Revisiting the Embarrassing Testimony of Jesus's Crucifixion, and Just Believing Scholars

I've mentioned multiple times in this blog that I know no Jew was expecting the Messiah to be crucified, and He would never have been invented this way, because famous agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman reported as much. Yet I thought of a couple arguments against this.

One is perhaps Ehrman was overstating the facts in Did Jesus Exist?, because he was responding to mythicists whom he disagrees with. The first answer is he had written about that long before his 2012 book on the subject(1), and the others go along with the next argument.

Then is the challenge that Ehrman is one of Christianity's biggest critics, who claims the Old Testament doesn't prophecy Jesus. Yet if they were expecting a crucified Savior, why would that be?

His chapter "Two Key Data for the Historicity of Jesus" isn't solely Ehrman's conclusion on this subject, though. (By the way, the other powerful proof is Paul knowing James His brother and Peter his close friend. Hard to imagine they all think He wasn't real.) Mythicism, Ehrman reports, doesn't come from just average skeptics. While Ehrman did say to his knowledge no one with an actual degree on the subject thinks Jesus is a total myth, highly intelligent people have hopped aboard that train(2). Yet, he rightly reminds us, in both this book and Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code, that just because someone's intelligent doesn't mean they aren't trying to just write best-sellers, or shoot down Christianity. Indeed, mythicism has been significantly ignored (as some mythicists have complained), and (I paraphrase something from that book, which I think was written multiple times and most likely was), "real historians would be scandalized if they heard such claims." 

Then, he does cite evidence. (Of course Ehrman cites evidence. Even with arguments I don't agree with, he has a logic behind them.) I actually got a book citing the Dead Sea Scrolls from a sale the library was having of old books. Those are very significant Jewish literature from around Jesus's time. I've seen a couple places where they talk about a powerful messiah(3).  Moreover, Ehrman once cited an entire book assessing much more evidence than he used(4). 

Richard Carrier is a big mythicist, and wrote Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed. Ehrman, of course, critiqued it, as his book is on dismantling the best arguments from people who believe there is no historical Jesus. Carrier lied, "this idea of a suffering, executed god, would resonate especially with those Jews and their sympathizers who expected a humiliated messiah." (5)

Contrast this to what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:23 (a critically accepted letter): "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." 

This is the missionary Paul writing to the church. He is a Jew traveling all over the Gentile world. His mission is to persuade everyone, and so of course he takes into account what they think! I think Paul is a much more credible source on first-century religious views of crucifixion than Richard Carrier.

I should explain here my view on when to trust scholars at their word when it comes to important things like this. Am I taking the authoritarian approach? That means the argument is an expert said it, so it must be true.

For me, a source has to be expert enough, and also unbiased enough and the view widespread enough. One time in class I remember an unbeliever saying some people, who belong to my "side," believe something I don't. (Christians can get so diverse, just because someone believes in Jesus doesn't mean they subscribe to everything else you heard from your other Christian friend.) I thought of a good illustration to respond: if Michael Behe and William Dembski, two expert proponents of Intelligent Design bought evidence for evolution, I would be in trouble (although I don't study our biological origins I reject evolution). 

I wrote this in an older post: " But something I think of is, where do people like me get evidence from anyway? I have never dug up anything myself, or created any criteria for establishing what Jesus really did that are reported in the Gospels. I learned these from experts. The thing is, you have to question your sources credibility: are they expert enough, and are they biased?" 

This reminds me of the time I bawked at a quote from Antony Flew. "...if ten thousand scholars tell me that they all agreed that they know that Jesus' tomb was opened on such and such a day, I want to ask them, on what evidence do you know this?" (6) See, he was debating Gary Habermas, whom you might know from earlier posts uses information so evidenced even at least a significant number of skeptical scholars agree with it. The historians actually have the evidence, and are better equipped to assess than us. Why would staunch unbelieving scholars believe Jesus's tomb was empty (in this example), unless they have looked at the evidence and seen it as verified? What does Flew expect, them to be silent? Of course Bart Ehrman and other skeptical scholars know this on the basis of evidence, or they wouldn't believe it!

Finally, I have a very different, highly credible source, who very well might be even more credible than Ehrman. He is Pinchas Lapide, the dedicated Jew who came to believe in Jesus's resurrection (although not Christianity) because of the evidence of the Disciples. He might be familiar because I've cited him before. Anyway, this blood-born Jew wrote, "The various conceptions of the resurrection in those times... resist any kind of systematizing. All schools have in common the belief that resurrection is a resuscitation of the dead, effected by God, without definitely answering the question of when, who, and where. Within the pluralism of Jewish faith, the spectrum of various expectations of the Messiah was--and is--just as broad as the scale of the hoped-for resurrection." (7)

Parallel that to what I wrote on the argument for Jesus's crucifixion, referring Ehrman: "Ancient Jews during the time of Jesus had a number of various expectations for what the messiah would be like, some examples being an earthly human king to overthrow the enemies of the Jews, an angelic cosmic being who would overthrow the enemy, or a powerful priest with another messiah. What all the Jewish expectations had in common was that the christ would be a powerful conqueror." 

Paul, Ehrman, and Lapide outweigh Richard Carrier and other proponents of this mythicism.

Citations:

1. I can cite Bart Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (Oxford University Press: Oxford, NY. 2006), 110; Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 82, cited in Andreas J. Kostenberger, Darrell L. Bock, and Josh D. Chatraw, Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible B&H Publishing Group: Nashville, TN. 2014), 173.

2. Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperOne: 2012), 2-3.

3. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, trans. Geza Vermes (Penguin Group: 2004), 25, 412-13.

4. John Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995). Cited in Bart Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (Oxford University Press: Oxford, NY. 2006), 263.

5. Richard Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed (n.p.: Lulu Press, 2009), 34, emphasis original. Cited in Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?., 167.

6.Gary Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate, edited by Terry L. Miethe (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 37.

7. Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (Augsburg Fortress Publishing House, 1982), 56-57.