Jesus of where? A response by Frank Zindler to Bart Ehrman
(We welcome FTN guestwriter and fellow mythicist Frank Zindler, editor of American Atheist Magazine and Director of American Atheist Press, rebutting the “historical” Jesus of Bart Ehrman’s rendering in his recent book Did Jesus Exist?)
Bart’s Subtitle
The subtitle of Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? promises The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. This leads prospective readers to expect that the Jesus of concern in the book is to be associated with the “town” of Nazareth and that it is this identifying tie between Nazareth and Jesus that will be the major investigative concern of the book. One would expect to find evidence supporting the historical existence of not just any-old Jesus. Rather, one anticipates learning the evidence supporting the existence of a Jesus who lived in a place called Nazareth at the turn of the era.
Evangelical and fundamentalist readers
might further expect to learn whether or not the Nazareth from which
Ehrman’s Jesus came was the place described in the gospels—a town big
enough to have a synagogue placed “on the brow of the hill” (Luke
4:28-30).
Alas, the Jesus of Nazareth found in
Bart’s subtitle is almost completely absent from the book. Only eleven
times in the 360-page book can we find the expression “Jesus of
Nazareth,” although the word “Nazareth” occurs 87 times. Three of the 11
appearances of “Jesus of Nazareth” occur on the title page, the
copyright page, and a section heading. He appears two more times in the
references at the back of the book, leaving a total of six places in the
book where the phrase “Jesus of Nazareth” is actually employed by
Ehrman himself. This averages one occurrence per every 60 pages! This
fact does not promote the impression that Jesus of Nazareth is the
actual character whose historical existence Ehrman intends to establish.
“The Jesus of Nazareth who came
forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom
of God, who founded the Kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give
his work its final consecration, never had any existence.“
ut it seems I have miscounted the number of places where Ehrman himself refers to Jesus of Nazareth. One of the six actually turns out to be a quotation from Albert Schweitzer:
“There is nothing
more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of
Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah,
who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of
heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration,
never had any existence…”
It is hard to see how this quotation supports Ehrman’s thesis, even though it is true that Schweitzer himself believed in the existence of an historical Jesus from somewhere or
other. (In fact, Ehrman nonchalantly comments on page 191, “If Jesus
existed, as the evidence suggests, but Nazareth did not, as this
[mythicist] assertion claims, then he merely came from somewhere else.”
Jesus of Timbuktu!
So there you have it! Ehrman’s book
proving the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth might actually be
proving the existence of Jesus of Hoboken, Jesus of Rancho Cucamonga, or
even the Jesus of Timbukthree instead! In the second edition of this
book, I would suggest the subtitle be changed to read The Historical Argument for Jesus of Fill-in-the-Blank.
Of the remaining five places where
Ehrman uses the phrase “Jesus of Nazareth,” one of them is a
misrepresentation of the writings of the ancient Jewish historian
Josephus:
“In his various
writings Josephus mentions a large number of Jews, especially as they
were important for the social, political, and historical situation in
Palestine. As it turns out, he discusses several persons named Jesus,
and he deals briefly also with John the Baptist. And on two occasions,
at least in the writings as they have come down to us today, he mentions
Jesus of Nazareth.”
Contrary to Ehrman’s claim, however, Josephus never refers to a “Jesus of Nazareth.”
(Amazingly, Ehrman actually quotes the two disputed Josephan passages
in his book where readers can immediately see that Nazareth does not
occur in the passages quoted!) This fact is important, because Josephus,
although he refers to forty-five places in Galilee and fortified a town
less than two miles from present-day Nazareth, knew nothing of Nazareth
itself. Naturally, then, he could not be witness to any character
styled Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, Josephus was from a priestly family.
How could he have ignored a polis [city-state] that had a synagogue?
This leaves four references to Jesus of
Nazareth for us to examine amidst 360 pages of expectedly well-written
prose. One of the three remainders is a rather anecdotal comment about
Ehrman’s experience at a Humanist conference where many of the
participants expressed mythicist leanings:
“…many of them were
completely taken aback when they learned that I have a different view,
that I think that there certainly was a Jesus of Nazareth, who was
crucified under Pontius Pilate, and about whom we can say a good deal as
a historical figure.”
Formally, this anecdote is merely a
reference to personal experience. Even so, it makes the concealed
unsubstantiated claim that “we can say a good deal [about Jesus] as a
historical figure.” One easily can forget that this hidden claim is a
wild exaggeration. We can say a good deal about Jesus of Nazareth?
