The Historical Jesus
Part I

Professor Bart D. Ehrman












THE TEACHING COMPANY ®

---

---

Bart Ehrman, Ph.D.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bart Ehrman is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Religious Studies at The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. With degrees from Wheaton College (B.A.) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D.,
magna cum laude), he taught at Rutgers for four years before moving to UNC in 1988. During his tenure at UNC,
he has garnered numerous awards and prizes, including the Students’ Undergraduate Teaching Award (1993), the
Ruth and Philip Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement (1994), and now the Bowman and Gordon
Gray Award for excellence in teaching (1998).
With a focus on early Christianity in its Greco-Roman environment and a special expertise in textual criticism of the
New Testament, Professor Ehrman has published dozens of book reviews and over twenty scholarly articles for
academic journals. He has authored or edited eight books, including Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New
Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999); The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian
Writings (Oxford, 1997; 2nd ed., 1999); After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford, 1999);
The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford 1998); The Orthodox Corruption of
Scripture (Oxford, 1993); and The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research (Eerdmans, 1996). He is
currently at work on a new Greek–English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard
University Press).
Professor Ehrman is a popular lecturer, giving numerous talks each year for such groups as the Carolina Speakers
Bureau, the UNC Program for the Humanities, the Biblical Archaeology Society, various local groups, and select
universities across the nation. He has served as the president of the Society of Biblical Literature, SE Region; book
review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature; editor of the Scholar’s Press Monograph Series The New
Testament in the Greek Fathers; and co-editor of the E.J. Brill series New Testament Tools and Studies. Among his
administrative responsibilities, Professor Ehrman has served on the executive committee of the Southeast Council
for the Study of Religion and has chaired the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society of Biblical
Religion, as well as serving as Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Religious Studies at UNC.
©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
i

---

Table of Contents

The Historical Jesus
Part I

Professor Biography............................................................................................i
Course Scope.......................................................................................................1
Lecture One

The Many Faces of Jesus...........................................2
Lecture Two

One Remarkable Life.................................................5
Lecture Three
Scholars Look at the Gospels ....................................8
Lecture Four

Fact and Fiction in the Gospels ...............................11
Lecture Five

The Birth of the Gospels..........................................15
Lecture Six

Some of the Other Gospels ......................................18
Lecture Seven
The Coptic Gospel of Thomas.................................21
Lecture Eight
Other
Sources ..........................................................24
Lecture Nine
Historical
CriteriaGetting Back to Jesus..............27
Lecture Ten
More
Historical Criteria...........................................31
Lecture Eleven
The Early Life of Jesus............................................34
Lecture Twelve
Jesus in His Context ................................................38
Timeline .............................................................................................................43
Glossary.............................................................................................................45
Biographical Notes...............................................................................See Part II
Annotated Bibliography......................................................................See Part II


