Block 1 - Ehrman - Pages 55-101

In this entry the focus is on how Ehrman deals with issues related to the historical critical method as a method. Beginning with Chapter 4. It might seem inflammatory for Ehrman to say that Jesus did NOT have much effect on the people of his day (middle of page 56). But there is a sense in which this might be true.

Here is my take on this issue. The number of people who were followers of Jesus would have to amount to a certain percentage of the overall population before they would be visible as a distinct subculture within a society. Therefore, a certain percentage of the population would have to become Christian before this new religion would even have any impact on the dominant pagan society (some scholars say 2% is the threshold). In the second century there are sufficient Christians that people know who they are. In the third century, the Christian population has increased to the point that the leaders of the dominant pagan culture fear the size of this group and during that time we see Empire wide persecutions organized and promoted by the governing authorities, because the Christians do not offer the expected proper honor to Caesar, (only Jesus is Lord) and therefore are perceived as constituting a threat to the Roman system of government.

With regard to Jesus himself, in Jerusalem he was a one week flash-in-the-pan media event. He rolls into town to great fanfare (so the Gospels say) and less than a week later he is dead, executed as a criminal. According to the synoptic Gospels, he is well known in Capernaum, and known of in Nazareth, maybe known in Chorazin and Bethsaida (see Matthew 11:20-22). The only adult event attributed to Jesus as happening in Nazareth is getting run out of town (Luke 4). There is only one recorded event placed in Bethsaida (Mark 6:22-26), and nothing is recorded as having happened in Chorazin, except for the reproach of Matthew 11:21. But we really do not know how well he is known outside of these areas. Until the last week of his earthly life he keeps a low profile. Most of the events before the last week take place in small towns and villages. For the average person in Jerusalem, he may Not have been seen as any different from any other rabble rouser who comes to town and quickly comes to the predictable end. In other words, outside of Capernaum, Jesus may have been someone whom no one took much time to think about, and was probably quickly forgotten by most.

Therefore, we should not be surprised that there is so little non-Christian information about Jesus in the first 100 years after his time on earth. The fact that Nero blamed the Christians for the fire in Rome, shows that Christians may have had much higher visibility in Roman society by 64 CE than Ehrman wants to grant (see bottom of page 58).

Aside: notice the gap in time between the date of Nero and the date of Roman historian Tacitus; yet Ehrman never questions the historical veracity of Tacitus' account of Nero. But anything written by a Christian about Jesus Ehrman questions as to historical accuracy. Also, the fact that Josephus included mention of Jesus in his Jewish Antiquities, shows there was written information about Jesus in the hands of unsympathetic Jews, indicating to me they considered Jesus noteworthy enough to mention him in the same context as John the Baptist. Ehrman grudgingly admits as much on page 62 (middle of page).

In Chapter 5, in the section on "Christian Sources outside the Canon," Ehrman spends much more time discussion Gnosticism than I believe is warranted. The emergence of Gnosticism in the second century CE as a strange version of Christianity is a fascinating subject in its own right. But I am Not so sure it is pertinent to the study of the historical Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas is a very significant document for New Testament scholars in that it demonstrates that the concept of the hypothetical "Q" source is a realistic option, since Thomas also is a "Gospel" compiled solely of the sayings of Jesus as is the hypothetical reconstructed Q. But the questions of whether or not any of the sayings of Jesus in Thomas go directly and independently back to Jesus is questionable. John Dominic Crossan is convinced that Thomas represents an independent line of tradition of the transmission of the sayings of Jesus, and is not dependent on the sources used in the synoptic Gospels. Most New Testament scholars question whether Thomas adds anything to what is known about Jesus apart from what is contained in the Synoptics. Indeed, many believe that the sources that Thomas used were the same those used by the writers of the Synoptics.

One of the enduring problems of using Thomas as a source for the historical Jesus is the question of how much the "Gnostic Myth" has influenced the content of the sayings of Jesus as they were transmitted orally among the Gnostics before being written down. The actual copy of Thomas that was found in the Egyptian desert was written in the 200's (third century CE). But the original composition of Thomas probably took place in the early to mid second century. As we will see in the discussion of the parables of Jesus, a very few of the sayings in Thomas may come from a reliable independent tradition, and it is possible that a few sayings in Thomas may exist in a form that is closer to what Jesus actually said than what is in the Synoptics (according to the rules of the historical critical method).

All the other non-canonical Gospels are too late in their origin to warrant serious consideration as sources for the life of Jesus. Much has been written about these "other Gospels" by Ehrman and others. But the point of Ehrman and other such scholars is to show that the version of Christianity found in the New Testament was not the only version of Christianity out there in the early years.

In Chapter 6, Ehrman offers a simplified, but well written description of the historical critical method. As a useful comparison to Borg, several points are worth noting. What Ehrman calls "Independent Attestation" is what Borg and others call "Multiple Attestation." Borg mentions "Coherence" but that does not come up in exactly the same form in Ehrman. Ehrman's "Contextual Credibility" (page 94) is useful and employed by all such scholars, but it is often not dealt with in detail as it serves to brush aside accounts and sayings that do not look historically credible. And since the Gospel of John is usually dismissed as having No historical value, Ehrman's use of the two examples from John (page 95) only serves to explain something very basic to someone who has never encountered the method before. The mention of "Dissimilarity" is a key piece in the historical critical method. The method simply does not work without it, as a means of saying, can we be absolutely sure that this idea originated with Jesus? For historical skeptics, that is very important, and it makes the resulting picture of Jesus airtight.

Or does it? I believe there is an inherent weakness in this approach to the method in that all that we have left of Jesus is that which is truly unique. The resulting image of Jesus is one that bears no resemblance to the Judaism he was born into and no resemblance to the Christian doctrine his ideas inspired. So anything about Jesus and his way of thinking that continue Jewish views and values are suspect, and likewise, anything that became doctrinally central to Christianity is considered unlikely to have come from Jesus. In many respects what we have as a result of the criterion of dissimilarity is a non-Jewish and non-Christian Jesus. I am tempted to wonder if this development of the historical critical method might have been due to the subconscious thinking of German scholars who were not immune to the anti-Semitism of their day and were also unsympathetic toward traditional Christian views.

The question that has always been in the background of all studies of the Life of Jesus is the question of how much has the religious predisposition of the scholar influenced the results of the reconstruction of the life of Jesus. All too often a suspicion crowds my mind that all scholars are looking for a Jesus they can believe in (Ehrman excepted). Isn't it a wee bit too convenient that the Jesus a scholar finds in the Gospels is just the Jesus she or he was looking for? I know this may be just as true for me as for others. But keep that question in mind as you continue your readings.

One other comment I have about Ehrman in chapter 6 is on page 93 where Ehrman makes a connection between Jesus and John the Baptist and the criterion of dissimilarity. I personally think that the baptism of Jesus by John makes more sense when placed in a separate category, the "criterion of embarrassment" as numerous scholars do. While most scholars believe the version of this event in Matthew is highly embellished, and that embellishment is due to the fact that the event actually happened, and it cannot be denied, but needs an explanation as to why Jesus would have been so baptized if (as the Gospels say) he is so much more important than John the Baptist. Thus Ehrman's reasoning on page 93 is correct, but embarrassment makes more sense as the applicable criterion than dissimilarity. The remainder of Chapter 6 is a good summary of Ehrman's conclusions about what can be known of the circumstances of Jesus' earthly life and a result of the application of the historical critical method to the synoptic Gospels.