Bart Ehrman has almost entirely avoided discussing “the historicity question” for years (I continually catalogue everything, and my responses, in Ehrman on Historicity Recap; some people have mistaken an article on his blog on this as recent, but in fact it is being misdated by his software and is over ten years old, and long-since rebutted). But just recently he dropped a forty-eight minute interview with Megan Lewis of the Misquoting Jesus Podcast, in which he spends about thirty scattered minutes on the subject of historicity. Let’s see what’s new.

The Framing

The substance starts at minute 3:25. They are not talking about challenges to historicity (what she more or less correctly defines as “mythicism”), but just, straight up, why Ehrman thinks there is enough evidence to be sure there was at least a guy, even though he agrees most of what we’re told about him is mythical. The subject is mainly: How much can we trust the sources we have? Ehrman does throw some shade around minute 4:20 with his usual false claim that mythicism isn’t seriously debated by experts, despite the fact that two peer-reviewed monographs and forty bona fide experts, and to date zero peer-reviewed monographs establishing historicity in response, refutes his disingenuous rhetoric on that point. Clearly it is debated, and indeed remains an open debate in the field. He just wants to ignore it.

Ehrman instead defaults to the same old position all historicists adopt, which is to just “assume” Jesus existed, and then ask what we can know about him, rather than establishing that Jesus existed before building on that assumption. It’s “skip a step” reasoning. Which is a crucial gap in the field. If Jesus didn’t exist, then how we interpret the sources and how we reconstruct the early history of Christianity substantially changes. If you disregard that and just assume Jesus existed, without a secure proof, you’re looking for the wrong thing, and building an edifice on sand.

This is one of the reasons, I suspect, that historians like Ehrman don’t want to look at this. They’ve built careers and massive bodies of literature on this assumption. It would be devastating—earth-shattering, disorienting even—to cast it all aside. Of course no one could then build their pet theories, either, since every historian needs Jesus to exist so they can promote their version of what he really said and did, and thus their version of what Christianity “really was” and thus now is. Of course none want to deal, either, with the harassment, vexation, and peer pressure they’d face from Christian peers, institutions, and funding sources if they were to cave on this and reverse course and rebuild the story of Christianity as something more akin to Mormonism or Islam, where the founder is an angel and not a real person, and the real “founders” just their prophets, imagining everything (or—God forbid—lying about it all).

Assumptions Substituted for Facts

Ehrman starts off with the obvious survey:

  • We have “no information” on most ancient persons (Jew or Gentile). True. And we don’t expect to. Most persons did not launch intercontinental religions from the efforts of dozens of friends and peers convinced they were a celestial superbeing. Those kinds of people tend to produce records. Still, we can plausibly account for why Jesus didn’t.
  • “We don’t have contemporary records” on Jesus, by which he means, “people who knew Jesus at the time didn’t leave us any writings about him.” True. I would count Paul (and possibly even the authors of Hebrews and 1 Clement) as contemporaries; but they didn’t know Jesus. I suspect the author of 1 Peter would have, had Jesus existed, but Ehrman deems that a forgery (I am less certain). But whether any of these authors knew of Jesus as an earthling (rather than an entity known only by revelation) would be the point of debate. Of course Ehrman assumes, earthling.
  • “We have sources of information” on Jesus “far beyond what we have for most people” of that time. Also true. The question is only whether that information pertains to a real person or not. Ehrman would agree most of that information is bogus. The only difference, then, between him and mythicists, is how much of that information is bogus.

