Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Mythical View of Jesus
1. Earl Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 2009), vii–viii. This is a much-expanded and somewhat revised edition of Doherty’s earlier book, which is sometimes looked upon as a modern classic in the field of mythicism, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 1999).
2. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, ed. John Bowden (1906; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 478. Quoted with approbation by Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Co., 2004), 166. Harpur realizes that Schweitzer does not mean that Jesus never existed, even though the way he cites the passage may well leave the unwary reader with that impression.
3. For fuller summaries of these early works, see Schweitzer, Quest, chaps. 22 and 23 (he added these chapters on mythicists only after the success of his first edition) and the brief but helpful overview of Archibald Robertson, Jesus: Myth or History? (London: Watts & Co., 1946). See also Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 1.
4. See Schweitzer, Quest, chap. 11.
5. J. M. Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. (London: Watts & Co., 1910).
6. See Schweitzer, Quest, 381–89.
7. Robert Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003); Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011).
8. Frank Zindler, Religions and Scriptures, vol. 1 of Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Won’t Reason (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011).
9. Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
10. A. Robertson, Jesus: Myth or History?, 107.
11. George A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 2nd ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986). See also the following of his writings, most of which do not significantly alter or advance his argument (but see note 20): The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988); The Jesus Legend (Peru, IL: Carus, 1996); Cutting Jesus Down to Size: What Higher Criticism Has Achieved and Where It Leaves Christianity (Chicago: Open Court, 2009); “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?” Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 19–25.
12. A. Robertson, Jesus: Myth or History?, x.
13. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 1:87.
14. I. Howard Marshall does devote a longer footnote to the question, I Believe in the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).
15. Mythicists are taken seriously by the two German New Testament scholars Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 122–23.
16. D. M. Murdock, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited, 1999).
17. Murdock, Christ Conspiracy, 21.
18. Murdock, Christ Conspiracy, 154.
19. Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 2.
20. For a good, direct, and recent statement of the mythicist view, see George A. Wells, “Independent Confirmation.” As will be clear, in one important respect Wells differs from most other mythicists: rather than tracing the invention of the historical Jesus back to the myths about the pagan gods, Wells thinks that it derived from Jewish wisdom traditions, in which God’s wisdom was thought to have been a personalized being who was with him at the creation and then came to visit humans (see, for example, Proverbs 8).
Chapter 2: Non-Christian Sources for the Life of Jesus
1. Robert Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011), 15.
2. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 25, emphasis his.
3. The only indication in the New Testament Gospels that Jesus could write is in the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8, where he writes on the ground while dealing with the woman’s accusers (in the context of saying, “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her”). Unfortunately, this passage was not originally in the Gospel of John but was added later. See my discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005), 63–65. There are only a couple of later legends of Jesus writing, including the famous exchange of letters that he has with King Abgar of Edessa, who sent him a request to be healed, to which Jesus graciously replied in writing. I include a translation of both letters in the book I published with my colleague Zlatko Plese, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 413–17.
4. Throughout this book I will be using the term pagan in the non-derogatory sense used by historians to refer to anyone who subscribed to any of the many polytheistic religions of antiquity—that is, anyone who was neither Jewish nor Christian. The term when used by historians does not have any negative connotations.
5. See the article on “Pontius Pilate” by Daniel Schwartz in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:395–401.
6. William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989).
7. Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).
8. On the question of the sources of the Gospels, see my fuller discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), chaps. 8 and 12.
9. For a collection of them, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
10. See the discussion in Hezser, Jewish Literacy, esp. 422–26.
11. For an accessible translation of this letter, along with translations of the other Roman sources that I mention in this chapter, see Robert M. Grant, Second-Century Christianity: A Collection of Fragments, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 3–12.
12. Representative of this view is Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Co., 2004), 162.
13. There is a large literature on Josephus. Of particular use for the topics I will be dealing with in this book, see Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002).
14. See the discussion in John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Reconsidering the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 59–69.
15. See Meier, Marginal Jew, 59–69.
16. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 534; his entire discussion can be found on 533–86.
17. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 535.
18. For two of the more important studies of the apologists, see R. M. Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988), and Eugene Gallagher, Divine Man or Magician? Celsus and Origen on Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1982).
19. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 562.
20. Ken Olson, “Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999): 305–22.
21. J. Carleton Paget, “Some Observations on Josephus and Christianity,” Journal of Theological Studies 52, no. 2 (2001): 539–624; Alice Whealey, “Josephus, Eusebius of Caesarea, and the Testimonium Flavianum,” in Josephus und das Neue Testament, ed. Christfried Böttrich and Jens Herzer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 73–116.
