Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth

629 Pages·2013·3.02 MB·English

by  Richard Carrier Ph.D.

BART EHRMAN
and the
QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL
JESUS OF NAZARETH
contributors

richard carrier, Ph.D., historian, philosopher, and author of Proving
History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Dr. Carrier
specializes in the religious and intellectual history of Greece and Rome and the
modern philosophy of naturalism and Atheism. His next book On the Historicity
of Jesus Christ will soon be published. To learn more about him and his work
see www.richardcarrier.info.

EARL DOHERTY began his research into the question of Jesus’ existence
in the early 1980s, and in 1996 was the first to create a Web-site presenting the
argument for what is now known as Jesus Mythicism. Both the Web-site and his
first published book in 1999, The Jesus Puzzle, were influential in bringing
Mythicism to wide public exposure and popularity. His 2009 opus, Jesus:
Neither God Nor Man, is perhaps the most comprehensive case yet published for
the non-existence of Jesus of Nazareth.

david fitzgerald is, among other things, a writer and historian on the
speaker’s bureau of both the Secular Student Alliance and Center for Inquiry;
Director of the world’s first Atheist Film Festival; an audience favorite at
Skepticon; and author of Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never
Existed At All (voted one of the top 5 Atheist/Agnostic books of 2010); and the
forthcoming The Complete Heretic’s Guide to Western Religion (Book One: The
Mormons) and Jesus: Mything in Action.

D. M. Murdock a.k.a. Acharya S is an alumna of Franklin & Marshall
College and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, where
she studied under world-renowned classicists and archaeologists. Murdock
researches in English, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, German,
Portuguese and other languages. She is the author of several books, including
The Christ Conspiracy, Suns of God, Who Was Jesus? and Christ in Egypt.
Articles by Murdock have been published on several Web-sites and E-zines, as
well as in magazines, books, and journals.

René Salm is An independent researcher, who has investigated the field of
religion for almost four decades, producing books on both Buddhism and
Christianity. He has had a successful career in the mental health field as well as
in music. His controversial book The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of
Jesus (2008) is an archeological exposé that shows that the town of Nazareth
came into existence after the time that ‘Jesus’ should have been living there.
Salm continues to investigate possible historical and religious links between
Christianity and Buddhism and maintains several Web-sites, including
www.mythicistpapers.com (Mythicist Papers) and www.nazarethmyth.info.

Robert M. Price, Ph.D. in Systematic Theology, Ph.D. in New Testament, is
the author of many books including Deconstructing Jesus, The Widow
Traditions in Luke-Acts, and The Amazing Colossal Apostle. He is the host of
two podcasts, The Bible Geek and The Human Bible. Price serves as contributing
editor for The American Rationalist and The Humanist. He is a native
Mississippian, lived long in New Jersey, and now happily dwells in remote
Selma, North Carolina, with his beloved wife Carol and daughters Victoria and
Veronica.

Frank R. Zindler is a linguist, geologist, neurophysiologist, and the editor of
American Atheist Press. A former professor of biology and geology, he
translated and published an English version of early German Christ-Myth
theorist Arthur Drews’ The Legend of Saint Peter. His The Jesus the Jews Never
Knew—an exhaustive study of all Jewish literature surviving from antiquity—
showed that the ancient Jews had never heard of ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Indeed,
they had never heard of Nazareth! Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? has criticized
several chapters of the first volume of Zindler’s four-volume Through Atheist
Eyes: Scenes From a World That Won’t Reason.

bart ehrman

and the

quest of the historical
jesus of nazareth

An Evaluation of Ehrman’s
Did Jesus Exist?

Edited by

Frank R. Zindler & Robert M. Price
2013
American Atheist Press
Cranford, New Jersey
ISBN-13: 978-1-57884-020-5
ISBN-10: 1-57884-020-1

© Copyright 2013 by American Atheist Press
225 Cristiani Street
Cranford, NJ 07016-0158

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www.atheists.org

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
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Printed in the United States of America.

Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth: An Evaluation
of Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bart Ehrman and the quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth : an evaluation
of Ehrman’s Did Jesus exist? / edited by Frank R. Zindler & Robert M. Price.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-57884-019-9 (alk. paper)
1. Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus exist? 2. Jesus Christ--Historicity. I. Zindler,
Frank R. II. Price, Robert M., 1954-
BT303.2.B33 2013
232.9’08--dc23
2013000900

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
to that
Child of the Enlightenment and
Founding Father

Thomas Paine

who wrote in The Age of Reason, Part Three:

Repeated forgeries and falsifications create a well-founded suspicion that all
the cases spoken of concerning the person called Jesus Christ are made cases, on
purpose to lug in, and that very clumsily, some broken sentences from the Old
Testament, and apply them as prophecies of those cases; and that so far from his
being the son of God, he did not exist even as a man — that he is merely an
imaginary or allegorical character, as Apollo, Hercules, Jupiter and all the deities
of antiquity were. There is no history written at the time Jesus Christ is said to