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The Epistle to the Hebrews (Part One)
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- God speaking through a Son in a new reading of scripture
- Hebrews’ Son a heavenly entity like the Logos
- Hebrews 101: a sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary
- an event of revelation at the start of the sect
- no words of Jesus on earth to be found
- another motif of “likeness” to humans
- “In the days of his flesh”: not Gethsemane
- Christ “out of Judah”
- Hebrews’ sacrifice in heaven
- taking on a “body” in the scriptural world
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Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels
(Did Jesus Exist? pp. 116-117)
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Reading an historical Jesus into scripture
Those who have become familiar with my writings over the years will know that I have a soft spot for the epistle to the Hebrews. In many ways it is the most revealing of the New Testament documents.
- It gives us a Son who is entirely known from scripture.
- It presents a heavenly event that could only have been imagined out of a Platonic application of scripture: a sacrifice by the Son, performed in a spiritual sanctuary, in which he offers his own “blood” to God — a blood which can hardly be regarded as being human, hauled up from Calvary.
Indeed, anomalies like this have increasingly forced modern scholars to take refuge in interpreting Christ’s sacrifice in the heavenly sanctuary as intended by the author to be merely a metaphor for the earthly Calvary event — an interpretation for which there is no justification in the epistle. Most significantly, Hebrews contains two verses which make it clear that its Jesus had never been on earth, two smoking guns that would do any mythicist gunslinger proud.
Ehrman, true to form, simply seizes on any and all words and phrases in the epistle which he thinks could have an earthly or human application and declares them as such. He admits that this epistle, too, shows no knowledge of the Gospels — which he ought to have extended to no knowledge of the Gospel story, whether written or oral — but nevertheless “it contains numerous references to the life of the historical Jesus.”
Ehrman itemizes some twenty of them (pp. 116-117, DJE?):
- Jesus appeared in ‘these last days’ (1:2).
- God spoke through him (that is, in his proclamation; 1:2). Continue reading “15. Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism – Pt. 15”