This is the second installment of our lecture
series. This week we will be looking at:
Did Jesus of Nazareth, who was
called Christ, exist as a real human being, “the man Christ Jesus” according to
1 Timothy 2:5?
If we want to know if someone exists today we
generally ask to see their birth certificate or some kind of photo ID. However,
while we don’t have that luxury and even though we are talking about a person who
lived over 2000 years ago in a pre-technological culture there are sources we
can rely on to prove that Jesus of Nazareth did exist. The sources we will discuss fall into three
main categories: (1) Christian (2) classical (that is, Greco-Roman), and (3)
Jewish.
(1)
Christian
Of course the main Christian source to show that
Jesus was a real person is the Bible. However,
some people today say that the Bible is
a book of fairy tales and that it was all made up. What do we have to say to
that? There are several reasons why you can trust what the Bible says about
Jesus, but I want to mention just three.
First of all the New Testament
accounts of Jesus were written too early to be legends. Look at the very beginning of the
Gospel of Luke. Luke has written an account of Jesus' life, and notice what he
says to his readers: I have carefully investigated everything from the
beginning, and I have checked what I have written with eyewitnesses.
Luke is saying that even though he is writing 30 to
40 years after the events of Jesus' resurrection, a lot of people who heard
Jesus was still alive—who saw that Jesus was still alive—were still
around. He is inviting anyone who reads his words to check his sources.
Writing even more recently than Luke—in other
words, even closer to the events of Jesus' life—was Paul. He wrote his letters
only 15-20 years after Jesus' ministry on earth. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul,
too, says many people saw Jesus appear to them after his death. At one point he
says Jesus appeared to 500 people at once. Paul then goes on to say, in
essence: Most of them are still alive, and you can still go talk to them.
In an effort to promote the Christian faith, Paul
could not possibly have written in a public document that there 500 people who
saw Jesus at once—most of them still alive—unless that was really the case.
Consider also Philippians 2. Here Paul quotes a
hymn of praise to Jesus' deity and divinity. If Philippians was written only 15
years after the events of Christ's life, and the hymn Paul is quoting had been
written by somebody even earlier than that, we know that people were already
worshiping Jesus as God. They believed his claims to be God, believed the
miracles, believed the crucifixion and death, believed the resurrection
appearances.
In The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown depicts
Constantine as having basically decreed Jesus' divinity in 325 AD, suppressing
all evidence of Jesus' original life as a human teacher. But as we have just
seen, the documents of the New Testament are way too early for that to be true.
The dates for the writing of the New Testament
documents essentially show that everything about Jesus—his words, his death,
his resurrection, his claims to be deity—really happened. Anyone could write
documents 200-300 years later when all the eyewitnesses were dead and say
anything they wanted about a figure—especially back then. But that person could
not say Jesus was crucified and then resurrected when thousands of people were
still alive who had seen whether he had been or not. If Jesus hadn't been
crucified, if there hadn't been appearances after his death, if there hadn't
been an empty tomb, if he hadn't made these claims, and these public documents
were just going around claiming all these things to be true—Christianity would
never have gotten off the ground.
Second, the New Testament
documents are too counterproductive in their content to be legends.
The theory
is that the Bible doesn't give you what actually happened. Instead, what you have in the
gospels is what the church leaders wanted you to believe happened, because this
is the view of Jesus that helps them consolidate their power and build their
movement.
Really?
If I'm a church leader living about 70-80 years
after Jesus, and I'm concocting these stories, would I record that in the
Garden of Gethsemane Jesus asked the Father if he could get out of the events
that were about to take place? Would I put in my account the moment where Jesus
looks up from the cross and says, "You've forsaken me"? Such passages
are confusing and offensive even today—let alone to first century readers.
If I was making up these stories, would I have
included verse 24 of our text for today—that those who first saw Jesus raised
from the dead were women? At a time when women's testimony was not admissible
evidence in court because of their low social status, all four gospel accounts
say the original eyewitnesses were women. If you were making these stories up
in an effort to consolidate your power, you would never make women the
eyewitnesses.
