Did Jesus really exist?

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.