My Review of "Did Jesus Exist?"

"It is worth emphasizing that even Mettinger himself does not think that his sparse findings are pertinent to the early Christian claims about Jesus as one who died and rose again." (224)

Funny how Ehrman keeps complaining about mythicists not being Biblical scholars, but when he delves into the Classicist's foray, he looks up another Bible scholar.

"The Jewish notion of resurrection is closely tied to a world-view that scholars have labeled Jewish apocalypticism... When the earliest Christians claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, it was in the context of this Jewish notion of the soon-to-come resurrection." (225-226)

A future historian might look back at us and say Jesus' resurrection could not have been celebrated every Easter because it was connected to apocalypticism. Baldr is another vegetation god whose death and resurrection was both seasonal (he was shot by a mistletoe, a parasitic plant that survives on tree branches during the winter) and also connected to the Norse apocalypse, Ragnarok (his death triggers a string of events that eventually leads to the end of the world).

"[From Mettinger:] In the first case the deities return but have not died; in the second case the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity." (227)

Mettinger must have a really loose definition for the word "unambiguous."

"With respect to ancient reports of the Greek Adonis, for example, there were in antiquity two forms of the myth, which only later were combined into a kind of megamyth. In the first form two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, compete for the affections of the human infant Adonis. Zeus (or in some of the myths Calliope) decides in Solomon-like fashion that Adonis will spend part of each year with each divinity, half the year with Aphrodite in the realms above, with the other gods, and the other half with Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. There is nothing here to suggest either the death or resurrection of Adonis. Part of the year he is in one place (the realm of the living) and part of the other (the realm of the dead). The other more familiar form of the myth comes from the Roman author Ovid. In this account the young man Adonis is killed by a boar and is then mourned and commemorated by the goddess Aphrodite in the form of a flower. In this version, then, Adonis definitely dies. But there is nothing to suggest that he was raised from the dead." (227)

Wait a minute. So in one myth Adonis moves in a seasonal rotation between "the realm of the dead" and the "realm of the living," but that doesn't suggest "either death or resurrection", and then in the other myth, Adonis dies, but there's no resurrection, so neither counts? The situation seems very similar to the Pauline Epistles and the Gospel of Mark. The Pauline Epistles has Jesus descending and rising between the heavens and the lower planes but does not actually give a full description of exactly how and why Jesus died and the Gospel of Mark gives a full description of Jesus' death but does not technically show Jesus' resurrection, having only implied it. So too with the story of Adonis being gored by the boar: Aphrodite sprinkles nectar into Adonis' blood and flowers spring up as a symbolic resurrection. Orphic Hymn #54, which is either from the late Hellenistic period or early Roman period, says: "At stated periods doom'd to set and rise, with splendid lamp, the glory of the skies. Two-horn'd and lovely, reverenc'd with tears, of beauteous form, adorn'd with copious hairs." Is Adonis really being "doom'd to set and rise" and be "reverenc'd with tears" without actually dying and resurrecting?

"It is only in later texts, long after Ovid and after the rise of Christianity, that one finds any suggestion that Adonis came back to life after his death. Smith argues that this later form of the tradition may in fact have been influenced by Christianity and its claim that a human had been raised from the dead." (228)

So Ehrman admits that Adonis moved between the underworld and the heavens, and that Adonis died, but his worshippers needed to copy the idea of the resurrection part of that equation from Christianity, that tiny Jewish peasant religion that Ehrman says no one could ever invent because its central precept of a crucified Messiah was too abhorrent. You know, because Hades=Death :: Heaven=Resurrection is just too complex a concept for those Adonis worshippers.

"But his wife, Isis went on a search to recover and reassemble them, leading to Osiris' rejuvenation. The key point to stress, however, is that Osiris does not--decidedly does not--return to life." (228)

So Osiris is not resurrected, but "rejuvenated" from being hacked into pieces!