Consider also the character of the leaders of the
early church. When you study the lives of the apostles in the New Testament,
they look like jerks. They look like fools. They look slow of heart. They look
like cowards. They look terrible. If you were a leader of the early
church, would you make up stories that highlight such unflattering features? Of
course you wouldn't! The only possible explanation for these features being
listed in the text is because they are true. They're totally counterproductive
for the power of the leaders of the early church. The New Testament documents
are too counterproductive to be legends.
Finally, the New Testament
documents are too detailed in their form to be legends.
One of the problems with saying
the gospel accounts have to be legends is that we don't know much about ancient
fiction. The novel or the short story, in which you have realistic fiction
written almost like history, is an invention of the 18th century. In ancient
times legends were not written like that. You would never start a myth with an
invitation to readers to test the facts. Read Beowulf. Read the Greek
myths, the Roman myths. Go read anything from the ancient world. They don't
start out the way Luke begins—with a challenge. C. S. Lewis was an expert in
ancient literature. He had this to say when looking at the gospels: "I
have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my
life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. [With] the
gospel texts, there are only two possible views. Either this is historical
reportage, or else some unknown ancient writer without known predecessors or
successors suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic,
realistic narrative. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned how
to read."
Here's the point: The New Testament documents don't
have the form of legends. They were written too early, the accounts are too
counterproductive, and they don't match the fictional style of the day. You can
trust these accounts historically. They tell you what really happened.
For all the reasons above, we can be sure that we can rely on the Bible and that Jesus of Nazareth did exist.
When people ask whether it is possible to prove
that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed the implication is that the Biblical
evidence for Jesus is biased because it is encased in a theological text
written by committed believers. What they really want to know is: Is there
extra-Biblical evidence for Jesus’ existence?” And there are.
(2) classical (that is,
Greco-Roman)
Tacitus—or
more formally, Caius/Gaius (or Publius) Cornelius Tacitus (55/56–c. 118
C.E.)—was a Roman senator, orator and ethnographer, and the best Roman
historian of his era.
Tacitus’s last major work, titled Annals,
written c. 116–117 C.E., includes a biography of Nero. In 64 C.E., during a
fire in Rome, Nero was suspected of secretly ordering the burning of a part of
town where he wanted to carry out a building project, so he tried to shift the blame to Christians. This was the
occasion for Tacitus to mention Christians, whom he despised. This is what he
wrote:
[N]either human effort nor the emperor’s
generosity nor the placating of the gods ended the scandalous belief that the
fire had been ordered [by Nero]. Therefore, to put down the rumor, Nero
substituted as culprits and punished in the most unusual ways those hated for
their shameful acts … whom the crowd called “Chrestians.” The founder of this
name, Christ [Christus in
Latin], had been executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius
Pilate … Suppressed for a time, the deadly superstition erupted again not only
in Judea, the origin of this evil, but also in the city [Rome], where all
things horrible and shameful from everywhere come together and become popular.
Tacitus’s terse statement about “Christus” clearly
corroborates the New Testament on certain historical details of Jesus’ death.
Tacitus presents four pieces of accurate knowledge about Jesus: (1) Christus,
used by Tacitus to refer to Jesus, was one distinctive way by which some
referred to him; (2) this Christus was associated with the beginning of
the movement of Christians, whose name originated from his; (3) he was executed
by the Roman governor of Judea; and (4) the time of his death was during
Pontius Pilate’s governorship of Judea, during the reign of Tiberius. (Many New
Testament scholars date Jesus’ death to c. 29 C.E.; Pilate governed Judea in
26–36 C.E., while Tiberius was emperor 14–37 C.E.)
Tacitus, like classical authors in general, does not
reveal the source(s) he used, but Tacitus was certainly among Rome’s best
historians and never given to careless writing.
Earlier in his career, when Tacitus was Proconsul
of Asia, he supervised trials, questioned people accused of being Christians
and judged and punished those whom he found guilty, as his friend Pliny the
Younger had done when he too was a provincial governor. Thus Tacitus stood a
very good chance of becoming aware of information that he characteristically
would have wanted to verify before accepting it as true.