For example, all sources say Jesus was raised from the dead and appeared to people; the Gospels even construct detailed historical narratives of this. Ehrman would agree the Risen Jesus in those documents and histories, even claimed eyewitness testimonies, is a myth; no such events occurred, no such man existed. That all records agree as to that man’s existence, and that we have lots of such records, Ehrman agrees still does not support the conclusion that he existed. He didn’t. There was no real Risen Jesus. That’s a myth, something people merely imagined. As Paul says (our only extant eyewitness reporter), he saw this guy only in a revelation, inside his mind, and spoke to him only in his mind, not out in the real world. So Ehrman knows you can have tons of “records” of something that nevertheless isn’t true. The Risen Jesus didn’t really exist. Despite all our “records.” So Ehrman knows (but won’t admit) that this argument can’t establish the historicity of the pre-risen Jesus any more than it does the post-risen Jesus. Because the quality of evidence is not any better for either (e.g. Paul seems to only know of either Jesus the same way: by revelation); and that’s the problem we have to confront, but that Ehrman wants desperately to avoid (see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?).

And avoid it he does. Ehrman simply presumes, for example (at minute 7:15), that “Paul knew Jesus’s brother” (even though the only kind of Brother of the Lord Paul ever mentions knowing was fictive, not biological). By not addressing mythicism, Ehrman can just pretend there is no evidence against what he is saying, and thus never have to respond to any of that evidence. This is argument by assumption. He is simply assuming his interpretation of what Paul says is correct; he is not making any evidence-based argument for that assumption being correct—much less certain, or even probable. This is the difference between historicism and mythicism now: historicists ignore the evidence, and replace it with questionable assumptions; mythicists attend to the evidence, and abandon questionable assumptions.

The same happens again (at minute 7:28) where Ehrman says Paul knew Jesus’s Disciples. Which is another questionable assumption, not a fact. Paul never mentions “Disciples.” Only “Apostles.” And Apostles, to Paul, are persons receiving a revelation of the Risen Jesus: this is explicit in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 and 9:1, in light of Galatians 1:11-12, which uses identical language, and Romans 16:25-26, which mentions no one learning anything from or about Jesus in life, only by revelation (hence when Paul says he “received from the Lord” the Eucharist scene, he evidently means directly, in a vision—not from “Disciples” who were there, which in his account they conspicuously aren’t). By using the word “Disciples” Ehrman is disingenuously implying Paul confirms these were people who sat at Jesus’s feet and were selected for leadership before his death. But that is precisely what we never find confirmed anywhere in Paul. He doesn’t seem to know about any interaction with Jesus before his death. That’s the problem Ehrman is skirting past, with a questionable assumption instead of facts or arguments.

The same happens when (around minute 8:35) Ehrman claims the Gospels, merely by existing, prove there were numerous lines of independent oral traditions floating around. This is another questionable assumption, not a fact, nor anything for which there is even any evidence—in fact, there is evidence against it (no such tradition appears to exist in the preceding generation: nothing in Paul, 1 Clement, Hebrews, or even 1 Peter, outside revelations and hidden messages in scripture; everything seems invented de novo in the Gospels: see Robyn Faith Walsh and the Gospels as Literature). And yet Ehrman declares this “multiple independent oral traditions” as if it was a fact. But it actually isn’t. None of the Gospels even say that’s what they had. They never mention disparate oral traditions at all, or say that’s what they were collecting—Luke says he has a tradition, but we know he means the books of Mark and Matthew; and the final redactors of John claim they had a source, but it too was a book, and probably an imaginary one (or a forgery); even Q, if it existed (and it probably didn’t), was a book. We also can’t distinguish oral traditions of the revelations of the Risen Jesus (Paul says they were ongoing) from oral traditions of any real Jesus. Nor can we distinguish oral traditions from the Christian belief that old Jewish scriptures contained quotable sayings of Jesus (see The Original Scriptural Concept of ‘The Lord’ Jesus; and the example of the millstone woe in Clement).

Historicists simply adopt this as an unproven assumption, and build everything (even their methods) on top of that assumption. They have never presented any evidence for this assumption being true, or even probable. This is a serious problem. All mythicists are doing is pointing this out (and we’re not the only ones who are: see, again, Walsh). All Ehrman is doing is ignoring the problem, skipping a step, and just “declaring” this assumption a fact—ironically the very bankrupt procedure he himself has taken amateur mythicists to task for doing. And he’s right: sloppy or crank mythicists do that a lot, and it’s not a valid procedure. So he shouldn’t be following that same procedure. His own case against doing so applies with the same force to himself. He just won’t acknowledge this (much less inform audiences of it, like his host Megan Lewis and her viewers).

