My previous post at Strange Notions underscored the often-unacknowledged philosophical premises at work when believers and non-believers sit down to debate about things biblical. In the course of my argument, I pointed to a possible area of common ground for Catholics and agnostics/atheists. A survey of statements by thinkers as different as Benedict XVI and Bart Ehrman reveals an important agreement upon the reality that everyone carries their own philosophical presuppositions and that a purely objective consideration of Jesus’ miracles is therefore impossible. Today I would like to carry forward this discussion. By way of doing this, I will first briefly summarize Bart Ehrman’s position on Jesus’ divinity and resurrection. Then I will critique what I consider to be an insufficient (but very common) Christian response to the skeptic’s position. Finally, I will dwell upon a couple keys given by C.S. Lewis and Pope Benedict XVI which point out from a Christian perspective the direction a philosophical dialogue about miracles needs to head.
Ehrman on Jesus’ Divinity and the Failure of the “Trilemma” Argument
Ehrman’s position concerning the divinity of Christ can be quickly grasped from his evaluation of C.S. Lewis’ famous “trilemma” argument. According to Lewis, Jesus’ lordship can be shown by reducing to the absurd the possibility that he was either a liar or a lunatic. But in Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman reveals a problem with Lewis’ logic:
"I had come to see that the very premise of Lewis’s argument was flawed. The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God…I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself…not three options but four: liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend."
At the risk of oversimplifying Ehrman’s more lengthy narrative, his position is that Jesus’ disciples began to profess his divinity only after they experienced him as risen from the dead. According to Ehrman’s analysis of the data in How Jesus Became God, the earliest Christian sources (Paul and Mark) do not portray Jesus as divine but rather as an exalted human or an angel. While Jesus certainly existed as a historical person, for Ehrman he is nevertheless a “legend” in that he was not divine as Christians subsequently came to believe.
Ehrman on Jesus’ Resurrection
One of the interesting features of Ehrman’s work is that he affirms at least some direct followers of Jesus sincerely believed their master had been raised from the dead. He suggests that “three or four people—though possibly more—had visions of Jesus sometime after he died.” Ehrman states that the question of whether these putative experiences were veridical (i.e. whether Jesus was really there or whether they were hallucinatory bereavement visions) is beside his point. Rather, the claim he puts forth is the following:
"[A]nyone who was an apocalyptic Jew like Jesus’s closest follower Peter, or Jesus’s own brother James, or his later apostle Paul, who thought that Jesus had come back to life, would naturally interpret it in light of his particular apocalyptic worldview— a worldview that informed everything that he thought about God, humans, the world, the future, and the afterlife. In that view, a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom."
In Ehrman’s view, then, it was the disciples’ own apocalyptic worldview (informed by Jesus’ teachings while he was alive) that led them to think of their visions of the crucified Jesus in terms of resurrection.
An Insufficient Christian Response
While the constraints of this post do not permit me to elaborate further on Ehrman’s arguments, it should be noted that they are formidable and cannot simply be written off without a robust response. For instance, I do not find satisfactory the response to this “quadrilemma” (Jesus is either a liar, lunatic, lord, or legend) in Kreeft and Tacelli’s Handbook of Christian Apologetics. With due respect to these thinkers whom I deeply admire (and who have likely provided more solid arguments in other texts outside of the present one), I think their response to the “legend” issue unfortunately evinces a rather common but simplistic understanding of the biblical evidence. The authors state that our extant biblical manuscripts contain “very few discrepancies and no really important ones,” but I think Ehrman’s books Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and Jesus, Interrupted sufficiently disabuse one of the notion that the Gospels only differ in accidentals such as order and number. And Ehrman is by no means the only author who writes about this sort of thing; he is popularizing information that biblical scholars already know.
Moreover,Kreeft and Tacelli argue, “If a mythic ‘layer’ had been added later to an originally merely human Jesus, we should find some evidence, at least indirectly and secondhand, of this earlier layer.” Here I think the authors have an unduly narrow view of “myth,” and moreover I think they fail to anticipate the obvious response of a bible scholar like Ehrman. What might he say? The evidence for this earlier, non-mythical layer is right there in front of us: it is the Gospel of Mark, whom scholars by and large recognize to be the first gospel composed.
Finally, the authors of the Handbook ask who possibly could have invented such a myth about Jesus. I think they are on to something in remarking, “No one invents an elaborate practical joke in order to be crucified, stoned, or beheaded.” Ehrman agrees to some extent with this insofar as he does not seem to think that the disciples maliciously invented the myth of a divine Jesus. (Remember, in Ehrman’s view at least some of the disciples really thought they saw Jesus alive after his death, and it is this that eventually led them to conclude he was divine). The authors fail to envision this sort of counter-argument when they claim, “Whether it was his first disciples or some later generation, no possible motive can account for this invention.” It is indeed difficult for a Christian to imagine someone inventing the notion that Jesus was divine, but is it fair to say that “no possible motive” could account for this? Couldn’t the disciples themselves have been delusional, as Ehrman seems to suggest? Or couldn’t they have been using the “risen” Jesus as a power play for their own (ultimately unsuccessful) personal ambitions? Now as a believer I am certainly not saying that this is what actually happened, but one cannot properly call it an impossible scenario.
Where the Discussion Ought to Head: C.S. Lewis on Miracles
While C.S. Lewis may not have hit a home run with his “trilemma” argument in defense of Christ’s divinity, I think that his book Miracles is invaluable for those who wish to profess the divinity of Jesus in the face of modern biblical criticism. Lewis begins by arguing along the same lines of Benedict XVI and Ehrman as discussed in my previous post. He correctly observes that the real issue at hand is a philosophical one: “The difficulties of the unbeliever do not begin with questions about this or that particular miracle; they begin much further back.” For Lewis the miracles question boils down to whether or not the natural world we know is the only reality that exists. Looked at from another angle, this is the same as asking whether or not the supernatural or divine exists. A negative answer to the question of the divine’s existence necessarily entails the conclusion that purported miracles such as Christ’s resurrection cannot be true.
A positive answer, on the other hand, means the following for Lewis: “If we decide that Nature is not the only thing that is, then we cannot say in advance whether she is safe from miracles or not.” In other words, if there exists a Being which/who is not limited by the confines of the natural world but is rather the very ground of this world, then we can never conclusively deny that this Being sometimes acts in a way other than that which we tend to expect based on our observations of nature. Lewis thus proposes that within the universe “there are rules behind the rules, and a unity which is deeper than uniformity.” While Christians often speak of miracles as divine “interventions,” this unfortunately appears to presuppose that God is somehow “absent” from his creation and then “intrudes” upon it to perform a miracle. But in truth, if God exists he is always present to his creation. For Lewis, then, the miracles we take to be “interruptions” of nature’s history are in reality “expressions of the truest and deepest unity in [God’s] total work.”
Even if we personally are not conscious of having experienced the miraculous, Lewis reminds us not to discount the fact that our world is full of stories of people who claim to have experienced miracles. Moreover, even if we were to live an entire millennium our experience would not necessarily inform us whether a given miracle happened. Indeed, Lewis and Ehrman both acknowledge that miracles are by definition improbable. It is always more likely that the witnesses to the alleged miracle are lying or deluded than that the miracle actually occurred. And yet, even as we know fraudulent cases exist, these by no means discredit all such claims regarding the miraculous. On this score I myself tend to be very skeptical when people talk of miraculous healings on the one hand or demonic possessions on the other. But then every once in a while I hear an account of some such phenomenon directly experienced by someone I trust and know not to be psychologically imbalanced. These are the moments that make me reconsider the possibility that maybe such things happen after all even if I (thankfully, in the case of possessions) have never directly experienced them.
At the end of the day, Lewis is right: I would be arguing in a circle if I were to conclude that miracles have not occurred merely because I have not experienced them. The bottom line for Lewis is that our experience cannot prove nature is closed, i.e. that it never admits of what from our point of view might look like “interruptions.” To be sure, living sanely in the world requires that we assume the laws of nature continue operating as we have always experienced them (We should not jump out of a boat expecting the gravity to be suspended before we sink into the sea). In fact, Lewis argues that the existence of miracles presupposes that nature is governed by laws. But this does not mean that walking on water is per se impossible. The impossibility of miracles is not something that can be proved, only assumed.
Benedict XVI and the Question of an “Open Philosophy”
I would like to conclude this post by returning to my point of departure in the previous one. In his 1988 Erasmus Lecture, the future Pope Benedict XVI poignantly wrote that “the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” In the course of his lecture, Benedict called for a “criticism of the criticism,” a self-critique of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. In the course of these two posts I have attempted to carry forward this critique in one small way, identifying the presence of philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and underscoring that believing miracles to be impossible is something people can only assume, not prove.
As one who daily engages in the craft of historical-critical exegesis, I find Benedict’s comments on this subject refreshing and liberating. In contrast with a naturalist, “ready-made philosophy” that precludes the possibility of miracles, the Christian approaches the Bible with an “open philosophy” that refuses to exclude the possibility that God himself “could enter into and work in human history, however improbable such a thing might at first appear.” This posture, deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition with its conviction that the boundary of time and eternity is permeable, allows for the Bible to be what the Church has always claimed it to be: the word of God in human words.
And yet when all is said and done, Christians should beware of thinking we have definitively proven that which we hold by faith. On the basis of reason alone we cannot conclude whether the Bible is the word of God, whether a given miracle has occurred, or whether Jesus rose from the dead. The real question undergirding all these has been given to us by Lewis. It is the question of whether or not God exists, whether we have independent reasons to believe that there exists a supernatural Being beyond the natural order, a Being to whom nature owes its existence and who may act within that order in ways we do not typically expect.
Read Lewis’ Miracles attentively, and there you will find well-argued reasons to believe that the answer to the above questions is “yes.” Moreover, even if you do not agree with him, I think you will find that he provides serious arguments which call into question whether a non-theistic worldview offers an intelligible account of the world in which we live. But this post’s aim remains much more modest in focusing on just one key thought from Lewis’ book: If we admit that nature is not the only thing that is—if we come to the conclusion that theism is true—then we are not “safe” from miracles. This by no means disproves atheism or agnosticism, but at least it points out one direction our dialogue needs to go.
“At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” - Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
My reflection today revolves around this poignant line from Joseph Ratzinger’s 1988 Erasmus Lecture in which he famously called for a “criticism of criticism.” In penning these words, the German cardinal was looking for a self-criticism of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. On the part of those involved in the craft of exegesis today, this would entail the effort to identify the philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and to consider honestly the degree of certainty warranted for the conclusions we draw when it comes to things biblical.
Joseph Ratzinger: Pure Objectivity Does Not Exist
Ratzinger’s comments a generation ago remain as relevant as ever for the sort of discussions we have here at Strange Notions. Whether we are aware of it or not, both Christians and atheists bring different philosophical presuppositions to the table when we sit down to debate about the Bible. These first principles are ‘spectacles’ we wear which color our entire view of reality, including what we think is going on within Scripture. Ratzinger for his part argues that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies here: “pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction,” for “the observer’s perspective is an essential determinant of the outcome of an experiment.”
What this means in terms of present purposes is that the answers to particular questions we ask of Scripture are in large part determined before we ever open up the text in the first place. What are we to make of Jesus’ miracles and of his resurrection in particular? If one is an atheist, then a natural explanation will be adduced for these phenomena. Such an explanation could take many forms: for example, a putative healing miracle could be explicable in light of modern medicine, or perhaps it was invented by the Gospel authors decades after Jesus’ life in order to convince others of his divinity.
On the other hand, a person who approaches the text assuming theism to be true will likely take the healing story at face value and attribute it to Jesus’ divine mastery over the natural order. Or perhaps the believer might take a position similar to that of the atheist but with the understanding that God in his providence shows us the face of Jesus by working through natural causes, whether that be medicine or human authors with their own agendas.
My point here is not to adjudicate which if any of these explanations best explains a given miracle story in the Gospels. Rather, I simply wish to underscore the reality that our conclusions about a given text are in large part governed by principles and commitments we had before opening up the Bible.
Throughout his career, Ratzinger has shown himself to be at once a great admirer and practitioner of modern exegesis as well as one of its most incisive critics. Far from rejecting a modern approach to Scripture, Ratzinger nevertheless admits that it “has brought forth great errors” caused in no small part by an unquestioning allegiance to certain “academic dogmas.”
A key mainstream assumption he finds particularly problematic is the belief (and I use that word here deliberately, to mean something one cannot prove) that God cannot enter in and work in human history. However improbable divine intervention in our world might appear, Ratzinger argues that this cannot be excluded a priori unless one has definitive proof that God does not exist. The miraculous is by its very nature, if you will, something unexpected and improbable. The jump from calling it improbable to impossible is what Ratzinger finds problematic, and he thinks that many people today read the Bible in this way without reflecting upon whether assuming such a conclusion is warranted or not.
Bart Ehrman: Everyone Has Presuppositions
Since this site is dedicated to fostering dialogue between believers and nonbelievers, I think it is only fair that we attempt to glimpse the same phenomena described by Ratzinger through a competing lens. One of my favorite authors in this regard is Bart Ehrman. The bestselling author, who describes himself as an agnostic, has written several books popularizing modern exegesis and challenging believers to consider more thoughtfully the origins of the Bible and Christianity. The reason I like reading Ehrman, as opposed to many other agnostic or atheist authors, lies not only in his accessible style but above all in his intellectual humility often lacking in believers and nonbelievers alike.
For this post, I simply wish to share some of his thoughts on doing historical biblical study as articulated in three of his recent books. I think there are many points of convergence with what Benedict is saying, even as the two authors ultimately come to quite different conclusions about the Christian faith.
Misquoting Jesus
In this book Ehrman rightly takes issue with those who dismiss modern scholarship out of hand as if it were only practiced by the godless. I suspect that the author is right in remarking that his own books are sometimes written off by those who—whether consciously or unconsciously—perceive his arguments as threatening to their faith. In response Ehrman remarks, “These scholars are not just a group of odd, elderly, basically irrelevant academics holed up in a few libraries around the world.”
In a real sense Christians owe our modern, translated Bibles to such people—some of whom are not believers. These academics have dedicated their careers to producing Bible editions that present us, as closely as possible, with the “original” texts of Scripture.
Most people fail to realize just how complicated was the origin of the biblical texts we now take for granted as “the Bible.” For one thing, we do not possess the original letters of the New Testament fresh from their authors’ pens. Moreover, the (many and much later) copies of texts we do possess contain important variants and points of seeming contradiction among themselves.
As if that were not enough, we then still have to consider the question of how to interpret what we do have. Which manuscripts ought to be considered authoritative? Which, if any, is the one Christians are supposed to consider inspired? As Ehrman says, “If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says.” For better or worse, that is clearly not the case.
Jesus, Interrupted
Ehrman here again goes to great length to make clear his conviction that modern biblical exegesis is not exclusively the domain of agnostic or atheist thinkers:
"My personal view is that a historical-critical approach to the Bible does not necessarily lead to agnosticism or atheism. It can in fact lead to a more intelligent and thoughtful faith— certainly more intelligent and thoughtful than an approach to the Bible that overlooks all of the problems that historical critics have discovered over the years."
The author mentions more than once that his closest friends are both scholars and believers. According to Ehrman, “[I]t was the problem of suffering, not a historical approach to the Bible, that led me to agnosticism.” He discusses the reasons for his conviction elsewhere in his book God’s Problem.
While I do not share his convictions regarding the problem of evil as an insurmountable obstacle to belief in God, that is the topic for another thread which receives frequent attention on this site. For our purposes, let us simply recall that Ehrman’s basis for professing agnosticism has primarily to do with the problem of evil, not the problems unearthed by modern biblical scholarship.
In my estimation, Ehrman does both sides of our debate a great service in debunking the notion that we hold our respective convictions on the basis of certain proofs. For example, he writes that we can neither prove nor disprove the resurrection:
"I am decidedly not saying that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I’m not saying the tomb was not empty. I’m not saying that he did not appear to his disciples and ascend into heaven. Believers believe that all these things are true. But they do not believe them because of historical evidence. They take the Christian claims on faith, not on the basis of proof. There can be no proof."
These words may alarm some Christians who think that we can “prove” the resurrection with the internal evidence of the New Testament or any other evidence for that matter. To be sure, we Christians can and must adduce reasons for our belief and be prepared to defend our faith against objections. But Ehrman is perfectly right to push us on the reality that these reasons do not amount to a definitive proof. That, indeed, is why we call it faith, not science.
Again, the Catholic position is by no means saying that faith is “unscientific” or at odds with science. Rather, the point here is that the Christian and the atheist may look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions because of our prior commitments which involve a decision to view the Bible through the lens of faith or not.
How Jesus Became God
Ehrman probes the issue of belief in the resurrection at greater length in his most recent work. Here he rightly criticizes an all-too common response of Christians when they are faced with the findings of modern biblical scholarship:
"The reason historians cannot prove or disprove whether God has performed a miracle in the past—such as raising Jesus from the dead—is not that historians are required to be secular humanists with an anti-supernaturalist bias. I want to stress this point because conservative Christian apologists, in order to score debating points, often claim that this is the case. In their view, if historians did not have anti-supernaturalist biases or assumptions, they would be able to affirm the historical 'evidence' that Jesus was raised from the dead."
Unfortunately, I have seen plenty in my years of teaching a mostly-Catholic audience to confirm Ehrman’s observations. Sometimes Catholic writers and speakers write off modern scholarship tout court with the use of scare quotes, calling modern thinkers “scholars” as if they were not actually scholars because they lack or at least seem to lack the faith that the Christian thinks is required for them to have any competence at all in their field.
Regarding evangelical Christians—Ehrman’s former self which I take to be his principal audience—the author adds a fascinating point to his criticism above:
"I should point out that these Christian apologists almost never consider the 'evidence' for other miracles from the past that have comparable— or even better—evidence to support them: for example, dozens of Roman senators claimed that King Romulus was snatched up into heaven from their midst; and many thousands of committed Roman Catholics can attest that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to them, alive—a claim that fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians roundly discount, even though the 'evidence' for it is very extensive…Protestant apologists interested in 'proving' that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted Blessed Virgin Mary."
This point of criticism is difficult for any Christian to address, and a robust response is needed. While it is not my point here to take on this problem, I would simply note that for the Catholic tradition God’s grace (including the possibility of miracles) is not constrained within the visible confines of the Catholic Church. Unlike some Christians, Catholics are not intrinsically opposed to the possibility of a non-Christian performing or experiencing a miracle.
In a later section of this book, Ehrman turns aside from the above considerations to consider in more detail the fundamentals of how to do history properly. At a pivotal point he says something which I could have mistaken as coming from the pen of Pope Benedict had I not known otherwise:
"The first thing to stress is that everyone has presuppositions, and it is impossible to live life, think deep thoughts , have religious experiences, or engage in historical inquiry without having presuppositions. The life of the mind cannot proceed without presuppositions. The question, though, is always this: What are the appropriate presuppositions for the task at hand?"
This is one of the questions that interests me most and which I think lies at the heart of Pope Benedict’s statement that the debate in exegesis is at bottom a philosophical one. We can never completely suspend our biases, but we can at least do our best to remain conscious of their presence and engage in a self-critique that helps to purify our thought and attune it with the breadth of knowledge we can gain from the sources available to us.
In this critique, a few pivotal questions emerge: Whose philosophical presuppositions best position us for an accurate understanding of the nature of things? Which ones best enable us to live well? And what would the process for making such a determination look like? These are issues I hope to take up in my next post at Strange Notions, but here my concern remains much more basic in showing that there is a problem recognized by good thinkers on both sides of the religious/non-religious aisle.
I would like to draw these remarks to a close with a word on complete objectivity which Ehrman, like Benedict, rejects as a possibility in our effort to interpret the Scriptures. As Ehrman states, “This is one of the great ironies of modern religion: more than almost any other religious group on the planet, conservative evangelicals, and most especially fundamentalist Christians, are children of the Enlightenment.”
Both modern Christians and modern skeptics yearn for a level of certitude that simply does not exist or exists for only a very limited range of truth claims. In Ehrman’s words, “[F]aith in a miracle is a matter of faith, not of objectively established knowledge.” For instance, if Jesus really did perform the miracles the gospels claim he did, then this would help explain how Jesus’ opponents could deny these actions in the face of evidence that God was working through him.
It is the same dynamic that we find in Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. The rich man suffering in Hades begs Father Abraham to send someone to his living relatives and warn them about the place of torment, to which Abraham replies, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Here again, people could look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions, a process largely determined by their prior convictions.
So did Jesus really come back from the dead as the above parable intimates? And was this parable even uttered by the historical Jesus in the first place? These are important questions which—for both believers and nonbelievers alike—are often answered even before they are asked. In the following post we will continue the conversation in more detail, but for now this is a good place to begin our discussion.
NOTE: Last week we featured a brief reflection by Fr. Robert Barron on biblical skeptic Bart Ehrman's new book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014). Today we feature a more in-depth review by Trent Horn.
Most Christians say the apostles came to believe Jesus was God after seeing how Christ’s resurrection vindicated his claims to divinity. But Bart Ehrman’s newest book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, offers another theory.
Ehrman is popular New Testament textual critic who was once a Fundamentalist Christian and is now an agnostic. Ehrman’s big claim to fame came with his 2005 book Misquoting Jesus, where he argued that the text of the New Testament was corrupted through the scribal copying process. He then argued that this corruption jeopardizes our orthodox understanding of the Bible. The book has sold millions of copies, and you’ve no doubt seen or heard Ehrman on late-night television, including the Colbert Report.
Ehrman’s thesis in his latest book is that the divide between human and divine in the ancient world was not as clean cut and “uncrossable” as it is for modern religious believers. According to Ehrman, in the ancient world it was common for the divide to be crossed in either the “gods come down in the likeness of men” direction or the “men go up and become gods” direction. Within this cultural milieu it was not improbable for the apostles to believe that their good rabbi had become “God.”
I enjoyed the book, and I think it's disappointing how many Christians jump into an automatic “pan-the-heretic” mode before reading it. Don’t misunderstand me: I think Ehrman is wrong, but his book is well-written.
Gods and men in the Ancient World
The first two chapters describe the malleable barrier between gods and men. The first few pages left a sour taste in my mouth. Ehrman begins with a story about a first-century miracle worker whose disciples believed he was the Son of God and had survived his own death. But, surprise! Ehrman’s not talking about Jesus but another supposed miracle-worker and contemporary of Jesus named Apollonius of Tyana. This sets the stage for Ehrman to talk about how in the ancient world men who become gods and vice-versa were really a dime a dozen.
However, Ehrman neglects to mention that although we have multiple sources for the life of Jesus we only have one source for Apollonius. Ehrman says this source, Philostratus, recorded what eyewitnesses said about Apollonius, but neglects to mention that the only eyewitness mentioned is one Damis from Nineveh, a city that didn’t even exist in the first century (which means Damis probably did not exist either). Ehrman also doesn’t mention how the wife of emperor Severus commissioned Philostratus to write the biography of Apollonius over a century after Apollonius’s “death.” The Life of Apollonius was probably created as a competitor to the Gospel accounts of Jesus which, by that point, were in wide circulation across the Roman Empire.
Ehrman acknowledges this theory in a footnote but then claims that all he is doing is showing how belief in “God-men” was easily accepted in the Roman cultural context; but I find this answer unsatisfying. If belief in a God-man like Apollonius was only easily accepted because it was crafted to imitate Jesus, it still doesn’t explain how Jesus’ divinity came about.
Perhaps the most striking concession Ehrman makes in this section is that Apollonius is the only story of a true “God-man” like Jesus. Ehrman writes, “I don’t know of any other cases in ancient Greek or Roman thought of this kind of “God-man,” where an already existing divine being is said to be born of a mortal woman." If the story of Apollonius is parasitic upon the story of Jesus, then that makes the story of the “God-man” Jesus all the more exceptional and difficult to explain without recourse to a miracle.
The Resurrection of Jesus
In chapter three we get a crash course in “historical Jesus studies” or the use of objective criteria to find what the nineteenth-century Biblical critic Martin Kähler called “The Jesus of History” (as opposed to the supposedly non-historical “Christ of faith” who inhabits the catechism). At about this point I noticed that some of what Ehrman was discussing also popped up in his previous book, Did Jesus Exist?
I think it was New Testament critic Burton Mack who said that the greatest mystery of Christianity is the question of how Jesus came to be worshipped as God so quickly after his death. Mythicists who deny Jesus existed have a simple answer: he was always worshipped as God and the human part was added later. Ehrman rejects that view, but has to find a way to get Jesus up the "ontological totem pole" at a very fast rate. Ehrman claims to be able to do this in his analysis of the Resurrection, an “event” that he says was necessary for Jesus not to be remembered as just another failed messiah.
Ehrman is adamant that this was not a fluffy “resurrection of Easter faith,” nor was it a “spiritual resurrection” as other critics try to make it out to be. It was instead a real bodily resurrection that the apostles proclaimed. He is careful to say, however, that it was belief in the resurrection that caused the apostles to think Jesus was God, and not the resurrection itself. Ehrman then devotes two chapters to providing a natural explanation for how this belief in the resurrection came about.
His main point is that although he once believed that we could know Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, he has now changed his mind and says we can’t know that for sure. He says we simply can’t know what happened to the body of Jesus. We can know, however, that the apostles had visions of Jesus after his death, but that was probably because they were bereaved and such visions are actually quite common. He says the answer to the question of whether or not these visions were real or hallucinatory is beyond the reach of the historian.
My Thoughts on the Resurrection
I’m not convinced by Ehrman’s arguments against the authenticity of the burial tradition. He says that because Joseph and the empty tomb are not mentioned in the creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, this shows it was probably a legendary development. But the creed’s use of the word buried (in Greek, hetaphe) implies something formal and ceremonial, not a mere chucking of a body into a ditch. In addition, there’s no reason to include those details in 1 Corinthians because they were not needed. When the creed says “Christ appeared” it’s natural to ask “to whom did he appear?” The creed answers this question with a list of witnesses. When it says Christ was buried, we don’t need to know who buried him, just as we don’t need to know who killed Christ (something the creed in 1 Corinthians also doesn’t mention).
In regards to the visions, how do we know that the disciples would have been bereaved and not angry that Jesus turned out to be a fraud instead of the messiah? I’m sure the disciples of John the Baptist mourned his death and may have felt guilty for not aiding him during his imprisonment, buttheir grief did not lead them to proclaim he had risen from the dead.
Overall, Ehrman’s treatment of the resurrection is good when he goes in depth about a subject and poor when he gives an off-hand response to an objection. For example, his cursory write-off of the resurrection accounts being contradictory and therefore not being reliable is not compelling because the accounts only differ in secondary details. Many ancient histories do the same. For example, among Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio we have three different accounts of where Nero was when Rome burned, but that doesn’t mean Nero wasn’t in the city when it happened.
The Path to Orthodoxy
In chapters eight and nine Ehrman narrates the struggles within the early Church as Christians sought to lay out in specific detail what they believed about God and Jesus. If you ever take the time to read the canons from councils like Nicea and Chalcedon, then you see how it’s really difficult to describe orthodoxy correctly. It’s really easy, however, to make your view a heresy. What is the Trinity? Are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each gods? Nope! That’s tri-theism. Are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit each a part of God? Nope! That’s modalism. While Ehrman’s description of the early Christological controversies is fairly useful, there are parts where I think he oversimplified to the point of error.
One of those would be his assertion that the third-century popes endorsed the heresy of modalism, which claims that there is one God who is one person and that this person appears in different “modes” or roles. In this view of God, there is no relationship between the Father and the Son since they are the same person (God) just as my role as “husband” has no personal relationship as “son.” Ehrman says that Pope Callistus I (218-223) endorsed this view, but our only source for this charge is Hippolytus, who, Ehrman neglects to tell his readers, was a bitter opponent of Callistus—making his charges unreliable. Callistus was certainly no modalist because he excommunicated Sabellius, one of modalism’s primary proponents (another name for modalism is Sabellianism). J.N.D. Kelly’s Oxford reference book on the popes gives a good description of the matter here.
Closing Thoughts
There’s a lot more to discuss here (especially Ehrman’s view of Paul’s Christology), but overall I think Ehrman’s work represents the typical “Jesus was a failed end-times prophet” approach that is popular within historical Jesus studies. Ehrman does part ways with some of his like-minded colleagues, such as Dale Allison (see page 185 of How Jesus Became God), and at those points it’s nice to see Ehrman put forward a compelling argument instead of just lobbing an assertion.
For readers who want a fuller treatment of the arguments in opposition to Ehrman’s case, I’d recommend the following resources:
How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature—A Response to Bart Ehrman. As the tile suggests, this book represents the viewpoints of five authors who disagree with Ehrman’s thesis. Kind of a mixed bag when it comes to quality, but Craig Evans’s essay on Jesus’ burial is worth the whole price.
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. This book by Richard Bauckham is a must-read for anyone who glosses over Ehrman’s claim that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses and so cannot be trusted.
The Resurrection of the Son of God. The well-known New Testament scholar N.T. Wright gives one of the most comprehensive treatments of both the resurrection and the surrounding cultural context that makes a natural “legend-based” explanation of the resurrection very implausible.
Well, it’s Easter time, and that means that the mainstream media and publishing houses can be counted upon to issue de-bunking attacks on orthodox Christianity. The best-publicized of these is Bart Ehrman’s latest book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.
Many by now know at least the outlines of Ehrman’s biography: once a devout Bible-believing evangelical Christian, trained at Wheaton College, the alma mater of Billy Graham, he saw the light and became an agnostic scholar and is now on a mission to undermine the fundamental assumptions of Christianity. In this most recent tome, Ehrman lays out what is actually a very old thesis, going back at least to the 18th century and repeated in skeptical circles ever since, namely, that Jesus was a simple itinerant preacher who never claimed to be divine and whose “resurrection” was in fact an invention of his disciples who experienced hallucinations of their master after his death. Of course Ehrman, like so many of his skeptical colleagues across the centuries, breathlessly presents this thesis as though he has made a brilliant discovery. But basically, it’s the same old story. When I was a teenager, I read British Biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield’s Passover Plot, which lays out the same narrative, and just a few months ago, I read Reza Aslan’s Zealot, which pursues a very similar line, and I’m sure next Christmas or Easter I will read still another iteration of the theory.
And so, once more into the breach. Ehrman’s major argument for the thesis that Jesus did not consider himself divine is that explicit statements of Jesus’ divine identity can be found only in the later fourth Gospel of John, whereas the three Synoptic Gospels, earlier and thus presumably more historically reliable, do not feature such statements from Jesus himself or the Gospel writers. This is so much nonsense. It is indeed the case that the most direct affirmations of divinity are found in John—“I and the Father are one;” “before Abraham was I am;” “He who sees me sees the Father,” etc. But equally clear statements of divinity are on clear display in the Synoptics, provided we know how to decipher a different semiotic system.
For example, in Mark’s Gospel, we hear that as the apostolic band is making its way toward Jerusalem with Jesus, “they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid” (Mk. 10:32). Awe and terror are the typical reactions to the presence of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Similarly, when Matthew reports that Jesus, at the beginning of the last week of his earthly life, approached Jerusalem from the east, by way of Bethpage and Bethany and the Mount of Olives, he is implicitly affirming Ezekiel’s prophecy that the glory of the Lord, which had departed from his temple, would return from the east, by way of the Mount of Olives. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus addresses the crippled man who had been lowered through the roof of Peter’s house, saying, “My son, your sins are forgiven,” to which the bystanders respond, “Who does this man think he is? Only God can forgive sins.” What is implied there is a Christology as high as anything in John’s Gospel.
And affirmations of divinity on the lips of Jesus himself positively abound in the Synoptics. When he says, in Matthew’s Gospel, “He who does not love me more than his mother or father is not worthy of me,” he is implying that he himself is the greatest possible good. When in Luke’s Gospel, he says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away,” he is identifying himself with the very Word of God. When he says in Matthew’s Gospel, in reference to himself, “But I tell you, something greater than the Temple is here,” he is affirming unambiguously that he is divine, since for first century Jews, only Yahweh himself would be greater than the Jerusalem Temple. Perhaps most remarkably, when he says, almost as a tossed-off aside at the commencement of the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard it said, but I say…” he is claiming superiority to the Torah, which was the highest possible authority for first century Jews. But the only one superior to the Torah would be the author of the Torah, namely God himself. Examples such as these from the Synoptic authors could be multiplied indefinitely. The point is that the sharp demarcation between the supposedly “high” Christology of John and the “low” Christology of the Synoptics, upon which the Ehrman thesis depends, is simply wrong-headed.
And now to the “hallucinations.” Most of the skeptical critics of Christianity subscribe to some version of David Hume’s account of the miraculous. Hume said that since no reasonable person could possibly believe in miracles, those who claimed to have experienced a miracle must be unreasonable. They must, then, be delusional or naïve or superstitious. Hume’s logic was circular and unconvincing in the eighteenth century, and it hasn’t improved with age. Yes, if we assume that miracles are impossible, then those who report them are, to some degree, insane, but what if we don’t make things easy for ourselves and assume the very proposition we are trying to prove? What if we keep an open mind and assume that miracles are, though rare, possible? Then we don’t have to presume without argument that those who claim to have experienced them are delusional, and we can look at their reports with unjaundiced eyes.
What in fact do we find when we turn to the resurrection appearance accounts in the New Testament? We find reports of many different people who experienced Jesus alive after his death and burial: Peter, John, Mary Magdalene, the twelve, “five hundred brothers at once,” and Paul. Does it strike you as reasonable that all of these people, on different occasions, were having hallucinations of the same person? The case of Paul is especially instructive. Ehrman argued that the visions of the risen Jesus were created in the anxious brains of his grief-stricken disciples, eager to commune once more with their dead Master. But Paul wasn’t grieving for Jesus at all; in fact, he was actively persecuting Jesus’ followers. He didn’t crave communion with a dead Master; he was trying to stamp out the memory of someone he took to be a pernicious betrayer of Judaism. And yet, his experience of the risen Jesus was so powerful that it utterly transformed his life, and he went to his death defending the objectivity of it.
Debunkers of orthodox Christianity have been around for a long time, and in some ways, it is testimony to the enduring power of the Christian faith that the nay-sayers feel obliged to repeat the same tired arguments over and over.
A small handful of scholars today, and a much larger group of Internet commenters, maintain that Jesus never existed. Proponents of this position, known as mythicists, claim that Jesus is a purely mythical figure invented by the writers of the New Testament (or its later copyists.) In this post I’ll offer the top four reasons (from weakest to strongest) that convince me Jesus of Nazareth was a real person without relying on the Gospel accounts of his life.
