Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them by Ehrman Bart D

Author:Ehrman, Bart D. [Ehrman, Bart D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, History, Spirituality, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780061173936
Amazon: 0061173932
Goodreads: 6101996
Publisher: HarperCollins (NY)
Published: 2009-02-20T08:00:00+00:00

These are not disinterested accounts by eyewitnesses, however. They are books written decades after the fact by authors who had heard stories about Jesus from the oral tradition, stories that had been altered and even made up over time. There were lots of discrepancies in these stories, and the Gospel writers themselves changed them as they saw fit. How is it possible to use such sources to find out what really happened historically? In fact, there are ways. Scholars have devised some methodological principles that, if followed closely and rigorously, can give us some indications of who Jesus really was.

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Criteria for Establishing the Veracity of Historical Material There is nothing overly complicated about these principles—they make sense, given everything that we have seen about the Gospel traditions so far. The first should seem a bit obvious: 1. The earlier the better. Since the traditions about Jesus changed over time as stories about him were told and retold, and as the written sources were altered, amplified, and edited, it makes sense that the earlier sources should be more trustworthy than the later ones.

Gospels from the eighth century will not, as a rule, be as historically reliable as Gospels from the first century (although they may be terrifically fun to read).

John is the latest of the four New Testament Gospels and tends to be less historically reliable than the others. It presents views of Jesus that represent later developments within the tradition—for example, that he was the Passover lamb who died on the day the Passover lambs were slaughtered, or that he claimed to be equal with God.

This doesn’t mean that we can completely discount everything found in John; on the contrary, we need to apply the other criteria to its accounts as well. But generally speaking, earlier is better.

Our earliest surviving Gospel is Mark, and it may contain more reliable information than John. But Mark was not the only source for later Gospels. There was probably another Gospel source that may have been produced as early as Mark and that no longer survives. In an earlier chapter I pointed out that Matthew and Luke got many of their stories from Mark, which they used as a source. There are numerous other traditions about Jesus in both Matthew and Luke that cannot be found in Mark. Most, but not all, of these traditions are sayings of Jesus, for example, the Lord’s prayer and the Beatitudes (found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark). Since the later Gospels could not have gotten these traditions from Mark, where did they get them? There are good reasons for thinking that Matthew did not get them from Luke, nor Luke from Matthew. And so, since the nineteenth century, scholars have

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maintained that they both got them from some other source. The German scholars who came up with this view called this other source Quelle, the German word for “source.

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