ii
©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

---

The Historical Jesus

Course Scope:
From the late Roman Empire, through the Middle Ages, down to the Reformation, and into our own day, no
institution has wielded such economic, political, and cultural power as the Christian church. And behind it all stands
Jesus, a man who continues to be worshiped throughout the world, by over a billion people today. Jesus of Nazareth
is undoubtedly the most important figure in the history of Western civilization.
Everyone who has even the faintest knowledge of Jesus has an opinion about him, and these opinions vary widely—
not only among lay people but even among historical scholars who have given their lives to the task of
reconstructing what Jesus was really like, what he really said and did. This course is designed to explain why it has
proved so difficult to know about the man behind the myth and to see what kinds of conclusions modern scholars
have drawn about him. The course will be taught from a strictly historical perspective; no particular theological
beliefs will be either affirmed or denied.
The course will begin with a discussion of the four Gospels of the New Testament, which everyone agrees are our
principal sources of knowledge about Jesus. But these books were not written as dispassionate histories for impartial
observers. In addition, it appears that their authors were not eyewitnesses to the events they narrate but were writing
several decades later, telling stories that they had heard—stories that had been in circulation year after year among
the followers of Jesus. The first step, then, will be to determine what kinds of books the Gospels are and to ascertain
how reliable their information about Jesus is. Apart from their worth as religious documents of faith, we will
examine how the Gospels are useful to historians who want to know what really happened.
As we will see, the Gospels create challenges for scholars who want to know about the words and deeds of Jesus.
After explicating some of these difficulties, we will consider other sources that are available, including other
Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament but that nonetheless purport to narrate the life and teachings of
Jesus. In addition, we will examine all the references to Jesus in every other ancient Jewish and Roman source.
After reviewing the available sources, we will examine the criteria that scholars have devised for getting behind the
stories told about Jesus to ascertain what he was really like. Once we have a handle on how to approach our sources
of information, we will consider the historical context of Jesus’ life; our assumption is that if we fail to situate Jesus
in his context, we will take him out of context and, therefore, misunderstand him. After discussing the political,
social, and cultural history of first-century Palestine, we will proceed to the second major part of the course, a
scholarly reconstruction of Jesus’ actual words and deeds.
There we will see that the earliest sources at our disposal, including the Gospel of Mark and the lost Gospel of Q
(one of the sources used by both Matthew and Luke), are probably correct in portraying Jesus as a Jewish
apocalypticist, one who anticipated that God was soon going to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the
forces of evil and establish his kingdom here on earth. Specifically, Jesus proclaimed that a cosmic judge from
heaven, called the Son of Man, was soon to appear, and that people needed to repent, turn to God, and adhere to his
own teachings in preparation. Those who did so would be rewarded with God’s kingdom; those who did not would
be destroyed.
The remaining lectures in the course will show how this apocalyptic message of Jesus affected his ethical teaching,
his own activities, and his final days. We will see that this proclamation caused a furor in Jerusalem when Jesus
went there to celebrate the Passover feast at the end of his life. Fearing that his preaching might excite the mobs, the
authorities in Jerusalem had him arrested and taken out of the way, handing him over to the Roman governor,
Pontius Pilate, who had him executed as a troublemaker.
The course will end, then, by considering how Jesus’ followers began to modify his message after they came to
believe that he had been raised by God from the dead, as they transformed the religion of Jesus (i.e., the one he
preached) into the religion about Jesus.
2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
1

---

Lecture One

The Many Faces of Jesus

Scope: Jesus of Nazareth is undoubtedly the most significant figure in the history of Western civilization, whose
influence moves far beyond the lives of his followers into many areas of modern life, but despite his
far-ranging impact, Jesus appears to be scarcely known. Opinions of lay people and scholars about him are
so much at odds with one another that they simply cannot all be right.


In this course, we will explore why this lack of information exists, with an eye toward trying to determine
what Jesus actually said and did. The course will neither presuppose nor disallow any particular forms of
belief (or disbelief) in Jesus; it will approach the task from a strictly historical perspective of inquiring into
our surviving evidence. Questions we will ask, and attempt to answer, include the following: What ancient
sources of knowledge do we have about Jesus (both literary and archaeological)? How historically reliable
are these sources? Can the Gospels of the New Testament be trusted to provide a historically accurate
picture of Jesus’ words and deeds? What methods have scholars devised for examining such ancient
sources? Once these methods are applied, what can we say with relative certainty about the things that
Jesus actually said and did?

