JI: Failed Prophets and Historical Methods

Last time I covered Ehrman's examination of the biblical and extrabiblical evidence for a historical Jesus, which turns out to be generally sparse and unreliable. Now I'll go over what he thinks we can know about him. He says that the parts of our sources that meet the criteria of biblical scholars are the parts that portray Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet rather than God incarnate. Jesus' mission was to get people to repent before the impending arrival the Son of Man, who would bring judgment upon the earth. Ehrman emphasizes that this is not a controversial idea, but rather one that is widely taught even in seminaries.

The earliest sources for Jesus, Mark and Q, contain numerous references to a coming judgment and the Kingdom of God. The examples Ehrman gives are Mark 8:38-9:1, Mark 13:24-30, Luke 12:39-40, Luke 17:24-30, and Matthew 13:40-43. These passages provide multiple attestation to the idea that Jesus spoke of imminent judgment. This message was common among prophets of the period—and most significantly, it was John the Baptist's message as recorded in Luke 3:7-9. Of course, judgment didn't come, meaning that Jesus' prediction failed like so many others before and afterward.

There are also some teachings that Ehrman thinks meet the criterion of dissimilarity, meaning they "cut against the grain" of what Christians would make up about Jesus:

• In Mark 8:34-38, Jesus seems to distinguish himself from the Son of Man—something a Christian writer probably wouldn't have done.
• In Matthew 19:23-30, Jesus says the disciples will sit on 12 thrones to judge Israel, evidently including Judas. Ehrman doesn't think the author would include this embarrassing mistake unless Jesus really said it.
• In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus explicitly says that people would go to heaven or hell based on their deeds—directly contradicting the later doctrine of faith-based salvation.

Virtually everything Jesus does in the gospels carries undertones of his apocalyptic message. His moral teachings were meant to get people in line before judgment arrived. His baptism from John the Baptist was an endorsement of John's apocalyptic views. His alleged healings and exorcisms were meant as a precursor to the banishment of suffering in the Kingdom of God. His overturning of the money changer's tables (or "cleansing the Temple") was meant to symbolize that the Temple would be destroyed when the Son of Man came.

Ehrman ends the chapter with an explanation of why the historical method can't be used to determine whether a miracle such as Jesus' resurrection occurred, regardless of the circumstances:

"If historians can only establish what probably happened, and miracles by their definition are the least probable occurrences, then more or less by definition, historians cannot establish that miracles have ever probably happened."

He stresses that historians don't say a miracle didn't occur, but only that if one did, it could not be determined historically. Then he goes on to give a possible explanation for the alleged resurrection: perhaps the body was stolen by a few of Jesus' followers (only Matthew says guards were posted at the tomb), and some of the disciples had visions of Jesus appearing to them. An extremely unlikely scenario, he says, but one that is by definition far more likely than a supernatural alternative.

JI: The Gospel of Nobody

This topic doesn't appear at any one point in JI, but it's something Ehrman references multiple times in the early chapters. Many Bible contradictions involve stories where source A says event X happened, while source B says event Y happened. Apologists often try to resolve these conflicts by combining the details of the conflicting stories and saying that both events happened. After all, they argue, source A doesn't say event Y didn't happen, nor does source B deny the possibility of event X.

But at times there are major problems with this tactic. First of all, of course each source isn't going to go out of its way to talk about events that didn't happen – that would require the Bible to be written in some bizarre form of legalese. But there are many cases where source A doesn't mention event Y even though it's an integral part of the story. It often seems very strange that A doesn't mention Y... until you consider the possibility that the author of A disagrees with the author of B and doesn't think Y happened at all.*

And second, when apologists try to make the events fit by mashing them together, they often create an entirely new story that none of the original stories agree with. In the case of the four gospels, where this happens quite often, I've dubbed this messy amalgam of fragmented details the "Gospel of Nobody."

On page 7 of JI, Ehrman uses the following contradiction as an example:

"In Mark's Gospel, Jesus tells Peter that he will deny him three times 'before the cock crows twice.' In Matthew's Gospel, he tells him that it will be 'before the cock crows.' Well, which is it—before the cock crows once or twice? ... [Here's one apologist's] solution: Peter actually denied Jesus six times, three times before the cock crowed and three more times before it crowed twice. ... [But] to resolve the tension between the Gospels the interpreter has to write his own Gospel, which is unlike any of the Gospels found in the New Testament. And isn't it a bit absurd to say that, in effect, only "my" Gospel—the one I create from parts of the four in the New Testament—is the right one, and that the others are only partially right?"

There's no one on earth who would think Peter denied Jesus six times after reading Mark or Matthew individually, since neither gospel indicates that he made more than three denials. And if Peter had made six denials, it would surely be important enough to note, so the most likely reason that neither gospel noted six is that neither gospel intends six.

Here's another example. Which women visited the tomb on the morning of the resurrection? Was it:

• Matt.: Mary Magdelene, the other Mary
• Mark: Mary Magdelene, Mary mother of James, Salome
• Luke: Mary Magdelene, Mary mother of James, Joanna, others
• John: Mary Magdelene

Now, based on this an apologist could claim that Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, the other Mary, Salome, Joanna, and possibly others all went to visit Jesus' tomb. But now we have a veritable horde of people, and some of the gospels begin to look quite misleading. What reason did Matthew, Mark and John have for giving no indication that anyone other than those mentioned visited the tomb, when it would have been as simple as adding "and other women"? John is especially dishonest: he implies that Mary Magdelene is making a lone pilgrimage to the tomb. There's no obvious explanation for this phenomenon—except that Matthew, Mark and John don't intend for there to be others tagging along.