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, (61 – c. 113), better known as Pliny
the Younger was a contemporary and friend of Tacitus. During his career he
was a lawyer, author, and magistrate of Ancient Rome.
Pliny the Younger wrote hundreds of letters which
are of great historical value. Pliny served as an imperial magistrate under Trajan
(who reigned 98–117). As the Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus (now in modern Turkey) Pliny
wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan
around 112 AD asking for counsel on dealing with Christians.
In the letter (Epistulae X.96) Pliny detailed an account of how he
conducted trials of suspected Christians who appeared before him as a result of
anonymous accusations and asked for the Emperor's guidance on how they should
be treated. Pliny had never performed a legal investigation of Christians, and
thus consulted Trajan in order to be on solid ground regarding his actions, and
saved his letters and Trajan's replies. Pliny's letter is the earliest
surviving Roman document to refer to early Christians.
Pliny the Younger, Emperor of Bythynia in
northwestern Turkey, writing to Emperor Trajan in 112 A.D. writes:
They were in the habit of meeting
on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang an anthem to Christ
as God, and bound themselves by a solemn oath not to commit any wicked deed,
but to abstain from all fraud, theft and adultery, never to break their word,
or deny a trust when called upon to honor it; after which it was their custom
to separate, and then meet again to partake of food, but ordinary and innocent
kind.
In this small excerpt confirms the first Christians
believed that Jesus was God, that they met on a regular basis on a fixed day,
and that Jesus taught a high moral code that they followed.
3
Jewish Sources
The other strong evidence that speaks directly
about Jesus as a real person comes from Josephus, a Jewish priest who grew up
as an aristocrat in first-century Palestine and ended up living in Rome,
supported by the patronage of three successive emperors. In the early days of
the first Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–70 C.E.), Josephus was a commander in
Galilee but soon surrendered and became a prisoner of war. He then prophesied
that his conqueror, the Roman commander Vespasian, would become emperor, and
when this actually happened, Vespasian freed him. “From then on Josephus lived
in Rome under the protection of the Flavians and there composed his historical
and apologetic writings” (Quoted from Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus,
p. 64). He even took the name Flavius, after the family name of his patron, the
emperor Vespasian, and set it before his birth name, becoming, in true Roman
style, Flavius Josephus. Most Jews viewed him as a despicable traitor. It was
by command of Vespasian’s son Titus that a Roman army in 70 C.E. destroyed
Jerusalem and burned the Temple, stealing its contents as spoils of war, which
are partly portrayed in the imagery of their gloating triumph on the Arch of
Titus in Rome. After Titus succeeded his father as emperor, Josephus accepted
the son’s imperial patronage, as he did of Titus’s brother and successor, Domitian.
Yet in his own mind, Josephus remained a Jew and in
his writings extolled Judaism. At the same time, by aligning himself with Roman
emperors who were at that time the worst enemies of the Jewish people, he chose
to ignore Jewish popular opinion.
Josephus stood in a unique position as a Jew who
was secure in Roman imperial patronage and protection, eager to express pride
in his Jewish heritage and yet personally independent of the Jewish community
at large. Thus, in introducing Romans to Judaism, he felt free to write
historical views for Roman consumption that were strongly at variance with
rabbinic views.
In his
two great works, The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, both
written in Greek for educated people, Josephus tried to appeal to aristocrats
in the Roman world, presenting Judaism as a religion to be admired for its
moral and philosophical depth. The Jewish
Antiquities mentions Jesus twice.
The shorter of these two references to Jesus (in
Book 20) is incidental to identifying Jesus’ brother James, the leader of the
church in Jerusalem. In the temporary absence of a Roman governor between
Festus’s death and governor Albinus’s arrival in 62 C.E., the high priest
Ananus instigated James’s execution. This is how Josephus described it:
Being therefore this kind of
person [i.e., a heartless Sadducee], Ananus, thinking that he had a favorable
opportunity because Festus had died and Albinus was still on his way, called a
meeting [literally, “sanhedrin”] of judges and brought into it the brother of
Jesus-who-is-called-Messiah … James by name, and some others. He made the
accusation that they had transgressed the law, and he handed them over to be
stoned.
