Did Christ Exist?

Sermon on the Mount by Carl Bloch (1877)

“Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him…”¹

-Bertrand Russell

“Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there is no conversation that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence.”²

-C.S. Lewis

The first question we must answer when examining Jesus of Nazareth is “did he even really exist?” The answer is yes. Despite what sophists say, there is ample evidence for the historical Jesus. First, I should mention that the Gospel accounts are trustworthy and reliable sources of Christ’s existence in and of themselves. But, we will get to those in the next chapter. And, for the skeptic, perhaps it will be best to begin with non-Christian sources. Before we get to these sources, however, we should begin with a brief introduction to how we know what we know about the ancient world.

How Can We Have Knowledge of Ancient History?

Most of what we know comes from written accounts. Archaeology can tell us much about how people lived, but it cannot tell us much about the details of people’s lives and acts (unless, of course, archaeologists uncover written sources!). As you probably know, very few people wrote in the ancient world and very few people could devote themselves to writing detailed historical accounts. Because of this (and the ravages of time), most of what we know about the Roman world in the first century comes from just a handful of historians: Tacitus, Josephus, Suetonius, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, and Dio Cassius, among a few others. These historians wrote on papyrus (mostly) but those manuscripts are long lost to us. What we have are copies of copies of copies. The earliest manuscript we have of Tacitus’ Annals is, for example, from at least seven hundred years after he wrote it.³ Our earliest surviving copy of Josephus’ writings dates to the 11th century — about nine hundred years after he lived and wrote.⁴ Suetonius’ oldest extant copy of Lives of the Twelve Caesars dates to the late 8th or early 9th century — around seven hundred years after he wrote it.⁵ This represents the norm for ancient sources.

Now, there is this idea out there, perpetuated by some, that lengthy separation between the original writing and earliest surviving manuscript means that a text is somehow automatically untrustworthy and corrupt. First, if we make this assumption, we must throw out most of what we know about ancient history and declare it unknowable — because this lengthy separation exists for the vast majority of sources. Second, this belief also assumes that those that copied ancient texts were involved in some vast and mischievous conspiracy to intentionally alter texts. This is ridiculous. Of course, copiers did make errors, and at times some did intentionally alter texts. But the logical assumption has to be that most texts were copied because the copier wanted an accurate copy of that text — not that these copiers wanted to deceive future readers. Lastly, the field of textual criticism exists to sort through any textual issues that may exist. Scholars do this by meticulously comparing manuscripts so that we can have high levels of confidence in our ancient sources.

Another idea that has been perpetuated by the unscholarly is that a source is invalid if its author was not alive during the time of the events in question (we do not have this problem for the Gospels, but we do have it for some of the evidence we are about to review). First, this thought completely negates oral histories, which can be very reliable.⁶ Second, this assumption negates the fact that many early histories were written by people who could, at least, interview people that were alive during the events in question. And third, this line of reasoning assumes the author had no earlier written histories (which have been lost to us) to draw from.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, there are three early references to Jesus of Nazareth that I want to mention in a bit of detail. You will remember that this evidence is being submitted in response to people like Bertrand Russell who maintained that Jesus simply did not exist.

Josephus

The historian Josephus was a general in the Jewish army who subsequently defected to Rome after being captured during the First Jewish Revolt (66–70 A.D.).⁷ Josephus spent the latter part of his life writing histories in Rome and he made two references to Jesus of Nazareth. The first — known as the Testimonium Flavianum — is found in Book 18 of Antiquities of the Jews (93 A.D.). According to Dr. Zvi Baras, there are three views scholars take on the Testimonium: 1) that of dogmatic Christians who accept it without question, 2) those who use “versatile argumentation” to denounce it as a complete forgery, and 3) the reasonable view that some of it should be accepted and some of it should be rejected.⁸ I take this latter view.