This makes historicity a circular argument: you must presume oral traditions were circulating, which entails presuming Jesus existed (as how else could oral traditions of him be circulating), in order to use those oral traditions (as conjectured to survive under layers of redaction in the Gospels) as evidence Jesus existed. A dog chasing its tail. Proper method would be to first prove there really were such oral traditions (and that they weren’t just of post-mortem revelations or coded readings of scripture, and that they didn’t just derive from the Gospels themselves, like Papias’s absurd myth of Judas swelling to the size of a wagon trail and exploding into a worm-bomb). And then try to locate what in the Gospels derives from it. Though that second mission could fail for its impossibility even if the first mission succeeded—and it hasn’t, so we are two steps removed from any usable data here. But even if we were only one step away, it can still be the case that the Gospels had oral traditions, but we now have no way to determine which things derived from it. And we aren’t just that one step away. We’re two. In fact, three—when you add the fact that Ehrman declares these oral traditions were independent of each other, which is yet a third claim that no one has ever demonstrated to be true—different, after all, does not mean independent, as traditions evolve independently like species (as we well know from studies of urban legends and ghost stories, even the Roswell myth).

But you won’t hear any of this from Ehrman. Oz must keep hiding behind the curtain. It’s all the more hyperbolic when he says (around minute 9:31) that the Gospels are “just as valuable as historical sources as any other historical source,” which I know he does not actually believe. He has repeatedly explained elsewhere (and even here goes on to admit) that they are highly compromised by myth and fiction—something one cannot say of, for example, the letters of Paul or the histories of Josephus or Tacitus, much less ancient inscriptions and autograph documents. So the Gospels are not “just as valuable” as other kinds of sources; they are, in fact, far more legitimately questionable as sources than almost anything else we could have. We definitely could have had far better records, as indeed we do for every other historical person we are confident of (I survey a slew of examples, and why the evidence for them is convincing yet lacking for Jesus, in Chapter 5 of Jesus from Outer Space).

Another example is when Ehrman glosses over the ongoing debate over the existence of Q (around minute 15:40), again simply declaring that an undisputed fact, and not (as it actually is) a questionable hypothesis (even famed Q-scholar John Kloppenborg gives it only 50/50 odds, and he’s being far too generous). Ehrman does briefly mention the possibility that Matthew just made stuff up and added it to Mark, and Luke just lifted and modded that material from Matthew, but he acts as if no one thinks that (a lot of experts think that now). This is important, because Ehrman invents a lot of hypothetical sources this way: rather than asking whether material unique to Matthew (M) and Luke (L), or even John (J and S), was just embellishment and construction, not “independently sourced” content, he simply assumes the latter. Questionable assumptions, based on no evidence, replacing facts—even probable facts.

That the Gospels make stuff up is actually extensively established, in precisely the way their having independent sources has not been. See, for example, my summary in my critique of Brierley of Dale Allison’s demonstration that the Sermon on the Mount is a post-war invention, indeed an invention in Greek with no Aramaic antecedent, and not derived from any oral tradition going back to Jesus. But one can point to the examples of the Nativity and Resurrection narratives: these are wholesale fictions, not “orally sourced” (see, for example, my discussions in Resurrection: Faith or Fact? and How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?). Likewise all the places where stories about Jesus just replicate tales of Moses and Elijah (and other literary characters), or make no sense as anything anyone saw or even reported seeing, but only as deliberate inventions of the Gospel authors themselves (see, for example, Why Did Mark Invent an Empty Tomb? and Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles; and as for Mark, so for Matthew, Luke, and John). We know they fabricate. We do not know they used oral sources.

