Bart D. Ehrman. Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. HarperOne, 2016. See here to purchase the book.
Bart Ehrman teaches religious studies at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill. A religious agnostic, he is renowned for his
controversial books about the New Testament and theology. Jesus Before the Gospels essentially critiques the idea that the biblical Gospels are historically accurate because they reflect eyewitness testimony.
In this review, I will be laying out key aspects of Ehrman’s argument. Then, I will evaluate it.
Ehrman’s argument:
A. Ehrman refers to memory studies and argues that people often
misremember what they hear and see. He cites examples of this, such as
John Dean’s inaccurate testimony during the Watergate scandal. Dean was
not entirely lying, for Dean said things that made himself look bad.
Yet, when the audio recording came out of Dean’s conversations about
which he testified, they were revealed to be quite different from how
Dean remembered them. Ehrman cites studies about memory that indicate
that people fill in the gaps of their memory with similar experiences
they have had, that their present influences their memory of the past,
and that the power of suggestion and imagination can even influence them
to “remember” things that did not actually occur. Being in a group
among people who shared an experience does not necessarily guarantee an
accurate memory, either, for people can easily subordinate their
distinct memories to the memory of the group, or the most assertive
person in the group.
B. The transmission of memories, too, leads to inaccuracies. This is
like the “telephone game,” in which one person tells something to
someone, who then tells someone else, who then tells someone else, etc.
Once the story gets to the end of the line, it is vastly different from
how it initially was. But do not pre-literate societies accurately pass
down oral traditions, since they cannot rely on books to preserve the
past? Ehrman argues in the negative. Against a scholar who cited a
tribe’s transmission of a tradition as an example of rigorous
memorization, Ehrman refers to a study that demonstrates that this
tribe’s transmission of the tradition was inaccurate, based on
comparison with other primary sources. Ehrman doubts the accuracy of
much of the Gospels, too, for at least forty years separate the life of
the historical Jesus and the writing of the Gospels. During that time,
traditions got altered and embellished, and stories were invented.
Against those who argue that students of rabbis could remember vast
amounts of their teacher’s teachings, Ehrman notes that the Gospels
contain discrepancies about what Jesus said and did, undermining the
possibility that disciples were remembering and transmitting Jesus’s
teachings verbatum. Ehrman does not believe that the Gospels were
written by eyewitnesses, for the disciples spoke Aramaic rather than
Greek, the language of the Gospels; moreover, the disciples were
illiterate and uneducated (Acts 4:13), not the sorts of people who could
write Gospels.
C. Scholars and apologists who believe that the Gospels reflect
eyewitness testimony like to cite Papias, an early second century
Christian, who states that Matthew wrote a Gospel and that Peter relayed
information for Mark, who wrote a Gospel. Ehrman does not find Papias
to be overly reliable, however: “Writing many years later (as much as a
century after Jesus’s death), he indicates that he knew people who knew
people who knew people who were with Jesus during his life. So it’s not
like having firsthand information, or anything close to it” (page 112).
Ehrman also compares the Gospels of Matthew and Mark with what Papias
says about them and concludes that Papias does not necessarily have in
mind the Gospels in our New Testament. If Papias was aware of the Gospel
of Matthew’s statement that Judas hanged himself (Matthew 27:5), for
example, why did Papias narrate that Judas died by swelling and
collapsing on the street? Ehrman is open to the possibility, however,
that church fathers based their ascription of the biblical Gospels to
Matthew and Mark on what Papias says about the writings that he is
discussing. Papias says Matthew wrote teachings of Jesus in Hebrew, and
the Gospel of Matthew is a Jewish Gospel with a lot of teachings from
Jesus. Consequently, church fathers concluded that the Gospel of Matthew
is the the writing that Papias means.