Really? Why, then, does Ehrman say virtually nothing specifically pertaining to Jesus of Nazareth in his entire book?
Assorted fallacies
Two of the remaining three references to
Jesus of Nazareth are simple instances of the fallacies of informal
logic known as the appeal to authority and the ad populum
(“three million Frenchmen can’t be wrong”) fallacies. The first
quotation of this sort is from his argument that mythicists generally do
not have enough specialized education to qualify them to write about a
mythical Jesus of Nazareth. They aren’t experts:
“It is striking that
virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these
qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical
figure.”
The second passage embodying these
fallacies is found in the section of his book entitled “The Gospels and
Their Written Sources”:
“Once it is conceded
that the Gospels can and should be treated as historical sources, no
different from other historical sources infused with their author’s
biases, it starts to become clear why historians have almost universally
agreed that whatever else one might say about him, Jesus of Nazareth
lived in first-century Palestine and was crucified by the prefect
[Ehrman corrects Tacitus concerning Pilate’s title] of Judea.”
Simply stating the obvious fact that the
vast majority of New Testament specialists are historicists is not
evidence for the concealed proposition “Jesus of Nazareth once lived in
Roman Palestine and was crucified by Pontius Pilate.” That is a
statement in need of proof—proof for which mythicists seek in vain in
the pages of Ehrman’s book.
That fact leaves us with only one passage
in the entire book where Ehrman uses the name “Jesus of Nazareth” as an
integral part of his argument. This instance is found in his discussion
of methodology to separate the miraculous Jesus from the mundane Jesus:
“The reason this
line of reasoning is in error is that we are not asking whether Jesus
really did miracles and, if so, why they (and he) are not mentioned by
pagan sources. We are asking whether Jesus of Nazareth actually existed.
Only after establishing that he did exist can we go on to ask if he did
miracles. If we decide that he did, only then can we revisit the
question of why no one, in that case, mentions him.”
We are left, therefore, with a book that
isn’t really intended to prove the existence of a god-man who came from
a place called Nazareth. Ehrman has hedged his bets and is attempting
to prove the existence of any Jesus who can be pressed into service to explain a unitary origin of Christianity.
Why Jesus?
One may fairly ask at this point, “Why should this initiating stimulator have been named Jesus either? Wasn’t he named Jesus because the Aramaic equivalent (yeshua‘) means Savior? In Septuagint Greek, the word IESOUS can also represent the name Joshua. Maybe we should be looking for a Joshua instead of a Savior?
But why, exactly, would Ehrman suppose that Jesus is the first name of his putative character, rather than a title or epithet? He knows that Christ is a title, not a name. Why not Jesus?
Moreover, wasn’t Jesus the ultimate name bestowed upon Paul’s “Christ
Jesus” in the so-called Kenosis Hymn (Philippians 2:5-11)?
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus…
Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him [Christ Jesus], and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.”
Isn’t Jesus here a name of
magical power given to a being who was called “Christ” before he was
titled Jesus? Isn’t that why we still find occasional references to Christ Jesus instead of Jesus Christ?
Is it not the case that if – as the
consensus of historicist scholarly opinion holds – unlike Hinduism and
traditional Egyptian, Greek and Roman religions, Christianity began at a
single point in time and was initiated by a single person, couldn’t
that person have been named Ichabod as well as Savior? Couldn’t the name
of Savior have been given to him after his death? If we no longer have
to think of Christianity as having been founded by a “Jesus of
Nazareth,” couldn’t it have been founded by someone named anything at
all?
In Did Jesus Exist? Ehrman
claims to have presented evidence for the existence of “Jesus of
Nazareth.” Mythicists in the rebuttals that will follow me, however,
shall look for evidence for the existence of Ehrman’s evidence.
Further Reading
Nazareth is not
mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament, nor do any ancient
historians or geographers mention it before the beginning of the fourth
century. The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing
of Nazareth. Josephus, who wrote extensively about Galilee (a region
roughly the size of Rhode Island) and conducted military operations back
and forth across the tiny territory in the last half of the first
century, mentions Nazareth not even once — although he does mention by
name 45 other cities and villages of Galilee. This is even more telling
when one discovers that Josephus does mention Japha, a village which is
just over a mile from present-day Nazareth! Josephus tells us that he
was occupied there for some time. Today, Japha can be considered a
suburb of Nazareth, but in Josephus’ day, I’ll wager, the people of
Japha buried their dead in the tombs of the unnamed necropolis that now
underlies the modern city called Nazareth….
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου