From my perspective, both of those views of Jesus Christ were/are extremely naïve. It is hard to take someone seriously who swallows the biblical narrative about Jesus hook, line and sinker; but it is also hard to entertain a thesis which ignores or dismisses so much evidence. One approach seeks to rescue Jesus from the extrabiblical myths and legends which have arisen about him, and the other seeks to totally discredit the notion that there was such a person! Both approaches, however, would have us believe that there has been a massive conspiracy to distort the truth of the matter! I've said it before: Humans tend to love the extremes.
Personally, I think Professor Bart Ehrman has taken a very scholarly and logical approach to the subject of "The Historical Jesus." In his book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, Ehrman devotes a whole chapter to the subject. In it, he immediately confronts the elephant in the room - that there are "problems with our sources." He also quickly acknowledges the dearth of non-Christian sources available to us (brief mentions by Pliny, Tacitus and Josephus - which was rendered less useful by the tampering of Christian scribes). Nevertheless, Professor Ehrman reminds us that we do have Christian sources in the guise of four gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John) from the First Century which can (and do) provide us with some historically reliable material in the hands of a competent scholar.
Professor Ehrman wrote that "Historians who have wanted to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus have therefore had to avoid two extremes in dealing with the Gospels. One extreme is to ignore the problems and pretend the Gospels are all perfectly accurate, historically trustworthy, biographies of Jesus. They are not that. The other extreme is to throw up your hands in despair and declare that we can't know anything about the historical Jesus. That is not true either. These Gospels can be used as historical sources; but they need to be used carefully, following rigorous methodological principles. When these principles are followed, it becomes clear that we can indeed say some things about what it is Jesus really said, did, and experienced." (p. 304, The Bible, Oxford University Press, 2018)
Earlier in his book, Ehrman also did an excellent job of looking at the sources used by the anonymous authors of our canonical gospels and persuasively demonstrated that both Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily from Mark. Like other scholars before him, he also concluded that Matthew, Luke and John all relied on other older sources (written and oral) for significant portions of their accounts. Ehrman listed the four criteria which scholars like him apply to those gospel accounts to extract historically credible information as demanding: 1) Antiquity, 2) Independent Attestation, 3) Dissimilarity, and 4) Contextual Credibility.
Using these criteria, the professor tells us that there are a number of things which we can know about the historical Jesus. According to Ehrman, Jesus was a practicing Jew who hailed from Nazareth (a very poor and backwater town), and that he was baptized by John the Baptist. Ehrman also informs us that Jesus' preaching and teaching was firmly rooted in the tradition of an apocalyptic prophet. Moreover, using his scholarly criteria, Ehrman informs us that we can be very confident that Jesus Christ was crucified by the Romans. The professor, of course, takes no position on the those elements of the gospel accounts which must rest entirely on the premise of faith for Christians (e.g. the virgin birth in Bethlehem, the miracles and the resurrection). Elsewhere in the book, Ehrman also makes plain that Christ was almost certainly born in the year 4 BCE and died in the year 30 CE.
Hence, from an historical perspective, Bart Ehrman demonstrates that we can know some things about the real Jesus of Nazareth. Whether or not Christian claims about the man are to be believed or not is a matter of personal opinion. For me, in addition to the historical facts which Ehrman underscored in his treatise, I also believe that Jesus of Nazareth was/is the Messiah promised in the Old Testament, the Son of God and the Savior of humankind. What do you think?
An article on the American Atheists website asks "Did Jesus Exist?" and questions the dearth of non-Christian references to Jesus from the First Century. (see https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/did-jesus-exist/) Why would such an important individual escape the notice of his contemporaries? Certainly, in the light of what Christ and his religion became, the absence of such references can appear glaring and compelling to us.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it is unfair and misleading to judge the dearth of historical references to Christ based on subsequent developments. During his own lifetime, we must remember that Jesus was from an unimportant family who lived modestly in a backwater village which was part of an unimportant region of a great empire. Indeed, the more appropriate question would be: Why would anyone expect to find any references to an itinerant preacher who was executed as a criminal by the local representative of that empire?
In fact, when one considers the situation of the Jews in the First Century relative to their Roman overlords and the momentous events which took place in 70 CE, the notion that either the Jewish or Roman elites of the time would have taken notice of the life and death of a poor itinerant Galilean preacher becomes absurd! Moreover, even after his followers began to be noticed by those elites, they were dismissed as a bizarre aberration of an ancient faith who mostly annoyed those few individuals who did take notice of them! And we must also remember that a scholarly consensus has formed around the fact that only a small percentage of the population was literate during this era (not a lot of folks who could read and write).