Could All This Jesus Stuff Be A Myth?

Timothy Dalrymple:

It’s difficult, of course, for a non-historian to know how to sort through these things. If one historian (or at least a person who holds herself out as a historian) claims that the Jesus story is a composite of pagan myths while another historian says otherwise, how do you know whom to believe?

This is why responses like this from Bart Ehrman are so difficult for the Jesus Mythers. It’s not as though the historians and New Testament scholars who affirm the existence of Jesus are ultra-conservative Christians who will defend their Jesus no matter what. That’s not the case at all. I’ve never met Ehrman, but I’ve met plenty of people in the field, plenty of historians and biblical scholars who are eager — truly eager — to overturn traditional views of Jesus. They’re also eager to publish books that make a splash, get on the cover of Time magazine, and sell like hotcakes. The fact that even they cannot bring themselves to say that Jesus never existed is devastating to the Jesus Myth hypothesis.

As Ehrman says, there is no serious historical scholar who believes that Jesus never existed. In fact, for the longest time there was no scholarly response to the Jesus Myth hypothesis, just because there were no credible proponents of the hypothesis in scholarly circles. Ehrman makes the reason plain. We have more evidence for Jesus than we do for anyone else in the ancient world — and arguably (I would add) more than anyone up through the medieval period. If the abundance of evidence for Jesus is insufficient, then the evidence for every other figure is even more insufficient and we might as well stop reading history books.

Simply put, if you can’t say that Jesus existed, then you can’t do history at all. Dismissals of the existence of Jesus are not historical. They’re ideological.

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