James is otherwise a barely noticed, minor figure
in Josephus’s lengthy tome. The sole reason for referring to James at all was
that his death resulted in Ananus losing his position as high priest. James
(Jacob) was a common Jewish name at this time. Many men named James are
mentioned in Josephus’s works, so Josephus needed to specify which one he
meant. The common custom of simply giving the father’s name (James, son of
Joseph) would not work here, because James’s father’s name was also very
common. Therefore Josephus identified this James by reference to his famous
brother Jesus. But James’s brother Jesus also had a very common name. Josephus
mentions at least 12 other men named Jesus. Therefore Josephus specified which
Jesus he was referring to by adding the phrase “who is called Messiah,” or,
since he was writing in Greek, Christos. This phrase was necessary to
identify clearly first Jesus and, via Jesus, James, the subject of the
discussion. This extraneous reference to
Jesus would have made no sense if Jesus had not been a real person.
The
phrase translated “who is called Christ,” signifies either that Jesus was
mentioned earlier in the book or that readers knew him well enough to grasp the
reference to him in identifying James.
This short identification of James by the title
that some people used in order to specify his brother gains credibility as an
affirmation of Jesus’ existence because the passage is not about Jesus. Rather,
his name appears in a functional phrase that is called for by the sense of the
passage. It can only be useful for the identification of James if it is a
reference to a real person, namely, “Jesus who is called Christ.”
The longer passage in Josephus’s Jewish
Antiquities (Book 18) that refers to Jesus is known as the Testimonium
Flavianum. This reference provides additional evidence for
Jesus’ existence. The Testimonium Flavianum reads as follows:
Around this time there lived
Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought
to call him a man. For he was one who did surprising deeds, and a
teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and
many of the Greeks. He was the
Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest
standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who in the first
place came to love him did not give up their affection for him, for on the third day, he appeared to them
restored to life. The prophets of God had prophesied this and countless other
marvelous things about him. And the tribe of Christians, so called after
him, have still to this day not died out.
All surviving manuscripts of the Testimonium
Flavianum that are in Greek, like the original, contain the same version of
this passage, with no significant differences. Even more important, the short
passage (mentioned above) that mentions Jesus in order to identify James
appears in a later section of the book (Book 20) and implies that Jesus was
mentioned previously.
We can learn quite a bit about
Jesus from Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Josephus, three famous historians
who were not Christian. Almost all the following statements about Jesus, which
are asserted in the New Testament, are corroborated or confirmed by the
relevant passages in Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Josephus. These independent
historical sources—two non-Christian Romans and the other Jewish—confirm what
we are told in the Gospels:
1. He
existed as a man. The
historian Josephus grew up in a priestly family in first-century Palestine and
wrote only decades after Jesus’ death. Jesus’ known associates, such as Jesus’
brother James, were Josephus’ contemporaries. The historical and cultural
context was second nature to Josephus. “If any Jewish writer were ever in a
position to know about the non-existence of Jesus, it would have been Josephus.
His implicit affirmation of the existence of Jesus has been, and still is, the
most significant obstacle for those who argue that the extra-Biblical evidence
is not probative on this point,” And Tacitus was careful enough not to report
real executions of nonexistent people.
2. His personal name was Jesus, as Josephus informs us.
3. He was called Christos in Greek, which is a translation of the
Hebrew word Messiah, both of which mean “anointed” or “(the) anointed
one,” as Josephus states and Tacitus implies.
4. He had a brother named James (Jacob), as Josephus reports.
5. He won over both Jews and “Greeks” (i.e., Gentiles of Hellenistic
culture), according to Josephus, large growth in the number of Jesus’ actual
followers came only after his death.
6. Jewish leaders of the day expressed unfavorable
opinions about him.
7. Pilate rendered the decision that he should be
executed, as both
Tacitus and Josephus state.