Outline
I. Jesus of Nazareth is almost certainly the most important figure in the history of Western civilization, a man
whose impact on the course of history is completely unparalleled.
A. His effect on secular history was not immediate. He was first known as an obscure Jewish teacher who was
crucified for sedition.
1. Within a century of his death, communities of followers had been established in all the major urban
areas of the Mediterranean.
2. Two centuries after that, he was known, and even worshiped, by some members of the aristocratic elite
in the Roman Empire; The Emperor himself, Constantine, became a follower in the early fourth
century AD.
3. A century after that, the entire Empire was officially Christian. Christianity then became the central
religion for virtually all of what became Europe and on into the New World.
4. Throughout this period, from the early Middle Ages to today, the Christian church has exercised
enormous political, economic, social, and cultural power—unlike any institution in the history of the
West. At the beginning of it all is the man Jesus himself.
B. The most obvious arena of Jesus’ influence, of course, is in the religious lives of his followers.
1. The latest demographic figures put the numbers of Christians, of all kinds, at well over a billion.
2. Millions of people devote their lives to Jesus, to following his teachings and to emulating his example.
Millions believe that both their present well being and their lives for all eternity are determined by
what he did.
C. Even those who do not believe in him cannot escape Jesus’ influence; his name, his life, and his teachings
fill our culture, and nonbelievers think of him as one of the great moral teachers of the ages.
II. You would think that a person who is this important would be well known. Nothing could be farther from the
truth.
A. Almost everyone has an opinion about Jesus, but the opinions are so much at odds with one another that
they can’t all be right.
B. Remarkably, the situation does not improve much when you move from the popular media to the world of
scholarship. Books and articles of recent vintage on Jesus number 2,045, representing radically different
conclusions. They can’t all be right.
C. Why are there so many different opinions about this, the most important figure in the history of our form of
civilization? Which view is most historically plausible? How can we possibly know?
1. These are some of the basic questions that we will address in this course on the historical Jesus.
2
2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

---

2. In the rest of this introductory lecture, I’d like to indicate what our approach will be, outline the major
components of our study, and provide a bit of important background information.
III. In this course, we will take a strictly historical approach to the question of the historical Jesus.
A. We could strive to understand Jesus from the perspective of faith.
1. That is how most people do understand Jesus, because they want to know what to believe about him
and they want to understand his significance for their lives and their relationships with God.
2. Approaching our study from this religious prospective can present hidden difficulties. If we decide to
approach the study of Jesus from the perspective of faith, then whose faith should it be?
3. Also, if we approach the study of the historical Jesus strictly from the perspective of faith, then we will
almost certainly end up where we started, because people almost always find what they expect to find
if they allow their expectations to guide the search.
B. For these reasons, it might be better to take a different approach to our task, one that requires us to suspend
our beliefs or disbeliefs about Jesus to see what he was actually like, to see what he really said and did.
1. This historical, as opposed to religious, approach to the study
does not claim to be better than a religious approach.
2. This approach does not require that we disbelieve, only that we do not allow our beliefs to determine
our historical conclusions.
3. A historical approach is interested in examining historical evidence. It does not mean that historians
cannot be believers.
IV. The course will be roughly divided into two parts. The first part deals with what our sources of information
about the historical Jesus are; the second part deals with what these sources can reveal to us when we examine
them following solid historical criteria.
A. First, we will consider all the surviving sources from antiquity that can help reconstruct what Jesus said
and did.
1. The principal sources of information about Jesus are the Gospels of the New Testament. We will begin
our investigation by determining how reliable these accounts are for reconstructing Jesus’ life by
asking—and answering—a number of questions.
2. We will then consider other sources from outside the New Testament, for example, a couple of dozen
other Gospels that record words and deeds of Jesus. We will also look at what other ancient people—
non-Christian Jews and pagans—had to say about Jesus to see if they can assist us in rounding out the
picture.
4. We will then discuss the task of using these sources for historical purposes, considering the kinds of
methods that scholars have developed.
B. Second, we will apply the methods we have discussed to the sources that have survived to see what they
can reveal to us about Jesus.
1. My thesis will not sound at all peculiar to those who are familiar with twentieth-century scholarship on
the historical Jesus.
2. Since the early part of the century, when the great humanitarian and medical missionary Albert
Schweitzer wrote The Quest of the Historical Jesus, scholars have widely considered Jesus to be a
kind of Jewish apocalyptic prophet. He anticipated that God was soon going to intervene in the course
of history to overthrow the forces of evil and bring in his good kingdom on earth.
3. I will try to show why this point of view has been so popular among so many scholars for so long and
then will discuss what Jesus actually taught and recount the most important events of Jesus’ life, those
surrounding his crucifixion.
5. I will conclude the course by discussing how the apocalyptic words and deeds of Jesus have affected
his followers down through the ages, until today.
V. Throughout our investigation, you will see that I consider evidence to be an important consideration in trying to
reconstruct a person from the past.
A. Some other scholars of the historical Jesus don’t share my view of evidence. They discuss their views at
great lengths in their books but never indicate how they know what they claim to know.
2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
3