"The same can be said, in Smith's view, of all the other divine beings often pointed to as pagan forerunners of Jesus. Some die but don't return; some disappear without dying and do return; but none of them die and return. Jonathan Z. Smith's well documented views have made a large impact on scholarship. Mark Smith is a scholar of the ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible who also opposes any notion of dying and rising gods in the ancient world. Mark Smith makes the compelling argument that when Frazer devised is theory about dying and rising gods, he was heavily influenced by his understanding of Christianity and Christian claims about Christ. But when one looks at the actual data about the pagan deities, without the lenses provided by later Christian views, there is nothing to make one consider them as gods who die and rise again." (228-229)

So mythicists, who are overwhelmingly represented by atheists, are looking at it through a Christian-viewed lens, and those who defend a historical Jesus, who are overwhelmingly represented by theologians and Bible scholars, understand the meaning better in Classical terms?

"The majority of scholars agree with the views of Smith and Smith: there is no unambiguous evidence that any pagans prior to Christanity believed in dying and rising gods, let alone that it was a widespread view held by lots of pagans in lots of times and places." (230)

When Ehrman says scholars, does he mean Biblical scholars or ancient religion scholars?

"One passage mythicists appeal to, however, may on the surface seem to suggest that Paul, writing before the Gospels, understood Jesus as God who died and rose again (comparable to dying and rising deities). This is the much-debated "hymn"--as it is called--found in Philippians 2:6-11... Even though mythicists typically treat it as unambiguous evidence of their views, the reality is that there is almost nothing unambiguous in the passage. Every word and phrase has been pored over and debated by scholars using the most sophisticated tools of analysis that are available. And still there is no consensus on what the passage means. But one thing is clear: it does not mean what mythicists typically claim it means. It does not portray Jesus in the guise of a pagan dying and rising god, even if that is what, on a superficial reading, it may appear to be about." (233)

Translation: "Hey, we may not have an answer for this one, but we still worked a lot harder than the mythicists in trying to come up with something other than what it appears to be."

"Another option is that this is describing Christ as a preexistent angelic being... In these cases, though, the angels may appear like God (in the 'form' of God), but they are not actually God. It is striking that a number of Jewish traditions speak of an angel being exalted to the level of God, sitting on a throne next to that of the Almighty." (237)

That is Metatron, ascribed to Elisha ben Abuya, which the Toledot identifies with Paul.

"And so the speeches of Acts, which must date well before any of our Gospels, and almost certainly predate the writings of Paul himself, indicate that it was at the resurrection that Jesus was made the Lord, the Christ, the Son of God (Acts 2:36; 13:32-33). This is the view of the creed that Paul quotes in Romans 1:3-4 as well. Some Christians were not content with the idea that Jesus was the Son of God only at his resurrection, however, and came to think that he must have been the Son of God for his entire public ministry. And so we have traditions that arose indicating that Jesus became the Son of God at his baptism. That may be the view still found in our earliest Gospel, Mark, who begins his narrative with Jesus being baptized and hearing the voice of God from heaven declaring him his son." (238)

Here, Ehrman has a point. The problem is its inconsistent. Romans 8:29 says that "those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son..." 1 Corinthians 8:5-6 says: "Indeed, even though there are many so-called gods in heaven and earth-- yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist." Jesus is also declared the Son of God at his death in Mark by the centurion.

"Jesus is called Christ in Paul, Mark, M, L, John, Josephus, Pliny, Tacitus, and so on. It is important to remember what this term meant in ancient Judaism." (240)

Marcion's version of Luke, which I believe is the earlier version, instead used the term "Chrestus" or "Righteous One", a term that may have some relation to the "Teacher of Righteousness". Josephus also refers to Honi the Circle Drawer as "righteous" and Tacitus also uses the term "Chrestus", not "Christus".

"For one thing, while it is true that Paul calls Jesus the Wisdom of God in I Corinthians, that is not the normal way that he refers to him and is certainly not the way he first thought of him. There is no reason to privilege this conception over the many others that can be found in Paul." (244)

The same could be said for arguing Paul only saw the Son of God as incarnate after the crucifixion.

