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

Author:Bart D. Ehrman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Religion, History
ISBN: 9780062089946
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Price’s modus operandi is to go through all the traditions of the Gospels and show that each and every story of Jesus can be shown to meet some need, concern, or interest of the early Christians, so there are no stories that can be shown to go back to a historical figure, Jesus. In other words, the first building block in every case trumps the second so that there are no historically accurate materials in the Gospels.

My own view is that this is completely wrong, for several reasons. For one thing, it is a misuse of the criterion of dissimilarity to use it to show what did not happen in the life of Jesus. The criterion is designed to be used as a positive guide to what Jesus really said and did and experienced, not as a negative criterion to show what he did not. That is to say, suppose Jesus in the Gospels predicts that he will go to Jerusalem and be crucified and then raised from the dead. Would this prediction pass the criterion of dissimilarity? Absolutely not! This is something that the community of Christians may well have wanted to put on Jesus’s lips. Since it does not pass the criterion, we cannot use this criterion to indicate that Jesus really made this prediction. But can we use it to say that he did not make the prediction? Once again, absolutely not! The criterion may make us suspicious of this or that tradition, but it cannot demonstrate on its own merits whether or not it is historical. In other words, by its very character the criterion does not and cannot indicate what Jesus did not do or say, only what he did do or say.

My second point is related. This criterion—and others we will consider in a later chapter—is designed to consider probabilities, not certainties. And, as Price himself acknowledges, this is all the historian can do: establish what probably happened in the past. To demand a criterion that yields certainty is to step outside historical research. All we can establish are probabilities. And there are a number of traditions about Jesus that easily pass the criterion of dissimilarity, making their historicity more probable than their nonhistoricity.

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