22. Final judgment on the authenticity of the Testimonium will ultimately depend, in the short term, on the strength of the argument that Olson can make in his doctoral dissertation and especially on the critical reaction to it by experts on both Josephus and Eusebius. However that debate resolves itself, it should be obvious that my case for the historicity of Jesus does not depend on the reliability of Josephus’s testimony, even though I take the passage to be, at its core, authentic.
23. The most conservative estimates put the population under one million. See Magen Broshi, Bread, Wine, Walls, and Scrolls (Sheffield, Eng.: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002).
24. Here I am simply summarizing my discussion in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 62–63. For fuller discussions, see the classic studies of R. Travers Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (New York: Ktav, 1903), and Morris Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1950).
Chapter 3: The Gospels as Historical Sources
1. See my college-level textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), chap. 8, and the bibliography that I offer there.
2. See Robert Kysar, John the Maverick Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).
3. Some scholars think that John knew and used the synoptic Gospels, but I think this is unlikely. Even if he did, he includes many stories unrelated to those of the synoptics, and in these at least there certainly cannot have been any dependence. On the entire question, see D. Moody Smith, John Among the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2001).
4. For a new translation of the Gospel of Thomas by Zlatko Plese, see Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Plese, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 310–35; for a discussion of the contents and character of the Gospel, see my book Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), chap. 3.
5. For translation of the Gospel of Peter, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels, 371–87; for discussion of its contents and character, see Ehrman, Lost Christianities, chap. 1.
6. For a full commentary on the Gospel of Peter, see Paul Foster, The Gospel of Peter (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
7. Translation and brief discussion of Papyrus Egerton 2 in Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels, 245–53.
8. This is a highly fragmentary account in which Jesus is beside the Jordan River, in which he may be described as performing a miracle, possibly to illustrate his parable about the miraculous growth of seeds.
9. See Ehrman, New Testament, chap. 8.
10. For a spirited attempt to dispense with Q and to argue that Matthew was the source of Luke, see Mark Goodacre, The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). As lively as the argument of the book is, it has failed to convince most of the scholars working in the field.
11. Joel Marcus, Mark: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, 2 vols., Anchor Bible Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000–2009).
12. I give some of the evidence, with bibliography, in New Testament, chap. 12.
13. April D. DeConick, The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation (London: T & T Clark, 2006). For the Gospel of Peter, see the less convincing argument of John Dominic Crossan, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1988). Even if one does not accept the extreme views of Crossan about a Cross Gospel that originated before even Mark, which was used by all four of the New Testament Gospel writers, a good case can still be made that the Gospel of Peter is based on written sources.
14. See Edgar McKnight, What Is Form Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969).
Chapter 4: Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels
1. For an introduction to Papias and a translation of all his surviving literary remains, see Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 2:86–119.
2. This and the following excerpts of Papias are taken from Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 85–119.
3. See John 7:53–8:11.
4. See my discussion in Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), 107–10.
5. See Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 107–10.
6. For introductions and translations, see Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:203–321.
7. I have taken translations from Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 203–321.
8. See Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:23–25.
9. This is the oldest form of the baptism scene found in the Gospel of Luke; see my discussion in Bart Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 73–79.
10. See my fuller study, Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011), 79–114.
11. See Ehrman, Forged, 43–78.
12. See chap. 3. To recall: the seven independent Gospel witnesses are Mark, parts of Matthew, parts of Luke, John (in whole or in part), the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas (in whole or in part), and Papyrus Egerton 2 (in whole or in part).
13. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 28.
14. See Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 27 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 705–7.
15. See Victor Paul Furnish, Jesus According to Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
16. One place where it is sometimes thought that Paul is quoting a prophecy instead of a saying of the historical Jesus is in 1 Corinthians 14:34–37, where he instructs women to be silent in the churches because this is “a command of the Lord.” The problem in this passage is that there are solid reasons, including some manuscript evidence, to suggest that the injunction for women not to speak was not originally part of 1 Corinthians but was added by later scribes. In that case, the command of the Lord would have to do with the passage before 14:34, where Paul urges order in the worship services instead of allowing chaos to reign, as it appears to have been doing in Corinth. One can easily imagine a teaching of Jesus where he instructed his disciples to be harmonious, unified, and orderly rather than self-aggrandizing and disruptive. Some such saying rather than a Christian prophecy may well lie behind Paul’s injunction.
17. I am drawing these examples from Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 19.
18. George A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (Peru, IL: Carus, 1996), 14.
19. George A. Wells, “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus,” Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 22.
Chapter 5: Two Key Data for the Historicity of Jesus
1. Earlier in my career I played with the idea that Cephas and Peter were two different persons, but now I think that’s a bit bizarre—as most of the critics of the idea have pointed out! The most compelling reason for identifying them as the same person is not simply John 1:42 but the historical fact that neither Cephas nor Peter was a personal name in the ancient world. Peter is the Greek word for “rock,” which in Aramaic was Cephas. And so Jesus gave this person—his real name was Simon—a nickname, “the Rock.” It seems highly unlikely that two different persons were given precisely the same nickname at the same time in history when this name did not previously exist.