This reliance on the questionable assumption of prior sources is a central theme of Raphael Lataster’s study corroborating mine in justifying doubts about the historicity of Jesus altogether. It simply is not logically valid to do what Ehrman does here and just declare any new thing said about Jesus as “having a source.” And that his belief in historicity rests on illogical declarations like this is why his belief is not credible; it is, in fact, highly questionable. You know you cannot trust his judgment here, because he has popped the hood and let you see how he is arriving at this judgment, and you can see for yourself that it is not logically valid. So neither are his conclusions. This is the problem with historicity. So now there are only two kinds of people: those who notice this; and those who don’t (or won’t admit it).

For example, Ehrman tries to argue (around minute 17:15) that Jesus must have taught parables involving seeds, because we have different examples of him doing so in the Gospels. This is a non sequitur. First, that he taught in parables at all is challenged by the complete absence of any knowledge of any such mode of teaching in any documents prior to Mark. Paul, never heard such things, never references them. Not in some 20,000 words about Jesus and what he taught. 1 Clement quotes Jesus a lot (almost always, actually, hidden sayings extracted from Scripture); not a single instance of parables as a mode he taught in. Hebrews, not a single example. Nor anything in 1 Peter either (though Ehrman would reject that as early). This appears, therefore, to be an innovation of Mark. Once he started the trend, now everyone starts inventing parables for Jesus to teach in. This is the more probable (and certainly no less probable) “source” of Jesus’s parables. Ehrman has no evidence otherwise. So he cannot rest on any assumption otherwise. And yet, that’s what he does. This is illogical.

The seed parables of Jesus appear to be creative fiction invented by the Evangelists, out of teachings not of Jesus, but of Paul (see 2 Corinthians 9, and 1 Corinthians 3, 9, and 15; Mark derives a lot of inspiration this way), following a model first contrived by Mark, inspiring Matthew and Luke (and even John) to rewrite Mark’s or even compose their own on inspiration from Mark’s. There is even evidence for this (and Ehrman knows that). Ehrman would have to present evidence that this isn’t what is happening, before he could declare that it isn’t what is happening. But he has no such evidence. He just replaces evidence for his conclusions with brute assumption instead. But brute assumption is not a valid mode of argument.

Eventually Ehrman gets around to discussing the Method of Criteria (starting around minute 18:50), claiming that it’s the same method used in other fields of history. That isn’t true. You won’t find hardly any of this elsewhere. It was almost all contrived for Jesus studies. Even when there are parallel methods across fields (like things comparable to the Criterion of Embarrassment), they are constructed and deployed differently. And this is a real problem. My entire book, Proving History, especially Chapter 5, surveys that problem, finding that literally every other formal study of these methods in Jesus studies that has ever been made agrees it’s a problem. Jesus historians are actually conspicuously avoiding the actual methods used in other fields of history (just compare what they do, with actual surveys of real historical methods: I provide a bibliography). And I suspect one reason for this is that real methods don’t get any results they want. For example, in no other field are “hypothetical sources” contrived, used, or relied on in the way we find in Jesus studies. Nor is any principle like “simpler versions of a story are earlier” (real historians well know abbreviation, truncation, and paraphrase are ordinary).

What Can We Know?

So what does Ehrman conclude from that? Skipping past literally every study on the reliability of the methods Ehrman thus describes (all of which challenge it), Ehrman declares they lead to some things “99%” of experts agree on (around minute 20:15):