"This is the kind of weak assertion that Wells typically makes. He provides no solid ground for thinking that Paul imagined Jesus to have lived in the remote past--certainly nothing to suggest that his life ended during the reign of King Jannaeus." (248)

Wells refers to the Talmud, which explicitly states it. Apparently, Ehrman did not really read much of Wells or the Talmud.

"What occasion did Paul have to mention something that everyone knew?... The reason the passage [I Corinthians 15:3-5] is highly relevant to our discussion here is that Paul gives no indication at all that a hundred years or more passed between Jesus' resurrection and his appearance to the apostles." (249)

So an obscure peasant being recently crucified is something "everyone" would know, but the time period between Yeshu's death and the present would had to have been known and referenced?

"It is hard to believe that Paul would have such a radically different view from every other Christian of his day, as Wells suggests. That Jesus lived recently is affirmed not only in all four of our canonical Gospels (where, for example, he is associated with John the Baptist and is said to have been born under the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, under the rulership of the Jewish king Herod, and so on); it is also the view of all the Gospel sources--Q (which associates Jesus with John the Baptist), M, and L--and of the non-Christian sources such as Josephus and Tacitus (who both mention Pilate)." (251)

And what Christians would those be? Most of early documents that were not Proto-Orthodox have been lost and, as with the Gospels of Marcion and Cerinthus, typically presumed by Biblical scholars without debate to be late and historically worthless. The Jesus of Mark and Matthew could easily have been a fictional character used to allegorize the church, Luke and John were not referenced until the 170s-180s, and Acts says that the name Christian only came up in Antioch after Barnabas and Saul started teaching there. And it's not true that all the gospels date Jesus' birth to King Herod: Luke dates Jesus' birth to a Roman census following Herod's death. In fact, that can be seen as a highly symbolic date for the birth of Jewish Messianic beliefs because that is when the Romans took direct control over Judea rather than controlling it through the puppet king Herod. The John the Baptist passages are relegated to the third layer of Q -- really only because they are not in Mark -- and they do not include John baptizing Jesus. M and L are even weaker alibis for a first century Jesus: what evidence is there that places Jesus in the first century A.D. in those? In fact, L includes Jesus speaking to a "legal expert" who quotes the first century B.C. religious teacher Hillel. The verse in Luke 7:40 where Jesus tells "Simon the Leper" to leave the woman anointing his feet alone (the same context from Mark in which Judas betrays him) and Luke 22:31 in which Jesus warns Simon of Satan taking him over may have a better context in which Simon is Jesus' enemy rather than his disciple, which fits more into the role of Simon Ben Shetach's hostility to both Yeshu and Honi the Circle Drawer. But far more convincingly, Burkett's book From Proto-Mark to Mark has shown that the story of Stephen being stoned to death in Acts was taken from a Passion source that was also used for Jesus' death in his gospel, which means L very likely had Jesus stoned to death by rule of the Sanhedrin without the Romans, just as he is in the Talmud and the Toledot.

"These sources, I should stress, are all independent of one another; some of them go back to Palestinian traditions that can be readily be dated to 31 or 32 CE, just a year or so after the traditional date of Jesus's death" (251)

What proof is there that any of those sayings sources go back to 31 or 32 CE? These dates are obviously based on the assumption of Jesus' crucifixion and so the premise is entirely based on circular logic.

"He quotes professional scholars at length when their views prove useful for developing aspects of his argument, but he fails to point out that not a single one of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis." (252)

Since when do you have to agree with everything a scholar says in order to quote them? Everyone knows that mythicists are in the extreme minority and it's not like he's trying to insinuate otherwise.

"Like Wells before him, Doherty refuses to allow that I Thessalonians--which explicitly says that the Jews (or the Judeans) were the ones responsible for the death of Jesus--can be used as evidence of Paul's view: it is, he insists, an insertion into Paul's writings, not from the apostle himself. (Here we find, again, textual studies driven by convenience: if a passage contradicts your views, simply claim that it was not actually written by the author.)" (253)

This view is shared by Helmut Koester, Burton Mack, Paula Fredriksen and Hyam Maccoby, each of whom believe in the gospel Jesus. In any case, the verse is equally problematic for those who believe in the gospel Jesus because it makes no mention of the Romans but lays the entire blame on the Jews, something that would be hardly acceptable in its historical context. It is also especially hard to date before the 70s since it speaks of some all-encompassing retribution. Ehrman should know this is a controversial verse, so it seems dishonest to insinuate that it is only questioned by mythicists.