2. For example, in Paul’s two longest letters, Romans and 1 Corinthians, he uses the name Jesus by itself a total of one time. He frequently, however, speaks of “the Lord.”
3. Robert Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 336.
4. J. M. Robertson, Jesus and Judas: A Textual and Historical Investigation (London: Watts & Co., 1927).
5. George A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 168.
6. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 336–43.
7. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 352.
8. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 349.
9. Price here is building on the imaginative but wildly speculative and widely discredited views of Robert Eisenmann in his book James, the Brother of Jesus (New York: Viking, 1997). For sober evaluations of what scholars think about the Dead Sea Scrolls and their community, see the authoritative and justly acclaimed works of such scholars as Joseph Fitzmyer, Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Paulist Press, 1992); Géza Vermès, The Story of the Scrolls (London: Penguin, 2010); and James Vanderkam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).
10. Translation of R. B. Wright, “Psalms of Solomon,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 2:667.
11. Translation of E. Isaac, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. Charlesworth, 2:49.
12. See John Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
13. Richard Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed (n.p.: Lulu Press, 2009), 34, emphasis his.
14. See John Collins, “Daniel, Book of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 2:29–37.
15. Louis Hartman, The Book of Daniel: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), 251.
16. Hartman, Book of Daniel, 252.
Chapter 6: The Mythicist Case
1. See Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005).
2. See Bart Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010).
3. The difference, of course, is that no one would use the Hitler Diaries as historical sources for the life of Hitler, as my student Stephen Carlson has pointed out to me. But that is because we have so many other sources, including those used by Kujau to construct his forgeries. If we did not have these other sources, though, a careful study of his forgeries could help us reconstruct his sources, and to that extent the Hitler Diaries would be like the Gospels: they would be evidence of earlier historical accounts. But my main point is that what matters is not the name of a book’s author (real or false) but the nature of its contents.
4. Luke indicates that Mary and Joseph returned to Nazareth after they had completed the necessary rites of purification. This is a reference to the law found in Leviticus 12, which indicates that thirty-two days after giving birth the woman was to make an offering to God for cleansing.
5. Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, chap. 2.
6. See Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 29–39.
7. Robert Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011); Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).
8. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, ed. John Bowden (1906; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), chaps. 22 and 23.
9. Frank Zindler, “Where Jesus Never Walked,” Through Atheist Eyes, vol. 1 (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011), 27–55. I do not mean to say that Zindler does not cite evidence for his view. He claims that the name Jesus in Mark 1:9 does not have the definite article, unlike the other eighty places it occurs in Mark, and therefore the verse does not appear to be written in Markan style. In response, I should say that (a) there are two other places in Mark where the name Jesus does not have the article; (b) if the problem with the entire verse is that the name Jesus does not have article, then if we posit a scribal change to the text, the more likely explanation is that a scribe inadvertently left out the article. Nazareth has nothing to do with it; and (c) there is not a single stitch of manuscript evidence to support his claim that the verse was interpolated into the Gospel. This latter point is worth stressing since it is the reason that no serious scholar of the textual tradition of Mark thinks that the verse is an interpolation.
10. George A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 2nd ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), 146.
11. René Salm, The Myth of Nazareth (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2008).
12. Salm, Myth of Nazareth, xii.
13. As I have learned from my UNC colleague Jodi Magness, one of the premier archaeologists of Roman Palestine in the world today.
14. Stephen J. Pfann, Ross Voss, and Yehudah Rapuano, “Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997–2002): Final Report,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 25 (2007): 16–79.
15. René Salm, “A Response to ‘Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997–2002): Final Report,’” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 95–103. The responses were compelling (based in part on their communications with Alexandre): Stephen J. Pfann and Yehudah Rapuano, “On the Nazareth Village Farm Report: A Reply to Salm,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 105–8; and Ken Dark, “Nazareth Village Farm: A Reply to Salm,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008): 109–11.
16. Pfann and Rapuano, “Nazareth Village Farm Report,” 108.
17. Pfann and Rapuano, “Nazareth Village Farm Report,” 108.
18. Ken Dark, “Review of Salm, Myth of Nazareth,” in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008), 145.
19. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 34.
20. Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
21. A convenient abbreviated version of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana can be found in David Cartlidge and David Dungan, Documents for the Study of the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).
22. Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Christianity Before Christ (1875; repr., New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 29.
23. Graves, Sixteen Crucified Saviors, 30–31.
24. Frank Zindler, “How Jesus Got a Life,” Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Won’t Reason (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011), 1:57–80.
25. Zindler, “How Jesus Got a Life,” 66.
26. For interesting works of real scholarship, see Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), and the speculative but fascinating work of David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).
