I'm mostly skimming rather than reading fully but I've got into reading Jesus mythicism stuff and felt like skimming this along with a couple of the famous recent mythicist books. To be fair here I feel slightly more sympathetic to the mythicist negative argument even if I don't find the positive alternatives they posit more convincing but I'd like to be convinced of the historicist argument because, you know, it's the academic consensus and I don't want to be believing in disproved stuff.

His discussion of the Testimonium Flavianum takes it as a given that there was an original core to it, gives a reconstruction, and then tests every mythicist argument criticising it by pointing to his reconstruction and saying "if it looked like this, this argument fails, therefore the mythicist criticisms of it are wrong". I understand that he's repeating academic consensus here (and at many points) and can't explicate every detail of why it's the consensus, but it strikes me as extremely unconvincing. He also claims he's going to deal with the “the brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah” reference but then doesn't? Odd.

A reoccurring argument goes something like "mythicists criticise x story about Jesus. [usually at least a mild rebuttal] Even if they're right, legends appearing around a real person doesn't mean the real person doesn't exist". It's both obviously correct but also reduces the historical Jesus you can say much about down further and further.

There's also an odd reluctance to even suggest that there could be deliberate fictional writing involved at any stage in the creation of the gospels - it's all just various "traditions"

Some good insights but much like earlier books. ( )

Spoiler alert: after more than 300 pages, Bart Ehrman concludes Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth with the following unambiguous claim: “Jesus did exist, whether we like it or not” (339). It is a proper ending to a convincing argument.

Ehrman proceeds deliberately, making clear along the way that the reader knows that he is an agnostic. His main issue, he asserts, is to dismiss “mythicists” such as Richard Carrier, Earl Doherty, Robert Price, and George A. Wells. He begins by attacking the mythicists’ qualifications, noting that only Price and Carrier have the appropriate academic training at the graduate level. In the main, however, Ehrman maintains that “it is striking that virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure” (5).
The book is divided into three parts: Part I, “Evidence for the Historical Jesus” (five chapters); Part II, “The Mythicists’ Claims” (two chapters); and Part III, “Who Was the Historical Jesus?” (two chapters, and a conclusion). Ehrman summarizes:

We are not, then, dealing merely with Gospels that were produced fifty or sixty years after Jesus’s alleged eath as the principal witnesses to his existence. We are talking about a large number of sources, dispersed over a remarkably broad geographical expanse, many of them dating to the years immediately after Jesus’s alleged life, some of them from Palestine itself. On the basis of this evidence alone, it is hard to understand how Jesus could have been “invented.” Invented by whom? Where? When? How then could there be so many independent strands of evidence?

But that is just the beginning. The reality is that every single author who mentions Jesus – pagan, Christian, or Jewish – was fully convinced that he at least lived. Even the enemies of the Jesus movement thought so; among their many slurs against the religion, his nonexistence is never one of them…Jesus certainly existed (171-173).

Part of the final chapter, “Conclusion,” is titled “The Mythicist’s Agenda.” Ehrman charges that “the mythicists who are so intent on showing that the historical Jesus never existed are not being driven by a historical concern. Their agenda is religious, and they are complicit in a religious ideology. They are not doing history; they are doing theology” (337-338). One could aim this critique at Ehrman’s own views, as he is quick to dismiss the numerous supernatural aspects reported by the same writers that he marshalls as evidence. But this, I think, is the topic of another book.
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This is a great introductory book to historical Jesus studies. It’s written at a popular level and the writing is engaging rather that stuffy scholarspeak.

Well known agnostic, Bart Ehrman takes aim at the “Jesus mythicist” movement, claiming that it is both an embarrassment to modern scholarship and hindrance to secular causes. Ehrman’s case moves in three parts. (1) A survey of the relevant evidence for the historical Jesus, (2) a polemic against the mythicist case, and (3) a positive reconstruction of the historical Jesus as an apocalyptic Jewish preacher.

Going into this book, I expected most of Ehrman’s argument to overlap with standard, boilerplate evangelical apologetics that most folks have already heard 1000 times before. So, I focused on the points that violate conservative/evangelical assumptions. Two nuggets stood out. First, by denying the Pauline authorship of the pastoral epistles, Ehrman strengthened his case; this is because non-Pauline works count as additional independent witnesses. Ehrman does something similar by treating Q as a separate, independent source, but that’s consistent with conservative evangelicalism. Second, Ehrman’s chief argument against “Jesus is a copy of other dying and rising gods” is that the earliest Christians didn’t think Jesus was god, but was a man appointed (adopted) by God to a special status following the resurrection. You can’t copy a claim if you’re not making the same claim in the first place. Ehrman goes on to argue that there are additional dissimilarities between Jesus and the dying/rising agricultural gods of the Ancient Near East; these are just additional, unnecessary layers to an argument that already cuts off the copycat argument at the knees. For Ehrman, this second step is to highlight the ignorance of mythicists more than anything else.

Obviously, I disagree with Ehrman’s reconstruction of Jesus as a failed apocalyptic prophet and other points, but that’s to be expected. My biggest beef with the book is that it’s about 40% too long. I get that it’s a fluffy popular book, but Ehrman could’ve made his core points in about 200 pages. Nevertheless, this should be required reading for anyone dipping their toes in the water of historical Jesus studies - especially non-Christians with an affinity for mythicism.

Content: 3.9/5
Style: 3.3/5
Length: 2.8/5
Exposing mythicism as the embarrassing, “young-earth” side of atheism: 6/5

OVERALL: 3.4/5 ( )

I have never encountered anyone who can better make an analysis of the bible into a page turner than Bart Ehrman, Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In this little gem, Ehrman takes on a group of atheists and agnostics (whom he calls “mythicists”) who deny that Jesus ever walked the face of the earth.

As those who have read any of his other books knows, Ehrman himself is not religious or even a Christian, but he is an honest historian. As such, he cannot ignore what he considers to be manifest historical evidence that there was once a Jewish man named Jesus who lived in the first century in Roman governed Palestine. In fact, it was not until recently (19th century) that anyone seemed seriously to doubt that such a man had existed.

However, what he was like and what he taught are other matters entirely. Ehrman describes Jesus as a Jewish “apocalypticist,” someone who believed that the end of the world was imminent. In fact, there are many passages in the New Testament stating Jesus believed and taught that the end of the world would come during the life time of his followers.

Ehrman speculates that the Jesus deniers are motivated by an animus directed at current right wing Christians who:

“… are working hard to promote ignorance over knowledge, for example, in the insistence that evolution is merely a theory and that creationism should be taught in the schools….and imposing certain sets of religious beliefs on our society…electing only those political figures who support certain religious agendas, no matter how hateful they may be toward other (poor, or non-American) human beings and how ignorant they may be about the world at large.”

Nonetheless, he argues that their well meaning agenda would be better served by promoting an understanding of the historical Jesus, someone who was a man of the first century who said nothing about modern issues such as abortion or gun rights. Ehrman concludes, “Jesus did exist, whether we like it or not.”

Evaluation: Ehrman rarely fails to make religious history and theory accessible and interesting.

(JAB) ( )