"It is true that Plato and his followers had a certain view of reality where, roughly speaking, this material world is but a reflection of the world of 'forms' But Platonism was simply one of the ancient philosophies popular at the time of Christianity. Also popular was Stoicism, with a completely different, nondualistic sense of the world; Stoicism lacked the notion that this realm is an imitation of the higher realm. So too did Epicureanism, which thought in fairly modern fashion that the material world is all there is. Why should we assume that the mystery cults were influenced by just one of these philosophies? Or for that matter any of them? What evidence does Doherty cite to show that mystery religions were at heart Platonic? Precisely none." (254-255)

Is Ehrman trying to say that Plato wasn't really that influential? Western philosophy is typically divided between the pre-Platonic and post-Platonic eras. It's often been said that all of Western philosophy is "just a series of footnotes to Plato". William Blake said: "If Christianity were morality, then Socrates is the Savior". Cynicism is heavily interrelated with Platonism (with many ancients attributing its founding, perhaps falsely, to Socrates' other student Antisthenes) and Stoicism was heavily interrelated with both Cynicism and Platonism. The Stoics saw the cosmos as a spherical continuum of matter held together by the power of God through the causality of the spirit that pervades it, which fits well with the conceptual landscape of the Pauline epistles. And the third century Stoic Plotinus did in fact espouse metaphysics based on three hypostases reflecting emanations from the One that are in imitation of the higher realm. Tertullian said the Valentinian cosmology "was of Plato's school" and that "Marcion's better god, with all his tranquility, he came from the Stoics", a statement I fully agree with, but is odd coming from him since Tertullian believed their versions of the gospels, John and Luke, had material deleted (not added!) from them. If you take all of the Hellenistic apologetics about the Old Testament out of the Pauline Epistles, then you are mostly left with is a heavily spiritualized form of Stoicism. And it is widely believed that Plato took many of his ideas from the Orphic mysteries, such as the belief that the soul is entrapped in the body, although Plato criticized them for proselytizing door to door and offering atonement for sin. Like Zoroastrianism and Egyptian beliefs, the belief in heaven and hell was also an important part of Orphic teachings, which relates to the epistles' heavy emphasis on salvation.

"When, in his second edition, Doherty admits that we do not know what the followers of the mystery cults thought, he is absolutely correct. We do not know. But he then asserts that they thought like the later Platonist Plutarch... Very rarely do common people think about the world the way upper-class, highly educated, elite philosophers do... The entire enterprise of philosophical reflection on ancient mythology was rooted precisely in the widely accepted fact that common people did not look at the world, or its myths, in the same way philosophers did. Elite philosophers tried to show that the myths accepted by others were emblematic of deeper spiritual truths." (255)

...unlike those stupid Gnostics who literally believed Thomas was the twin brother of Jesus but didn't understand biology.

"I hardly need to emphasize again that the early followers of Jesus were not elite philosophers. They were by and large common people. Not even Paul was philosophically trained. To be sure, as a literate person he was far better educated than most Christians of his day. But he was no Plutarch. His worldview was not principally dependent on Plato. It was dependent on the Jewish traditions, as these were mediated through the Hebrew scriptures... There are no grounds for assuming that Paul, whose views of Jesus were taken over from the Palestinian Jewish Christians who preceded him, held a radically different view of Jesus from his predecessors." (255-256)

Other than calling the whole of the Jewish Law a curse and getting into a disagreement over eating kosher foods with Cephas and James in Antioch?

"Paul tells us about his background. He was raised a highly religious Jew, and he was a Pharisee. Were Pharisaic Jews influenced by the mystery cults? Did they spend their days plumbing the depths of the myths about Attis and Osiris? Did they look deeply into the mysteries of Isis and Mithras?" (256)

Hyam Maccoby makes a good case that the Pauline epistles better reflect Gnostic theology than Pharisaic teachings. I believe the core of the Pauline epistles is Gnostic, with an early version of 1 Corinthians perhaps originally being used by the Pentacoastal-like tongue-speaking Montanists and Galatians originating as the centerpiece theology of the anti-Old Testament Marcionites.