First, I firmly believe the passage was altered by later Christians to make it look like Josephus endorsed Christ’s divinity. It is simply too pro-Christian for Josephus (a Jew turned pagan) to have written it. Second, it seems to me that only the most biased and academically inconsistent anti-religionists denounce the passage completely — denying the historical record in an attempt to promote a conspiracy theory. Both positions lack credibility. Therefore, in all likelihood this passage provides credible evidence for the historicity of Jesus because even interpolated versions were based on Josephus’s original text.⁹

Here is the Testimonium as it has come down to us. According to Dr. James Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the words in all capitals are very likely Christian interpolations:

“Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man IF IT BE LAWFUL TO CALL HIM A MAN, for he was a doer of wonders, A TEACHER OF SUCH MEN AS RECEIVE THE TRUTH WITH PLEASURE. He drew many after him BOTH OF THE JEWS AND THE GENTILES. HE WAS THE CHRIST. When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, FOR HE APPEARED TO THEM ALIVE AGAIN THE THIRD DAY, AS THE DIVINE PROPHETS HAD FORETOLD THESE AND THEN THOUSAND OTHER WONDERFUL THINGS ABOUT HIM, and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day (Antiquities 18:63–64).”¹⁰

Dr. Tabor — a New Testament scholar who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago — also points us to a version of the Testimonium that the scholar Shlomo Pines discovered. This version, which is from Arabic, dates to the 10th century and lacks the Christian interpolations for obvious reasons:

“At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus, and his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon their loyalty to him. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive. Accordingly they believed that he was the Messiah, concerning whom the Prophets have recounted wonders.”¹¹

This Arabic version is fascinating because even without the Christian interpolations we have strong evidence that in the first century Christ’s followers were affirming his resurrection.

Now let’s get on to Josephus’ less controversial passage. In his Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20, he writes “Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned…” (brackets not mine).¹²

This reference is important because 1) as previously stated, Josephus was not a Christian 2) he was born in 37 A.D., 3) this reference corroborates what the book of Acts claims about James, and 4) it shows that Jesus’ followers were claiming he was the Messiah very early in the First Century.

First, Josephus was not a Christian. It is hard to imagine a reason he would fabricate this reference. Second, his birth in 37 A.D. in Jerusalem means he would have known about the Church there. In fact, he would have come of age at the midpoint in the first century when this church was both thriving and facing persecution. Third, his mention of James the brother of Christ squares what we see in Matthew 13:55, 1 Corinthians 15:7, Galatians 1:18–19, in Acts 1 and 15, and elsewhere — that James was the brother of Christ and that he was a leader of the Church in Jerusalem.¹³ Given that early Christians continued to worship in the Temple, and that Jerusalem was a relatively small place, it is very likely that Josephus encountered James as a young man. Lastly, this reference confirms that Christ’s followers were claiming he was the messiah very early. This was not something made up hundreds of years after his death. This was a claim being made by those that followed Christ when He walked the earth.

Now, we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but this brings up an interesting question; we know these early Christians faced constant persecution and many were killed for their beliefs. James himself was martyred for his belief that his brother was in fact the Son of God.¹⁴ Now, I can understand why religious fanatics are willing to die for a religion they think is true. But I know of no religious fanatics who are willing to die for a religion they know is a lie. James was willing to die, rather than say his brother was not God. James was either insane, or he was on to something.

Tacitus

Tacitus was a famous Roman historian and senator who published his Annals in 109 A.D. This reference comes in a section in which he is describing the great fire that burned Rome in 64 A.D., which Emperor Nero blamed on the Christians to deflect the blame from himself:

“But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.”¹⁵

The anti-religionists have likewise attempted to explain away this evidence as a later Christian interpolation. Atheistic textual scholar Tim O’Neil — explains why these explanations fall short: “…this passage is distinctively Tacitean in its language and style and it is hard to see how a later Christian scribe could have managed to affect perfect second century Latin grammar and an authentic Tacitean style and fool about 400 years worth of Tacitus scholars, who all regard this passage [as]…genuine.”¹⁶

Anti-religionists have also attempted to argue that Tacitus is simply reporting hearsay in this quotation. This is problematic because in Book IV on the Annals Tacitus expressly informs his reader he has labored to ignore hearsay and only report true history.¹⁷

This quotation establishes much. First, Tacitus is a Roman and a pagan; he has no motive to make up a story about Jesus Christ. If anything, he loathes the Christians, declaring them guilty of “abominations.” Second, this quotation firmly establishes exactly what the books of Acts and Romans claim — that Christianity was firmly established in Rome by the reign of Nero. This is just about thirty years after Christ.

