Ehrman; The Historical Jesus.pdf

The Historical Jesus

Part I

Professor Bart D. Ehrman

T HE T EACHING C OMPANY ®

Bart Ehrman, Ph.D.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bart Ehrman is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Religious Studies at The University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill. With degrees from Wheaton College (B.A.) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D.,

magna cum laude), he taught at Rutgers for four years before moving to UNC in 1988. During his tenure at UNC,

he has garnered numerous awards and prizes, including the Students’ Undergraduate Teaching Award (1993), the

Ruth and Philip Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement (1994), and now the Bowman and Gordon

Gray Award for excellence in teaching (1998).

With a focus on early Christianity in its Greco-Roman environment and a special expertise in textual criticism of the

New Testament, Professor Ehrman has published dozens of book reviews and over twenty scholarly articles for

academic journals. He has authored or edited eight books, including Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New

Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999); The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian

Writings (Oxford, 1997; 2 nd ed., 1999); After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford, 1999);

The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford 1998); The Orthodox Corruption of

Scripture (Oxford, 1993); and The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research (Eerdmans, 1996). He is

currently at work on a new Greek–English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard

University Press).

Professor Ehrman is a popular lecturer, giving numerous talks each year for such groups as the Carolina Speakers

Bureau, the UNC Program for the Humanities, the Biblical Archaeology Society, various local groups, and select

universities across the nation. He has served as the president of the Society of Biblical Literature, SE Region; book

review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature ; editor of the Scholar’s Press Monograph Series The New

Testament in the Greek Fathers ; and co-editor of the E.J. Brill series New Testament Tools and Studies . Among his

administrative responsibilities, Professor Ehrman has served on the executive committee of the Southeast Council

for the Study of Religion and has chaired the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society of Biblical

Religion, as well as serving as Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Religious Studies at UNC.

Table of Contents

The Historical Jesus

Part I

Professor Biography ............................................................................................i

Course Scope .......................................................................................................1

Lecture One The Many Faces of Jesus...........................................2

Lecture Two One Remarkable Life.................................................5

Lecture Three Scholars Look at the Gospels ....................................8

Lecture Four Fact and Fiction in the Gospels ...............................11

Lecture Five The Birth of the Gospels..........................................15

Lecture Six Some of the Other Gospels ......................................18

Lecture Seven The Coptic Gospel of Thomas .................................21

Lecture Eight Other Sources ..........................................................24

Lecture Nine Historical CriteriaGetting Back to Jesus..............27

Lecture Ten More Historical Criteria...........................................31

Lecture Eleven The Early Life of Jesus ............................................34

Lecture Twelve Jesus in His Context ................................................38

Timeline .............................................................................................................43

Glossary .............................................................................................................45

Biographical Notes ............................................................................... See Part II

Annotated Bibliography ...................................................................... See Part II

The Historical Jesus

Course Scope:

From the late Roman Empire, through the Middle Ages, down to the Reformation, and into our own day, no

institution has wielded such economic, political, and cultural power as the Christian church. And behind it all stands

Jesus, a man who continues to be worshiped throughout the world, by over a billion people today. Jesus of Nazareth

is undoubtedly the most important figure in the history of Western civilization.

Everyone who has even the faintest knowledge of Jesus has an opinion about him, and these opinions vary widely—

not only among lay people but even among historical scholars who have given their lives to the task of

reconstructing what Jesus was really like, what he really said and did. This course is designed to explain why it has

proved so difficult to know about the man behind the myth and to see what kinds of conclusions modern scholars

have drawn about him. The course will be taught from a strictly historical perspective; no particular theological

beliefs will be either affirmed or denied.

The course will begin with a discussion of the four Gospels of the New Testament, which everyone agrees are our

principal sources of knowledge about Jesus. But these books were not written as dispassionate histories for impartial

observers. In addition, it appears that their authors were not eyewitnesses to the events they narrate but were writing

several decades later, telling stories that they had heard—stories that had been in circulation year after year among

the followers of Jesus. The first step, then, will be to determine what kinds of books the Gospels are and to ascertain

how reliable their information about Jesus is. Apart from their worth as religious documents of faith, we will

examine how the Gospels are useful to historians who want to know what really happened.

As we will see, the Gospels create challenges for scholars who want to know about the words and deeds of Jesus.

After explicating some of these difficulties, we will consider other sources that are available, including other

Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament but that nonetheless purport to narrate the life and teachings of

Jesus. In addition, we will examine all the references to Jesus in every other ancient Jewish and Roman source.

After reviewing the available sources, we will examine the criteria that scholars have devised for getting behind the

stories told about Jesus to ascertain what he was really like. Once we have a handle on how to approach our sources

of information, we will consider the historical context of Jesus’ life; our assumption is that if we fail to situate Jesus

in his context, we will take him out of context and, therefore, misunderstand him. After discussing the political,

social, and cultural history of first-century Palestine, we will proceed to the second major part of the course, a

scholarly reconstruction of Jesus’ actual words and deeds.

There we will see that the earliest sources at our disposal, including the Gospel of Mark and the lost Gospel of Q

(one of the sources used by both Matthew and Luke), are probably correct in portraying Jesus as a Jewish

apocalypticist, one who anticipated that God was soon going to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the

forces of evil and establish his kingdom here on earth. Specifically, Jesus proclaimed that a cosmic judge from

heaven, called the Son of Man, was soon to appear, and that people needed to repent, turn to God, and adhere to his

own teachings in preparation. Those who did so would be rewarded with God’s kingdom; those who did not would

be destroyed.

The remaining lectures in the course will show how this apocalyptic message of Jesus affected his ethical teaching,

his own activities, and his final days. We will see that this proclamation caused a furor in Jerusalem when Jesus

went there to celebrate the Passover feast at the end of his life. Fearing that his preaching might excite the mobs, the

authorities in Jerusalem had him arrested and taken out of the way, handing him over to the Roman governor,

Pontius Pilate, who had him executed as a troublemaker.

The course will end, then, by considering how Jesus’ followers began to modify his message after they came to

believe that he had been raised by God from the dead, as they transformed the religion of Jesus (i.e., the one he

preached) into the religion about Jesus.

2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

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