  • Jesus was from Galilee. (Yet no such fact is mentioned before the Gospels; while the Gospels all are following Scripture on that point, and even have literary reasons to invent it, to get the right metaphorical geography: OHJ, pp. 411-18, 440, 464.)
  • Jesus came from Nazareth. (Ditto. In fact, there is evidence this was a telephone-gamed distortion of something completely else being said of him: see both Proving History and Historicity, index, “Nazareth.”)
  • He was lower class. (As were many mythical heroes at some point in their lives. See Not the Impossible Faith, Chapter 2. The Gospel Jesus was even modeled on the slave-heroes Moses and Aesop: see OHJ, index.)
  • He left home to begin an itinerant preaching ministry. (Ditto.)
  • He had people who followed him around. (Ditto.)
  • He thought he was an important teacher—possibly even a prophet or messiah. (This was already true of the imaginary Risen Jesus as well.)
  • In the last week of his life [later Ehrman adds “during a Passover week”] he went to Jerusalem to proclaim his message. (Where Scripture required the gospel and messiah to go. There is no basis for believing “the last week” or “Passover” part of this, either, as all things calendric here are a literary device of the Gospels.)
  • He fell on the wrong side of the law. (Necessary for the story whether he existed or not; other heroes the Gospel Jesus was modeled on also fell afoul of the law, e.g. Aesop.)
  • He apparently offended the Jewish authorities and was handed over to the Roman authorities. (Which does not make a lot of historical sense, but was required by the Scriptural and literary aims of the Gospels. Paul never mentions this; only forgers. And the Talmud has only the Jews involved, decades before the Romans were even there.)
  • He was crucified by the Romans for claiming to be the future king of the Jews. (Ditto. Indeed, the Talmud never heard of this; there he is killed for sorcery. Paul never discusses the charges, or who did the killing; he seems to think supernatural agents did it.)

I will agree that if Jesus existed, these are indeed the most likely facts of him—although I’m less certain of the Nazareth connection, as that appears to have evolved from a different moniker; and few of these facts need to be true of him. Even if the whole Galilee connection was invented later, that in itself would not mean Jesus didn’t exist, just that he came from and preached somewhere else than legend had it. But as there are well-evidenced reasons these things would be invented or said of a mythical Jesus, they do not require a historical Jesus, or even (by themselves) increase the likelihood of one. One can generate similar lists for every mythical hero of antiquity, all of whom had elaborate biographies written, and indeed with similar functions to the Gospels. So what Ehrman is saying here isn’t very convincing.

One Weird Error

Other than all these failures of logic, Ehrman makes one confusing error of fact, which is mysterious to me as I know he knows the information that he is screwing up here: at one point (around minute 22:34), Ehrman gets into the weeds trying to use Pontius Pilate as an example of an unattested person comparable to Jesus. He’s not, and bizarrely Ehrman even admits he’s not (so how is he an example of Ehrman’s point?), by mentioning that we have an autograph inscription attesting his existence—a far sight more than we have for Jesus. But then he says, incredibly, “If you talk about other people writing about him, there’s no written record of him in the first century, at all” (24:10). Um. No. Josephus writes about him extensively in the first century, indeed only forty years after the fact. And Philo wrote about him—and he was a contemporary!

Ehrman has inexplicably made this mistake several times before. But what’s weird here is not only that in Did Jesus Exist (pp. 43-45), Ehrman mentions all of these things (and even complained that he did, when I called him out for omitting them from his Huffington Post article, even though I acknowledged that at the time), but also that even in this video, in the very next sentence (24:58), he also mentions these facts. Though he incorrectly says Philo was writing twenty years later (no, Philo is writing just a few years later, and about his own contemporary memories of Pilate’s actions), he nevertheless concedes Philo and Josephus wrote about him in the first century (he is vague as to Philo being a contemporary; but he was). So, what’s going on?

I can only infer that when Ehrman said “first century,” he meant, rather, “when Pilate was alive” (Pilate died after the year 37) because even “early first century” would be false, as Philo wrote about Pilate c. 42 A.D. The important point, however, is that this is far better attestation than we have for Jesus: a contemporary, writing about him unambiguously, just a few years after; and a critical historian writing from good sources just a few decades later; and corroborated by other historians not far removed (Tacitus wrote independently about Pilate around 116 A.D.). This is far better evidence than the Gospels. Ehrman really should not have used this example (he has better examples; I’ll revisit his argument in a moment). It completely undermines the point he was trying to make (and yet needn’t have).

Q & A

The interview concludes (starting around minute 32:20) with a brief audience Q&A, which is loaded with decent questions, only one of which bringing to the forefront the points I just made, the rest simply stipulating historicity rather than querying it.