Suetonius

Suetonius, in his Life of Claudius (around 121 A.D.), writes, “He [Emperor Claudius] banished from Rome all the Jews, who were continually making disturbances at the instigation of one Chrestus.”¹⁸ Just who this “Chrestus” was has caused much controversy over the years. I will admit there is some mystery here — but Raymond Brown and John Meier make a strong case that this reference is in fact to Christ:

“The presence of Christians in Rome in the 40s could explain a tantalizing statement by Suetonius…[his] phrasing would make one think that Chrestus or Chrestos was a troublemaker among the Jews in Rome. The name is attested as a Roman name, but how would a pagan Roman have caused such internal friction among Jews as to cause expulsion? If one theorizes that Chrestus might have been a Jew, among the several hundred names of Roman Jews known from the Jewish catacombs and other sources, no instance of “Chrestus” appears. On the other hand, in the second century (the period when Suetonius was writing), both “Christus” (Christ) and “Christianus” (Christian) were often written with an “e” instead of an “i” following the “r”. One wonders whether Suetonius might not be giving us a garbled memory of struggles among the Jews over Christ.”¹⁹

Interestingly enough, this expulsion is also mentioned in Acts 18: “After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome.”²⁰

You must decide if you believe this Suetonius reference refers to Christ or some other figure. For myself, I do not have as much confidence in this reference as I do in those of Josephus and Tacitus. But, for me, the mention of this obscure historical event (the expulsion of Jews from Rome) in both Suetonius and Acts, and the fact that both sources mention Claudius as the expeller, seems like a bit too much coincidence.

Whatever you think of the above passage, Suetonius left us another reference to Christians that seems only to be controversial for the most ardent anti-religionists. What I mean here is that the sort of people who deny the authenticity of this passage start with the assumption that Jesus did not live and thus the references must have been added by Christians in the Middle Ages. This reference by Suetenois is, however, widely accepted. And I must add, if Christians really did add this passage a thousand years after the fact, why did they add only one brief mention of Christians and why do they label Christians as “impious”? This was not a time when such alterations would be subject to much scrutiny. Why not really beef it up (like was done with the Testimonium Flavianum)? Anyway, we find the reference in the Life of Nero: “He [Nero] likewise inflicted punishments on the Christians, a sort of people who held a new and impious superstition.”²¹ Nero reigned from 54 to 68 A.D. Here is more hard proof that Christians were active and causing trouble in Rome very soon after Christ’s death — probably because they were preaching the Eucharist and the resurrection.

There are many other sources we could go into at this point, but I think I have presented good evidence for the historical Jesus, by ancient standards. If the reader thinks this evidence is thin, please remember two things: 1) we have not even mentioned the New Testament yet, which contains ample evidence for Jesus of Nazareth. 2) How many non-Christian sources did you expect there to be supporting the existence of Jewish peasant from Palestine in the 1st century? The fact that we have any is quite remarkable and proves there was indeed something unique about this man.

Conclusion

Because of all of this evidence, all fair-minded scholars concede that a historical Jesus of Nazareth walked this earth. Only the most biased “scholars” deny his existence. Dr. Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar with a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He was a born-again Christian in high school, but abandoned his faith in seminary and is now an agnostic.²² He summarizes the case for the historical Jesus like so: “…there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea….this is the view of nearly every trained scholar on the planet.”²³

Tim O’Neill — the atheistic historian mentioned above who specializes in analyzing historical texts — puts it this way:

“The original question we concerned ourselves with was whether historians regard the existence of Jesus to be ‘historical fact’. The answer is that they do as much as any scholar can do so for the existence of an obscure peasant preacher in the ancient world. There is as much, if not slightly more, evidence for the existence of Yeshua ben Yusef as there is for other comparable Jewish preachers, prophets, and Messianic claimants, even without looking at the gospel material. Additionally, that material contains elements which only make sense if their stories are about a historical figure. The arguments of the Jesus Mythicists, on the other hand, require contortions and suppositions that simply do not stand up to Occam’s Razor and continually rest on positions that are not accepted by the majority of even non-Christian and Jewish scholars. The proponents of the Jesus Myth hypothesis are almost exclusively amateurs with an ideological axe to grind and their position is and will almost certainly remain on the outer fringe of theories about the origins of Christianity.”²⁴

Let’s move on to the textual integrity of the New Testament.