---

B. Establishing what happened in the past isn’t a matter of guessingit’s a matter of evidence. If you are
reading the results of a rigorous examination of evidence, you have a right to see what that evidence is.
C. In this course, I’ll not simply regale you with my views of who Jesus was but will go to some length to
explain what the evidence is. If you disagree with my conclusions, you’ll be able to examine the evidence
for yourself and decide where I’ve gone wrong in interpreting it.

Suggested Reading:
Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chap. 1.
Tatum, In Quest of Jesus, chap. 5.
Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.

Questions to Consider:
1. Some people maintain that it is impossible to study Jesus without believing in him. Do you think this is true? Is
it true for other areas of academic study? Is it possible, for example, to study Buddhism without being a
Buddhist? Or the Dialogues of Socrates without being a Platonist? Or communism without being a Marxist?
2. It would be useful at the outset of this course for you to be clear in your own mind what you already think
about Jesus’ life and teachings. You might want to jot down a couple of notes along these lines, to compare
with what you’ve come to think by the time the course is completed.
4
2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

---

Lecture Two

One Remarkable Life

Scope: It is difficult to know where to begin the study of the historical Jesus—with the first Gospel of the New
Testament, the first book of the New Testament to be written, the first Gospel to be written, or somewhere
else? In some ways it makes best sense to begin not with the New Testament at all, but with the world in
which the Christian religion was born, a world largely populated by “pagans.”


One of the leading questions to deal with at the outset of a study of Jesus is whether the Christian view that
Jesus was both divine and human derives from the circumstance that stories were told about him in the
pagan environment. Is it possible that former pagans who converted to belief in Jesus portrayed him in
terms that they were already familiar with, as one who was more than mortal? If so, how can we get behind
the developing doctrine about Jesus as a kind of “divine man” to see what he was really like in history?
That will be one of the objectives of this course of study.

Outline
I. In investigating the historical Jesus, we must first ask where to start.
A. The Gospels are a logical starting point.
1. We could start with the first Gospel of the New Testament, Matthew. Even though Matthew is the first
book to occur in the New Testament, however, it was not the first written.
2. The first books written were actually by the apostle Paul, to whom are ascribed thirteen of the twenty-
seven books of the New Testament, and who wrote ten or fifteen years before the Gospels.
3. As we will see later in the course, Paul does not record a good deal of information about the words and
deeds of Jesus.
B. Maybe we should begin with the earliest Gospel to be written, which most scholars agree was the Gospel
of Mark. But Mark was written several decades after Jesus lived; most scholars date it to AD 65–70 (Jesus
probably died around AD 30).
II. I’ve decided that the best place to begin our study is by summarizing for you the life of a remarkable man who
lived nearly 2,000 years ago.
A. The accounts of his life may sound familiar to you.
1. Before he was born, his mother knew he would not be a normal child. An angelic visitor told her that
her son would be divine.
2. His birth was accompanied by miraculous signs and wonders and as a child, he was religiously
precocious.
3. As an adult, he left home to engage in an itinerant preaching ministry, teaching his good news that
people should live for what is spiritual, not the material things of this world.
4. He gathered disciples and did miracles to confirm them in their faith.
5. He raised the ire of many of those in power, who had him brought up on charges before the Roman
authorities.
6. Even after he left this world, though, his followers claimed that he had ascended to heaven and that
they had seen him alive afterwards. They wrote books about his life, and some of these writings still
survive today.
7. I doubt if any of you has ever read them, and I doubt if many of you have even heard the name of the
man I’ve been describing: Apollonius of Tyana. He was a famous neo-Pythagorean philosopher of the
first century AD, a worshiper of pagan gods, whose life and teachings are recorded for us in the
writings of his later follower Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana.
B. Apollonius lived at about the same time as Jesus, although they never knew each other. Their followers,
though, knew each other and had heated debates about who was superior.
C. These were not the only two men believed to be divine. Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God
that we know about in our world, but he was not at all the only one talked about in his world.
2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
5