4. It is the mainstream position in academia.
I admit this is the weakest of my four reasons, but I list it to show that there is no serious debate among the vast majority of scholars in the fields related to the question of the existence of Jesus. John Dominic Crossan, who co-founded the skeptical Jesus Seminar, denies that Jesus rose from the dead but is confident that Jesus was an historical person. He writes, “That [Jesus] was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be" (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 145). Bart Ehrman is an agnostic who is forthright in his rejection of mythicism. Ehrman teaches at the University of North Carolina and is widely regarded as an expert on the New Testament documents. He writes, “The view that Jesus existed is held by virtually every expert on the planet” (Did Jesus Exist?, p. 4).
3. Jesus’ existence is confirmed by extra-Biblical sources.
The first century Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus twice. The shorter reference is in Book 20 of his Antiquities of the Jews and describes the stoning of law breakers in A.D. 62. One of the criminals is described as “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James.” What makes this passage authentic is that it lacks Christian terms like “the Lord,” it fits into the context of this section of the antiquities, and the passage is found in every manuscript copy of the Antiquities.
Titus Flavius Josephus (37 – c. 100)
The longer passage in Book 18 is called the Testimonium Flavianum. Scholars are divided on this passage because, while it does mention Jesus, it contains phrases that were almost certainly added by Christian copyists. These include phrases that would never have been used by a Jew like Josephus, such as saying of Jesus, “He was the Christ” or “he appeared alive again on the third day.”
Mythicists maintain that the entire passage is a forgery because it is out of context and interrupts Josephus’ previous narrative. But this view neglects the fact that writers in the ancient world did not use footnotes and would often wander into unrelated topics in their writings. According to New Testament scholar James D. G. Dunn, the passage has clearly been subject to Christian redaction, but there are also words Christians would never use of Jesus. These include calling Jesus “a wise man” or referring to themselves as a “tribe” which is strong evidence Josephus originally wrote something like the following:
“At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who received the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians (named after him) has not died out” (Jesus Remembered, p. 141).
Furthermore, the Roman historian Tacitus records in his Annals that after the great fire in Rome, Emperor Nero fastened the blame on a despised group of people called Christians. Tacitus identifies this group thusly: “Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius.” Bart D. Ehrman writes, “Tacitus’s report confirms what we know from other sources, that Jesus was executed by order of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, sometime during Tiberius’s reign" (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to Early Christian Writings, 212).
2. The Early Church Fathers don’t describe the mythicist heresy.
Those who deny that Jesus existed usually argue that the first Christians believed Jesus was just a cosmic savior figure who communicated to believers through visions. Later Christians then added the apocryphal details of Jesus’ life (such as his execution under Pontius Pilate) in order to ground him in first century Palestine. If the mythicist theory is true, then at some point in Christian history there would had to have been a break or outright revolt between new converts who believed in a real Jesus and the “orthodox” establishment view that Jesus never existed.
St. Irenaeus (2nd century – c. AD 202)
Other heresies, such as Gnosticism or Donatism, were like that stubborn bump in the carpet. You could stamp them out in one place only to have them pop up again centuries later, but the mythcist “heresy” is nowhere to be found in the early Church. So what’s more likely: that the early Church hunted down and destroyed every member of mythicist Christianity in order to prevent the heresy from spreading and conveniently never wrote about it, or that the early Christians were not mythicists and so there was nothing for the Church Fathers to campaign against? (Some mythcists argue that the heresy of Docetism included a mythic Jesus, but I don’t find that claim convincing. See this blog post for a good rebuttal of that idea).
1. St. Paul knew the disciples of Jesus.
Almost all mythicists concede that St. Paul was a real person, because we have his letters. In Galatians 1:18-19, Paul describes his personal meeting in Jerusalem with Peter and James, “the brother of the Lord.” Surely if Jesus was a fictional person then one of his own relatives would have known that (note that in Greek the term for brother could also mean kin). Mythicists offer several explanations for this passage which Robert Price considers to be part of what he calls “The most powerful argument against the Christ-Myth theory.” (The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems, p. 333).
Earl Doherty, a mythicist, claims that James’ title probably referred to a pre-existing Jewish monastic group who called themselves “the brothers of the Lord” of which James may have been the leader (Jesus: Neither God nor Man, p. 61). But we have no corroborating evidence that such a group existed in Jerusalem at that time. Furthermore, Paul criticizes the Corinthians for professing allegiance to a certain individual, even Christ, and as a result creating division within the Church (1 Corinthians 1: 11-13). It is unlikely Paul would praise James for being a member of such a divisive faction (Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd, The Jesus Legend, p. 206).
Price claims that the title could be a reference to James’ spiritual imitation of Christ. He appeals to a nineteenth-century Chinese zealot who called himself “Jesus’ little brother” as proof of his theory that “brother” could mean spiritual follower (p. 338). But such a far removed example from the context of first century Palestine makes Price’s reasoning pretty hard to accept when compared to a plain reading of the text.
In conclusion, I think there are many good reasons to think that Jesus really did exist and was the founder of a religious sect in first century Palestine. This includes the evidence we have from extra-Biblical sources, the Church Fathers, and the first-hand testimony of Paul. I understand much more can be written on this subject but I think this is a good starting point for those who are interested in the (largely Internet-based) debate over the historical Jesus.
(P.S. If you think Jesus was just a rip-off of pagan religions (such as the Egyptian God Horus), then please see my colleague Jon Sorensen’s magnificent takedown of that hypothesis.)
