For history’s most famous and influential person, Jesus of Nazareth cuts a frustratingly enigmatic figure. Veiled beneath a shroud of obscurity are not only his life and teachings (not to mention the miracles with which he is credited) but even his very existence.
That the debate over Jesus’ existence should have raged both so long and so fiercely should hardly come as a surprise. Christians are invested in defending the existence of the man upon whom their religion is founded, while those on the other side of the argument are presented with low-hanging fruit in challenging the historicity of Christianity’s founder.
The truth, in short, is that Jesus almost certainly did exist. The amount of written evidence is simply too overwhelming to deny his existence. True, we have not come into possession of any primary evidence of note (letters written by own his hand, for example, or direct contemporary references to him in the form of writing, coins, or statues). Primary evidence is gold dust for ancient historians, and we should not be surprised that none exists for a first-century Jewish preacher living under Roman-occupied Judaea. We do, however, have a decent amount of secondary evidence for Jesus’ existence from Christian, Jewish, and Roman writers.
Sceptics often criticize such secondary evidence for being too thin or sketchy. But this is shaky ground for outright denying a historical figure’s existence. After all, if we are to demand a minimum threshold for the weight of evidence required to confirm someone’s existence, why should we not require it for others for whom we have little primary evidence? Such as Socrates, for example.
As with Jesus, we have nothing of Socrates’ writing and no trace of him in the archaeological record. His teachings survive only as preserved by his contemporaries (Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes), and in later anecdotal references. Does this lack of primary evidence mean we should question that Socrates existed? Probably not (though I suspect he would have appreciated such a line of questioning).
Still, we do not have as much to gain from questioning Socrates’s existence on public forums or in heated arguments as we do with the founder of a world religion. So what is our evidence for Jesus’ existence? First, we turn to the earliest Christian authors, Jesus’ disciples.
Christian Sources on Jesus’ Existence
Our earliest comes from the letters of St. Paul, written around 25 years after Jesus’ death. Paul reveals that he knew Jesus’ brother, James, as well as his most fervent disciple, Peter. This is pretty good evidence for at least the existence of a historical Jesus. Then there are the four New Testament gospels (those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and, a little more problematically, John) probably written within 40 years of Jesus’ death.
It’s difficult to see why they would have invented such a detailed, and more importantly Jewish, figure, especially given the relative unpopularity of Judaism in Palestine under the early Roman Empire.
Then again, only two main episodes in Jesus’ life can be corroborated across all four gospels. The first was his baptism by John; the second was his crucifixion on the orders of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate.
Not only are these events taken as gospel because of the frequency with which they’re attested, but there’s also the compelling argument ex silentio that it would have been bizarre to make them up.
With the baptism, for example, it’s strange that Jesus needed to be baptized at all considering Jesus was supposed to have been born free from the sins the procedure was intended to cleanse. With the crucifixion story, it’s hard to rationalize why early Christians would have invented such a drawn-out, painful, and frankly rather embarrassing death for their founder. That is unless early Christian martyrs were trying to project a story of martyrdom onto their leader to give them a sort of inspirational role model. In fact, we know that many early Christians—the 1st century CE bishop Ignatius of Antioch, for example—saw Christ’s death as a model fit for imitation.
It’s not so much Jesus’ death that troubles skeptics as his subsequent resurrection. I don’t wish to delve too deeply into the supernatural elements of Jesus’ life. Suffice to say that there were plenty from the beginning. In Galatians (1:11-12) Paul writes that the gospel he’s preaching is not of human origin. It was instead “received by revelation from Jesus Christ”. It is instead more worthwhile to move away from these texts and turn to accounts written by (roughly) contemporary non-Christian authors.
Non-Christian Sources on Jesus’ Existence
The first and chronologically closest was Flavius Josephus (37 – 100 CE). Josephus spent his later years living comfortably in Rome, writing the history of his people under the patronage of the Flavian emperors, Vespasian and Titus. But while his first name might suggest he was a Roman, Josephus was in fact Jewish.
