Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart D. Ehrman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I don’t read (vs listen to) a lot of non-fiction, but Ehrman’s Bible history books are always engaging, entertaining, and educational — and this one is no exception.
Ehrman is a religious studies professor, and usually makes waves in certain evangelical / fundamentalist Christian circles by applying a critical literary and historical view to the Bible and its creation. That he is an agnostic / atheist simply adds to the hue and cry that he is out to attack Christianity by disagreeing with the inerrancy, inspiration, and literal truth of the Bible. By noting how Scripture came about and evolved and changed over time, these folks consider Ehrman to be questioning their faith.
This time, Ehrman is (though pursuing the truth in the same fashion) on the other side of the “debate,” examining the question as an historian and literary scholar whether Jesus of Nazareth existed. He tackles head-on those who question the historic presence of Jesus, to the dismay of some fervent atheists and to (one presumes) the glee of those evangelical Christians (though the picture Ehrman ends up drawing of what we can historically assert about Jesus’ reality is quite different from what they preach at First Baptist on Sunday mornings).
In the course of the book, Ehrman gives a good primer as to how historians work from the written record — what makes for a good source vs a dubious source, how later insertions can be detected (or concluded not to be such), and how something that seems so sketchy as the historical reality of an early 1st Century Jewish preacher in Palestine named Jesus (after all, one might argue, all we have is a bunch of religious texts written decades or more after his presumed death) actually can be very confidently assumed to be true, even if certain details of his career (including the supernatural elements) cannot be proven or presumed to have happen. While Ehrman’s arguments aren’t new, they have rarely been put forward so neatly and approachably for lay people.
Ehrman occasionally over-hammers his points home, whether from exasperation or a surfeit of thoroughness. In other cases, he does seem to dismiss arguments a little too categorically or quickly, which has led to some heated online debates. Occasionally his arguments as presented seem a bit circular, though a re-read dispels most of those. And he occasionally goes overboard in weighting credentials — while it’s useful to know who’s actually spent years-to-decades researching this material and who hasn’t, the repetition this case comes across as a bit defensive, though not (quite) academic snobbery.
But aside from those flaws (which knock things from 5 to 4 stars for me), the book is quite approachable and educational, and as someone who is both a Christian and an amateur historian, I found it fascinating how a series of fine threads, each individually fragile — the collection of fragments, passing references, and hardly-primary-material books of the New Testament — can, with enough entanglement, create a strong fabric for the basic historical existence of Jesus … even if they don’t tell us nearly as much as we’d like about him. (Ehrman does tell us some things we can fairly confidently know about Jesus — but a lot of that is a covered in one of the myriad other books he’s written, so all we get is a very high-level summary.)
I strongly recommend this book, not as a tool to build faith in Jesus as Savior (it is not), but as a tool to build faith in the historic process and learning how we can know what we know.