The first question asked was, if all we had was Mark (not Paul, nor any other Gospel), then how confident would we be that Jesus really existed? This catches Ehrman at his poor methodology, because he answers that having one lengthy biography of a person is far better than we have for most other people. But we have (or know they had) lengthy biographies of many mythical persons (Romulus, Osiris, Aesop, Hercules, Bacchus, Inanna, Moses, Abraham, and on and on). So Ehrman’s reasoning is illogical. Merely having a biography of someone doesn’t tell us whether they existed—at all. But this is the same kind of illogical reasoning he keeps resting his confidence in a historical Jesus on.

The best one could do is argue that, if we have a mundane and credibly constructed and content-filled biography, prior probability favors historicity (even if not to a certainty, certainly to a probability; there were many bogus biographies of real people, too, but they tended to be rendered plausibly at least). But Mark is not a mundane and credibly constructed and content-filled biography; it is rather an implausible, overtly fictionalized mythography filled with unbelievable events, sequences, and behaviors (see Jesus from Outer Space, Chapter 6, esp. pp. 129-48). When we look at the body of other works of that time like that, most are of mythical, not historical persons. So in the reference class Mark is actually in, prior probability favors non-existence (even if not to a certainty, certainly to a probability; there were some fantastical biographies of real people, but they weren’t as common). Ehrman is thus ignoring the correct reference class, and all its contents.

Even Ehrman’s selected analogy is poorly chosen: historians aren’t that sure of the historicity of Apollonius of Tyana, and rest their odds favoring it on external facts, like that Lucian says he met a student of one of his Disciples (and unlike Paul, Lucian actually says that). As Maria Dzielska explains in her introduction to Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History, “a historian assuming that Apollonius of Tyana existed solely as a hero of an extensive legend…would not stray far from the truth,” and the only reason she favors a hypothesis of historicity is that there is evidence external to the Life we have of him, scant as it is, that is sufficient to tip the scale into at least minimal historicity. In the question Ehrman was asked, it was stipulated that we would have no such evidence backing Mark. It is clear were that the case, Dzielska would be more doubtful. And so should Ehrman be.

So what would my answer be? Under the conditions asked, I would say the probability Jesus existed would stick around 1 in 3, at both ends of my error margin. So my a judicantiori estimate would substantially rise, but my a fortiori estimate wouldn’t, because we’d lose under those conditions all evidence supporting historicity, as well as all evidence casting it into further doubt. On “just Mark,” the historicity of Jesus would be comparable to that of Aesop: a plausible but probably fictional culture hero. He would beat the likes of Hercules, Bacchus, Moses, or Osiris only because for them we have additional evidence casting them in doubt, which on the question’s stated conditions we would not have for Jesus.

The second question was about whether the sayings the Gospels attribute to Jesus declaring the end is nigh go back to Jesus or were made-up (citing John Meier as a major scholar who thinks the latter). Ehrman’s answer is reasonable. He’s working from an assumption that Jesus existed, and if we grant that, then it is indeed more likely Jesus preached that than that someone made it up later. If anything, the Gospels are trying to spin an apologetic around that saying to kick that can down the road, a problem they wouldn’t face if that prediction weren’t popularly known. And since it’s in Paul, we know it predates the Gospels.

If we assumed, instead, that Jesus didn’t exist, we wouldn’t get a substantially different answer: it is clear Paul believed the Risen Jesus was telling him and the other Apostles exactly this, either in direct revelations—which means (to us) dreams or hallucinations—or through messages they believed Jesus anciently hid in Scripture. We could say “Jesus didn’t say that” only in the sense that their imaginary Jesus wasn’t real; but to them, the Jesus of their dreams, trances, and secret Bible codes was real, and thus he did say or communicate this. We can doubt the exact wording (that “this generation would not pass away” first sounds like apologetic can-kicking to me; and Paul would have cited it in response to those asking him when the end would come), but not the gist (the first Christians clearly believed Jesus had told them the end was nigh).

