Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart D. Ehrman

Author:Bart D. Ehrman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062206442
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2013-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Are All the Stories of the Gospels Filled with Legendary Material?

The legendary character of the Gospel accounts of Jesus are stressed by almost all mythicists, but by none with the rigor and passion of Robert Price, whose recent The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems echoes, in this respect, many of the themes and restates many of the conclusions that he reached in his earlier work, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.7 I will address important aspects of Price’s case against the historical Jesus in the next chapter. For now I want to stress that his emphasis—hammered home page after page—that the Gospel accounts contain legendary material, when seen in a more balanced light, is only marginally relevant to the question of whether Jesus existed.

Price’s argument is sophisticated, and it is a little difficult to explain in lay terms the basic methodological point that forms its backbone. In part it relates to what I mentioned earlier when talking about the form critics, German authors from the beginning of the twentieth century like Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann. In their view, as we saw, communities shaped the traditions that they passed along about Jesus so that these traditions took specific “forms” depending on the context (the Sitz im Leben—the “situation in life”) in which they were being told. Stories of Jesus’s controversies over the Sabbath took one shape or form, stories of his miracles another form, and so on. One of the implications of this view is that early Christian communities told stories about Jesus only when these stories were relevant to their own communal life situations. Why tell stories that have no relevance? In the logic of Price’s argument, this is the first point: communities tell stories only when they advance their own self-interests in one way or another.

His second point comes from developments in scholarship that happened in the wake of form criticism, especially among the students of Rudolf Bultmann. These students wondered if there was any way to get behind the stories that had been molded and shaped in the early Christian communities, to see if any surviving traditions escaped the Christian storytellers’ influences. Suppose there existed stories about Jesus that show no signs of having been created by the communities that told them, stories, for example, that appear to stand at odds with what the early Christian communities would have wanted to say about Jesus. Traditions dissimilar to what Christians were saying about Jesus would not have been created or formulated by the early Christian storytellers. And so those traditions, if they existed, would involve stories that were told not simply because they were useful in the life situation (Sitz im Leben) of the communities in which they were passed along. Stories like that were probably told simply because they were stories about Jesus that really happened.

This is a standard principle used by scholars today to establish which of the stories in the Gospels almost certainly go back to the historical Jesus as opposed to being made up by later storytellers talking about his life in light of their community’s concerns and needs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.