---

III. It is important to begin our study of Jesus with some sense of the context in which the early Christians told
stories about him.
A. As we’ll see later, the Gospel writers seem to have inherited their stories about Jesus from a rich oral
tradition about him.
1. The Gospels are anonymous, even though there are traditional names for the purported authors.
2. Scholars are fairly unanimous that they were written some decades after Jesus’ death: Mark, AD 65–
70; Matthew and Luke, AD 80–85; and John, AD 90–95.
3. These books, as with all the books of the New Testament, were written in Greek, even though Jesus, as
a Palestinian Jew, would have spoken Aramaic.
4. Because most Christians, even in the first century, were probably non-Jews— i.e., they were converted
from being “pagans”—it would be worth learning about typical pagan beliefs to understand how the
stories about Jesus might have been modified by Christians who told them. Note that “pagan” is not a
derogatory term for historians; it simply means someone who is neither Jewish nor Christian.
B. Even though pagan religions were highly diversified, we can say the following about all of them: they were
polytheistic and used sacrifices to placate the gods; they had no particular creed or system of ethics that
had to be believed as a matter of religion; and they were not scriptural religions, nor were they exclusive as
to which god or gods one could or should worship.
C. For the most part, pagans did not see their gods as jealous or in competition with one another. They
understood the realm of the gods as a kind of pyramid of power and authority with some kind of supreme
deity at the top and the great gods below him followed by local deities, then family and personal deities .
1. Below them were other kinds of local deities, who still were unbelievably powerful from the human
perspective, followed by family and personal deities and then lesser beings (daimonia).
2. Finally, were demi-gods, that is, humans who were half mortal and half divine.

IV. We should be aware that pagan beliefs about partially divine humans may have influenced early pagan converts
to Christianity.
A. In the next lecture, we will consider this question further. At this point, to stimulate your thinking, I’d like
to note a couple of interesting points from our surviving Gospels.
B. As I’ve indicated, Mark was the first Gospel to be written. As we’ll see, compelling reasons exist to
believe that Luke used Mark as one of his sources for writing his account some 10–15 years later.
1. For the purposes of our brief comparison here, I’d like to point out how these Gospels begin and end.
Mark (the shortest of the Gospels) begins with references to the Jewish prophets, includes the account
of Jesus’ baptism as an adult by John the Baptist, and ends with his women followers going to his
tomb to learn that he has been raised from the dead.
2. The emphasis in Mark is on the “Son of God,” a term used to describe an individual or group of
people who mediate God’s will on earth. The Son of God is not a divine being.
3. Luke, by comparison, begins with accounts of Jesus’ miraculous birth to a mother who is a virgin and
ends with a description of Jesus’ ascending into heaven.
4. Is it an accident that the later account—written after the stories about Jesus had been in circulation for
a longer time among former pagans—is the one that portrays Jesus more in line with what pagans
typically thought about divine men?
C. John’s Gospel was written even later and also makes for an interesting comparison with Mark.
1. Scholars do not think that John used Mark (or Luke) as one of his sources. Like Mark, John does not
narrate a virgin birth or ascension.
2. The difference in the way Jesus is portrayed between John and Mark, though, is striking.
3. In Mark, Jesus is clearly God’s favored one, his son, whom God empowers to do miracles and who
dies for the sins of the world. But he is portrayed as completely human in every way. He never talks
about himself as divine, and no one identifies him as being God—not even Mark himself.
4. Contrast that with Jesus’ portrayal in John, which begins by identifying Jesus as the Word of God,
who was responsible for the creation of the universe, who is called God both by the author and by
others in the Gospel (e.g., 21:25), and who says himself that he is completely equal with God (10:30).
5. Again, is it an accident that the earliest of our Gospels portrays Jesus as human and the latest portrays
him as God?
6
2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

---

Document Outline

• Professor Bart D. Ehrman
• Professor Bart D. Ehrman

---