27. The literature on the mystery cults is extensive. For a most recent and accessible introduction by an authority in the field, see Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010).
28. Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 44–46.
Chapter 7: Mythicist Inventions
1. On Kersey Graves, see the previous chapter. For more recent discussions, see Robert Price, Christ-Myth Theory, 16. The details of the transformation from dying-rising god to the historical Jesus are worked out differently, of course, by different mythicist authors. As two popular examples, see Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Co., 2004), and Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999).
2. See the discussion, for example, in Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 4.
3. Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of the Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 2001), 217.
4. Mettinger, Riddle of the Resurrection, 219.
5. Mettinger, Riddle of the Resurrection, 221.
6. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005), 4:2535–40.
7. J. Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” 2535.
8. J. Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” 2538.
9. Mark S. Smith, “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising God’ in the Biblical World: An Update, with Special Reference to Baal in the Baal Cycle,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 12 (1998): 257–313.
10. M. S. Smith, “Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods,’” 288.
11. Most famous is Ralph Martin, A Hymn of Christ: Philippians 2:5–11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1997). See also the useful collection of essays in Ralph Martin and Brian Dodd, eds., Where Christology Began: Essays on Philippians 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).
12. Few scholars take the latter view, but one who does is Gordon Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, New International Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995).
13. To get a sense of the richness of the interpretive tradition, see, for example, the commentary by John Reumann, Philippians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Yale Anchor Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2008), 338–83.
14. For a brief statement of this view, see the essay by James D. G. Dunn, “Christ, Adam, and Preexistence,” in Where Christology Began, ed. Martin and Dodd, 74–83.
15. See Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977).
16. See “The Speeches of Acts” in chapter 4, above.
17. And, of course, in later Christian texts. It remains a significant question whether it is the view of the Philippians hymn. It is important to recognize that views of Jesus did not develop in a straight line in all early Christian communities at the same pace. Some communities began calling Jesus God before others did. But the development we clearly see in the Gospels (starting with Mark and ending with John) replicates the development that happened throughout Christendom at large, in different places and at different times, as Christians went from thinking that Jesus was exalted to be the Son of God at the resurrection (thus the speeches in Acts) to thinking that he was the Son of God at his baptism to thinking that he was Son of God from his birth to thinking that he had existed as Son of God even before his birth.
18. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus.
19. Archibald Robertson, Jesus: Myth or History? (London: Watts & Co., 1946), 95.
20. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 39.
21. See my discussion in Forged.
22. See Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 97.
23. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 18.
24. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, 33.
25. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 97.
26. For example, Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 1999), 5.
27. Doherty, Jesus Puzzle, 98.
28. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, 101.
29. Wells, Did Jesus Exist?, 101; Wells, “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?” Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 23. For Wells, Mark was the first to combine the idea of an earthly Jesus who taught and did miracles with a passion narrative.
30. Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, xi.
31. See D. Moody Smith, John Among the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2001).
32. See Robert Kysar, John the Maverick Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).
33. See “The Aramaic Origins of (Some) Oral Traditions” in chap. 3 above.
Chapter 8: Finding the Jesus of History
1. See further my discussion in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), chap. 2, esp. n. 1.
2. An earlier assertion of this view can be found in Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (1892; repr., Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1995).
3. For a full exposition of Judaism in the days of Jesus, see E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992).
4. It needs to be remembered that when scholars use the term pagan it does not have derogatory connotations; it simply refers to people who held to polytheistic religious beliefs, who were not, therefore, either Jewish or Christian.
5. Josephus indicates that the Pharisees made up the largest group and that they numbered six thousand, the Essenes claimed four thousand, and the Sadducees had far fewer. These numbers should be considered in light of the overall Jewish population at the time, which may have been as many as four million.
6. For further reading on the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls, see James Vanderkam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
7. For fuller information, see my discussion in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet. For a comprehensive coverage of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought, see John Collins, ed., Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, vol. 1 (New York: Continuum, 1998).
8. The story is found only in Matthew and Luke, so in that sense it is multiply attested, but the accounts disagree sharply in their depictions of the event.
9. See Jonathan Reed, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000).
Chapter 9: Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet
1. Pharisees were known to be strong advocates of the apocalyptic doctrine of the resurrection of the dead at the end of the age, in contrast to the Sadducees. See, for example, Acts 23:6–8.
2. For portions of the following discussions I have relied heavily on my more extensive treatment in Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), chaps. 8–10.
3. See Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, 193–97.
4. I assume that the stronger word, “hate,” is original to Jesus rather than “love more than,” as in Matt. 10:37, and that the latter represents a change by Christians who recounted these words of Jesus and were taken aback by their harshness.
5. This is argued most convincingly in E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 71–76.
6. See the discussion in my book The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 166–69.
7. See Ehrman, Lost Gospel of Judas, chap. 10.