A fascinating look at the historical Jesus

Growing up, I looked at the Bible pretty much only as a religious text. My parents—whose own parents were Christian Scientists—encouraged me to read it from a pretty young age. (I was especially freaked out by the Book of Revelation.) I also studied the Bible from 7^th grade through 12^th grade, because the school I went to had a chapel where students attended regular services.

As I got older, I started thinking about the Bible from more of a historical point of view. What do we actually know about the stories it contains? I eventually turned to one of my favorite sources for online courses—Wondrium—and watched several sets of lectures on both the Old Testament and the New Testament. I enjoyed the Old Testament courses, but the one I really recommend for anyone who’s interested in the connection between history and the Bible is called The New Testament, taught by Bart Ehrman, a scholar at the University of North Carolina.

This isn’t a course on theology. Ehrman doesn’t get into ethical debates or discuss miracles. He’s coming at the material from a historical point of view. Although the lectures seem to have been recorded more than 20 years ago, they’ve aged well. Ehrman does a great job of giving you a framework for understanding how the Bible came together and how it ties to actual events, primarily the life of Jesus and his contemporaries.

The first thing he does is highlight the challenge facing academics who study the period. For example, the four gospels, which tell the story of Jesus’s life and death, were based on oral accounts that had been passed around for decades before anyone wrote them down. The first written version, the Gospel of Mark, was composed at least 30 years after Jesus’s death. The Gospel of John came as many as 60 years after his death. (As Ehrman says: To get a sense of how hard that would be, imagine sitting down today to create, from memory, the first-ever written account of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.)

Even the oldest copies of New Testament texts that we have today are many generations removed from the original manuscripts, with accidental and intentional changes introduced over the centuries. We simply don’t know what, exactly, the first written accounts said.

Given those challenges, what do historians know about Jesus, and how can they know it? Ehrman walks you through some of the criteria used to sort through the facts. For example, stories that are retold by multiple independent witnesses are more likely to be true. So are accounts that match facts that have already been established. And historians give more weight to witnesses who seem to work against their own self-interest (by telling stories that make them look bad, for example).

Here’s what Ehrman concludes based on those criteria. Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist—meaning he preached that society was controlled by the forces of evil, and that God would soon overthrow these rulers and establish a utopian kingdom on Earth. Both the Roman authorities and Jewish leaders in Jerusalem considered Jesus and other apocalypticists a threat to public order. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, had him arrested, put on trial, and executed immediately.

As interesting as the historical events reported in the New Testament are, the history of the book and of Christianity itself is even more fascinating. Who decided which texts belonged in the New Testament and which ones didn’t? (The bishop of Alexandria is credited with making those calls in the middle of the 4^th century CE.) Why was Christianity embraced as a religion? (The apostle Paul was an important factor, spreading the word through his letters to fellow Christians, which make up a substantial part of the New Testament.)

Ehrman handles these and other topics well. If you want to know more, though, I also loved the Wondrium course Understanding the New Testament, taught by historian David Brakke. Brakke’s lectures were recorded more recently than Ehrman’s, and he comes at the material from a slightly different angle. Both of them are well worth watching. It’s cool to see how historians try to understand pivotal moments that happened thousands of years ago.