Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible by Bart D. Ehrman

Author:Bart D. Ehrman [Ehrman, Bart D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: en
ISBN: 9780061173943
Amazon: 0061173940
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2010-02-02T07:00:00+00:00

Other Sources for Reconstructing the Life of Jesus

If you’ve watched enough Hollywood movies about Jesus, you may think that Jesus was one of the most talked about figures in the Roman Empire. After all, the Son of God who heals the sick, casts out demons, and raises the dead does not come along every day. And evidently the Roman authorities were fearful enough of his power to want to do away with him, fearful of this God-man in their midst. Possibly the orders actually came down from on high, from Rome itself.

Unfortunately, all that is pure fantasy. What I am about to say seems quite odd to most of us, since, after all, Jesus is by all accounts the most significant person in the history of Western Civilization. But he was not the most significant person in his own day. Quite the contrary, he appears to have been almost a complete unknown.

What do Greek and Roman sources have to say about Jesus? Or to make the question more pointed: if Jesus lived and died in the first century (death around 30 CE), what do the Greek and Roman sources from his own day through the end of the century (say, the year 100) have to say about him? The answer is breathtaking. They have absolutely nothing to say about him. He is never discussed, challenged, attacked, maligned, or talked about in any way in any surviving pagan source of the period. There are no birth records, accounts of his trial and death, reflections on his significance, or disputes about his teachings. In fact, his name is never mentioned once in any pagan source. And we have a lot of Greek and Roman sources from the period: religious scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, natural scientists; we have thousands of private letters; we have inscriptions placed on buildings in public places. In no first-century Greek or Roman (pagan) source is Jesus mentioned.

Scholars have never been sure what to make of that. Most simply suppose that Jesus wasn’t all that important in his day. But whether or not that is right, the reality is that if we want to know what Jesus said and did, we cannot rely on what his enemies in the empire were saying. As far as we know, they weren’t saying anything.

The first time Jesus is mentioned in a pagan source is in the year 112 CE. The author, Pliny the Younger, was a governor of a Roman province. In a letter that he wrote to his emperor, Trajan, he indicates that there was a group of people called Christians who were meeting illegally; he wants to know how to handle the situation. These people, he tells the emperor, “worship Christ as a God.” That’s all he says about Jesus. It’s not much to go on if you want to know anything about the historical Jesus.

A bit more information is provided by a friend of Pliny’s, the Roman historian Tacitus. In writing his history of Rome in the year 115,

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