The Faces of Jesus - Bart Ehrman

The Various Portraits of Jesus in the Gospels. The search for the historical Jesus buried beneath metaphors of theological narratives and church dogma.

Every Christian sooner or later has to ask the question, "Who was Jesus really?" And we ask this in our age in a special way because we are very historically oriented. We are modern, or perhaps post-modern, people, but all of us have a sense that we want to know what things were really like. We know that the past is different from the present. We have experienced rapid change, all of us in our generation. And so we want to know what was Jesus really like. And that quest to understand what he was really like has turned out to be very disappointing. So how do we really get at that? We must, first of all, understand that in history facts always lie under interpretations and we never get to the facts. They're only interpretations. There is only an interpreted Jesus, there are many interpreted Jesuses. So where do we begin? We begin not with Jesus, we have no access to him. We begin with the responses to Jesus, by his followers, by outsiders who heard about him.... We begin with those reactions as they're enshrined in the text we have.

All we have from this period about Jesus is text, finally. And we try to work backwards and say, "How did we get these texts? Who wrote these texts? Where did they get the ideas?" Surely behind the written text there were oral traditions, we know that. There were oral traditions that went on after the written text, and we have evidence of those being written down later. So we try to dissect those. We say, "What kind of traditions? How were they shaped? What kinds of stories did people tell about Jesus?" Those stories have a shape to them. Do we find other stories in the culture of the Mediterranean world around Jesus? Other stories about other people that are shaped the same way? We have reports of what Jesus said. He told parables, he told stories, he told little epigrams. Those have a shape to them. Are they like any sayings that are attributed to other people at the same time? We're trying to put this whole story into a context of its own history, of its own time. And our ideal here is to be able to hear those stories, hear those sayings, as someone in the first century would have heard them, recognizing that there were conventions that if people heard a certain way of talking they would say, "Hmm, this person claims to be a prophet." Or this person about whom this story is told is a magician, someone with magical power, a healer, or this is a wise person, a person who delivers certain kinds of maxims or epigrams or tells proverbs or parables and the like. So there are socially conditioned ways of identifying people that one can see almost built into the shape of the tradition about Jesus. If we're smart enough, by comparing other sources from a similar time and place, we can retrace that history, working backwards from the text in the earliest time that we can get to.

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[Ritsoz]

why sum41 ? why? :P

[glower125]

christianity is an insult to basic human intelligence.

[crucisnh]

@harpo103 I understood what you're saying. My point is that I don't think that that has anything to do with reasonableness. I think that it has to do with good scholarly practices, regardless of whether it's in biblical research or physics or astronomy. I can see an honest researcher having an opinion about where his research might lead, but if that researcher is using proper scholarship, he should also be willing to let the data lead him wherever it goes.

[harpo103]

@EnnoiaBlog Jesus was a REAL flesh and blood person. He did actually live. Whether he was the messiah or was divine, is totally up for speculation. Its up to an individual to decide that point. Nobody should be able to tell you what to believe. You really have to figure it all out for yourself.

[harpo103]

@crucisnh I mean that the zealots work ass-backwards. Which is the opposite way that a reasonable person would work.They already have their minds made up as to what the answer is. They just need "evidence" to support their "facts". Nobody knows all of the answers. Most people don't even understand the questions! They just nod their empty heads in unsion and bow down to whatever authority figure they deem worthy of praise. They NEED a scolding daddy figure to tell them what to do.

[crucisnh]

@harpo103 I envy you for having had the chance to take a class with him, even before he got to be sort of famous.

I'm not sure that I'd say "reasonable people" in your final sentence. I think that I'd say the zealots aren't doing particularly good scholarship, if they don't go where the facts take them. It might be hard to not have a preconceived idea. But if one doesn't go where the facts take you, it seems intellectually dishonest.

[PeteWaldo]

Why would you only include one side of a debate? Why not at least put links to parts 1 through 12 on your video "Show more" info section?

watch?v=aUMsCKlIBAo

And since when are mathematics necessarily divorced from calculating probability?

beholdthebeast. com/mathematical_precision_of_­prophecy. htm#daniel_70_weeks

[harpo103]

Jesus was a real person.

But, was he also a God?

Was he THE Messiah?

Thats up to an individual to work out for themselves.

Bart's only telling us what History already knows.

[harpo103]

I took a class that Bart was teaching at Rutgers in the mid 1980s. He was going for his Phd at Princeton, just down the road. I found him to be very serious, intelligent and kind. He just happens to go wherever the facts take him. The religious zealots have a preconceived idea of what the world is all about, then they try to find evidence to support their ideas.

They work ass-backwards to what Reasonable people would do.

[crucisnh]

@harpo103 I agree that they find him difficult to debate, because they can't honestly claim that he doesn't know the Bible as well as they do. What I find frustrating is in some of Ehrman debates about "can X be proven historically?", the Christian debaters constantly try to ignore accepted scholarly historical practices to justify their side. What's the point of a debate on whether something can be proven historically if historical practices are ignored? It's silly.

[crucisnh]

@EnnoiaBlog I just can't accept that, because I can't see a bunch of guys (i.e. the apostles) spreading across the world for something they knew was a myth and getting themselves killed for preaching about this "myth". Oh, sure, I won't say that the theological Jesus is true, but I don't doubt that the historical one existed.

[harpo103]

Evangelicals are scared sh*t of Ehrman!