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Footnotes

1. Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1957. 16.
2. Lewis, The Essential C.S. Lewis, 331–332.
3. Oliver, Revilo P. “The First Medicean MS of Tacitus and the Titulature of Ancient Books.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 82 (1951): 232–61. Accessed December 17, 2020. doi:10.2307/283436.
4. Bond, Helen K. “Josephus and the New Testament.” Chapter. In A Companion to Josephus, edited by Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers, 147–58. United Kingdom: Wiley, 2016.
5. Kaster, R.A. (2014). The Transmission of Suetonius’s Caesars in the Middle Ages. Transactions of the American Philological Association 144(1), 133–186. doi:10.1353/apa.2014.0000.
6. I’m sure you have heard the standard attack on oral histories. The attack usually relies on an example that draws from the game telephone. In the game a bunch of people stand in a line and one person whispers a phrase into the next person’s ear, and the message is passed on until it gets to the end, where the message is announced by the last person. The message is normally hilariously distorted. At this point the teacher, or whoever is leading the game will say something like, “you see, class, how easily information can become distorted — this is why we should be suspect of oral histories.” This argument is deeply flawed. First, it assumes the students in the practical exercise wanted to pass the message on correctly. I know I myself love to change the message when I am playing this game — the bizarre result is what makes the game fun. Second, in this game you can only hear what one person up the line is saying. This is hardly representative of what happens in real life. Oral histories are typically shared by multiple elders in a community and these stories are shared with multiple generations concurrently. Those who tell the story wrong will be corrected. Third, the game assumes that there will only be one chance to (whisper) transmit the history correctly. Oral histories are, of course, transmitted regularly over the course of one’s life and they are proclaimed loudly and boldly. Priests, scribes, or Elders take care to ensure the next generation receives the accurate version of their important cultural stories and histories.
7. “Josephus.” Livius. Accessed December 12, 2020. https://www.livius.org/sources/content/josephus/.
8. Baras, Zvi. “The Testimonium Flavianum and the Martyrdom of James.” Essay. In Josephus, Judaism and Christianity, edited by Louis H. Feldman and Hata Gōhei, 338–39. Leiden: Brill, 1987.
9. Grose, Peter. “New Evidence on Jesus’ Life Reported.” The New York Times. February 13, 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/13/archives/new-evidence-on-jesus-life-reported-2-israeli-scholars-believe-they.html.
10. Tabor, James. “Josephus on Jesus.” The Jewish Roman World of Jesus. University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Accessed December 15, 2020. https://pages.uncc.edu/james-tabor/ancient-judaism/josephus-jesus/.
11. Ibid.
12. Josephus, Flavius. “The Antiquities of the Jews.” Translated by William Whiston, [93 A.D.] 2009. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2848/2848-h/2848-h.htm#link202HCH0009.
13. Myers, Jeannie. “Who Was James, Jesus’ Brother?” biblestudytools.com. Salem Web Network, May 27, 2020. https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/who-was-jesus-brother-james.html.
14. See the above quotation from Josephus.
15. Tacitus. The Annals. In The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer Adler, translated by A.J. Church and W. J. Brodribb, 14:168. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1990.
16. O’Neill, Tim. “An Atheist Historian Examines the Evidence for Jesus (Part 2 of 2).” Strange Notions, June 6, 2014. https://strangenotions.com/an-atheist-historian-examines-the-evidence-for-jesus-part-2-of-2/.
17. Tacitus, Annals (Book IV), 66.
18. Tranquillus, Suetonius. “The Lives of the Twelve Ceasars.” Edited by T. Forester. Translated by Alexander Thomson. Project Gutenberg, [121 A.D.] 2016. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6400/6400-h/6400-h.htm#link2H_4_0006.
19. Brown, Raymond, and John Meier. Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity. New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983. 100–101. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Antioch_and_Rome/_6H3XKLXGvYC?hl=en&gbpv=1.
20. Acts 18:1–2 (ESV).
21. Suetonius, “The Lives of the Twelve Ceasars.”
22. Stasio, Frank, and Robert Kinlaw. “The Sunday School Teacher Turned Skeptic: Meet Bart Ehrman.” North Carolina Public Radio, March 5, 2018. https://www.wunc.org/post/sunday-school-teacher-turned-skeptic-meet-bart-ehrman.
23. Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York: HarperOne, 2012. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Did_Jesus_Exist/hf5Rj8EtsPkC?hl=en&gbpv=0.
24. O’Neill, “An Atheist Historian Examines the Evidence for Jesus (Part 2 of 2).”