D. Ehrman does not think that the biblical Gospels were written by
the people to whom they are ascribed. When quoting sayings of Jesus that
are found in the Gospels, church fathers prior to Irenaeus (second
century) never cite the authors of the Gospels by name. Justin Martyr
refers to the memoirs of the apostles, which is not very specific. Here,
I will interject Larry Hurtado’s observation
that Justin in Dialogue 103.8 says the memoirs were written by apostles
and those who knew apostles. Hurtado thinks that is consistent with the
traditional ascriptions of the biblical Gospel, for John and Matthew
were apostles who knew Jesus, and Mark and Luke were not apostles
themselves but knew apostles. Hurtado, in contrast with Ehrman, thinks
that Justin was referring to the biblical Gospels and was assuming their
traditional ascriptions.
E. Ehrman defines “memory,” not just in terms of recollections of
what one personally experienced, but also as a community’s statement
about what happened in the past, even if that community did not live
during that past. Ehrman does not believe that the authors of the
biblical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Judas
personally knew the historical Jesus, but he still calls their writings
“memories” because they are making a statement about the past. Their
“memories,” Ehrman argues, is their response to what they themselves are
experiencing, such as alienation and persecution.
F. Ehrman maintains that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet calling
fellow Jews to repent in light of the impending Kingdom of God. Later,
as this apocalyptic cataclysm failed to materialize, Christians talked
about delay in the second coming of Christ and even came to de-emphasize
eschatology. John’s Gospel lacks imminent eschatology, focusing instead
on believers going to heaven after they die. In contrast with many
scholars, Christian and non-Christian, Ehrman doubts that the historical
Jesus even performed miracles, such as healing and exorcism. In part,
this is because Ehrman is skeptical about miracles: he refers to an odd
occurrence in the Gospel of Peter and simply dismisses it as unlikely.
As a historian, Ehrman maintains that historians make judgments about
what is likely in the past, and miracles are off the table because they
contradict common experience and natural law. Ehrman also notes that
miracle stories developed over time and became embellished within
Christianity, as can be seen in Christian writings such as the Infancy
Gospel of Thomas, and he thinks that sort of thing could also have
happened by the time that the biblical Gospels were written. In
addition, Ehrman observes different views of miracles among the Gospels.
The Gospel of John presents miracles as ways that Jesus proved to
others his divine identity. The synoptic Gospels, by contrast, deny that
Jesus would perform signs to prove his identity (except the sign of
Jonah) and instead present his miracles as acts of compassion. Ehrman
also refers to synoptic passages, however, in which miracles are
indications that the Kingdom of God has come.
G. I am reading John MacArthur’s Twelve Ordinary Men, which
is about the twelve apostles, and MacArthur tries to harmonize the
different stories about Jesus’s calling of his disciples. For MacArthur,
many disciples followed Jesus voluntary, but Jesus later called some of
them to deeper levels of commitment (i.e., leaving their jobs) and even
sent some out as apostles, proclaiming the coming Kingdom and doing
miracles. Ehrman rejects this approach because he believes it
compromises the distinct voices of the Gospels. Jesus in the Gospel of
Mark tells people to leave all, and they follow, and this demonstrates
Mark’s belief that Jesus has an authority that compels people; that
cannot be reconciled with John’s belief that people followed Jesus
voluntarily and initiated the discipleship.
My evaluation:
A. Conservative scholars have their counter-arguments to the sorts of
arguments that Ehrman presents. Against the claim that the disciples
could not have written Gospels because they were illiterate and did not
know Greek, scholars such as Donald Guthrie have contended that Greek
was known in first century Palestine and that some of the disciples, as
businessmen, may have been more sophisticated and fluent in it than
people realize. Regarding Acts 4:13’s claim that Peter and John were
illiterate, Jennifer Dines, who (as far as I know) is not a conservative
Christian scholar, points out in her book The Septuagint (pages 112-113) that the Greek word agrammatos
refers to a lack of sophistication in writing, not necessarily a
complete inability to read and write. Theophilus of Antioch in the
second century C.E. says people were saying that the biblical prophets,
who wrote books, were agrammatoi; they were obviously literate,
since they wrote books, but their books were not deemed to be refined.
Conservative scholars also say that the apostles, even if they
themselves could not have produced beautiful works, could have had
professional writers write down their testimony in a more refined
manner, as occurred in antiquity. Ehrman seems to question that
Palestinian Christians would be in other countries writing in Greek, but
is that so implausible? Paul attests that Christians traveled.