The third question was interesting but premised on historicity: was the historical Jesus suffering delusions of grandeur, or did he have a more decent, humble understanding of himself? Ehrman takes the position that makes sense given his model of the historical Jesus, that Jesus didn’t make the aggrandizing claims attributed to him, but rather, they arose from “visions” and “interpretations” after his death—in other words, this aggrandizement started with his followers after he was gone, and not with him. I think that’s a reasonable model, particularly if you adopt Ehrman’s also-reasonable hypothesis that Jesus didn’t even expect to get killed (as the Gospels depict he did) and wasn’t claiming to be a supernatural agent of God. But it’s also reasonable, as Ehrman hypothesizes, that Jesus did believe he’d be crowned king by God and rule Judea, which would be a bit full of himself.

I happen to think it’s more likely that (if he existed) Jesus did expect to get killed, and even did everything he could to cause it, because he believed he was the dying messiah of Daniel 9 whose sacrifice would unlock the apocalypse of Daniel 12 (placing him in the company of several other suicidal “Jesus Christs” who appear to have been on the same game, as I explain in my Wichita Talk), which doesn’t require him to have believed he was a superbeing or future king (though it is compatible with it). But I don’t believe the evidence is solid enough to say I must be right about that and Ehrman’s model is wrong; it’s also plausible. What isn’t plausible is the Christian apologetical triumphal model where Jesus was going around claiming he was a god who would soon burn everyone to death with cosmic deathrays. Odds favor any of that rubbish being a post-mortem imagining of his distraught followers.

The fourth question was also interesting, and neutral to the question of historicity, which is (my paraphrase here), “Did anyone produce anything claiming to be written by Jesus? And if not, why not?” Ehrman mentions one, the Letter to Abgar. But I think the questioner meant, why not then a full Gospel? I think the reason so few attempts were made to forge such things is because it would be too hard to pull it off. Trying to claim you found a lost letter from Jesus in a royal archive is more believable, as it comes with a plausible built-in story as to how it never was made public until then. But a Gospel? After so many revered Christian texts circulated with no knowledge of it, indeed even proto-canonized writings with no knowledge of it, you’d be hard pressed to convince anyone your “sudden discovery” of a Gospel written by Jesus Himself wasn’t a fraud. This is why Gospels tended to be attributed to semi-obscure persons (not always, but usually); it was harder to sell the notion that a renowned person wrote something no one had until then heard of.

Ehrman took the question more as whether Jesus was literate, and what he says on that is reasonable, even if I don’t fully concur. Ehrman’s doubts could be defensible, on a well-enough developed theory of how an illiterate could be taken seriously as a prophet. Otherwise, a historical Jesus almost certainly had to have been an educated Rabbi. That’s the only way he could market himself as an expert in the Scriptures and therefore an authority anyone should heed—if he couldn’t even read them, he’d be outed as obviously not inspired by God from day one. And as it happens, the Gospels never say he was illiterate, and continually refer to him as a Rabbi.

I think the same must be true of (at least the leading) Apostles. Peter had to be literate, for example, or else he could never win any argument with Paul, who could read and thus interpret the Scriptures—and Paul would have made constant hay over this. That Paul instead repeatedly acts like Peter is his equal means he must have been—and thus, actually, just as educated. Only Acts says they were illiterate; the Gospels only describe them as fishermen, which was probably fiction (to contrive the “fishers of men” metaphor), but even if true would not indicate, as all Rabbis were required to ply manual trades (see my discussion of this in Not the Impossible Faith, Chapter 2). I think Acts trying to spin them as illiterates is the same turn that painted Mohammed as illiterate to make his achievements seem more miraculous (and thus genuinely of God), even though all accounts of him peg him as a top-level elite, whose actual illiteracy would simply be improbable. So, too, Jesus and the Apostles.

The last question was unrelated to the historicity of Jesus (and his summary of the discussion starting around minute 45 doesn’t add anything), so I’ll conclude here. You might notice Ehrman skipped a lot of arguments he was attempting ten years ago; and nothing he settles on here is new; and neither is he responding to any refutations it, but simply ignoring them (see Ehrman on Historicity Recap).

