluding that the most reliable information we have about Jesus apart from the Gospels are found in the book of Acts, the epistles of Paul, and other New Testament texts. No one disputes the fact that Paul wrote his letters from the late 40s to the early 60s, and according to Ehrman, this “is highly relevant for establishing the historical existence of Jesus.” Similarly, the book of Acts, he says, “preserves traditions about the life of Jesus that are both independent of anything said in the Gospel and, in the judgment of most critical historians, [are] based on traditions in circulation before the production of the Gospel.” He even goes on to say that Luke’s second volume “shows how the Christian movement went from being a small group of Jesus’ followers immediately after his death to becoming a worldwide phenomenon.”
In his assessment of the book of Acts, Ehrman observes that for this writer, “Jesus was very much a man who really lived and died in Judea, as can be seen…in the speeches that occur abundantly throughout the narrative.” These speeches have not been “invented” and are not based on “Luke’s fertile imagination.” Rather, his account “incorporates much older traditions. And these traditions are quite emphatic that Jesus was a Jewish man who lived, did spectacular deeds, taught, and was executed, as a human in Jerusalem.”In fact, in his discussion of events recorded in the first chapter of Acts, Ehrman goes so far as to admit that Luke’s account “gives clear evidence of being very early and Palestinian in origin…This is a tradition that goes back to the earliest Christian community in Palestine.”
As he assesses the writings of Paul, Ehrman says, “The reality is that, convenient or not, Paul speaks about Jesus, assumes that he really lived, that he was a Jewish teacher, and that he died by crucifixion.” Paul frequently uses “the terminology of ‘received’ and ‘delivered’” which according to Ehrman “is the kind of language commonly used in Jewish circles to refer to traditions that are handed on from one teacher to the next.”And as he unpacks the significance of the tradition concerning the Last Supper in 1 Cor. 11, Paul “emphasizes that this event happened ‘on the night in which he was handed over.’” For Ehrman, this is significant: “This is not some vague mythological reference but a concrete historical one. Paul knows that Jesus had a Last Supper with his disciples in which he predicted his approaching death, the very night he was handed over to the authorities.”
“In one of his rare autobiographical passages,” Ehrman continues, “Paul indicates that just a few years after his conversion he went to Jerusalem and met face-to-face with two significant figures in the early Christian movement,” namely Peter and James, the brother of Jesus. “These are two good people to know if you want to know anything about the historical Jesus. I wish I knew them.” Ehrman then unpacks the significance of all this: “Paul states as clearly as possible that he knew Jesus’ brother. Can we get any closer to an eyewitness report than this? The fact that Paul knew Jesus’ closest disciple and his own brother throws a real monkey wrench into the mythicist view that Jesus never lived.” After all, “If Jesus never lived, you would think that his brother would know about it.”
Ehrman then makes a rather startling admission:
Since no one would have made up the idea of a crucified messiah, Jesus must really have existed, must really have raised messianic expectations, and must really have been crucified. No Jew would have invented him. And it is important to remember that Jews were saying that Jesus was the crucified messiah in the early 30s. We can date their claims to at least 32 CE, when Paul began persecuting these Jews. In fact, their claims must have originated even earlier. Paul knew Jesus’ right-hand man, Peter and Jesus’ brother James. They are evidence that this belief in the crucified messiah goes all the way back to a short time after Jesus’ death.
While this may seem somewhat surprising, particularly in light of Ehrman’s atheism, we need to realize that this kind of approach is not at all out of step in the world of contemporary New Testament scholarship, even among other hardcore liberal, agnostic, and atheist scholars. According to James Ware, “there is almost universal scholarly consensus that 1 Cor 15:3-5 contains a carefully preserved tradition pre-dating Paul’s apostolic activity.” Along these same lines, Ehrman writes, “The idea that Christians were telling stories of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection before…Paul is held by virtually all scholars of the New Testament, and for compelling reasons.” So if Paul became a believer within two years of the crucifixion, this would indicate that the idea of Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t a doctrine that was invented sometime later. In fact, atheist scholar Gerd Lüdemann says, “we may reckon that the appearances of Jesus were talked about immediately after they happened.” These are frank and startling admissions.
Click here to read the FULL article
Shane Rosenthal is the founder and host of The Humble Skeptic podcast and the author of Is Faith Blind? (due in 2024). Shane was one of the creators of the White Horse Inn radio broadcast which he also hosted from 2019-2021, and has written numerous articles for various sites and publications, including TableTalk, Core Christianity, Modern Reformation, and others.
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