Carolina QuotesPaul knows one of [Jesus's] brothers personally. It is hard to get much closer to the historical Jesus than that. If Jesus never lived, you would think that his brother would know about it.
Bart D. Ehrman Carolinian
Source
Ch. 5: 'Two Key Data for the Historicity of Jesus'; referring to James, brother of Jesus
- work
- Did Jesus Exist? (2012)
- year
- 2012
Cite this record
“Paul knows one of [Jesus's] brothers personally. It is hard …” Bart D. Ehrman. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-2674988F5C. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/2674988f5c
More from Bart D. Ehrman
The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God. [...] I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself. And surely if Jesus had really spent his days in Galilee and then Jerusalem calling himself God, all of our sources would be eager to report it. To put it differently, if Jesus claimed he was divine, it seemed very strange indeed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all failed to say anything about it. Did they just forget to mention that part?
If the findings of historical criticism are right, then some kinds of theological claims are certainly to be judged as inadequate and wrong-headed. It would be impossible, I should think, to argue that the Bible is a unified whole, inerrant in all its parts, inspired by God in every way. It can’t be that. There are too many divergences, discrepancies, contradictions; too many alternative ways of looking at the same issue, alternatives that often are at odds with one another. The Bible is not a unity, it is a massive plurality. God did not write the Bible, people did.
The question is then how can we decide what anybody in the ancient world said. We can't. We wish we could. It would be nice if we could. You would like to think that because you can go to the store and buy an edition of Plato that you are actually reading Plato, but the problem is that we just do not have the kind of evidence that we need in order to establish what ancient authors actually wrote.