B. Ehrman critiques the work of scholars who hold that the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony, such as Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.
Ehrman does not engage many of Bauckham’s arguments, such as the
argument that the Gospel of Mark is similar to how other ancient sources
present the testimony of eyewitnesses. This is not to suggest that
Ehrman should have engaged that. Ehrman’s book is popular, and Ehrman
manages to pack a punch with the arguments that he does make. Still,
readers should know that there may be more to the story than what Ehrman
presents.
C. A question that I had in reading this book is what Ehrman thinks
got the ball rolling. If Jesus did no miracles, how did people come to
see him as God? I have read his book, How Jesus Became God, and
he attributes it to early Christians’ belief that Jesus rose from the
dead, which was based on visions that they had. I just wonder if that,
by itself, would be sufficient to give people such an exalted notion of
Jesus. Why wouldn’t they just see him as some prophet who rose from the
dead?
D. Christian apologists have argued that the apostles, who had been
with Jesus, would have been able to have suppressed any inaccuracies. I
decided to read Ehrman’s book to see an alternative scenario to this.
The picture I get from Ehrman’s book is that, yes, the apostles were
around, but stories got told and retold. Invention and embellishment
occurred. The apostles may have heard the story about Jesus walking on
water and thought, “You know, I think I do remember that happening,”
even if it did not. Their exalted picture of Jesus after Jesus’s
resurrection could have influenced them to “remember” such an event.
Although the Romans, not the Jews, crucified Jesus, early Christian
conflicts with mainstream Judaism could have influenced them to
“remember” Jewish authorities playing a greater role in Jesus’s
execution. Stories spread, grew, and came to be, and, by the time that
people sat down to write the Gospels, the authors drew from those
stories, true and false, to paint a picture of who Jesus was. There is a
middle ground between saying that the Gospels reflect verbatum what
Jesus said and did, and saying that Christians simply made things up,
and knew they were making things up. Ehrman presented what that middle
ground could have looked like.
E. Ehrman offers explanations as to how the biblical Gospels came to
be ascribed to those who bear their names. Luke-Acts, for example, was
ascribed to Luke due to parts of Acts that seemed to suggest that the
author was a companion to Paul. The Gospel of John appears to refer to
eyewitness testimony (John 19:35; 21:24). Ehrman did not adequately
address why these factors do not indicate that Luke and John wrote those
writings. He may do so in other books, though. A lot of ancient
Christian writings purport to be by eyewitnesses to Jesus, even if they
were not, as Ehrman talks about in Forged.
F. I am not sure what to do with Ehrman’s argument that eyewitness
testimony is unreliable. Even Ehrman does not depict it as thoroughly
unreliable: we do remember some things accurately, especially the gist.
But there are limitations to our memories. The question is: are those
limitations in memory enough to cast doubt on what the Gospels say about
Jesus?
G. Do I find Ehrman to be persuasive? He does raise a lot of
considerations that make his arguments persuasive. When I read the
Gospels, I seriously doubt that they are direct transcripts of what
Jesus said and did. There are discrepancies among them. The authors’
distinct theological perspectives influence what they include and how
they organize the stories. There are aspects of the Gospels that appear
to speak to events after the death of Jesus, such as the persecution of
Christians. Apologists have their arguments, though, as to why the
Gospels are historical, such as the McGrews’ argument of undesigned
coincidences in the Gospels, and those deserve consideration.
H. Ehrman closes the book by saying that the Gospels are still
valuable, even if they are historically inaccurate. I was not clear as
to whether he thinks they can still be religiously valuable to
Christians. Obviously, their interest to him is more historical, since
he is an agnostic. Can the Gospels be religiously valuable, even if
Ehrman’s portrayal of them were to be correct? Well, they teach good
values, such as love for others, including enemies. But I am not sure if
their religious worldview—-about God, God’s activity—-can be reliable
and authoritative, if the historical foundation of that worldview is
inaccurate, if it is solely the product of human beings. I am not saying
that the Bible has to be inerrant for Christianity to be true, but
certain details should probably be historically accurate, at least.
I checked this book out from the library. My review is honest.