He had fought against the Romans during the First Jewish War, and was only spared his life because he somewhat miraculously predicted that his captor, Vespasian, would one day become emperor. Which he did in 69 CE, three years before the war’s conclusion. Jesus appears twice in Josephus’s writings—firstly in a passage about the death of James, Jesus’ brother, and secondly when Josephus writes about Jesus being crucified by Pontius Pilate.
There are a few problems with Josephus’s accounts.
Not only was Jesus a common name (with no less than 20 appearing across Josephus’s works), but the passages that stress this Jesus as “the Messiah” or “a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man” look forced and out of sync with Josephus’s general style. They could well be later additions by Christian scribes.
There’s also the issue that while Josephus had a habit of being very, very thorough, his documentation on Jesus leaves a lot to be desired. He leaves out certain historical nuggets central to Jesus’ story—such as King Herod’s massacring of infants—that you’d expect to find, particularly given that Josephus’ text was a detailed history of the Jewish People.
Our Roman writers, as we’ll now see, had very different interests.
Roman Authors on Jesus’ Existence
First is the senatorial historian Tacitus (58 – 120 CE).
Jesus appears in his account of the reign of Emperor Nero, under whom Tacitus was born. Tacitus describes how in the aftermath of the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE Nero scapegoated the Christians to draw attention away from himself (many people widely suspected he’d started the fire himself). The Christians, Tacitus informs us, were named after their founder Christ, who was put to death during the reign of Tiberius (14 – 37 CE) by the procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate.
We don’t have any copies of Tacitus’s Annals before the 11th century, so this could have been added later. But it’s unlikely. Firstly, the Latin fits Tacitus’s tone perfectly. Secondly, Tacitus follows his brief biography of Jesus with a damning indictment of Christianity, not something a later Christian writer is likely to have added.
Tacitus’ dislike can be explained by the potential danger Christian monotheism was seen to pose to the polytheistic (and by this stage full-on emperor-worshipping) religion of the Roman Empire. And it was a sentiment shared by Tacitus’s close friend—and our final important Roman writer—Pliny the Younger (61 – 113 AD).
Jesus appears in one of Pliny’s many letters to his powerful pen pal, the emperor Trajan. The letter asks what he should do when it comes to prosecuting and punishing Christians in his province of Bithynia (modern Turkey). He describes how it’s impossible to get Christians to renounce Christ, and talks about how they congregate before dawn on a certain day to chant and pray to Christ as if he were a god.
Trajan replied that those suspected of being Christian should be made to offer sacrifices to statues of the Roman gods and renounce their religion. If they accepted, they could be acquitted. If they did not, Pliny could go ahead and butcher them.
Pliny had no reason to make any of this up, particularly when writing to the most powerful man in the world. Along with Tacitus, Josephus, and, however problematically, the Gospels, this should be considered as solid evidence for a historical Jesus’ existence. Nevertheless, the last 250-or-so years have had no shortage of people willing to challenge Jesus’ historicity, proponents of what’s called the Christ myth theory.
The Christ-Myth theory
The Christ Myth Theory has been pretty much completely disregarded by modern scholarship. But it had its heydays, particularly during periods of state-driven secularisation. Among the first to take up the argument were two late 18th-century Frenchmen, Charles François Dupuis and Constantin-François Volney. Volney in particular was influenced by the French Revolution, which pushed a strong agenda of dechristianization, largely to reclaim vast swathes of land from the Catholic Church.
The theory underwent another renaissance under the Soviet Union. But again this wasn’t because the Russians had any more (or less) evidence for the existence of Jesus than anybody else. It’s largely down to the fact that the research was ideologically driven, intended to lend credence to Marxist-Leninist atheism by undermining Christianity at its foundations (or rather at its founder).
So did Jesus really exist?
That a historical Jesus existed is beyond most reasonable doubt. But in trying to establish if Jesus existed perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. More fertile ground for thought might come from asking in what capacity Jesus was believed to have existed.
Was it as a preacher, a prophet, or a moral instructor? Was it as the Son of God? Was it as someone who even intended to found a religion? Questions like these bring us closer to Jesus’ historical legacy which far outlived his time on Earth.