"The Law was given to the Jewish people not as some kind of onerous burden that they had to bear--as so many Christians today seem to think--but for the opposite reason: to provide guidance to God's people about how they should worship him and relate to one another in their communal lives together." (273)

What gave Christians this idea that the Law is an onerous burden? That "highly religious Jew" with the Pharisee background.

"So the stories about Jesus the miracle-working five-year-old who could wither his playmates when they irritated him--as found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas--are not historically reliable, since those stories serve a Christian purpose of showing that Jesus was a powerful Son of God even before his public ministry" (291-292).

That's not the criterion of dissimilarity. That's the criterion of basic common sense.

"We saw how the story that Jesus was crucified created enormous headaches for the Christian mission because no Jews would have expected a crucified messiah. This tradition clearly passes the criterion of dissimilarity. Given the additional fact that it is so thoroughly probable that in fact Jesus was crucified. That is far more probable than an alternative claim, for example, that he was stoned to death or that he ascended without dying or even that he simply lived out his life and died as an old man in Nazareth, none of which is ever mentioned in our sources." (292)

So Jesus being stoned to death is about as historically likely as him ascending into heaven without dying? Using the criterion of disimiliarity against the mythicist argument entails the assumption that anyone inventing the idea could invent anything and chose what to invent based on the least headaches it would evoke to future Christologies... This whole attitude that anything dissimilar to Orthodox Christianity and Judaism must go back to Jesus is not a very good criteria. Besides that, why would a Messiah being stoned to death be any easier to deal with than a crucified Messiah?

"Or take the details of Jesus's life. The idea that he had brothers does not serve any clear-cut Christian agenda. It is simply taken as a statement of fact by the early authors who mention it (Paul, Mark, John, Josephus)." (292)

It is not just given as a statement of fact in either Mark or John. Both Mark and John use the brothers to make hostile theological statements against some group, Galilean zealots for Mark and probably the James' sect in Jerusalem for John.

"Conversely, the likelihood of Jesus entering into Jerusalem straddling two donkeys and with the crowd shouting out that he was the messiah is decreased by the circumstance that had such an event really happened (unlikely as it is on its own terms), Jesus would no doubt have been arrested by the authorities on the spot instead of a week later." (293)

Here, Ehrman actually makes a good point. The Toledot also echoes this tradition; only it gives details the gospels do not, such as having 310 probably armed disciples with him. Had this event happened in the first century B.C., then the explanation that the authorities did not arrest him because they were afraid the crowds would riot becomes far more plausible.

"Archaeological work on Nazareth indicates that it was a small hamlet with no evidence of any wealth whatsoever... After he began his public ministry, we have reports that the people of his hometown had trouble understanding what happened to him, how he could suddenly seem so wise and insightful into the religious traditions of Israel (Mark 6; Luke 4). This suggests that he was not a wunderkind growing up but an altogether average person. (295-296)

The story in Mark sets up a wisdom saying about all prophets not being accepted in their homeland, which probably reflects the author's time period rather than Jesus'. It hardly qualifies as evidence of what Jesus' childhood was like.

"But if, as seems probable, Jesus was widely seen among his followers as an expert interpreter of the Torah, this may suggest that he could read and study the texts." (296)

What is this based on? The childhood story of Jesus teaching the scholars at the temple that Luke stole from Josephus' autobiography?

"Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic preacher. But students wish that I would also present 'the other side'. I sympathize with the concern, but I also recognize why it is a problem. The semester lasts only fifteen weeks... I could present the evidence that other scholars offer for seeing Jesus as something else. But which other side would I choose: that Jesus was a political revolutionary? A proto-Marxist? A proto-feminist? A countercultural hero? A Jewish holy man? A Jewish Cynic philosopher? A married man with children?" (298)

"Political revolutionary" and "Jewish Cynic philosopher" should both be addressed. The semester isn't that short. "Proto-feminism" might not be a bad subject to touch upon in the context of Montanism and the Pauline verse about "neither male nor female." One wonders why Ehrman didn't bother to write an entire book against the idea of Jesus the first century married man with children since even Dan Brown seems to be equivalent to the Christ-Myth hypothesis. If Ehrman had chosen that topic, maybe he wouldn't have felt the need to add so much filler.

"The Law was a central component of Jesus's teaching... From Q: Jesus states that it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for a single dot of the Law to pass away... I should stress that some of these multiply attested sayings appear to pass the criterion of dissimilarity. For example, in the first passage mentioned (Mark 10:17-27), when a rich man asks Jesus how to have eternal life, he tells him to 'keep the commandments'... The early Christians maintained that a person had to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus for eternal life... So why is Jesus portrayed in this passage as saying that salvation comes to those who keep the Law? Because that is something he actually said... Unlike certain Pharisees, Jesus did not think that what really mattered before God was the scrupulous observance of the laws in all their details." (309-310)

When the story came out that Hebrew Nation meat products were not "100% kosher", Jon Stewart of the Daily Show joked, "Or as it's known to Jews: not kosher!" How can Jesus have said that that not "a single dot of the Law... could "pass away" yet at the same time not believe in "the scrupulous observance of the laws in all their details"? Those two statements are in complete contradiction. Furthermore, Ehrman just got finished explaining how since John the Baptist was apocalyptic before Jesus, and Paul was apocalyptic after Jesus, then Jesus must have been apocalyptic as well. But assuming everything Ehrman believes is true, if John believed in a strict observance of the Law, as suggested by his complaint that Herod broke an obscure law about marrying your brother's x-wife (a particularly strict interpretation of Lev. 18:20), and if Jesus' brother James had a strict interpretation of the Torah, as described by Josephus, then by that logic doesn't that mean Jesus' interpretation of the Law was also strict, in contradiction to the gospels? Mark has Jesus allowing his disciples to pluck corn on the Sabbath and denying all kosher laws by saying nothing put into the mouth can make you unclean. Keeping the Ten Commandments for salvation may seem Jewish, but in contrast to keeping all the Torah laws, it's rather lax. Plus, in Acts 15:20, the second James decides that Gentiles would only have to abstain from things like polluted from idols, fornication, strangled animals, and blood, which correlates to the "Noahide Laws" for Gentiles in the Talmud, rules that are roughly equivalent to the Ten Commandments except that they don't contain prohibitions against worshiping another god, the Sabbath, and coveting. These rules are more universal but still somewhat ritualistic. If Jesus taught that ritualistic laws were unimportant for Jews, why would James enforce rituals on Gentiles? And if Jesus taught the Ten Commandments were necessary for salvation, why would the Jerusalem Church cite Pharasaic Law for Gentiles in its stead? In fact, if you read on, Mark goes out of order and lists the commandments against [#6] murder, [#7] adultery, [#8] stealing, [#?] defrauding, and [#5] dishonoring ones parents. Mark has notably added a new commandment against fraud but has skipped having no other gods, graven images, and the Sabbath, all of which are particularly problematic for Christians both then and now. An observant Jew would never had written such a thing. Since dishonoring one's parents as the *first* commandment would stick out like a thumb, that one was relegated to the end so that the more universal laws take their place according to where they *should* be: with murder being the most egregious sin. Thus, Mark appears to be trying to convert the concept of the Ten Commandments, which Jews have always believed had been given not to all mankind but only for them to follow, into a universal code very similar to the way conservative Christians today attempt to claim that Western Civilization is based on the Ten Commandments while at the same time not accepting the plain interpretation that worshipping Jesus breaks the first commandment, kneeling at a cross or wearing a crucifix breaks the second commandment, and working on Saturday breaks the fourth commandment.