Conclusion

Despite all that, Ehrman is still correct when (around minute 8:18) he emphasizes that we cannot dismiss the Gospels, for example, merely because they were collected into what is now the Bible. They were written apart from it, and only collected into that edition later. Yes, that collection was deliberate propaganda serving the interests of a singular sect or conglomerate (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts). And yes, that poses unique problems (the risk of doctoring and editing; selection bias; the inclusion of forgeries). But it does not of itself simply “rule out” its contents as source material. So it is not reasonable to demand sources “outside the Bible.” That would be immensely useful, and it is still a fact that we don’t have any (independent of the Bible anyway). But we can still use what was gathered into the New Testament, just with adequate critical caution.

For example, I think the Epistles of Paul—of which none exist (today) outside the Bible—are very useful historical sources. They weren’t just wholesale fabrications (half of them were; but the other half, not: see The Historicity of Paul the Apostle and How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?). And they contain some reliable data about the origins of the religion, even if in some respects vague or compromised (e.g. see Dating the Corinthian Creed and Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once! and even Galatians 1:19 and Romans 1:3, and all the verses I have cited even here today). The fact that these documents are “in the Bible” is not sufficient reason to conclude they have zero weight as evidence. And the same must apply to the Gospels. If we are to dismiss the Gospels as unusable, we need evidence other than the mere fact of what collection they ended up in.

Likewise, Ehrman correctly throws cold water on the opposite tack as well, when he explains (around minute 10) how the Gospels are not eyewitness records, nor reliable (nor by anyone who “lived in Israel” or “spoke Aramaic,” or had eyewitness sources—but, at best, only highly distorted, anonymous, untraceable “oral traditions”). His first correct admission threw cold water on mythicist extremists (who want to claim everything is forged or void of historical worth); his second, on historicist extremists (better known as Christian apologists). There is even in this section of the video a great description of an experiment he runs in his class to prove empirically to his students that “verbatim agreement” between accounts is evidence of copying, not independent attestation (starting around minute 12:46).

Similarly, Ehrman is quite correct about the Argument from Silence (minute 21:40): as long as we abandon the tall tales of the Gospels (in which Jesus was famed even “across Syria”, and managed to successfully storm and escape a heavily guarded temple, and murder thousands of pigs, and so on), all we have left is a minor nobody. Other messianic pretenders made far bigger splashes (OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 4), and yet even they barely won mention (and none contemporary that survives; though contemporary records must have been made for Josephus to know of them). Jesus could easily have been another one of these guys, only far less effectual (see my Wichita Talk on the best case for this possibility). Ehrman is likewise correct that we have no contemporary attestation of Josephus either (his historicity is only established by the evidence of his own writings, and later readers of them; what Ehrman then says about Pilate here, however, is false, as I already mentioned).

So there was no reason even for many contemporary records to have been made for Jesus, much less survive. For example, there would be government records (of the trial and its judgment, for example; even census records), but even Christians would not have had access to those, they aren’t likely to have survived the wars of the region (or even regular archival housecleaning), and certainly won’t have made it to the present day (almost no such records did; even less so from Judea). So we cannot argue Jesus didn’t exist from the mere poverty of evidence (hence in OHJ, Chapter 8, I find this has zero effect on the probability he existed; although having had such evidence would definitely have increased it).

But then Ehrman stacks up questionable assumptions as if they were established facts, to get “information” about a historical Jesus. The problem is that this is what he has to do. If the historicity of Jesus were a securely establishable fact, we should not have to resort to this. And yet, take away every premise conjured this way (every time he just declares an unevidenced assumption, or even a counter-evidence assumption, as a fact), and he has no arguments for a historical Jesus. This should worry you. Because the fact that this is the only way Ehrman can get from the data to a historical Jesus is itself evidence that we should doubt the historicity of Jesus.

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