8. His execution was specifically by crucifixion, according to Josephus.
9. He was executed during Pontius Pilate’s
governorship over Judea (26–36 C.E.), as Josephus implies and Tacitus states, adding that it
was during Tiberius’s reign.
Some of Jesus’ followers did not abandon their
personal loyalty to him even after his crucifixion but submitted to his
teaching. They believed that Jesus later appeared to them alive in accordance
with prophecies, most likely those found in the Hebrew Bible. A well-attested
link between Jesus and Christians is that Christ, as a term used to identify
Jesus, became the basis of the term used to identify his followers: Christians.
The Christian movement began in Judea, according to Tacitus. Josephus observes
that it continued during the first century. Tacitus tells us that by the second
century it had spread as far as Rome.
Strikingly, there was never any debate in the ancient
world about whether Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. No pagans and
Jews who opposed Christianity denied Jesus’ historicity or even questioned it.
The nondenial of Jesus’ existence is particularly
notable in rabbinic writings of those first several centuries C.E. If anyone in
the ancient world had a reason to dislike the Christian faith, it was the
rabbis. To argue successfully that Jesus never existed but was a creation of
early Christians would have been the most effective argument against
Christianity yet all Jewish sources treat Jesus as a fully historical person. Instead,
the rabbis tried to use the real events of Jesus’ life against him. They was
denounced him as the illegitimate child of Mary and a sorcerer, that his miracles
were evil magic, that he encouraged the apostasy and was justly executed for
his own sins. But they do not deny his existence. Why? Because they could not
say Jesus didn’t exist when thousands of people were still alive who had seen him,
heard of him, or had been to hear him speak.
Lucian of
Samosata (c. 115–200 C.E.) was a Greek satirist who wrote The Passing of
Peregrinus, about a former Christian who later became a famous Cynic and
revolutionary and died in 165 C.E. In two sections of Peregrinus—Lucian,
while discussing Peregrinus’s career, without naming Jesus, clearly refers to
him, albeit with contempt in the midst of satire:
It was then that he learned the marvelous wisdom of
the Christians, by associating with their priests and scribes in Palestine.
And— what else?—in short order he made them look like children, for he was a
prophet, cult leader, head of the congregation and everything, all by himself.
He interpreted and explained some of their books, and wrote many himself. They
revered him as a god, used him as a lawgiver, and set him down as a
protector—to be sure, after that other whom they still worship, the man who was
crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world.
For having convinced themselves that they are going
to be immortal and live forever, the poor wretches despise death and most even willingly
give themselves up. Furthermore, their first lawgiver persuaded them that they
are all brothers of one another after they have transgressed once for all by
denying the Greek gods and by worshiping that crucified sophist himself and
living according to his laws.
Although Lucian was aware of the Christians’
“books” (some of which might have been parts of the New Testament), his many
bits of misinformation make it seem very likely that he did not read them. The
compound term “priests and scribes,” for example, seems to have been borrowed
from Judaism, and indeed, Christianity and Judaism were sometimes confused among
classical authors.
Lucian seems to have gathered all of his
information from sources independent of
the New Testament and other Christian writings. For this reason, this writing of his is usually valued as
independent evidence for the existence of Jesus. This is true despite his
ridicule and contempt for Christians and their “crucified sophist.” Lucian
despised Christians for worshiping someone thought to be a criminal worthy of
death and especially despised “the man who was crucified.”
▸ Celsus,
the Platonist philosopher, considered Jesus to be a magician who made
exorbitant claims.
▸
Suetonius, a Roman writer, lawyer and historian, wrote of riots in 49 C.E.
among Jews in Rome which might have been about Christus but which he
thought were incited by “the instigator Chrestus,” whose identification
with Jesus is not completely certain.
▸ Mara bar
Serapion, a prisoner of war held by the Romans, wrote a letter to his son that
described “the wise Jewish king” in a way that seems to indicate Jesus but does
not specify his identity.
As a final observation: In New Testament
scholarship generally, a number of specialists consider the question of whether
Jesus existed to have been finally and conclusively settled in the affirmative.
A few vocal scholars, however, still deny that he ever lived.