"'Truly I say to you, that you who have followed me, in the new world, when the Son of Man is sitting on the throne of his glory, you will be seated--even you--on twelve thrones ruling the twelve tribes of Israel' (Matthew 19:28) That this saying probably goes back to Jesus himself is suggested by the fact that it is delivered to all twelve disciples, including, of course, Judas Iscariot. No one living after Jesus's death, who knew that he had been betrayed by one of his own (as reported in all our early sources), would have made up a saying in which the betrayer would be one of the rulers of the future kingdom." (318)

Yet Ehrman has no problem with the statements from 1 Corinthians that after Jesus was "betrayed"/"handed over", he appeared to Cephas and then to "the twelve". Ehrman says this was immediately after Jesus' death and yet they have already replaced the twelfth disciple? Why would the disciples recruit a twelfth disciple before they saw the resurrected Jesus? According to Acts, they recruited Matthais, but that was because they had already seen Jesus' resurrection and even his ascension. The Twelve were not disciples of Jesus, but preachers of Jesus, and the names from the gospels were only added later to symbolize certain sects with the Jesus movement. Thus there's no reason to believe this verse in Matthew had to go back to a historical Jesus.

"We do not have any indication that Jesus entered into direct conflict with the Essenes, although it should be clear that his interpretation of the apocalyptic realities that were bearing down on the world was very different from theirs. Whereas they believed in separating themselves from the rest of society so as to maintain their personal and communal purity, Jesus believed in spending time with the impure, the 'tax collectors and sinners', who would be the ones to be brought into the kingdom. Jesus's views would have been anathema to the Qumran community." (320)

We don't really know if all Essenes were as strict as the Qumran community, and by the time Mark was written, the Romans had already destroyed that community. Its surviving members probably would have ended up destitute and living off handouts on the streets of neighboring towns with no more authoritarian figures enforcing Qumran's strict rules on purity. Thus it wouldn't be too hard to envision Qumran Essenes gradually losing their strict puritanical outlook.

"The idea that [Jesus] would personally destroy the Temple does not, of course, pass the criterion of dissimiliarity: Christians who considered him the all-powerful Lord may well have given the sayings that twist in order to show that after his death, he 'got even' with Jews by destroying the Temple. Neither does it do well by the criterion of contextual credibility: it is hard to imagine Jesus as a one-man wrecking crew able to demolish entire buildings. Similarly problematic is the notion, found only in John, that when Jesus talked about the Temple being destroyed and raised in three days, he was actually speaking of his body (John 2:21)... One might be tempted to push the criterion of dissimilarity a bit further and claim that since the Temple was in fact destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, none of the predictions of Jesus can be safely trusted as actually going back to him--that is, that later Christians put predictions of its destruction on his lips to show his prophetic powers. Most scholars, though, consider this an extreme view since the predictions of the destruction on one level or another pass all of our criteria: (a) they are multiply attested (Mark, John, Acts, and Thomas); (b) in one respect at least, the earliest form of these sayings appears to pass the criterion of dissimilarity since Jesus's claim in Mark that not one stone will be left upon another did not in fact come true, as you can see yourself by visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem today; if anyone actually knew the details of the destruction, they wouldn't have invented this verse; and (c) just as important, the sayings are contextually credible. For we know of other prophetic figures throughout the history of Israel who maintained that the Jewish people had so strayed from God that he would enter into judgment against them by destroying their central place of worship." (324-325).

It's ironic that Ehrman not only denies that prediction about the Temple's destruction is based on after-the-fact knowledge, but assumes most scholars take to the same idea. On page 48 he dates Mark to 70 (and Matthew and Luke to 85, and John to 90), following the majority of Biblical scholars, but the reason they date Mark to 70 is because of the predictions to the Temple being destroyed (and John to 90 because of it's believed to be a reaction to the hypothetical Council of Jamnia, whose very existence, not to mention the link to John's gospel, is based on very weak evidence). So Ehrman's claims that we have evidence for a historical Jesus from first century gospels is based on evidence he doesn't even believe in. Some scholars set the dating back to 65 to allow for Mark to have predicted the Temple's destruction based on the rebellion. In fact, Ehrman in his other books uses that same range: 65-70. Mark probably did not know the full details of the Temple's destruction, but while the "not one brick" statement is definitely an exaggeration, it does reflect the historic reality of seeing something amazingly large utterly demolished.