Let's look at one last example, which Ehrman describes on page 8. When the women (or woman) visited Jesus' tomb, who did they (or she) see?:

• Matt.: one angel
• Mark: one man
• Luke: two men
• John: two angels

Now admittedly, the men in Mark and Luke are dressed in white robes, so one could plausibly argue that they are meant to be angels. But why would Matthew and Mark both mention only one person when Luke and John say there were two? What possible motive could they have for not having the accurate number? The simplest and best explanation is that Matthew and Mark don't mean for there to be two of them at all.

There are many other examples like this, both in the Gospels and elsewhere. In examining such cases, I think these are the crucial questions to ask:

1. Is the omitted detail integral to the story?
2. Does a "reconstructed" version of the story make the original stories look misleading?
3. Could the omitted detail have been easily added?

I would argue that we should consider cases where the answers to two or all of these questions are "yes" to be contradictions – minor compared to others we can find in the Bible, but contradictions nonetheless.

*Apologists often try to spin such accounts as "complementary." They apparently forget that "the Bible" did not exist in the early church. If a congregation had one gospel and not others, they would not get a "complementary" account, but instead a highly flawed one that ignored crucial events.

The Evidential Bottleneck

"After that he was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep." (I Corinthians 15:6)

Some Christians make a big deal out of this verse, claiming that it lends strong support for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. After all, 500 eyewitnesses should be more than enough to prove that such an event occurred beyond a shadow of a doubt, right? Here's what prominent apologist Josh McDowell says about this:

"Let's take the more than 500 witnesses who saw Jesus alive after His death and burial, and place them in a courtroom. Do you realize that if each of those 500 people were to testify for only six minutes, including cross-examination, you would have an amazing 50 hours of firsthand testimony? Add to this the testimony of many other eyewitnesses and you would well have the largest and most lopsided trial in history."

But there's an immense problem with this line of reasoning: we don't have 50 hours of firsthand testimony. In fact, we don't have the testimony of 500 people at all. We have the testimony of one person – Paul – who claims that there were 500 witnesses. He could easily be exaggerating, lying, or simply misinformed.

Could early Christians have investigated for themselves whether Paul's claim was true? Possibly, but just as most Christians today care nothing for evidence, the vast majority of Christians back then would have been perfectly happy just to take Paul's word for it. On top of that, note that Paul doesn't mention who these people are, nor where they're currently living. If Christians wanted to confirm Paul's claim, they would have had to know both their identities and locations. Then they would have had to set out on a long journey from Corinth, hundreds of miles across the ancient world, just to interview them.

Notice also that "some have fallen asleep" – in other words, died. These alleged witnesses would have been very old, so there was only a small window of opportunity for some dedicated skeptic to confirm what Paul said. And let's imagine for a moment that a skeptic found the Christians Paul was referring to, and they all said they had never seen the risen Christ – Paul was either bluffing or honestly mistaken. If that skeptic went around proclaiming that Paul was wrong, who would the other Christians believe? Most if not all of them would ignore this evidence because they likely viewed Paul as more trustworthy, and because confirmation bias and wishful thinking would cause them to cling to their existing beliefs. It would be very easy for Paul to make this claim without it coming back to haunt him.

Finally, the nail in the coffin of this supposed evidence. In verse 3, shortly before Paul mentions the witnesses, he says:

"For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received, that..."

In other words, Paul isn't even claiming that he talked to the witnesses himself; he received this information from someone else. It may even have been simply taken from the oral tradition of the time. For every link added to the chain, the chances of exaggeration or outright fabrication are compounded tremendously.

Far from being having the incontrovertible testimony of 500 witnesses, we instead have the (at least) thirdhand testimony of a single person. This evidential bottleneck comes up time and time again when critically examining the Bible. It would make little difference if Paul said there were five thousand witnesses: any claim must be considered in terms of the immediate source.

News of the Resurrection

There are a huge number of contradictions in the gospels, primarily because they are four parallel accounts of the same basic story. The concentration of clashing details is especially high in the resurrection accounts. One of these is centered on the following question: What did the women visiting Jesus' tomb do when they found that he had been resurrected? Here's what Matthew 28:8 says:

"So they went out quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to bring the disciples his word."

So the women immediately ran to the disciples to tell them the good news of Jesus' resurrection. Luke 24:9 says basically the same thing:

"Then they returned from the tomb and told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest."

Okay. Now look at what Mark 16:8 says:

"So they went out quickly and fled from the tomb, for they trembled and were amazed. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

Here the women flee from the tomb and say nothing! This is a very clear contradiction, and not one that I think can be plausibly reconciled.

Apologetics Press writer Eric Lyons makes an attempt. He claims that "for a time" the women said nothing, as portrayed in Mark, but "later that day" they went to tell the disciples, as in Matthew and Luke. But neither Matthew nor Luke give any indication that the women waited to tell them. In fact, Matthew indicates precisely the opposite: the women "went out quickly ... and ran to bring" the news. There is simply no room here for the women to have hesitated.

Lyons also mentions that Mark 16:10 has Mary Magdelene going to tell the disciples. However, this does not solve the problem, for three reasons. First, Mark mentions only Mary giving the news, while Matthew and Luke have all the women doing so – another contradiction. Second, Lyons ignores the consensus among biblical scholars that Mark 16:9-20 is a later addition and not part of the original gospel. Third and (in my opinion) most importantly, verse 10 does not magically make verse 8 go away. For "they said nothing to anyone" to make any sense at all, a significant amount of time must have passed before any of the women gave the news – in direct contradiction with Matthew.

As I said, I don't think this contradiction can be plausibly reconciled. But even if it can, there are hundreds of other contradictions in the Bible, many of which would be even harder to resolve than this one.