"As surprised as I was at the meeting of humanists to hear so much about religion, what I was not surprised to learn was that a good number of people there--at least the ones I talked to--are either mythicists or leaning towards mythicism... By staking out a position that is accepted by almost no one else, they open themselves to mockery and to charges of intellectual dishonesty. But to accomplish their goals (about which I will say more in a moment), this is completely unnecessary. Of course, for mythicists, it goes without saying, belief in Jesus is a problem." (333-334)

Finally we reach the pinnacle of Ehrman's self-importance in his conclusion: Mythicists open themselves up to being labeled intellectually dishonest because no one would adopt such an unpopular position. Well, not unpopular at the humanist meeting Ehrman went to in order to receive an award, but unpopular among the people who matter: Biblical scholars like himself.

"It is no accident that virtually all mythicists (in fact, all of them, to my knowledge) are either atheists or agnostics." (337)

This is somewhat true. There is a large undercurrent of anti-theism that fuels the Christ-Myth movement. However, there is also a large undercurrent of religious faith that fuels the biases of theologians and Biblical scholars. Taken in the form of a Hegelian triad, we could say: Thesis: Most theologians and Biblical scholars believe in a historical Jesus and are either Christians or former Christians. Antithesis: Most of those who argue for a mythical Jesus are either atheist or agnostic. Synthesis: Robert Price, a former Baptist minister, is the only theologian and Biblical scholar who is also a mythicist, as well as the only writer who refered to himself as a "Christian atheist".

"Their agenda is religious; and they are complicit in a religious ideology. They are not doing history; they are doing theology. But neither issue--the good done in the name of Christ or the evil--is of any relevance to me as a historian when I try to sacrifice the past in order to promote the worthy cause of my own social and political agendas. No one else should either. Jesus did exist, whether we like it or not." (339)

Frank Zindler is part of an atheist group and writes against Christianity. Earl Doherty published his book under the name "Age of Reason Publications". But Robert Price, G.A. Wells, and Alvar Ellegard do not really fit the mold of the tireless anti-theist. Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy, and G.R.S. Mead have extremely positive attitudes towards Gnostic Christianity and belong or belonged to Gnostic-like groups. I know a former monk who was very open to the Christ-Myth theory because it implied that Christianity could be understood as a universal religion. Considering that the Sumerian Dumuzi is so closely connected to a goddess cult that survived for 25,000 years in all of Eurasia, such a concept might not be so far off. I myself believed in the historicity of the gospel Jesus for many years, although I still thought Biblical scholars were doing a disservice to their subject by ignoring Christianity's relationship to the mystery religions and the problems inherent in the epistles. It was not until I learned of the existence of the first century B.C. Jesus in the Talmud and the Toledot that Doherty's Jesus Puzzle and Ellegard's Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ suddenly fell into place. I of course enjoy reading other hypotheses on the historical Jesus and weighing in on them and I respect scholars with different opinions, but I do not like scholars like Bart Ehrman and Joseph Hoffmann who throw out more insults than facts. Mythicists may be made up of amateurs and Classicists, but Ehrman hardly proves his side the most professional in what has got to be the most error-ridden scholarly work I have ever read in my life. The fact that Ehrman takes such an extreme reaction towards mythicists' making their arguments out to be less relevant than Dan Brown conspiracy theories while at the same time focusing so much more vitriol on them than anyone else gives a pretty good indication of who is letting their emotions get the better of them. Even if the parallels between dying-and-rising gods and the resurrection of Jesus were all just a coincidence, the mystery religions would still be relevant as a parallel psychological motif. Ehrman does not use the language of a scholar who desires a dialogue with mythicists. He appears to have sought out to learn the bare minimum necessary to write a book, filled in the bare bones with material he's written about before, and then turned it into a personal attack on their intellectual integrity. Ehrman calls mythicism a religious agenda, but it is Ehrman's crusade against the dying-and-rising gods of the foreign lands of classical mythology that exhibits the true zeal of religious reactionary.